The Girl on the Outside Read Online Free

Burt’s face and again felt the guilt and shame that flooded her when she had fled to her room.
    The moment she shouted out had been the moment she realized that her family was falling apart over school integration. She didn’t want Negroes in their lives just as she didn’t want them in her school.
    Her mind was plagued with a nagging fear, with the anxiety she often felt when a storm was brewing. She sat quiet and still in a storm, chilled by lightning that licked the edge of dark clouds like the tongues of snakes, the thunder too far away to be heard.
    Sophia now fingered the ruffles on the white organdy curtains at the window and crushed them up around her face, thinking about her Grandma Stuart. If her grandma were alive, she would straighten Burt out.
    She sat on the floor beneath the window. In spite of the heat, she was comforted by the coolness of her room. Practically all the furniture in it had once belonged to her grandmother, Sophie Stuart. Sophia had been named for her, pronouncing Sophia with a long i, So-phi-a .
    The room was spacious enough to hold a four-poster bed. And even in summer Sophia insisted on covering that bed with a heavy white candlewick spread that was an heirloom in their family.
    â€œIt’s nothing but a dust collector,” Ida had said when Sophia wanted the bedspread. “It’s old and hot and heavy.”
    â€œBut I promise I’ll fold it every night. Please, may I?” Now, sometimes as she kept her promise, Sophia wondered if the beauty the spread gave was worth the trouble.
    She liked her room with its pale green walls and white ruffled curtains. The heaviness of an old desk and her bookcase was lessened by touches of color: pale yellow roses, a gold and blue pennant from Chatman High, a delicate hand-painted screen, Burt’s gift from Korea, and paintings of her own here and there on the walls.
    Now she stretched out on the floor and lay quiet and still, trying to concentrate on the sounds of that early evening, but her mind wandered back to Burt and the nine Negroes. She felt that exciting curiosity she had suppressed earlier, when she wondered how it would be with them in the classroom. Then suddenly she was frightened in a way that she had not been since she was a little girl.
    She could dimly perceive an evening, hot like this, when she was about six or seven years old. She had gone with Grandma Stuart to South End, a section of town where only Negroes lived. She rode in the back seat of a big black car while her Grandma drove. The pavement ended abruptly and Sophia found herself in another world, a world of dusty streets and small houses with unpainted sidings. Many of the houses were adorned with pots of ferns hanging on porches.
    Twilight was lavender and the people, dark as the twilight, sat on their porches. Soft voices were warmly punctuated with laughter. Sophia remembered the smells of spices, of fish and smoke mixed with dust.
    Her grandmother pulled up in front of a house where lots of people sat on the porch. The yard was filled with children playing; smaller ones jumped rope or played tag; large ones played an unknown circle game, singing and clapping their hands. They were having so much fun that Sophia wanted to join them.
    â€œI’ll play just a little while,” she said to Grandma Stuart. She reached to open the car door.
    â€œDon’t you open that door!” The tone startled Sophia and she looked at her grandmother. The look on her grandmother’s face frightened Sophia.
    â€œI’ll be right here,” Sophia said, thinking her grandmother felt she might get lost.
    â€œYou will not get out of this car.”
    â€œWhy, Grandma?”
    â€œBecause I say so.”
    Her grandmother had never spoken to Sophia in that tone of voice before.
    Suddenly, Sophia became afraid. She crawled over the seat and sat close beside her grandmother. Her grandmother honked the horn.
    Soon a tall, dark woman came out to the