“You should be ashamed of yourself … white trash!” Her eyes were huge as they dragged her off, and with every ounce of her being she wanted to hit and bite and kick, thinking of Richard Blake and how he had been killed, but she didn't dare. They threw her into the back of the truck, with much of Dr. Clarke's group, and half an hour later, she was being fingerprinted and she was in jail. She sat in a jail cell for the rest of the day, with fifteen other girls, all of them black, and she could see Sharon across the way. They had each been allowed one phone call, the whites at least, the blacks were still being “processed” according to the cops, and Sharon shouted to her to call her Mom, which Tana did. She arrived in Yolan at midnight, and released Sharon and Tana simultaneously, congratulating them both. Tana could see that she looked harder and more drawn than she had six months before, but she seemed pleased with what the girls had done. She wasn't even upset when Sharon told her the news the next day. She was being kicked out of Green Hill, effective immediately. Her things had already been packed by the housemother of Jasmine House, and she was being asked to leave the campus before noon. Tana was in shock when she heard, and she knew what she could expect for herself when she was ushered into the Dean's office. It was just as she had thought. She was being asked to leave. There would be no scholarship the following year. In fact, there would be no following year at all. Like Sharon, it was all over for her. The only difference was that if she was willing to stay on in a probationary state, she could stay on until the end of the year, which would at least mean that she could take her final exams and apply to another school. But where? She sat in her room in shock after Sharon had left. Sharon was going back to Washington with her mother, and there had already been talk of her spending a little time as a volunteer for Dr. King.
“I know Daddy'll be mad because he wants me to go to school, but you know, truthfully, Tan, I've had it up to here with school.” She looked sorrowfully at Tana then. “But what about you?” She was devastated about the price of the sit-in for her friend. She had never gotten arrested before, although they had been warned before the church sit-in that it was a real possibility, yet she really hadn't expected it.
“Maybe it's all for the best.” Tana tried to cheer her up, and she was still in shock when Sharon left, and she sat alone in her room until dark. Her probation meant that she had to eat alone at Jasmine House, keep to her room at night, and avoid all social activities including the freshman prom. She was a pariah of sorts, but she also knew that school would be over in three weeks.
The worst of it was that, as they had warned Tana they would, they informed Jean. She called, hysterical, that night, sobbing into the phone. “Why didn't you tell me that little bitch was black?”
“What difference does it make what color she is? She's my best friend.” But tears filled Tana's eyes and the emotions of the past few days overwhelmed her suddenly. Everyone at school was looking at her as though she had killed someone, and Sharon was gone. She didn't know where she would go to school next year, and her mother was screaming at her … it was like being five years old and being told you had been very, very bad, but not being sure why.
“You call that a friend?” Her mother laughed through her tears. “She cost you your scholarship, and got you kicked out of school. And do you think you'll get accepted anywhere else after this?”
“Of course you will, you jerk.” Harry reassured her through her sobs the next day. “Shit, there are zillions of radicals at BU.”
“I'm not a radical.” She cried some more.
“I know that. All you did was go to a sit-in, for chrissake. It's your own goddamn fault for going to that prissy redneck school. I mean shit, you aren't even in the civilized world down there. Why the hell don't you come up here to school?”
“You really think I might be able to get in?”
“With your grades, are you kidding? They'd let you run the place.”
“You're just trying to make me feel better.” She started to cry again.
“You're giving me a mammoth pain in the ass, Tan. Why don't you just let me get you an application and see what happens?” And what happened was that she got in, much to her own astonishment and her mother's chagrin.
“Boston University? What kind of school is that?”
“One of the best in the country, and they even gave me a scholarship.” Harry had taken the application over himself, put in a good word for her, which seemed like a crazy thing to do and touched her to the core, and by July first, it was settled. She was going to Boston University in the fall.
She was still numb from the events of two months before, and her mother still wanted to wrestle about it with her.
“I think you should get a job for a while, Tan. You can't hang around in school for the rest of your life.”
Tana looked horrified. “How about for another three years, like until I get a degree?”
“And then what? What are you going to do then, Tana, that you couldn't do now?”
“Get a decent job.”
“You could go to work for Durning International right now. I spoke to Arthur last week.…”
Tana seemed to be screaming at her all the time now, but she never understood. “For chrissake, don't condemn me to that for the rest of my life.”
“Condemn you! Condemn you! How dare you say such a thing? You get arrested, kicked out of school, and you think you have a right to the world. You're lucky a man like Arthur Durning would even consider hiring you.”
“He's lucky I didn't bring charges against his son last year!” The words flew out of Tana's mouth before she could stop them and Jean Roberts stared at her.
“How dare you say a thing like that?”
Her voice was quiet and sad, “It's true, Mom.”
She turned her back to Tana, as though shielding herself from the look on Tana's face, not wanting to hear. “I don't want to hear you tell lies like that.” Tana walked quietly out of the room, and a few days later she was gone.
She went to stay with Harry at his father's place in Cape Cod, and they played tennis and sailed, swam, and visited his friends, and she never felt threatened by him at all. The relationship was entirely platonic as far as she was concerned and therefore comfortable for her. Harry's feelings were something else but he kept them carefully veiled. She wrote to Sharon several times, but the answers she got back were brief, scrambled, and obviously written in haste. She'd never been so busy, or so happy, in her life. Her mother had been right, and she had a wonderful job working as a volunteer for Dr. Martin Luther King. It was amazing how their lives had changed in one short year.