by Robin Talley
I bite my lip. Blood rushes to my cheeks. I try to turn my head so Sarah can’t see, but she leans over and studies me for a long moment before she speaks again.
“We aren’t supposed to do any extracurriculars this year,” Sarah says. “That’s why I can’t join the school choir, either.”
“But this is your last year,” Judy says. “If you aren’t in the choir now you never will be.”
Sarah shrugs.
Judy turns to me with a searching look. I don’t know what she expects me to do about it.
“We’re behind on the assignment,” I say. “We still have another ten pages before we’re done. We should stop wasting time.”
I get out my scissors. After a moment, Sarah reaches for a magazine and flips it open.
I wonder what she’s thinking.
I’ve been trying to make her understand. It isn’t working. I’m not even close.
I can’t give up. That wouldn’t be the honorable thing to do. Her path ahead couldn’t be clearer. All I have to do is show her the way.
Except that I’m starting to feel a little lost myself.
Lie #11
“THIS IS EXACTLY what I’m talking about!” Daddy slams the newspaper down on the dining table and fumbles for his lighter. He puffs on his Winston once, twice. He picks the paper back up and slams it down again. “This kind of writing only glorifies the Negro!”
Mom laughs. Daddy glowers at her. “I wasn’t joking, Rose.”
“I’m sorry,” Mom says without looking up from her plate. It used to bother Mom when Daddy talked to her that way, but that was years ago.
“Who wrote it, Daddy?” I ask.
“That knucklehead editor in Norfolk. I told him if he keeps this up he’ll never work at another paper in this state again. He doesn’t listen. He’s a fool.”
I nod. Daddy stops to take a few more puffs on his cigarette, but he’s not done yet. He’s just gotten started.
He puts out his Winston and lights another. “It’s dangerous, publishing articles like this. It skews the way readers see the world. It gives no regard for the Negro who is lazy, who is thieving, who is cowardly.”
I nod again. We read about those kinds of Negroes in the paper all the time. It’s why a lot of my friends’ mothers came to the segregation meetings all last year. They were worried about a criminal element coming into our school.
But since only a few Negroes came to Jefferson this year, I suppose we got lucky. None of them have done anything criminal yet. I’ve never seen them act lazy, either.
Sarah sure doesn’t. She works harder than anyone I know. I’ve seen her doing homework at lunch, her pencil flying across the page. She’s got to be solving the problems in her head at lightning speed.
I don’t know how she does that. Sometimes, I almost wish I were more like her. I definitely wish I were as brave as she is. I’ve never stood up to anyone the way she does every day when she walks in those school doors.
She makes it look easy. No matter what people do to her she just walks on, her head high, her skirt swinging. There’s something mesmerizing about the way she walks.
But Sarah’s unusual in a lot of ways. She’s certainly not a normal colored person. She’s not naturally predisposed to be submissive, for one thing. People always say I’m stubborn, but that’s because they’ve never met Sarah Dunbar.
For weeks now I’ve been trying to make Sarah understand how things are, but for everything I say, she has an answer ready.
I’ll say segregation is the law, and always has been. She’ll say laws get changed when they’re wrong, and always have.
I’ll say God put the races on different continents so we’d each stay with our own. She’ll say my people messed that up, then, when we brought her people over here as slaves, and when we came to America even though the Indians were already here.
I’ll say she’s an agitator, and an infuriating one at that. And she won’t even answer. She’ll just cock her head and smile. Like I’m one of those monkeys with the windup boxes and I’ve just done a silly dance for her.
And the day after we’ve argued, I’ll see her in school, looking docilely up at the teachers as though she’s never said an unkind word to anyone.
No. The real Sarah Dunbar is reserved for me and Judy alone.
Just for me, really. When she’s talking to Judy, Sarah’s perfectly nice and polite, but when I try to tell her something, her eyes narrow and her arguments fly.
Worst of all, she seems to enjoy it. Whenever I make a point, something lights up in her eyes, and I can tell she’s already planning what she’s going to say back. She talks so fast it’s difficult to keep up with her, and I have to think harder about what I want to say back. It takes more effort than it used to for me to think through what she’s saying and look for places to point out what she’s getting wrong, but the arguments all come rapid-fire to Sarah.
It’s as though we’re back in my tenth-grade Debate class. Except in class, no one ever wanted to debate me because I always won.
It’s a good thing Sarah wasn’t in that class. One of us might not have made it out alive.
“It’s not as if I disagree with Herb’s premise, of course.” Daddy is still talking, even though Mom isn’t listening anymore. “I’d never suggest the Negro isn’t worthy. Indeed, the majority of Negroes make up a worthy, God-fearing people. It is our obligation as Christians to love the Negro as we love our own children.”
I nod again. What’s different about Daddy, compared to the other people in town who don’t have his education, is that he understands the subtleties of these things. These are complicated principles he’s talking about. He knows they need to be handled in complicated ways.
“But to suggest that the white man and the Negro are the same is dangerous,” he goes on. “It only stirs them up. Gives them the idea they’re better than us. Why, it’s already worked on some of them. This week one of our reporters reviewed the latest lists and found out one of our copy boys works for the NAACP. There’s an agitator on my own payroll!”
