Lies We Tell Ourselves: Shortlisted for the 2016 Carnegie Medal. Robin Talley
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out their final ruling: the white parents, and the governor and the rest of the segregationists had lost.
Here we are. Whether they like it or not.
Whether we like it or not, too.
“Miss Dunbar.” Mr. Lewis hands me a paper.
No one ever calls me “Miss.” Usually it’s just “Sarah.” Or, if it’s a white person talking, “Girl.”
He hands Chuck and Ennis their schedules, too. I try to read the scrawled handwriting on mine.
* * *
Typing? I took Typing at my old school. And I’ve already had two years of French. Plus there’s no music class on my schedule at all. At my old school, Johns High, I was going to take Advanced Music Performance this year.
“What do these R’s after the course names mean?” Chuck whispers. I look at his schedule. He has the same first-period Math class I do. Other than that, we don’t have any classes together.
I don’t know what the R’s mean, either. I want to ask Mr. Lewis, but Ennis is already standing up.
“Come on,” he says. “We don’t want to be late. Thank you, sir.”
“Go straight to your first-period classes,” Mr. Lewis says. “There’s no Homeroom today. Good luck.”
Good luck? I wonder if he’s joking.
We file out of the auditorium in silence. Someone has shut the doors, even though the assembly only just ended. Ennis pushes them open and steps out into the hall.
“There they are!” The cries are coming from all around us. At least a dozen boys are gathered, most in letterman’s sweaters. “There’s those coon diggers!”
“You have to go to the second floor?” Ennis mutters to me, not taking his eyes off the boys. They’re coming closer. They’re smiling.
“Yes,” I whisper. “Chuck does, too.”
“You go first, Sarah,” Chuck says. His voice is low and gravelly. “We’ll keep them from following you.”
“If we separate they’ll only split up and follow us all,” I whisper.
I wonder if Mr. Lewis knew this would happen. If that’s why he kept us late. I want to trust him, but it’s hard to trust anyone in this place.
“What’re you doin’ here, niggers?” one of the boys says. “You know you don’t belong in our school.”
“It’s our school, too,” Chuck says. “So what are you doing here?”
That sets the boys off. Two of them run at Chuck.
“Hey!” comes a loud voice behind us. Mr. Lewis. The boys stop in their tracks. “What’s this about?”
“That one started it,” one of the boys says, pointing at Chuck.
“He didn’t,” I say. “He wasn’t doing anything, he—”
Mr. Lewis raises his eyebrows at me. “Young lady, I think you and Mr. Mack had better get to class. Charles, Bo, Eddie, come with me.”
“But—”
Ennis takes my arm and pulls me away before I can finish.
“What will happen to Chuck?” I whisper when we’re far enough away. Behind us Mr. Lewis is leading Chuck and the two white boys who charged him toward the front office.
“Probably nothing,” Ennis says. “That teacher got there before anything happened. He’ll get a lecture, that’s all.”
“Will anything happen to the white boys?”
“No way.”
We’re walking up an empty staircase. Ennis is looking around in every direction, and I remember I’m supposed to do the same thing. We have to be extra alert in the stairwells. In Little Rock that’s where they set off the firecrackers.
“Keep an eye out for Ruth, will you?” I ask Ennis. “If you see her in the halls, make sure she’s all right?”
“I’ll try.”
Ennis leaves me at my classroom door, walking as fast as he can down the hall. I hope he doesn’t run into any other white boys.
I hadn’t thought much about Ennis before this morning. Chuck was in my group of friends back at Johns, but Ennis mostly kept to himself. After the way he helped Ruth in the parking lot, though, I’m going to be watching out for him, too.
The door to room 218 is closed. I’m scared to push it open, but if I don’t I’ll get a tardy slip. So I take a long breath, say a quick prayer and open the door.
Inside the room it’s dead silent. Then, as one, twenty heads jerk up. Twenty white faces gaze up at me. The door latches closed behind me like a gunshot.
I want to drop my eyes. Instead I look out into the sea of faces. Every one is looking back at me.
First come the stares.
Next, the pointing and the whispers.
Last, and most frightening, are the grins.
ALL THE GRINNERS are boys. They’re looking at me as if it’s Christmas morning and I’m the biggest present under the tree.
My legs are so weak I’m sure they’ll give way. I’ll wind up sprawled out across the floor on my backside while the white people laugh.
I keep my chin up as I move toward an empty seat in the front row.
“Who are you?” a woman asks. She’s tall, with gray-streaked hair, a sour look on her face and a stack of textbooks in her arms. She was the other teacher handing out schedules in the auditorium. Mrs. Gruber.
We have to be polite to the teachers, no matter what. We can’t do anything they could discipline us for. Especially not today.
That’s easy for me. I’m always polite to adults. I don’t know how to be any other way.
“My name is Sarah Dunbar, ma’am. My schedule says room 218.”
Mrs. Gruber dumps the stack of books on an empty desk and snatches my schedule out of my hand. She frowns at it. “Did you write this yourself? How do I know you’re supposed to be here?”
After Mr. Lewis, I’d thought the teachers might be nice to us. I should’ve known better. Mr. Lewis is just one white man. This school has plenty more.
“No, ma’am, I didn’t write it,” I say. “Mr. Lewis gave it to me. He said the office had to write out our schedules by hand at the last minute.”
Mrs. Gruber gives the paper back to me. “That doesn’t give you an excuse to take until the last minute yourself. Maybe at your school students can show up for class whenever they please, but at Jefferson you get detention when you’re tardy.”
I bite my lip. Mama and Daddy will be so disappointed in me. “Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Gruber writes out a detention slip and thrusts it at me. “Take a seat.”
I go to the empty desk in the middle of the front row and put down my books. Before I can sit down, the white girl at the desk next to mine bolts out of her chair.
She’s moving so fast I don’t recognize her at first. She sweeps up her books and her coat and glides to an empty seat on the far side of the room. Her