Lies We Tell Ourselves

by Robin Talley

  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.”

  “You think any of this was my idea?” The girl crosses her arms over her chest. Her eyes are turned down but her voice is angry.

  I still can’t believe she’s talking this way. She acted uppity yesterday, too, but it wasn’t this bad. Daddy says Negro brains are naturally predisposed to be submissive. Something must’ve gone wrong in this girl’s brain.

  “Um, can I say something?” Judy asks. I glare at her, but she’s not looking at me. “Since it seems like you’re all right now.”

  The colored girl nods, slowly.

  “I’m not sure if you heard us yesterday, but I wanted to say I’m really sorry about what I did,” Judy says all in a rush. “What I said to Bo and the others after French. And moving seats in Math. I—I wanted to tell you I don’t think that’s right.”

  The colored girl and I both roll our eyes at the same time.

  “What are you playing at?” the colored girl says. “If you didn’t think it was right you wouldn’t have done it.”

  “And since when do you think it isn’t right?” I ask Judy. This is certainly the first time I’m hearing any of this.

  “Since—I don’t know.” Judy blinks three times, fast. Like she’s trying not to cry. “It all—yesterday was so—”

  She turns back to the mirror.

  I sigh. “You missed a spot. Far right, near your neck.”

  Judy nods and gets her makeup sponge back out, still blinking.

  “Have you seen a doctor about your face?” the colored girl asks her. I can’t believe her nerve.

  “Leave Judy alone,” I tell her. It’s all I can do not to shout. How dare she come where she knows she’s not wanted, treat me with disrespect and then say something like that to my friend? I wouldn’t even let a white girl get away with that. “It’s a port wine stain. It’s normal. She’s not sick.”

  “Oh, so my skin color is the only one you have a problem with?” the colored girl says.

  I roll my eyes again. “Come on, Judy. Your makeup’s done. Let’s go.”

  The colored girl moves toward the door at the same time we do. I remember we’re going to the same class and I hold out my hand to stop her.

  “No,” I say. “You wait here until we’re gone. Someone could see us leaving together.”

  The girl starts to step back. Then she hesitates and shakes her head.

  “No,” she says. “I won’t let you tell me what to do anymore.”

  In the end, I give up and let her leave first, but for all that, we reach the door to French at the same time.

  Miss Whitson frowns at us when we open the door. The rest of the class is already working on some assignment. I hadn’t realized we were so late.

  “Mademoiselle Hairston, Mademoiselle Dunbar, Mademoiselle Campbell, welcome,” Miss Whitson says quietly, in French. She comes into the hall to talk to us. “You’re very late, you know.”

  The colored girl and I nod. Judy looks blank. I’ve tried to help her with her French but it just won’t take.

  “I’ve been assigning partners for the winter term project,” Miss Whitson says, still speaking French.

  Judy looks at me with wide eyes. She has no idea what’s going on. The colored girl does, though. She looks as nervous as I feel.

  “As everyone else has been assigned, that leaves the three of you to work together,” Miss Whitson says. “Your assignment is due in April. Instructions are on the board.”

  “No,” the colored girl and I say in the same breath. We lock eyes for a second. Then we both scowl and look away.

  “I’d like to do the project alone, please,” the colored girl tells Miss Whitson in rapid French. Her accent is better than I would’ve expected.

  “Yes, please, Madame, let her work alone,” I say.

  Judy is still blinking back and forth between the rest of us, lost.

  “This is a team project,” Miss Whitson says. “No exceptions. Now take your seats before I go looking for my tardy slips.”

  Fear leaps in my stomach. If my father finds out I’m going to be doing homework with a colored girl, he’ll do worse than hit. I don’t even want to know what he’ll do.

  I can tell from her face the colored girl wants to argue with Miss Whitson, but she doesn’t. The colored people are always polite with teachers, no matter how rudely they treat the rest of us.

  This is all her fault. This colored girl, and the others like her, aren’t just out to ruin our school. This girl is going to ruin my entire life.

  I bump her with my elbow as we make our way to our seats. It’s childish, I know, but it’s nothing compared to what I’ll get at home tonight.

  “Next time go find yourself a colored bathroom,” I hiss when Miss Whitson turns away. “And tell your dumb kid sister to watch out for herself from now on, because I’m certainly not doing that ever again.”

  The girl fixes her dark eyes on me. It’s strange to see so much anger on such a pretty face. She raises her eyebrows, then looks away. Dismissing me.

  I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever been this mad at someone who wasn’t my father.

  My father.

  My stomach rolls over again. He’ll never believe me when I tell him this project was that hateful colored girl’s fault, not mine.

  But I’ll always remember what she did. And I’ll make sure she pays for it.

  Lie #9

  WHEN I GET home, the ball of fear in my stomach grows bigger and bigger until it swallows me whole.

  I’ll figure a way to fix this. I always think of something.

  They wouldn’t really expect me to be partners with a colored girl. Not with my father being who he is.

  I have to put a stop to this before he finds out. If I don’t—

  I shove that thought far away and tighten my grip on Mom’s eyeliner pencil. I’m hiding in the bathroom, trying out eye makeup for my date with Jack on Saturday. I want to look like Sophia Loren, but my hand isn’t steady enough to pull it off, so I just look like a red-haired raccoon.


  “Linda?” Mom knocks on the door. “Are you in there?”

  Shoot. I reach for a cloth to wipe off the makeup. “I’m washing my hair,” I call.

  “You just washed your hair on Sunday.” Mom tries the knob, but I’ve locked it. She tries again. “Linda Louise Hairston! Come out here right now!”

  I scrub my eyes clean and throw Mom’s pencil back in the drawer before I swing the door open. Mom rubs her eyes, her dark hair coming loose from her bun. She used to get mad when my brothers and I were little and broke the rules, but ever since I got sick in fifth grade, she’s always just looked tired.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I haven’t been feeling well. Something awful happened at school today.”

  Mom softens. “What is it?”

  “It’s Miss Whitson. You remember, I had her for French last year?”

  Mom nods, her jaw set. Mom and Miss Whitson fought all year when they were co-chairing the PTA charity carnival. Miss Whitson kept assigning boys to the cleanup crew, which had always been just girls. Mom kept changing the assignments behind her back because she said the boys would only make a mess of things. By the time the carnival was a week away they were both sending me back and forth every day with nasty notes to pass to each other. Mom’s notes said Miss Whitson was too modern in her sensibilities and Miss Whitson’s notes said Mom wasn’t appropriately charitable.

  It’s made French class awkward ever since. Which is too bad, because I love French.

  I tell Mom what happened today, and her face goes white. She knows as well as I do what would happen if Daddy found out about the colored girl.

  “I’ll call Sharon Whitson right now,” she says. “We’ll get this taken care of. Don’t worry.”

  I go to my room to wait. I try to start my homework, but I don’t get far. With the school closed, I spent September to January doing all my work through correspondence courses, where all you have to do is read a text and take a quiz through the mail—easy-peasy. Having actual assignments from actual teachers is a lot more work.

  When Mom comes into my room a few minutes later, I give up and shut my textbook. Mom’s face is still white.