Breaking Apart Other People’s Expectations : Books: Lorene Cary says her memoir of being a middle-class black girl at an upper-class boarding school is really a ‘growing-up book.’

Writer Lorene Cary lives with an interior critic.

She envisions her “Watcher at the Gate,” as she calls it, as a spectral entity that resides in the basement of her three-story Philadelphia home “like the mother in ‘Psyc” This Watcher wafts up to her makeshift suite of work rooms on the third floor cackling criticism. It is the voice that cries warnings when Cary writes whatever she feels inside; it urges her toward adherence to other peoples’ expectations of the work of a black woman writer.

Recently, although the ghost still comes and goes, Cary is less apt to pay heed. There are other, celebratory voices contending for her attention since the March release by Knopf of “Black Ice,” her well-received memoir of how a middle-class black girl fared at an upper-crust white private boarding school in the 1970s.

It’s a story that pleased some critics by offering an integrationist’s hope of melting-pot America. Cary, at age 15, left family, neighborhood and public high school in Philadelphia to confront and challenge rich, white people on their own terms. She did so, not by protesting, but by studying in the opulence and privilege that characterize St. Paul’s. She assimilated, in a transition so smooth she was later asked to teach and serve as a director at the school.

Ellen Goodman, the syndicated columnist, called the book “honest and eloquent and ultimately optimistic.” A reviewer for the New York Times said he would read what Cary writes in future because she has a “wry, reflective, unpreachy voice all her own.” Jonathan Yardley, book critic at the Washington Post, heaped uncharacteristic and lavish praise, noting that via her first book-length project, Cary “won her way into (his) heart.”

This last one made Cary smile. She had never heard of Yardley, but her publisher had and was elated.

“I didn’t know what to make of all the attention,” she says during a recent lunch in Washington, sandwiched between engagements on her promotional tour. “I thought about writing a good book. I didn’t write it according to a political formula. I didn’t write it to please white critics.”

Those critics say she may be the next luminary among black writers, but the thought makes Cary frown. It was the idea of being thus categorized that she sought to exorcise by writing “Black Ice.”

“There is this notion--I used to have it--that I couldn’t write my story, be black and American at the same time,” she says. “It’s the idea you’ve got to be Richard Wright or Henry James. If you’re not Richard Wright or Henry James, then shut up.

“ ‘Black Ice’ is a growing up book,” she says. “It’s not a race-in-America book. I don’t know race in America. I just wrote what I know. I knew what I felt like growing up. I wrote (about my experience) and I was not crushed by the system and white institutions.”

The daughter of a junior high science teacher and a beautician, Cary was recruited on scholarship to St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious boarding schools. St. Paul’s, where a Kennedy cousin was a schoolmate and statesmen were dinner guests, came to Cary’s attention in 1971 by way of a next-door neighbor. The neighbor had heard about the school’s attempts at integration. Cary was interviewed and accepted, and she attended St. Paul’s for her junior and senior years.

She began filled with high expectations for herself. As she writes, “I was not afraid to go to St. Paul’s School, although it was becoming clear to me from the solicitous white faces that people thought I was--or ought to be. I had no idea that wealth and privilege could confer real advantages beyond the obvious ones sprawled before us. Instead, I believed that rich white people were like poodles: over-bred, inbred, degenerate. All the coddling and permissiveness would have a bad effect, I figured, now that they were up against those of us who’d lived a real life in the real world.”

But her grades disappointed her. In her first term she received three Bs and two Cs. One teacher told her she was “doing great,” she writes.

Thinking of herself and the approximately 40 other black students at the 500-student school, Cary writes, “I wondered if anyone here had ever expected me to do better than this. White faces of the adults flashed in my head, smiling, encouraging, tilted to one side, asking if I’d like to talk. . . . Early on they’d told me that I’d do fine. 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.”

However, Cary did well enough at St. Paul’s--her successes included being elected senior class vice president--and grew from the St. Paul’s “experiment” to accept a life different from what she might have imagined as a child.

At St. Paul’s, Cary says, she learned to accept herself. “St. Paul’s gave me new words into which I must translate the old, but St. Paul’s would keep me inside my black skin, that fine fine membrane that was meant to hold in my blood, not bind up my soul.”

After graduation, she majored in English at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees, worked as a magazine journalist and, by the school’s invitation, taught for a year at St. Paul’s and served on its board.

She works daily on research and drafts of a second book, a novel about three black families in pre-Civil War Philadelphia. She’s a mother of a 6-year-old daughter and wife of eight years to a free-lance writer, R. C. Smith.

She is concerned with education in general and grows furious about some white teachers’ attitudes toward black students.

“People don’t believe black children can learn,” she says. “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. They really pushed so that you would really learn. (Black) kids have to be believed in. I don’t think they often are.

“The thing that frightens me most is the hypocrisy. We say one thing on a public level, but we don’t mean it. We say we love our children most. But that’s not where we spend our money.

“We build places to put our children, but nowhere are they nearly as nice as our corporations’ (headquarters).”

Of private schools, she says, “It’s upsetting to me to see my book used to say this is the only way to go,” noting that some critics may mistakenly interpret her work that way. “St. Paul’s works for some and not for others. I wrote ‘Black Ice’ to throw my story in the mix. It’s not to say this is the way, but here is a way.”

Before “Black Ice,” Cary wrote for TV Guide and Time magazine, throwing herself into other people’s stories because something--The Watcher, perhaps?--kept her from “writing my story,” she says.

“Black Ice” is her literary declaration of independence, an affirmation of “finding something and doing it” without fear of being accepted or rejected. The title is drawn from an experience at school, where she 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.

“I used to think I could have a better story, a blacker story, if I had gone some other way through life,” she says. “But I don’t want to say that to myself any more.”