Lies We Tell Ourselves

by Robin Talley

  She’s trapped in the middle of a crowd that’s getting bigger with each passing second. The boys who’d been chasing us have merged with it. There must be fifty of them surrounding her, jeering and throwing pennies. There’s spit all over Yvonne’s dress. Some of the boys are winding their legs back like they’re about to kick her.

  Chuck reaches the middle of the circle first. He leans down and says something to Yvonne that I can’t hear over the shouting. The white boy nearest him, a greaser with slicked-back hair, kicks out at Chuck, but Chuck sees him in time and lunges out of the way.

  That only makes the boy angrier. He’s backing up to deliver another kick when a woman’s voice booms, “Everyone move along, now!”

  The shouting dies down fast, but no one moves. Not until the teacher, a gray-haired woman I don’t recognize, comes into the middle of the circle. When she sees Yvonne huddled on the floor she recoils.

  “One of you, go to the office and call for a doctor!” she says.

  The white girls nearest me turn and run. Within seconds, all the other white people have gone as fast as they came. The four of us Negroes and the gray-haired teacher are the only ones left in the hall.

  I kneel on the floor. Chuck is still bent down, trying to say something in a low voice, but Yvonne hasn’t moved. I catch his eye and whisper, “Let me try.”

  He shrugs and stands up. The teacher takes him aside to ask a question. I want to talk to the teacher, too, but I need to focus on Yvonne. Ruth could get here any second and I don’t want her to see her friend like this.

  “They’re all gone,” I tell Yvonne. “You can get up. I’m here, and Chuck and Paulie, too. You’re not by yourself anymore.”

  After a long second, she turns her head and meets my eyes. Hers are wet.

  “They tripped me,” she says.

  “I know. Are you bleeding at all? Did you get hurt when you fell?”

  “I don’t think so. My knee hurts a little. There were so many of them. I was afraid to get up. I thought they’d never leave me alone if I—”

  “I know,” I say. “It’s all right. It was smart, what you did. Can you stand?”

  Slowly, Yvonne uncurls from her crouch. She lifts her head and looks around the hall. When she sees we really are alone she lets me help her up. Dust and dirt are all over her clothes, and her face is streaked with tears. She winces when she puts her weight on her right leg.

  I reach out a hand to help her up. That’s when I notice I’m shaking harder than she is.

  What if the teacher hadn’t gotten there when she did? Yvonne could’ve really been hurt. Or Chuck could’ve.

  It could have been any of us.

  I look around for the others. Paulie is standing against the lockers, pressing his fist into his forehead. Ennis is here, too, talking with Chuck and the teacher. Chuck looks angry. The teacher is nodding at Ennis, who’s saying something in a low, serious voice.

  “All right,” Ennis says to all of us after a minute. “We’ve got to go fast. The others are waiting for us by the side exit at the bottom of the stairs.”

  “Are they safe?” I ask.

  “They were when I left them.”

  That doesn’t make me feel better.

  Yvonne’s knee is worse than she’d thought, so we have to move slowly. I want to run ahead to see Ruth, but that wouldn’t be right. I’m the only other girl here, so I have to let Yvonne lean on me as we make our way toward the stairs.

  At least Ruth isn’t alone. I’ll see her soon. As soon as I possibly can.

  “What did the teacher say?” I ask Chuck as we navigate the stairwell. Yvonne flinches on every step.

  “She wanted to call a doctor to come look at Yvonne. Ennis talked her out of it. He said she’d be safer if we could get her to Mrs. Mullins’s first.”

  I think Ennis is right, but from the set of Chuck’s jaw I can tell he disagrees.

  When we finally get to the side exit Ruth is waiting for us just inside the door with the other freshmen and sophomores. One of the younger girls is crying. Ruth has her arm around her.

  I want to gather Ruth into my arms and never let go. Instead I motion for both girls to walk with me and Yvonne.

  “That’s enough of that, now,” I tell the crying girl. “We have to move.”

  Ruth glares at me. I ignore her.

