Carrie Hughes takes her son’s hand.
They approach the front doors of Harrison
Street School. Langston pulls his hand away,
not belligerent, but independent, even
at the age of six. They open wooden doors,
enter a musky-smelling foyer. A snippy
attendant asks what they want. The attendance’s
middle-age face attests she’s a smoker,
skin find-lined and drawn. The attendant says
they’ll have to wait.
Half an hour later, the principal ushers
Carrie and her son into his office.
Carrie tells him she wants to enroll her son
in the first grade. The principal, Eli S. Foster,
a heavy man with thinning hair, pinched nose,
puckered lips that look as if he’d brushed
his teeth with lemon juice, rares back
in his chair, evidently offended by the very idea,
leans forward with folded hands atop his desk,
demands that Langston attend the more-distant,
colored children’s Washington School.
Carrie protests that her son cannot walk that
distance daily. She tells the principal that
he will hear more about his decision when
she addresses the Topeka Board of Education.
She grabs Langston’s hand again. Mother and son
leave as quickly as possible.
At his grandmother’s house, he slumps
on the porch, hears them through the screen door
throwing a particular word back and forth.
He does not understand “Segregation,” but
the word chills him, lies at the bottom of his stomach
like a chunk of everlasting ice.
