One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia

else,” protesters are just people with protest songs and demands who don’t stand a chance of getting anything. The only things Cecile seemed to care about were her poems and her peace and quiet. The only thing we seemed to care about was our television set. Armed with that, I brought up our sole demand and stood ready with our reasons, as if my Safeway S were pressed to my chest.
    She said, “No one needs a television set.”
    “We do,” I said.
    “To catch our shows,” Vonetta said.
    “Yeah,” Fern said. “To catch our cartoons.”
    “And the evening news,” I threw in. You could practically see the whole world on the evening news.
    “And Mike Douglas.”
    “That’s right. We want Mike Douglas.”
    How else would we see Motown groups, James Brown, or Aretha Franklin?
    The Mike Douglas Show wasn’t the only place to find colored people on television. Each week, Jet magazine pointed out all the shows with colored people. My sisters and I became expert colored counters. We had it down to a science. Not only did we count how many colored people were on TV, we also counted the number of words the actors were given to say. For instance, it was easy to count the number of words the Negro engineer on Mission Impossible spoke as well as the black POW on Hogan’s Heroes. Sometimes the black POW didn’t have any words to say, so we scored him a “1” for being there. We counted how many times Lieutenant Uhuru hailed the frequency on Star Trek. We’d even take turns being her, although Big Ma would have never let us wear a minidress or space boots. But then there was I Spy . All three of us together couldn’t count every word Bill Cosby said. And then therewas a new show, Julia , coming in September, starring Diahann Carroll. We agreed to shout out “Black Infinity!” when Julia came on because each episode would be all about her character.
    We didn’t just count the shows. We counted the commercials as well. We’d run into the TV room in time to catch the commercials with colored people using deodorant, shaving cream, and wash powder. There was a little colored girl on our favorite commercial who looked just like Fern. In fact, I said that little girl could have been Fern, which made Vonetta jealous. In the commercial, the little girl took a bite of buttered bread and said, “Gee, Ma. This is the best butter I ever ate.” Then we’d say it the way she did, in her dead, expressionless voice; and we’d outdo ourselves trying to say it with the right amount of deadness. We figured that that was how the commercial people told her to say it. Not too colored. Then we’d get silly and say it every kind of colored way we knew how.
    We gave Cecile all of our reasons why she should have a television set in her green stucco house. We even showed her how it would give her peace of mind to do her work without us bothering her. To our reasons, the Establishment said, “Television is a liar and a story.” But we weren’t ready to give up.
    “The evening news comes on television,” I said. “That’s all true because it’s on the news.”
    She grunted.
    “And the weatherman gives the weather report. That’s important.”
    Another grunt.
    “And the Monkees do the monkey.” Then Fern swung her arms up and down and bopped her head like a go-go dancer.
    Cecile made a “what” expression. Flummoxed. Good old Fern! Fern had managed to completely flummox the Establishment.
    And then we started singing our protest song, chewing away at her peace and quiet: “Here we come. Walking down the street….” like Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, and the other singing Monkees.
    The next day when we came back from the Center, we found a radio in our room, the cord wrapped around its plastic body. It was a sho-’nuf, left-by-the-garbage-dump, secondhand radio. Vonetta and Fern squealed as if the little colored girl in the commercial were standing in our room eating buttered bread.

Civic Pride
    We’d been learning about civics