“Keeping busy,” he said. “I like that. You work for me, you keep busy.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I folded the big stuff, and now I’m matching the socks.”
Mr. Maddox stretched his arm out and propped himself against the basement wall. He was towering over me, and I felt a little boxed in. He had come so near that I could feel his breath on my
face. I could also smell him. He didn’t stink, but I wasn’t used to being so close to a grown man, and his smell made me think of sweat and work, muscle and meat. I didn’t dislike
it, but it was a little unsettling.
“Another thing I like about you,” he said, “is that you’re not scared of me. I’m a big guy, and I know some people get nervous when I’m standing next to them
like this.”
“Nope,” I said. “Not me.”
“No,” he said. “You’re not afraid.” He’d had his right arm cocked on his hip, and now he reached over and put his hand on my shoulder. It was a hot September
day, and I was wearing a sleeveless shirt. His enormous hand was so rough and calloused that I thought I could feel the individual ridges of his fingerprints.
“You take your responsibilities seriously,” he went on, “and you don’t make a big deal out of little things. Unlike Doris. She’s always making a huge deal over dumb
little things. You’ve got a good sense of humor; you’re fun to be around. You’ve got spunk, and you’re mature for your age. How old are you again?”
“Twelve.”
“Twelve? That’s all? That’s hard to believe. You look and act much older than that.” Mr. Maddox suddenly slipped his thick thumb into my armpit and stroked it. “And
you’ve already got your peach fuzz coming in.”
I jerked back. “Cut it out!”
Mr. Maddox held my shoulder with his thumb still in my armpit for just a moment longer, then dropped his hand and laughed. “Now, don’t go getting all stupid on me,” he said.
“I didn’t do anything wrong. I was just commenting on your coming-of-age. I got a wife and daughter, I grew up with sisters, and I know all about women and their cycles and when they
start developing. This is just nature. I’m an adult, and you’re on the way to becoming one. If we’re going to have a working relationship, the way grown-ups do, we need to be able
to talk about things like this. For example, maybe someday you won’t be able to come to work for me because you started your cycle and got cramps, and you’ll need to tell me that.
Happens all the time at the mill.”
I looked down at the pile of unfolded socks. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t want to get all stupid and blow it out of proportion. Even though Mr. Maddox sticking his
thumb in my armpit felt completely wrong, I couldn’t disagree with a single thing he said.
Mr. Maddox reached over and pushed my chin up. “You’re not mad at me, are you?” he asked. “I thought we were just talking about growing up. Look, if you’re mad, you
should say something. If you think I did you wrong, you can do me wrong. You can call me a name. Any name you want.” He paused. “Or you can hit me. Go ahead, hit me.” He spread
out his arms. “Right here in the stomach. Hard as you can.” He waited a moment. Then he pointed at his jaw. “Or right here in the face if you want.”
“No, thanks.”
“Don’t want to hit me? Why not?” He paused again. “I know you’re not scared of me, so I guess you’re not mad at me. Good.” He took out his roll of bills
and pulled off a twenty. “Here’s for your day’s work,” he said, and headed back up the stairs.
Twenty dollars was way more than Mr. Maddox usually paid me for a day’s work. The whole thing had been creepy, and by taking the money, I felt I was letting him buy me off. But twenty
dollars was a lot of money. Mr. Maddox knew I needed it, and he knew I’d take it. I put the money in my pocket, finished matching the socks, and left without saying goodbye to anyone.
“I don’t like Mr. Maddox,” I told Liz that night.
“You don’t have to like him,” she said. “You just have to know how to handle him.”
I had been planning to tell Liz what had happened, but it was sort of embarrassing. Also, when I played it through in my head, Mr. Maddox hadn’t actually done anything wrong, and if he
had, he’d more or less apologized. I kept telling myself that I didn’t want to make a bigger deal out of it than it was. From now on, I just had to figure out how to handle him. Like
Liz did.
Usually Mom called
once a week, but every now and then she called a few days late or skipped a week. When that happened, she’d
apologize, saying she meant to call, but you know how crazy the music world can get.
