we mean it . . . but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other, that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes?”
“Seems to me that the Negroes are doing just fine,” Sarah observed from the kitchen, where she was ironing sheets.
“The Negroes are not doing fine,” Jo said, and her sister had muttered, “Oh, boy, here we go.”
“All I’m saying is that nobody made any special laws to help the Jews,” said Sarah.
“I think that things were a little easier for the Jews. Insofar as nobody brought us to this country as property,” said Jo.
“Maybe we weren’t slaves, but I certainly don’t remember anyone throwing us welcome parties. Remember the M.S. St. Louis?”
Jo nodded. It felt like every week of Hebrew school they’d gotten lessons on the Holocaust, including the story of the ship of nine hundred Jewish refugees that had been turned away from the United States in 1939 because the government believed the passengers were spies.
“I’ve told you what it was like for me as a girl. Kids calling me names. Throwing things at me. And nobody made any laws to make it easier for Jews to find jobs or houses,” Sarah said, pointing her spray bottle of starch at Jo for emphasis.
“Right,” said Jo. “You know what it’s like to feel discrimination. So why would you want anyone else to suffer?”
“I don’t want anyone to suffer. I want everyone to have the same chances.”
“That’s all these laws will do. Give Negroes the same chances.”
“No,” Sarah said, setting her iron down with a thump. “It’s giving them more.” She raised her chin. “Negroes could work hard and have all of that, too. If they wanted.”
“That’s like saying you could win a marathon if you had to start five miles behind everyone else. And then told if you didn’t win, you just weren’t trying hard enough. Don’t you see the way everything’s set up to keep Negroes from getting ahead?”
Sarah sent the final sheet billowing into the air and began to fold it in precise squares. “I see that the Steins sold their house to the Johnsons. And now our house is worth ten thousand dollars less than what it used to be. That’s what I see.” With that, Sarah had gone to her bedroom, closing the door behind her.
“Dead?” Jo said. At the desk beside hers, a girl named Norma Tester was crying, and Professor Fleiss’s normally robust bass voice was almost too quiet to hear when he said, “Class is dismissed.”
Jo went out to the Diag, which was funereally silent, cutting through the crowds of weeping classmates, looking for a television. Kids were clustered six deep around the sets in the Union, so thickly that it was impossible to see. “It is true?” Jo asked, and the curly-haired boy in front of her nodded grimly, saying, “Cronkite just confirmed it.”
“His poor wife,” said someone, and someone else chimed in, “She just lost that baby, you know.”
“It doesn’t seem real,” Jo said, half to herself. She felt a creeping numbness, the constriction in her chest that she remembered from her worst fights with her mother. All around her, girls were sobbing, boys were shaking their hands and saying, “I can’t believe it,” all of them looking at one another, asking, “What happens now?” Jo felt a wave of longing, the loneliness that she’d trained herself to ignore. I don’t want to be alone, she thought. She wondered if Lynnie had heard the news. That was when the girl in front of her turned around. She’d looked up at Jo and said, in a low, familiar voice, “Will you walk with me? I need to walk. I think if I don’t start moving, I’m going to explode.”
Jo nodded. She felt exactly the same way. Together, the two of them turned and made their way back outside.
“I’m Shelley Finkelbein,” said the girl, and Jo, who hadn’t recognized her yet, said, “Oh.”
“Have we met?” Shelley asked, glancing up at Jo.
Jo shook her head. “You were in my Intro to Philosophy class for about a minute.”
Shelley waved her hand, dismissing philosophy.
“And I saw you in Romeo and Juliet.”
“Oh,” said Shelley, her cheeks turning pink. “Well. At least it wasn’t Carousel. A disaster for the ages.”
“Is that the one where everyone was naked?” Jo asked, remembering what she’d heard about that performance, which ran for three nights in a church basement and had been the talk of the campus.
“Lightly clad,” said Shelley,