Lies We Tell Ourselves: Shortlisted for the 2016 Carnegie Medal
Robin Talley
***SHORTLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL 2016******WINNER OF THE INAUGURAL AMNESTY CILIP HONOUR 2016***Lie #1: I'm not afraidLie #2: I'm sure I'm doing the right thingLie #3: I don't care what they think of meIt’s 1959. The battle for civil rights is raging. And it’s Sarah’s first day of school as one of the first black students at previously all-white Jefferson High.No one wants Sarah there. Not the Governor. Not the teachers. And certainly not the students – especially Linda, daughter of the town’s most ardent segregationist.Sarah and Linda are supposed to despise each other. But the more time they spend together, the less their differences matter. And both girls start to feel something they’ve never felt before. Something they’re determined to ignore.Because it’s one thing to stand up to an unjust world – but another to be terrified of what’s in your own heart.‘The main characters are terrific in what is a moving YA novel. And an important one.’ – The Telegraph’This is so thought-provoking it almost hurts to read it, yet every word is needed, is necessary and consequently this is a novel that lingers long after you've finished it' - Lovereading‘This is an emotional and compelling read that I did not want to put down. It is beautifully written and the tension just simmers on the pages.’ – Bookbabblers‘This book packs a very powerful punch’ - Historical Novel Society‘With great characterisation, tough issues covered, and a plot which had me guessing right up until the last pages, this is a must-read. Massively recommended!’ - The Bookbag‘This exceptional novel of first love and sexual awakenings is set against a backdrop of shocking racism and prejudice. It is incredibly well written as the tense, riveting story seamlessly combines fiction with historical fact.’ - Booktrust‘Every now and then a Young Adult book comes along that I want to push into every readers hands both young and old and Lies We Tell Ourselves is that book for 2014’ – Jess Hearts Books‘Talley has mixed two controversial topics together to create a firecracker of a story’ - Cheryl M-M's Book Blog*A Goodreads Choice Awards semi-finalist 2014*
In 1959 Virginia, the lives of two girls on opposite sides of the battle for civil rights will be changed forever.
Sarah Dunbar is one of the first black students to attend the previously all-white Jefferson High School. An honors student at her old school, she is put into remedial classes, spit on and tormented daily.
Linda Hairston is the daughter of one of the town's most vocal opponents of school integration. She has been taught all her life that the races should be kept "separate but equal."
Forced to work together on a school project, Sarah and Linda must confront harsh truths about race, power and how they really feel about one another.
Boldly realistic and emotionally compelling, Lies We Tell Ourselves is a brave and stunning novel about finding truth amid the lies, and finding your voice even when others are determined to silence it.
ROBIN TALLEY grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, writing terrible teen poetry and riding a desegregation bus to the school across town. A Lambda Literary Fellow, Robin lives in Washington, DC, with her fiancée, plus an antisocial cat and a goofy dog. When Robin's not writing, she's often planning communication strategies at organisations fighting for equal rights and social justice. You can find her on the web at www.robintalley.com (http://www.robintalley.com) or on Twitter @robin_talley (http://www.twitter.com/robin_talley).
ISBN: 978-1-472-05514-9
LIES WE TELL OURSELVES
© 2014 Robin Talley
Published in Great Britain 2014
by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
Version: 2018-10-26
To the Norfolk 17:
Delores Johnson Brown
LaVera Forbes Brown
Louis Cousins
Alveraze Frederick Gonsouland
Andrew Heidelberg
Geraldine Talley Hobby
Edward Jordan
Betty Jean Reed Kea
Olivia Driver Lindsay
Lolita Portis-Jones
Johnnie Rouse
James Turner Jr
Patricia Turner
Carol Wellington
Claudia Wellington
Patricia Godbolt White
Reginald Young
May your courage resonate with every generation
Contents
Cover (#u7fa609a9-8489-5563-8275-1274db7665b9)
Back Cover Text (#u0520fac1-6856-5f10-b3e1-c43b4ab6aa34)
About the Author (#ud9ed06ed-b34b-5cd3-bde4-bfe5870c39eb)
Title Page (#u05d8b34f-b934-5742-b2b0-541f6f654c52)
Copyright (#u78a0489f-3c45-5821-b702-75a3f65717f9)
Dedication (#u01d2e1a8-9f33-5b19-999b-b3085c537a1d)
Part 1 (#ulink_3bd62d7f-149c-53a3-b875-7ff676bf0c6f)
Lie1 (#ulink_0dc251b3-7934-5a9f-9f6e-590fd526b374)
Lie2 (#ulink_51bdfda0-7be7-5443-90cb-9d856d0187d8)
Lie3 (#ulink_7eef7697-e5ae-5139-b4ad-2bd5fda091a0)
Lie4 (#ulink_443496ba-fbed-598c-8873-33aa7b6fca8f)
Lie5 (#ulink_aeadcda7-6751-578a-878a-aabe36f66222)
Lie6 (#ulink_07395d6f-f6b4-5786-bf66-4d8b545bb3cc)
Lie7 (#ulink_11c8d3e3-e3ed-5263-8588-dd97a0e51735)
Part 2 (#ulink_d474e62f-0595-5803-aa15-a808236714c9)
Lie8 (#ulink_41d3b38b-7609-5d60-b10b-afe17509e566)
Lie9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lie26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Truth1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Truth2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
(#ulink_19f69dcd-2a97-5f1a-9b92-100672e843fe)
LIE #1 (#ulink_2aa1c464-ee3c-577b-8afe-30a28e9e3a03)
Jefferson High School, Davisburg, Virginia
February 2, 1959
THE WHITE PEOPLE are waiting for us.
Chuck sees them first. He’s gone out ahead of our group to peer around the corner by the hardware store. From there you can see all of Jefferson High.
The gleaming redbrick walls run forty feet high. The building is a block wide, and the windowpanes are spotless. A heavy concrete arch hangs over the two-story wood-and-glass doors at the front entrance.
The only thing between us and the school is the parking lot. And the white people.
We’ve all walked past Jefferson a thousand times before, but this will be the first time any of us steps inside. Until today, those big wooden doors might as well have been triple-locked, and we didn’t have the key.
Our school, on the other side of town, is only one story. It’s narrow—no wider than the Food Town. Our teachers put boards in the windows to cover the cracks in the glass, but that’s not enough to stop the wind from whistling past us at our desks.
Our old school, anyway. Jefferson is supposed to be our school now.
If we can make it through those big brown doors.
“They’re out there all right,” Chuck says when he comes back. He’s trying to smile, but he just looks frozen. “Somebody sent out the welcome committee.”
No one laughs. We can hear the white people. They’re shouting, but the sound is too disjointed for us to make out the words.
I’m glad. I don’t want to hear. I don’t want my little sister Ruth to hear it, either. I try to pull her closer to me, but she jerks away. Ruth will be fifteen in two weeks, and she already thinks she’s too old to need help from her big sister.
“If anything happens, you come find me, all right?” I whisper. “Don’t trust the teachers or the white people. Come straight to me.”
“I can take care of myself,” Ruth whispers back. She steps away from me and links arms with Yvonne, one of the other freshmen.
“What are you gonna do if they try something?” Chuck asks Ennis. He keeps his voice low, trying to blend in with the dull roar coming from the school, so the younger kids won’t hear him. Chuck, Ennis and I are the only three seniors in our group. Most of the others are freshmen and sophomores. “They’ve got some big guys on that football team.”
“Never mind that,” Ennis says, raising his voice so the others can hear. “They won’t try anything, not in school. All they’ll do is call us names, and we’ll just ignore them and keep walking. Isn’t that right, Sarah?”
“That’s right,” I echo. I want to sound in charge, like Mrs. Mullins, but my voice wobbles.
Ennis holds my eye. His face looks like Daddy’s did this morning, when he watched Ruth and me climb into the carpool station wagon. Like he’s taking a good, long look, in case he doesn’t get another chance.
Ennis sounds like Daddy, too. My father and Mrs. Mullins and the rest of the NAACP leaders have been coaching us on the rules since the summer, when the court first said the school board had to let us into the white school. Rule One: Ignore anything the white people say to you and keep walking. Rule Two: Always sit at the front of the classroom, near the door, so you can make a quick getaway if you need to. And Rule Three: Stay together whenever you possibly can.
“What if they spit on us?” one of the freshmen boys whispers. The ten of us are walking so tightly together down the narrow sidewalk we can’t help but hear each other now, but none of us makes any move to separate. “We’re supposed to stand there and take it?”
“You take it unless you want to get something worse after school lets out,” Chuck says.
There’s a glint in Chuck’s eye. I don’t think he’ll take anything he doesn’t want to take.
I wonder what he thinks is going to happen today. I wonder if he’s ready.
I thought I was. Now I’m not so sure.
“Listen up, everybody, this is important.” Ennis sounds serious and official, like the NAACP men. “Remember what they told us. Look straight ahead and act like you don’t hear the white people. If a teacher says something to you, you don’t talk back. Don’t let anybody get you alone in the bathroom or on the stairs. And no matter what happens, you just keep walking.”
“What if somebody tries to hang us from the flagpole?” the freshman says. “Do we just keep walking then, too?”
“You watch your mouth,” Chuck tells him. “You’ll scare the girls.”
I want to tell him the girls are plenty scared already.
Instead I straighten my shoulders and lift my head. The younger kids are watching me. I can’t let them see how my stomach is dropping to my feet. How the fear is buzzing in my ear like a mosquito that won’t be swatted away.
We round the corner. Across the street, Jefferson High School sweeps into view. The white people are spread out across the front steps and the massive parking lot. Now I know why we could hear the crowd so well. There must be hundreds of them. The whole student body, all standing there. Waiting.
“Just like I said,” Chuck says. He lets out a low whistle. “Our very own personal welcome wagon.”
Ahead of me, Ruth shivers, despite her bulky winter coat. Under it she’s wearing her favorite blue plaid dress with the crinoline slip and brand-new saddle shoes. I’m in my best white blouse, starched stiff. Our hair is done so nice it might as well be Easter Sunday. Mama fixed it last night, heating the hot combs on the stove and yanking each strand smooth. Everything’s topsy-turvy with school starting in February instead of September, but we’re all in our best clothes anyway. No one wants the white people to think we can’t afford things as nice as theirs.
I try to catch Chuck’s eye, but he isn’t paying attention to me. He’s looking at the crowd.
They’re watching us.
They’re shouting.
Each new voice is sharper and angrier than the last.
I still can’t make out what they’re saying, but we’re not far now.
I want to cover Ruth’s ears. She’d never let me. Besides, she’ll hear it soon enough no matter what I do.
Our group has gone quiet. The boys are done blustering. Ruth lets go of Yvonne and steps back toward me. Behind us, a girl hiccups.
What if one of them starts crying? If the white people see us in tears, they’ll laugh. They’ll think they’ve beaten us before we’ve begun. We have to look strong.
I close my eyes, take a long breath and recite in my clearest voice. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”
Ruth joins in. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters.”
Then, all ten of us, in the same breath. “He restoreth my soul.”
Some of them have spotted us from across the street. The white boys at the front of the crowd are pushing past each other to get the first look at us.
Police officers line the school’s sidewalks in front of the boys. They’re watching us, too.
I don’t bother looking back at them. The police aren’t here to help us. Their shiny badges are all that’s stopping them from yelling with the other white people. For all we know they trade in those badges for white sheets at night.
Then reporters are running toward us. A flashbulb goes off in my face. The heat singes my eyes. All I see is bright white pain.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
I want to reach for Ruth, but my hands are shaking. It’s all I can do to hold on to my books.
“Are you afraid?” a reporter shouts, shoving a microphone at my chin. “If you succeed, you’ll be the first Negroes to set foot in a white school in this state. What do you think will happen once you get inside?”
I step around him. Ruth is holding her head high. I lift mine, too.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
We’re almost at the parking lot now. We can hear the shouts.
“Here come the niggers!” yells a boy on the steps. “The niggers are coming!”
The rest of the crowd takes up his chant, as if they rehearsed it. “The niggers! The niggers! The niggers!”
I try to take Ruth’s hand. She shakes me away, but her shoulders are quivering.
I wish she wasn’t here with us. I wish she didn’t have to do this.
I wish I didn’t have to do this.
I think about what the white reporter said. If you succeed...
And if we don’t?
“It will be all right,” I tell Ruth.
But my words are drowned out in the shouting.
“Mau maus!”
“Tar babies!”
“Coons!”
And “nigger.” Over and over.
“Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!”
I’ve never been called a nigger in my life. Not until today.
We step over the curb. The white people jostle us, bumping up against us, trying to shove us back. We keep pushing forward, slowly, but it’s hard. The crowd isn’t moving, so we have to slide between them. Ennis and Chuck go in front, clearing a path, ignoring the elbows to their sides and shoves at their chests.
I want to put Ruth behind me, but then I couldn’t see her, and what if we got separated? What would I tell Mama and Daddy?
I grab her arm too tight, my fingers digging in. Ruth doesn’t complain. She leans in closer to me.
“Go back to Africa!” someone shouts by my ear. “We don’t want niggers in our school!”
Just walk. Get inside. Get Ruth inside. When the reporters go away everyone will calm down. If we can get through this part it will be all right.
My cup runneth over.
Ruth’s arm jerks away from me. I almost fall, my legs swaying dangerously under me, but I catch myself before I collapse.
I turn toward Ruth, or where she should be. Three older boys, their backs to me, are standing around my little sister, towering over her. One of them steps close to her. Too close. He knocks the books out of her arms, into the dirt.
I lunge toward them, but Ennis is faster. He dodges through a gap between the boys—he doesn’t shove them; we’re not allowed to touch any of them, no matter what they do to us—and pulls Ruth back toward me, leaving her books where they fell. He nods at me in a way that almost makes me believe he’s got everything under control.
He doesn’t. He can’t. If the boys do anything to him, Ennis doesn’t stand a chance, not with three against one. But they let him go, snarling, “We’re gonna make your life Hell, black boy.”
Ruth’s still holding her chin high, but she’s shaking harder than ever. I wrap my hand back around her arm. My knuckles go pale. I swallow. Once, twice, three times. Enough to keep my eyes steady and my cheeks dry.
“What about my books?” Ruth asks me.
“We’ll get you new books.” The blood is rushing in my ears. I remember I should’ve thanked Ennis. I look for him, but he’s surrounded by another group of white boys.
I can’t help him. I can’t stop walking.
Two girls, their faces all twisted up, start a new chant. “Two, four, six, eight! We don’t want to integrate!”
Others join in. The whole world is a sea of angry white faces and bright white flashbulbs. “Two, four, six, eight! We don’t want to—”
“Is the NAACP paying you to go to school here?” a reporter shouts. “Why are you doing this?”
A girl pushes past the reporter to yell in my ear. Her voice is so shrill I’m sure my eardrum will burst. “Niggers go home! Dirty niggers go home!”
Ennis is back in front, pushing through the crowd with Chuck. Ennis is very tall, so he’s easy to spot. People always ask if he plays basketball. He hates it because he’s terrible at basketball. He’s the best player on the football and baseball teams, though.
He was at our old school, anyway. That’s all done now that he’s coming to Jefferson. No sports for the boys, no choir for me, no cheerleading for Ruth. No dances or plays for any of us. No extracurriculars, that’s what Mrs. Mullins said, not this year.
Something flies through the air toward Ennis. I shout for him to duck, but I’m too late. Whatever it is bounces off his head. Ennis keeps moving like he didn’t even feel it.
I look for the police. They’re standing on the curb, watching us. One sees me looking and points toward the main entrance. Telling me to keep moving.
He’s looking right at us. He must have seen Ennis get hit.
He doesn’t care. None of them do.
I bet they’d care if we threw things back.
“Nigger!” The girl is still shrieking at me. “Nigger! Nigger! You’re nothing but a filthy, stinking nigger!”
We’re almost there. The door is only a few yards away, but the crowd of white people in front of it is too thick. And the shouts are getting louder.
We’ll never make it. We were stupid to think this could ever work.
I wonder if they knew that. The police. The judge. Mrs. Mullins. Daddy. Mama. Did they think we’d even get this far? Did they think this was enough?
Maybe next year. Maybe the year after that. Someday, they’ll let us through, but not today.
