For old time’s sake
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It took us 30 years, but we finally got even – and maybe a little bit more.
Maybe to you it might seem a small thing that we never had a senior prom in high school, but to us it became a symbol of a time when you couldn’t say the word nigger without having someone shove it back down you’re throat.
Lucky for us, the times have changed – back to those good old days when you weren’t afraid to speak your mind.
All this stuff about making the punishment fit the crime has stuck in my craw since 1957 when this whole thing started.
Little “Miss Liberal” made it happen, coming out of teaching college with her head full of new ideas about civil rights and the “brotherhood of man.”
People always tell you how great the 50s were, but the seeds of the 60s got planted there – even before Kennedy.
And we had the bad luck of getting Little Miss Liberal as our teacher during our senior year.
We didn’t know what political correctness was. For us, senior year was supposed to be a crazy and wild time before we had to buckle down to the real world.
We didn’t care about whether nor not niggers got to sit in the front or the back of the bus, or got an equal education.
We didn’t have any in our school so what was the point?
She was so serious we wanted to shake her and wake her up to what was really important.
We didn’t mean any serious harm with our antics and didn’t take kindly to her treating us like criminals for what we did.
And we certainly didn’t deserve the punishment we eventually got.
Sure, we acted up a little on our field trip to
Nobody got hurt.
Not even when we started hooting at the niggers we saw on
They didn’t even know we insulted them, waving back as our bus passed.
Little Miss Liberal, of course, got bent out of shape, marching up and down the length of the bus, her face so red we thought she would explode, telling us to shut up.
You would have roared as much as we did. And, of course, nobody shut up.
She got so peeved at us, she told the bus driver to turn the bus around and go
back to
“You people don’t deserve a field trip,” she told us – as if any of us really cared about going to the museum.
Most of us had come along just to escape the boredom of school and avoid her dull lectures.
Had we come to catch any of the strip clubs, then we might have been upset turning back.
As it was we managed to get a couple of girls drunk enough to do their own strip on the bus, making the whole trip back an even bigger hoot.
Little Miss Liberal was so peeved by that time she had stopped shouting and just glared out the window.
Boy, did we get our when we got back to school.
She put up such a stink that the principal came down and lectured us for an hour on how we needed to be “responsible citizens.”
I think he caught how little we cared from our bored faces that only got him peeved, too.
We figured nothing mattered since we already had our final grades and knew we would be graduating in June short of a natural disaster.
We never figured that bastard would cancel our senior prom.
Of course, our parents protested. And when that didn’t work, pleaded with him to be reasonable. Then, they threatened. But the man would not be moved.
When they took the matter to the school board, he got up and made this God-awful speech full of liberal bullshit about how we ought not to get away with misusing minorities or mistreating women. As if the name calling, the beer bottles and the strip tease on the bus hurt anybody.
We didn’t know it, but we had become victims of the times since all of those on the school board were flaming liberals, too.
Then, the mayor got hold of the story – and though a few years earlier we could count on him to hunt down communists even when none exited, he had hopped on the “back of the bus” bandwagon and decided to make us an example of all that was wrong with society.
And while our parents eventually voted him and the school board out of office, it came too late to help us. By that time, we had scattered across the whole country, where we found nearly everybody thinking like they did.
Years passed, then decades, and those of us still in touch, pretty much felt the same way, as if we had been ripped off. Those liberal bastards had stolen a precious moment from our lives, one we knew we could never get back.
It was a gap in our lives that each of us ached to fill.
Perhaps we needed to wait for times to change, and some new more acceptable way of thinking to come into vogue.
Then someone got the idea that maybe we could have a reunion, and call it a prom.
When we approached the school board about it, they not only agreed, they agreed to pay for it, and searched out everybody they could find from that graduating class, so they could make up for the wrong they did us.
Sure, Miss Liberal was there, looking older and sadder, but no less red-faced as each one of us walked in and told her what we thought.
She nearly fainted when I got up to make my speech and told everybody there that it’s okay to call a nigger a nigger – for old time’s sake.