Late Afternoon
After their break, Sam started his story:
“These last few days I’ve been having blanks of my life filled in. It’s much appreciated,” said Sam.
“History was all around me but never spoken, and I never thought about this history until I was forty years old. Once I became curious, I started to read and learned about all kinds of horrors in Tallahassee, Quincy, and surrounding areas. I also read Larry’s book over there about the civil rights movement in Tallahassee, not to mention about the rape and the sit-ins, none of which I heard a word of growing up. I learned of Miss Jasmine’s one hundredth birthday party last year. I got your phone number, Miss Jasmine, and arranged to meet with you this week.
“Let me see if I can highlight some key things related to this history from the first twenty years of my life.
“I entered Kat Sulleman Elementary School in September 1966. It has been so interesting learning about Miss Sulleman as a flesh and blood person these last few days. From my perspective school was just a new thing in my life. There were no thoughts for me about segregation or integration.
From first grade until fifth grade, I only remember one black kid at the entire school. Calvin seemed awkward because he could barely read or couldn’t read at all. He was also a head taller than everybody and we used to joke with him that he had ‘flunked’ a couple of grades.
“There was another white kid who couldn’t read, and by high school I learned they called it dyslexia. He was my neighbor about five doors down and the grandson of the mayor chased out of Sheriff Ortega’s house. Who knows what his family talked about at the dinner table? As far as I remember he was always a nice kid, and at some point I figured out he had learned to trick people about reading. Once when I was in college, I bumped into him in a bar. I wanted to give him my phone number, and he asked me to write it down for him, claiming that he had lost his reading glasses and couldn’t see to write. I think his entire school career he was in ‘special classes,’ whatever ‘special’ meant.
“I recall Calvin was in my second-grade class and he got a lot of respect at show-and-tell. Calvin didn’t have anything to show but he sang ‘Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,’ and knocked everybody over. He sounded just like the radio. A couple of the teachers on our hall and some of the custodians popped their heads in to listen.
“I don’t remember that we ever had a white custodian, and as little kids we thought the custodians were magicians because when a kid puked, they would show up with the funny green powder and spread it all over the puke so they could sweep it up like it was dirt. Magic!
“Anyway, April 1968 was when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I was in second grade. This was also the same year that Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and George Wallace ran for president. The elementary school had a straw poll. I voted for Pat Paulson.”
Miss Jasmine about fell off the sofa laughing. Kenneth, Larry, and Rosemary didn’t get it. Whale was indifferent.
“Would you like to explain about Pat Paulson, Miss Jasmine?”
“No, Sam. You go right ahead; you’re doing an excellent job. Just think, if Pat Paulson had been elected president in 1968 things could’ve been different.”
“Pat Paulson. He was a comedian and had a comedy bit on The Smothers Brothers,” said Sam.
“The Smothers Brothers, what’s that?” said Rosmary.
Larry started to answer but Kenneth said first: “It was a TV show on Sunday nights. It was a satirical comedy show and had musicians like Ray Charles, the Temptations, the Beatles, the Doors…Stevie Wonder…”
“That’s what I read,” said Larry. “You are old enough to have seen it.”
“I never had no TV. I just heard about it at school,” said Kenneth.
“You didn’t have a TV?” said Rosemary.
“I never had a permanent place to stay until Miss Jasmine took me in when I was forty. After high school I mostly slept outside and in shelters. It’s hard to get steady work when you can’t read.
“I didn’t have no real parents neither. My birth daddy was Miss Jasmine’s older brother. He never acknowledged me, and my mother died soon after I was born. I don’t think anybody ever told Miss Jasmine I was born, and she had lost contact with my dad, or maybe vice versa. My whole life I just stayed with different neighbors, and they passed me around until I got out of high school. Then I just lived on the street until finally somebody told Miss Jasmine about me. She told me to come stay here. That wasn’t until I was forty, twenty years ago.”
“Damn,” said Rosemary. I was just asking if you had a TV. That’s a whole life story right there.”
Sam continued: “I guess I had the opposite life. My dad was a college professor; we were so-called middle class. We had a TV, but of course there was just CBS unless you had cable; then you could also get NBC and ABC. Most of Tallahassee and probably most of America would watch The Smothers Brothers every Sunday evening from 1967 to 1969. Their show was canceled because of their anti-establishment satires.
“In 1968 Pat Paulson had a bit on the show that he was running for president. In one segment a reporter would interview people on the street and ask, ‘What would you do if Pat Paulson were elected president?’ Uniformly they would all answer, ‘Leave the country.’
“After asking several people the reporter came face to face with Pat Paulson, who was disguised in a trench coat and sunglasses. When the reporter asked him, ‘What would you do if Pat Paulson were elected president?’ Pat Paulson replied, ‘Leave the country.’”
Miss Jasmine was in stitches, taking a few minutes to compose herself and then asking, “And the straw poll, Sam?”
“Well, the day after the straw poll, the school had counted the votes, and Principal Engles announced the results through the intercom. Like the green puke powder, kids were all amazed at the intercom system. The principal was in his office, and he could talk to every classroom in the school at the same time. More magic!
