Lina and Mr. Parson watched from the door as the students paraded into the hallway. Other students, emerging from classrooms, stared at the parade in bewilderment, then gradually adopted the chant themselves. Dean Bianchi appeared, wobbling in the sea of students. Shouting into a cone, she demanded silence, but no one paid her mind. The young people stormed forward as one, lurched down the hall, heads held high and fists in the air, until every teacher had hurried to their classroom door to witness the spectacle.
“Mr. Parson,” Lina whispered. “They gonna arrest you for inciting a riot.”
“This came from them,” he said calmly. “Their idea. Come watch.”
She joined him by the windows, from which they could see the students marching in pairs down the street like the Freedom Fighters of Selma, wrapping around the school building in the direction of Betsy Head Park, not an adult in sight: a bunch of twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-year-olds deciding they’d had enough. It was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen. This was the generation that was going to change the world.
But the sound of an argument outside the classroom pulled Lina’s attention away from the window. In the hallway, she found Mrs. Rebecca Salzman facing an irate Janet Thomas.
“It ain’t fair! They all left the building!” the ninth grader cried. “I’ll do detention tomorrow.”
“This was a hard day for every one of us,” said Mrs. Salzman, employing her most soothing voice. “But that doesn’t mean all the rules have changed.”
“Fuck you, white lady!”
“Janet, your language.”
“You’re just scared!” Janet seethed. “You’re scared of Black Power!”
Janet raised her arm and slapped Mrs. Salzman’s cheek.
Lina couldn’t believe it.
By the time she and Mrs. Salzman had overcome their shock, Janet was already plunging down the stairs. Lina leapt after her, but the girl ran faster.
“Janet—stop!”
But Janet cut past the security guard and darted out the main doors.
Lina returned to the classroom to find Mrs. Salzman sitting in her desk chair with her face turned toward the window, one hand still on the injured cheek.
“Mrs. Salzman!” Lina reached for her shoulder. “Are you all right? You should tell Principal Harris!”
Mrs. Salzman slipped away from Lina’s touch. Without a glance at Lina, she stood and began packing her briefcase.
“He wouldn’t believe me,” she said. “Or care.”
“What?”
“I’m on the side of the enemy.”
“Why would you say that?” Lina was flabbergasted.
“It’s not just Janet. It’s all of you,” Mrs. Salzman said, waving her hands with exasperation. “You set these children on us, and then you stand and watch.”
“No one ever said…”
“Teaching them to hate what you call ‘white people.’?” Mrs. Salzman tucked her long braid into a hat and glared at Lina, a tight fury in her wet eyes. “That’s what you all are doing. The opposite of what the Reverend King believed. You and your new colleagues—you’re teaching these children to hate. And you think you are the only people ever to be mistreated on this earth, but I’m a Brownsville girl. I grew up right here, and my brother started the Brownsville Boys Club. And things weren’t easy. You’re too young to remember, but six million of my people were murdered in Nazi concentration camps by hateful people who raised their fists in the air and declared themselves the fittest race on earth. And now my colleagues promote the same kind of behavior.”
“We don’t promote violence against other people.”
“Why does Nick Parson have Malcolm X posters all over the hallway? Why are there drawings of pale faces in cages?”
“That was Veronica, she was drawing her vision of justice for—”
“I have never seen color. I don’t understand why you’d want the children seeing it.”
Mrs. Salzman seized her briefcase and marched out of the room.
