Little Rock, Arkansas. No black child had ever been in the same school with a white. Two thousand white children at Central High. Nine black children willing to be the first. The governor ordered the National Guard to the school to keep the nine children out.

Macey read that twice, to be sure. To keep nine children out of the building?

Yes, the state brought in its own army, whose soldiers said, We’re here to keep the niggers out.

Macey hated having that word in the room with her. She put her finger over the word to clean up the page and read on.

Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford came to the school alone. Black and alone in a dress she had made herself for the new experience. “Here she comes!” shouted the crowd. “Here comes one of the niggers!”

Macey did not like crowds. She didn’t like being squashed onto bleachers for a football game and she didn’t like taking the subway at rush hour, pressed forward by a crowd that might shove her off the edge.

A crowd holding stones.

To throw.

At you.

Screaming: “Go home, you black bitch!”

A Guardsman lifted his rifle—but not to protect Elizabeth. He pointed it at her. Bayonet and all, he pointed it at a fifteen-year-old girl. Someone yelled, “Lynch her!” and the mob pressed closer.

Macey could not keep the book under the covers with her. She dropped it to the floor, and it fell facedown, pages splayed and bent, like what the crowd wanted to do to Elizabeth Eckford.

I’m fifteen, too, thought Macey. What if I sewed my own dress, and ironed it that morning, and prayed with my parents, and walked up to a school—a school! a perfectly ordinary school!—me and my skin, because I can’t go without it—and hundreds of sweaty, angry, shouting people who think I’d be better off with a rope around my neck surrounded me?

I wouldn’t be brave enough to stay in school after that.

I wouldn’t care about school after that.

5

Grace said, “No. Tell me it isn’t true, Macey. You are not still taking your shortcuts. Tell me you have grown up and you use sidewalks or, better yet, cars.”

“I am extremely grown-up, I am remarkably mature, and I trespass at every opportunity.”

“Is the barbed wire still there, or have you cut it down, rolled it up and made it easier on yourself?”

“It’s somebody else’s barbed wire, Grace, I’m not going to damage it. I’m not a vandal or a thief. I’m a simple trespasser.”

Grace moaned. “Oh, for a driver’s license and a reasonably sane friend.”

They reached the barbed wire and Grace rolled her eyes, walked up and down the fence, discovered no way around, and let Macey hold the wires for her. “Good thing I’m a size six,” said Grace. “How do you fit through?”