Wingshooters Read Online Free PDF Page B

to teach at our school, and his wife was a nurse at the clinic. A black couple had moved to Deerhorn, a town that, before my own arrival the year before, had never been home to a soul who wasn’t white. In that town, in 1974, this was as dramatic and inconceivable as deer starting to speak or a flock of ducks flying backwards. To my grandparents and their friends, black people lived elsewhere, in big-city slums or remote country settings, deep in the backwater South. Blacks, they believed, were lazy and ignorant, and if any one Negro had not run afoul of the law, it would only be a matter of time before he succumbed to his basic nature and robbed a house or assaulted a woman. To them, the voting and housing laws of the 1960s and ’70s must have seemed like capitulations, the equivalent of handouts from a weak-willed government and directly counter to the natural order of things. Blacks could be useful, yes, in other parts of the country, to work as field hands or nannies or cooks. But they were certainly not meant to be employed there in Deerhorn. They were not meant to live among whites.
    This unthinking racism was so accepted and prevalent that people didn’t even bother to disguise it. One of the reasons why people were discouraged from visiting places like Chicago and New York was that those places were known to be “dark.” If a teenager stole a car or committed a petty crime, he was said to be acting “colored.” The only black men who were respected were athletes—Dave May of the Brewers, MacArthur Lane of the Packers. But even they were only acceptable in their prescribed public roles—as sports heroes removed from everyday life. And there were limits to the admiration. Many people, including Charlie, had been unhappy that spring when Hank Aaron had broken Babe Ruth’s home run record.
    That morning, several teachers gathered near the steps that led down to the playground. Miss Anderson was there, and Mr. Sealer, who taught fourth grade. Mrs. Hood, the first grade teacher, stood next to him, and one step above her was the kindergarten teacher, Miss Gandt. Because I usually stayed on a bench near the steps and didn’t wander out to the playground, I could hear their conversation, although they made no real effort to keep their voices down.
    “… can’t believe it,” Mrs. Hood, the first grade teacher, was saying. She was a small woman in her forties who wore her blond hair in a bun and had a voice so high you thought she was pretending. “I know they’ve been telling us, but I never thought they’d actually go through with it.”
    “I’ll tell you, if Janie had known that this would happen,” said Miss Gandt, the teacher from kindergarten, who was dark-haired and gruff, “she never would have taken the time off. She would have stayed in her class till the second she went into labor.”
    “Fred says she’s all in knots about it,” said Mr. Sealer, the fourth grade teacher. He was in his fifties, with a paunch and very red cheeks, and he was known to keep a flask of whiskey in his desk. “This country’s going to hell and it’s happening fast. I told you that mess in Boston was going to affect us. It’s crazy—white children being bused into the ghetto, and those ghetto children let loose in white schools. The way things are going these days, with busing and all, it’s no surprise they’re letting niggers teach our children.”
    Mrs. Hood nodded and leaned forward so that Mr. Sealer could light her cigarette. “Not to mention his wife’s going to be working at the clinic.”
    “But at least we can avoid the clinic,” Miss Anderson said, sounding almost mournful. “With school, the parents don’t have a choice. What are we going to do about these poor children?”
    “Well, couldn’t you do something, Penny?” Miss Gandt asked intently. “I mean, couldn’t you talk to Steven?”
    There was a silence. Although Miss Anderson’s romance with Mr. Baker was general knowledge, it was