  The four of us will be the first ones outside. Through the narrow window we can see the crowd gathered around the door, waiting for us. We have no choice but to walk right into the middle of it.

  “Can you get them to the curb?” Ennis whispers to me. His forehead is creased, but we both know it’s better this way. The boys should be at the back of the crowd this time, where the rowdiest white people will be. “The cars are waiting. Get in the first one. It’s Mr. Stern driving.”

  I nod. “What about everyone else?”

  “We’ll be right behind you.”

  He says something more, but I can’t make out the words. As soon as we step outside the doors the noise from the crowd is deafening.

  I can’t see any faces now, or hear any voices. It’s all a blur of white and hate.

  I want to run, but the crowd would just run after us. As soon as we’re off school property, they’d catch us. I don’t want to think about what would happen then.

  So I walk as fast as I can, and I make the others do the same, even though Yvonne is groaning from the pain in her knee. She and I are in front, with Ruth and the other girl behind us. I can see Mr. Stern’s car up ahead. Ennis was right—it’s probably the safest of the NAACP cars for us to take. No one will think we’re aiming to get into a car with a white man.

  The white people are swarming us from all sides now. It’s as bad as it was this morning.

  No. It’s worse. This morning the white people just looked furious. Now they look like killers.

  “Get the niggers!” A chant starts up. “Get the niggers! Get the niggers! Get them!”

  They’re right up in our faces. After a full day of this their glares and shouts aren’t shocking anymore. I’m used to the feeling of my heart throbbing in my chest, my eyes sharpening, my shoulders quaking with fear.

  Police officers line the curb. I don’t expect any more help from them than I did this morning.

  I glance over my shoulder to see the other girls and almost trip, catching myself at the very last second.

  This won’t work. I can’t walk in front of them and make sure they’re safe at the same time.

  Ruth catches my eye and nods. It feels like a terrible mistake, but I move behind the others and let Ruth take the lead.

  This is the most frightened I’ve been for her all day, but there’s nothing I can do. Ruth marches through the crowd, her head high, her gaze straight ahead. The white people scream at her but they move aside, like she’s Moses parting the waters.

  This time, when someone spits on her hand, she ignores it and keeps on walking.

  It makes me want to cry. Instead I keep my eyes dry and fixed, letting Ruth lead us.

  They’re still shouting. I sing to myself in my head to drown out their words. An old hymn. The old ones are always the best.

  Rock of Ages,

  cleft for me,

  let me hide

  myself in thee.

  Something sails over Yvonne’s head. A ball of paper with something heavy wrapped inside.

  I don’t say anything. I don’t think she noticed. I can’t tell whether the white boy who threw it was only trying to scare us or if he just has bad aim.

  The chant has changed now, back to the familiar “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t wanna integrate.” We’re almost at the curb. Mr. Stern is waiting in the car with his engine on.

  It’s over. Soon we’ll be out of this place. We’ve survived. This
day is finally at an end.

  Ruth opens the back door and climbs inside, moving over so Yvonne and the other girl can slide in. I get in the front seat with Mr. Stern.

  With the windows rolled up we can barely hear the chants. It really is over. Mr. Stern steps on the gas.

  But just as he’s turning the wheel, the back door on the far side—Ruth’s side—jerks open. A grown white man with a wide chest and huge hands is standing by the side of the car, holding on tight to the door frame and looking right at Ruth.

  “Get out of the car, niggers, before we drag you out,” the man’s voice booms. “You, too, you nigger-loving Jew.”

  Lie #6

  THE MAN’S WORDS slap me in the face, hot and wet and vicious. I slam open my car door. My heart pounds in my ears. I’ll go over to where the man is and—I don’t know what I’ll do. Something. Whatever it takes to get him away from my sister.

  Before I can get out of the car Mr. Stern jerks on the wheel and pounds on the gas. The car jolts into the street. The white man loses his grip on Ruth’s door and stumbles backward onto the pavement.

