I recently read a disturbing article in the Kalamazoo Gazette. An 11 year old boy drowned at a pool party, celebrating the end of school. The boy was black, and the article was slanted towards the responsibility of the people who threw the party. Apparently, the parents thought it was a mandatory school party, when it was actually a PTO sponsored event.

My big question is, so what?

Who cares who sponsored the event? What does that have to do with the untimely death of this child?

When I was in High School, my friend Della lost her little sister at Woods Lake. Woods Lake is the only free place to swim in Kalamazoo, and people used to make jokes about the top layer of the lake being made of jherri juice. Needless to say, most of the people that *swam* there were black.

I don’t remember all the details of the event, but I have seen a similar scene enough times to guess what went down. Della’s mother didn’t swim; she probably wasn’t even there–just sent the kids down there to get them out of her hair. A bunch of kids splashing around in the murky water, and the little one goes out just a bit too far. . . by the time the lifeguard gets involved, it’s too late. Somebody’s baby is gone.

I remember taking gym class in High School, and swimming was required for one semester. Most of the black girls stayed in the shallow end of the pool, protecting their hair. I had mercifully learned how to swim at the age of 12, so I had to participate in the swimming portion of the class. The peer pressure was a very strong force to counter. Not to mention the desire to NOT look like a wet dog for the rest of the school day (I had gym like 1st hour)!

In my gym class only 3 out of the 8 black kids knew how to swim. Don’t think they finished the class knowing how to swim, either.

I had taken lessons for years before it finally clicked for me.

So, I’m looking at this issue, as I’ve been looking at it for years. Curtis and I had signed the kids up for lessons for years, too. At the Y, at WMU, at Borgess Health Center, at the Kik pool–you name it, we tried it–and they still didn’t know how to swim.

Curtis finally put his foot down. He wasn’t paying for one more ‘Y’ lesson–and that included all the aforementioned places. He was only interested in a program where they actually learned how to swim. And for that to happen, they had to learn to swim for a purpose, like competing.

I desperately wanted the children to learn to swim. I didn’t want to be scared to death every time they were near a body of water. I wanted to be able to swim with them, and have fun. I didn’t want what happened to Della’s sister to happen to them.

So, I had my antennae out for a swim team. One day, we dropped in on the Orbe’s, a family from our church. They lived in the neighborhood, near the Cousins, other friends of ours, who had recently moved. Since we used to just drop in on the Cousins, I thought we could just drop in on the Orbes as well. They were a birracial couple that had joined the church the same time that we did.
It was a hot day, and Mark Orbe brought out the slip ‘n’ slide. Victoria, their daughter around Yanni’s age, came out in a maroon and white speedo swim suit. “That’s her team suit,” Natalie, her mother, told me. Intrigued, I asked all about this team.

It turns out that Victoria had been swimming on a team for a few years now, and they practiced at nearby Central High School. Natalie gave the phone number, and I called in September of 2001, right around the time to try out for the team.

I didn’t know whether Yanni swam well enough to join a swim team, but it turned out that the coach would work on any shortcomings she would have, and bring her up to speed quickly.

Xay was signed up in the winter session of that year.

And I’ve watched my children struggle to become good swimmers.

Curtis took them to the Y to practice one day, and he met a woman who was supervising her granddaughter in the pool. The woman was white and her granddaughter was birracial. The woman had been researching about black people and swimming. She’d noticed that her granddaughter had a hard time with floating. She had wondered if the struggle was genetic. Upon further inspection, the woman found out that black people have denser muscles and bones than white people, making it more difficult for them to float. This could be compensated by sheer muscle strength, she suggested.

Curtis bought Yanni a book called Total Immersion, which details a way to swim more *slippery*, or how to more efficiently glide through the water. Yanni never finished reading it, but I read it. I took these principles to heart and worked on them while I was swimming twice a week at the Y.

I think those principles are the key to breaking the bouyancy conundrum that makes it hard for black people to swim.

There are a few black swimmers in Yanni and Xay’s current swim club, and I’ve noticed that even the best of them struggles with the strokes that require you to float on top of the water: freestyle and back stroke. They do much better with the more underwater strokes, like breast stroke and butterfly–the brute force strokes, if you will.

I think the benefits of being a good swimmer far outweigh the barriers to achieving that goal. I have watched how swimming has shaped and molded the children’s bodies, (and my own!), as well as formated their minds. They are much sharper in their thinking since they have been swimming.

There’s something to be said for a challenge.  I am proud of the children from not shying away from the great challenge of floating and swimming.  It will stand them well in the future, whatever they decide to do.