My Mother the Cheerleader by Robert Sharenow

Author:Robert Sharenow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061851308
Publisher: HarperCollins

Two, four, six, eight,

We don’t want to integrate!

My mother wasn’t paying attention to the school anymore. She stared off into the distance, where Morgan’s car had disappeared. I ran to get my bike, hoping I’d be able to catch up with him.

CHAPTER 16

Mr. John Steinbeck’s visit to William Frantz Elementary School left him stunned and disgusted by what he witnessed. He questioned the very humanity of the Cheerleaders and expressed complete dismay at the complicity of the community at large. How could so many people watch an innocent child be bombarded with such violent hatred? Who was worse, the protestors attacking the child or the scores of silent witnesses who allowed it to happen?

Segregation was something everyone in our neighborhood just took for granted. If you had asked your average Ninth Warder at the time if there should be segregated schools, it would’ve been like asking “Should the sky be blue?” In the Middle Ages everyone just assumed the world was flat—they didn’t have any good reason to think otherwise. Then Copernicus came along with this new way of looking at things. I’d bet that Copernicus’s neighbors probably thought he was a complete nut job. But it’s not as if he was going to try to push people over the edge of the world to prove he was right. It was just a theoretical idea that didn’t put any direct responsibility or pressure on ordinary people. Integration was also a theoretical idea, but it was a theoretical idea that people in the Ninth Ward were being asked to put into action. For my mother, the idea of sending a child into an integrated school was just as crazy as taking a walk off the edge of the flat Earth.

I’d love to be able to say that deep in my thirteen-year-old heart I believed in integration and hated my mother for what she was doing. But the fact of the matter is I never really gave it a thought, except to resent the fact that my mother never took any interest in my education until the news reporters and photographers started showing up outside the front entrance of the school. Sure I felt bad for Ruby Bridges. I really did. But it never occurred to me that my mother and the others were wrong. I just felt sorry that Ruby was being manipulated by her parents, the N.A.A.C.P., and the Communists into doing something that so many people thought was bad.

But as I pedaled my bike away from the school that day, germs of doubt and questions crept into my mind. An image of Morgan staring at Ruby and the Cheerleaders in tight-lipped outrage lingered in my head. I tried to decipher his expression at that moment. His face seemed to communicate hurt, disbelief, confusion, and defiance, all at the same time. Why did he just stand there and watch? Why did he go nose-to-nose with Royce and Clem? Was he really a Communist spy? Was he a Jew? I’d never known a Communist or a Jew.

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