Please, God, let this be over.
Someone shrieks behind me. I glance back.
Yvonne is clutching her neck. I can’t tell if she’s bleeding.
“Yvonne!” Ruth tries to turn back, but I hold her arm. We can worry about Yvonne later.
“Nigger!” The white girl at my shoulder is so close I can feel her hot breath on my face. “Coon digger! Stinking nigger!”
“Oh!” Ruth stumbles. I reach to catch her before she falls, but she finds her footing quickly. She’s wiping something off her face.
The boy who spat on her is grinning. I want to hit him, hard, shove him back into the group of boys behind him. See how he likes it when he’s not the one with the power.
Instead I keep walking, propelling my sister forward. We’re inching closer to the doors.
We’re not so far now. Maybe we can get inside. Inside, it will be better.
“You know you ain’t going in there, nigger!” the girl screeches in my ear. “You turn around and go home if you know what’s good for you! We don’t want no niggers in our school!”
Ennis and Chuck are on the steps, almost at the front entrance. The doors are propped open. Behind them more white students are yelling and jostling. Two boys in letterman’s sweaters have their fists raised.
We just have to get past them. Inside the school, the teachers will keep everyone under control. The people who are shouting will start acting like regular people again. The entire school can’t be made up of monsters.
Chuck and Ennis have stopped to wait for the others to catch up. Ruth and I are right behind them, so we stop, too.
Now that we’re not moving, the crowd around us gets even thicker. The shouts get louder. The girl who’s been following me has been joined by two of her friends.
“Who’s that other nigger girl, huh?” she yells. “Is that your baby sister? Your tar baby sister?”
The girls screech in laughter. Ruth looks straight ahead, but her chin isn’t quite as high anymore.
I want to take Daddy’s pocketknife and slice the white girl’s tongue in two.
“Keep the niggers out!” A group of boys chants in the doorway. “Stop the niggers! Don’t let the niggers in!”
But they have to let us in. This is Virginia, not Mississippi. They’ll let us in, and they’ll see that having us here doesn’t make any difference. Then things will settle down.
That’s what Daddy said. And Mama. And Mrs. Mullins, and Mr. Stern, and everyone else at the NAACP. It’ll be hard at first, but then things will go back to normal. We’ll just be going to school. A better school, with solid windows and real lab equipment and a choir that travels all over the state.
Everything will be easier when we get inside that big brick building.
I turn toward the police. They’ll make sure we get inside. That’s their job, isn’t it? To enforce the court ruling?
But the police are so far away, and the crowd is so thick. I can’t see them anymore.
We’re together now, all ten of us, surrounded by hundreds of white people who are shouting louder than ever. Chuck and Ennis press forward, and the rest of us follow. We’re so tightly packed I can smell the detergent Ennis’s mother used on his pressed white shirt. It’s the same kind my mother uses. I try to imagine I’m back at home on laundry day, helping Mama hang sheets on the line. My little brother playing by the porch steps. Ruth turning cartwheels in the yard while Mama calls for her to go inside and finish her homework.
“It’s gonna be open season on coons when y’all get inside,” a boy shouts behind me. “Just you wait.”
Ennis pushes past the boys blocking the doors. Ruth and I stumble after him.
We’re inside.
It’s done. We did it. We’re in the school.
But the white people are still staring at us. Shouting at us.
They’re all around me. And they still look hungry.
Someone shoves into my right side. From behind, someone else’s elbow juts into my lower back. Another tall boy with blond hair is right in front of me. All I can see is the thick white wool of his letterman’s sweater.
Someone pushes into me from behind. My face is crushed against the blond boy’s sweater, but he doesn’t move. I can’t breathe.
“Hey!” I hear Ennis shout, but he sounds far away. I don’t know where Ruth is. My chest feels too tight.
Someone is ramming me hard from the left, but I can’t move. There are too many white people. There’s nowhere to go.
I can’t do this. I can’t stay here. I can’t breathe.
A tight grip closes around my right arm above the elbow, cutting off my circulation. Fingers dig into my flesh. They’re going to drag me out of here.
I’ve just made it through, and already it’s all going to be over. But I don’t care, because all I want is to breathe again.
The hand on my arm tugs harder, pulling me through the thick knot of people. This is it. They’re going to take me away. I don’t know what they’ll do to me, and I don’t care, because I just want to breathe. I just want this to be over.
That’s when the screaming starts.
Lie #2 (#ulink_159f5f91-f394-5adf-bc77-8ff571639a98)
MY ARM FEELS as if it’s being wrenched from its socket as I stumble through the crush of white people. The pain rockets through me, and my eyes flood with tears.
The grip on my arm lets go. I clutch at my chest as the breath floods back into my lungs.
Then I remember where I am. I turn to run.
“Sarah!” It’s Chuck. It’s only Chuck.
Ruth is next to him, staring at me with her forehead creased. The rest of the group is gathered behind them.
“Sarah, you all right?” Chuck says.
I nod. I can breathe again, at least. But we’re not safe yet.
The shouts are louder here than they were outside. They echo off the walls and high ceilings of the school vestibule, pressing in on us from all sides. More shouts come from deep inside the building. All around us, white people press in, shoving at our backs and glaring at our faces. The building looks huge from the outside, but the vestibule feels tiny with all these people packed so tightly into it, every one of them turned toward us.
Where are the teachers? The principal?
“Where do we go?” Ruth asks. I don’t know what to tell her.
“Mrs. Mullins gave me the list,” Ennis says. “Seniors go to the auditorium, juniors, the atrium, sophomores, the gym, freshmen—”
“The cafeteria,” Paulie cuts in.
“No way.” I’m not letting go of Ruth. Not again.
She pulls out of my grip anyway. She’s holding her head up again. Back to her old self.
“What are you going to do, babysit me all day?” she asks me.
“I’ll walk the freshmen over,” Chuck says. He nods toward Yvonne, who’s still rubbing her neck. There’s a red mark near her collarbone, but no blood. “I’ll watch out for them.”
I’m not sure about that. I don’t want my sister out of my sight.
But I don’t know what else to do. Ruth is right. I can’t be with her all day.
Plus, I don’t know where the cafeteria is. Or the auditorium, or anything else. I’ve never set foot in this building before, but Chuck is looking up and down the halls as if he knows his way around. I’ll have to trust him.
My heart thuds as I watch Ruth go to Chuck’s side, turn her back and walk away. All I can do is pray she’ll be safe.
Yesterday I would’ve thought prayer was enough. Today I’m not so sure.
“Come on,” Ennis says. “We’ve got to go. If we’re late we’ll get detention.”
I’ve never had detention before, but Mrs. Mullins told us the white teachers would look for any excuse to send us there. We can never be late to class, no matter what.
But if we have to deal with shouting crowds every day, won’t we always be late?
No. The crowd was only for today. Tomorrow things will go back to normal.
Whatever “normal” is at this huge, looming school, with the shining glass trophy cases lining every hallway and the brand-new books everyone is carrying. And the huge white boys in letterman’s sweaters lurking around every corner.
Somehow Ennis already knows his way around Jefferson, too, so I follow him. The auditorium isn’t far from the front doors, but it takes us a long time to get there because the white people are still swarming.
They’re still shouting, too. And throwing balls of paper. And sticking out their feet to trip us. One catches Ennis’s ankle and he falls hard, catching himself with his hands before his face hits the ground. It takes all my strength not to cry out when I see him going down.
The white people howl laughter as I help him up. Ennis is biting his lip and cradling his wrist. I pray it isn’t broken. If one of us comes home with a broken bone, the courts could say they were wrong and integration was too dangerous after all. They could send us all back to our old school. Daddy would be furious.
“Hey, you look real pretty today,” a girl says in my direction.
I turn around. Did one of the white people really say something nice to me?
No. Of course not.
The girl laughs at me and draws back. I can see what’s going to happen but there’s nothing I can do about it. The crowd is too thick for me to get away before the girl spits on the yellow flowered skirt Mama made for my sixteenth birthday.
I’m shaking again. Ennis looks at my skirt, then at me. He’s still holding his wrist.
“Come on,” he says. “We’re almost there.”
It’s getting hard to breathe.
Chuck will have to leave Ruth to come join us. It’ll be my sister and two other freshmen alone with all these angry white people. What if someone trips her like they did Ennis? What if she gets hurt, and she needs me?
Somehow Ennis knows what I’m thinking.
“You’ll only make it worse if you try to go back, Sarah,” he says, giving me that serious look again. “You’ve got to have faith it will be all right.”
I’m trying to have faith. It’s so hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
Chuck catches up with us at the auditorium doors. It’s too loud for us to hear each other, but he nods to tell me Ruth is all right.
She was all right when he left her, anyway. Who knows what might have happened since then.
A group of boys sings as we walk through the doors. The tune is a song that’s been playing on the radio lately, “Charlie Brown.” I used to like that song, but the boys have changed the words. “Fee fee, fi fi, fo fo, fum! I smell niggers in the auditorium!”
They howl with laughter at their own joke. Other boys and girls join in, snickering at Ennis and Chuck and me as we try to find seats. This room must be built to hold a thousand people. All the seniors are running back and forth between the rows, shouting, laughing, pointing at us. Teachers are standing around, too, but they’re talking to each other, looking at their watches, as if they haven’t even noticed we’re here.
“Two, four, six, eight!” The chant continues as the three of us move toward the front of the room. “We don’t want to integrate!”
Posters for school activities hang on the walls. Basketball practice. Science club meetings. Ticket sales for the prom. My eyes linger on a poster for Glee Club auditions before I remember we aren’t welcome at the clubs and teams and dances at this school. We aren’t even welcome to breathe the same air.
We find three seats together in the front row. I sit between Chuck and Ennis, trying to fold my coat so the spit on my skirt doesn’t show. Normally I’d feel uncomfortable sitting with two boys, but everything about today already feels strange.
We haven’t been sitting ten seconds when everyone else who was sitting on the front row stands up, all in one smooth motion, and files out.
For the second time this morning, I wonder if the white people rehearsed that.
“Boy, does it ever stink in here all of a sudden,” one girl says. Her friends laugh and pinch their noses.
Now that we’re alone in the front row, the chanting starts up again behind us. At first it’s just a few people, but then the rest of them join in. The voices get very loud very fast.
“Niggers go home! Niggers go home! Niggers go home!”
I look straight ahead. Ennis and Chuck are doing the same thing. I want to meet Chuck’s eyes but I’m afraid he’ll only try to make some awful joke, and instead of laughing I’ll burst into tears.
There is only one thing in this world right now that I want.
I want to get out of here. I want to get up, go find my sister and drag her out the front door. I don’t want either of us to ever set foot in this place again.
I’m starting to think things aren’t going to get better after this. I’m starting to think they’re going to get worse.
“All right now,” comes a voice. A teacher is on the stage, holding a clipboard. I wait for her to tell everyone to stop yelling and be polite and respectful, the way the teachers at my old school would have, but she just says, “All right,” again. Slowly, the chanting dies down.
The teacher looks bored. As if it’s any other first day of school. As if we aren’t starting five months late because the governor closed the whole school last semester to stop ten Negroes from walking through the front doors. As if there wasn’t almost a riot in the parking lot five minutes ago.
“Your senior class president will lead us in prayer,” the teacher says. She nods toward yet another boy with blond hair and blue eyes and a varsity letterman’s sweater.
“Let’s all bow our heads,” the boy says.
Automatically, my head goes down, my eyes shut and my hands fold in my lap. Before the prayer has even started, I feel something pushing on my lower back. Then the pressure gets sharper. Digging into my flesh through my thin cotton blouse.
Is it a knife? Am I going to die right now, right here? Before I’ve been to a single class in this godforsaken school? What will happen to Ruth if I die?
I’m about to leap out of my seat when I realize it can’t be a knife. A blade would be slicing into my skin, not just pressing.
This isn’t a knife. It’s a sharpened pencil point.
But it still hurts. A lot.
I ignore it and breathe deeply, trying not to let the pain distract me from my prayer as the blond-haired boy intones, “Our Heavenly Father.”
A second pencil joins the first, twin points drilling into me. I move forward in my seat, but the pencils move with me. They’re pushing deeper now. I wonder if I’m bleeding.
“You best pray hard, nigger bitch,” a boy’s voice says, low in my ear. “We’re gonna tear you to pieces first chance we get.”
That makes me shiver, but I don’t let the boy see. I move my lips along with my own prayer. Please, Father, watch out for Ruth today. And for me, and for all of us. Please watch over us and protect us and let us make it through safely. In Your holy name.
“Amen,” I say with the blond boy and the rest of the senior class. I open my eyes.
The stabbing pain is gone.
Even though I know better—and I’d have killed Ruth if she’d done this—I turn around. I want to see who gave me the bruises forming on my back. I want to meet his eyes.
There’s no one there. The seat behind me is empty. So are the seats on either side of it. The rest of the auditorium is a blur of identical-looking white faces.
Then I see a pretty girl with red hair and a stylish white Villager blouse a few rows back. She’s looking at me. But this girl isn’t sneering, or pinching her nose, or getting ready to throw something at me. She’s just looking.
She nudges her friend, another white girl with frizzy brown hair. The brown-haired girl sees me looking at them and puts her hand up in front of her cheek as if she’s embarrassed, but the red-haired girl isn’t shy about staring.
It takes me too long to realize I’m staring back at the red-haired girl.
I drop my head, but it’s too late.
Did she notice? Could she tell?
This hasn’t happened to me in a long time. Noticing a girl like that, and letting her see it. I’ve learned how to force it down when I feel those things. To act as if I’m normal.
But sometimes I can’t stop it. I can’t stop it now.
My cheeks are flushed. I feel off balance, even though I’m still sitting down. I grip the armrest to steady myself.
My mind is running to scary places. The images come too fast for me to stop them.
I imagine what it would be like if I were alone with the red-haired girl. How it would feel if she smiled at me with her pretty smile, and I smiled back, and—
No. I know better than to think this way.
I can’t take any risks. Especially not at this school. If anyone found out the truth about me it would mean—I don’t even know what it would mean. I only know it would be horrible. It would be a hundred times worse than what happened in the parking lot this morning. A thousand times.
Then I realize I’ve got another problem altogether.
The other white people have noticed I’m turned around. They’re whispering to each other and pointing at me.
The boys leer. The girls scrunch up their faces. One boy rolls a spitball.
I turn back around fast. I can’t make that mistake again.
I’d thought some of the white people at Jefferson might be all right. But if they were, they’d be helping us, wouldn’t they? They’d be telling the other white people to leave us alone. They’d have held the doors open so we could get through.
No one’s helped us yet.
The teacher is back at the front of the stage, still looking bored. “All right, seniors. It’s time to distribute your schedules and locker assignments for the year. When your name is called, go to Mr. Lewis or Mrs. Gruber to pick yours up. Then go straight to your first period class. There will be no dawdling in the halls. Tardiness will result in detention.”
“Want to bet she said that just for us?” Chuck mutters.
The spitball hits my back. The surprise of it makes me catch my breath, but I don’t let the white people see me flinch. Instead I reach back and pull the spitball off my blouse. It’s cold and slimy. It makes my stomach churn, but I tell myself it’s no worse than changing my little brother’s diapers, and I did that for two and a half years.
“Donna Abner?” calls a man standing in the aisle to our left. Mr. Lewis. His name was on the Glee Club poster, so he must be the Music teacher. A white girl moves up the aisle toward him.
“It’s alphabetical,” Ennis whispers as Mrs. Gruber calls for Leonard Anderson from the opposite aisle. “Sarah, you’ll be first, but come back here and wait for us after you get your schedule. We’ll all go to first period together.”
“What if we’re not in the same class?” Chuck asks.
Mrs. Mullins said the school might put us in different classes. If we were separated, the school officials thought, there’d be less risk of violence. I guess they thought two or three Negroes together would try to take on an entire classroom full of whites. As if any of us wanted to get killed.
“We’ll walk together anyway,” Ennis says. “The longer we’re together the safer we are. That’s more important than detention.”
But when the teachers reach the D’s, they skip right over where my last name, Dunbar, should be and go straight from Thomas Dillard to Nancy Duncan.
Should I say something? I look at Ennis.
“Let’s wait,” he whispers.
