tokenism.
Karen’s sole black classmate was a boy named Temple Moody. They sat together at lunch the day they met—the first day of third grade—and every school day after that.
To look at, Temple was about as black as a person could get, as though the school were hoping to pack as much blackness as possible into each “token black” seat in each of his successive integrated classrooms. Initially he was chosen for his mannerly comportment and tidy clothes and resented only for making it impossible for his classmates to win at Eraser Walk. The eraser nestled in his hair like an egg in a nest. He could have hopped to the blackboard on one foot. The class voted never to play Eraser Walk again. One by one, his superior achievements were acknowledged with surrender. He called it “raising the white flag.”
By week five of third grade, Karen had forgotten what it was like to be bullied. Temple was not about to let competing children distract her.
It was soon a done deal among the children that they would marry. There was no question of a white boy’s teasing her or kissing her. No girls of either race played with her hair.
Meg bought a packet of thirty Valentines, enough for the entire class. Karen labeled and distributed them all, but she brought home only three: one from the teacher, one from Temple, and one from a Catholic girl whose exotic last name—Schmidt—regularly made the class dissolve in laughter. Birthdays were a nonstarter, since Meg couldn’t have kids over to that house. Plus the date and the year were false, so it seemed like tempting fate to make a big deal out of Karen’s birthday. Christmas depressedMeg, and she did her best to ignore it. Amber “Shit” Schmidt was not a big party-thrower either.
So for several years in a row, the high point of Karen’s year was Temple Moody’s birthday. Possibly it more than made up for the Neapolitan ice cream and Pin the Tail on the Donkey she missed by not being white. Temple’s birthday involved adults and older children—approximately fifty in all—along with hard liquor, catfish, chicken, trifle, and a piñata.
He lived in a sprawling compound on a creek bank, hundreds of years old, with a four-seater outhouse and a shed full of broken farm implements from before the trees grew. The woods leading to it were dense with greenbrier through which deer had beaten paths like a hedge maze. There was only one party game: Run Wild. The adults would settle in, on and around the porch, while the children ran wild. Eventually one of Temple’s older brothers would throw a rope over a high oak bough and haul up the piñata.
The Moodys regarded piñatas as a neglected Native American tradition. They assumed partial descent from Indians. Temple’s mother had a fond uncle in Reno, Nevada, at the end of the Trail of Tears, and he mailed her authentic Indian crafts every year for Christmas: Navajo sand paintings, Pomo baskets, Hopi dolls. And for Temple’s birthday, a piñata.
Temple’s mother had grown up in Hampton and gone to junior college, but few other Moodys had been to school past eighth grade, and many not at all. The Brown decision in 1954 made a lot of school systems close their doors, and people like the Moodys lost out. Most were fundamentalist Christians, but inability to read kept them from getting pedantic about it. They deduced religious doctrine from the behavior of people more devout than themselves, and it made them a very tolerant and easygoing bunch of people. But with gaps in their knowledge ofthe world. Such as what lay at the ends of roads they had never driven. Where Reno might be. The look of an ocean. At the same time, they knew many things that were written down nowhere. For example, that they had lived on that creek bank continuously since the days when it was an Indian town.
Blindfolded and armed with a baseball bat, Temple would stand under the oak while an older brother raised and lowered the piñata and made it sway wildly.
Karen’s sole black classmate was a boy named Temple Moody. They sat together at lunch the day they met—the first day of third grade—and every school day after that.
To look at, Temple was about as black as a person could get, as though the school were hoping to pack as much blackness as possible into each “token black” seat in each of his successive integrated classrooms. Initially he was chosen for his mannerly comportment and tidy clothes and resented only for making it impossible for his classmates to win at Eraser Walk. The eraser nestled in his hair like an egg in a nest. He could have hopped to the blackboard on one foot. The class voted never to play Eraser Walk again. One by one, his superior achievements were acknowledged with surrender. He called it “raising the white flag.”
By week five of third grade, Karen had forgotten what it was like to be bullied. Temple was not about to let competing children distract her.
It was soon a done deal among the children that they would marry. There was no question of a white boy’s teasing her or kissing her. No girls of either race played with her hair.
Meg bought a packet of thirty Valentines, enough for the entire class. Karen labeled and distributed them all, but she brought home only three: one from the teacher, one from Temple, and one from a Catholic girl whose exotic last name—Schmidt—regularly made the class dissolve in laughter. Birthdays were a nonstarter, since Meg couldn’t have kids over to that house. Plus the date and the year were false, so it seemed like tempting fate to make a big deal out of Karen’s birthday. Christmas depressedMeg, and she did her best to ignore it. Amber “Shit” Schmidt was not a big party-thrower either.
So for several years in a row, the high point of Karen’s year was Temple Moody’s birthday. Possibly it more than made up for the Neapolitan ice cream and Pin the Tail on the Donkey she missed by not being white. Temple’s birthday involved adults and older children—approximately fifty in all—along with hard liquor, catfish, chicken, trifle, and a piñata.
He lived in a sprawling compound on a creek bank, hundreds of years old, with a four-seater outhouse and a shed full of broken farm implements from before the trees grew. The woods leading to it were dense with greenbrier through which deer had beaten paths like a hedge maze. There was only one party game: Run Wild. The adults would settle in, on and around the porch, while the children ran wild. Eventually one of Temple’s older brothers would throw a rope over a high oak bough and haul up the piñata.
The Moodys regarded piñatas as a neglected Native American tradition. They assumed partial descent from Indians. Temple’s mother had a fond uncle in Reno, Nevada, at the end of the Trail of Tears, and he mailed her authentic Indian crafts every year for Christmas: Navajo sand paintings, Pomo baskets, Hopi dolls. And for Temple’s birthday, a piñata.
Temple’s mother had grown up in Hampton and gone to junior college, but few other Moodys had been to school past eighth grade, and many not at all. The Brown decision in 1954 made a lot of school systems close their doors, and people like the Moodys lost out. Most were fundamentalist Christians, but inability to read kept them from getting pedantic about it. They deduced religious doctrine from the behavior of people more devout than themselves, and it made them a very tolerant and easygoing bunch of people. But with gaps in their knowledge ofthe world. Such as what lay at the ends of roads they had never driven. Where Reno might be. The look of an ocean. At the same time, they knew many things that were written down nowhere. For example, that they had lived on that creek bank continuously since the days when it was an Indian town.
Blindfolded and armed with a baseball bat, Temple would stand under the oak while an older brother raised and lowered the piñata and made it sway wildly.
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