  Two of our car doors are open, but we’re already speeding along the street in front of the school. I lean out to pull my door shut, even though I’m sure I’m going to fall out of the car. In the backseat Ruth does the same thing. She slams the lock down on her door. I should lock mine, too, but I’m shaking too hard.

  Two more big white men chase our car down the street, shouting. We outpace them at the next block. The police are nowhere to be seen.

  I turn around to make sure Ruth’s all right. She’s resting her head on the window, gazing outside. Her hands are clasped in her lap. They’re trembling.

  “Is anyone hurt?” Mr. Stern says when it’s quiet enough to hear each other.

  “Yvonne is,” I say. “She’ll need a doctor.”

  “It’s only a bruise on my knee,” Yvonne says. “No worse than I used to get roughhousing with my brothers.”

  I try to meet Yvonne’s eyes in the rearview mirror. She won’t look at me. I know what happened today was nothing like playing with her brothers. She knows it, too.

  “Even so,” Mr. Stern says. “We’re going to Mrs. Mullins’s house. She’ll call a doctor if you need one. Ruth, Sarah, your father will be at the Mullins’, too.”

  I can’t imagine seeing Daddy now. Not after everything that’s happened today. It’s hard to believe that I still have parents. That there’s a world outside Jefferson High School.

  We all know the way to Mrs. Mullins’s house by heart—she’s in charge of our integration case for the NAACP, and we go to her house a lot—so I notice Mr. Stern is taking the long way. We’ve been driving almost an hour when we get there. Trying to keep any white people from following us, probably.

  We’re the last ones to reach the house. Daddy is on the front steps when we pull up. Ruth bolts out of the car and runs up to the porch, her saddle shoes leaving dents behind her in the freshly mown grass. She flings her arms around our father the way she used to when she was little.

  “Daddy,” Ruth cries, loud enough for the rest of us to hear even though we’re still at the curb. “Daddy, Daddy.”

  Daddy looks at me over her shoulder. I nod to tell him we’re both all right. He hugs Ruth back, then unwraps her arms from his waist. He rubs his eye, and I can tell from his bleary look he’s skipping his afternoon nap to be here. Daddy works two jobs—days at the Negro newspaper, the Davisburg Free Press, where he’s a reporter and editor, and nights and weekends at the Davisburg Gazette, where he’s a copy boy. Whenever he has to miss his nap we all know to stay quiet and let him have his peace.

  “All right, Ruthie,” he says. “Let’s go in the house and you can tell me all about it.”

  I help Yvonne inside. All the people from the NAACP who’ve been working on the court case and teaching in the special school they set up for us last semester are gathered in Mrs. Mullins’s living room. Their eyes bob from one to the other of us as we walk in and sit down on the rug. They’ve been waiting to make sure all ten of us are safe.

  Ruth comes in last, with Daddy, and only then do Mrs. Mullins and the others cheer.

  “Praise the Lord,” Mrs. Mullins says. “I knew He’d watch over you and keep you safe.”

  Oh. Is that what He was doing? Is that what the Lord calls keeping us safe?

  That was a sinful thought. I close my eyes to pray for forgiveness.

  Praying usually brings warmth and relief. I wait, but I don’t feel any different than I did before. I don’t feel anything at all.

  Mrs. Mullins asks how our day went. The younger kids rush to answer her.

  I stretch my legs out in front of me and try to hide the stains on my skirt. I wish we could go home. My house is only a few blocks away. Mr. and Mrs. Mullins live in Morningside, like us. Ennis’s family lives here, too. It’s the nicest Negro neighborhood in Davisburg. Too nice for us Dunbars, really. Some nights I hear Mama and Daddy arguing about money in the kitchen. Daddy’s newspaper work doesn’t pay as well as it did when we lived in Chicago, and Mama’s always worried his boss at the white paper will fire him once he checks the state registry and finds out we’re involved with the NAACP. We could move to Davis Heights—that’s where Chuck lives—but Daddy says he wants Ruth and Bobby and me to “associate with the best kind of children,” whatever that means. He’s probably worried we’ll have to move to New Town, where everyone’s so poor the whites and Negroes live side by side, but I don’t think New Town would be so bad. At least it’s not Clayton Mill, the Negro neighborhood way outside of town, where the houses are made of tar paper.