When they get to the M’s, when Ennis should be called, the teachers skip over him, too. The same thing happens with Chuck when they get to the T’s.
Maybe this was all a big mistake.
We were told we’d been admitted to the school, and that we should come in today along with the white people, but maybe the courts have issued a new ruling. Maybe the police will troop in to pull us out of here. The white people will line the halls and cheer as we’re escorted from the building.
The auditorium is almost empty now. Somehow it’s scarier seeing just a few angry white faces staring us down instead of a hundred. If they got one of us alone they could do anything they wanted and it would be their word against ours.
Finally the last name, Susan Young, is called. Mr. Lewis gives Susan her schedule. Once her back is turned he comes over to stand in front of Ennis, Chuck and me.
The rest of the teachers have left. Mr. Lewis leans back and rests his elbow on the stage, looking us over.
My heartbeat speeds up. Mr. Lewis is a teacher, but that doesn’t mean he supports integration. Would he do something to us if it meant risking his job? Not that anyone would believe three colored children telling stories about a grown white man.
Then Mr. Lewis smiles.
I tilt my head, confused. It looks like a real smile, not a sneer.
“Hello,” he says. “Welcome to Jefferson High School.”
Is this a trick? Next to me, Chuck shifts in his seat. There’s suspicion in his eyes.
Mr. Lewis looks at each of us in turn, still smiling. “I’m told you three will be the first Negroes to graduate from a white school in Davisburg County. All I can say is, it’s about time.”
Oh.
It’s the first kind thing anyone has said to us.
I try to smile back at Mr. Lewis. Mama would want me to be polite.
“Let’s get you some schedules.” Mr. Lewis pulls three rumpled papers from his pocket. “Sorry we didn’t have them with the others. Apparently someone in the office didn’t think you’d be here today, so your schedules had to be assembled rather hastily.”
He chuckles. I don’t. We might very well not have been here today. Some of the white parents tried to file an emergency petition at the courthouse just yesterday to stop us from getting into Jefferson.
The white parents, and the school board, and Senator Byrd and Governor Almond fought this with everything they had. It’s been five years since the Supreme Court said integration had to happen, but for five years, the white people kept fighting, and our schools stayed segregated. Until last week, when the courts put out their final ruling: the white parents, and the governor and the rest of the segregationists had lost.
Here we are. Whether they like it or not.
Whether we like it or not, too.
“Miss Dunbar.” Mr. Lewis hands me a paper.
No one ever calls me “Miss.” Usually it’s just “Sarah.” Or, if it’s a white person talking, “Girl.”
He hands Chuck and Ennis their schedules, too. I try to read the scrawled handwriting on mine.
* * *
Typing? I took Typing at my old school. And I’ve already had two years of French. Plus there’s no music class on my schedule at all. At my old school, Johns High, I was going to take Advanced Music Performance this year.
“What do these R’s after the course names mean?” Chuck whispers. I look at his schedule. He has the same first-period Math class I do. Other than that, we don’t have any classes together.
I don’t know what the R’s mean, either. I want to ask Mr. Lewis, but Ennis is already standing up.
“Come on,” he says. “We don’t want to be late. Thank you, sir.”
“Go straight to your first-period classes,” Mr. Lewis says. “There’s no Homeroom today. Good luck.”
Good luck? I wonder if he’s joking.
We file out of the auditorium in silence. Someone has shut the doors, even though the assembly only just ended. Ennis pushes them open and steps out into the hall.
“There they are!” The cries are coming from all around us. At least a dozen boys are gathered, most in letterman’s sweaters. “There’s those coon diggers!”
“You have to go to the second floor?” Ennis mutters to me, not taking his eyes off the boys. They’re coming closer. They’re smiling.
“Yes,” I whisper. “Chuck does, too.”
“You go first, Sarah,” Chuck says. His voice is low and gravelly. “We’ll keep them from following you.”
“If we separate they’ll only split up and follow us all,” I whisper.
I wonder if Mr. Lewis knew this would happen. If that’s why he kept us late. I want to trust him, but it’s hard to trust anyone in this place.
“What’re you doin’ here, niggers?” one of the boys says. “You know you don’t belong in our school.”
“It’s our school, too,” Chuck says. “So what are you doing here?”
That sets the boys off. Two of them run at Chuck.
“Hey!” comes a loud voice behind us. Mr. Lewis. The boys stop in their tracks. “What’s this about?”
“That one started it,” one of the boys says, pointing at Chuck.
“He didn’t,” I say. “He wasn’t doing anything, he—”
Mr. Lewis raises his eyebrows at me. “Young lady, I think you and Mr. Mack had better get to class. Charles, Bo, Eddie, come with me.”
“But—”
Ennis takes my arm and pulls me away before I can finish.
“What will happen to Chuck?” I whisper when we’re far enough away. Behind us Mr. Lewis is leading Chuck and the two white boys who charged him toward the front office.
“Probably nothing,” Ennis says. “That teacher got there before anything happened. He’ll get a lecture, that’s all.”
“Will anything happen to the white boys?”
“No way.”
We’re walking up an empty staircase. Ennis is looking around in every direction, and I remember I’m supposed to do the same thing. We have to be extra alert in the stairwells. In Little Rock that’s where they set off the firecrackers.
“Keep an eye out for Ruth, will you?” I ask Ennis. “If you see her in the halls, make sure she’s all right?”
“I’ll try.”
Ennis leaves me at my classroom door, walking as fast as he can down the hall. I hope he doesn’t run into any other white boys.
I hadn’t thought much about Ennis before this morning. Chuck was in my group of friends back at Johns, but Ennis mostly kept to himself. After the way he helped Ruth in the parking lot, though, I’m going to be watching out for him, too.
The door to room 218 is closed. I’m scared to push it open, but if I don’t I’ll get a tardy slip. So I take a long breath, say a quick prayer and open the door.
Inside the room it’s dead silent. Then, as one, twenty heads jerk up. Twenty white faces gaze up at me. The door latches closed behind me like a gunshot.
I want to drop my eyes. Instead I look out into the sea of faces. Every one is looking back at me.
First come the stares.
Next, the pointing and the whispers.
Last, and most frightening, are the grins.
Lie #3 (#ulink_12911089-e4be-519f-99ed-10dd03141c05)
ALL THE GRINNERS are boys. They’re looking at me as if it’s Christmas morning and I’m the biggest present under the tree.
My legs are so weak I’m sure they’ll give way. I’ll wind up sprawled out across the floor on my backside while the white people laugh.
I keep my chin up as I move toward an empty seat in the front row.
“Who are you?” a woman asks. She’s tall, with gray-streaked hair, a sour look on her face and a stack of textbooks in her arms. She was the other teacher handing out schedules in the auditorium. Mrs. Gruber.
We have to be polite to the teachers, no matter what. We can’t do anything they could discipline us for. Especially not today.
That’s easy for me. I’m always polite to adults. I don’t know how to be any other way.
“My name is Sarah Dunbar, ma’am. My schedule says room 218.”
Mrs. Gruber dumps the stack of books on an empty desk and snatches my schedule out of my hand. She frowns at it. “Did you write this yourself? How do I know you’re supposed to be here?”
After Mr. Lewis, I’d thought the teachers might be nice to us. I should’ve known better. Mr. Lewis is just one white man. This school has plenty more.
“No, ma’am, I didn’t write it,” I say. “Mr. Lewis gave it to me. He said the office had to write out our schedules by hand at the last minute.”
Mrs. Gruber gives the paper back to me. “That doesn’t give you an excuse to take until the last minute yourself. Maybe at your school students can show up for class whenever they please, but at Jefferson you get detention when you’re tardy.”
I bite my lip. Mama and Daddy will be so disappointed in me. “Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Gruber writes out a detention slip and thrusts it at me. “Take a seat.”
I go to the empty desk in the middle of the front row and put down my books. Before I can sit down, the white girl at the desk next to mine bolts out of her chair.
She’s moving so fast I don’t recognize her at first. She sweeps up her books and her coat and glides to an empty seat on the far side of the room. Her hips swing under her pleated skirt and her lips curl in a smile. Everyone is watching her. And she knows it.
It’s the red-haired girl from the auditorium. With the smattering of freckles across her nose and the bright look in her blue eyes.
She’s even prettier up close. Except for the hateful look on her face.
Her frizzy-haired friend is in the seat right behind mine. She has a heavy layer of makeup on one side of her face and a stricken look in her eyes.
Only when the boy in the seat on the other side of mine gets up to join the red-haired girl do I understand what’s going on.
Everyone sitting within two desks of mine is gone in seconds, scurrying to find other seats. Soon there aren’t any empty desks left except the ones near me. The extra white students perch on the radiator at the back.
Mrs. Gruber studies a pile of papers on her desk. To look at her, you’d never know students were running around as though the classroom were under siege.
The seat behind mine is the only one near me that’s still occupied. Everyone looks at the frizzy-haired girl.
The girl looks fast from side to side. She meets my eyes for a second. Then she cups her hand over her made-up cheek. The red-haired girl whispers, “Judy, come on.”
The frizzy-haired girl, Judy, jumps out of her seat, dropping her books in her haste. A few boys laugh as she kneels to gather them up. She goes to the back of the room and sits on the radiator with the others.
I keep my chin high. At least this way I won’t have to worry about anyone drilling pencils into my back.
Mrs. Gruber passes out our textbooks as though nothing happened, dropping mine onto my desk with a thud. She’s turning toward the blackboard when the door swings open.
Every head in the room jerks up again, mine included.
I should be glad to see Chuck standing there. Instead I wish he’d turn around and walk right back out. I don’t want to watch it happen all over again.
“What now?” Mrs. Gruber slams a textbook down.
“I’m sorry I’m late, ma’am,” Chuck says in his most polite teacher voice. “I’m Charles Tapscott. I was talking to Mr. Lewis in the office about—”
“Sit down.” Mrs. Gruber sighs and writes out another detention slip.
Chuck takes the empty seat next to me. Two boys sitting near him get up and join the others in the back of the room.
Chuck doesn’t ignore it the way I did, though. He turns to watch them walk away, his mouth open in an O.
One of the boys in the back of the class opens his mouth wide and makes a face just like Chuck’s. Then he squeals like a pig.
Everyone laughs. Mrs. Gruber acts like she didn’t notice that, either.
“Hey, this ain’t fair,” another boy says. “Why we gotta have two of ’em in our class? Like one coon’s not bad enough.”
Some of the others grumble in agreement.
“All right, everyone, settle down,” Mrs. Gruber says. She doesn’t even look at the boy who spoke. “Who doesn’t have a book yet?” Chuck and a few other people raise their hands.
I flip open my new textbook. I’ve always liked school. Adults always tell me I’m a bright girl with a good future ahead of me. If I can concentrate on my classwork maybe the white people’s antics won’t bother me so much.
As soon as I open the book I know something’s wrong.
I leaf through to the last chapter to make sure. There’s no doubt. I raise my hand. Then I put it down again. Mrs. Gruber isn’t going to want to help me.
But she saw. She comes to stand right in front of my desk and sighs again, loudly. “Did you want something?”
“No, I—” I start to falter, but I can’t show any weakness in front of these people. I meet Mrs. Gruber’s eyes. “I was curious as to the name of this course.”
One of the white boys laughs. “Nigger shows up, doesn’t even know what class she’s in!”
Another joins in. “Don’t you see the charts on the wall? Can’t you tell a Math class? Ain’t you ever seen numbers before, nigger?”
“As your schedule clearly states, this is Remedial Math 12,” Mrs. Gruber says. Then she turns her back.
“Remedial?” Oh. That’s what the R’s stood for. They were on almost every class on my schedule. Chuck’s, too. They’ve put us in the remedial track.
All the Negroes who came here were in the college prep courses back at Johns. That’s why they picked us to integrate Jefferson. We were supposed to be the best of the best. The kind of students who could handle the white school’s classes and still have enough smarts left over to put up with the rest of it.
I learned how to do the work in this textbook in ninth grade.
I wonder if they put us in these classes because they think we’re stupid or because they wanted to punish us for coming here in the first place. I wonder if my college will still let me in when they see those remedial classes on my transcript.
But I don’t have time to worry about that now. I have a bigger problem.
Everyone in this room heard what I said.
They know I think I’m too smart for Remedial. Smarter than they are.
I am smarter than they are, but that isn’t going to help me now.
The boys start in right away.
“The nigger thinks she’s a genius,” one says. “Look everybody, we’ve got Einstein in our class!”
“Hey, girl, if you too good for Remedial, how ’bout you put your smarts to use and come clean my house?”
“Hey, nigger, can you count this high? Two, four, six, eight, we don’t wanna integrate!”
Mrs. Gruber keeps her eyes on the chalkboard.
It goes on that way for the rest of the period. The boys leave us alone while Mrs. Gruber is talking, but as soon as she looks away they start in on me, and Chuck, too. Mrs. Gruber hears it, but she doesn’t say anything.
I keep looking straight ahead. At first I think I’ll get used to it. Instead, the longer it goes on, the more it stings.
“Those niggers need to be put in their place.”
“What’d they come here for? Don’t they know we don’t want to look at their ugly black faces?”
“I bet they got their nigger tails tucked in under those clothes. Let’s rip ’em out.”
When the bell rings I want to charge out of the classroom. I want to put as much distance between myself and these people as I can.
There’s no use. The white people in the hall won’t be any better. It’ll be worse, in fact, because there will be more of them.
So Chuck and I gather our things and leave with everyone else, ignoring the pushing and shoving until we’re out in the hallway. There, the white people gather around us in a circle to shout names until we’ve separated and made our way to our next classes. Then they follow us down the hall, shouting at us, pushing us, stepping on our heels, jabbing elbows into our sides.
Not much changes the rest of the morning. In every class the students move away from my desk as soon as I sit down. My Typing and History teachers aren’t as bad as Mrs. Gruber, but neither of them makes any effort to make me feel welcome. I come to recognize the look in each of my teachers’ eyes when I walk through their classroom doors. The look that says they wish I’d turn around and walk right back out. I’m making their jobs harder just by being here.
Fourth-period French is different.
The students look the same as ever. Most of them have been in some of my classes already that day. The red-haired girl and her friend Judy are there, sitting on the far side of the room, scowling at me.
As I come in a boy yells, “Ain’t you heard? We don’t care what no nigger-loving judge has to say. We don’t believe in race mixing in this class. So you best turn around and run back to Africa.” The rest of the class move their seats away from mine.
I sit straight in my seat, blinking at the chalkboard, like always. It’s a lucky thing I’m good at pretending.
The teacher, Miss Whitson, comes in as the final bell rings. She stands in the doorway for a long minute, gazing around the classroom. I can’t tell what she’s thinking.
She comes over to my desk and whispers, so low only I can hear, “What’s your name?”
“Sarah Dunbar,” I whisper back.
She makes a note on her roll and goes to the chalkboard. The room is still quiet. Everyone must already know you don’t mess around in Miss Whitson’s class.
“This is French II.” She gives us all a hard look. “I expect you to have the fundamentals of the language down. We’re getting a late start this year and we have a lot of makeup work to do, but I’m not lowering my expectations of how you’ll perform on your end-of-year exams. So if you want to pass you’ll have to work hard.”
Everyone looks worried. Good. If they’re nervous about passing the class maybe they won’t have time to yell at me.
“We’ll start off with a refresher on conversation,” Miss Whitson goes on. “I’ll pair you off. You and your partner will talk about what you did over Christmas. Then you’ll drill each other on the irregular verbs on pages fourteen through eighteen. I’ll be listening closely and grading you on your participation. If I hear one word of English it’s an automatic failure.”
There’s low grumbling from the back of the class. A girl raises her hand. “Miss Whitson?”
“Oui?” Miss Whitson says.
The girl replies in English. “Miss Whitson, you’re not going to pair anyone with her, are you?”
“That’s enough,” Miss Whitson says in French. She begins to read the pairs off from her roll book. “Abner, Baker.”
I suppose it doesn’t matter who I’m paired with. None of these people want anything to do with me. My partner will probably go sit as far from me as he can get, even if it means we both get a failing grade. Maybe Miss Whitson will let me do a makeup assignment instead.
“Campbell, Dunbar,” Miss Whitson says.
