by Nat Hentoff
“No group should have veto power over what books we can read,” Barney volunteered.
“Exactly.” The librarian nodded her head. “Think, Kate. If Huckleberry Finn is going to be thrown out of school because it offends some black parents, what’s to stop other groups of parents from getting up their lists of books they want out of here? Catholics, Jews, feminists, antifeminists, conservatives, liberals, Greeks, Turks, Armenians. Where does it end, Kate?”
NAT HENTOFF is a well-known staff writer for The Village Voice. He is the author of Jazz Country, I’m Really Dragged but Nothing Gets Me Down, This School Is Driving Me Crazy, and Does This School Have Capital Punishment?.
ALSO AVAILABLE IN LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS:
HOOPS, Walter Dean Myers
WHIRLIGIG, Paul Fleischman
HEROES, Robert Cormier
TUNES FOR BEARS TO DANCE TO, Robert Cormier
BREAKING BOXES, A. M. Jenkins
THE KILLER’S COUSIN, Nancy Werlin
FOR MIKE, Shelley Sykes
HOLES, Louis Sachar
HATE YOU, Graham McNamee
CLOSE TO A KILLER, Marsha Qualey
YEARLING BOOKS are designed especially to entertain and enlighten young people. Patricia Reilly Giff, consultant to this series, received her bachelor’s degree from Marymount College and a master’s degree in history from St. John’s University. She holds a Professional Diploma in Reading and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hofstra University. She was a teacher and reading consultant for many years, and is the author of numerous books for young readers.
Contents
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter - I
Chapter - II
Chapter - III
Chapter - IV
Chapter - V
Chapter - VI
Chapter - VII
Chapter - VIII
Chapter - IX
Chapter - X
Chapter - XI
Chapter - XII
Chapter - XIII
Chapter - XIV
Chapter - XV
Chapter - XVI
Copyright
FOR
KATHY RUSSELL, IRENE TURIN,
SUSAN MAASZ, AND JUDITH KRUG
I
“He’s going to be right inside the door,” Luke said to Barney as they neared the entrance to George Mason High School. “He’s going to be standing there with that big phony smile and that chocolate voice.”
Luke, sticking out his stomach as far as a lean sixteen-year-old could, deepened his voice in imitation of the man behind the door—Michael Moore, also known as Mighty Mike, the principal of the school. “ ‘Welcome back, Luke, good buddy. Have a good summer? Yeah, you look like you had a great summer. Raring to get at the books, good buddy? Har, har, har, I bet you are.’ ”
Turning to Barney, who was shorter, a year older, and the incoming editor of the George Mason Standard, Luke said, “Why don’t we go in the back way?”
Barney laughed. “He’ll get us sooner or later. Might as well be now.”
As they reached the front door, Barney opened it and gestured for Luke to precede him. “After you, good buddy.”
Luke scowled, poked his head in, and stiffened as a large man in his late forties, with a magnificent mane of prematurely white hair, fixed his pale-blue eyes on the boy. “Well, look who’s here.” Mr. Moore placed his hand on Luke’s shoulder. “Cool Hand Luke. Have a good summer, good buddy?”
“I got possessed,” Luke said tonelessly. “Somebody else is inside me now.”
“Har, har, har.” The principal dug his hand into the boy’s shoulder. “Well, I hope he gets his papers in on time. Look who else is raring to get at the books. And at the news! Barnaby, you look like you had a great summer. That still is you, isn’t it, Barnaby?”
“We switch,” Barney said solemnly. “Sometimes what’s in Luke gets into me.”
“That’s nothing new.” The principal clapped Barney on the back. “Well, look who’s here.” Mr. Moore moved in on a group of students who had just opened the door. “Have a good summer, good buddy?”
“Let’s move,” Luke whispered to Barney. “He could do it all over again.”
“I’m going in the library,” Barney said. “I want to say hello to Mrs. Salters.”
“Mrs. Salters, she’s gone,” said a cool, clipped voice behind them. “Checked out for good.”
Barney turned. “Hey, Kate!” he said to the thin, crisp girl with jet-black hair and large round glasses. “You were supposed to write me this summer.”
“I started to a couple of times”—Kate smiled—“but it was all so boring. Except for Mrs. Salters, and I didn’t want to spoil your summer.”
“What happened to her?”
“Well,” said Kate, “she told my mother—you know, my mother went to college with her—that if she stayed another year, she’d kill him. She’d take a butcher knife, march right into his office, and cut out his tin heart. It was either murder or quit. So she quit.”
“Who?” Barney and Luke asked in unison. “Who was she going to murder?”
“That yo-yo over there,” Kate said impatiently, pointing to Mr. Moore, who waved cheerily back at her.
“Why? What did he do?” Barney asked.
Kate shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s all I heard. My mother was telling the story to my father until they realized I’d come into the room. She said she couldn’t tell me the details, because if the story got spread all over school, that yo-yo would make it hard for Mrs. Salters to get another job.”
“You don’t know anything more?” Barney shouted.
“Summer’s over!” the principal shouted from across the lobby. “Keep it down!” He grinned at them.
