Forty Minutes of Hell Read Online Free Page A

went on the attack, insisting to Patton that the punishment didn’t fit the crime. Richardson, who often stared at his shoes when confronted by authority, was quietly thrilled that Ol’ Mama had straightened out the most feared faculty member in the building. He didn’t expect what happened when they got outside the office.
    Ol’ Mama turned on Richardson and let him have it, too. “I saw you looking down at the ground in there,” she said, poking him in the chest. “Don’t you ever put your head down in front of anyone. You look every man in the eye, I don’t care what color he is!”
    Richardson offered to escort her home, but she declined, and ordered him back to class. But not until she gave him one more earful. “You don’t like yourself,” she said. “Don’t be staring down at the floor ever again.”
    Richardson, who was fourteen at the time, sees this episode as a crossroads in his life. “She had given me permission to be a man,” he says.
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    As a teenager, Nolan began to see more of El Paso. He had friends who owned ranflas, and they wanted to drive these jalopies to investigate more than the town’s swimming pools.
    â€œI think my first shock was trying to go to the movies, and seeinghow the different theaters operated,” Richardson says. “Movies were our biggest form of entertainment, but nearly all of the theaters were for whites only.” At the Mission Theater, blacks could sit in the balcony. The Alcazar Theater was the only integrated movie house in El Paso until Richardson attended college, although the army base sometimes hosted integrated audiences at movies then, too. Occasionally, his Mexican-American friends had to be reminded that Richardson couldn’t go everywhere they were allowed.
    Mexican-Americans viewed Richardson as one of their own, and his status as an unofficial Mexican had its benefits—with perhaps one drawback. “The treatment my dad received from Mexican-Americans is very different than the way he was received by whites,” his daughter Madalyn says. “Still, I don’t think El Paso’s Mexican people fully understood the racial discrimination he was fighting against. It was different for him as a black man. But that’s because the Mexican people never assigned the color black to his skin.”
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    During Richardson’s history class his junior year at Bowie, a teacher told the students about a high school in the South where the Negro students were having problems. The National Guard had been called in to help a handful of Negro kids enroll at the all-white Central High School. Nine of them, mostly girls, came to Central, and some of those girls had been spit on, even by their classmates.
    This was in Arkansas, the teacher said. Then she pulled down a tattered map and reminded the students where Arkansas was. Girls being threatened and spit upon? Richardson didn’t know whether to weep or fight.
    That night, he and his grandmother went across the street to a neighbor’s to see Arkansas on the evening news. “All these troops were coming in, and their governor was on, too,” Richardson recalls,“talking bad about President Eisenhower. Nothing like that had ever happened at Bowie. Until that day in class, there was no reason to talk about what was happening in Arkansas. Now I was frightened, scared of Arkansas, Mississippi, places like that. Ol’ Mama said it was horrible there for black folks.”
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    Fearing Ol’ Mama’s fierce glare, Richardson took school seriously, and developed other talents besides athletics. He played the dented trumpet issued by the school for marching band, except during football season. “The coach wouldn’t let me march during the halftime shows,” he says.
    As a young boy, Richardson idolized Rocky Galarza, a Segundo Barrio legend with movie-star good looks. Ten years Richardson’s