I have no idea who “Campbell” is. No one remembers my last name, either, so there’s no reaction until Miss Whitson finishes the list, claps her hands and tells us all to go sit with our partners.
I don’t move. I expect everyone to ignore me. So it’s a surprise when the frizzy-haired girl from this morning puts her books down on the empty desk next to mine.
“You got the nigger, Judy?” a boy says behind us. He’s part of the gang who tried to charge at Chuck in the hall this morning. “You better watch out if you don’t want to get any of that black on you! You don’t want to wind up even uglier than you already are!”
“You leave Judy alone, Bo!” the red-haired girl says. She looks furious.
“Bo Nash!” Miss Whitson says. “You heard me. One more English word out of anyone in this class and it’s an F.”
I keep my gaze fixed straight ahead. What does this girl Judy think she’s doing, sitting down next to me? She moved away from my desk in Math, so I don’t know why she thinks it’s safe to be near me now. Well, whatever she tries to do to me, I won’t give her the satisfaction of reacting.
“Um,” Judy says. “Bonjour?”
Oh.
I wasn’t expecting that.
No white student has said a single sentence to me today that didn’t include nigger, coon or some other hateful word. Except the girl in the hall who spat on my good skirt.
“Bonjour,” I murmur, waiting to see if this is a trick.
“My name is Judy,” she says in terribly mangled French.
“My name is Sarah.”
We’re quiet after that. I suppose Judy thinks she’s said enough not to fail. I look at the clock over the blackboard, wondering how many minutes will pass before someone yells something new at me.
“Um,” Judy says again. She holds the cover of her French textbook out in front of her, squinting.
Then I see the real problem. “My name is Judy” is the only sentence this girl knows how to say in French.
“How are you?” I ask, hoping a simple sentence like that will be familiar to her.
She stares at me blankly.
This is useless. I turn back to the clock.
“I—” Judy starts to say.
I shake my head to show her she’s still speaking English.
Judy shakes her head, too, and half smiles. She raises her eyebrows and shrugs in what looks like an apology.
Maybe this is an act. Part of an elaborate trick she and her friends are pulling. I bet the cruel red-haired girl is the ringleader.
Or maybe I was right before. Maybe not all the white people in this school hate us.
Miss Whitson is coming our way. Judy peers up at the bulletin board, which lists some common French words. Colors. Parts of the body. Family members.
“Sister!” Judy says. She struggles to say a complete sentence, butchering the French. My mother, who teaches French and English at the colored junior high, would cringe if she heard. “Um. You have sister?”
What?
The only way this girl could know I have a sister is if she’s seen her. Everyone always says Ruth and I look alike.
I haven’t seen Ruth all morning.
“Did you see my sister?” I ask Judy in rapid French. “Where? How was she? Was she safe?”
Judy frowns and shrugs helplessly. She doesn’t understand.
“Have you seen her?” I repeat in English. “Is she safe?”
Miss Whitson is watching us. I’m sure she heard me speaking English, but she doesn’t say anything.
“Oui,” Judy says.
“Was anyone hurting her?”
“No,” Judy says. “I mean, non.”
I close my eyes and breathe in, long and slow. I feel like I haven’t breathed all morning.
Maybe we really can do this. Maybe it will be all right.
I’m so relieved I don’t even mind practicing French with a girl who can’t pronounce bonjour. So we get out our books and take turns conjugating regarder.
When the bell rings I grab my books. I try to move straight for the door, but before I’m even out of my desk the red-haired girl is blocking my way.
I wish she wouldn’t stand so near. I try again to force that feeling down. The strange buzzing in my chest that comes with being so close to a girl who’s this pretty. It doesn’t work.
“It’s a shame you had to work with her, Judy,” the girl says, looking right at me. “I’ll speak to my father tonight. He’ll get us both transferred out of this class. Math, too. We shouldn’t have to suffer just because some Northern interloper judge says so.”
The girl is right in my face. Her bright blue eyes are narrowed and fixed on mine. I can’t let her know she’s getting to me. I try to edge around her but she blocks my way with her purse. It’s just as fashionable as the rest of her—a cloth bag with round wooden handles covered in the same plaid fabric as her skirt.
There’s something about the way this girl talks. Something about the look in her eyes.
She makes me angrier than the others do.
She’s not like the girl who screamed at me in the parking lot or the one who spat on me in the hall. This girl doesn’t do that sort of thing. She works quietly. Efficiently. Ruthlessly.
I just wish she weren’t so pretty. That lovely face sets off a fire inside me that isn’t ever supposed to burn.
She frightens me. But she makes me want to stop being polite.
I shouldn’t say anything to her. It’s against the rules, and the rules are there for a reason.
It only happens because I can’t stop myself.
“It’s a shame you had to have such an awful friend, Judy,” I say, looking straight into the red-haired girl’s eyes. “I suppose we all have to suffer in our own ways.”
The red-haired girl stiffens. Everyone in the classroom is staring at us.
As soon as the words are out of my mouth, my nervousness returns. This girl may be too smart to throw rocks in the parking lot, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t just as dangerous as the rest of them. Smarts can do more damage than strength.
But if this girl is really so smart, why does she believe in segregation? There’s nothing logical about keeping people separated by their skin colors.
She’s as bad as the governor. Everyone says he’s an intelligent man. He’s a lawyer who argued in front of the Supreme Court, saying it would be too dangerous for colored children and white children to go to the same school. Then he got elected to the highest post in the state. Governor Almond has got to be one of the smartest men there is, but he believes in segregation, too.
I should’ve been smart enough not to talk back to this beautiful, dangerous girl.
It scares me, the way she makes me feel. I need to get away from her.
I slip around the red-haired girl while she’s still distracted and leave as quickly as I can. The rest of them spill out behind me. They don’t seem to be following me, though. They’re talking to Judy and her friend.
“It’s true,” one of them says. “Those agitators are just awful. I can’t believe that one had the nerve to talk to you that way, Linda.”
Linda. That must be the red-haired girl’s name. It suits her.
“What was it like speaking French with the nigger?” a boy asks Judy.
“Yeah, did she speak some of that coonjab to ya?” another one says.
“I don’t know,” Judy says. “I couldn’t understand what she said. It was in French.”
“No way,” a boy says. “You know that nigger don’t speak no French. They don’t say no ‘parlez-vous’ in Africa.”
Everyone laughs.
I’ve still got my back to the group. To be safe, I really should speed up to get away from them, but I want to hear what else Judy says. She’s the only white student all day who’s seemed like she might be all right.
“Does she stink even harder up close?” a boy asks her. “Man, I bet sitting next to one of them is worse than being on a pig farm in August.”
“I didn’t smell anything,” Judy says.
There’s a long pause where all I hear are footsteps. Then one of the boys says, “What’s the matter, Judy, you turning into a nigger-lover?”
There’s another long pause.
Then Linda speaks up. I’d recognize her voice anywhere.
“Don’t feel like you have to protect her, Judy,” Linda says. “You don’t owe her anything. They’re the ones who messed up this whole year for all of us, remember?”
There’s another pause. Then Judy’s voice falters. “Well. She talked real fast. Like how people up North sound.”
Some of the boys chuckle.
“I bet she wasn’t really saying anything in French,” Judy says. “I bet she just making a bunch of noises.”
No. No.
Everyone’s laughing now. One of the boys makes a honking sound.
“Yeah, do that again!” another boy says. “That’s what nigger French sounds like.”
Soon all the boys are doing it. Their laughter howls down the hall.
But they’re getting drowned out now by the other shouts. The usual ones. The circle has started to form around me, the way it always does in the halls. There are too many catcalls of “Nigger!” and “Ugly coon!” to distinguish one voice from another.
In a way, I’m relieved.
When it’s this loud it’s hard to hear the voice in my head.
The one that’s saying I was wrong. That Judy isn’t all right.
That every white person in this school is just as bad as every other.
Lie #4 (#ulink_54e3db22-7bff-506a-828f-ea46cfe0a143)
“LOOK AT THAT ugly face.” The white girl behind me in the lunch line is talking to her friend, but she’s gazing straight at me. “I guess there ain’t nothing she can do about it, though. They don’t make no black lipstick.”
Her friend stares at me, too.
I want to tell the white girl she’s uglier than I’ll ever be, with her fat ankles and her rat’s nest hair.
Instead I keep my eyes on the wall.
I’d expected the name-calling. The spitting. The shoving. I wasn’t ready for it, but I’d known it was coming.
What I didn’t plan on was the staring.
Everyone stares at me. Boys, girls. Freshmen, seniors. Teachers, secretaries.
Everyone. All day long. If I so much as move my little finger, fifty people watch me do it.
Maybe they think I can’t see them. That I’m blind as well as black.
“There she is!” a man’s voice booms. “There’s our young Miss Sarah Dunbar!”
I start to panic. Then I remember none of the white people know my name.
Mr. Muse is coming toward me, a bucket swinging from his hand and a wide smile on his face.
“Mr. Muse!” I grin up at him. He’s the tallest man in our church, nearly a foot taller than Daddy. His wife is in the choir with me, but I’d forgotten he worked at Jefferson. He sets his bucket down on the floor, peels off one of his rubber gloves and holds out his big hand to me. I clasp it, ignoring the looks and snickers from the white people. Mr. Muse’s hand is warm in mine.
“Bless you, Sarah,” he says, beaming down at me. “You know we’re all real, real glad to see you here.”
I can’t find words to tell Mr. Muse how glad I am to see him, too. His is the first friendly face I’ve seen in I don’t know how long.
“Now you just remember, we’re all so proud of you.” Mr. Muse drops my hand. He bends down to retrieve his bucket with the mop handle poking out the top. “And you’re surely making your mama and daddy proud, too.”
“Thank you so much, Mr. Muse, sir,” I say.
“Sir?” the girl behind me snickers in a high-pitched voice that she probably thinks sounds Northern. Like me. “Leave it to a doggone dirty nigger to call the doggone dirty janitor ‘sir.’ You get on out of here with your stinking bucket, boy.”
Mr. Muse acts like he didn’t hear the girl. He smiles at me again, then turns to leave the cafeteria, whistling that jazz tune they’ve been playing on the radio all winter.
I wish I could keep clasping Mr. Muse’s big warm hand for the rest of the day.
Usually when I see Negroes working as janitors or cleaning women, I get embarrassed. I understand why they’re doing it—it’s hard enough to find jobs as it is—but I hate to think of any of us mopping up spilled food we wouldn’t be allowed to eat if we were paying customers.
But the food in this cafeteria isn’t only for white people anymore. I’m here now.
I smile as I make my way through the lunch line. I take a double helping of green beans, my favorite, from the lunch ladies who pass me a tray without meeting my eyes. I will eat green beans today. The same green beans the white people get to eat. Because that’s my right. Mr. Muse and the others are counting on me to prove that it’s so.
But when I come out of the line Mr. Muse is long gone. The only black face in the room is mine.
The tables are arranged in long rows. There are almost no empty seats left. I was near the back of the lunch line, since I was late getting to the cafeteria. Groups of boys kept blocking my way in the halls.
One table has a few empty seats at the end. I move toward it, carefully stepping over the feet stuck out in my path, and set my tray on the painted wood surface.
Right away there’s a murmur from the white people nearest me. And then everyone sitting at the long table—there must be thirty of them—stands up.
“I can’t eat with this stench,” one girl says.
“I know. I lost my appetite.”
“They’re going to have to bleach this whole table to get the smell out.”
They leave, squeezing into other tables. Some of the girls are sharing seats. The boys hold their trays in their hands, trying to shove food in their mouths standing up.
I pretend not to notice. I pretend not to hear the laughter all around me. Or the new rounds of taunts that come with it.
I know I don’t really smell, but I still want to take about fifty showers when I get home to make sure.
No. I can’t think that way. I can’t let these white people get to me.
I’m lucky, really. I have a whole table to myself.
But I don’t feel lucky.
I take a bite of my green beans. They taste like rubber.
Just then, a girl shrieks near the end of the line and I forget all about my food. What if it’s Ruth?
I stand up fast, ignoring the boy behind me who calls me a damn nigger when my chair bumps into his, and crane my neck to see what’s going on in the line.
It’s not Ruth. The shrieking girl is white and blonde. She’s standing with a group of friends, covering her face with her hands.
Ten feet behind her Ennis is backing away slowly, gripping his tray, his eyes surveying the room.
No one else seems to have noticed the girl’s shriek. I sit back down. Whatever’s going on, I don’t need to draw more attention to it.
Ennis sees me and makes his way over, casting looks back at the blonde girl. She’s crying. Her friend pats her arm.
Ennis swiftly lifts his tray away from a boy who’s trying to knock it over and puts it down on the table across from me.
“What happened?” I nod toward the blonde girl.
Ennis sits down, shrugs and stirs his applesauce. “I don’t know. I walked by her, and she took one look at me and started screaming. You’d think she’d never seen a colored man before.”
Oh. I hadn’t thought about that. I wonder how many other girls at this school are going to scream whenever one of the Negro boys crosses their paths.
For years now, ever since we moved down here, I’ve been listening to Mama and Daddy talk about integration. Sometimes at night Ruth and I sneak out of our room and sit on the top step in our nightgowns, listening to our parents’ voices drift up the staircase. Mostly they talked about the court cases. That part was boring, but sooner or later they’d stop talking about injunctions and petitions and hearing dates and start talking about what integration might really be like for us. Once, when it was so late Ruth had fallen asleep, I heard Mama whisper to Daddy that what worried her most was our Negro boys. The white parents might give a dozen reasons for opposing integration, she’d said, but what they were really worried about deep down was their girls being around our boys. She never said exactly what worried them about that, though. Intermarriage, I suppose. The idea that black boys might get their nice white girls in trouble.
I don’t like to think about that sort of thing. It makes me blush. Besides, no Negro boy I know would ever risk going near a white girl. A few years ago a boy down in Mississippi got killed for doing a lot less than that.
“Hey, I saw your sister after second period,” Ennis says. “She was all right.”
I jerk up in my seat. “You’re sure? She wasn’t hurt?”
“She looked great. Walking down the hall with her nose in the air. From the way she acted you wouldn’t even know there was anyone yelling.”
I’m relieved, but at the same time I want to cry. “People were yelling at her?”
“Well, yeah. But no worse than the rest of us.”
I nod. “Thanks for helping her this morning. With those boys on the way in. I was so worried.”
“Oh. Sure.” He shrugs like it was nothing.
“I wish I could see her,” I say. “During the class breaks, just to make sure she’s all right. Then I wouldn’t have to worry all day. But I don’t even know where the freshmen classes are.”
“They’re all mixed together.” Ennis opens his notebook and turns to a blank sheet. He sketches out the school’s first floor, second floor, third floor and basement. “This is where I saw her this morning. She must have a class near there.”
He draws blocks around the Math, English, History and Science sections of the school, then draws in the stairwells and puts stars next to the gym, cafeteria and auditorium.
“How do you know all this?” I ask him.
“Mr. Muse snuck Chuck and me in during one of his shifts last summer. He wanted to make sure we knew our way around in case there was trouble.”
Right. Just in case.
“This is the main entrance.” Ennis draws a big X. “Where we’ll never go in again if we can help it.”
“You really think it’ll make a difference?”
“I think we’ve got to try.”
I can’t tell whether Ennis means what he’s saying. Whether he really thinks there’s any point in hoping things will get better.
But there are only five months left until I graduate. I can do this for five months.
I have to graduate from this school. It means so much to Mama and Daddy.
To me, too. I want to walk across that stage in front of all those white people and get that diploma. Show them there’s nothing they can do that I can’t.
But once I’m gone, Ruth will still have another three years in this place.
I squeeze my eyes tight against that thought.
A tray clatters down on the table beside mine, making me flinch.
“Sorry I’m late,” Chuck says.
“What happened?” Ennis fixes Chuck with a look.
Chuck shrugs. “Some guys hassling me. I got rid of them.”
“Got rid of them how?” There’s a warning in Ennis’s voice.
“It’s not important,” Chuck says.
I don’t want to know how Chuck got rid of them. I wonder if fighting is the sort of thing boys always talk about at lunch.
I’ve never sat with a boy in the cafeteria before. Girls and boys don’t usually do that after elementary school. But everything in my life is different now, so I suppose this might as well be different, too.
