I admire Cecile Lusby’s first-place winning essay in our recent Writing It Real contest for its use of dialog to involve the reader in the author’s life-changing childhood experience and for the way the essay spans time, letting us know the impacts of our interactions with others affect us for a lifetime, and working out who we are takes decades

American Union
by Cecile Lusby

I started school in 1947 at a time when my mother’s divorce caused us to move from place to place, school to school. Every school campus had a Sunshine Class situated inside a fenced off area where handicapped children were taught. Post-polio patients got around on crutches or wheelchairs, as did those with cerebral palsy. Downs’ Syndrome and “slow” students of all ages and sizes went to that area. Their playground fence set them apart from, but visible to the rest of the campus. Little fingers and hands poked out of the diamond shaped openings in the cyclone fence. I went up to touch their hands and talk to them only to be shoo-ed away before recess ended. The times required that these children be separate.

In fall of 1952 I was almost eleven when we moved in with our great aunt at the family ranch outside of Fresno. I started at American Union Elementary, having just finished fifth grade at St. Joseph’s in Berkeley. The other students in my new class had already chosen their own friends years before. In my second week I returned from lunch taking the back way and saw a girl standing inside the yard of the Sunshine Class. I waved to her.

In the next days we talked over the hurricane fence and got to know each other. She said her name was Benetta, but I could call her Beni. She was in sixth grade too, “But I don’t know why I’m in here. Somebody mixed me up.”

“How is that?” I asked.

“Look around, Ceci. Everyone here is  handicapped or slow. What are the teachers thinking?” Beni’s brow furrowed.

Once in class again, I waited for everyone to get busy with desk work before I raised my hand.

“What is it, Cecile?” Mrs. Matheson said.

“Can I check something with you?”

My teacher motioned for me to come up to her desk, where with my back turned to the class, I broached the subject on my mind. I murmured the story of Benetta and her problem. I asked why somebody didn’t take her out of Sunshine.

“Wait now, slow down, you better show me at recess.”

When the bell rang, the other students streamed out onto the playground, I took Mrs. Matheson out the back door to the little yard next door and pointed to my restless new friend in the Sunshine Class.

“I see, let’s go back now,” Mrs. Matheson said, ushering me once again to her desk. “You know that girl just started here.”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes the colored children have to wait while we figure out where to place them. It takes time.”

“That’s easy,” I said. “She’s in sixth grade.”

“We know that many of the children who come from schools in the South are behind. They don’t get the same training or books as we do in California. They catch up eventually, but most are a year or two behind in reading.”

I listened for a minute, and then spoke up.

“Beni’s not from the South. She’s just moved here from Oakland, and I’m from Berkeley. There’s nothing wrong with her.”

This time my teacher was quiet.

“Cecile, let me write you a pass to the principal. I have to stay here with my students, but if you want to, you can go to see if Mrs. Sorenson will talk to you now.”

I took the pass and spoke to the principal as properly as I could, since this was my chance to speak up and I wanted to be heard.

“Mrs. Sorenson, if you just go over and talk to her, you’ll see she’s just fine. She talks so fast my mind can’t keep up with her. She has an uncle who’s deaf, so she knows finger spelling. She knows all the songs in her Hit Parade magazine by heart and some country songs, too.”

“All right then, I’ll look into it. You can go back to class now.” Mrs. Sorenson said.
I didn’t know what would happen, but the next week Mrs. Matheson opened the classroom door and Benetta walked in and took a seat. I was overjoyed.

Beni and I became inseparable after that. I had longed for a good friend I could share my innermost thoughts with, someone who would tell me her secrets, and someone I could say almost anything to. I invited her and another friend, Marylou Orozco over to our place one Saturday. We giggled and gossiped and sang along with the radio. Mama fixed a lunch of tuna sandwiches, but stayed in the kitchen that day. After the girls went home Mama sat me down to explain:

“Ceci, I want you to listen. You can have your friends, all sorts of friends now. But it’s time you knew you cannot be bringing home Negro or Mexican friends in seventh or eighth grade because things change in high school, and we do not mix with them socially in high school. Not at dances, and certainly not for dating.”

