The Outsiders



Jackie Thomas was an outsider just about from the day that she was born in Washington. Almost as soon as the little black girl could stand up and walk, she stuck out from the other children, and not only because she was taller than many of them.

She was the youngest of four children. By the time she came along, her mother Muriel already had her hands full with the first three children. Her father tried to do what he could to help, but that wasn’t really very much. James Thomas worked on the night shift to make a little extra money for the family, and that meant that he had to sleep during the day.

When Jackie was three years old, she began to notice the school-books that her brothers and her sister brought home. All that Jackie could do then was to look at the pictures, and she was frustrated at not being able to get at the words that she was told said such interesting things.

Her mother decided to try teaching Jackie to read a little. If Jackie watched television, the little girl would often turn the sound up too much and that would keep her father awake. Books didn’t make noise.

Things didn’t exactly work the way that Muriel Thomas had planned, though. That little bit of reading turned into a lot of it.

Jackie tried to work her way through all the school-books now, though many of them were still way beyond her. There were not many other books in that house, let alone books for little children. There was a Bible, which was much harder for Jackie to understand than the school-books were. But for a while Jackie was read to from the Bible.

And that created problems of its own. Jackie started asking the minister questions after church on Sunday that he had trouble believing a little black girl would think of by herself.

Jackie’s mother started taking her on a walk once a week, all of three blocks to the local library. The one book a week they started with at that time had turned into two books by the time Jackie was old enough for kindergarten.

Kindergarten brought on other problems. The teachers did not like the idea of a child already knowing how to read, and doing it about as well as a third-grader. This upset their plans; they declared that she would certainly have gotten it wrong and would probably have a lot of trouble in school because of it. One of them just stopped short of saying that a child who learned things outside of school would never be normal.

But she was normal. Jackie was just as interested in her dolls and in playing games as any other little girl. She was a little taller and a little stronger for her age than most, but not so much that you would think to comment on it.

Since she was already walking to school with other children, it wasn’t long before she was allowed to walk to the library with one child or another and back again. And soon she was allowed to make the trip by herself if she had to. The librarian in branch #19 got to know Jackie’s happy face as well as she did her own, because the little girl was always looking for corners in the library that she hadn’t found before.

One corner that Jackie found along the way was science. As she slowly turned into a big girl, she learned a lot of it. She began with little books on astronomy, then she worked through physics and chemistry, and finally she spent a long time on computer science. All this reading made it easier to stay up with the studies in these subjects, indeed left her knowing more at the beginning than some did at the end. She got some comments from others about “acting white”, but by the time she finished high school she had been getting those comments for years and treating them just the way they deserved.

By the time she finished high school she was five foot eleven, slim, and beautiful. A couple of boys had tried to give her practice in biology by then. The ones who couldn’t be talked or slapped out of it found out that she had picked up a good knowledge of anatomy and even some judo. Some of the other girls in her neighborhood had already learned harder lessons; her own sister had miscarried once, though they were both careful to not let their mother find out about it.

Jackie had high grades and even higher recommendations from her teachers. She was clearly going to be the first person from her family to go on to college. Then her father had a heart attack.

All the plans for college went out the window then, at least for a while. The burial expenses took a while to pay off. Muriel Thomas grieved herself into becoming ill and couldn’t work, not that she had done work outside the home for the last twenty-five years. Her brother Donald was in the army and couldn’t send home much money. The younger brother, Bob, did not work steadily. Her sister Lucille only made a little at her job as a store clerk. Because of the paperwork, the survivors’ benefits did not start for most of a year, and the insurance took nearly as long to come through.

All of which meant that Jackie took a fast three-month course in electronics and started looking for a job. Then she found out that there were dozens of companies after her and she could hold out for a fairly high starting salary. Since she was black, female, and good at what she did, she was in an automatic three-way minority. She could fill a couple of EEOC slots at once for the government contractors. To be honest, it seemed strange to her that she would be wanted just because she was an outsider, and it was not entirely comfortable.

She wondered at times if she wasn’t being an outsider in the modern world just by being a virgin then, and for years afterward. But Jackie had made up her mind that she wasn’t going to be sidetracked by any man unless he was clearly about as smart as she was.

She started working at Sanders Associates in Rockville. That company tried to keep one foot in each of two streams by leasing desktop computers to the smaller government agencies, and maintaining them, and writing and consulting on software for mainframes for the middle-sized ones. (The big agencies do those things themselves.)

Jackie started in their computer repair division. On her first day on the job, she got buried in her work and barely looked up in time to see everyone else vanish out the door at lunch-time. She packed away her tools and she was gazing out the front door of the building and trying to decide where to eat when a voice behind her said: “None of them are really great, but the sandwich shop across the street is all right. Martucci’s has good shrimp on Thursdays.”

When she turned around a short red-haired and very Irish woman gave her a wide freckled grin. “You are Jackie Thomas, right? My name’s Maggie Flynn.”

They went out to lunch together that day, and every one after that for the next three weeks. They talked about the news or clothes or what they were doing at work. After some of that last, Maggie came to a conclusion one day and she decided to take a chance on looking foolish. She went into her supervisor’s office the first thing in the afternoon.

