by Robin Talley
“That’s a terrible idea,” she says. She’s talking faster than she did in the bathroom that day. Her words don’t sound as careful as they did then, either. “Opera names don’t work as book titles. Carmen. Faust. Les Troyens. They don’t make sense on their own.”
“No one asked you,” I say, even though she’s right.
“Well you should’ve,” she says. “I’m doing this project, too, in case you forgot.”
I sniff. “As if I could.”
I expect Sarah’s face to crumple. Instead she just gazes at me, her head tilted, her eyes thoughtful.
If I talked to another girl this way, she’d already be getting teary. That’s how it’s always happened before. It’s how I got that freshman last year to stop asking if she could write an editorial for the Clarion. It’s how I got Donna to drop out of solo auditions for the Balladeers so I don’t have to worry about sharing the girls’ parts.
But Sarah only says, still talking so fast it’s hard to keep up, “Believe me, I don’t want to spend any more time with you than I have to, either.”
“I don’t believe you, actually,” I say. “I think you’re getting exactly what you wanted.”
“What I wanted?” She shakes her head, then chuckles. Her laugh has a tinkle to it that would sound nice coming from someone else. “You think this is how I want to spend my afternoons?”
“You wanted integration, you got it,” I say. “If you’re not happy now, then, well. I’m sorry for us, because we didn’t have a choice in the matter. I’m certainly not sorry for you.”
Sarah shakes her head again. “No one wants to go to school with someone who hates them.”
Judy frowns. “Then why did you—”
I cut her off. Judy never understands things like this.
“No one said anything about hate,” I tell Sarah. “We’re Christians. Christians don’t hate.”
Sarah’s mouth drops open. For a long moment, she just stares at me.
“Do you really believe that?” she finally says.
“There’s a difference between hate and disagreement,” I explain. “We don’t hate anyone. We simply don’t approve of your methods. You’re trying to shove integration down our throats instead of letting things happen naturally.”
“All we’re doing is going to school.” Sarah’s still watching me closely. It’s unnerving. “What’s unnatural about that?”
“You went to court and forced it, is what’s unnatural.” I force myself to stop and take a breath. I’m trying to be patient, but it’s not easy. “If you’d just let things happen in their normal course the school board would’ve figured out a way to make sure everyone was happy with their schools, white and colored both, but that takes time. That’s why everyone’s so angry now. Before all this happened, whites and Negroes in Davisburg used to get along just fine, but the way your people did this has made everyone hostile. The integration has been so rushed we haven’t been able to prepare.”
“How did you need to prepare?” Sarah says. “Rehearse new chants and practice tripping us?”
I roll my eyes. Why do integrationists always blame all of us for the actions of a few? Why can’t they see that we’re talking about bigger issues here than chants and slogans?
“Some people will always behave childishly,” I say, “but what matters is—”
“Some people?” Sarah interrupts me again. “Try everyone!”
I roll my eyes again. She’s so predictable. She probably saw one bratty kid behaving badly and assumed every single white person was doing exactly the same thing.
“Not everyone,” I correct her. “I wasn’t one of those immature people yelling at you in the parking lot.”
“You might as well have been.” Her eyes are flashing. It would be frightening if she weren’t so wrong about everything. “You might let other people do your dirty work, but that doesn’t mean you’re any different from them.”
I shake my head, but I’m thinking about Barbara Points and her friends. We all saw them follow those two colored girls into school on the first day, screaming into their faces the whole way. I didn’t know then that the two girls were Sarah and her little sister.
Barbara’s a sophomore who lives on one of the tobacco farms outside town. Last year she missed more school than she showed up for. I’ve certainly never known her to get to school early before. But she still got to school in plenty of time to see the colored people coming in.
Sarah’s little sister had looked terrified that morning, but Sarah never once looked scared. Even when we were all sure there was no way the colored people were going to make it inside the school without somebody getting knocked onto the pavement. Or worse.
Is that what Sarah thinks of me? That I’m the same as Barbara Points? And here I’d been starting to think Sarah seemed intelligent.
“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “Don’t lump me in with those girls. They don’t have half a brain between them.”
“So you think because you have a brain, that makes it all right for you to act the way you do?” Sarah tilts her head back and fixes her eyes on the ceiling. I can’t tell if she’s tired or frustrated. She’s still talking as fast as ever. “It doesn’t show much in the way of brains to decide you don’t like people you don’t even know. All because of their color.”
“It’s not that I don’t like colored people,” I explain. I want to make sure she understands this part. “This isn’t about liking anyone or not liking anyone. It’s about right and wrong. And what you’re doing—agitating—is wrong.”
Sarah looks straight at me. I sit back, startled. Something about that look in her eyes makes me feel dizzy. Like I might fall if I don’t work hard to keep steady.
“That might be what you tell yourself,” she says. “But that doesn’t excuse screaming at us every day, or tripping us in the halls.”
