Sallie Lou Pinkston came from Mobile, Alabama, to the small, northern
town of Cade Mills, when she was ten years old. She was the only girl in
an adoring family of brothers—a lovely, sunny-haired child, with the
confidence in her right to rule her world which her happy family life
had given her. She entered the fifth grade that fall, and scored an
immediate success with the whole room, teacher included. Her southern
accent was a continual source of delight; her matter-of-course
assumption that everyone wanted to do the entertaining things she
planned kept the whole room, with two exceptions, tied to her dainty
apron-strings.
The two exceptions were Laurastine and Enameline Flack. Laurastine and
Enameline belonged to the one colored family in town, and they had
always attended the public school and had always been well treated by
the other children. But when Sallie Lou cast her golden charm over the
room, things changed. Sallie Lou didn’t understand why they should be
there at all, and she surely didn’t intend to tolerate them as her
social equals. Led by the irresistible charm of Sallie Lou, vying with
each other to stand in her graces, the other children began to ignore
the two little colored girls, or openly to laugh at them and pointedly
to leave them out of their games.
Miss Stone, the teacher, being a northern woman and a believer in
literal democracy, thought this a very bad state of things indeed. The
two little girls were well behaved, wistful, little creatures, whose
tears at the new turn of things went straight to Miss Stone’s big heart.
She knew that the remedy must come in some way through Sallie Lou, who
had caused the havoc; for there was no possible way to supplant her
dominant influence, nor was such a thing desirable except for this one
cause. Sallie Lou had wakened the room to a new interest in many things,
and in everything except the treatment of the little “niggers” she was
sweetness and docility itself.
Could Sallie Lou be converted? Miss Stone tried it, with doubt in her
heart; she knew what prejudice is. She invited Sallie Lou to her house
for supper one Friday night, and after supper they sat by the fire and
had a long talk about it. Miss Stone presented the pathetic cases of
Laurastine and Enameline as touchingly as she could, but Sallie Lou
merely smiled divinely and told her, most sweetly, that of course she
wanted to do what was right, but that it wasn’t right for “niggers” to
mix socially with white people, and that the town should provide a
separate school for them. She was firmly entrenched behind the prejudice
of her rearing in a community which solved the problem this way.
Miss Stone reluctantly retreated from the attack, but she did not give
up. She went behind the prejudice to its support, behind the example to
its example. She cultivated Sallie Lou’s mother, her father, her four
charming brothers. The parents, finding few cultured people in the
little town, welcomed the well-read teacher and were very cordial to
her. When she had won their respect and liking, Miss Stone asked for a
frank talk with them about the conditions in her room, and told them
just how the irresistible Sallie Lou was leading all the other children
in the fifth grade to snub the two little Flacks.
At first the Pinkstons were amused, then they were indignant. They too
felt that the two colored children had no business in a school for white
children. But when Miss Stone had shown them that a separate school was
impracticable in a town that had but one colored family, that conditions
were very different from those of a southern city, and that a change in
Sallie Lou’s attitude would avert a personal tragedy for two innocent
little girls, the parents came finally to see the matter from her point
of view. They promised to talk to Sallie Lou and to persuade her to
change her tactics. Miss Stone thanked them, and changed the subject
quickly and brightly to something else.
Sallie Lou, at first with formal and awkward condescension, but later
with the same frank charm that won everyone to her, asked the two little
outcasts back into the fold of fifth grade fun. The rest fell easily
into their old democratic way of sharing things. Miss Stone had solved
the problem of race prejudice by changing the example.