The Silver Star

by Jeannette Walls

  On the day of a game, you were supposed to wear red and white to school. It wasn’t a rule, but everyone did it, Terri Pruitt told me. I put on a red-and-white T-shirt the day the Bulldogs were scheduled to play the Owls in the season opener. Liz made a point of wearing her orange-and-purple skirt, saying that she was a nonconformist, like Mom. She had to put on that blue dress when Maddox wanted and go along with whatever he said, but that was because she was on his payroll. No one at Byler High was going to tell her what to wear or who to cheer for.

  Everyone at Byler was required to attend the pep rally, held the day of game. I got out of home ec to decorate the gym. All the kids and teachers were wearing red and white, including the former Nelson students. Each class sat together, and they all competed to cheer the loudest, with the noisiest class winning the spirit stick and the privilege of waving it around at the game that night. When it was the seventh-graders’ turn, Vanessa and I stood in front of the class, waving our arms and pumping our fists in the air. One kid stood up and shouted, “You go, Day-Glo Girl!” I just grinned and pumped my fists even harder, and I’ll admit I was downright proud when we won that spirit stick.

  The game started in the early evening. The floodlights around the football field had been turned on even though there was still plenty of light left. A hot wind blew across the field, and a half-moon hung in the silver sky.

  The entire Wyatt family showed up early to get seats down front so they could cheer Ruth on. Joe, who was carrying Earl, waved at me. Liz didn’t come—she said she agreed with Mom, football was barbaric—but Uncle Tinsley showed up, wearing a gray felt hat and an old red-and-white varsity jacket with a big B on it. He walked over to where I was standing on the sidelines with the pep squad. “Class of ’48,” he said. “We swept the division.” He winked. “Go get ’em, Bulldogs.”

  The bleachers filled up quickly, and just like in the school cafeteria, the blacks and the whites sat separately. After the band came out, the Bulldogs were introduced one by one, each running onto the field when his name was called. The white fans cheered for the white Byler players, but they stayed pretty quiet for the black players who’d been at Nelson. At the same time, the blacks in the bleachers cheered for the black players but not the white ones.

  When the Owls took the field, their fans cheered for the entire team, but the Owls had only one black player. One of the things people had been talking about before the game was that the Owls had always been a weak team, but Big Creek was a tiny town up in the mountains, and hardly any blacks lived there, so the team hadn’t had the integration issues Byler was going through.

  At the start of the game, the crowd was enthusiastic, cheering every time the Bulldogs completed a pass or made a tackle and booing every time the Owls advanced. The cheerleaders were in position along the sidelines, kicking and jumping around and shaking their pom-poms, while the pep squad ran back and forth in front of the bleachers, pumping the crowd, yelling, “Bulldogs growl, Owls howl!”

  Everyone was having a blast, and it didn’t seem to me that you had to be a barbarian to enjoy the game. By the second quarter, however, the Bulldogs had fallen behind by two touchdowns, and the mood of the crowd turned sour. I didn’t know much about football—the rules seemed incredibly confusing—but I did know we were losing. During a time-out, I asked Ruth what was going on. The Bulldogs weren’t playing like a team, she explained. Dale Scarberry, the white quarterback, was passing only to the white receivers, and the new black players weren’t blocking for their white teammates. If that kept up, the Bulldogs would be massacred.

  When Dale Scarberry threw a pass that was picked off by one of the Owls, I was surprised to hear the Byler fans—both the students and the adults—start booing their own team. They kept it up every time another Bulldog made a mistake, not just booing but cussing and shouting things like “You’re stinking up the field!” “Idiot!” “Bench him!” “You suck!” and “Shit for brains!”

  The Owls scored again, and that was when things got really ugly. We pep squadders were still jumping and pumping, trying to get the crowd back on our side, when someone threw a paper bag of garbage on the field. I dashed out to pick it up, and when I got back to the sideline, I saw a white man in the bleachers stand up and hurl a hamburger at Vanessa Johnson’s sister, Leticia, as she was raising her pom-poms over her head with a big grin. The hamburger hit her in the chest, leaving a greasy mark on her pretty red-and-white uniform.

