School the second day was much like the first, although Bridges recounts specific taunts and threats she heard while walking up to the school entrance. She quotes racist slurs and direct threats of violence, like a woman who repeatedly told the young girl, “I’m going to poison you. I’ll find a way” (22). Bridges said she tried to ignore the aggression from the crowd.

Bridges met her teacher on the second school day at William Frantz. She was a young, white woman named Mrs. Barbara Henry. Mrs. Henry began instructing Bridges in a classroom alone, with Mrs. Bridges as the only other person attending. Many parents pulled their children out of school and the school administration did not make an effort to integrate the classrooms yet. Bridges stayed in the classroom all day. She recalls that she “wasn’t allowed to have lunch in the cafeteria or go outside for recess,” and that if she needed to use the bathroom, marshals waiting outside the door accompanied her (22).

Mrs. Bridges stopped attending on the third day, and Bridges remembers crying but going ahead alone.

The “passerby” to which Bridges refers in this chapter title is famous American author John Steinbeck. In 1960, Steinbeck took a road trip with his dog Charley. Bridges’s account of this trip became one of his published works, Travels with Charley. Steinbeck had heard about the racist crowds outside the elementary school and when he passed through New Orleans in November, he went to observe the crowd of protesters at William Frantz. He was particularly interested in a group of women known as the Cheerleaders, whose “foul language even shocked a man as worldly as Steinbeck” (24).

The chapter contains an excerpt from Travels with Charley that recounts Steinbeck’s impressions. He called the whole event a “show” and stressed how small Bridges was amidst the chaos of the crowd. He calls her a “fawn,” a “doll,” and a “mite” (25).

The chapter contains the famous Norman Rockwell illustration of Bridges walking to school surrounded by marshals, which was published in 1964 in Look Magazine. Bridges’s name did not appear in either Steinbeck’s account or in Rockwell’s title (named The Problem We All Live With). Bridges reveals that the names of all the integrating first graders in the city were never published for their protection.

Bridges reviews the social dynamics among the white residents of New Orleans. She previously discussed parents who boycotted integration because they disapproved of it and did not want their children to consort with African American children, but she now discusses white parents who feared crossing the picket lines and becoming targets of violence themselves. “However,” she says, “A few families took the risk” (26). Methodist minister Reverend Lloyd Foreman walked his young white daughter, Pam, to school every day. The segregationist crowd “taunted them without mercy” (26).

Again, the book contains a sizeable excerpt from Travels with Charley. Steinbeck wrote about “the white man who dared to bring his white child to school” (26). Steinbeck recognized that the moment of Foreman’s arrival was highly anticipated among the crowd: “This is what they had come to see and hear,” he wrote (26). Writing of the reception the Cheerleaders gave the Foremans, Steinbeck said, “No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted…But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate” (26).

The chapter also contains a picture of a white woman holding up a length of fabric with the caption, “Woman threatening to strangle the Reverend Foreman with her scarf” (26). These sources indicate that the dynamics of the conflict were not merely white versus Black, but rather segregationist versus integrationist, or racist versus antiracist.