The time wasn’t quite right yet for Liz and me to come up to New York, Mom told us, but we weren’t going to be stuck at Mayfield forever. Besides, it was good for us to be exposed to
life in Byler. It would help us understand her, what she had to put up with and why she made the decision to leave. It would make us grateful that she’d taken pains to raise us among
open-minded nonconformists instead of people who treated you like a pariah if you didn’t do everything exactly the way they did.
When I told Mom I joined the pep squad, she sighed. “Why would you want to do that?” she asked. She’d been a cheerleader herself, she said, and she shuddered to remember it.
Football was barbaric. And cheerleading was a way of brainwashing women into thinking that the men were the stars and the most women could expect out of life was to stand on the sidelines and cheer
them on.
“Don’t be someone else’s little cheerleader,” Mom said. “Be the star of your own show. Even if there’s no audience.”
I knew Mom had a point. Still, I liked being on the pep squad. It was fun, and I’d made some friends. What was wrong with that? Also, I’d figured out that school spirit was important
in Byler, and if you didn’t show any, you wouldn’t get very far.
Liz, however, took Mom’s advice to heart. She’d been leaning in that direction anyway and was glad to have Mom’s perspective to support her own views. I’d been trying my
best to make things work out at Byler, but you couldn’t say the same about Liz. She was constantly making comments about quaint local customs, dropping Latin phrases, correcting other
kids’ grammar, and grimacing at the sound of country music. After the first day of school, Liz and I had worn blue jeans, but after a couple of weeks, she’d gone back to outfits that
made her stand out, including the orange-and-purple skirt, a beret, and recently, even some of Mom’s old clothes—the very ones Uncle Tinsley had wanted us to wear—like a tweed
hunting jacket and riding breeches. It had been years since I’d been in the same school with Liz, and while I was in the habit of thinking of her as brilliant and beautiful and all-around
perfect, it was clear the other kids at Byler thought she acted peculiar and put on airs.
In California, we’d never paid much attention to school sports. The only people who really cared were the kids on the teams. But in Byler, the entire town was obsessed
with the Bulldogs. Signs cheering on the team appeared in the storefronts along Holladay Avenue. People painted Bulldog slogans on the windows of their cars and houses and planted red and white
flowers in their gardens. Grown-ups standing on street corners discussed the team’s prospects and debated the strengths and weaknesses of individual players. Teachers interrupted class to
talk about the upcoming game. And everyone treated the members of the team like gods.
On the day of a game, you were supposed to wear red and white to school. It wasn’t a rule, but everyone did it, Terri Pruitt told me. I put on a red-and-white T-shirt the day the Bulldogs
were scheduled to play the Owls in the season opener. Liz made a point of wearing her orange-and-purple skirt, saying that she was a nonconformist, like Mom. She had to put on that blue dress when
Maddox wanted and go along with whatever he said, but that was because she was on his payroll. No one at Byler High was going to tell her what to wear or who to cheer for.
Everyone at Byler was required to attend the pep rally, held the day of game. I got out of home ec to decorate the gym. All the kids and teachers were wearing red and white, including the former
Nelson students. Each class sat together, and they all competed to cheer the loudest, with the noisiest class winning the spirit stick and the privilege of waving it around at the game that night.
When it was the seventh-graders’ turn, Vanessa and I stood in front of the class, waving our arms and pumping our fists in the air. One kid stood up and shouted, “You go, Day-Glo
Girl!” I just grinned and pumped my fists even harder, and I’ll admit I was downright proud when we won that spirit stick.
The game started in the early evening. The floodlights around the football field had been turned on even though there was still plenty of light left. A hot wind blew across the
field, and a half-moon hung in the silver sky.
The entire Wyatt family showed up early to get seats down front so they could cheer Ruth on. Joe, who was carrying Earl, waved at me. Liz didn’t come—she said she agreed with Mom,
football was barbaric—but Uncle Tinsley showed up, wearing a gray felt hat and an old red-and-white varsity jacket with a big
B
on it. He walked over to where I was standing on the
sidelines with the pep squad. “Class of ’48,” he said. “We swept the division.” He winked. “Go get ’em, Bulldogs.”