I wonder what will happen when word of it gets back to our old school. I wonder if the girls will talk about me. Say the sorts of things that get said about girls sometimes.
I had my first boyfriend last year. His name was Alvin. We went to the movies and held hands and walked around the park. We even kissed a little, but we never French-kissed. Girls aren’t supposed to do that until after high school.
I don’t mind that. I try not to even think about things like kissing and holding hands. When I do, I get confused and upset, and I have to stop thinking about it fast before I start thinking the wrong things.
I used to think the wrong things all the time. Before I knew they were wrong.
It started back when we lived in Chicago. One day I was walking with Mama and Ruth and we passed a movie theater that had a poster out front for Gone with the Wind. The poster showed the girl lying back in the man’s arms. Her green dress was cut low. I looked at that picture and it made me feel—
Something. I don’t know what, exactly. I just know that feeling was wrong.
But I didn’t know that then. And I didn’t know it was wrong when I used to take Mama’s copies of Ebony off the coffee table when she was done with them. I’d take them up to my room and turn straight to the back, where they had the fashion pictures. I’d turn the magazine around to all angles and look at the girls posing. The swimsuit articles were my favorites. I read every word on those pages. Mama was always surprised when she’d take us shopping for swimsuits in June and I knew all about cotton knit Lastex and the new “disciplined” bikinis.
Now that I’m almost grown-up, I know about right and wrong. It was shameful, the things I used to do. That’s why I don’t like to think about things like kissing.
I still have every one of those magazines in a box under my bed, though.
I try to focus on Chuck and Ennis’s conversation. They’re talking about their teachers. None of the others were as bad as Mrs. Gruber.
I tell them about what happened in French. Neither of them knows who Judy is, but when I mention Linda, Ennis knows exactly who I’m talking about.
“That’s Linda Hairston,” he says. “You know about the Hairstons, right?”
I shake my head, but as Ennis starts to explain, I realize I do know.
Linda’s father is William Hairston, the editor for the Davisburg Gazette. He’s the one who writes the editorials opposing integration. He’s also Daddy’s boss.
Daddy reads his editorials out loud at the breakfast table sometimes. They’re mostly about how integration will ruin our state for good. The last one he read us had a section about how Negro children should be taught only by Negro teachers, for our own benefit, because no one else can understand how “uniquely” our brains work.
Daddy says Mr. Hairston is much worse for Negroes than the boys who throw rocks or call us names. People respect Mr. Hairston. Thousands of people read what he writes and think it’s the truth.
Daddy is a copy boy for Mr. Hairston’s paper. He hates working there, but he doesn’t have any choice. He doesn’t make enough money just writing for the Negro paper, the way he used to when we lived in Chicago.
Did I put Daddy’s job at risk when I talked back to Linda? I need to be more careful from now on.
“What other classes did you have this morning?” Ennis asks me.
“Math, Typing, History and French. Every one was either a repeat or remedial.”
“Mine, too,” Ennis says. “And I’m in Auto Shop.”
“I’ve got Shop, too,” Chuck says. “Next period.”
The boys in College Prep at our old school never took Shop. I doubt Chuck and Ennis ever learned how to use tools. Ennis especially. His father is a lawyer, and his mother hires a handyman whenever they need something fixed. I hope Ennis doesn’t wind up cutting himself with a saw or anything like that.
“Why can’t we take the right classes?” I say. “The ones we were supposed to take at Johns?”
“The white teachers don’t know we’re going to college,” Chuck says. “They just put us in the classes they thought colored kids would take.”
That makes sense. Mrs. Gruber seemed surprised I could even read.
“Do you know where you’re going to college?” I ask Ennis. I already know Chuck is going to Virginia State College.
“Howard, if I get in,” Ennis says.
I sit back, surprised. Ennis’s whole family lives here in Davisburg, so I thought he’d go to a school around here. Howard’s all the way up in Washington, D.C. I’m going there, too, but it doesn’t matter so much for me since my family is spread out. My aunt and uncle and cousins are in Chicago and my grandparents still live in Alabama.
“I’m going to Howard, too,” I say. “My uncle’s friend works there. He said he’s sure I’ll get a scholarship.”
Ennis nods and looks down at the chili on his plate. Quickly I add, “Of course, I’m sure you’ll get one, too. Your marks have always been good.”
Good, but not as good as mine. I was first in my class at Johns, and Ennis was only third or fourth.
I don’t say that. It would be rude. Besides, it isn’t right for girls to talk about being smart around boys.
“That was at Johns,” Ennis says. “Who knows what will happen here.”
Oh. I hadn’t thought about getting lower marks now that we’re at a white school. I shift in my seat.
Ennis gets up to dump his tray. I’m still picking at my food. Chuck tries to tell me a joke about Fidel Castro but I’m too anxious to pay much attention.
Chuck cuts himself off halfway through the joke. His eyes are fixed on something over my shoulder. I turn to follow his gaze.
Ennis is twenty feet from our table, frozen in his tracks. Another blonde girl is running up to him, smiling. She speaks to him, but I can’t hear what she says. Ennis keeps his eyes on the floor and mumbles a response. The girl smiles as if nothing is wrong.
The room is getting quiet. We’re not the only ones watching Ennis and the blonde girl.
This is even worse than the girl who screamed earlier. This time, people are seeing it. A Negro boy who’s seen talking to a white girl could be in for very serious trouble.
Ennis backs away from the girl, keeping his head down.
I’m so focused on them I don’t even notice the boys coming up behind me until one of them knocks into the back of my chair. The table juts under my rib cage, knocking my breath out of me. Then something cold trickles down the back of my neck.
The table behind me bursts into laughter. “She almost looks white now!” a boy calls out.
I reach around and feel wetness on my hair, my neck, the back of my blouse. I pull my fingers back. They’re dripping with milk.
Is it all over me? I jump out of my seat, twisting backward to see my clothes. That only makes them laugh harder. It feels as though I’m soaking wet all over.
“Hey!” Chuck leaps up. His eyes dart around the room, even though the boys who drenched me are long gone. I didn’t get a look at them, and I don’t think Chuck did, either. “What the Hell is the matter with you, picking on a girl? You afraid to go for somebody who’ll fight back?”
“Didn’t nobody do nothing to her,” a boy at the next table says. “She must’a spilled it on herself. You coons ain’t got no table manners.”
Ennis takes my arm. He must’ve gotten away from the blonde girl somehow. He shakes his head at Chuck and pulls gently on my sleeve. “Come on.”
The laughter gets louder as the three of us wind our way toward the exit. The milk drips down into the waistband of my skirt. They must’ve dumped an entire carton on me.
Accidentally, of course. That’s what they’d say if I told a teacher. Which I can’t. I didn’t even see who did it. And it’s not as if any of the white people who saw would say so.
I go straight to the girls’ bathroom. Inside, three girls are standing by the mirrors, talking. Their eyes go wide when they see me. I wait for them to call me a nigger or laugh at the milk dripping from my hair. Instead they look at me, look back at each other and rush out the door without a word.
I close my eyes and savor the quiet. It’s the first time all day I’ve been alone.
As badly as I want to clean myself up, I go into a stall first. I’ve been avoiding the bathroom, afraid of getting trapped inside where I’d have no chance of calling a teacher for help, but I can’t wait any longer.
When I reach for the toilet paper, I pull my hand back, surprised. Then I touch it again to make sure.
The toilet paper here is soft. At my old school, our toilet paper was rough and coarse. I’d thought that’s how all school toilet paper was.
Just colored-school toilet paper, apparently.
When I go back out to the mirrors, the bathroom is still empty. I wonder if those girls told the others I was in here. There could be a crowd forming outside the door, waiting to get me when I leave, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.
I mop up as much of the milk as I can with toilet paper and paper towels. There isn’t much use. I can wipe off my neck but I can’t reach my back without unbuttoning my blouse, and I am not going to do that here, where anyone could walk in. The milk that’s soaked into my hair is a lost cause. I can pick some of it out once it dries, but Mama will still have to help me wash it tonight. For now, I’ll just have to walk around with milk all over me.
This shouldn’t be important. It was just a prank. Boys being boys. I should be able to handle this.
When I look back up into the mirror I’m crying.
I wipe the tears away and stare at my reflection until my face smooths out and my eyes go empty.
This is how they have to see me. If they know I feel things, they’ll only try to make me feel worse.
Maybe if I keep trying, I really won’t feel anything.
Another tear springs up in the corner of my eye. I scrub it away with the heel of my hand.
I stare into the mirror and wait until there’s no more threat of tears.
Everyone is counting on me. I can’t be a failure.
I won’t.
Lie #5 (#ulink_63a34b2c-321b-5b33-9adc-f0c0635c7a4d)
MY AFTERNOON CLASSES are no better than the morning’s. In Home Ec the teacher gives me my own set of pans and bowls and silverware to use for the whole semester so the white girls won’t have to touch the same things I do. In Study Hall I sing hymns in my head while the boys make honking noises at me and the teacher takes a nap at his desk. In Remedial English our textbook reader doesn’t have any stories longer than fifteen pages, except for one by James Joyce that my mother gave me to read when I was twelve.
I’m the only Negro in every class.
Halfway through sixth period I start counting the number of times I hear people call me a nigger. By the time the bell rings at the end of the day I’m up to twenty-five.
Chuck and Paulie, the only junior in our group, are a short way down the hall when I come out of my last class. They’re walking so fast they’re almost running. Behind them a group of white boys is walking even faster.
I can tell from the looks on their faces that the white boys aren’t playing. As soon as we’re off school grounds they’re going to do whatever they want to us.
“Downstairs, side exit,” Chuck mutters when they reach me. “The NAACP’s got cars waiting for us.”
I struggle to walk as quickly as Chuck and Paulie as we head for the stairs, but my breath is coming fast, and my sweaty feet are sliding in my loafers.
“What about the others?” I ask.
“Everyone knows where to go. Ennis is spreading the word.”
I pick up my pace and try not to worry about Ruth. Ennis will make sure she’s all right.
All around us, more white people spill out of classrooms. Some of the boys join the group following us. I want to look over my shoulder and see how many are back there, but if they see me looking it will only make things worse.
Besides, I can tell the crowd is growing by the number of niggers I hear. My count is already up past forty.
I scan the hallway for a teacher, but there are none in sight. And if I did spot a teacher there’s no way to know if she’d help. The stairs are still a long way off.
“They’re only trying to scare us,” Chuck whispers.
“It’s working,” Paulie whispers back. He looks paler than I’ve ever seen him.
“Don’t talk that way,” I say.
We don’t know who might be listening.
Ahead of us, in front of the stairwell there’s another, bigger, crowd, also shouting taunts. Strangely, though, this group has their backs to us. They don’t even seem to know we’re coming. They’re gathered around something lying on the floor.
No. Not something. Someone.
I break into a run. Chuck calls out for me to wait, but then he must see what I’m seeing, because the hard soles of his shoes come pounding down the hall behind me.
The boys following us have started running, too.
The shouts coming from the group ahead are the loudest they’ve been since we made it inside the school. They’re so noisy I want to clap my hands over my ears.
I can’t. Not until I know who they’re shouting at.
“Somebody show that girl this ain’t no school for coons!” someone shouts.
“We’re gonna teach her a lesson!”
So it’s a girl. I want to pray for my sister’s safety but my thoughts are racing too fast for prayers.
“Look at her all bent over like that,” someone else says. “That nigger’s fatter than Aunt Jemima!”
“Go back to the cotton field, you ugly burrhead!” a girl shrieks.
Chuck gets to the crowd first. I’m right behind him as he pushes through the group to the center of the circle. I spot a pink skirt hem crumpled on the floor.
It isn’t Ruth. To my shame I breathe a sigh of relief.
It’s Yvonne. She’s crouched on the ground in the middle of the crowd, facedown, her hands folded over her head and her knees tucked under her.
It takes me a second to piece together what happened. Someone must have tripped her, and she couldn’t get up right away in the midst of that huge crowd. Instead she hunched down to protect herself from being kicked. It doesn’t look as if she’s badly hurt, not yet, but the longer she stays where she is the more likely something is to happen.
She’s trapped in the middle of a crowd that’s getting bigger with each passing second. The boys who’d been chasing us have merged with it. There must be fifty of them surrounding her, jeering and throwing pennies. There’s spit all over Yvonne’s dress. Some of the boys are winding their legs back like they’re about to kick her.
Chuck reaches the middle of the circle first. He leans down and says something to Yvonne that I can’t hear over the shouting. The white boy nearest him, a greaser with slicked-back hair, kicks out at Chuck, but Chuck sees him in time and lunges out of the way.
That only makes the boy angrier. He’s backing up to deliver another kick when a woman’s voice booms, “Everyone move along, now!”
The shouting dies down fast, but no one moves. Not until the teacher, a gray-haired woman I don’t recognize, comes into the middle of the circle. When she sees Yvonne huddled on the floor she recoils.
“One of you, go to the office and call for a doctor!” she says.
The white girls nearest me turn and run. Within seconds, all the other white people have gone as fast as they came. The four of us Negroes and the gray-haired teacher are the only ones left in the hall.
I kneel on the floor. Chuck is still bent down, trying to say something in a low voice, but Yvonne hasn’t moved. I catch his eye and whisper, “Let me try.”
He shrugs and stands up. The teacher takes him aside to ask a question. I want to talk to the teacher, too, but I need to focus on Yvonne. Ruth could get here any second and I don’t want her to see her friend like this.
“They’re all gone,” I tell Yvonne. “You can get up. I’m here, and Chuck and Paulie, too. You’re not by yourself anymore.”
After a long second, she turns her head and meets my eyes. Hers are wet.
“They tripped me,” she says.
“I know. Are you bleeding at all? Did you get hurt when you fell?”
“I don’t think so. My knee hurts a little. There were so many of them. I was afraid to get up. I thought they’d never leave me alone if I—”
“I know,” I say. “It’s all right. It was smart, what you did. Can you stand?”
Slowly, Yvonne uncurls from her crouch. She lifts her head and looks around the hall. When she sees we really are alone she lets me help her up. Dust and dirt are all over her clothes, and her face is streaked with tears. She winces when she puts her weight on her right leg.
I reach out a hand to help her up. That’s when I notice I’m shaking harder than she is.
What if the teacher hadn’t gotten there when she did? Yvonne could’ve really been hurt. Or Chuck could’ve.
It could have been any of us.
I look around for the others. Paulie is standing against the lockers, pressing his fist into his forehead. Ennis is here, too, talking with Chuck and the teacher. Chuck looks angry. The teacher is nodding at Ennis, who’s saying something in a low, serious voice.
“All right,” Ennis says to all of us after a minute. “We’ve got to go fast. The others are waiting for us by the side exit at the bottom of the stairs.”
“Are they safe?” I ask.
“They were when I left them.”
That doesn’t make me feel better.
Yvonne’s knee is worse than she’d thought, so we have to move slowly. I want to run ahead to see Ruth, but that wouldn’t be right. I’m the only other girl here, so I have to let Yvonne lean on me as we make our way toward the stairs.
At least Ruth isn’t alone. I’ll see her soon. As soon as I possibly can.
“What did the teacher say?” I ask Chuck as we navigate the stairwell. Yvonne flinches on every step.
“She wanted to call a doctor to come look at Yvonne. Ennis talked her out of it. He said she’d be safer if we could get her to Mrs. Mullins’s first.”
I think Ennis is right, but from the set of Chuck’s jaw I can tell he disagrees.
When we finally get to the side exit Ruth is waiting for us just inside the door with the other freshmen and sophomores. One of the younger girls is crying. Ruth has her arm around her.
I want to gather Ruth into my arms and never let go. Instead I motion for both girls to walk with me and Yvonne.
“That’s enough of that, now,” I tell the crying girl. “We have to move.”
Ruth glares at me. I ignore her.
The four of us will be the first ones outside. Through the narrow window we can see the crowd gathered around the door, waiting for us. We have no choice but to walk right into the middle of it.
“Can you get them to the curb?” Ennis whispers to me. His forehead is creased, but we both know it’s better this way. The boys should be at the back of the crowd this time, where the rowdiest white people will be. “The cars are waiting. Get in the first one. It’s Mr. Stern driving.”
