Word: bus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...couldn't rightly call this type of grilling envy. Sometimes it reflected amazement at the unpractical and uncomfortable use foreigners made of their money. In a cramped bus headed for dull and puny Olympia, near the tumbled grace of the ancient games-site, a teenager offered her seat to a German woman and murmured, "Those back-breaking packs: I would never do this tourism...
...chicken-lady was the intruder who finally forced me on the road again. I first met her on the bus to my relative's house; she was the stout matron, slouched in a rear seat with lumpy plastic sacks packed against it. A younger woman staggered up the steps moaning, "God, I'm tired." So Stout, bridling at her gall, blurted, "Tired! What've you got to be tired about?" And the rest went sort of like this...
...days that followed, the chicken-lady never failed to pounce as the bus set me down at her doorstep for the hike home. And then I had to start talking. I think she was putting together a mental list of everything money can buy--a little project to while away the time. And she figured an American should know about luxury. Most country people refused to be taken in, as they saw it, by a thin cotton dress and a limp wallet. After all, you need money to get past that ocean. I would catch this woman scrutinizing me warily...
...South Bostonians are not unique, however; many blacks in Roxbury and Dorchester, on the exploitation score, "know where they're coming from." Parents in the black sections of town don't relish busing either, but for them the school bus has become a symbol of mobility, not upward mobility, but just some kind of mobility--a foot in the door to society. For desegregation alone will not change the poor black's view of city politics and power; even when a black student can look a white teacher in the eye at South Boston High, he still knows where that...
Which brings us back to the Marcus Garvey House, and across the street to a bus pick-up corner, on Friday morning. A small kid, maybe a fourth grader, who I had noticed earlier holding his mother's hand in their doorway, whispering and pointing, suddenly broke loose and hustled up to the corner to join two other children waiting for their bus. "Hey, maybe we missed it," he was telling them before long, beginning to strut and lecture like a little headmaster himself. "We missed that bus, I'm telling you. It's gone," he kept repeating. And after...