Excerpt from Buses Are a Comin' by Charles Person, Richard Rooker, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Mar-ce-lite," society said, "wake up."

And she did. Marcelite learned at a young age this world did not operate for her the way it operated for whites.

My bus story—my awakening—came on a day I had a headache. It happened the year before Claudette and Mary Louise and Rosa experienced their bus stories. It happened in 1954. I was twelve.

I stood at the bus stop with my head pounding. I boarded the bus and paid my fare. I was headed to Briarcliff for work. But I was also headed where I had been taught to head. To the back of the bus. Back to the back I walked to sit where we all sat. The bus pulled away from the curb. Normal day. Normal bus. As the bus picked up speed, it began to make odd sounds in the back. Mechanical noises. Clanging noises. Headache expanding noises. The noises got louder and louder. They exacerbated the pain pounding in my head. They intensified the throbbing. They tweaked my normal complacency into defiance. I needed to get away. I needed to move from the rear of the bus. I rose from my seat, and I walked forward—as far forward as I could—to settle into a seat that gave as much space as possible between me and the harsh sounds.

Like Marcelite's older African American woman, a concerned elderly woman—almost grandmotherly—intervened. She looked at me all the way from the back with eyes conveying something between worry and anger. Probably both.

"What are you doing?" her eyes counseled in silent inquiry. "You'll get us in trouble!" her face warned. "Come back," her body language beseeched.

But I was young. Younger than Claudette, younger than Mary Louise. I was … twelve. Just trying to get to my pinboy job at Briarcliff. Just trying to get away from a headache.

"Why should I?" my return gaze asked.

That was the question: Why?

"Why should anyone care where I sit?" my twelve-year-old, headstrong self conveyed to her.

The bus driver cared. He glared in the mirror giving me as much of his attention as he did the road ahead of us. He glared as if his eyes would move me on their own.

I was going to stay where I was. There was no reason to do otherwise. I stayed put.

Then a strange thing happened.

Nothing.

Based on my reading of that woman's face, I had thought everything would happen. Everything bad. But nothing happened. Nothing. I rode the rest of the way to Briarcliff and got off the bus. Except for my headache hammering to the vibration of the bus's noise, it was a normal day on a normal bus.

In the larger scope of my life, though, it was not normal.

That was the first event, the first episode I remember that made me think something was wrong. It opened my eyes wide enough to start noticing the reality of the world around me.

The look in that woman's eyes, the pronouncement of her face, the misgiving in her alerted posture, said loudly and clearly, "Stop!" Even if I did not have ears or sense to hear it, a sliver of the sound penetrated something in me at that age telling me things were not as I believed them to be, a sliver that pricked me enough to look at the sliver and wonder why it bothered me so much. What did that woman know that I did not? What did she understand that I would come to learn? She shook my norms. She tapped on the concrete innocence of my youth. It had a ring of hmmmm that made me question my boyish certainties. My job at Briarcliff was moving me beyond the Bottom. On the way to work, segregation. At dinnertime at the Majestic, segregation. Even in the safe environs Mr. O'Neill insisted upon in the alley itself, it was starting to sink in. Separation.

Excerpted from Buses Are a Comin' by Charles Person and Richard Rooker. Copyright © 2021 by Charles Person and Richard Rooker. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.