  Leticia ignored it—she even went on smiling—and all the cheerleaders continued their routine. Then a white man I recognized from the hill stood up and threw a big cup filled with ice and cola. When it hit Leticia on the shoulder, the lid flew off, drenching her uniform. Leticia kept going, kicking up and cheering as vigorously as before, though she had stopped smiling.

  Aunt Al turned to face the two white men. “Hey, now, that ain’t right!” she shouted.

  At that point, a black man standing on the bleacher steps hurled a soda cup at Ruth. It hit her on the shoulder, the drink splattering down her uniform.

  That was too much for Joe. He sprang up and charged toward the black man, but other blacks knocked him down before he got there. A bunch of white fans started jumping across the bleacher seats to defend Joe, and then all hell broke loose, people everywhere throwing drinks and food, shouting, trading punches, and tackling one another, women cursing and pulling hair, babies crying and kids screaming, the seventh-grader with the spirit stick smacking some guy on the head with it. The ruckus went on until the police rushed into the bleachers with their nightsticks out and broke it up.

  We lost the game 36 to 6.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  In school on Monday, all anyone could talk about was the game. Some white students were outraged about the brawl in the bleachers, calling it shameful and disgraceful, but they blamed it on integration, saying this was what was going to happen when you mixed black and white; nothing good could come of it. Some black kids were just as disgusted, although they were saying the ruckus wasn’t their fault, fights had never erupted at Nelson games, and they’d just been defending themselves. Most students were less upset about the brawl than about the shellacking the Bulldogs had taken at the hands of the Big Creek Owls, whom they usually creamed. Integration was supposed to improve the team, kids were saying, but now we couldn’t even beat those pencil necks from Big Creek.

  The principal, at the end of his morning announcements over the P.A. system, mentioned the need for “mutual respect and school unity.” But it wasn’t until English class, after lunch, that any of my teachers directly raised the subject.

  My English teacher, Miss Jarvis, a thin-lipped young woman who got very excited about the readings she assigned, told us that she thought we ought to discuss what had happened at the game.

  “The whites started it,” said Vanessa Johnson. “Throwing that Coke at my sister.”

  “Stuff always gets thrown at games,” said Tinky Brewster, a kid from the hill. “It’s just like you all to make it a racial thing.”

  “We’re not simply going to trade accusations here,” Miss Jarvis said. “But I’d like people’s views on what we can do to make integration a success at Byler High.”

  White kids started saying the problem was that blacks were always carrying on about prejudice and slavery, even though blacks were freed a hundred years ago. And blacks could have black pride, but if you started talking about white pride, all of a sudden it was racist. How come we can’t use the N-word, but they can call us honkies? Anyway, a bunch of the white kids from the hill said, none of their families had owned slaves. In fact, they went on, most of their great-great-grandparents had been indentured servants, but you never heard people complaining about the Irish being enslaved. I was looking around guiltily to see if anyone was going to mention the old Holladay cotton plantation. No one did, and I sure wasn’t about to bring it up.

  Slavery might have ended a hundred years ago, the black kids replied, but until recently, they couldn�
�t eat in the Bulldog Diner, and even today, they got glared at when they did. They started getting hired at Holladay Textiles only a few years ago, and they were still given the worst jobs. The real problem, the black students said, was that whites were scared that blacks were taking over sports and music. They wanted blacks to shut up, stop demanding their rights, and go back to cleaning toilets, washing clothes, and cooking food for white people.

  “Well, we’re not going to resolve this issue in a day,” Miss Jarvis said. Instead, she wanted us to read a book about racial conflict in a small Southern town. It was called To Kill a Mockingbird.

