The Boy on the Bus

And the Jim Crow era was finally ending. Racism remained. It was like humidity -- always there, saturating the atmosphere. North Florida is part of the Deep South. Even a college town -- Gainesville is home to the University of Florida -- wasn't immune. Alachua County was among the last places in America to integrate.

All through the 1960s, the white public schools had just a token black student or two. For every KKK lunatic, there were countless good folks who were frightened by the idea of mixed-race schools. To put it in perspective: Even the Florida Gators, the university football team, didn't field a single black player until wide receiver Willie Jackson got his chance in the fall of 1970.

Desegregation came about only through much trauma and struggle by a few idealistic civil rights leaders -- among them the Rev. Wright, whose daughter, LaVon, was one of three black students to integrate Gainesville High School. The FBI told Wright that it wasn't safe to let LaVon take the bus to school. He had to drop her off and pick her up. White students called her every name in the book. She was beaten up.

"We had to know what integration was like," Wright said. "It was not exactly what we thought it would be."

Then came busing. Most whites lived on the west side of town, most blacks on the east. In a 1971 decision upholding forced busing, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote: "The remedy for such segregation may be administratively awkward, inconvenient and even bizarre in some situations and may impose burdens on some; but all awkwardness and inconvenience cannot be avoided in the interim period when remedial adjustments are being made to eliminate the dual school systems."

Yes, I found it rather awkward going to Duval, but only because I found it rather awkward being alive, being 9 years old, being kind of brainy and very skinny and self-conscious about our family being poor (though probably not as poor as most of the kids who walked to Duval from the neighborhood). I was 57 pounds of insecurity.

And those girl creatures: transfixing, terrifying.

But racial tension? None. I'm not suggesting that we were ultra-enlightened, that we were little angels of egalitarianism. Just that race didn't matter as much as other things. My Mom's second marriage broke up: That mattered.

My older brother, Kevin, who was in sixth grade at Duval and aspired to rock stardom, remembers the biggest news that year: "Black Sabbath came out with their first album." Also, marbles were huge. The sixth-graders spent all of recess trying to win marbles, one precision thumb-flick at a time. Cat's eyes were big. Baby blues. Kids were judged not by the color of their skin, but by the contents of their marble pouches.

I had a great homeroom teacher, Mr. Terrell. He'd been in the Army and knew how to maintain discipline. He was also young, hip and fun. You didn't see a lot of male teachers in those days. That he was black didn't seem as important as the fact that he played touch football with us every day for a solid hour after lunch. He played quarterback on both sides of the ball. (Trust me when I report that Terrell-to-Achenbach was the Montana-to-Rice of Duval Elementary.) Mr. Terrell seemed to believe in me; he would tell me that I could do anything I set my mind to -- a potent spell from a teacher's magic wand.

Another blessing: Mr. Cliett, the vice principal, who had been the first white administrator to arrive at Duval, several months earlier. He was full of experiments, like a chess tournament in which the students dressed up as knights and bishops and rooks and whatnot and marched around on a giant chessboard on the softball diamond. He also taught a special "enrichment" class for a select group of us with good grades. We began with logic, straight from a college textbook.

Bill Cliett is now retired and -- he told me when I called -- working on a book about James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake." Which seems like exactly the kind of thing Mr. Cliett should be doing.