than the two racially divided student bodies. There was on the majority
of the staff an air of resignation, of discouragement and the whiff of
alcoholism. In a strange sort of way I sympathized with them, even
though they were my sworn adversaries as teachers, they were trapped in
this glorified hell hole just like I was. They had begun as their
careers bright eyed and dreamed of teaching bright-eyed students but
ended up as prison guards, jail wardens and meeting student's eyes upon
the clock.
It was a sham school and those smart enough to realize it had best to
keep their mouths shut because the teachers were well aware of it too
and didn't want to hear any crap out of a sixteen-year-old kid. So I
learned to play a little game just to keep it all interesting. If I was
stoned, I acted like I wasn't; waving my arm to answers the questions.
If I wasn't stoned I acted like I was, "What? Were you talking to me
man? What was the question again man? I didn't hear you?"
Several times I was sent to the office on a pretense, "David would you carry this note down to the office for me please?"
"What? You want me to do what? The office? Yeah, Ok, sure thing man.
Then I would enter the office as if I just left a Jr. ROTC meeting. "Hi!
Good morning ma'am Mr. Warren sent me down here with a very important
note for the principal. Would you like to give it to him ma'am, or
should I?
She would open the note and read the code "On Drugs! Flying higher than a
kite!" then she would say, "I'll see if Mr. Connors can see you now."
Mr. Conner would call out from his office, "David Cox, in here now!" So as I
entered I could see Conner giving me the once over. Then he began,
"David, do you have any idea why Mr. Warren sent you down here?
"No sir, Mr. Connors, I really don't but Mr. Warren seems to me to be
the kind of person who either likes you or he doesn't, and personally, I
think he's got it in for me. Whenever I raise my hand to answer
questions he won't call on me and whenever I don't raise my hand he
sends me down here to waste your time."
Connors began to roll his eyes because it was perfectly obvious that I
wasn't stoned. But everyone here played games, so don't think that I
started this all by myself. When I left the Principal's office I asked
for a hall pass and Mrs. Riddley the office secretary, told me, "You
don't need one because were on a teacher's errand. But when I returned
to Mr. Warren's class, his first question to me was, "Where's your hall
pass mister?"
"Mrs. Riddley told me I didn't need one!"
"Well, she was wrong Mr. Cox, go back and get one."
So I returned to the office, but Mrs. Riddley insisted that I didn't need a pass and refused to give me one. So there I was, in high school legal
limbo, not in class and not legally out of class and so there was only
one thing left to do. I left, I went home and waited for the school to
call. It wasn't unusual for them not to call; it all depended on what
kind of day they were having. It was just another level of game being
played because it was all about marking you present. The school got
their federal funding dependent on the number of warm bodies counted in
desks, so missing bodies were sometimes best left unaccounted for.
Did I feel bad about missing school? Should I have felt bad about missing school? Well I didn't, and I wasn't, because it wasn't a school at all.
It was an apparition, a pretend school, and the way the community felt
about it was like this, "its good enough for the niggers and white trash
but I don't want my tax dollars to pay for it!" That is why in 1972 the
community had not raised property taxes to support the schools since
1956. It had only been seven years since the county had begun to supply
students with textbooks. Legislation which had been pushed through the
legislature by a Governor who himself had gone through such a school
system and had only advanced by reading from the textbooks
of others.
It had given him a photographic memory, the ability to memorize a page
with one reading. The Eighth Air force and the GI bill had given him a
chance to go to college and then to law school. He was the proverbial
one in a million, a flower growing through a crack in the asphalt. He
became a judge and made history by becoming the first judge in the
state's history to sentence a white man to death for murdering a black
man. He then went on to make history yet again, by blocking the door at
the University of Alabama.
There was a strange duality to the entire society which preached the
gospel of church going and hard work while looking down on those who
worked the hardest and went to the wrong church. They threw stones at
the alleged immorality of others while the immorality that went on at
the country club went uninspected and was above reproach.
For me? It was perfect for me, I belonged there. It was Dante's lowest
level of hell. I lived here in my own duality, a house that was not a
home. A family that wasn't a family, but a cinder of a star that had
fallen to Earth. I was sleeping soundly when my childhood ended; my
sister woke me and in somber and serious tones and announced, "Dave,
mothers gone."
Well that was it, not much more to say. The shell shocked and debased
gathered on a January morning amid the blowing snow to bury a body in
the dirt, your mother, your wife or your childhood. Two months later was
my first day at Communist Martyrs High school and the teacher asked,
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