The bleachers filled up quickly, and just like in the school cafeteria, the blacks and the whites sat separately. After the band came out, the Bulldogs were introduced one by one, each running
onto the field when his name was called. The white fans cheered for the white Byler players, but they stayed pretty quiet for the black players who’d been at Nelson. At the same time, the
blacks in the bleachers cheered for the black players but not the white ones.
When the Owls took the field, their fans cheered for the entire team, but the Owls had only one black player. One of the things people had been talking about before the game was that the Owls
had always been a weak team, but Big Creek was a tiny town up in the mountains, and hardly any blacks lived there, so the team hadn’t had the integration issues Byler was going through.
At the start of the game, the crowd was enthusiastic, cheering every time the Bulldogs completed a pass or made a tackle and booing every time the Owls advanced. The cheerleaders were in
position along the sidelines, kicking and jumping around and shaking their pom-poms, while the pep squad ran back and forth in front of the bleachers, pumping the crowd, yelling, “Bulldogs
growl, Owls howl!”
Everyone was having a blast, and it didn’t seem to me that you had to be a barbarian to enjoy the game. By the second quarter, however, the Bulldogs had fallen behind by two touchdowns,
and the mood of the crowd turned sour. I didn’t know much about football—the rules seemed incredibly confusing—but I did know we were losing. During a time-out, I asked Ruth what
was going on. The Bulldogs weren’t playing like a team, she explained. Dale Scarberry, the white quarterback, was passing only to the white receivers, and the new black players weren’t
blocking for their white teammates. If that kept up, the Bulldogs would be massacred.
When Dale Scarberry threw a pass that was picked off by one of the Owls, I was surprised to hear the Byler fans—both the students and the adults—start booing their own team. They
kept it up every time another Bulldog made a mistake, not just booing but cussing and shouting things like “You’re stinking up the field!” “Idiot!” “Bench
him!” “You suck!” and “Shit for brains!”
The Owls scored again, and that was when things got really ugly. We pep squadders were still jumping and pumping, trying to get the crowd back on our side, when someone threw a paper bag of
garbage on the field. I dashed out to pick it up, and when I got back to the sideline, I saw a white man in the bleachers stand up and hurl a hamburger at Vanessa Johnson’s sister, Leticia,
as she was raising her pom-poms over her head with a big grin. The hamburger hit her in the chest, leaving a greasy mark on her pretty red-and-white uniform.
Leticia ignored it—she even went on smiling—and all the cheerleaders continued their routine. Then a white man I recognized from the hill stood up and threw a big cup filled with ice
and cola. When it hit Leticia on the shoulder, the lid flew off, drenching her uniform. Leticia kept going, kicking up and cheering as vigorously as before, though she had stopped smiling.
Aunt Al turned to face the two white men. “Hey, now, that ain’t right!” she shouted.
At that point, a black man standing on the bleacher steps hurled a soda cup at Ruth. It hit her on the shoulder, the drink splattering down her uniform.
That was too much for Joe. He sprang up and charged toward the black man, but other blacks knocked him down before he got there. A bunch of white fans started jumping across the bleacher seats
to defend Joe, and then all hell broke loose, people everywhere throwing drinks and food, shouting, trading punches, and tackling one another, women cursing and pulling hair, babies crying and kids
screaming, the seventh-grader with the spirit stick smacking some guy on the head with it. The ruckus went on until the police rushed into the bleachers with their nightsticks out and broke it
up.
We lost the game 36 to 6.
In school on
Monday, all anyone could talk about was the game. Some white students were outraged about the brawl in the bleachers,
calling it shameful and disgraceful, but they blamed it on integration, saying this was what was going to happen when you mixed black and white; nothing good could come of it. Some black kids were
just as disgusted, although they were saying the ruckus wasn’t their fault, fights had never erupted at Nelson games, and they’d just been defending themselves. Most students were less
upset about the brawl than about the shellacking the Bulldogs had taken at the hands of the Big Creek Owls, whom they usually creamed. Integration was supposed to improve the team, kids were
saying, but now we couldn’t even beat those pencil necks from Big Creek.
The principal, at the end of his morning announcements over the P.A. system, mentioned the need for “mutual respect and school unity.” But it wasn’t until English class, after
lunch, that any of my teachers directly raised the subject.