Nice Little Girls Don't Get Into Fights

 

As a child, I wasn’t the “Mama don’t take no mess”, “Do you want some of this?” “I wish you would...” person you see before you today. I wasn’t allowed to fight, it was frowned upon, my parents felt that I should be able to reasonably discuss my concerns, or just bring them to them. That was very effective, up to a point.

I would say the first significant fight I got into in school was in sixth grade with a tall girl named Cassandra. I don’t recall why we fell out, but I do recall that she caught me on the wrong day. I usually ignored people who aggravated me, or turned them in if they were determined to bust my “butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth” imagine that I tried to cultivate as a little girl. My schoolmates had a laundry list of ready accusations against me and my friends - the usual charges were “You talk like a white girl “, “You tried to steal my boyfriend”, or the ever-present “You think you know everything!”. I don’t apologize for being Patrice Brazil. If you can’t hang, don’t hang around.

Anyway, Cassandra was about a foot taller than me and she intimidated everyone. Her taunts to others were usually met with tears. Today, I didn’t feel like being a victim to her bullying so instead of placating her, my response was along the lines of “Well, that’s a butt whooping I’m going to have to take.” She was taken aback, but not nearly as much as when we went to recess and I didn’t run for the hills as other victims of her assaults had done.

Today I was cool - I waited to see what she would do, and when she struck I did something I had never done before, I hit her back – with a ferocity that I don’t think she was ready for. We weren’t tussling on the ground or anything, but I hit her as hard as I could several times before our teacher, Ms. Crawford, pulled us apart.

I had never been in a fight so my teacher was shocked speechless momentarily. My other friends were looking at me as if I was crazy - “Are you fighting the tall girl?” I knew I was going to get in trouble, but I prepared my defense as carefully as Clarence Darrow. “She threatened me, I was just defending myself and she threw the first punch anyway. I told her I wasn’t playing with her, she didn’t listen to me.” My teacher gave us a stern lecture about tolerance, playing like nice little girls who come from decent homes, and how people who settle their differences with fists usually wind up dead.

I wouldn’t recommend it as a first choice, but it did accomplish a few things. No one ever teased me about sounding like a white girl again, looking at some snotty nosed boy they were ga-ga over, or threaten me to a fight. I wasn’t Muhammed Ali out there, I could have been clobbered. Cassandra never spoke to me again as you can well imagine, but I learned the very hard way that appeasement never works – something a very dear friend of mine reminds me of almost daily.