can write.”
This he did, and never wore the sailor suit but once. Bright-eyed as usual, proud, white and blue, he marched one day into class in his Carducci regalia, only to return home crestfallen and confused. Though the girls had loved it, an older boy had teased him all day about being “a fag.”
“What’s a fag?” Arnold demanded of Anna.
She didn’t know.
George: “It’s a kind of sissy. Like a boy who only wants to play with girls, play with dolls—that kind of thing. Johnny was being stupid.”
“Ah, said Anna, “finocchio.”
“I teach you something if such ever happens again. You just say to him, ‘Stick and stones can break my bones,’”—and here George joined in—“‘but names can never hurt me.’
“Can you say that?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
He did, putting “stick” instinctively in the plural.
“Good,” said his father, and punched him affectionately on the shoulder.
Five
The hot Texas summer of ’57 passed uneventfully enough, in Mansfield. So convincing had been last year’s demonstration that August registration needed no more than private reminders about safety for any Negroes who might think of registering their children at all-white MHS. But the effigies waited warily in their garages.
All was not so circumspect in Little Rock next door, where Governor Orval Faubus and the Arkansas National Guard linked arms around Central High School to prevent nine Negro children from entering. President Eisenhower sent a thousand paratroopers to intervene. Like their effigies, Mansfield’s Negroes also waited warily, glued to their radios and TVs. Eventually, they stopped holding their breaths: it would be eight more years before the first black children walked through the door at Mansfield High.
. . .
On Friday evening, October 4th, 1957, all hell broke loose from the skies: the Russkies had put a “sputnik” in the heavens. Commies were circling the earth and were even now passing over Mansfield, Texas, every ninety-six minutes, beeping in Russian to their hearts’ content. President Eisenhower heard the news on the golf links at Gettysburg; the Hitler-Giardinis and the rest of America heard it on the eleven o’clock news. It was a weekend of panic and punditry.
Senator Henry Jackson declared Sputnik “a devastating blow” to America and called upon the president to proclaim “a week of shame and danger.” Republicans warned about the harmful effects of “progressive education,” “flabby curricula,” and “the shirking of basic subjects,” and even liberals joined the weekend chorus, urging more funding for education and science. By consensus the Cold War was not just about weapons but, even more importantly, about knowledge—and this “second Pearl Harbor” showed America was “losing the race.”
On Monday morning, Mrs. Armstrong asked her second grade class to prepare their weekly show-and-tells on the topic of Sputnik. When by Thursday no child had come forward, Mrs. Armstrong asked Edna and Arnold to make a presentation the next morning, the first-week anniversary of the artificial moon.
Edna (“the Brain”) Rawson was the child of Edward Rawson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Texas at Arlington, and Stella Rawson, pediatrician, and the only unabashed liberal in Mansfield. Stella was for everything everyone else opposed and was opposed to everything everyone else was for—except Mansfield High football, for which she was raging with juices, a fanatical president of the Mansfield Tigers Boosters’ Club.
Edna came to class the next morning with what may have been the very first newsprint-and-marker presentation in the history of the United States. Her parents delivered her to school with her mother’s painting easel and a pad of paper only six inches shorter than she was. She hoisted it up on the stand and asked Mrs. Armstrong to turn the cover back to the first page. There, almost invisibly sketched in light pencil, was a diagram she proceeded to darken as she spoke, her father having suggested the value of visuals. Her drawing eventually looked like this:
“This up here,” said Edna, reaching way up on tippy-toes with her Magic Marker™ held by its very end, “is supposed to be someone shooting a gun . . . up on top of a mountain . . . on top of the earth.” She turned to face the class. “Sputnik is nothing new. Hundreds of years ago Isaac Newton . . .”
“Who’s that?” shouted Mac Herndon.
“A scientist. Hundreds of years ago Isaac Newton said that anything you throw is an earth satellite. He really said that. If you stand up here on the mountain and throw a stone or shoot a slow bullet, it falls to the earth [here she filled in the first falling line] in an ellipse.”
“What’s an ellipse?” shouted Dave Herndon, Mac’s twin brother.
“It’s like this.” She sketched one in the air, then filled out the inner ellipse in the diagram. “You only see a small part of it because the bullet or the stone drops so quickly. But the faster you throw or shoot it, the farther it goes before it hits the ground. And if you shoot it fast enough . . .”
“It goes all the way around,” Ellie Blatchly sang out in enthusiastic epiphany.
“Correct,” said Edna, filling in the large curve. “Like a little moon, traveling around again and again, since there’s nothing to stop it. That’s all Sputnik is. It is not new. Thank you very much.” And she bowed to prompted applause. The class was impressed, if slightly intimidated.
Arnold, too, had his presentational strategy. He had decided to adopt once more the persona of Long John Silver, from last year’s school play, dressing up in his pirate costume, complete with eyepatch and his mother’s old wooden leg.
“May I have a volunteer, please?” Six hands shot waving into the air—all from his enamored female fan club. He chose Eunice MacIntyre, the one he was least likely to be teased about being in love with.
“Please go get the globe.” Eunice got up from her seat and fetched the globe from its stand at the back of the room.” Bring it up here.”
With Eunice standing embarrassed in front of the class, Arnold pulled from the paper bag he had been toting a beautiful ten-inch model of a pirate ship he had built from a kit awarded to him for his stellar performance as Long John.
“Turn it so they can see Russia.” Eunice had a hard time with this command, so Arnold did it for her. “This is Moscow,” he said, and placed the ship down on what he thought might be the Kremlin. He looked at the outsized projectile and began revving up its engines with brumm brumms. The boat vibrated slightly atop the Kremlin wall. He began to bob lightly at the knees while increasing the amplitude of the sound. Then all of a sudden there was a big mouth-explosion, and the pirate ship lifted off the earth and began to circle the globe with that steady beeping that had so unnerved American radio listeners over the past week. The path of the orbit had to pass repeatedly through the small space between Carol’s arms, the globe and her chest, but after a few revolutions, she learned to leave him room, and the two of them performed a charming beep-ballet for the next minute. Audience attention was beginning to wander when, surprise of surprises, the bottom of the ship hinged open and out dropped an egg from its bomb bay—an egg that skittered off the globe and splattered on the floor. The class gasped. No one had ever dirtied the floor like that. Even Arnold was shocked: he had been prepared to clean up the globe but not the floor, or Carol’s shoes and socks.
“You will clean that up, Arnold?” Mrs. Armstrong pointedly inquired.
“Yes. But first . . . Sputnik is an aluminum sphere twenty-two inches in diameter, weighing 184 pounds. It is traveling 18,000 miles per hour in an orbit 550 miles above the earth. There is