Eric Flynt

Recess

Police cars pull up to the high school across the street, sirens on. I’m in seventh grade social studies. Coach keeps us from the windows until Miss Ladner, a math teacher, opens the door, jogs in and over to his desk. She’s too excited to whisper, says there was a race riot at the high school, that someone heard gunshots. She’s going to check on Jamie, her son, and find out what’s going on. Coach agrees to watch her students and she leaves to get them. “Race riot” hisses around the room, but we quiet down when Coach tells us to. There are two black kids in the class, a boy and girl in the back corner, who look out the window and at their desktops.

When the other class streams in, we get loud again. They look around for people they know and rush over to tell them what they heard. Then three black students come in together, look around, start walking toward the back window, and Coach says, “Hold on everybody, we gotta’ keep this organized.” He splits their class into random groups, sits them in the aisles. Each aisle has one of the black students, including a girl on the floor a few yards in front of me. When everyone starts whispering again, she pulls her thighs up to her chest, looks around, tries to search out her friends through all the desktops and freckled knees.

We find out later there weren’t any gunshots -- just three fights the principal either overreacted to or reacted to, depending on your view. There’s an assembly where a lot of parents and teachers decide there are racial issues we have to deal with, and by next semester there are security guards and metal detectors in the hallways.

Eric Flynt recently earned his M.A. in fiction from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He now lives and writes in New Orleans, where he teaches middle and high school creative writing at Lusher Charter School.