  I liked To Kill a Mockingbird, but I didn’t think it was the most amazing book ever written, the way Miss Jarvis did. The best part, I thought, wasn’t the stuff about race but the way Scout and the two boys snooped around the big haunted house where the scary recluse lived. That really reminded me of being a kid.

  For all of Miss Jarvis’s singing its praises as great literature, a lot of the kids in the class had real problems with the book. The white ones said they knew blacks shouldn’t be lynched, and they didn’t need a book preaching to them about it. Some resented the way the book divided the town into good respectable whites and bad white-trash types. The black kids, for their part, wondered why the hero had to be a noble white guy trying to save a helpless black guy and why the head of the lynch mob was described by the noble white guy as basically a decent man who happened to have a blind spot when it came to hanging innocent blacks. They also didn’t like the way that all the good blacks knew their place and made their children stand up when the noble white guy walked by. It was all that Stepin-Fetchit-yass-suh-no-suh stuff.

  “No one’s challenging the system,” Vanessa said.

  “This discussion isn’t going the way I’d anticipated,” Miss Jarvis said. What she wanted us to do, she went on, was to put our thoughts down on paper.

  When Uncle Tinsley heard about the assignment, his eyes lit up. “To Kill a Mockingbird is a fine book in its own way,” he said. “But if you really want to understand Southern race relations, you need to read the great historian C. Vann Woodward.”

  Uncle Tinsley was sitting at his desk in the library. He pulled out a book from the floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind him and passed it to me. The title was The Strange Career of Jim Crow.

  I started reading, but the writing was so complicated that I got bogged down on the very first page. Uncle Tinsley grabbed the book back and flipped through it, eagerly explaining the ideas and quoting sentences while I took notes.

  Because blacks and whites in the South had lived together under slavery, Uncle Tinsley said, they got along better after the Civil War than blacks and whites up north, where the races hadn’t mixed nearly as much. Legal segregation started first in the North and it was hypocritical of Northerners to blame it all on the South. In fact, the Jim Crow laws began in the South only at the turn of the century. Around that time, outsiders started using what C. Vann Woodward called “negrophobia” to turn poor whites against poor blacks, when the two groups should have been natural allies.

  Uncle Tinsley helped me write up the paper—basically dictating large chunks of it—and had me read it to him. A little way in, he cut me off. I needed to throw myself into the presentation, he said. He’d been in the drama club at Washington and Lee, and he showed me how to gesture for emphasis and use what he called pregnant pauses.

  The next day, when it was my turn to read my essay to the class, I didn’t know if the other kids would be interested in or even understand what Uncle Tinsley had helped me write—I barely understood it myself—and that made me so nervous, the paper was shaking in my hands. It didn’t help that Uncle Tinsley had me throw in fancy words and phrases like “white man’s burden” and “negrophobia.”

  I tried to use the gestures he had shown me, but I forgot the pregnant pauses. Instead, I started rushing through the essay, and my gestures got a little wild. When I finished the paper, I looked up. Some kids were whispering or doodling, and a few were smirking, but most seemed bewildered.

  Tinky Brewster raised his hand. “What’s ‘negrophobia’?” he asked.

  “You don’t have to know what it means to know it’s a highfalutin word for people who don’t like black folks,” Vanessa piped up from the back of the class. “Bean, you one crazy-ass white girl.”

  The entire class cracked up.

  “Now, Vanessa,” Miss Jarvis said, starting to get teacherly, but then, looking at the class, she changed her mind. “Well, at least you’ve finally found one thing you can all agree on.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Liz and I were scrounging around in the attic one afternoon, opening trunks and chests to see what was inside, when we came across an old guitar. Mice had chewed at the neck, but Liz toyed with the tuning pegs and declared that the sound wasn’t half bad. When we brought it downstairs, Uncle Tinsley told us it was Mom’s first guitar, from when she was about Liz’s age and decided she wanted to become a folksinger. Liz took the guitar into the music shop in town, where the clerk put on new strings and tuned it. Liz started spending afternoons in the bird wing, strumming away on it.