  Ennis, Paulie and I reach for the sandwiches Mrs. Mullins has set out for the adults. I barely ate any lunch and now I’m starving.

  “You and your sister were leading the pack out there,” Ennis says. He’s talking quietly, so Mrs. Mullins won’t hear us on her side of the room. He pours a cup of coffee and passes it to me. I’ve never had coffee before, but I take a sip. It burns my tongue. “Looks like you got in the car all right.”

  “It was awful.” I put the coffee down on the floor. I hate to be wasteful, but if I have to keep drinking that after everything else that’s happened today I think I really will cry.

  “I know it was,” he says. “But we all got out safe. That’s what matters.”

  Ennis smiles at me. I don’t smile back.

  “It’ll settle down after a couple of days,” Paulie says. “The white people will get used to us. Once they see we aren’t going away.”

  “No they won’t!” Chuck shouts.

  Everyone in the room stops talking and turns to look behind us. Chuck’s standing there with fire in his eyes.

  “Did you see what they did today?” Chuck says. He’s the only one of us who didn’t sit on the rug like children at story hour as soon as we came in. He’s standing with his back straight, his fists clenched.

  “Did you see what they did to Yvonne?” he shouts. “They aren’t going to get used to us! Or if they do, they’ll just get used to calling us niggers and trying to lynch us in the parking lot!”

  “Charles Irving Tapscott!” Daddy is on his feet, pointing his finger. Chuck is just as tall as my father, but he steps back. “You know better than to say something like that in front of these children. I’ll be placing a call to your father tonight.”

  Chuck bites his lip and drops his head. “I’m sorry, sir.” He sits down next to Ennis and me on the rug.

  Chuck is usually a jokester. The sort of boy everyone likes because he’s funny and nice to everyone. The boy trembling next to me now is somebody else altogether.

  Yvonne’s lip quivers. For a minute, we’re all quiet. Then the younger kids start whispering.

  “I saw somebody in the hall who said he had a knife.”

  “A gir
l in Gym said she was going to pour gas on us and set us on fire.”

  “On TV they said a girl got stabbed in Little Rock.”

  “That’s not true,” Mrs. Mullins says. “Anyway, this isn’t Little Rock. Those sorts of things won’t happen here.”

  “They were throwing rocks at us,” Ruth says.

  “And sticks and pencils,” a sophomore boy says. “One almost stuck me in the eye.”

  Mrs. Mullins shakes her head. “It’s because today was the first day. It will die down.”

  “I tried to tell a teacher,” the sophomore boy goes on. “She said she couldn’t do anything because no adults saw it happen.”

  “Most of the teachers and the administrators won’t be much help, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Mullins says. “But if anything serious happens, if you need a doctor, you should certainly tell your parents right away.”

  “Translation,” Chuck mutters so only Ennis, Paulie and I can hear. “Don’t tattle, or the judge will send us all back to our old school. Jim Crow is still alive and well in good old Virginia.”

  “Shush,” Ennis tells him.

  But I’ve heard Mama and Daddy say that, too. If there’s any sign integration is causing violence, the courts could delay it another year. Then we’d have to go back to Johns High, and the school board lawyers would probably come up with some reason why integration had to be pushed back another year after that. And another, and another. Decades would pass before the next black face showed up at Jefferson High School.

  We’ve already been waiting forever. When we filed our lawsuit, two years had passed since the Supreme Court said all the schools in the country had to be integrated.

  My family was still living in Chicago when we first heard what the Supreme Court had done. I was only in seventh grade. We moved to Virginia that summer, and I thought when we got here, we’d be going to school with white people.

  That was before I understood how hard the white people in the South would fight us. It wasn’t until the next year, when Little Rock integrated its high school and the white people rioted in the streets, that I understood what my family and I had signed on for.