“Nothing,” Kate whispered.
“Who’s the new librarian?” Barney said glumly.
“Fitzgerald.” Kate looked at her watch. “Something Fitzgerald. My mother says she feels sorry for her.”
Deirdre Fitzgerald looked around the library that morning with satisfaction. It was all so inviting. The boldly colored posters, the newly polished tables (she’d done the polishing), the parade of magazines in the racks, and the books. Ah, the shelves and shelves and shelves of books.
Tall, slender, with long, lustrous brown hair and sharp features that might have been forbidding had her eyes and voice not been so soft, Deirdre walked along the shelves, opening books at random, reading a paragraph or two, and then putting them carefully back.
Stopping at her desk, she stood in reflection, remembering the day—she was sure it had been a Friday—when, as a little girl, she had gotten her first card at the public library branch near her home. She could still feel the excitement. And the delicious frustration. Would she ever be able to read all the books in that astonishingly clean, bright, orderly room? The white-haired librarian had laughed and said, “Don’t count, Deirdre. It’s not a contest. Enjoy them one at a time.”
But she had counted, and indeed she had read a rather enormous number of the books in that library. As a child she had wanted to stay there all her life. And in a way—Deirdre Fitzgerald smiled—she had.
“My, you’re in good spirits.” A brisk, chunky blond woman in her early forties came into the library. “I feel like the bad fairy at the christening.”
The librarian, frowning in puzzlement, looked at her. “I’m Deirdre Fitzgerald.”
“Sorry, no manners. Me, I mean,” said the blond woman. “When I’ve got something on my mind, I have no manners. I’m Nora Baines. I teach history in this amusement park. We’ll be working together a lot because I am notorious among stude
nts for insisting that supplementary reading lists be taken seriously.”
Deirdre motioned for Nora Baines to take a seat.
“No, thanks,” said the history teacher. “I don’t like to get too comfortable in this school. Makes it easier for them to ambush you.”
“Them?”
“Everybody. Students. Fellow faculty members. Mighty Mike Moore, our magnetic principal. Parents. And various other citizens who consider public education to be the public’s business. They’re right, of course. It is the public’s business. Still, I wish they’d all take a long sabbatical and keep their noses out of our affairs for a while. God, what a time we had last year.”
“I heard something about a little trouble last year,” Deirdre Fitzgerald said, “but Mr. Moore told me that it was just that—a few complaints about library books and textbooks, and they were all resolved okay.”
“Ha!” Nora Baines snapped. “You’ll see how he resolves complaints. That’s why Karen Salters left. Listen, I’ve got to get to first period. We’ll talk later. You need a crash course in how to survive around here. Hey, you a fighter?”
Deirdre smiled. “Only when my back is against the wall. Then I’m so terrifying, I scare even myself.”
“Good,” said Nora Baines from the door. “You don’t know it yet, but that’s exactly where your back is.”
II
“This is a history course.” Nora Baines was speaking, later that morning, with her customary staccato energy. “But we shall also be reading novels. Why do you suppose that is?”
“Because fiction,” Barney said, “is sometimes more real than fact. I mean, it can tell you more than facts. It can tell you more about what ordinary people were like in certain times and places than laws and battles and things like that.”
Nora Baines peered at Barney. “And why is that?”
“Well, because fiction is imagination. The novelist can suppose, and so he can get inside people’s heads. Like, if he’s writing about the past, and he knows a lot about the past, he makes you become part of it because you get all involved with the story and the people in it.”
“He. He. He.” Kate turned around and said dryly to Barney, “All novelists are males?”
“I expect Barney is willing to agree,” said Nora Baines, “that his use of ‘he’ encompasses women as well.”
Barney nodded in genial agreement.
“Why can’t he say ‘she’ then”—Kate turned back to the teacher—“and agree that ‘she’ encompasses men as well?”
“Because it doesn’t feel right,” Barney said.
“Uh-huh!” Kate’s voice was triumphant. “Sure, sexism is comfortable, just as racism is. Why change when you’re on top?”
Luke and some of the other boys guffawed.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Kate said angrily, “and you know I didn’t. Bunch of yo-yos.”
“Kate has just made her point.” Nora Baines looked at Luke. “That was such a comfortable bray, Luke Hagstrom. You will be right at home in our journey through the nineteenth century—until you meet Susan B. Anthony. She’ll give you a good shaking up.
“Now”—Nora Baines was pacing in front of her desk—“about ‘he’ and ‘she’ and all that. You can avoid the pronouns, Kate, by using ‘novelist’ or ‘writer’ instead of ‘he’ in what Barney just said. For instance, ‘If it’s about the past, the novelist makes you become part of it.’
“As for myself,” the history teacher went on, “I don’t have any problem using ‘he’ to mean both genders because I grew up that way. I have certainly always considered myself part of mankind, after all. But I understand what you’re talking about, Kate. Just watch out that you don’t fall into such deformities of language as ‘clergyperson’ or ‘policeperson’ or ‘chairperson.’ I will not accept any such genderless abominations in any paper in this class.”
