By Gini Mascorro
Dallas, TX – ?Why can?t I stay at Meadowbrook?? I whined, when I found out that I?d be taking the bus every day to Mitchell Boulevard. I can?t remember the answer Mom gave me. I wonder if she even understood, herself.
The first days of school were always hard, no doubt about it. But the first thing that stood out about this year was that my mother had to drive me to another subdivision across the freeway where I could catch my bus.
I?ll never forget the first time we took that drive over the train tracks and found ourselves in another world. A 30-minute bus trip to a place we never even knew existed. At least on the way to Meadowbrook, there?d been familiar sights and landmarks. And what made it worse was passing another bus full of kids, headed for the schools in our neck of the woods. Were the same questions running through their minds that ran through mine? During the entire school year, it took a lot of work to get me to the bus stop and school on time. A typical day would start around 5:45 a.m. On the way to the bathroom, I?d find myself resentfully stirring to the gloomy ?Mr. Peppermint? theme on TV and praying that if a tornado did strike that day, my mother would have plenty of time to drive over to Mitchell Boulevard to rescue me. Tornado and air-raid drills had drilled that much into me, at least. The fear that my parents might not make it in time before the school was leveled to the ground by a spring storm or approaching enemy troops kept me up many nights during my second-grade school year.
And the fears didn?t go away as the year progressed. I was scared much of the time?my nerves always on constant alert. And it wasn?t only the fear of tornadoes and Commies. Suppose our bus driver forgot about us on some rainy afternoon and we?d have no way of getting home? Not to mention the fears of being beaten up by the little girls who sneered, ?You don?t belong here!? Naturally, those were the words that were the hardest to overcome.
Were there ever any second-graders in Fort Worth who felt like they fit in? ?Separate but equal? had never occurred to us. We were seven years old and obsessed with the crust on our peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches! Was this supposed to be the big lesson we?d all be grateful for later in life? How could we ever feel equal or even comfortable when unfamiliar with our surroundings? How many other kids out there?Black, White, Brown?felt punished for something they didn?t even know they did? Were we supposed to get some kind of warm-and-fuzzy, one-love feeling from being bused miles across town? If that?s the case, then it definitely eluded me. No reasonable explanations were ever offered.
Looking back, I know that the adults in charge really did have our best interests in mind and did do their best to ensure our right to exist together, to live in a place where we?re guaranteed the right not be excluded from anything based on our skin tone. So for the next big social experiment, I pray that the big ones first ask the little ones what they want, and where they want to be.
Gini Mascorro is a producer at KERA 90.1 in Dallas.