He’s talking about Sarah’s father.
“Who hired him?” Mom says. Probably worried if word gets around she’ll lose her next PTA election. When she heard my aunt Betty had paid a Puerto Rican woman to teach her Spanish, Mom canceled my spring break trip to visit her in Alexandria. Instead I spent that week sleeping over at Judy’s and helping her mom with her laundry orders.
“I don’t know,” Daddy says. “I intend to find out. I’ve told them this boy’s not to be fired, not yet, but I won’t have anything like this happening again. From now on we’ll consult the lists before we hire any Negroes.”
“Is he a good copy boy?” I ask.
Daddy looks at me for the first time all night. I sit up straight.
“Copy boys get the coffee and run the wire stories to the news room.” Daddy taps the ash off his cigarette. “Any idiot could do it. Most of them get run off the job the first year because they aren’t tough enough to handle the pressure.”
“Is this one tough enough?” I ask.
Daddy scowls at me.
I clamp my mouth shut, but it’s too late. He’s leaning back in his seat the way he does when he’s preparing for a good long yell.
“This isn’t about any one copy boy,” he shouts. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
I shrink back in my seat, but he isn’t waiting for an answer. He isn’t even looking at me anymore.
“It isn’t about them or us,” he goes on. “It’s about right and wrong! It’s about the way things are supposed to be, and the people who want to come in from the outside and tell us they know better. Well I’ve been in this state all my life, and my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were here before me, and I don’t need some agitator coming in an
d telling me they all had it wrong. We aren’t going to sit by and let these outsiders tell us how to run our state!”
He isn’t yelling at me this time. He’s yelling at the world. All the people who won’t just do as he says.
“Just as it’s unethical to say nothing when we see a neighbor being robbed, or a dog being beaten,” he says, “it’s wrong to sit idly by and allow these things to destroy our community.”
I nod. I wonder what Daddy would do if he really saw a dog being beaten. Probably join in.
“We must speak out!” He pounds his fist in his hand. Ash dangles from his cigarette and drops onto the tablecloth. “We must take action! When agitators try to steer our country in a direction we know to be wrong, it’s up to us to steer it back again. That’s why it’s important for our children—the ones who suffer the most from this—to be outspoken in their support for our way of life.”
I nod some more. Mom takes another sip of sherry and keeps her eyes fixed on the clock over Daddy’s head.
When Daddy talks like this he’s practicing for his editorials. Soon he’ll make these same words prettier and print them in the Gazette. The day after that, every white man in town who thinks himself intelligent will be saying these words and pretending they’re his own.
Daddy doesn’t put everything he thinks in his editorials, though. I know, because I’ve seen the letters he writes to his friends. Newspapermen who write for papers down South. Georgia, Alabama, Florida. Daddy works on his letters at the kitchen table for days before he posts them. They use words he’d never put in the Gazette. “Racial purity.” “The sanctity of Southern white womanhood.” “The dangers of mongrelization.”
No one wants to say it out loud or put it down in newsprint, but we all know the truth.
Colored people aren’t the same as whites. They aren’t as smart. They haven’t accomplished the things we have. They aren’t as good as we are.
Everyone knows it. Even the colored people know. It’s just not good etiquette to say so. It feels shameful to even think the words.
That’s probably why I’ve never thought about it much. It’s just how things have always been.
But I’m thinking about it now. And it feels more shameful than ever.
When I first saw Sarah it was easy to think of her as just another Negro. Now it’s getting harder to remember what her dark skin, chocolate eyes and full lips really mean.
Sarah is special. She’s smarter than the rest of her people. Better.
Does God do that sometimes? Make one person different? Put her up above the rest of her race?
Daddy says when he was a boy they didn’t have these problems. The colored people knew their place and they stayed there. He says he’s sorry I have to grow up in trying times like these and can’t enjoy my childhood the way he did.
“May I be excused?” I whisper to Mom when Daddy pauses to light another cigarette.
She nods. I go to my room and close the door.
When I first found out about the French project, I used to be terrified every night I might let something slip to Daddy over dinner.
As the weeks went by I stopped worrying. The truth is, I could probably tell Daddy the whole story and he wouldn’t even look up from his food. He doesn’t listen to what I say. And he only pays attention to the things I do to tell me I’m doing them wrong.
I go to my bedroom mirror and stare at the picture of Jack taped up in the frame. This isn’t going to last forever.
I take out my calendar and cross off March 16.
I’m one day closer to getting out of this house for good.
* * *
“So I had to tell Leonard I can’t very well go to the dance with him since I already told Mom I’d go with Mrs. West’s nephew, but the problem is Mrs. West tricked my mom into it. She said yes before we saw a picture of the guy, and it turns out he’s short and has pimples and his name is Barney, of all things. So now I have to go to a dance with a short boy who’ll probably step all over my toes. And I can put up with that because it can’t be worse than when I went to Brenda’s sweet sixteen with Gary and he spilled punch down my dress because I wouldn’t play Seven Minutes in Heaven with him in that gross basement closet where Mr. Green keeps his taxidermy equipment. I mean, really, what if I’d sat on a dead raccoon or something? Can you imagine? But now the problem is, Leonard thinks I didn’t want to go with him, so how do I get him to find out I don’t really like Barney, so I can get Leonard to ask me on a date without seeming too, you know, forward?”
