White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

Filmstrip in the Dark

Walter sat in front of me in seventh-grade American history, his shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter as he drew cartoons in the margins of my textbook. He often slipped me cough drops and sticks of Juicy Fruit gum, contraband in the classrooms. He kept his Afro short and tidy instead of letting it flatten on the sides or catch stray pieces of lint. He smelled like lemon oil. One day when Mr. Palmer turned off the lights to show a filmstrip , Walter’s hand inched across the top of my desk, grazed my pinky, then came to rest on top of mine. Its heat seared me. The top of his hand was the color of hot cocoa, though it looked gray in the light of the images projected onto the pull-down screen. Heart pounding, I looked around to see if anyone noticed us. Sandra, who sat next to me, was drawing flowers on her book cover. Billy had his head down on his desk, his eyes closed. Some of the other kids were yawning. At this point, I must have made a decision to let him keep his hand there, but I don’t remember what I was thinking in the dizzying seconds after he touched my hand. At our table in the cafeteria, I had been willing to test the boundaries when I admitted to liking a black boy in my homeroom. Now I was willing step farther with Walter, a boy I did find attractive. I liked the frisson of doing something illicit, wanted to see what would happen. What motivated Walter? That he liked me was almost beside the point. It was too dangerous for him to come out and tell me. He had to find a safe way to test the limits. It was brave, and also brilliant, of him to slide his hand across the desk. He counted on me not to make a scene in the hushed classroom. If I refused to take his hand, all he had to do was turn around and pretend nothing happened. I carefully slid my textbooks into a barricade next to our hands, so nobody would see. Walter slipped his thumb under my palm, fingers stroking the back of my hand. My fingers nudged his. His head faced the front, eyes on the red and white cloth that Betsy Ross was Filmstrip in the Dark 82 83 sewing. I didn’t want to look at his face anyway, our hands the only evidence of our sweat commingling, breaking all the taboos. On and on the chirpy narrator went about Betsy’s skills as a seamstress , a beep signaling Mr. Palmer to advance to the next picture. The more the narrator talked, the more ridiculous the filmstrip seemed. What did Betsy know about black boys? Had she ever touched one? Mr. Palmer, change jingling in his pockets as he paced the room on his long legs, didn’t seem to notice. He paused, rubbed the beard on his dark face, then continued. When he walked past us to turn the lights back on, Walter pulled his hand back into his lap. I picked up my pencil and looked down at my notebook. I wondered if I was blushing. I didn’t hear whether Mr. Palmer assigned us any homework and had to ask Sandra. I wondered where else Walter and I could hold hands. The secret burned inside me like a flame that could be blown out by any harsh words, any hostile looks. I liked him, but none of the ordinary rules applied. If he had been white, the next step might have been to walk together in the hall, look for each other on the playground at recess, and sit together to watch the kickball games. If things escalated, he might have called me at home or arranged to meet me after school. However, I had no idea where he lived, what his house looked like, where he hung out after school. Did I like him enough to hear Sandra warn me, “Watch out!”? To hear Billy and his friends saying, “Ebony and ivory!” everywhere I went? To be stared at and followed when I tried to sit next to him on a bench at the school playground? To have nowhere to go outside of school? I hadn’t seen a single mixed-race couple at school, or almost anywhere in Richmond. The only one I could think of was Mom’s boss, who was...