Valentine’s Dance

For the second year in a row, my husband James took our seven-year-old daughter Ella to the Father-Daughter Valentine’s Day dance, sponsored by the Charlottesville Parks and Recreation Department. It’s a popular affair, with room for only the first 200 couples, and it sells out quickly. For $10 a couple, you can twirl your girl on the heart-bedecked dance floor to the rhythms of Justin Bieber, the Hokie Pokie, the chicken dance, and the Macarena, plus feast on cupcakes, pretzels and drinks. Each girl goes home with a box of chocolates and a red carnation.

There is no dress code, but even the men go formal. Almost every dad wears a tie, and a few are in tuxedos. The girls decorate themselves in dresses as red as the red velvet cupcakes, some with hair in pink ribbons, swirled on top of their heads like frosting.

But what’s remarkable about the event is how racially and economically integrated it is. Or rather, what’s remarkable about most events we go to here is how much they are not.

Social segregation is still a problem all over the country, including in Brooklyn, where we lived until a couple years ago (all you have to do is watch a Spike Lee film to prove that point.) But here in the South, where school integration is something of recent memory, it has a different emotional resonance.

Charlottesville is a progressive college town, and 80 percent of us voted for Barack Obama. But we are surrounded by the remnants of our history. Only an hour to the east is the capitol of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and our downtown showcases a park named after Robert E. Lee and a statue of Stonewall Jackson. You don’t have to drive far, maybe fifteen minutes south to Scottsville, to see Confederate flags on grand old porches.

Partly it’s our fault when we mainly see people like us. My daughter’s dance and French classes are expensive, as are my son’s saxophone lessons and the live music and theater performances we love. But everything we do doesn’t have to be like that.

Our family has choices, so we have chosen to put our daughter on the city municipal swim team, whose negligible entry fee makes it open to all, instead of a team at a fancy swim club. We send her to a public school with an award-winning black principal. We transferred our son from a mostly white private school to the public city high school, which is about half black and half white.

If we’re really lucky, our children will grow up–with a black president, principal, school board members, neighbors, and friends—in a much more integrated society than previous generations. We’ll reserve our daughter’s Valentine’s Dance tickets early every year and hope that the only colors she’ll be concerned about are red and pink.

Photo: Ella in her homemade updo ready for the dance