  Mom had tried to teach us both to play the guitar. I was hopeless. Tone-deaf, Mom said. Liz showed real potential, but she couldn’t take any sort of criticism, and Mom was always telling her what she was doing wrong and moving her fingers to the correct position. Great musicians bent the rules, Mom said, but before you could bend the rules, you had to learn them, so she was always badgering Liz to practice and Liz finally said, “I’ve had it.”

  Now, since Mom wasn’t around looking over her shoulder, Liz could have fun picking out notes and chords, following songs on the radio, and figuring out what worked and what didn’t without someone getting exasperated every time she hit a wrong note.

  After a while, Liz decided she needed a guitar in better working condition. The music store in Byler had a used Silvertone in the window for a good price—at $110, the clerk said it was a steal—and Liz decided to buy it with the money in her passbook savings account. Since the peach-fuzz business, I had wanted to avoid Mr. Maddox, so I hadn’t been working much, but Liz was still doing his filing and helping in his office, and she had socked away nearly two hundred dollars in her account.

  One Monday afternoon in November, shortly after I’d read my “Negrophobia Essay”—as everyone in class had taken to calling it—Liz biked into town with plans to go to the bank, withdraw the money, and bring back the guitar that day. The guitar had a strap, and she was going to bike home with it slung upside down across her back. She was pretty excited.

  By the time the light started fading, it was chilly enough to see your breath. I had put on a navy pea coat of Mom’s that I found in the attic—unlike most of the stuff, it didn’t look old-timey—and was out in front of the house raking leaves into big piles you could jump on when Liz came pedaling up the driveway. She didn’t have the guitar.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Did someone else already buy it?”

  “My money wasn’t in the bank,” Liz said. “Mr. Maddox took it out.”

  She parked the bike under the carriage overhang, and we sat down on the front steps. After going to the bank, she’d gone over to the Maddoxes’ to find out what the heck had happened to her money. Mr. Maddox told her that he’d moved the money out of her account, since the interest rate was so low, and instead invested it in T-bills, which had a much higher rate of interest but couldn’t be liquidated until maturity—one year out. It was a shrewd move, he said, and if he hadn’t been so busy, he would have explained it to her before. When Liz told him she wanted the money to buy a guitar, Mr. Maddox said she was a fool to waste her money on a passing fancy. Most kids who decided they wanted to play a musical instrument lost interest after a couple of months, he said, and they or their parents were out the cost of the damn thing while it just took up space in a closet.

  “I can’t believe it,” Liz said. “That’s my money. Mr. Maddox can’t
tell me what to do with it.”

  The very moment Liz uttered those words, Uncle Tinsley came out of the house carrying a ladle. Dinner was ready.

  “Mr. Maddox?” he asked. “Jerry Maddox? What about Jerry Maddox?”

  Liz and I looked at each other. It was one thing to avoid telling Uncle Tinsley what we’d been up to. It was another thing to outright lie now that he’d asked point-blank.

  “Mr. Maddox won’t give me my money,” Liz said again.

  “What do you mean?” Uncle Tinsley asked.

  “We’ve been working for him,” Liz said.

  “It was the only job we could get,” I added.

  Uncle Tinsley looked at the two of us for a long moment without saying anything. Then he sat down next to us, put the ladle on the step, and pressed his fingers against his temples. I couldn’t tell if he was upset or angry, disgusted or worried. Maybe he was feeling all those things at once.

  “We needed money for clothes,” Liz said.

  “And we wanted to help out with the expenses,” I said.

  Uncle Tinsley took a deep breath. “Holladays working for Maddoxes,” he said. “I never thought it would come to that.” He looked over at us. “And you kept it from me.”

  “We just didn’t want to upset you,” I said.

  “Well, now I know, and now I’m about as upset as I could possibly be,” he said. “So you might as well tell me the whole story.”