Then my thoughts go to Judge Otis Wright the Third, and I wonder how all this is sitting on his mind. Mr. Kalman says a judge has probably the hardest job in the world, harder even than a referee, because there’s the right thing to do, and there’s the legal thing to do, but they aren’t always the same.
Is that a paradox? The right and wrong of it, side by side in one decision?
It occurs to me that if Judge Otis Wright the Third is lying in his bed right now, trying to fall asleep, and I’m lying in mine, maybe we’re on the same thought channel and I can send him a mental message.
So from my pillow to his, this is what I send: Hello there, Judge Otis Wright the Third. Sam Warren here. I just want you to know that it’s okay if you decide the case against me.
I sure hope the other seven hundred thousand kids in the district didn’t hear that.
Tuesday morning we’re sitting in Mr. Powell’s class doing a worksheet on decimals when Miss Lochman comes in to say, “Sam, Alistair, Jaesang, and Catalina, get your backpacks and come with me.”
We look at one another like four criminals suddenly caught, only I can’t remember doing anything wrong since I held up my NO HOMEWORK sign. I get this twisty, queasy feeling as we follow Miss Lochman out the door.
“Where are you taking us?” Alistair asks.
“To the front gate. You’re being pulled out of school.”
“What for? What’d we do?”
“I was just told to come get you.”
She escorts us down the hall, down the stairs, and out the double doors into the yard. There’s a cold wind blowing dead leaves up from the ground, back into the trees. A worried wind. My stomach starts to flip, but when I see who’s standing on the other side of the gate waiting for us, it lands again.
“Dad?” I say.
“He’s made a decision.”
“Who?”
“Judge Wright. Mr. Kalman called. Said to get you down to the courthouse right away. We have twenty minutes to get there.”
We hop on the freeway and race downtown in the carpool lane. We park and come up to the street level and find Sadie and Sean in front, waiting for us with Mr. Kalman. We all go in together and head up to room 527.
The minute the door to the judge’s chambers opens, we all stand.
Judge Otis Wright the Third asks us to “sit, please,” and we do.
Then he sits in his tall leather chair and opens a folder. He takes out a single sheet of paper. He looks right at me for a second. Then his eyes drift down to the paper. He reads it aloud.
“If this were a case of one individual seeking injunctive relief from the stresses of homework, I could find in favor of the plaintiff. But I don’t believe you have made a strong enough case for damages to the entire class. Nor do I find the privacy argument compelling enough to outweigh the district’s urgent obligation to educate the children. Therefore, in the matter of Warren v. Board of Education, I find in favor of the district. The claim is denied.”
“What’s it mean?” Alistair asks.
Sadie turns to me. “You follow that?”
“Yeah,” I say. “We lost.”
Outside the courtroom we’re ambushed by a mob of reporters. One shoves a microphone in my face.
“Sam,” he says as if he knows me, “how do you feel about today’s verdict?”
“Lousy.”
“Are you going to appeal to the Ninth Circuit?”
I hadn’t thought about this. If you sue in federal court and lose, you can ask a higher court for a second chance.
I look at Sadie and shrug. From a few steps up, a voice booms down.
“You bet your ass we’re going to appeal,” Mr. Kalman says.
15
Sam Francisco
Who would’ve thought that standing on a desk could lead to sitting on a plane? Three weeks later we fly to San Francisco to go before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
It almost didn’t happen. When Mr. Kalman found out it would take 180 days and Alistair finger-counted all the way to summer, we practically gave up. Mr. Kalman said he wasn’t sure he would even live that long. And we couldn’t appeal without our lawyer.
Catalina calculated our odds of winning the appeal at a hundred to one against, so we were all willing to let it go.
Not Sadie. “There’s got to be a way we can move to the front of the line,” she said.
Sean suggested a hunger strike because that’s what Gandhi would have done.
“Only as a last resort, please,” said Alistair.
Then I remembered learning about Rosa Parks, how she was tired after a long day at work and refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white passenger. The bus driver said, “I’ll have you arrested,” and Rosa Parks said, “You may have me arrested.” And then Martin Luther King Jr. and another minister named Ralph Abernathy organized a boycott of the buses in Montgomery. “Don’t ride the bus,” they said. And the people all told their friends, “Don’t ride the bus.”
“For a long time almost no black people, and not very many white people, rode the bus,” I told Sadie and Sean, Alistair, Jaesang, Catalina, and Mr. Kalman. “That’s what got the attention of the Supreme Court. And in 1956 they ruled you can’t separate people based on the color of their skin. So by sitting down, Rosa Parks stood up for her rights.”
Which is a paradox, if you think about it.
“Just like you, Sam!” Alistair said. “Only you stood up to stand up for our rights.”
“Boycott,” Sean said. “Brilliant. We stop going to school until the appeals court takes our case.”
We all looked at Mr. Kalman.
“It’s bold,” he said. “But if you incite a boycott of the schools, you could get suspended.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” I said.
“I suppose if you got enough kids all over the state to stay