“I haven’t tripped you,” I point out. “Neither has Judy. Neither has—”
“The entire school was shouting at us! Hundreds of you!”
“Well, what did you expect? If you’d let things happen gradually, instead of—”
“The Supreme Court ruled five years ago! What do you need, ten more years? Twenty?”
I hate being interrupted more than almost anything. I give Sarah my hardest glare and wait for her to look sheepish. She just glares right back.
“We needed time,” I repeat, trying not to let that flashing look in her eyes throw me off track. “You didn’t give us any, so the governor was forced to close our school, even though yours stayed open. You want to make everything better for you no matter what it does to us.”
“No one forced anything,” Sarah says. “It was only last year the governor made that law about closing the white schools so they couldn’t be integrated. After your father wrote all those editorials about it. If the governor hadn’t put up such a fight we could’ve integrated quietly, without all this hatred and name-calling.”
At first I wonder if there could be any truth to that. But then I forget about it. I’m too busy being shocked that Sarah Dunbar had the nerve to talk about my father.
Sarah’s father works for my father. I found out from that article about the integrators. I pulled that paper out of the trash and reread it. It said Sarah was the daughter of a junior high school teacher and a copy boy at the Gazette. And that she sang in her church choir and wanted to be a teacher herself someday.
The part about her parents and her church choir was strange to read. I’d never thought about what the colored students do when they’re not in school. Sarah must have a house somewhere. She must do things like help her mother with dinner or iron her clothes for church. The same kinds of things I do.
“The point is, we didn’t force your governor to do anything,” Sarah goes on.
“My governor?” I say.
“He’s your governor, too.”
Sarah lifts her chin and looks me straight in the eyes again. “He’s not my anything if he doesn’t treat me the same way he treats you.”
My jaw drops.
“That’s anarchy,” I say quietly. I wait for her to take it back.
Sarah doesn’t even blink. “No it’s not. If the law is wrong, we have to say the law is wrong.”
Daddy was right. The colored students really are Communists.
I scoot backward, trying to put as much distance between Sarah and me as I can in the tiny space of the storage room. I turn to Judy for help, but she’s looking back and forth between me and Sarah with a lost expression on her face.
“It’s anarchy!” I cry. “It’s Communist, too!”
“We’re not Communists.” Sarah sounds much calmer than I feel. “We go to church every week. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a Communist.”
When I tell Daddy what Sarah said, he’ll get her kicked out of school for sure! Her father fired, too, probably.
My heart thumps. She might not really be a Communist, but with what she said, she’s close enough. And if she is, the other colored people must be, too.
I was right about everything.
We’re going to win. We’ll get the integration overturned, and everyone will know it was me who did it. My father will smile at me the way he used to.
“You’re going to wish you never said that,” I say. “Wait until my father hears—”
“How’s he going to hear?” Sarah says. “I bet he doesn’t even know you’re doing this project with me. You can’t have him knowing you’ve been associating with one of us, can you?”
I sit back onto my crate. My head thunks against the concrete wall behind me.
She’s right.
For a second I actually believed I could fix integration.
How stupid could I be? I’m not important enough for that. I’m not anyone special.
Then Sarah Dunbar has the nerve to smile at me.
I hate her.
She thinks she can say whatever she wants. She thinks I can’t stop her.
Sarah Dunbar isn’t afraid of me at all.
What gave her the right to tell us what to do? How can she be so sure she’s right when everyone else, from the governor to Reverend Pierce to Daddy, all say she’s wrong?
She doesn’t even know what she’s talking about. She’s just saying what the Communists at the NAACP taught her to say.
She acts like she knows, though. That’s the problem. She sits over there with her pretty smile and her pretty words. Someone who didn’t know better might think she was telling the truth.
Someone has to show Sarah she’s wrong.
I may not be important enough to fix integration, but I can fix her.
Lie #10
JEFFERSON HIGH CLARION
Wednesday, February 11, 1959
How Will You Be Remembered?
By Linda Hairston, Editorial Page Editor
We thought it could never happen. Not here in Virginia. The governor did what he could to stop it, but even George Washington’s hardest fought battles sometimes ended in defeat.
No matter what may be happening around us, I implore my fellow Jefferson students to hold fast. We can’t give up yet.
I don’t mean giving up the legal battles. That’s for the government to settle. I mean something much more important: don’t give up the beliefs you hold in your heart.
Your heart is much stronger than any court ruling or edict from Washington. Your beliefs come from your faith and your heritage. Faith and heritage run deeper than the orders of any politician.
Someday, the history books will write about what’s happening to us right now. What do you want them to say about you? That you did nothing while history was happening all around you? Or do you want them to say you stood up for your beliefs, for your culture, for your state?
We all have to stand up for what we know is right. It’s up to us as Americans and as the generation who will someday lead this country to set the right path for those who will come after us.