“What?” I blink over at Donna. Our Tri-Hi-Y meeting just ended, and we’re sitting with Nancy on a bench in front of the school parking lot, waiting for our rides. Donna frowns at me, but I don’t have an answer to give her. I lost track of her story somewhere around Barney’s pimples.
Normally I’d have been full of advice for Donna’s boy trouble, but I’m preoccupied thinking about my new idea. The next time I see Sarah—which will be an hour from now, at Bailey’s—I’ll tell her what the colored people should really focus on, if they’re so concerned about their schools, is raising money to buy new books so their students won’t have to share. I bet the colored churches could raise a lot from their own people if they put their minds to it. Instead of putting all their money into court cases that ruin everything for the rest of us.
Donna repeats her story, telling me all about Leonard and Mrs. West’s trickery. I stifle a yawn and tell her she should spend the dance making eyes at Leonard every time he’s nearby. Especially if she gets a chance to do it over Barney’s shoulder while they’re dancing.
“Leonard will get the message,” I tell her. I gaze out across the parking lot, wishing Jack would hurry up and get here. “Trust me.”
“That’s right, he will.” Nancy taps her foot on the pavement. “Hey, I forgot, how long did Bo go steady with Kathy Shepard for?”
Bo asked Nancy to the dance last week. She hasn’t let us talk about anything else since.
“A month, sophomore year.” Donna waves to three JV cheerleaders crossing the grounds. The cheerleaders always travel in packs.
“You really want to go steady with Bo?” I ask Nancy. I can’t imagine wanting to see more of Bo Nash than absolutely necessary.
“Maybe.” She shrugs, smiling. “I haven’t gone steady yet this year.”
Donna must be as tired of talking about Nancy and Bo as I am because she says, “Did you hear about choir?”
“What about choir?” I ask. We’re supposed to start rehearsals soon. We’ve already missed the competitions, thanks to the integration messing up our school year, but the spring concert will be coming up before long.
Donna lowers her voice to a whisper, even though we’re the only three people in sight. “I heard that colored girl is joining. Brenda saw her sign up in Mr. Lewis’s office this morning.”
Colored girl? Do they mean my colored girl?
“I thought they weren’t allowed to do that,” Nancy says. “No activities. I thought that was the rule.”
“I’m not sure if it’s really a rule or just something everyone agreed on,” I say. My hands are getting clammy. Sarah, in the choir? With me? “Either way it’s awful. I’m sure Mr. Lewis won’t let her in.”
“Brenda said he let her sign up,” Donna says. “She said he held the pen right out to her. He didn’t even put it down on the desk for her to pick up.”
“Well, Mr. Lewis has always been a little strange,” Nancy says.
I’m bursting to ask. Finally I give in. “Are you talking about Sarah Dunbar?”
“Who’s Sarah Dunbar?” Donna says.
“The senior colored girl. She’s in our French class. The one with the little sister.” I’m exasperated. We’ve been in classes with these people now for a month and a half. I can’t be the only one who’s learned their names
. “She was wearing a white dress with green ruffles yesterday.”
Donna and Nancy are looking at me oddly.
“I’m not sure,” Donna says. “I think it was her, maybe.”
“We should ask you,” Nancy says. “You seem to know an awful lot about the colored people.”
Shoot. I shouldn’t have mentioned Sarah’s dress. I just couldn’t help but notice it. You wouldn’t think dark skin would look good in white, but it does. The pale dress made Sarah’s face glow, somehow.
“Can you even imagine, a colored girl singing in the spring concert?” I say. “Our parents would never stand for it.”
I can imagine it.
I imagine standing next to Sarah in our Balladeers robes, singing with her. Listening to her hit each note in her clear, shining voice.
I imagine the way her face will look when she sings. How her eyes will light up when she hears how good we sound together. The way she’ll smile when the crowd applauds us.
I hope Mr. Lewis will put her in the Balladeers with me. It’s the most elite group out of the whole choir—only four boys and four girls—but she’s good enough, no question. Last year the Balladeers traveled across the state for competitions. It would’ve been fun to travel with Sarah. We could stay up late talking on the bus on the way home. Then stop off for hamburgers and Cokes. We’d sit at the counter with our knees knocking together and giggle about how bad the other teams were.
Jack’s car pulls up. I’m not as happy to see him as I’d thought I’d be. He rushes over to take my books and smiles hello at my friends. I wave goodbye to them as Jack opens the car door for me. We only have an hour before I have to meet Sarah and Judy, but I’m glad he’s ushering me around like a gentleman all the same.
Jack drives us out to the country and we park far out on the edge of town, where we won’t have to worry about someone seeing us. I tell him little things about my day, but all I’m thinking about is what it will be like seeing Sarah at choir practice. Will she argue with me even there? Flash her eyes at me the way she does at Bailey’s? Whenever she does that, it makes me feel weird in the pit of my stomach.
