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Neither did Guy suffer most of the routine affronts that face a Negro growing up in the U.S. His father, Clarence L. Smith, is now a $10,900-a-year civilian analyst of military penal procedures at the Pentagon. His mother, Artenia Gibson Smith, of American Indian and Negro descent, has been a teacher and counselor in Washington's public schools for the past 33 years. The Smiths took pains to insulate their only child from the abrasions of ghetto life.
Sweaty Hands & a Prize. Comfortably settled in an integrated Northeast Washington neighborhood, the Smiths enrolled their only child in the progressive Georgetown Day School, established in 1945 with the aim of forestalling any sense of racial separateness in children's minds. Guy was in a minority, but not by all that much: 30 of Georgetown Day's 100 pupils were Negroes.
"At first," recalls one teacher, "he was a wild boy. He threw his desk around sometimes. But then he settled down. He's really sweet, with a natural, outgoing personality." So outgoing that by the ninth grade he was elected president of his class, of the student council, and was earning straight As.
The protective parental umbrella over Guy began to shred when, at 14, he left Georgetown Day and enrolled at Hawthorne, another progressive private school, located in the now reconstructed slum of Southwest Washington. Though not the first Negro to enter Hawthorne, Guy was the first to stay there, and eventually won a prize for being the best all-round student. Soon, though, he realized that he was a Negro, and some of what that meant. In an annual school forum on race relations, he shocked his white friends by saying: "Whenever I'm in a room with mostly white students, my hands begin to sweat."
Incongruously, Guy became fairly conservative among white students who were almost exclusively liberal Democrats. He was tagged "the Great Dissenter" for so often taking the opposition viewpoint in class discussions on almost any subject. But if he developed an independent political attitude at Hawthorne, he also discovered an independent attitude toward himself. Says Alexander Orr, who founded the school with his wife: "He was solid, happy, and proud to be a Negro."
Confident Gait. Probably nothing kept him happier than Navajo, the rebellious cutting horse owned by a stable Guy patronized. Clarence Smith remembers that Guy had always been "horse-happy." "I have a saddleback," says the father, "from crawling around and playing horse for him when he was a tiny squirt." When Guy found that he was one of the few riders who could manage the stubborn pinto, ownership became the only way out. Clarence Smith bought Guy the horse, and it became, in the father's words, an "only brother" to Guy, and later the "common denominator" between Guy and Peggy. At 13, Guy would hurry off from Georgetown Day at 3 p.m. each day to ride in Rock Creek Park. With Navajo he entered horse shows and won ribbons. And it was through the pinto that, at 18, he met his bride-to-be, then only 14 years old.