If you believe, deep in your heart, that the way you were raised was right—that the world has always been this way because that was how our Heavenly Father intended it—then you can’t simply sit back and wait while agitators from the North try to cram their radical ideas down our throats.
It’s up to us to make our voices heard. What we do right now could determine the very future of our state. Please don’t make your children, or your grandchildren, hang their heads in shame when they speak of you.
I’m proud of our traditions. I’m proud to be a Southerner and a Virginian. I’m proud to fight to preserve our way of life.
If you’re proud, too, then I hope you’ll fight alongside me.
* * *
“SETTLE DOWN NOW,” Mrs. Gruber says, pulling a pack of gum out of Kenneth Cox’s hand before he can put another stick in his mouth. He’s been chewing gum and spitting it at the junior colored boy in the front row. Two pieces have already hit the boy’s arm, but I guess Mrs. Gruber only just got tired of watching it.
“Why can’t you all be well behaved in Study Hall, the way these girls are?” Mrs. Gruber says. “Look how hard Linda’s studying over there.”
Mrs. Gruber smiles at me. I smile back, even though Mrs. Gruber smiles like a weasel. I’ve had her for Math all four years of high school, and this year I have her for Study Hall, too. She likes me. All my teachers like me because Mom always finds out my teachers’ birthdays at the beginning of the year and sends me to school with loaves of fresh-baked banana bread for them. (Fresh-baked by Martha. She’s the colored woman who comes to our house three times a week to clean and do our baking.)
After Study Hall I pack up my books and turn to talk to Donna, but Kenneth gets in my way. He’s an offensive lineman. Standing in front of me he might as well be a mountain range. I have to tilt my head back to see his face.
“Teacher’s pet,” he says, but he’s smiling. The boys know better than to really tease me. Especially the juniors, like Kenneth, who want to stay on the football team next year.
“Don’t blame me,” I say. “If you don’t want to get in trouble, don’t do silly things in class.”
Kenneth frowns. “I thought you’d think it was funny. After what you wrote in the paper.”
He thought my editorial was about gum-spitting? Now I understand why Daddy’s always complaining about his writing being misunderstood.
I wasn’t writing about silly, petty things. I was writing about the real issues behind integration. About the federal government telling all the states what to do, since they don’t trust us to decide for ourselves.
It gets me fired up again just thinking about it. Why should anyone else tell us how to run our schools? Or tell Judy’s boss, Mr. Bailey, what he’s allowed to do in his own store? Why should the government tell me I have to use the same bathroom as colored women when I’m doing my shopping? What business is it of theirs?
“I wasn’t talking about acting childish,” I tell Kenneth, rolling my eyes.
His face twists into an angry frown. I’ve gone too far. I’m about to apologize when he says, “Well, it shouldn’t matter to you anyway. It’s not like you’re one of those nigger-lovers.”
I laugh. It’s just so preposterous. Kenneth laughs, too, the tension evaporated.
“Sorry, Kenneth,” I say. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter.”
“What was that about?” Donna asks me when Kenneth’s gone.
“Nothing,” I tell her.
The junior colored boy—I think his name is Paul—is still sitting rigid in the front row. There’s some gum left on his arm, as though he tried to pull it off but couldn’t get it all. I think about ha
ving to touch a wad of gum covered in Kenneth Cox’s spit, and I shudder.
I know Kenneth and the other boys in Bo’s gang are only trying to protest integration in their own way. I know the colored people should’ve known better than to come to our school if they didn’t want this kind of thing to happen. But I still don’t like seeing it happen right in front of me. It’s only natural not to want to talk to the colored people, or sit near them, but there’s no need for boys like Kenneth to be disgusting in front of all of us.
Everything is so much worse with the colored people here. If they aren’t giving the boys reasons to act like idiots, they’re driving people to send angry letters to Daddy about his editorials. Those letters make Daddy storm around the house so much I’ve started reading my books in the laundry room. That’s the one place he never goes.
The colored people are ruining my senior year.
And now I have no choice but to spend time with one of them.
I still haven’t told anyone about being project partners with Sarah. All I said to Jack was that I had to meet Judy after school a few days a week for a homework assignment. Jack didn’t like that—we usually go for drives out to the country on sunny afternoons when he doesn’t have to work—but he didn’t ask me any more about it.
I’ve never talked to Jack about integration, but once at a game I overheard him telling Daddy that if he got made head coach, he could promise there wouldn’t be any Nigras playing football for Jefferson.
When I walk to Bailey’s in the afternoons I always have an excuse prepared in case someone sees me. So far I haven’t gotten caught. Sometimes, though, I think getting caught on the way would be better than what I have to deal with when I get there.
Sarah Dunbar is an awful girl.
Not only because she’s an NAACP agitator. Simply because she’s awful.
She insists on talking when I want to talk. She argues with me even when I’m right. She even makes Judy think I’m wrong sometimes.
