The Silver Star(47)
Leticia ignored it—she even went on smiling—and all the cheerleaders continued their routine. Then a white man I recognized from the hill stood up and threw a big cup filled with ice and cola. When it hit Leticia on the shoulder, the lid flew off, drenching her uniform. Leticia kept going, kicking up and cheering as vigorously as before, though she had stopped smiling.
Aunt Al turned to face the two white men. “Hey, now, that ain’t right!” she shouted.
At that point, a black man standing on the bleacher steps hurled a soda cup at Ruth. It hit her on the shoulder, the drink splattering down her uniform.
That was too much for Joe. He sprang up and charged toward the black man, but other blacks knocked him down before he got there. A bunch of white fans started jumping across the bleacher seats to defend Joe, and then all hell broke loose, people everywhere throwing drinks and food, shouting, trading punches, and tackling one another, women cursing and pulling hair, babies crying and kids screaming, the seventh-grader with the spirit stick smacking some guy on the head with it. The ruckus went on until the police rushed into the bleachers with their nightsticks out and broke it up.
We lost the game 36 to 6.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
In school on Monday, all anyone could talk about was the game. Some white students were outraged about the brawl in the bleachers, calling it shameful and disgraceful, but they blamed it on integration, saying this was what was going to happen when you mixed black and white; nothing good could come of it. Some black kids were just as disgusted, although they were saying the ruckus wasn’t their fault, fights had never erupted at Nelson games, and they’d just been defending themselves. Most students were less upset about the brawl than about the shellacking the Bulldogs had taken at the hands of the Big Creek Owls, whom they usually creamed. Integration was supposed to improve the team, kids were saying, but now we couldn’t even beat those pencil necks from Big Creek.
The principal, at the end of his morning announcements over the P.A. system, mentioned the need for “mutual respect and school unity.” But it wasn’t until English class, after lunch, that any of my teachers directly raised the subject.
My English teacher, Miss Jarvis, a thin-lipped young woman who got very excited about the readings she assigned, told us that she thought we ought to discuss what had happened at the game.
“The whites started it,” said Vanessa Johnson. “Throwing that Coke at my sister.”
“Stuff always gets thrown at games,” said Tinky Brewster, a kid from the hill. “It’s just like you all to make it a racial thing.”
“We’re not simply going to trade accusations here,” Miss Jarvis said. “But I’d like people’s views on what we can do to make integration a success at Byler High.”
White kids started saying the problem was that blacks were always carrying on about prejudice and slavery, even though blacks were freed a hundred years ago. And blacks could have black pride, but if you started talking about white pride, all of a sudden it was racist. How come we can’t use the N-word, but they can call us honkies? Anyway, a bunch of the white kids from the hill said, none of their families had owned slaves. In fact, they went on, most of their great-great-grandparents had been indentured servants, but you never heard people complaining about the Irish being enslaved. I was looking around guiltily to see if anyone was going to mention the old Holladay cotton plantation. No one did, and I sure wasn’t about to bring it up.
Slavery might have ended a hundred years ago, the black kids replied, but until recently, they couldn’t eat in the Bulldog Diner, and even today, they got glared at when they did. They started getting hired at Holladay Textiles only a few years ago, and they were still given the worst jobs. The real problem, the black students said, was that whites were scared that blacks were taking over sports and music. They wanted blacks to shut up, stop demanding their rights, and go back to cleaning toilets, washing clothes, and cooking food for white people.
“Well, we’re not going to resolve this issue in a day,” Miss Jarvis said. Instead, she wanted us to read a book about racial conflict in a small Southern town. It was called To Kill a Mockingbird.
I liked To Kill a Mockingbird, but I didn’t think it was the most amazing book ever written, the way Miss Jarvis did. The best part, I thought, wasn’t the stuff about race but the way Scout and the two boys snooped around the big haunted house where the scary recluse lived. That really reminded me of being a kid.
For all of Miss Jarvis’s singing its praises as great literature, a lot of the kids in the class had real problems with the book. The white ones said they knew blacks shouldn’t be lynched, and they didn’t need a book preaching to them about it. Some resented the way the book divided the town into good respectable whites and bad white-trash types. The black kids, for their part, wondered why the hero had to be a noble white guy trying to save a helpless black guy and why the head of the lynch mob was described by the noble white guy as basically a decent man who happened to have a blind spot when it came to hanging innocent blacks. They also didn’t like the way that all the good blacks knew their place and made their children stand up when the noble white guy walked by. It was all that Stepin-Fetchit-yass-suh-no-suh stuff.