1960s, Ocean View, Delaware

By Joseph Taylor

Every year, I look forward to telling my high-school English students about the night Henry David Thoreau spent in jail. The Walden Pond author had refused to pay taxes due to the U.S. government’s support of slavery at the time.

When Thoreau’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson comes to bail him out of jail, Emerson asks, “What are you doing in there?” Thoreau replies with a question of his own: “What are you doing out there?”

The story inevitably leads to an enthusiastic classroom discussion about injustice being a fact of life for many people in the world. We question how much of an obligation we have, if any, to fight or to ease the sting of injustice. And I invariably end up telling my students about an act of injustice I witnessed almost 40 years ago.

James and I were in third grade, and the year was 1967. In spite of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in the Supreme Court 13 years earlier, integration had only recently taken place at Lord Baltimore Elementary School in Ocean View, Delaware. I didn’t comprehend the civil-rights struggles and court battles that led to our meeting.

I don’t remember how we eventually became best buddies, though it probably started with James’ mischievous smile or the excessive volume of his laughter that always pushed the limits of acceptability in Mrs. Mitchell’s class, where we sat next to each other. Nor do I remember noticing our different skin colors — his dark, mine light. In fact, I never noticed any significant differences between us until that morning at school.

The circle around James had already formed when I arrived at the remote corner of the playground. The ring consisted of about 12 boys, half of whom were my friends. They were slowly rotating around James as he looked desperately for a way out of his captivity. At times, he would try to break through the line, only to be shoved or kicked back into the middle.

As James became more and more frightened, the laughs and jeers of the pack became more chaotic, its racial slurs more brutal. Over and over, the boys chanted while James kicked and clawed to break free. From my viewpoint in the shadows behind the jungle gym, I saw the look of terror in his eyes.

As our eyes connected, he must have seen my fear in return. He must have thought that his friend was coming to his rescue.

When I ask my students how they would respond to this situation, I remind them that I knew every boy — some of whom I truly considered friends — participating in this racist frenzy. The responses over the years are varied but predictable.

Some say they would have responded with physical force. Others say they would have taken off to find a teacher in hopes that the “cavalry” would arrive in time to liberate James from his captivity. I can always anticipate when a student is getting ready to ask the inevitable question that is so difficult to answer: “What did you do, Mr. Taylor?”

I wonder how many of them already know the answer before I tell them about how I turned my back on James that day. How I walked away without telling anyone about what I saw. How a key battle on the playground was lost that day in a war against racism and ignorance. How, by turning my back on the injustice there, I had turned my back on injustice everywhere. How the memory of that day continues to scratch and claw at me, until I am able once again to coax it back into the deepest recess of my mind.

My students are always surprised to hear that from the moment I walked away from James, I have no further memories of that day. In fact, I have very few memories of James from that moment through July 1, 1976, nine years later, when I received a phone call.

Although he had never learned to swim, James dove into the water to rescue a drowning nephew. An uncle managed to save the young child, but no one got to James in time. At the funeral, his brother told me that he would never forget the look in James’ eyes before he went under for the last time.

I had seen James sinking. I told him that I understood.

For many years, I told the story because I thought it served to emphasize the importance of our making decisions today that will lead to consequences we can live with tomorrow. Only recently have I realized that I tell the story as an act of catharsis. Each time, I see the look in James’ eyes that day.

I have been told that I expect too much bravery from the scared third grader still roaming the playgrounds of my past. Perhaps. I do believe, however, that we are never too young or old to strive to make the world around us a more just place to live. And like Thoreau, we cannot be afraid to follow our conscience, even if we land on the other side of the bars or on the wrong side of the circle.

Joseph Taylor writes and teaches English in Costa Rica. He believes that to truly see your country and understand your personal history, one must live abroad for a few years.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 | Email This Post

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 12:02 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.