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Summer is shrinking. A few days ago, here in Rio, Wisc., we had a morning that started out dim and just got dimmer as the morning wore on, until, close to noon, the clouds above at last blackened and burst open with crackles of lightning and a deafening, drenching downpour. The dimming day put me in mind of the year my family lived in Lexington, Kentucky, when I was in eighth grade and started the school year in a junior high that ran two sessions, the first session, mine, with classes starting, I believe it was, at six-thirty in the morning. Overpopulation, you know. It had just been invented and hadn’t yet been fixed. From the day after Labor Day, on into the fall and winter, the school days began, the waiting at the bus stop began, in actual deep darkness. But the good thing was, after lunchtime the day was done. Afternoons were long and free.
Not too long after that school year began, my dad, a soldier, was required to move our family from the house my folks had just purchased in the suburbs, to quarters on the post to which he had been assigned. My siblings and I had to change schools, this time to schools with a normal schedule, and the morning buses ran in daylight.
For some reason, I don’t know if it had something to do with segregation or with integration, we army kids got on a bus on the post and went each morning to a little stone country school, Briar Hill Elementary, I believe it was, where we—the junior high and the high school kids, anyway—switched buses to go on to other schools elsewhere. I think probably the army kids who were elementary age stayed at Briar Hill, but I can’t recall for sure. In any case, I do know my next bus was not typically already there and waiting when we got to Briar Hill, and we older kids milled about for a time, most mornings, as various buses came along to drop off and pick up students.
Some of the high school kids, the boys probably, or only the boys, I think it would have been, white boys, I mean, waiting, standing at the curb at the transfer stop, would sometimes taunt the black kids aboard the idling buses. They would stand close to the bus and look up into the windows, straight into the staring, expressionless faces of little kids or big kids, black kids on those buses, and shade their eyes, the white boys, pretending they couldn’t see inside, and they’d say cruel, smart-ass things in exaggerated southern accents, like, “Ohhh! Sho’ is dahk in there! Anybody in thayre now? Betta turn on some lahts so’s Ah kin see you all!”
Me, I said nothing.
Now, I don’t ask a whole lot from an eighth-grader who stands silent when he sees something he knows is wrong, you know. What could he say? What could he have said in that time, and in that moment, to those smart-ass big kids? I don’t know. I said nothing. The black kids on the buses said nothing. They just stared.
The stares have stayed with me, a lot of years.
♦
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