“The newspaper said last night,” Luke volunteered brightly, “that Mr. Moore is the new chair of the state principals’ association.”
“He can’t stand any more upholstering than he already has,” said a voice from the back of the room.
“Ridiculous!” Nora Baines sat down with a thump. “All right, let’s get on with nineteenth-century American history. Your first assignment, as you can see by the reading list, will be the numbered pages in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. He was a young French nobleman who came here in 1831 to find out what this young country was all about. And one of the things he found was that this was no fake democracy. The people really did rule. Or, as he put it, in America, ‘The people are the cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them.’ ”
Kate snorted. “Male, white people did all the ruling. Period.”
“Patience,” Nora Baines said. “You and Frederick Douglass will get your chance. If I may continue, this young Frenchman was worried, though. Even with all this democracy, something seemed to be missing. What do you suppose it was?”
Silence. Finally broken by Barney. “Well, it has to be what Kate said—only white males shared in that democracy.”
“That is obvious to some of us now,” Nora Baines said. “But what dangerous weakness in the new America did de Tocqueville see then?”
All faces were blank. The teacher sighed and said, “De Tocqueville was worried that individual differences were getting blurred in this grand rule by the people. Here—” She picked up a paperback book. “He wrote: ‘Every citizen, being assimilated to all the rest, is lost in the crowd, and nothing stands conspicuous but the great and imposing image of the people at large.’ ”
There was still puzzlement among the students.
“Okay.” Nora Baines got up and started pacing again. “Just a short time before, a revolutionary war had been fought to get rid of British tyranny. But now, was there a danger that the democratic majority could be as tyrannical as a king? Mind you, this young Frenchman admired a lot about America, but he also wrote: ‘I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.’ Do you see? He was afraid that individual freedom of thought was being lost in that great democratic crowd. It was one thing to dissent against the British in 1776, but by 1831 de Tocqueville found very few Americans who dared to dissent publicly against popular opinion in this new nation.”
“That’s crazy,” Luke Hagstrom said. “Americans have always been disagreeing with each other about all kinds of things. Look at the Abolitionists. Look at the Civil War, for God’s sake. Look at the Vietnam War. Just listen to all those people calling in on the radio talk shows all the time—biting each other’s heads off.”
“I don’t think it’s as simple as Luke says,” Barney broke in. “There are a lot of places in this country, and I bet there always have been, where if you’re all alone in what you think, and you say what you think, you get treated like a leper or a criminal.”
“Well, sure,” Luke said, “if you let them do that to you. I just wouldn’t talk to people that dumb.”
“Great,” said Kate. “That’d really help get your ideas across.”
“Is it possible that both Luke and Barney are right?” Nora Baines asked. “Think about it as you read de Tocqueville. By the way, does everyone have a reading list?”
All nodded.
“Democracy in America,” Nora Baines said, “is our first text. There will be no one single textbook for the course. Now, on the supplementary reading list, the first title—which will be read along with de Tocqueville—is Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I want you to think about the state of individual liberties in America as shown in this story about a boy and a runaway slave going down the Mississippi on a raft some twenty years after the Frenchman came here. Then, through historians and other novelists, we shall proceed more chronologically through the nineteenth century—but always keeping de Tocqueville and Mark Twain in mind.”
“That supplementary reading list,” Luke
asked. “Do we have to read all the books on it?”
“Only those that are starred,” Nora Baines said. “Like Huckleberry Finn. First two chapters by next class. It will do you no harm to read the other books, however.”
“You mean, it won’t do our grades any harm?” Luke said archly.
“That is also a possibility, Mr. Hagstrom, Not a certainty, but a possibility. As for those unstarred books, there aren’t enough for everyone in the class, so you can sign up for the copies we do have with Miss Fitzgerald in the library. She’s taken Mrs. Salters’s place.”
“Why did Mrs. Salters leave?” Kate seized the opening.
“I believe,” Nora Baines said with unaccustomed hesitation, “she was offered a better job in another state.”
“That’s not what I heard,” Kate said.
“What did you hear?” Nora Baines looked at her with considerable interest.
Kate tugged at her hair. “Just enough to know she didn’t like it here anymore.”
“Any questions on the assignments?” The teacher looked around the room.
“Has Mrs. Salters left for that other job yet?” Barney asked.
“Uh, no.”
“Then I’ll call her,” Barney said. “Why she left might be a story for the paper.”
“Well”—Nora Baines picked up her books—“that would be up to Mrs. Salters, wouldn’t it?”
III
The next day Scott Berman, ambling down the corridor, just beginning to taste the after-school pizza only two hours away, felt a sharp tap on his shoulder. He stopped, turned, and saw an angry Gordon McLean.
“You read the first assignment in Huckleberry Finn?” McLean asked hoarsely.
“Naw. I’ll do it tonight. It’s not due until tomorrow. I never do anything early. Suppose the school burns down a week before the assignment’s due and you’ve already done it. It’s all wasted.” Berman smiled, but McLean’s scowl was unwavering.
“The book is full of ‘niggers,’ “McLean said. “Look.”
He pulled the paperback out of his pocket.
