BLACK AND WHITE

        This story should be read in black and white. Not black letters on white pages or black people interacting with white people but like black and white photography. The harsh compositions and stark images of the fifties and sixties and before revealed more character and depth than today’s digital high resolution, sharp color, hues, and shadings, so technically advanced that it obscures the subtle moods, passions, and underlying truths of its human subjects. Read this story as if it were an old black and white photo.

#

In 1964, in Mrs. Henderson’s fourth grade class at Jefferson Elementary School in East Bakersfield, the third Thursday of each month was dance day. By May there had already been seven previous dance days (there was not one in December). As the eighth one commenced, Dina, sitting next to Delia Rosas in the back of the class, watched glumly as the boys began picking partners.
        She dreaded dance day not because she didn’t like dancing, which she did, or didn’t like music, which she certainly did. Music was one of her greatest passions. She was forever surrounded by it, her father a professional musician, her mother in the church choir, her sister in a rock band in San Francisco. She listened to music every day, watched Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw on Saturday nights. Alone at home in front of the TV, she would routinely lose herself to music, move freely and without restraint. But this happened only at home and when alone.
        She hated dance day because none of the boys ever picked her for their partner. In those days, when Mrs. Henderson cleared the front of the class and prepared to place the needle onto the revolving black vinyl record, the protocol was for the boys to ask the girls to dance, the most popular boys always picking the most popular girls, the shyer boys then picking the less popular ones, then the few stragglers, the introverts and misfits, mostly girls, would be left sitting alone, to be paired by Mrs. Henderson to dance with the other outcasts, then to follow Mrs. Henderson’s prescribed movements, their faces taut, their insides screaming that they hated themselves for being fat or ugly or tall or cross-eyed.
        Dina was not only very dark skinned and socially awkward, but one of only three black students at Jefferson Elementary, part of the first wave of black students to integrate this formerly all-white school. The previous year, at Potomac Elementary, state tests determined she was a fast learner with an unusually high IQ. When her fourth-grade school year started, she was redirected, with her mother’s uneasy blessings, to Jefferson, along with Barry and Bobby Thomas, black twin brothers from another all-black elementary school.
        The bare truth was that Dina was a lovely young woman with alert brown eyes,