“Why can’t I keep the friends I have now?”

“Why? Why can’t you get your head out of the clouds, young lady.  It’s just the way it is? Don’t make it harder than it already is.” My mother left the room.

This time there was nothing as obvious as a fence or a wall, but my mother had drawn her line, an invisible line. My face felt hot and yet I was shivering. Did other white mothers in our country know about this cutting off point? Was this the way everybody thought? Was it about the part of our US History book that said they used to count slaves as 3/5 of a person? The part of the book I thought was a misprint?

In the 1953 academic year Beni and I moved up to seventh grade and were still best friends. She was by this time tall and strong, a fierce tetherball opponent who slammed me down in seconds. We loved to sing together in the afternoon on the phone. While I could learn a song after the second hearing, Beni astounded me many times by having a song memorized after hearing it only once.

Beni was advanced physically as well, already wearing a bra at age eleven. I was still in my fifth grade undershirts, standing about four feet, nine inches, but in the back of my mind I knew I was on the same path to puberty, and that I would catch up. I could not race ahead, nor could I slow the changes in Beni. Never for a minute did I think of time passing in terms of eighth or ninth grade and my mother’s deadline. There was still the rest of seventh grade ahead of us.

Her family were Jehovah’s Witnesses who did not celebrate holidays, nor believe in saints, so we decided not to talk about religion to avoid arguing. When spring came she didn’t wear green for St. Patrick’s Day. At the end of April, the tether pole turned into a May pole for our May Day festival. Fresno began to heat up, and then came baseball. Before the end of the school year, Beni wanted me to go with her to the playground so she could sit and watch the boys practice. She had her eye on one boy I didn’t know, one who rode on her school bus. I saw him across the field, and saw her staring. He ignored her, and strutted around the other players flexing his muscles. He started yelling and swearing at the other boys within his earshot.

“Do you really like that boy, Beni? Listen to his language!”

“Come on, Ceci. He’s just kidding around. To me, he’s cute.”

“You’re better than that. He’s not good enough. Why would you want that ni…..?”

I saw her draw up next to me. I heard her gasp.

I looked up at the instant the light in her eyes went out. I had hurt my friend, and now she was up on her feet, furious.

“I heard you, Ceci. How could you say that?”

“Oh my God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. Not you…”

I stammered. I had been trained never to use that word.

“I thought you were my friend, not prejudiced,” she said. “Now you? Even you? “ She looked at me. “Yes, even you.” She turned her back and walked away.

The next day she wouldn’t talk to me, or the day after that. I kept my head down on my desk. I read. Mrs. Matheson asked me what was wrong. The whole class noticed our falling out. The weekend came and went and by Monday I was beside myself.

“Beni, please. I said I was sorry. Won’t you be my friend again?”

“Will you swear not to say that word ever?”

“Of course, “ I said. We tried again to be buddies until the end of the school year and after that we had just our phone calls. It was difficult then, strained. Nothing was ever the same. Then Mama put me back in Catholic school when we moved away.

I never saw Beni again. The decades went by and I looked her up on Google. She is a business owner, an entrepreneur who founded a civil rights organization dedicated to fighting the KKK. Her program has lasted for over 30 years. She never married, and never had children. She is her own boss.

As for me I left home at 19 and the next year I ran off with a black man, married, had two children and divorced, causing my mother to cut off all communication for twenty years. My children and I grew up together, went to college, and made good lives, but I still feel a lump in my throat whenever I remember the day I used the N word. It reminds me of my imperfection and of my failure to live up to my standards. But my remorse drove me to work harder to remove racial barriers in our country.      In 1976, when my daughter Morgan called after she arrived at middle school before her records did and was put in a special education class because she looked African American, I thought again of Beni. Strangely enough, though, it wasn’t until my recent seventieth birthday and its gift of time that I could think about going to Mrs. Matheson and then to the principal to speak up for my friend and see my behavior and my character in a balanced way. I can move now beyond regret when I remember Beni and give thanks for the year that changed my course and set me on my path.

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