Of all the black institutions that formed their separate town within our town, I experienced only one directly. It was right on the grounds of our parochial grammar school. A one-story clapboard building, it housed two classrooms linked by a small entryway. Named St. Mary’s Colored School, it operated from 1891 to 1949.

The building was primitive. Electricity was late in coming, and only in 1942 were the privies behind the school replaced by cinderblock lavatories.

The clapboard school sat on the far side of the parking lot from the Victorian brick building that housed eight grades of us white children. Eight nuns oversaw our education; two other nuns taught exclusively in the colored school. We kids thought those two were akin to the missionaries we read about, enduring life on foreign soil to save pagan souls.

The colored school’s total population was about 60, with four grades taught in each of the two rooms. From across the playground, we could hear the students chanting the multiplication tables or the sing-song responses to catechism questions: "Why did God make us? God made us to love and to serve Him and to be happy with Him in Heaven." We, of course, chanted the same, though most probably imagined a separate Heaven for the coloreds to be happy in.

In fourth grade I sat near a window and could see the colored kids out for mid-morning recess and lunch-hour, both scheduled at separate times from ours. They played close outside their own building and, at a clap from Sister Damian or her companion, would line up and march back in to their lessons.

A special duty when I was 11 took me back and forth to the colored school, but never deeper into it than the entryway.

Fifth-grade boys were responsible for delivering lunch milk to all the classrooms. The local dairy brought the milk each morning to our building’s front steps, half-pint glass bottles sealed with foil lids. During white recess, pairs of us boys, each two hauling a heavy crate of bottles between them, fanned out to place each grade’s milk next to the teacher’s desk.

There were accidents, of course. Joe Boyle always said that I was the one who stumbled as we carried a crate up the building’s back steel stairs. We were almost to the top, and the crate tumbled back down, bottles spilling and smashing all the way. We were horror-struck.

The crash echoed through the long main corridor, and from classroom doorways down its length, nuns popped into the hall. The nun nearest to us appraised the damage and sent us looking for Mr. Nash, the janitor. The old man, an immigrant, stood at the base of the steel stairs, glaring at all the broken glass and at sticky milk still dripping down the risers. Then he waved us away. English failed him. To vent his anger, he reverted to muttered German.

Despite our spilled milk, Joe and I remained a team; and for a whole month we shared an adventure with another pair of classmates. The four of us hauled two heavy crates of bottles across the playground to the colored school. The first day we were excited as only boys of 11 can be, sure were entering a separate, alien world.

And we were. Sister Damian and her companion were each teaching four grades in their classrooms of 30. They did this by using the pattern of the old one-room schools around here: While one group worked actively with the teacher or perhaps an older student, the rest did their sums or memorized their catechism. It took close organization, but it worked.

The pattern was entirely different over in the white classrooms, each of which contained a single grade. Each nun marched her 30 charges lockstep through a day-long series of lessons: catechism first, then arithmetic, then history, then English, then penmanship, then music or, sometimes, poetry and pictures.

There was lots of memorization, blackboard work, and recitation in front of the class. For the last, the nun stood in the back of the room and directed us, one by one, to the front to recite the poem we had all been assigned to memorize. I remember sweating bullets, declaiming the opening of Longfellow’s "Hiawatha," while my classmates, who had also memorized it, waited with glee for a hesitation or a dropped word.

That first time we milk boys got to the colored school doorway, we walked inside on tiptoe. We put down our crates and turned to leave, but of course had to steal a glance through the open door of the first-to-fourth grade classroom. As one, all 30 kids were looking up; they’d heard the clink of the bottles.

All those faces stared at us blankly till one first grader grinned and waved. Joe Boyle, bless him, waved back, and suddenly the whole class was smiling and waving. We heard knuckles wrapped sharply on the teacher’s desk. All heads in the classroom went down. We fled the building.

"You shouldn’t have waved!" one of the boys shouted at Joe as we ran. "You’ll get them mixed up!" His next words were ones that I’d often heard. "You know they’re happier with their own kind!"

Back into the white world we boys ran, and the heavy door swung shut behind us.

Read about Jim Atwell’s new book, "From Fly Creek _ Celebrating Life in Leatherstocking Country" at JimAtwell.com.