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A TRIP BY TROLLEY

It was on the New Jersey Avenue line, and though the day was bitterly cold, Camilla and I found ourselves off on another of Aunt Pearl's strongly recommended 'culture' tours, this one to look at the fine decorations the White people had put up on their houses for Christmas. We had waited for the streetcar for almost ten minutes, and I had been so happy to see it that I had gotten on as quickly as possible and run to the back. Maybe it was so cold that people's cars weren't working right, but by Military Road there was a crowd of White people on the streetcar, so many that some had to stand. That there were plenty of empty seats in the back where the Colored people sat mattered little to these White people. They would never have sat there anyway, though some of them eyed the seats, as if wondering what anyone else would say if they sat in the Colored section for just a minute. Maybe if one person had been brave enough (or tired enough!) to sit down, like Miss Rosa Parks would be in a couple of years, the whole crowd of them would have done it and been comfortable, and bus integration would have started right before my eyes. But as it was, the White people just shifted their packages around and held on to their leather straps all the tighter, eyeing those empty, inviting seats in the Colored section.

I saw her from the window. She looked more like a confection than a child. She was all in pink. Her little jacket was made of mouton with a hood that framed her angel-face in white, and she wore a pink-and-white muff. Even her leggings were pink. She was shod in little white boots for tramping in the snow. Her eyes were brilliant blue and the cold had pinched her cheeks pink. Her little Cupid's bow mouth was red, with pearly teeth behind. She looked to be about my age. She pulled off her cap as her father carried her onto the streetcar, and a cascade of blonde corkscrew curls poured out. She had a pink ribbon in her hair, and I could see the edge of a white angora sweater. She was cuter than Shirley Temple in Heidi.

A man moved aside, so that her father could prop her up on the metal covering that housed the rear door mechanism that served as the demarcation between the White and Colored sections. She sat with her little legs dangling over the platform, looking intently at the two brown girls right across from her.

I felt self-conscious that she was staring at me. My own hair, ironed painfully straight and larded down by Aunt Pearl, felt

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