On the day of a game, you were supposed to wear red and white to school. It wasn’t a rule, but everyone did it, Terri Pruitt told me. I put on a red-and-white T-shirt the day the Bulldogs were scheduled to play the Owls in the season opener. Liz made a point of wearing her orange-and-purple skirt, saying that she was a nonconformist, like Mom. She had to put on that blue dress when Maddox wanted and go along with whatever he said, but that was because she was on his payroll. No one at Byler High was going to tell her what to wear or who to cheer for.
Everyone at Byler was required to attend the pep rally, held the day of game. I got out of home ec to decorate the gym. All the kids and teachers were wearing red and white, including the former Nelson students. Each class sat together, and they all competed to cheer the loudest, with the noisiest class winning the spirit stick and the privilege of waving it around at the game that night. When it was the seventh-graders’ turn, Vanessa and I stood in front of the class, waving our arms and pumping our fists in the air. One kid stood up and shouted, “You go, Day-Glo Girl!” I just grinned and pumped my fists even harder, and I’ll admit I was downright proud when we won that spirit stick.
The game started in the early evening. The floodlights around the football field had been turned on even though there was still plenty of light left. A hot wind blew across the field, and a half-moon hung in the silver sky.
The entire Wyatt family showed up early to get seats down front so they could cheer Ruth on. Joe, who was carrying Earl, waved at me. Liz didn’t come—she said she agreed with Mom, football was barbaric—but Uncle Tinsley showed up, wearing a gray felt hat and an old red-and-white varsity jacket with a big B on it. He walked over to where I was standing on the sidelines with the pep squad. “Class of ’48,” he said. “We swept the division.” He winked. “Go get ’em, Bulldogs.”
The bleachers filled up quickly, and just like in the school cafeteria, the blacks and the whites sat separately. After the band came out, the Bulldogs were introduced one by one, each running onto the field when his name was called. The white fans cheered for the white Byler players, but they stayed pretty quiet for the black players who’d been at Nelson. At the same time, the blacks in the bleachers cheered for the black players but not the white ones.
When the Owls took the field, their fans cheered for the entire team, but the Owls had only one black player. One of the things people had been talking about before the game was that the Owls had always been a weak team, but Big Creek was a tiny town up in the mountains, and hardly any blacks lived there, so the team hadn’t had the integration issues Byler was going through.
At the start of the game, the crowd was enthusiastic, cheering every time the Bulldogs completed a pass or made a tackle and booing every time the Owls advanced. The cheerleaders were in position along the sidelines, kicking and jumping around and shaking their pom-poms, while the pep squad ran back and forth in front of the bleachers, pumping the crowd, yelling, “Bulldogs growl, Owls howl!”
Everyone was having a blast, and it didn’t seem to me that you had to be a barbarian to enjoy the game. By the second quarter, however, the Bulldogs had fallen behind by two touchdowns, and the mood of the crowd turned sour. I didn’t know much about football—the rules seemed incredibly confusing—but I did know we were losing. During a time-out, I asked Ruth what was going on. The Bulldogs weren’t playing like a team, she explained. Dale Scarberry, the white quarterback, was passing only to the white receivers, and the new black players weren’t blocking for their white teammates. If that kept up, the Bulldogs would be massacred.
When Dale Scarberry threw a pass that was picked off by one of the Owls, I was surprised to hear the Byler fans—both the students and the adults—start booing their own team. They kept it up every time another Bulldog made a mistake, not just booing but cussing and shouting things like “You’re stinking up the field!” “Idiot!” “Bench him!” “You suck!” and “Shit for brains!”
The Owls scored again, and that was when things got really ugly. We pep squadders were still jumping and pumping, trying to get the crowd back on our side, when someone threw a paper bag of garbage on the field. I dashed out to pick it up, and when I got back to the sideline, I saw a white man in the bleachers stand up and hurl a hamburger at Vanessa Johnson’s sister, Leticia, as she was raising her pom-poms over her head with a big grin. The hamburger hit her in the chest, leaving a greasy mark on her pretty red-and-white uniform.