She wore a ferocious smile and pushed her way through the milling people, holding a fistful of clippings high in her hand to keep them from being crushed. Since it was her left hand I looked particularly for a wedding ring, and saw that there was none. I slipped in behind her to get carried along by the wave, but the crush was dense, and I was given a warning, too, "Watch it, sailor. Everybody wants to hear."
Nellie was received with shouts of greeting. I don't know how many Cheerleaders there were. There was no fixed line between the Cheerleaders and the crowd behind them. What I could see was that a group was passing newspaper clippings back and forth and reading them aloud with little squeals of delight.
Now the crowd grew restless, as an audience does when the clock goes past curtain time. Men all around me looked at their watches. I looked at mine. It was three minutes to nine.
The show opened on time. Sounds of sirens. Motorcycle cops. Then two big black cars filled with big men in blond felt hats pulled up in front of the school. The crowd seemed to hold its breath. Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere in the automobiles they extracted the littlest Negro girl you ever saw, dressed in shining starchy white, with new shoes on her feet so little they were almost round. Her face and legs were very black against the white.
The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades. The little girl did not look at the howling crowd but from the sides the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll, and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school, and the child was even more a mite because the men were so big. Then the girl made a curious hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle of her first skip the weight bore her down and her little round feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards. Slowly, they climbed the steps and entered the school.
The papers had printed that the jibes and jeers were cruel and sometimes obscene, and so they were, but this was not the big show. The crowd was waiting for the white man who dared to bring his white child to school...
No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted. It was indicated that they were indelicate, some even said obscene. On television, the sound track was made to blur or had crowd noises cut in to cover. But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate. In a long and unprotected life I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow?
...Here was no principle good or bad, no direction. These blowsy women with their little hats and their clippings hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heartbreaking. These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience.
The full title of the book is, "Travels with Charley in Search of America." The event occurred in New Orleans in 1959 or 1960. It has taken me two sittings to copy Steinbeck's words because I cannot stop crying and cannot unclench my teeth.
I first read Travels thirty-five years ago. Some scenes -- including the one I copied and abridged for you -- have stayed with me. But, it was not until last night when I again opened the book did I recognize the power and prescience of these old words to define oh so clearly America's great divide. Steinbeck wrote the Tea Party: crazy actors playing to a crazy audience.
We shall overcome.
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