Chapter 18: The Little Papers

When Cookie was deemed recovered by Nurse Fleming, she was given a hall pass and sent back to math class. However the class-ending bell had rung as she made it back to the room so Cookie merely collected her books, from her desk, and went to her next class which was history.

Mr. Boswell was a short, paunchy man in black, thick-frame glasses. Although he didn't look that old, he only had brownish-graying hair around the circumference of his bald head. He wore a white, short-sleeve shirt and baggy, brown trousers that were held up (around his protruding belly) by thick red suspenders. Standing with his hairy arms to his sides, he looked like Tweedle-dee from 'Alice In Wonderland'.

He had made a seating chart for his class and handed each student a copy as they came into the room.

Cookie's desk was in the front row, just to the right of Mr. Boswell's large desk.

Looking around, she saw that Kathy Grimes sat to her left and Nancy Martin to the left beyond her. An attractive girl she knew as Kelly Greene sat to Cookie's right and Gwen Butsell, a heavy girl with thick-thighs and glasses with Coke-bottle lenses, to the right of her. In fact, the whole front row of desks were occupied by girls.

As everyone became settled and the bell rang to announce the start of second hour, Mr. Boswell stood before his desk and introduced himself while, the whole time, his eyes scanned from student to student around the room.

In mid sentence he stopped and looked back to the fourth row and asked pretty, red-haired Stacy Connelly, who was wearing an above the knee length, flower-print dress, to change seat locations with Gwen Butsell, in the front row, and informed the both of them that this would be a permanent seating assignment change.

After the girls had traded places, Mr. Boswell continued his introduction, walking slowly, back and forth, at the front of the room, as he spoke.

"This class will be less about history and more about current events," he told the students. "The struggle of the negro race, in the South, is the greatest struggle this country has ever faced and I am deeply committed to that struggle as each and every one of you should be..."

As Mr. Boswell talked and paced, he kept stopping and bending to pick up little scraps of paper that were scattered in seemingly random places across the front of the classroom floor.

"Our country was founded on the fact that ALL people were created equal," he said, "and the blatant discrimination against the negro, in the South, runs totally counter to the principals that our nation was founded on."

As he stopped and bent again, to pick up a scrap of paper in front of where Kelly Greene was sitting, Cookie noticed that he was looking under her desk as if he were trying to see something there.

Kelly didn't seem to notice and Mr. Boswell stood upright and continued, "It is a dirty shame that officials in the South continue to look the other way as innocent negroes are beaten and tortured and lynched for simply seeking their due civil rights..."

And now Mr. Boswell was in front of Stacy Connelly's desk and he bent again for another scrap of paper and hardly hid the fact that he wasn't even looking at the floor, he was looking directly under Stacy's desk and, being that her knees were slightly parted, he spent a good deal of time bent and looking.

Cookie even noticed Kathy Grimes reach over and nudge Nancy and point the scene out to her and both girl's giggled quietly, to each other, as he now stood upright and continued talking.

"I want us all to be civil rights activists ... every single one of us," he said as he came to just in front of Cookie's desk and stopped. "Because if any one of us is oppressed and not free," and he bent now for a scrap of paper, on the floor in front of her, "then all of us are oppressed and not free."

Cookie reached down to smooth her plaid skirt to the sides of her thighs and she put her knees together and placed her hand over them as she watched him looking under her desk.

Mr. Boswell seemed to glance a look of disapproval, up at her reddened face, as he then stood and placed the little scrap of paper, he had collected, in his pocket and continued with his lecture.

"None of you privileged, suburban, white kids here are free as long as poor, suffering, hungry black kids exist in the South," he said, as he walked to in front of Kathy's seat and bent for a shard of paper there.

Cookie and Nancy both watched him as Mr. Boswell looked under Kathy's desk toward her exposed knees and the hem of the white skirt that she was wearing with her light-pink, knit sweater. Kathy, who was loudly chewing her gum and looking back at him with a sweet, angelic smile on her freckled face, abruptly parted her legs so that each of her knees were at opposite sides of her chair and Mr. Boswell's eyes went wide as dinner-plates and he seemed to inhale whatever the sight was before him.

"C-c-colored people," he stuttered now, still bent and looking under Kathy's desk, "should be the number one priority of every one of you ... as it is of me and all the other members of the N double-A CP." And he slowly closed his eyes, as if to etch the sight, he was seeing, into his mind, and then he stood, quickly turning his back on the class, adjusting something at the front of his trousers and walking stiffly to stand behind his desk.