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184 32 Princess in the Tower Elaine W. Shoben Gearing up for the start of the new school year in 1956 was fun for me as an eight-year-old in southern Ohio, and it was uncomplicated by consciousness of national events. I had no knowledge of the Supreme Court’s rulings during the previous two years in Brown v. Board of Education and certainly no idea that such things were relevant to life in my small town. The television—newly acquired as our family’s first—brought the black and white wonder of Howdy Doody that summer and none of the dramatic images we would later see on the news of resistance to school desegregation in Little Rock and elsewhere during the years to follow. When I went back to my previously all-white school, there was suddenly a handful of black faces in the halls. This story is about one of those children, a girl in my class named Mary, and what happened to her as a petition enrollment child whose change of school was not part of a larger school desegregation plan. In order to tell her story, however, I need to explain more about the town and to tell a bit about myself because, in the end, I managed to do a terrible thing to Mary. ✭ ✭ ✭ Why did some black-faced children suddenly appear in my school among the sea of white-faced children that year? With a law professor’s perspective now on my child’s memory, I’m guessing that after Brown some of the African American parents in town petitioned the school board to send their children to my school. Rather than face a possible lawsuit after hearing what the Supreme Court did, the board must have granted the smattering of petitions. School started in the hot days right after Labor Day and my friends and I had important things on our minds. We simply ignored the new kids and went about our daily lives. On one of the first days of class Ricky M. kissed me lightning fast when he passed by where I was standing in the cloakroom, and I never knew if it was on a dare or a genuine sign of affection. At eight years old, that difference is often hard to discern. My friends Beth and Melissa discussed ElaineW. Shoben 185 with me for hours matters such as the kiss, but we never once mentioned to each other the presence of the new black faces in the school. I’m not sure we even noticed them at first. The new girl, Mary P., in my class was the only African American child in the third grade. She sat in the last row and stared at the backs of all her white classmates and the white teacher at the front of the room. Mary was the best-behaved child in my class. She always came to school dressed impeccably in a starched dress. All the girl students and female teachers were required to wear dresses or skirts and blouses in those days, but Mary’s attire was always especially well kept. She never caused trouble and she kept to herself as much as possible. With hindsight, I’m guessing that her parents impressed upon her the precariousness of her situation. She was very careful of every step she took. She was very smart and rarely needed to be told anything twice. No doubt her parents were impressed with her abilities and wanted to offer her the chance of an education to develop her potential. Surely they knew the danger that she would be abused verbally or even physically at the white school, but they probably felt that they could prepare her to face open racism. What they apparently miscalculated was the cost of a more subtle kind of social isolation. The racial segregation in that southern Ohio town was not salient to a child like me. The people who were called “Nigras” (in polite talk) did the menial jobs and kept a low profile. For me they were just as much a part of the background as the silos in the countryside. I didn’t see either one very often because I led a sheltered life as a member of a professional family in town. The social order was stable and invisible for my friends and me, so we went about our lives in ignorance even that the community was governed by it. On the playground the third-graders...

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