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Thursday
Last week, as part of a Black history unit, three of us whose families were part of a landmark Civil Rights case journeyed to Sewanee Elementary School—my alma mater—to tell a fifth-grade class what it had been like. The star of the show was Juliette Taylor, whose mother (Emma Hill) was determined to integrate schools in Franklin County, Tennessee, even if she had to send Juliette alone into the lion’s den to do it.
I should add that Emma, whom my family knew well, didn’t ask anything of her daughter beyond what she herself had done. As secretary of the local NAACP, she had known Rosa Parks, met Martin Luther King, marched in Selma, been one of the freedom riders, and spent time in jail. While she was working on behalf of civil rights, her husband was taking care of Juliette and her five siblings.
What I learned from Juliette last week is what happened after integration. The stories she told, and that I’ve heard from other child pioneers from the 1960s, remind me of a passage in Ruth Ozeki’s For the Time Being, which I’m currently in the middle of. Some background is useful before I turn to the 2013 novel.
In 1962, eight Franklin County families—four black and four white—sued our Board of Education for denying their children the right to attend integrated schools, as mandated by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling. The kids, including Juliette and me, were the plaintiffs in the case and we prevailed. The next year, African American children were admitted into formerly all-white classrooms.
Only integration occurred over a two-year period, not all at once. Juliette told us how, for a year, she was the only Black child in her class. On the first day of school, she was also the only Black child on her school bus, her little brother begging off sick at the last moment. There were a number of parents on the bus, whom she later learned were KKK members (they weren’t wearing robes at the time). Then, when she got to school, she remembered other Black families circling the school in their cars in order to determine whether Emma Hill’s daughter had actually shown up. Was the activist mother backing up her words with action?
The solitude continued. Juliette noted that she was the only Black girl on the basketball team—she showed us a team photo—but added that her fellow students weren’t as bad as the teachers. One woman called her a nigraresse—one step up from the n-word—and asked her why she wasn’t out picking cotton. After a couple of years of this, Juliette was so unhappy that her mother sent her up to live with relatives and finish out her schooling in Ohio.
In my own seventh grade class, we had one African American student that first year—Ronnie Staten—and I remember him once being called the n-word by a fellow student. I also remember how he just smiled in return, utterly deflating the bully. I learned years later that his mother, Sarah Staten, had coached her children to respond in just this way. So for Ronnie, it worked.
But it didn’t work with Jeffrey Patton, the only African American in my high school. In his case, he lasted for a semester before leaving. Five years ago, when I talked to him about the experience, he observed that the school had no plan to help him with the racism.
Nor had things gotten a whole lot better 15 years later. Juliette brought a friend, Charliss Burnett, whose daughter was so distraught by the racism of both a teacher and the principal of Sewanee Elementary that Charliss transferred her to another school down the mountain. When Charliss told me the name of the teacher, I realized that she’s someone I know and would have expected better of.
The situation in Ozeki’s book gets at the cruelty of children towards someone who is different. One of the narrators is a girl whose father moves the family to Silicone Valley so that he can work for a dot.com start-up. When the bubble bursts in 2000, he is forced to return to Japan, where he can’t find a job. His daughter Nao, having been raised American, can barely manage Japanese and is consequently targeted by her classmates. The following scene occurs right after her father has dropped her off at school:
The minute he turned his back, they would start to move in. Have you ever seen those nature documentaries where they show a pack of wild hyenas moving in to kill a wildebeest or a baby gazelle? They come in from all sides and cut the most pathetic animal off from the herd and surround it, getting closer and closer and staying real tight, and if Dad had happened to turn around to wave to me, it would have looked like good-natured fun, like I had lots of fun friends, gathering around me, singing out greetings in terrible English—Guddo moningu, dear Transfer Student Yasutani! Hello! Hello!—And Dad would have been reassured to see me so popular and everyone making an effort to be nice to me. And it’s usually one hyena, not always the biggest one, but one that’s small and quick and mean, who lunges first, breaking flesh and drawing blood, which is the signal for the rest of the pack to attack, so that by the time we got through the doors of the school, I was usually covered with fresh cuts and pinching bruises, and my uniform was all untucked with new little tears in it made by the sharp points of nail scissors that the girls kept in their pencil cases to trim their split ends. Hyenas don’t kill their prey. They cripple them and then eat them alive.
The bullying continues throughout the day:
They would walk by my desk and pretend to gag or sniff the air and say Iyada! Gaijin kusai! [Gross! She stinks like a foreigner!] or Bimbo kusai! [She stinks like a poor person]. Sometimes they practiced their idiomatic English on me, repeating stuff they learned from American rap lyrics: Yo, big fat-ass ho, puleezu show me some juicy coochie, ain’t you a slutto, you even take it in the butto, come lick on my nutto, oh hell yeah. Etc. You get the idea.
Her attempts to tune out such voices may have been tried by Juliette, Ronnie, Jeffrey and Charliss’s daughter. They don’t work for Nao:
My strategy was basically just to ignore them or play dead or pretend I didn’t exist. I thought that maybe if I just pretended hard enough it would actually come true, and I would either die or disappear. Or at least it would come true enough for my classmates to believe it and stop tormenting me, but they didn’t. They didn’t stop until they’d chased me home to our apartment, and I ran up the stairs and locked the door behind me, panting and bleeding from lots of little places like under my arms or between my legs where the cut wouldn’t show.
The cuts may be invisible to outsiders but, as I learned from our panel discussion, the victims still feel them decades later.
