White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

My Flag, My Shame

70 Maybe if one of my teachers had explained the African American view of the Confederacy instead of shunning topics with any hint of racial controversy, I would have been prepared to resist the sales pitch of the man in an Allman Brothers Band T-shirt. I was at the Virginia State Fair, and it was the fall of 1972, my seventh grade year at Binford. It was my last stop on a long night of prowling around the midway with the Zellers. We had gorged ourselves with popcorn and cotton candy, ridden the dizzying Round-Up, and thrown darts at balloons, hoping for a prize. The man, perched on a box behind a folding table, his hair clasped back in a ponytail, watched me eyeing the array of patches he sold. There was a peace sign, an assortment of psychedelic mushrooms, and a giant marijuana leaf. He picked up a checkered flag crisscrossed with the Confederate flag and waved it above the table. “Go Confederates!” he said, his teeth bright as the lights on the ride whirling outside the tent. “Get it?” I was at the age when a man’s smile could make a difference. “Yeah!” I said, and smiled back. “How much?” “For you?” he said, eyeing my sister’s hand-me-down denim jacket, my wad of frizzy hair, my dime store earrings, my dogged determination to fit in somewhere, anywhere. “Tell you what. Two dollars.” I reached into the pocket of my Levi’s jeans and handed over the money. “That’ll look real nice on your jacket there,” he said, packing the patch in a paper bag and smiling again. “Come back and see me sometime.” I took the bag, and my cousins, impatient to leave, didn’t ask to see it. In the back seat of the Chevy station wagon, wedged between Naomi and Sammy, I rubbed the patch in the dark. Finally, I felt like a Richmonder. My mother made no comment as I left the next morning, the new patch on the front of my jacket. Despite her support for integration, My Flag, My Shame 71 she was too much of a southerner to see the flag as anything objectionable . I practically strutted up to the door of the school instead of doing my usual hangdog scuttle. I hadn’t gotten twenty feet inside when a black girl I didn’t know shoved me. Her Afro puffed up like a cloud of steam above her head. She narrowed her eyes, jabbing me where the patch was sewn on, cursed at me, and stalked off. Stunned, I continued into homeroom, where two boys went silent and glared at me as I walked by. It took Denise, the black girl who had once let me touch her Afro, to tell me what I had done wrong. She was one of the few girls who seemed comfortable enough to be consistently friendly with me. After lunch that day, Denise pulled me into a corner of the cracked and weedy asphalt that passed as our playground. “That flag on your jacket,” she said, the usual teasing edge gone from her voice. “It’s got to go.” My stomach somersaulted. Still, I didn’t know exactly what I had done wrong. I waited for her to say more. “You really don’t get it, do you?” she said impatiently. Denise and I had just stumbled into the no-man’s-land between what busing was supposed to achieve and one of the nation’s most potent symbols of racial misunderstanding. As twelve-year-olds, we were supposed to be more open to social change, but we were also woefully lacking any kind of perspective on history. “Don’t you see we would still be slaves if they won?” she said. No answer I gave could possibly stanch the shame that flooded my face. I wadded up the jacket, stuffed it into my knapsack, and didn’t wear it on the bus that afternoon, even though I was shivering. When I got home, I took out my mother’s manicure scissors and cut out every one of my careful stitches. I shoved the patch into the back of my drawer. I certainly couldn’t wear it again. Yet I also couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. I had so carefully chosen it—a starcrossed reminder of all I still had to learn about American history. ...