“I don’t remember the vote totals exactly, but Principal Engles read us the number of votes. We had Richard Nixon first, and Hubert Humphrey second by a hair. Then George Wallace had about fifteen percent.”
“Praise the Lord!” said Miss Jasmine. “Governor Wallace found Jesus!”
“We were all looking at her and she said, ‘I’m sorry, sometimes I get carried away, my memories and all. Roberta A. always told me I should have been a thespian—tee hee hee!”
Sam continued, “Then the principal read, ‘Pat Paulson, one vote.’ That was me and I jumped out of my chair whooping with joy. I could not believe that they counted my vote!”
“You were one gadfly voting for another gadfly,” said Miss Jasmine.
“It sounds like democracy to me,” said Rosemary. “You vote for the best candidate, that candidate loses, we call it democracy. But at least you can hold your head high.”
“Watch out they don’t come and chop it off,” said Miss Jasmine.
“Well,” said Sam, “I did not realize at first, but by middle school I figured out that most of the second-grade students just voted for whoever their parents voted for, because how our second grade voted was basically how the country voted in the 1968 election. My second-grade class was a bellwether for the nation. Even though my parents voted for Humphrey and not Paulson.
“One more thing about 1968. The Summer Olympics were held in Mexico City that year in October. This was the year that Tommie Smith and John Carlos wore single black gloves and raised black fists during their medal ceremony for the 200 meters. I recall that half the kids at school were going around complaining about black power, again probably just parroting their parents.
“May I?” said Larry. “Often not mentioned is that Peter Norman of Australia also wore a racial injustice badge on the podium with Smith and Carlos. And American athlete Dick Fosbury won the gold medal in the high jump. After the American national anthem played for his medal ceremony, he also raised a black fist. Fosbury is white. But what people remember is the black people protesting, not the white people.
“Also, even though the Mexico City Olympics had Bob Beamon setting the world record in the long jump that stood for thirty years, about a week before the Olympics started the Mexican government gunned down and killed at least thirty peaceful student protesters. Needless to say, the Olympics rolled on as if to say, ‘Nothing to see here.’”
Rosemary nodded. “My goodness, it’s Larry the Librarian, putting things into perspective.”
“Thanks, Larry,” said Sam. “I can’t say I remember much about the next years except the Jackson 5 and the Osmonds were hot. Little kids thought both bands were cool because Michael Jackson and Donny Osmond were roughly our age, and I think that gave us hope that we could be stars. Of course we didn’t have talent. Maybe Calvin. I don’t know what ever happened to him.
“I remember some things about fifth grade but first I need to tell what I remember about the summer of 1970. Schools were finally going to be integrated in the fall. As we got close to the school year, Griffin was the main black elementary school for children living in Frenchtown. Griffin was a half mile from the governor’s mansion and less than a mile from my house. When they drew up the districting, I was scheduled to go to Griffin. My mother told me I would be in the five percent of white students who were assigned to go there.
“However, just a few weeks before school started my parents got a notice from the school board that said I would stay at Kat Sulleman. It was announced in the newspaper that Griffin would be closed. I heard my mother and father discussing this at the dinner table—after we had prayed over our food, of course. My mother was certain that the reason they closed Griffin was because the governor’s daughter, who was my age, was also zoned for the black school.
“When school started in fall of 1970, the schools were finally integrated. The governor’s daughter was at Kat Sulleman with me, and with the black kids that came from Griffin including Kenneth. As Kenneth said, our fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Roberts, was mean. I heard my mother complain many times; she couldn’t understand why they allowed people who hate kids to teach them.
“I have no recollection of anything we did in class that was academic, although we must have done something. I do remember Mrs. Roberts lectured us every day and I can’t remember what about. We just bit our lips and sucked it up, except for Kelvin.
“She was often upset at Kelvin. He was one of the two white kids who drowned three years later. Kelvin was a bully and always picking fights, so he had a reputation down at the principal’s office. I remember every time he got sent to the office, Mrs. Roberts would lecture us about how we shouldn’t let Kelvin ‘lord’ over us. Lord over us is what she said.
“I was friends with Kelvin, or at least he wanted to be friends with me—I’m not sure why. I just didn’t want to get beat up. He spent the night at my house a couple of times. He thought my dad used weird words. He kept asking me what a college professor did.”
“Kelvin never picked on me much or the other black kids,” said Kenneth. “He mostly beat up white kids and was good at sports.”
“That’s right,” said McArdle. “We didn’t have any problems between black and white kids. My recollection is that most of the boys just wanted to play sports. One time in PE class, Coach Ward said we could divide the teams on our own and he needed to go get some more equipment. By the time he came back we had divided into one all-black team and one all-white team. Coach Ward almost flipped his lid.
“Coach Ward physically started pulling a kid from one team and put them on the other team and kept on until we were properly integrated. Then he said: ‘Now don’t y’all do that again, you hear?’
“Do you remember that, Kenneth?” asked Sam.
“Yeah, I remember PE, I remember Coach Ward, I think he was the only black teacher. And I remember Kelvin. I don’t know what was wrong with that boy, except his father seemed to want him to be a professional athlete. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t have a father. Sam, do you remember movie day?”