I nod. “What about everyone else?”
“We’ll be right behind you.”
He says something more, but I can’t make out the words. As soon as we step outside the doors the noise from the crowd is deafening.
I can’t see any faces now, or hear any voices. It’s all a blur of white and hate.
I want to run, but the crowd would just run after us. As soon as we’re off school property, they’d catch us. I don’t want to think about what would happen then.
So I walk as fast as I can, and I make the others do the same, even though Yvonne is groaning from the pain in her knee. She and I are in front, with Ruth and the other girl behind us. I can see Mr. Stern’s car up ahead. Ennis was right—it’s probably the safest of the NAACP cars for us to take. No one will think we’re aiming to get into a car with a white man.
The white people are swarming us from all sides now. It’s as bad as it was this morning.
No. It’s worse. This morning the white people just looked furious. Now they look like killers.
“Get the niggers!” A chant starts up. “Get the niggers! Get the niggers! Get them!”
They’re right up in our faces. After a full day of this their glares and shouts aren’t shocking anymore. I’m used to the feeling of my heart throbbing in my chest, my eyes sharpening, my shoulders quaking with fear.
Police officers line the curb. I don’t expect any more help from them than I did this morning.
I glance over my shoulder to see the other girls and almost trip, catching myself at the very last second.
This won’t work. I can’t walk in front of them and make sure they’re safe at the same time.
Ruth catches my eye and nods. It feels like a terrible mistake, but I move behind the others and let Ruth take the lead.
This is the most frightened I’ve been for her all day, but there’s nothing I can do. Ruth marches through the crowd, her head high, her gaze straight ahead. The white people scream at her but they move aside, like she’s Moses parting the waters.
This time, when someone spits on her hand, she ignores it and keeps on walking.
It makes me want to cry. Instead I keep my eyes dry and fixed, letting Ruth lead us.
They’re still shouting. I sing to myself in my head to drown out their words. An old hymn. The old ones are always the best.
Rock of Ages,
cleft for me,
let me hide
myself in thee.
Something sails over Yvonne’s head. A ball of paper with something heavy wrapped inside.
I don’t say anything. I don’t think she noticed. I can’t tell whether the white boy who threw it was only trying to scare us or if he just has bad aim.
The chant has changed now, back to the familiar “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t wanna integrate.” We’re almost at the curb. Mr. Stern is waiting in the car with his engine on.
It’s over. Soon we’ll be out of this place. We’ve survived. This day is finally at an end.
Ruth opens the back door and climbs inside, moving over so Yvonne and the other girl can slide in. I get in the front seat with Mr. Stern.
With the windows rolled up we can barely hear the chants. It really is over. Mr. Stern steps on the gas.
But just as he’s turning the wheel, the back door on the far side—Ruth’s side—jerks open. A grown white man with a wide chest and huge hands is standing by the side of the car, holding on tight to the door frame and looking right at Ruth.
“Get out of the car, niggers, before we drag you out,” the man’s voice booms. “You, too, you nigger-loving Jew.”
Lie #6 (#ulink_b43c4814-de5e-5765-b7a2-9542210a5df3)
THE MAN’S WORDS slap me in the face, hot and wet and vicious. I slam open my car door. My heart pounds in my ears. I’ll go over to where the man is and—I don’t know what I’ll do. Something. Whatever it takes to get him away from my sister.
Before I can get out of the car Mr. Stern jerks on the wheel and pounds on the gas. The car jolts into the street. The white man loses his grip on Ruth’s door and stumbles backward onto the pavement.
Two of our car doors are open, but we’re already speeding along the street in front of the school. I lean out to pull my door shut, even though I’m sure I’m going to fall out of the car. In the backseat Ruth does the same thing. She slams the lock down on her door. I should lock mine, too, but I’m shaking too hard.
Two more big white men chase our car down the street, shouting. We outpace them at the next block. The police are nowhere to be seen.
I turn around to make sure Ruth’s all right. She’s resting her head on the window, gazing outside. Her hands are clasped in her lap. They’re trembling.
“Is anyone hurt?” Mr. Stern says when it’s quiet enough to hear each other.
“Yvonne is,” I say. “She’ll need a doctor.”
“It’s only a bruise on my knee,” Yvonne says. “No worse than I used to get roughhousing with my brothers.”
I try to meet Yvonne’s eyes in the rearview mirror. She won’t look at me. I know what happened today was nothing like playing with her brothers. She knows it, too.
“Even so,” Mr. Stern says. “We’re going to Mrs. Mullins’s house. She’ll call a doctor if you need one. Ruth, Sarah, your father will be at the Mullins’, too.”
I can’t imagine seeing Daddy now. Not after everything that’s happened today. It’s hard to believe that I still have parents. That there’s a world outside Jefferson High School.
We all know the way to Mrs. Mullins’s house by heart—she’s in charge of our integration case for the NAACP, and we go to her house a lot—so I notice Mr. Stern is taking the long way. We’ve been driving almost an hour when we get there. Trying to keep any white people from following us, probably.
We’re the last ones to reach the house. Daddy is on the front steps when we pull up. Ruth bolts out of the car and runs up to the porch, her saddle shoes leaving dents behind her in the freshly mown grass. She flings her arms around our father the way she used to when she was little.
“Daddy,” Ruth cries, loud enough for the rest of us to hear even though we’re still at the curb. “Daddy, Daddy.”
Daddy looks at me over her shoulder. I nod to tell him we’re both all right. He hugs Ruth back, then unwraps her arms from his waist. He rubs his eye, and I can tell from his bleary look he’s skipping his afternoon nap to be here. Daddy works two jobs—days at the Negro newspaper, the Davisburg Free Press, where he’s a reporter and editor, and nights and weekends at the Davisburg Gazette, where he’s a copy boy. Whenever he has to miss his nap we all know to stay quiet and let him have his peace.
“All right, Ruthie,” he says. “Let’s go in the house and you can tell me all about it.”
I help Yvonne inside. All the people from the NAACP who’ve been working on the court case and teaching in the special school they set up for us last semester are gathered in Mrs. Mullins’s living room. Their eyes bob from one to the other of us as we walk in and sit down on the rug. They’ve been waiting to make sure all ten of us are safe.
Ruth comes in last, with Daddy, and only then do Mrs. Mullins and the others cheer.
“Praise the Lord,” Mrs. Mullins says. “I knew He’d watch over you and keep you safe.”
Oh. Is that what He was doing? Is that what the Lord calls keeping us safe?
That was a sinful thought. I close my eyes to pray for forgiveness.
Praying usually brings warmth and relief. I wait, but I don’t feel any different than I did before. I don’t feel anything at all.
Mrs. Mullins asks how our day went. The younger kids rush to answer her.
I stretch my legs out in front of me and try to hide the stains on my skirt. I wish we could go home. My house is only a few blocks away. Mr. and Mrs. Mullins live in Morningside, like us. Ennis’s family lives here, too. It’s the nicest Negro neighborhood in Davisburg. Too nice for us Dunbars, really. Some nights I hear Mama and Daddy arguing about money in the kitchen. Daddy’s newspaper work doesn’t pay as well as it did when we lived in Chicago, and Mama’s always worried his boss at the white paper will fire him once he checks the state registry and finds out we’re involved with the NAACP. We could move to Davis Heights—that’s where Chuck lives—but Daddy says he wants Ruth and Bobby and me to “associate with the best kind of children,” whatever that means. He’s probably worried we’ll have to move to New Town, where everyone’s so poor the whites and Negroes live side by side, but I don’t think New Town would be so bad. At least it’s not Clayton Mill, the Negro neighborhood way outside of town, where the houses are made of tar paper.
Ennis, Paulie and I reach for the sandwiches Mrs. Mullins has set out for the adults. I barely ate any lunch and now I’m starving.
“You and your sister were leading the pack out there,” Ennis says. He’s talking quietly, so Mrs. Mullins won’t hear us on her side of the room. He pours a cup of coffee and passes it to me. I’ve never had coffee before, but I take a sip. It burns my tongue. “Looks like you got in the car all right.”
“It was awful.” I put the coffee down on the floor. I hate to be wasteful, but if I have to keep drinking that after everything else that’s happened today I think I really will cry.
“I know it was,” he says. “But we all got out safe. That’s what matters.”
Ennis smiles at me. I don’t smile back.
“It’ll settle down after a couple of days,” Paulie says. “The white people will get used to us. Once they see we aren’t going away.”
“No they won’t!” Chuck shouts.
Everyone in the room stops talking and turns to look behind us. Chuck’s standing there with fire in his eyes.
“Did you see what they did today?” Chuck says. He’s the only one of us who didn’t sit on the rug like children at story hour as soon as we came in. He’s standing with his back straight, his fists clenched.
“Did you see what they did to Yvonne?” he shouts. “They aren’t going to get used to us! Or if they do, they’ll just get used to calling us niggers and trying to lynch us in the parking lot!”
“Charles Irving Tapscott!” Daddy is on his feet, pointing his finger. Chuck is just as tall as my father, but he steps back. “You know better than to say something like that in front of these children. I’ll be placing a call to your father tonight.”
Chuck bites his lip and drops his head. “I’m sorry, sir.” He sits down next to Ennis and me on the rug.
Chuck is usually a jokester. The sort of boy everyone likes because he’s funny and nice to everyone. The boy trembling next to me now is somebody else altogether.
Yvonne’s lip quivers. For a minute, we’re all quiet. Then the younger kids start whispering.
“I saw somebody in the hall who said he had a knife.”
“A girl in Gym said she was going to pour gas on us and set us on fire.”
“On TV they said a girl got stabbed in Little Rock.”
“That’s not true,” Mrs. Mullins says. “Anyway, this isn’t Little Rock. Those sorts of things won’t happen here.”
“They were throwing rocks at us,” Ruth says.
“And sticks and pencils,” a sophomore boy says. “One almost stuck me in the eye.”
Mrs. Mullins shakes her head. “It’s because today was the first day. It will die down.”
“I tried to tell a teacher,” the sophomore boy goes on. “She said she couldn’t do anything because no adults saw it happen.”
“Most of the teachers and the administrators won’t be much help, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Mullins says. “But if anything serious happens, if you need a doctor, you should certainly tell your parents right away.”
“Translation,” Chuck mutters so only Ennis, Paulie and I can hear. “Don’t tattle, or the judge will send us all back to our old school. Jim Crow is still alive and well in good old Virginia.”
“Shush,” Ennis tells him.
But I’ve heard Mama and Daddy say that, too. If there’s any sign integration is causing violence, the courts could delay it another year. Then we’d have to go back to Johns High, and the school board lawyers would probably come up with some reason why integration had to be pushed back another year after that. And another, and another. Decades would pass before the next black face showed up at Jefferson High School.
We’ve already been waiting forever. When we filed our lawsuit, two years had passed since the Supreme Court said all the schools in the country had to be integrated.
My family was still living in Chicago when we first heard what the Supreme Court had done. I was only in seventh grade. We moved to Virginia that summer, and I thought when we got here, we’d be going to school with white people.
That was before I understood how hard the white people in the South would fight us. It wasn’t until the next year, when Little Rock integrated its high school and the white people rioted in the streets, that I understood what my family and I had signed on for.
Mama and Daddy signed on to the NAACP’s lawsuit, and for three years, Ruth and I and the other colored children waited. We took tests and went to court and watched white lawyers talk about whether colored children were smart enough to keep up with white children. I sat on a bench in the courtroom and watched the superintendent hold up my file and testify in front of a white-haired judge about how, even though I’d scored in the top 5 percent on the aptitude tests, I wasn’t fit to go to a white school because I’d have “trouble adapting socially.”
Forty Negro kids had applied to transfer to white schools in Davisburg. Some of them changed their minds when they saw what we were up against. Most of the rest got rejected because the school board said they hadn’t passed the tests—even though none of us ever saw a grade book. So now it was down to us ten. We’d done so well on the tests they couldn’t come up with any more excuses. The judge said “trouble adapting socially” wasn’t a good enough reason to keep us at a school where the heaters only worked on the days it wasn’t raining.
The white parents tried to get the decision overturned, and the case went back and forth and back and forth until last summer, when the federal judge ruled Jefferson had to admit us, period.
So the governor shut down all the white schools in Virginia that had been ordered to admit Negroes. He figured if colored people couldn’t go to the white schools, it meant he’d won. He didn’t seem to care that if the white schools were closed, then white people couldn’t go to school, either. The white people called it “Massive Resistance,” because they were doing whatever it took to resist the Supreme Court’s order. When Daddy first saw that newspaper photo of the big locks on the Jefferson High’s front doors he said, “I’ve got to hand it to the governor. I didn’t think he had the nerve.”
Starting last September, the white kids had to find a private school to go to or miss school altogether. But the ten of us did all right. The NAACP tutored us at Mrs. Mullins’s house for free. We studied so much English and History and French and Math and Science no one could accuse us of not keeping up with the white kids.
When Christmas break came and went and the schools were still closed, we’d started to think we might spend the whole year taking classes in Mrs. Mullins’s house. Then, last week, another court said it was illegal for the governor to close the schools just because he felt like it. After five months of sitting empty, Jefferson had to be opened. Even to us.
Daddy says we’re lucky. Down in Prince Edward County, they shut down their entire school system—every single white school and every single colored school, from kindergarten up through twelfth grade—so they wouldn’t have to integrate. The courts can’t do anything about it. So the white parents there used county tax money to set up a private school for their kids to go to, for free. Only the white kids get to go there, though. The Negroes in Prince Edward County don’t have any schools at all. Some of their parents could afford to send them to private schools in other districts, but most of them are sitting at home all day, reading whatever books their parents can scrounge up for them and hoping they’ll wind up with enough education to get a job someday.
“Sarah, honey, do you want me to help you with your hair?” a quiet voice says behind me.
I turn, startled. Miss Freeman, Mrs. Mullins’s younger sister, is smiling at me.
I’d forgotten all about the milk in my hair. After Mama took all that time to wash it last night, too. I must be stinking up the house for Miss Freeman to mention it.
“Thank you, ma’am.” I get up and follow her to the bathroom.
“I’m sure looking forward to seeing you sing at church this Sunday,” Miss Freeman says as she closes the door behind us and pulls pins out of my hair. Her voice is soft and pleasant. I ignore the way she’s yanking at my scalp because it’s so nice to hear someone talk about something that’s not integration. “What’s the anthem this week?”
It takes me a minute to remember. “‘Light Rises in the Darkness.’”
“Oh, that’ll be real pretty. Do you have a solo?”
I wince at another sharp tug. “Not this time.”
“Well, I hope you have one soon. I loved it when you sang on Christmas Eve.” There’s a pause in the yanking. “You know, why don’t I go see if I can find you a clean blouse to wear home. We’ll put this one in the wash.”
She leaves. The milk stain must be bad. I twist around to see it in the bathroom mirror. Sure enough, a broad swath of yellow runs all the way down the back of my blouse. Revolting. Below it are two holes in the fabric where the boy poked me with pencils in the auditorium. I press my fingers against the spot and feel a tender bruise.
A tear pricks at my eye, but I squeeze my lids shut. I can’t give in to tears. If anyone saw, they’d think I was just another weak colored girl. That I couldn’t handle this.
The door opens. I try to put on a smile for Miss Freeman, but it’s just Ruth.
She gazes at my reflection in the mirror. “What happened?”
“Nothing. Somebody accidentally spilled some milk on me.”
Ruth nods, pretending to believe me.
I sit on the toilet seat, facing the wall. Ruth comes up behind me and combs through my hair with her fingers, picking out the flakes of dried milk. Ruth and I are used to fixing each other’s hair. She’s a lot gentler than Miss Freeman.
We’re quiet for a long time. Then, softly, Ruth says, “I didn’t think it would be like that.”
I want to hug her. Instead I say, “What did you think it would be like?”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought— No. It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid. Tell me.”
I turn to face her. Ruth sighs and looks at the window over my head. “I thought when we got there, they’d see they were wrong. I thought they’d let us join their clubs and come to their football games, like everyone else. And maybe later, when the white people thought about it some more, they’d stop trying to tell us we can’t do other things, too.”
“What kind of other things?”
Ruth shrugs and looks down. “You know. Other places. Like at the Sugar Castle.”
