When I began to think about the Nile, it occurred to me for the first time what curious, liminal places all pools are: neither land nor sea, artificial spaces created by man where we float between worlds like embryos or astronauts. Of course this is a good metaphor for what happens in a middle-class black community whose children are taught to thrive in both white mainstream and black cultures. But a pool is also a metaphor for the classic amphibious role of belonging and not belonging that belongs traditionally to artists and thinkers–people who rely on the borderland fluid state of the imagination that generates creativity.
So it is interesting and possibly no accident that so many of us children who grew up at that time in the shady streets around the Nile became creators and communicators. Our ranks included writers like Lorene Cary and myself, scholars like Donald Bogle and Henry Martin, filmmakers, professors, photographers, and journalists. And though a few of us chose to stay in Yeadon, many had futures that spread across the country, and some, like me, even overseas. I went off to college in Boston, wrote my first books in Russia, then settled in Italy—thus, in becoming an expatriate, adding one more facet to the role of resident alien. It took me years to perceive that this role echoed my upbringing as a middle-class black American, and still longer to perceive how much my writing—and all artistic work–springs from the kind of vision that comes only from being simultaneously, so to speak, inside and outside of a given experience.
The Nile Swim Club—I feel extra happy about this—went on to outlive the white swim club that inspired its conception. Like so many traditionally black institutions, the club went through a period of declining membership when segregation eased. But it stayed open and nowadays sits nearly unchanged at the end of my old street still resembling an architectural dream of the sixties, still wafting all summer the sounds of splashing and children’s voices into what remains a comfortable black suburb.
On a visit to Philadelphia not long ago, I met a taxi driver from Nigeria, who told me he had settled in Yeadon because it is a good place to raise a family and he had high regard for the local schools. Of course he knew of the Nile Swim Club, and as we spoke I wondered what resonance the name had for a person actually arrived from the continent of Africa, in a very different period of American history. But whether or not the name now seems quaint, or simply insignificant, the mentality that created it still floats through those green streets: the fervent hope of black immigrants, whether from overseas or from the ruined landscapes of Southern slavery, that their children will come to belong fully to America—a hope always tinged with the profound conviction that such belonging can never really be. Perhaps it was this unsettling subtext that allowed us Yeadon kids of many decades ago to grow up, not just privileged, but curiously inspired. In any case, thanks to the Nile, and all it stood for, we were lucky enough to learn to swim and dive and tread water, skills that of course last all your life.