“You mean special movie day, girls only?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.”
“Seriously?” asked Rosemary. “You mean the class where they teach the fifth-grade girls all about having their period and all about how to keep the boys out of their pants? We did that too. What did they tell the boys, Sam?”
“That’s the great thing about boys’ sports. No periods for boys. On special movie day, all the fifth-grade girls went into the auditorium and all the fifth-grade boys went out onto the baseball field. This was such an important day that Principal Engles himself came out to tell us about special movie day. Except we didn’t get a movie, and he didn’t tell us what movie the girls were watching.
“I have no idea what Principal Engles studied. I do know they didn’t tell us anything about sex or biology that day other than someday soon we might start noticing that we have hair under our arms and other places. We were just in fifth grade and most of us were not at that stage yet. In hindsight it’s obvious Principal Engles had no idea what to say so he started having a conversation with Coach Ward about different options for deodorant and cologne. Very practical biology lesson for fifth-grade boys.
“I remember Coach Ward standing near Principal Engles, leaning on a baseball bat. Later in life that struck me as phallic. Appropriate for the subject. I have no idea what Coach Ward thought about this talk. Anyway, I don’t think they told us anything in school about the real birds and the bees until seventh grade when we had a two-week unit on sex and human biology as part of our health class.
“Let’s see if I can embarrass all the men,” said Rosemary.
“We’d rather not. I’m starting to get embarrassed already,” said Larry.
“Me too,” said Kenneth.
“Me three,” said Sam. “And I started it.”
“Well, I’ll just ask Miss Jasmine later when you delicate boys ain’t around,” said Rosemary.
“That will be fine,” said Miss Jasmine. “These men are so fragile. Let’s see if we can get back to what Sam was talking about, shall we?”
Sam said, “I don’t have a lot to say really. In my memory we never had issues between black kids and white kids; we got along fine. I did notice that as we moved up through high school, I had more classes with fewer black kids, usually English and Spanish classes.”
Sam continued, “Miss Jasmine, you told us the story of Little Roberta and her singing at the assembly. May I tell my version?”
“That would be nice,” she answered.
“May I ask in advance that you don’t throw me out of your house?”
“You explain first, and I’ll decide about throwing you out later,” she said.
McArdle started. “In seventh grade I had language arts class with Miss Roberta Barnes. This was the 1972-73 school year. Miss Jasmine, I had no idea until I came here this week that she was your daughter. But I will tell you that everything you said in your version of the assembly sounds about right to me.
“When she went up to sing, some people started to jeer and pretty soon it was most of us, including me. Mob mentality. I don’t know about Kenneth.”
Kenneth said, “Well I didn’t know then, but decades later someone figured out we were cousins, Little Roberta ten years older than me. I thought the jeering was wrong and that the way people treated her in class was wrong. It should’ve been “yes, ma’am” and “that’s right, ma’am,” but most of the kids would argue with her and act like they didn’t care what she said. I did not participate in that. What I did was nothing, and I learned at the assembly that doing nothing was wrong.
“When Aunt Jasmine took me in and I realized Roberta was my cousin, we talked about the assembly many times. Aunt Jasmine said I could feel guilty if I wanted and that if I had a conscience I should feel guilty, but also that I needed to get over it. She said she knew I could barely read and probably never read a book in my life. Aunt Jasmine felt guilty about that.
“But she told me there was a book called Lord of the Flies. It was one of Roberta’s books from college. Larry read it to me. A group of teenagers are stranded on an island with no rescue in sight. They divide into little societies and attack each other. Piggy gets killed. The book basically shows how societies become antagonistic and immoral. Pardon my educated words. As Aunt Jasmine says, we like to code switch.”
Sam said, “I think all of us realized on that day that we were animals, and that Miss Barnes was an angel, and we had just picked the meat off her bones. Personally, I never acted disrespectful with Miss Barnes until the assembly. Partly because my parents tried to teach me some basic ethical principles, but also because I simply didn’t want get in trouble. I thought getting into trouble was stupid, so for me punishment reminded me of the limits of behavior.
“What I did in her class with a couple of my friends was that we would wait until she was distracted by the troublemakers and then we would crawl out the window and skip class. We always made sure she had taken roll first, but maybe that’s why I don’t remember much about the class.”
“You mean to tell me that you and your friends crawled out the goddamn window at school to skip my little girl’s class? Is that what you were telling me, Mr. McArdle?”
“Yes, ma’am. Are you throwing me out now?”
“Not just yet. Please continue.”
“In the second semester, I think all the kids knew Miss Barnes wasn’t going to be rehired. Some of us felt bad about it but not bad enough to do anything. For example, we could have apologized to her and apologized to the school, and maybe even petition that should she be hired back. But we didn’t.
“I do remember when they brought in her spring semester replacement. I’ve never met Miss Amy and only know about her from Miss Jasmine’s stories this week. But from the descriptions I’ve heard, I’m sure her replacement was Miss Amy’s double. Both in personality and in size. Her name was Miss Beverly.”