{"id":419,"date":"2020-06-11T13:08:56","date_gmt":"2020-06-11T17:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.maryannmcguigan.com\/?p=419"},"modified":"2020-06-11T13:08:56","modified_gmt":"2020-06-11T17:08:56","slug":"fiona-is-white-yolanda-is-black-their-friendship-breaks-the-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/fiona-is-white-yolanda-is-black-their-friendship-breaks-the-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiona is white. Yolanda is black. Their friendship breaks the rules."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>And if Fiona wants to be accepted by her newfound friends, she&#8217;ll have to end it. She knows what she should do, but heroics don\u2019t come easy to an outcast. Her courage gets lost\u2014until Yolanda helps her find it. <\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[From <em>Morning in a Different Place<\/em>, Bronx, NY, 1963]\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">President Kennedy is on TV, giving a press conference. The other girls don\u2019t want to watch it. I do, but I don\u2019t say so. I like Kennedy. I like how he says things I\u2019m afraid to say, like about Negroes. He went on television and told everybody to examine their conscience, and I watched my parents while they listened to him talk about all the wrongs that have been done to Negroes. He talked about equal rights and freedom, and even my mother was moved. She even thinks the Congress should pass the civil rights law, but if anybody dares to lift a placard to protest segregation, she calls them communist sympathizers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cMy father can\u2019t stand Kennedy,\u201d says Terry. \u201cHe never should have let the Negroes have that march in Washington.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThe march just made everything worse,\u201d says Ellen. \u201cNow the Ku Klux Klan is bombing churches.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019ve heard this logic before. It\u2019s the way my mother explains the bombing of the Baptist church in Birmingham, as if people demanding their rights is what killed those girls, not the hate. It\u2019s bad enough to listen to my mother spout this nonsense, but coming from kids my own age, it\u2019s really hard to take. I want to say something, tell them they\u2019ve got it wrong. But I\u2019m hanging by a thread here. If I say something like that, this whole adventure is over. So I don\u2019t disagree or say what I really feel. I catch Kathy looking at me. She\u2019s seen me with Yolanda. They all have. That\u2019s when I see what\u2019s happening. They\u2019ve triumphed and they know it. They know why I\u2019m not saying anything\u2014because I want to be one of them. They\u2019re leaving it up to me. Anytime I want to I can tell them that prejudice is wrong, that Negroes are human beings, too, just like us. That having Yolanda as my friend is no big deal. Anytime I want to I can say that and we can go back to the way things were on my first day back to school, when I was just that weird girl whose family got evicted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I\u2019m not saying anything. Things have a chance to be different now for me. These girls are trying to be friendly. We don\u2019t have to agree on every little thing. They just think the same way nearly everyone thinks in this country. Nothing I say can change that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And if Fiona wants to be accepted by her newfound friends, she&#8217;ll have to end it. She knows what she should do, but heroics don\u2019t come easy to an outcast. Her courage gets lost\u2014until Yolanda helps her find it. [From Morning in a Different Place, Bronx, NY, 1963] President Kennedy is on TV, giving a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":422,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8,9,10,11],"class_list":["post-419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-civil-rights-movement","tag-interracial-friendship","tag-literary-fiction","tag-young-adult-fiction"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}