Fire from the Rock

While spending a quiet afternoon at home, Sylvia decides to sit at the kitchen table with her mother and Aunt Bessie as they all work to stick green stamps in books to earn prizes. While they fill the books, they chat. Her mother mentions that the state senate voted in four new segregation bills, including one that makes attendance at integrated schools optional. Aunt Bessie says that Jews who survived Auschwitz are getting paid $1,000. Sylvia’s mother says they deserve more. Sylvia is reminded of Mr. Zucker’s concentration camp tattoo as well as how the millions of Jews killed in the Holocaust are not unlike the millions of Africans enslaved and killed in the United States. She thinks of all the many ways kids have been killed because of who they are, and she wonders again about why she is volunteering to put herself in harm’s way to integrate Central High.

Miss Washington announces to the class that Sylvia is one of the remaining 42 students on the list to integrate Central High. She tells the students that Sylvia must be interviewed by members of the school board the next day as the next part of the process. Sylvia has no idea what to expect from the interview. When she is at home that evening, she tells her parents that she has an interview. Her brother, Gary, is unusually quiet. DJ wants everything to stay the same. Her mother and especially her father seem very supportive. Sylvia is terrified. In her diary, she writes that she wonders what it will be like to attend school with students who listen to white musicians and have crushes on white actors. She hopes that not everyone at the school will be racist. She also writes that the Zuckers’ home has been vandalized with a swastika three times and Rachel said her father cried.