Cary, Lorene 1956–

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Lorene Cary 1956–

Writer, educator

Black Ice Deemed “Eloquent and Honest”

Lorene Cary is a writer whose articles have appeared in Time, Newsweek, Essence, and other publications. She also took a year out to teach at St. Paul’s, the private high school she attended in the 1970s. Much of her current creative work derives from her high school experience.

Cary left her public high school in Philadelphia in 1971 to attend the elite St Paul’s prep school in New Hampshire. She is best known in literary circles for her book Black Ice, which she wrote about her two years boarding at the school. Formerly all white and all male, St. Paul’s became interested in finding black girls to attend the school, and though Cary was reportedly “resentful at being used as part of some ‘liberal-minded experiment,’ she nevertheless jumped at the chance,” as Phillip Lopate noted in the New York Times Book Review. In fact, Cary, whose parents are both teachers, conceded in Black Ice that she “had been raised for just this opportunity…. Wasn’t it time for me to play my part in that mammoth enterprise—the integration, the moral transformation, no less, of America? I had been waiting for this the way a fairy princess waits for a man.” As Cary informed Los Angeles Times contributor Sam Fulwood III, she was ready “to confront and challenge rich, white people on their own terms.”

How she did that was by applying high expectations for herself, but “her grades disappointed her,” Fulwood reported. Three Bs and two Cs in her first term earned a “you’re doing great” comment from a teacher but prompted Cary to do some deep thinking about her future: “I wondered if anyone here had ever expected me to do better than this…. I felt betrayed, first by them, then by my own naivete. [Cs] were probably what they’d meant by fine for black scholarship kids. Maybe that’s what they’d been saying all along, only I hadn’t heard it.”

Trying to sort out these issues, Cary initially wrote an article in 1988 for American Visions magazine. She knew, however, that she had enough material for a book, so she interviewed other St. Paul’s graduates, especially black males who went to the school before it turned co-ed, but “it didn’t work,” she told Rosemary L. Brady in the New York Times Book Review. Those ex-students agreed to talk to Cary, but only off the record, so Cary realized, “I couldn’t get down and dirty with anybody else’s story but my own.”

At a Glance…

Born November 29, 1956, in Philadelphia, PA; daughter of John (a junior high school science teacher) and Carole (a teacher) Cary; married R. C. Smith (a freelance writer), August 27, 1983;children: Laura, Geoffrey (stepson). Education: University of Pennsylvania; B.A. and M.A., 1978; University of Sussex, M.A., 1979.

Writer. Reporter and writer for Time magazine, 1980, and TV Guide, 1981-82; St. Paul’s (private high school), Concord, NH, teacher, 1982-83, and trustee, 1985-89; free-lance writer, 1983—;contributing editor for Newsweek, 1991—.

Member: Authors Guild.

Awards: D.L. from Colby College, Waterville, ME, 1992.

Addresses: c/o Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 201 East 50th St., New York, NY 10022.

The book’s title, according to the Los Angeles Times, “is drawn from an experience at school [in which Cary] learned that on a skating pond, the smoothest ice is called black ice. She looked for black ice on the pond but didn’t find it, and the phrase became her metaphor for the search for purity and perfection, not necessarily the attainment of them.” Compared to the violence that marred the efforts to desegregate schools in the 1950s and 1960s, Cary’s experience at St. Paul’s appeared to be a less strained, far less threatening, and certainly less publicized process. Though she found it no fairy-tale experience, Cary “did well enough at St. Paul’s… and grew from the St. Paul’s ‘experiment’ to accept a life different from what she might have imagined as a child,” noted Fulwood.

Returned to Teach at Her High School

However, Cary is outraged by the racist attitudes that continue to shape the way some white teachers deal with black students. The writer explained that some people just “don’t believe black children can learn…. I’ve learned how it is to be pushed and pushed until I learned. That’s what I learned at St. Paul’s. I had a few teachers who pushed. It was their mission…. [Black] kids have to be believed in. I don’t think they often are.”

Ten years after Cary left St. Paul’s, she returned to teach English and then serve as a trustee. What kind of teacher was she? Like the other faculty members, she “exerted too much pressure on my already-stress-filled students,” she wrote in Black Ice. “Without words, I exuded it like sweat from my pores. No doubt they could smell it on my skin as I bent over their shoulders to point out how they could improve their theses on the third rewrite. And yet it took all my control to keep from shaking them sometimes, from jacking them up against the wall and screaming into their faces: ‘Look at what you have here…. Learn, damn you! Take it in and go out into the world and do something.’” After all, Cary reasoned, “The faculty that had appeared to my teenage eyes as a monolith of critical white adulthood now revealed itself as a community of idealists, all trying, each according to his or her ability, to help young people…. I felt the zeal of it, the ironic, subversive missionary zeal.”

Black Ice Deemed “Eloquent and Honest”

Cary told Essence writer V. R. Peterson that she “wanted the book to be true to adolescence, Blackness and spirituality…. The only point in making the private public is to do a sharing of oneself.” Her book certainly found common ground with Newsweek reviewer Marcus Mabry, who also attended an elite prep school, and he exclaimed, “That experience came rushing back to me as I read… Black Ice.” But Mabry also remarked: “Given her candor, it is surprising how much Cary leaves out… [issues like] her racial-identity crisis, her fear of becoming an Oreo… [of becoming] too white to be accepted by the black world and too black to be accepted by the white world…. What could be an extremely compelling memoir about the burden of race on adolescence stops short, leaving racial identity issues boiling just below the surface.”

In his New York Times review of Black Ice, Lopate called the book “tightly focused” and “remarkable,” and Ellen Goodman of the Los Angeles Times hailed it as “a cautionary and hopeful story about the journey to belonging” and welcomed Cary’s work as an “eloquent and honest” portrait of “the internal immigrants, a new generation of Americans who walked through doors that had been opened a crack but led into an emotional maze.” As Lopate put it, “I was drawn into Lorene Cary’s story, and sorry that it ended before I could receive the full imprint of her life. I would be happy to follow this narrator anywhere, and hope there will be sequels crossing into adulthood.”