The Sugar Castle is the candy store downtown. We always walk past it when Mama takes us to shop for school clothes and Christmas presents. Through the windows you can see dozens of white children filling little bags with Bazooka gum and Red Hots and candy cigarettes. They dig their dirty little hands right down into the candy bins to pick the best pieces and plop them in their bags.
Bobby always begs to go in. He doesn’t read well enough yet to understand the sign on the door that says White Only. So Mama and Ruth and I always tell him we’re running late and can’t go in the store. Then we stop by Food Town on the way home and pick him up a Tootsie Roll.
When we first moved down here Ruth would gaze in the Sugar Castle windows, too. She was big enough by then to know the rules. She could read the sign, and besides, she knew no white parents would want their children putting their hands in candy bins where black children’s fingers had been. But Chick-O-Sticks were always Ruth’s favorites when we lived in Chicago, and the Sugar Castle was the only store in Davisburg where you could get them.
For her eleventh birthday Mama gave Ruth a whole bag of Chick-O-Sticks. I’ve always wondered how she got them. She must have paid someone to go in the store for her.
“I used to think that, too,” I tell Ruth. “When they first started the lawsuit.”
“Did you think it would make the white people be nice to us?”
“No.” I almost laugh. “I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.”
“Well, maybe some of the white people at school could be—”
“No. They won’t.”
I think about the girl who smiled at me this morning before she spit on my good skirt. And the one who shrieked at Ennis in the cafeteria. And Judy, who acted nice at first, then got all her friends to make honking noises whenever I passed by.
“No,” I say again. “We can’t ever trust any of them. We have to stick together, like Mrs. Mullins says.”
Ruth bows her head. “All right.”
I want to say something to make her feel better, but I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to do any of this.
All I really want to do is go to sleep. Lie down in my room at home and stay there, and keep Ruth there, too. Forever.
It feels like there’s a giant hole opening inside me. My future, sliding into a gaping black pit.
I don’t want this to be my life. My sister’s, either.
It’s too late for that now.
The door behind us opens. I swallow and try to smile again. It doesn’t work.
“Sorry, this was all Helen had.” Miss Freeman holds out a hideous pink high-collared blouse. “Let’s see if it fits.”
I take off my stained white blouse.
“Ooh, the milk went all the way through your slip, too,” Ruth says. “Mama’s going to be so upset.”
“No, she won’t,” Miss Freeman says. “She’ll know it wasn’t your fault, Sarah.”
That’s right. Mama will know. Because it’s not my fault.
It’s hers. And Daddy’s. They were the ones who wanted this.
If it hadn’t been for them we could’ve stayed at Johns. I’d be president of the choir and taking college prep classes. I wouldn’t have to worry about Howard revoking my scholarship once they hear I’m in Remedial. I wouldn’t have to worry about Ruth getting her arm broken on her way to Homeroom.
I shouldn’t be thinking this way. It’s disrespectful. Besides, it’s my own fault. I never said I didn’t want this. Our parents asked Ruth and me years ago if we wanted to register at Jefferson—to get the best education we could, and to do our part for the movement. We said yes right away. Why wouldn’t we? Adults had been telling us all our lives that it was up to us to make sure we got a good education. Besides, back then, it seemed impossible that integration would ever really happen here.
But I still said yes.
I have no one to blame but myself. Anything that happens now is my own fault.
I close my eyes and say a quick prayer for God to forgive me for thinking disrespectfully. This time, it does make me feel a little better.
Mrs. Mullins’s blouse comes close enough to fitting me. I do up the buttons on the sleeves while Ruth finishes picking the biggest white flakes out of my hair.
“Remember what I said,” I whisper to her when we’re leaving the house an hour later. “The white people aren’t like us. They’ll turn on you without any warning. You have to be careful, Ruthie. You can’t trust them.”
“I’ll remember.” She huffs, the same way she does when I tell her not to mess with the stuff on my desk at home.
I pray she takes this seriously. I pray she really will remember.
Not one of us can afford to forget.
Lie #7 (#ulink_05293e79-18f9-571e-b308-048f28a1234e)
“THIS IS DUMB.” Ruth yanks a needle through the old brown skirt she’s sewing a patch onto and bites down on a piece of bacon at the same time. “You can’t follow me around all day.”
“I won’t be following you.” I’m hunting through Mama’s sewing box for gray thread. All I can find is garish pinks and blues. “And stop chewing with your mouth open.”
“I’m not a little kid. It’s not your job to tell me what to do.” Ruth puts down her sewing and grabs the biggest piece of bacon on the plate. She takes a huge bite, chewing with her mouth open so wide pieces of bacon fall out.
“Girls, hush,” Mama says. “Your father needs to concentrate.”
“Sorry, Daddy,” Ruth and I murmur toward where our father is perched on the ledge of the living room window.
There’s a loud bang. “Dang it,” Daddy says. He hammered his finger again.
“We still need to close the gap on this end, Bob.” Mr. Mullins hefts up the other end of the last piece of plywood. It’s barely light out yet, but already they’ve nearly finished covering all the first-floor windows on the front of the house. For the first ten minutes they were working Bobby kept wandering around asking why they were making so much noise, and could he help Daddy play workshop. Mama finally told him to go to his room until it was time for school.
Ruth and I didn’t ask why they were putting the boards up. We didn’t ask why Mama brought down the basket of old clothes from the attic and told us to mend them, either. We knew we’d be wearing our old clothes to school from now on in case they get ruined. We knew Daddy and Mr. Mullins were putting boards on the windows in case the white people threw rocks when they drove by the house.
There’s no use talking about these things. These things just are.
Mama snips a piece of thread, then looks at the map I’ve laid out on the breakfast table next to our sewing. “You’re sure this is necessary, Sarah?” she says.
I look at her. She looks back, then lowers her eyes.
I don’t know if this will work, but I’ve got to try.
School is worse than I thought it would be, but I can survive this. And I’m going to make sure Ruth survives it, too.
As long as I have my dignity, I can do anything.
Last night I took Ennis’s sketch of the school and Ruth’s class schedule and I drew a map to follow through the day. I’ve already figured out how I can check in on Ruth after Homeroom and before third period, but our lunch periods are staggered, and I’m having trouble figuring out a way to get from the basement to the second floor and back without being late for Home Ec.
I can’t be late to class again. I’ve already got detention after school today, thanks to Mrs. Gruber. Ruth will have to leave school without me. That’s not a risk I ever want to take again.
I barely slept last night. Instead I lay there for hours, listening to Ruth tossing and turning in the next bed, murmuring in her sleep. High-pitched cries, the kind she used to make when we were little and Mama tried to make her take her stomach medicine.
I must’ve fallen asleep sometime. Because I remember dreaming.
In the dream it was still yesterday morning. I was trying to get across the school parking lot, holding Ruth by her arm, but instead of walking, we were running. A monster as big as a city bus was chasing us. It had deep red scales, a thumping, clubbed tail and glistening huge white eyes. Ruth and I were trying to get inside the school, where we’d be safe, but once we’d finished the sprint across the lot and made it through the front doors, the monster kept coming. Then there were more monsters, and more. Soon a whole herd of them was thundering down the hallway behind us. We kept looking for a way out, but every time we turned a corner it led to another hallway, endless rows of gleaming lockers and polished floors.
Ruth was pulled from my grip. I screamed. When I turned to look for her, Linda Hairston was standing in Ruth’s place. She smiled at me, her pretty red hair glistening under the fluorescent lights, just like the monsters’ scales. Linda threw back her head and howled. Her laughter was so loud and fierce the monsters stopped chasing us and started laughing with her.
“You be careful today,” Mama says after we’ve changed into our mended clothes and gathered our things to meet the carpool. “Even with the new rule, you make sure and keep a watch out.”
“We know, Mama,” Ruth says, wiping off her cheek after Mama kisses her.
Mrs. Mullins called us late last night to tell us about the new rule. The principal had just announced it. When the gray-haired teacher reported what happened to Yvonne, the principal decided no one could be punished because no adult saw who’d instigated it. So from now on anyone who got caught fighting—no matter who started the fight—would be expelled.
Ruth whooped when Mama told us the news. Mama and I just frowned at each other. Somehow we didn’t think it would be as simple as that.
Mama puts her hand on my shoulder as I’m going to the door.
“Remember what to do when it gets hard,” she says. “Take your worries to the Lord. Have faith. He’s watching over all of you.”
I nod. Mama’s right, of course.
But I can’t help wondering why the Lord has to watch over us from so far away.
* * *
New rule or not, today is no better than yesterday.
We go in the side door this time, like Ennis planned, but there are just as many white people waiting for us there. The police aren’t here today, but that doesn’t seem to make a difference. The white people throw sticks past our heads and shout as loud as ever. That must not count as fighting, because no one gets expelled that I hear about.
I’m still not used to being called “nigger,” but I’ve stopped keeping track of how many times I hear it. Instead I count the minutes left in the school day. I watch the hands of the classroom clocks wind their way around until I’m free of this place and the people in it.
In Math someone’s brought in extra desks for the back of the room. Now everyone has a seat without having to get anywhere near Chuck and me. Chuck draws a picture in his notebook of Mrs. Gruber standing in front of a classroom full of tanks and soldiers firing on each other. The Mrs. Gruber in the picture, who’s twice as fat and three times as ugly as the real Mrs. Gruber, has her eyes squeezed shut and fingers stuck in her ears. A comic-book speech balloon has her singing, “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!!” When Chuck shows it to me I almost smile.
Adults always tell us education is the most important thing in life, but I’m not learning anything at Jefferson. It’s supposed to be the best school for miles around, with the best facilities and the best teachers, but none of that is doing me any good. Our science labs at Johns weren’t as nice as the ones here, but when I was at Johns I could focus on my schoolwork. I didn’t have to spend every moment looking over my shoulder to see what would be thrown at me next.
In History I overhear two girls gossiping about something they heard from their friends. According to their story, one of the Negro girls (only the girl telling the story calls her a “nigger girl,” in the giggly whisper of a child who’s trying out a naughty word for the first time), went up to a white girl in the locker room this morning and told her she smelled like cow shit and looked worse. The white girl told her boyfriend, and he told his friends. Now the boys are saying they’ll “get that nigger back” later today.
The gossip can’t be true. None of the Negro girls in our group would ever do such a thing. None of them would use that kind of foul language. Besides, Mrs. Mullins has told us a thousand times not to talk back to the white students. I can’t stop remembering what Yvonne looked like yesterday, though, huddled in a pile in the hall. When school lets out today, I’ll make sure to keep every single one of these girls someplace I can see them until we get safely home.
When I get to Typing, the teacher points out a typewriter she’s set aside in the far corner for me and the Negro girls who take Typing in other periods. The teacher smiles, like she’s waiting for me to thank her. And I do it. I grit my teeth, but I still say, “Thank you, ma’am,” sweet as sugar.
As I drop my purse on the desk I see something tucked under my typewriter. One of the white girls must have left it there. It’s a clipping from the Davisburg Gazette. I didn’t see the paper this morning—Mama had already put it away somewhere—but this front-page story is headlined Negroes Integrate Jefferson High. Two School Board Members Resign in Protest. Under the headline is a photo of the ten of us. Someone has drawn a circle on the photo in lipstick, right around my face, and put a big red X over it. Scrawled black ink in the margins says “DIE UGLY NIGGER.”
I swallow, glad I have my back to the rest of the room so the girls can’t see my face. I start to crumple up the paper when I see a sidebar with the headline Jefferson Students Speak Out. One of the reporters who blinded me with his flashbulbs yesterday must’ve talked to some of the white students afterward. The first quote in the story is from Linda Hairston.
“‘What about our right to an education?’” Linda’s quote reads. “‘No one talks about that. The colored people aren’t the only ones who should have rights.’”
Yesterday I’d thought Linda Hairston was smart.
I crush the paper in my fist, march to the front of the room and throw it in the trash can. On my way back I fold my arms across my chest so no one will see my hands shaking.
During each class break I walk as fast as I can, following the routes I mapped out at breakfast. I see Ruth every time, and every time, she’s all right. There’s a new ink stain on her blouse that wasn’t there this morning, but she isn’t hurt. She’s just walking down the hall surrounded by a circle of white people, clutching her books and pretending not to hear the chants of “nigger, nigger, nigger” that follow her everywhere.
The white people follow me, too, slowing me down. It doesn’t matter what route I take. They walk behind me and in front of me. Trying to trip me, calling out to me, stepping on my heels, blocking my path. It’s like walking through quicksand.
When I leave third-period History, trying to forget what that awful Mrs. Johnson said in her lecture about the slave trade, there are still two hundred and thirty-five minutes left in the school day. I speed toward the stairs to get to Ruth, uncertain of how I’ll get back to the second floor in time for French.
It isn’t the distance that’s the problem. I could walk there and back easily if the white people would only leave me alone.
But they won’t. In fact, there’s a group of white boys following me as I exit the staircase and start down the first-floor hall.
They’ve been behind me since History. I don’t have to look back to know they’re still there. The feeling of eyes on my back is familiar by now.
But there’s something different about this time. These boys are being quiet. They aren’t chanting, or calling me names or joking with each other. Occasionally one of them will snicker, but the others quickly hush him.
When I’m halfway down the hall, they’re still following, silent except for their thudding footsteps. From the sound of it there are at least ten of them. People coming the other way wave at the boys as they pass, smiling and calling to them.
The boys are getting closer.
I speed up, but their footsteps get faster, too. There’s no way I could outrun them.
They must be planning something. I hope they get it over with soon. I brace myself for the feeling of an object striking my back. A wad of spit, a pencil, a rock they snuck in from outside.
Nothing comes.
Something’s wrong.
The voice in my head is certain. I don’t know what’s happening, but I know it’s something new. Something bad.
I speed up, but the shuffling footsteps are louder now. One of the boys is right behind me.
The pain comes with a jolt. I freeze. My breath stops, and my voice catches in my throat. The shock of it is too strong.
The boy is squeezing my breasts, hard.
He lets go as fast as he grabbed on, and then all the boys are running past me at once. Laughing. Trading high fives.
There’s no way to know which of them did it.
The crowd coming the other way has stopped moving, too. They’re pointing at me, laughing. The girls are covering their mouths to hide their giggles.
I cross my arms over my chest, but that only makes them laugh harder.
That really just happened.
That boy touched me. I didn’t want him to, but he did it anyway. That was why he did it. Because he knew I didn’t want it.
Nothing is mine anymore.
Even my own body isn’t mine. Not if that pack of white boys doesn’t want it to be.
Everyone saw what they did.
It’s exactly like my dream. The pack of monsters, laughing.
I drop my head so they can’t see my face. I would never let someone do that to me. I’m not the sort of girl who would ever do anything like that.
The white people at this school don’t care what sort of girl I am.
I look down at myself. I don’t look any different than I did this morning. What the boy did hadn’t left a mark. But nothing will ever undo it.
My dignity was all I had.
Tears well in my eyes. The pack of boys is all the way at the end of the hall now. One of them, a tall brown-haired boy, is still looking back at me, grinning, but the rest are looking at something up ahead.
“That’s her,” one of them calls. “That’s the nigger who talked back to my girl.”
“Big Sis still back where we left her?” another boy answers. His voice carries all the way down the hall. They don’t care who hears them.
“Yeah,” the other boy says. “We scared her off but good.”
“Let’s go, then.”
I recognize the brown dress. The one she was mending this morning.
It’s Ruth they’re running toward.
She’s the one the story was about. The one who talked trash to a white girl.
My shoes feel like lead. I run, my legs pumping as hard as they can, but I’m not fast enough.
“Stop it!” I shout. It comes out as a screech. The white people gathered on the sides of the hall are still and quiet, watching.
The boys have caught up with Ruth. They’ve got her in a corner where she can’t back away. I’m still too far to see her face, but I can picture the fear in her eyes.
“Leave her alone!” I scream, but the crowd has gotten noisy again. No one hears me.
I don’t care about the rules anymore. I’m not going to ignore what’s happening.
I tear down the hall after them.
But I can already tell I’m going to be too late.
(#ulink_ef7c1896-2a9e-532f-b96f-1fb34b51c280)
Lie #8 (#ulink_4dab57e2-8f34-52b8-926e-4e51ba72216c)
THEY CANCELED THE prom today.
