And the teacher told them, "No one is going to knock ten points off your grades. Get on out from here and have a good time."
We were not only organized in making our get-away, we had also arranged for a little bit of entertainment by surprise. Three of us boys had made a man-size straw dummy, and while all the other students and teachers were playing in the sand down in the river, we boys secretly took our dummy up on a high cliff across the river, and there on the edge of that cliff, in plain view of the spectators below, Virgil Davis and I got into an argument which ended in a fight.
Before we took the straw dummy up on the cliff, we arranged for one boy to remain in the crowd below to call attention to our fight up on the cliff. We boxed and pushed and shoved and rolled and tumbled. Then we rolled behind some bushes to where we had the dummy hidden. And when I came back into view, I was wrestling the dummy instead of Virgil. When we rolled near the edge of the cliff, we struggled to our feet and I knocked him over the edge and he fell to the river below.
This was no big deal but it was different, and it brought a few screams from the gallery below.
By the first day of April the following year, the school board had decided that this April Fool thing had gone too far, and they convinced us kids that they meant business. We knew there was no way we could pull another stunt like we pulled the year before and get away with it. We accepted the new ruling and had no intention of causing any trouble.
However, just before the lunch hour that day I was talking with some boys and jokingly said, "We'd better not run away but when they tell us to pass to classes, we could just remain seated." I hadn't really meant it and we didn't plan action. If I had meant it, I would have suggested that we remain seated only a minute or less, just to demonstrate student solidarity, and that not in defiance, but rather in fun.
But I underestimated the effects of my little suggestion and the solidarity of the student body. When one o'clock came and the teacher said, "Rise and pass to your classes," not one student got up. I was surprised. Something was happening here beyond any suggestion I had made.
Other teachers got together, whispered a few words in their huddle and one of them gave the order again, but still no one made a move. Then Mr. Hinton came out, spoke a few words of advice to us and asked us to go to our classes. This time three girls got up and went to class, perhaps the same three who showed up for class the year before.
By this time I had begun to feel guilty and uneasy. I didn't know who had planned all this nor whether it was the result of my suggestion, but I knew I could be held responsible because of what I had said. The thing had gotten out of hand and someone could get hurt. I knew that someone could be me. This just wasn't right, but I didn't want to be the one to spoil something someone else had planned, if indeed someone else had planned it, so I went along with the scheme.
Next, Mr. Greene called a student into his office. I don't remember who the student was, but he soon came back and took his seat with the rest of us. And again, another teacher asked us to respond, but we didn't.