An hour later there was a message that the personnel department wanted to talk to Jackie. She sat there on the edge of the red leather seat frightened and chewing her lip. She knew that she had been making mistakes on her job, but she hoped that they were not going to fire her this quickly. She really had been trying…

They sat her down and had her take an odd sort of test in logic. When she finished it a half-hour later, there was a wait for a few minutes and then she was called into a private office.

A beefy middle-aged man in a brown suit looked at her and said: “Would you be interested in moving into another job?”

“I — I don’t know,” she said nervously. “If you don’t think I’m any good where I am –”

“Don’t know anything about that, haven’t heard a word,” was the gruff reply. “We want to send you for training and put you into the programming department. This test says you would be good at it. You’re worth more than we thought. Your file says you haven’t taken any computer languages, that right?”

“No, but I’ve read some –”

“So much the better. You want the job? Can you start classes a week from Monday?”

Jackie nodded in disbelief.

Those six weeks in the classroom and the computer lab were among the hardest but most enjoyable that she had ever spent. And when it was over, she was put into a cubicle of her own with her own name-plate, a lot more money, and a greeting from Maggie.

“Hello, stranger, ” she said with a freckled grin. “I expect I’ll be seeing more of you now, since you are going to be ten feet away. Want to try the new Indian place at lunch-time?”

It worked out. Both the job and the Indian place.

In a little over a year, her family’s financial problems were over. The money that was due had come in, her mother was working and making enough to get by on, and her younger brother Bob had settled down and was talking about marrying his girlfriend.

Jackie took a plunge then and moved out into her own apartment. She didn’t feel quite comfortable enough to quit her job and go to college full time, but she started in on night courses.

Jackie was glad to be out in the business world, where (most of the time) being black didn’t matter one way or the other, and green was mostly the color that counted. Also, being female (most of the time) didn’t matter unless it was from a personal and individual interest, and that she didn’t mind handling.

Reading, of course, wasn’t unusual in those circles, and probably being a virgin wasn’t either. Technical people aren’t all that social when they are young.

There were not many young and unmarried black men she met whom she would consider dating, and that bothered her. And it bothered her that it bothered her, because she didn’t like to think she was racially prejudiced.

There were good black men in Washington, Jackie knew, but too
many of them were from the old families, that have had money and position since the year one, or anyway Civil War days. And that sort didn’t want to spend time with somebody who had just come up from the ghetto. Even if they did, she didn’t feel right dating men who were involved in politics or law, since she didn’t really trust them the rest of the time.

Eventually Jackie decided that a good man was a good man, and racial solidarity could go hang. She was moved out from her mother’s place and into her own apartment before she acted on that decision, though. Her family would have raised Cain if they thought that she might be dating a white man. And if she decided to marry one… Well, she would fight that battle then.

As it was, her younger brother complained to her when he came by one night and he found her talking and laughing with Maggie Flynn. Bob asked why she didn’t hang around with her own kind and make friends with them. It was just as well that he didn’t know they had been exchanging notes on men they had both dated.

Jackie had been best friends with Maggie for three years then, and they had been through a lot together both at work and outside of it.

In July Maggie gave a party, and a man named Jim Miller was at it. Jackie couldn’t remember afterward who had introduced the two of them, but it was probably Maggie. She did half-remember hearing some comment about putting together the most lost and most together people there. It wasn’t clear to Jackie if she was really the second, but Jim was certainly the first.

Jim was thin and soft-spoken and very shy. He had been in from Texas then for about two weeks and he knew only two or three people at the party, those being the ones he worked with. It took a while to draw him into a conversation, but it proved to be well worth the effort.

He was interested in a lot of things, and he could talk about any of them with a little coaxing. The deep blue eyes behind those glasses had seen and read a lot, and the head under the fine blond hair worked awfully well. Once the party really got going, he was in the middle of a circle of listeners and he stayed there for hours, with people handing him drinks. People drifted in and out of the circle, but it didn’t occur to Jackie until later that she had been there listening the whole time.

Jim noticed it, though. And maybe two weeks later, the telephone rang, and a soft pleasant voice was asking her out to dinner and a movie. She accepted.

That evening was a very nice one and she was happy to say yes to his request to meet him again on the next Saturday also. Her light brown hand fit very well into his tanned one.

They saw each other about once a week for that August and September, and Jackie found herself looking forward to the next date and wishing that each one lasted longer. When they found excuses to call each other in the middle of the week, to make sure of arrangements that were already clear to both of them, the conversations lasted a while.

Soon one or the other of them suggested meeting early on a Saturday to go somewhere, and then they started spending twelve or fourteen hours together at a time. Then it became both Saturday and Sunday and phone-calls twice a week. They both realized at about the same time what was happening, and they were very glad of it.

Maggie Flynn saw it coming sooner than they did, and she bubbled with delight.

Jackie’s twenty-second birthday came in October, and Jim gave her a long and beautiful pale-green dress. When she opened the box, Jackie kissed him hard and she impulsively vanished into her bedroom to try it on and to model it for him.

She wore the dress that night as they went to a dinner- theater, and when he left her in her apartment and she took it off she half-wished that Jim had stayed and was in her bedroom now taking it off of her.

She imagined his hands on her bare back, which he had bared. His palms would spread against her skin and draw her toward him so that she could feel his muscles ripple with every movement that he made. She would arch against him and he would press her even closer there. His hands would slide down her spine and mold her hips to his and she would feel the hardening pressure of his arousal against her stomach.