Because of the colored people. Everything that happens now is because of the colored people.
If Daddy has to work late at the paper it’s because the integrationist teachers are making up stories. If I’m behind in English it’s because the NAACP forced the school to close last semester. If I get caught daydreaming in Math it’s because the colored girl in the front row distracted me.
But the prom? Why did they have to get that, too?
I was going to the prom with Jack. It was going to be my last date of high school, and the first time Jack and I went to a dance together. Jack is far too old for these sorts of things—he’s twenty-two—but he said he’d come anyway. He said I shouldn’t have to miss out on my own prom just because my fiancé is an older man who’s long past childish stuff like school dances.
“I don’t see why they had to cancel in the first place,” Judy says. She has to raise her voice for me to hear her. There’s noise up ahead. People shouting. There’s always shouting in the halls now that the colored people are here.
We’re walking down the hall toward the first-floor bathroom near the stairwell. It’s the only bathroom Judy ever wants to go in because it’s always empty and she can fix her makeup without anyone seeing. The toilets in that bathroom have been stopped up since our freshman year.
“It’s obvious,” I say patiently. You have to be patient with Judy. She’s not slow like people think. She’s naive, that’s all. “No one wants white people and colored people dancing together.”
“Would that really happen?” Judy says. “Was someone going to force us to dance with them? Wouldn’t the coloreds only dance with each other?”
“Coloreds isn’t a word,” I tell her for the hundredth time. I swerve to step around a group of giggly sophomores. People are so rude, blocking the halls like this. They think just because our school is integrated they all have the right to act like animals.
“Right,” Judy says. “Sorry. The Nigras, I meant. But wouldn’t they?”
“Who knows what would happen,” I say. “No one thought we’d be forced to let them into our school. It’s not as if they didn’t already have their own. If they weren’t happy going to school with each other, why should they be happy dancing with each other?”
“Oh,” Judy says. “I hadn’t thought about it that way.”
I picture the shiny blue dress in my closet. It’s strapless, with a matching blue wrap and blue high heels. It looks almost as good as the fancy one from Miller & Rhoads I modeled in the Future Business Leaders of America fashion show last year. Mom took me shopping for it the day they announced the schools were going to reopen. She said it was too bad about the integration, but at least I wouldn’t have to miss out on all the fun of my senior year.
Daddy was furious when he found out. He said I wasn’t going to any dance with any colored boys. I told him I wasn’t going with a colored boy, I was going with Jack, and besides, it wasn’t my fault the governor gave up on segregation. Daddy said as long as I was under his roof I would speak to him respectfully, and I said then it was a good thing I wouldn’t be under his roof much longer. Then he pulled back his hand. For a second I thought he was going to do it. I think he thought so, too.
I almost wanted him to do it. To prove I still mattered to him even a little bit.
But he didn’t. He put his hand down and said I was an ungrateful little girl and he had work to do. Then he went to his study and didn’t come out again all night. As though he’d forgotten I was out there.
Mom told me to keep the dress because you never knew. Daddy had been known to change his mind about things. Then she disappeared upstairs with a glass of sherry and I was alone again.
The noise is getting louder as we near the stairwell. “We’re gonna shut that nigger up!” a boy yells.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. This again?
“That looks like a colored girl they’ve got there,” Judy says. The shouting is so loud I have to strain to hear her.
“A girl?” I say. “Who’s got her?”
“Bo and his gang, I think.”
I could’ve guessed. Bo Nash and his friends are a bunch of nobodies. Or they would be, anyway, if Bo hadn’t scored two touchdowns back-to-back sophomore year. He went from no-good redneck farm boy to town hero in one night. It only got worse that spring, when he pitched a no-hitter for the baseball team’s state championship. Girls stopped joking about Bo’s dirty, mismatched socks and started cooing about his dreamy blue eyes. It was enough to make you vomit. Now Bo thinks he owns the school. And everybody else seems to think so, too.
Well, not me. Any boy who wants to beat up on a girl, colored or not, isn’t worth the sweat in his undershorts. Bo’s a star of the team, so I can’t be outright nasty to him—not unless I want to hear everyone whispering about me in the halls all year—but I can take him down a peg or two.
Bo is right up in front of the colored girl when I get there. He and his friends have got her backed into a corner. She’s turning her head this way and that, looking for a way out. It’s one of the younger ones. Her white blouse has an ink stain on it, and her brown skirt is old and patched.
I stride up to the group and step in neatly between the boys and the girl, facing Bo. He scowls at me. Behind us, people are yelling, and another girl is screaming. I hold out my hands the way Reverend Pierce does when he’s trying to get an especially rowdy congregation at Davisburg Baptist to sit down and be at peace already.
“What’s the matter, Bo?” I ask, raising my voice so everyone can hear. “You’ve got everybody all riled up. For a second I thought Elvis came to town.”
A bunch of people laugh. I smile, because I know it’ll make Bo mad. I haven’t forgotten what he said to Judy in French yesterday. If he thinks he can get away with treating my best friend like that, he’s even dumber than I thought.
“You best just get on out the way, Linda,” Bo says. “We’re teaching somebody a lesson.”
I look over my shoulder in fake surprise, as if I didn’t know the colored girl was there. She’s cowering against the lockers. I take my first good look at her. Her eyes are wide and shockingly white around her deep black irises. The sleeves of her blouse have been let out so far the frayed edges are showing. She probably lives in one of those falling-down shacks out in Clayton Mill. My brothers say those places are full of lowlifes and it isn’t safe for a girl like me to go near them.
The colored people are all poor as dirt. They look it and smell it, too. Everyone says so.
I turn back toward Bo. “Right,” I say. “Because picking on some dumb, dirty little colored girl takes you and twenty of your friends.”
There’s more laughter behind Bo. The girl who was screaming before has stopped, thank the Lord. Everyone is watching me.
“She talked down to Gary’s girl,” Bo says, nodding toward the black-haired boy behind him. “She needs to learn her place.”
“Gary has a girl?” I’d heard that—Gary started going out with that freshman Carolyn, because everyone says she’ll go all the way with anyone who gives her his football pin—but I pretend I haven’t. “That’s really nice, Gary. Maybe we can double-date sometime.”
“Well, sure, Linda,” Gary says, smiling as if it’s a sunny Sunday afternoon, and there isn’t a scared little colored girl hiding behind me in the hallway. All the boys on the team want to go on double dates with Jack and me. “That’d be swell.”
Bo isn’t smiling.
“I’m not joking around, Linda,” he says. “You got to get out of our way. I don’t like to push a girl, but—”
Unless she’s a colored girl, apparently. I lower my voice so only Bo can hear. “I’m sure you didn’t just threaten me, Bo. Because if you did, you know Coach Pollard will hear all about it.”
Bo cocks his head to the side. His face slackens. I’ve won.
I raise my voice again.
“I thought you all might like to know Principal Cole is right around the corner,” I lie. “I saw him on my way from English. Maybe you don’t care, but I just figured I’d mention it...”
The boys back away. Everyone knows the new rule about fighting. No one’s talked about anything else all day.
My father thinks the rule is absurd. He told Mom and me all about it last night. He’ll have an editorial out tomorrow about how we need to teach our children personal responsibility, instead of harshly disciplining boys for being boys. Once the people of Davisburg have read what he has to say, he told us, he expects the policy to be reversed promptly.
“Don’t you do that again, Linda,” Bo says under his breath before he fades away with the rest of his group.
“Aw, Bo, I’m just teasing,” I reply, just as low.
I hope he believes me. I don’t have a bit of respect for Bo Nash, but he’s not someone you want mad at you, either.
When I turn around, the little colored girl is gone. I guess she went to her class. We only have two minutes left before French, but Judy still needs to do up her makeup, so we go into the bathroom.
Judy scrubs her face clean, grabs her compact and gets to work, moving so fast she’s going to leave streaks. I’m about to tell her to fix it when the door bursts open and a girl rushes past us and crouches on the floor. It’s another colored girl.
Judy drops her compact she’s so shocked. I’m surprised, too. We used to come in this bathroom between classes every day last year, and not once did anyone else come in.
“What are you—” Judy says, but I hold up my hand for her to let me handle this.
“You’re not welcome here,” I tell the girl, who’s not looking at us. I’m not sure she even noticed we were in here. It’s not the same colored girl Bo was after, so I don’t know why she’s making such a fuss. “We were here first.”
The girl doesn’t seem to hear me. She’s fallen down on her knees on the tiles, her head bent.
Oh, no. She’s praying.
I can’t interrupt a girl who’s praying. Even a colored girl.
Why does she have to pray in the bathroom? They have colored churches, don’t they?
Why does she have to come where I am in the first place? And why did that other girl have to go where Bo and his friends were waiting? It’s utter foolishness. If the school had to let them in, they should’ve picked some other section of the building where the colored people could go so the rest of us wouldn’t have to see them, the way they did at the bus station.
Or smell them. I sniff the air to see if the girl has made the bathroom stink yet. So far it’s just the usual smell of disinfectant and old paint, but she hasn’t been here long.
Judy looks at me, waiting for me to tell her what to do, but I don’t know what to say. When someone’s praying, you’re supposed to be quiet and respectful. But those are the rules for white people. Are they the same for Negroes? It’s so hard to keep track.
There’s still another minute until French, and Judy isn’t done with her makeup yet. I gesture for her to keep working on her cheek. She turns back to the mirror.
There’s something wrong with the colored girl. Her lips are moving quickly but silently, and she’s rocking up and down. She’s crying. I wonder what’s upset her so much.
If Daddy ever finds out I was in a bathroom with one of them, by choice, he’ll let his hand fly after all.
The girl goes on praying for a long time. She looks familiar. I must’ve seen her before, but it’s hard to tell them all apart.
Then I remember. This girl is the one from French. The one who called me “awful.”
She’s the worst of the whole lot.
Why did she have to run in here, out of all of them? Why do these colored people have to keep making my life harder?
Finally the girl stops rocking. She keeps her head bowed and her eyes shut, but her lips aren’t moving anymore.
It’s strange seeing a colored person so close up. Her hair is straight, but it looks rough and coarse. Not like my hair or Judy’s at all. And her skin is so dark. Much darker than mine gets even after I’ve been out in the sun for months. Touching her probably feels like touching sandpaper. Not that I’d ever touch colored skin.
It would be all right for us to leave now. God would understand. The truth is, though, I want to know what’s wrong with this girl.
I’m just curious. Who wouldn’t be?
And it doesn’t matter if I’m a tiny bit late to French. None of the teachers ever give me detentions, not if they want to get invited to the Christmas parties. My mother has been president of the Jefferson PTA since my oldest brother was a freshman.
“Are you all right?” Judy asks the girl when she finally opens her eyes.
I glare at Judy. She whispers an “Oh” and looks apologetic.
Judy never remembers you’re supposed to act differently around different people. If it weren’t for me, she’d talk to this colored girl the same way she talks to Reverend Pierce.
The colored girl doesn’t show any sign of having heard Judy. She’s looking down at her clothes. I wonder if she’s checking for stains. This morning I saw one of the other colored girls get sprayed with ink outside the library. Everyone was laughing. It made me think of the time Eddie Lowe pushed me into a puddle in second grade when I was wearing my new Easter dress. I got so upset Daddy wrote an angry letter and Eddie’s father sent us a check for five dollars to buy me a new one.
The girl this morning didn’t look upset, though. She just kept walking with her head held up so high I wanted to look around for her puppet strings.
“I’m leaving,” this colored girl says, standing up.
“You don’t have to,” Judy says. “No one ever comes in this bathroom. If you want to be alone—”
Judy stops talking when I shake my head at her. It’s one thing to show basic human decency. It’s another to go out of your way to accommodate someone who’s trying to change our whole way of life.
I wrote an editorial about that for the school newspaper last year. I said if the integrationists won, the rest of us should behave like civilized people, but we shouldn’t feel obligated to act happy about things.
Daddy liked that column. Or anyway, Mom told me she thought he probably did.
The colored girl is looking at Judy, her head tilted. Even with her dark skin and old, patched clothes, the colored girl is pretty. She has long hair, longer than the style is now, and her eyes are wide and dark.
It’s strange. I’ve never thought of a colored girl as being pretty before. My friends whisper sometimes about how a few of the colored boys look all right, but everyone says that’s because so many of them are tall and muscled from working outside. I don’t know what would make a colored girl nice looking, exactly. But then, I’d never seen a colored girl up close before yesterday.
“Do you need—?” the colored girl starts to ask Judy. Then she stops. Judy cups her hand over her cheek, and I realize what the girl is looking at. Judy never finished fixing her makeup. The colored girl saw her birthmark.
Judy takes out her makeup case and hurries to brush more onto her face.
“Never mind,” the colored girl says. “I’ll be leaving now.”
“Good.” I tug Judy’s elbow. “You can leave the whole school while you’re at it, and take your friends with you. Hurry up, Judy, we’re already late.”
“Are you all right?” Judy asks the girl as she sweeps on more makeup. “You were crying. And—praying.”
“Don’t talk to her, Judy,” I whisper.
The colored girl looks at me, tilting her head to one side. I look back just as fiercely. What gives her the right to stare at me?
She looks like she’s thinking hard. Deciding something. Finally, she opens her mouth. When she speaks, it’s slow, like she’s measuring each word before she says it.
“Since when do you care about being polite?” the colored girl says.
Judy gasps. I would, too, except I can hardly breathe at all.
I can’t believe she spoke to me that way.
No one speaks to me that way.
No one who’s not related to me, anyway. Certainly not a Negro.
Who does this girl think she is?
And after I just finished helping that other colored girl, too. If it weren’t for me that little girl would be splattered all over the lockers by now.
Daddy was right. The Negro students think they’re entitled. They think their own schools—the ones set aside specifically for them—aren’t enough. They think they have to come to our schools, even if it means hundreds of us have to suffer just so a handful of them can be satisfied.
The colored girl smiles. As though she’s proud of herself.
“I didn’t ask you to come to this school,” I tell her.
A corner of the girl’s lip turns up.
Is she laughing at me?
“I’ve got you figured out,” she says. “You’re Linda Hairston, aren’t you? Your father is William Hairston.”
“Yes,” I say. Everyone knows that. I don’t know why this girl is acting as if knowing it makes her special.
“You were the one talking to that gang of white boys. You called my sister dumb.”
Oh. I try to remember if I heard anything about two of the integrators being sisters, but I don’t think the paper said anything except that there were ten of them and they’d all claimed they weren’t Communists.
“So why did you get in front of her in the first place?” the girl asks me. “Some sort of stunt to show that your father isn’t the monster his editorials make him out to be?”
“My father’s no monster,” I hiss.
But I do wonder why I got between Bo and that girl. I was mad at Bo, sure, but I could’ve just made fun of him in the cafeteria or something instead.
I guess it just didn’t seem right, what Bo was doing. A whole group of boys, going after a little freshman girl.
And there was something about the little girl’s face, too. She looked so afraid. It didn’t seem right that she had to be so scared just because she was a Negro. She couldn’t help her color.
She could help being an agitator, though. She shouldn’t have been stirring up trouble at our school. What happened to her was her own fault. I’m too softhearted for my own good.
What bad luck, that I had to run into her older sister right after. I glare at the girl. She glares back at me and shakes her head.
“I’ve read your father’s editorials,” the girl says. “Looks as though you both like to tell everybody else what to do. Especially us Negroes.”
“Nobody’s telling you what to do,” I say. “Your people are the ones telling us what to do. If you’d just let things be, we’d all be better off, your people and mine both. Your sister wouldn’t have gotten in trouble in the hall today and needed my help.”
I try to emphasize that last word, help, so this girl will know she should be thanking me, not arguing, but she doesn’t look especially thankful. When she speaks again, her words are still slow and deliberate.
“All my sister and I are trying to do is go to school,” she says. “We should be able to do that without having to worry about people coming at us in the halls.”
“You already had a school to go to,” I point out. “A school that’s been open all year long. Your prom didn’t get canceled. I bet you’re happy to have ruined it all for the rest of us, though.”
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/robin-talley-2/lies-we-tell-ourselves-shortlisted-for-the-2016-carnegie-me/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.