In a place like Pottersville, where there wasn’t a lot to do, a Friday night high school football game was a social event. When it was the July jamboree game, it was the social event of the year.

Why football in the summer? It was Pottersville. Every other game was played in the fall but the July jamboree was reserved for the early summer to correspond with the other celebrated annual event—the Pottersville Possum Festival.

When I walked inside the football field gate, Merrill was standing there waiting for me. His clothes matched his skin tone—midnight. He wore black tailored slacks with a thin white pinstripe, black-and-white wing tip shoes, and a black collarless long-sleeve shirt.

People swarmed around everywhere—lining the fence around the field, standing in line at the concession stand, sitting in the bleachers.

Cheerleaders roamed around selling programs and blue and white shakers while the two teams, on opposite ends of the field, warmed up.

In stark contrast to Merrill’s cat-burglar ensemble, I wore Levi’s 550 stone-washed straight-leg jeans, leather deck shoes with no socks, and a white collarless long-sleeve shirt.

As we approached the home bleachers, Merrill extracted a quarter from his pocket and said, “Call it.”

“Tails,” I said.

Merrill flipped the coin.

“Tails,” he said. “You win. What will it be, eighty or twenty?”

For as long as I could remember, the bleachers had been divided up into eighty-twenty. The first eighty percent, the unofficial white section, the last twenty, the unofficial black section.

“Twenty,” I said.

We walked along the narrow sidewalk at the front of the bleachers past the white section, where a few people spoke to us, down to the black section, where a few more people spoke to us.

We sat down beside a heavy black woman whom everybody called Miss Tanya. She said, “Boys, how y’all doin’ tonight?”

“Just fine, Miss Tanya. How are you?” I said.

“Honey,” she said, “I am blessed.”

When the game started, Miss Tanya yelled, “Come on, Tigers. Kick some butt!” Her whole body, all three hundred pounds, bounced up and down as she yelled.

Miss Tanya continued to talk to us and to the players throughout the first quarter. Merrill and I were quiet—he watching the game, I looking for Laura.

Near the end of the second quarter I spotted her. She was on the other side of the field helping the jamboree court prepare for its halftime program.

I could see that all of the young ladies on the jamboree court and most of the women helping them had on corsages, but Laura did not.

“Idiot!” I exclaimed.

“That was stupid,” Merrill said. “The whole left side of the field was open.”

“No, not that. I forgot something. Miss Tanya,” I said looking over at her, “where’d you get that corsage?”

“From the school this afternoon. Shaniqua bought it for me.”

“Are they still selling them?”