Pat Hale
Warren G. Harding Elementary School, 1962 Oh Nikita, how you scared us! With your foreignness, your failure to speak English, your plain babushka of a wife, your round face so angry, so white we knew you never saw the sun. We knew you did not sit in lawn chairs at picnics, did not eat corn on the cob, did not play touch football with your brothers and their children like the Kennedys. The only time we saw you smile was in photographs with children, Life Magazine, boys in short pants, girls with white eyelashes and neat braids, red pioneer scarves at their throats. They would gladly take our seats in the classroom, replace our flag with their own. The Readers Digest said it – we believed. Oh Nikita, when we crawled under our desks for the air-raid drills, when we cradled our heads and turned away from the windows, when we lay in the hallways with our coats over us, our faces to the floor, it was not mushroom clouds we imagined, not missiles arcing in from Cuba. It was your face we saw, your angry shoe, and row upon row of schoolgirls marching.
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