The Long Ride

by Marina Budhos

  “Not too far,” I say.

  “Far,” Francesca says at the same time.

  “The first time I rode a bus by myself,” she explains, “cost a nickel. And it was a streetcar. Not a bus.”

  I smile, thinking of my research project. I go quiet. This bus ride feels different from the school ride. We’re on our own.

  When we reach our stop and clamber down the steps, the muggy air hits us.

  “My hair!” Francesca wails. She wriggles out of her cardigan and stuffs it into her bag. I do the same. Josie looks cautious. Then she shrugs hers off and gives it to Francesca to put away.

  We walk past a row of stores, the little candy shop where the man was so nice. The more we walk, the happier I become, summer starting to feel good on our newly long legs and bare shoulders. We stroll arm in arm, showing our skin, brown and copper and mahogany. We blend and are apart. We won’t let anyone make us feel wrong anywhere.

  * * *

  * * *

  I recognize the house and tidy yard. And then there’s John, coming down the driveway with a hose in his hand, Darren loping behind. “You made it!” John calls out. I’m suddenly warm all over.

  John’s high-tops are so clean, they’re almost blinding.

  “New?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “I told him they going to get dirty in two seconds,” Darren says.

  “Not if you leave me alone,” John says.

  “That right?” Darren lunges for the hose, rushes to turn on a spigot. Arcs of water spray John, and then us. We shriek and dodge, running into the yard. After a while we flop down on the grass.

  “You get your letter?” Darren asks Josie. He means the summer program.

  “Yeah.”

  “You going to do it?” I ask him.

  “I’ll make him do it,” Josie says.

  Darren grins. “Good.”

  We talk some more about the summer, drops of water drying on our arms. Francesca will be off to England in August, but without her mother, who has to work. John is waiting for his brother, Ronald, to come home from the army and then they’ll visit family in North Carolina. These days my parents’ worries have shifted in another direction: What will happen when Karim gets his draft number in another year? We’re going to drive up to Canada to stay with relatives and maybe see about Karim living with second cousins of my father, who immigrated to Toronto. It tears my father up. “It’s a nasty business, this war in Vietnam. I didn’t raise my son to run away.”

  “Y’all better keep in touch,” Darren says. “ ’Specially since Josie and me are sweating it out.”

  “I’ll send you a postcard from Canada,” I say. “Snow and mountains. Though it won’t be cold then.”

  “I better get that postcard.”

  “Sure.”

  “We won’t be together for me and Jamila’s birthdays,” Francesca says sadly.

  “We’ll celebrate in the fall,” I say.

  The screen door flaps open. “Anyone here hungry?”

  Nana stands on the back steps in a blue dress, holding up a pitcher of lemonade and shaking a tub of ginger cookies.

  I jump up. “Yes!”

  Next door I hear voices, someone skipping rope. There’s a scent of cut grass. A bus rumbles past a few blocks away. White socks sway on a laundry line. All around us is the smell and feel of summer, of turning thirteen, tipping us forward.

  This novel is a work of fiction. It is based on a busing plan that was implemented in my neighborhood in Queens, New York, in the late sixties and early seventies. I grew up hearing about it from the older kids, and I watched the controversy divide my community. I also drew from my experiences attending diverse public schools. A social studies teacher did take away my journal and read it out loud. And I was picked on for having a beau who was black and told to “stay with my own race.” At the time, I was speechless, especially since my race wasn’t obvious to me. This book is my attempt to finally speak to some of those experiences.

  When we think of integration, we usually think of the iconic images of the National Guard accompanying nine students to school in Little Rock, Arkansas, or of black children being bused into white neighborhoods. Yet the story is much more complex—and it is ongoing.

  In 1954, in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a segregated education was not an equal one. But change was slow, and in the 1970s it was clear that our nation’s schools remained as segregated as ever. All over the country, school districts experimented with different plans to foster integration. In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled that busing could be used to achieve desegregation. Some plans faltered or provoked bitter protests and riots, as in Boston between 1974 and 1976. Some plans were successful. Former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder, who grew up in Queens, was selected to attend a gifted program in a white school and often speaks of this as a wonderful educational and social experience. Going to that school shaped who he became.

  What is often forgotten in the story of desegregation is that children are the ones who must carry out these experiments. While in the 1960s the fight for civil rights was often captured in large events covered in national news, in the 1970s it played out in ordinary neighborhoods, where people struggled, imperfectly, to live out those grand ideals. Schools carried the burden of integration, while the rest of people’s lives—where they lived and worked and who they socialized with—remained deeply segregated.

  We have yet to meet the challenge of integrating our schools, along with our cities and towns; today, many districts around the nation, including those in New York City, are more segregated than ever, and the NYC Department of Education is still trying to address inequities. Change doesn’t come easily.

  Integration is not just a black and white issue; it is also about those of us who do not fit into neat racial categories and who may have been the first to “integrate” schools simply by moving into white neighborhoods. This is sometimes called the “Loving Generation,” referring to the U.S. Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia, which in 1967 struck down the law forbidding interracial marriage in the state of Virginia. That ruling nullified similar laws in fifteen states. For me—of mixed race, with parents who taught in public schools—the conflicts and hopes of this period in large part shaped my coming-of-age. By the time I went to high school, some of these initial clashes around integration had subsided. But even in my own highly integrated high school, there was internal resegregation—an issue that schools struggle with to this day.

  The integration plan portrayed in this novel is like many of the clumsy first collisions: well-meaning but unsuccessful. Yet that can’t be the end of the story. Studies show that students of color who attend integrated schools tend to do better academically than those who don’t. And it’s not just minority children who benefit, but all children: a Columbia University Teachers College study found that those who had experienced desegregation “found it to be one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives, the best—and sometimes the only—opportunity to meet and interact regularly with people of different backgrounds.”

  If you learn to know and love someone of a different race and ethnicity, they won’t be a stereotype or an “other” in your mind. You will truly know your own country in all its wonderful diversity. That’s the greatest education and gift we can give our children.

  Thank you to Darcy Hall for sharing her experience with the I.S. 8 pairing plan, warts and all, and to Jim Hendler for sharing memories and documents from his father Samuel Hendler’s archive.

  As always, I want to thank my dream team of Wendy Lamb and Dana Carey. Dana, in particular, pushed me hard this time around. To my older son, Sasha, thank you for your perspective and for showing me how we have and haven’t moved on from the seventies. My husband, as always, was my sounding board for so m
uch, and reminded me of Albers’s color theory. Living with middle schooler Rafi helped me keep the touch light in this book.

  Sadly, my mother, Shirley Budhos, did not live to see this novel finished. I’ve always known this book would be dedicated to her. My mother taught me how to read before I began school, implanting in me not just a love of books but a sense of taking possession of one’s own knowledge and learning. She always spoke frankly about race and taught me not to be afraid to speak up about uncomfortable issues.

  And we also always went shopping on Jamaica Avenue!

  Marina Budhos is the author of several award-winning adult and YA novels, including Watched, Ask Me No Questions, and Tell Us We’re Home. With her husband, Marc Aronson, she wrote Eyes of the World: Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and the Invention of Modern Photojournalism and Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science. She lives in a book-filled house in Maplewood, New Jersey, where she can often be found reading on her front porch.

  marinabudhos.com

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