The Day They Came to Arrest the Book Read Online Free Page B

principal’s hand, motioned to his son to get up, and said at the door, jerking his thumb toward the wall of photographs, “Sure aren’t many blacks up there. Maybe you ought to put up a group picture of the kitchen and custodial staff. That’d balance it out some.”

V
    The next morning, zooming down the corridor toward a class that had somehow started without him, Gordon McLean, seeing Nora Baines approaching, slowed just enough to proclaim, “Huck Finn is dead!
Dead! Dead!”
and sailed on.
    “What on earth?” She looked after him, shook her head, and was about to go on when Maggie Crowley, a lanky, cheerful-looking woman in her late twenties, came around the corner.
    Normally Baines kept her distance from Maggie Crowley, being suspicious of anyone in constant good spirits, particularly anyone teaching at George Mason High School. “You’ve got to be deaf, dumb, and blind, or loony,” Baines had told Deirdre Fitzgerald, “to walk around like she does with a smile all the time.” However, Baines had recently acquired a certain respect for Crowley. Maggie had not only created a new course,American Problems, for this new school year, but had actually gotten the principal to approve it despite the controversies its guest speakers might stir up.
    Crowley had worked on Mr. Moore all last spring; and he had finally given her a go-ahead only after having exacted a pledge that, as the principal put it, “Every single controversial subject—which means everything you will be covering in this course—must be dealt with objectively. It is your responsibility to see that
all
sides are fairly presented.”
    “How did you get him to even consider going for it?” Nora Baines had asked last May when the approval came through.
    “Mighty Mike came to realize, with a lot of nudging from me”—Maggie had laughed—“that through the guest speakers, this would be a way to appease those parents who keep complaining that their kids only get the ‘liberal’ point of view on everything. From the textbooks and the teachers, and what not.
    “There’s some truth to that, you know,” Maggie had said. “Nobody at George Mason teaches that the earth is flat or that the poor should all be sterilized or that the only way to deal with Russia is to cremate it. Though, from what I hear in the teachers’ lounge, some of our colleagues do believe in one or more of the above. They just don’t teach it.
    “Anyway,” Maggie had continued, “Moore likes being able to tell certain parents that, through my new course, the kids will be getting points of view at George Mason that they’d get in very, very few other schools.Damn right. Like this whole shooting match was created in six days, and the theory of evolution is just monkey business. Hey, do you know that one of the anti-gun-control guests I’ve been trying to line up won’t come unless he can bring his rifle? I said no, and he said I’m violating his constitutional rights. So I’m a reasonable person. Bring it unloaded, I said. But what if he gets accosted by a radical student? he said.”
    “Or by a middle-aged history teacher?” Nora Baines had sounded eager.
    “Well, I told him that in this saloon, everybody has to check his guns at the door. The beauty part of this whole thing for me, Nora, is that the kids, by being able to listen to and argue with a whole spectrum of advocates—from Catholic nuclear pacifists to my gun-toting friend, and I’ll get him—the kids may get the knack of thinking for
themselves.”
    On this September morning, as Maggie Crowley came around the corner, she was even more animated than usual. “Hey,” she said to Nora, “I’m having a debate next Thursday. ‘Is Individual Freedom Getting Out of Hand?’ You like that?”
    Nora Baines looked uncertain. “Tell me more. Who’s debating?”
    “I’ve got a young lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union and … I’ve got Matthew Griswold.”
    “Good Lord,” Baines said, “the