The Cruisers Read Free Page A

what I had seen in the movies or on television. What I was thinking was that I didn’t want to deal with Alvin. I wanted to deal with the Civil War, do a good job on that, and move on. As far as I was concerned, Mr. Culpepper had to be on our side.
    To see Mr. Culpepper you had to write him a note asking him to meet with you and telling him what you wanted to talk about. In the note, I wrote that I needed to set up an official meeting between the Cruisers and Alvin McCraney as soon as possible.
    I didn’t really know Alvin. He played goalie on the soccer team and was supposed to be hard. He had been in one of my Language Arts classes in the seventh grade and he was pretty smart. But all the students at Da Vinci had the smart thing going on, so it wasn’t a big deal.
    School seemed to drag all afternoon and a lot of the kids were rapping about what Alvin had written. Ashley had things stirred up again.
    I knew I had to write something for
The Cruiser.
I had Media Studies so I could hang out in the library, and Itried working on a piece. At first everything I was writing sounded too mad, but when I started making it look less mad it was sounding lame.
    “Hey, Zander, what’s happening?” Sidney Aronofsky asked.
    “Nothing much,” I said, putting my piece aside. “How you doing?”
    “Okay, okay,” Sidney said. “Look, I just want you to know that I didn’t like that piece in
The Palette.
I don’t think whoever wrote it was right, and I don’t think that I should have to be held up as a racist because I’m white or because my folks are from the South.”
    “Who said that you were a racist?”
    “Nobody said it,” Sidney said. “But when something like that comes out it makes you either try to ignore it or you slide to one side or the other. You know what I mean?”
    “Yes, sort of,” I said.
    Sidney was at Da Vinci because of his general grades and the fact that he had played chess in the nationals. He was Mr. Culpepper’s ideal student. His grades were good and at least once a year he was featured in some newspaper because of his chess. He was also one of the four best under-sixteen players in New York.
    Okay, the picture was getting clearer. I hadn’t thought much about it when LaShonda first mentioned it but I did see some of the other white soccer players clowning around in the hallway and I figured they were getting off on what Alvin had written. They were laughing and joking around in the hallway and whenever a black or Latino kid came by they would put their heads down like they were hiding something. The white kids, like Sidney, were taking it seriously, too.
    At two-thirty, the last announcements of the day came over the loudspeaker. Usually, the announcements were just about what team was practicing, or sometimes a teacher would remind us what paper was due the next day. The announcement that came over the loudspeaker after I had given Mr. Culpepper the note surprised me. A girl announced that the Cruisers and the Sons of the Confederacy were to meet in Mr. Culpepper’s office at eight-thirty in the morning.
    Bobbi met me in the hallway near the front door.
    “Who are the Sons of the Confederacy?” she asked.
    “It’s got to be something Alvin dreamed up,” I said. “But I guess if we can be the Cruisers they can be the Sons of the Confederacy.”
    “You getting nervous?” she asked.
    “No,” I lied.
    “I am, too,” she said, smiling her squinchy-eyed smile. “But it’s good we’re getting our first meeting so soon, right?”
    “Right.”
     
THE CRUISER
    OP-ED TO THE SONS OF THE CONFEDERACY
By Zander Scott
    What are we talking about when we use words like “civilized”? Are we talking about just getting people to do what we want them to do and act the way we want, or are we allowing them the full range of experiences that we would allow ourselves? If someone takes a man from his home and family and forces him to work in the cotton fields of Georgia against his will, who is the