White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

Girl Talk

72 In the dark, in the wooden seats of the auditorium at Binford, the film jittered through the projector. All the girls were watching, the boys sent upstairs to their own special assembly with the male gym teacher. On the screen, a girl in a plaid skirt and saddle shoes, her blond hair curled into a flip, walked into her living room. Her mother, a navy blue dress smoothed over her knees, looked up from her knitting. “Guess what, Mom!” the girl announced, smiling. “You’re menstruating, dear!” said the mother, as if that’s the first thing that any mother would guess out loud like that. “Why, yes!” said the girl. “How did you know?” “Oh, sometimes mothers know things like that,” she said. In the auditorium, some girls snickered. Mrs. Martin, the guidance counselor, paced the aisles in her white blouse and plaid skirt, her heels ticking officiously. I elbowed Liz and rolled my eyes. Liz and I sat in a row with about two dozen white girls; the rest of the auditorium was filled with black girls. The only other white person that I remember in the room was Mrs. Martin. The mother showed her daughter a sanitary napkin, then told her to wash carefully on the days of her period. Their bathroom had a plush toilet seat cover and matching wallpaper with flowers on it. The girl looked shocked when her classmate called her period “the curse.” “It’s not the curse,” the narrator said in a voice-over. “It’s perfectly normal.” “Yeah, and perfectly embarrassing,” I muttered to Liz, who had to cover her mouth to stifle her laughter. We were all watching the same film, but neither the script nor the teacher helped me to feel I had anything common with the black girls who were also going through the awkward transition to womanhood. The staff at the school handled the film the way they handled so many other things—by following the requirements of the curriculum, but backing off from any real discussion. Who in our Girl Talk 73 auditorium could possibly identify with the characters in the film? Everyone in the film was white, dressed in their 1950s fashions, relics from the era when schools were still segregated and Elvis’s dancing was still risqué. The worst thing the girls in the film had to worry about was how to politely decline swimming invitations during the days of their periods. A counselor or teacher who felt more comfortable in front of an integrated group might have acknowledged the absurdity of the film’s old-fashioned script. She might have asked us to give practical advice to each other, especially about confronting the obnoxious boys who rummaged through our purses, holding up any sanitary supplies they found. That could have helped bridge some of the divisions between us. Mrs. Martin just showed the film, left no time for questions, and sent us back to class. What did the film’s producers know of the racial tensions that kept girls from talking to each other about the most basic of female functions ? About squirming through cramps because I thought it was worse to tell a black girl than to tough it out? About tying a sweater around my waist because I hated the bathroom so much, I sometimes ended up with stained pants? The stalls of the girls’ bathroom had no trash receptacles. This was probably a simple oversight, but it made discretion impossible because we had to walk out to a trash can that was in the corner of the bathroom where the most hostile girls had staked out their turf. At a different school, the girls might have complained to each other, and then urged the bravest one to go ask the school nurse for better trash disposal. Instead, no one said anything and nothing changed. At home, my mother stashed her feminine supplies way back in her closet, never leaving a trace of her period in the bathroom. She delivered the little information she shared in a detached, clinical tone that instantly squelched my questions. My older sister, obsessed with privacy, said nothing. My white girlfriends were the only people I knew who would talk about periods at all, and we usually joked to cover our discomfort. In my situation, no matter what the film’s narrator said, I indeed felt cursed to be a young woman. ...