9/11It is just past 7:20 a.m., November 12, 2001 at Robert E. Lee High School in Springfield, Virginia, just eight miles south of the Pentagon. In Fairfax County, Veterans’ Day is not a school holiday, but so many parents in our neighborhood have the day off that the schools here serve Thanksgiving dinner at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month and invite parents to visit their children’s classrooms for special programs and a quick tour of bulletin boards and halls decorated proudly with artwork. My daughter Emily used to enjoy bringing in her own personal veteran, and my husband, the only parent of a kindergartener old enough to have served two tours in Vietnam, used to secretly enjoy being dragged in for inspection.
This year, however, it is different. Emily is in ninth grade now, and Jim and I are required to keep our distance. I drive the neighborhood carpool and am dismissed with an airy wave. Before I reach home, the girls are in their first period class, Pre-IB World History. Their teacher, Mrs. Feldmayer, waits quietly while the principal gets on the intercom to thank all the veterans on his faculty and read their names. Emily is surprised to learn that Mandy Weiss’s mom, the Attendance Lady, is a Navy reservist and that both her biology teacher and her sister’s chemistry teacher used the G.I. bill to get their Master’s degrees. Then Mrs. Feldmayer asks the students whose parents are veterans to raise their hands. Our neighborhood, located just about halfway between the Pentagon and Fort Myer on the north and Fort Belvoir on the south, houses many military families. Seven out of twenty youngsters raise their hands, including Emily. She is the only one at her table, until Beth Dickerson lifts her hand slowly, shyly, about halfway up. “I don’t know if my dad is or not-I guess he was,” she volunteers. Beth’s father, Army Lt. Col. Jerry Dickerson, was killed just two months ago when American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into his brand-new Army staff offices in the west side of the Pentagon.
Robert E. Lee High School was hard hit on September 11. Six parents were killed–three in the Pentagon and three on the plane. Several others were near-misses: Christian Bowman’s mom, a senior flight attendant, was on the plane that left Gate C3 just minutes before the fatal flight. Jessica Shipman’s dad, a corporate executive on his way to a conference, had booked himself on a cheaper flight with a stopover that left an hour earlier; five of his co-workers died. Beth’s classmates cluster around to hug her; her mother is moving the family back home to Arkansas, but they want her to remember something about Springfield besides the fact that she lost her father here.
At 11:00, the students in Peer Mediation get on the intercom. Two students sing God Bless America, four more read vignettes written by soldiers who served in World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. A “band dork” plays Taps on the trumpet, and the students hold hands and cry together as all the painful memories of the worst day of their life come back in a searing flash.
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I know what it must have been like when the news first reached the school and then spread; I was in the tenth grade when Kennedy was assassinated. What I could not have known was the panic that strikes a city under siege. School superintendent Daniel Domenich ordered the schools left open. “We need to keep the roads clear for emergency vehicles,” he said urgently into a dozen microphones. “Please don’t come for your children; they are safest here.” The lines at the school’s two pay phones snaked through the halls as youngsters lined up to call home to make sure their parents were safe. No one’s cell phones were working: we learned later that most of the parents who worked in the Pentagon had given their cells to the firefighters and rescue workers. Nicole Alleger’s mom, a Navy chief petty officer who is a trained paramedic, stayed to help and did not arrive home until 8 p.m. Other parents used their vans and SUV’s to transport the wounded (injured? no–wounded) to nearby Arlington Hospital, or they just left their car keys with the paramedics and took the subway home. The students who knew that their parents had been on Flight 77 waited in terror, glued to the footage of the devastation in New York and the horrifying fire spreading through the Pentagon. Emily finally reached us at 12:30, sobbing with relief. No one had thought to tell her that her dad had taken the day off, but she knew that the Center for Military History’s Pentagon office was near the west side of the Pentagon, in Wedge II, not far from the heliport.
Robert E. Lee’s eighteen hundred students, privileged and high-achieving beneficiaries of a wealthy school system, residents of one of the richest counties in the United States, accustomed to thinking of their parents as a checkbook or credit card and a set of car keys–perhaps the keys to their used Volvo–had suddenly been parachuted into downtown Beirut.
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Schools were closed on September 12. The students at Lee had twenty-four hours to decide what their response to September 11 would be. A torrent of Instant Messages flying around the neighborhood made it impossible for anyone but kids to get online. The students reached out first, briefly, to their families, then hungrily, intensely, to one another.
On the morning of September 13, I picked up the girls in my carpool as usual, but there was no more idle chatter about borrowing each other’s clothes or about who is really hot or what happened last night on Gilmore Girls. Two lifelong friends, Mandy Zinn–whose parents are the offspring of Holocaust survivors with strong ties to Israel–and Tiffany Abu-Shaikha–whose mother is from Puerto Rico and whose father is a Jordanian Muslim–greeted each other with affectionate hugs but spoke awkwardly, tentatively. On the way to school, each walked the other cautiously through the history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as their parents had explained it to them the night before–seeking common ground, trying to understand if generations of hereditary enmity meant that they must now be enemies too.
Tiffany was particularly concerned that Muslim students at Lee might be targeted. Many East Asian and Middle Eastern families in our neighborhood maintain the practices of their home cultures–young girls wear their heads covered, as do Sikh boys, or they come to school in full chador. Students who fast during Ramadan gather in Miss Scott’s classroom during lunch so they don’t have to sit in the cafeteria and watch everyone else eat. Emily offered advice,” Don’t worry, Tiffany, everyone thinks you’re Black anyway,” and all the girls laughed. But there was no real cause for concern. When we arrived at the parking lot, the members of the Student Government Association were handing out white ribbons for everyone to wear. They were making a special effort to approach students from the Middle East and pin ribbons on them. Student leaders had spent all day on September 12 making 900 ribbons and planning a candlelight vigil to be held the following week.
The Fairfax County school system probably prohibits gatherings on school property where there will be prayers. No one at the vigil cared. The parking lot was filled with students and their families. Candles were lighted and clutched in trembling hands. Everyone signed the six-foot banners that the students had made for the grieving families, and for the Fairfax County police and firefighters still on round-the-clock shifts doing search and recovery. Parents who were off duty came to take the banners to the fire and police stations. The banners said simply “To the Dickersons…Bakers…Yanceys…Lee Remembers…”
The principal opened the program with a prayer for peace and understanding. Then it was the students’ turn. One by one, they spoke of their outrage at this unprovoked assault on their country, their pain at the senseless loss of life, their despair that their friends’ moms and dads had become “collateral damage.” Sweet, fresh-faced American kids in their jeans and khakis, their Old Navy’s, their American Eagles, their FUBU’s, and an occasional Abercrombie & Fitch, whose families had come here from Pakistan, Germany, Iran, Cambodia, and England, or from Africa in the cargo hold of a slave ship. Whenever and however they had come, all sought a better life for their children. Future Business Leaders of America president Raheel Khan spoke first, then Matt Fiorino, then Ramin Bajoghli. Homecoming queen Tiffany Capehart read a poem she had written. Each of the heartfelt messages ended the same way, with a plea for racial and religious tolerance in this home of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Virginia Statutes on Religious Freedom. “We are a family,” they said, one after another. “We are all in pain; we must turn to one another for comfort and resolve and work together to create a better world free of the hatred and destruction born of ignorance and intolerance.”
They sounded very different from the generation of students with whom I went to segregated high schools in Memphis in the 1960’s. Those of us who dedicated our adolescence and early adulthood to the American civil rights movement knew that the key to true acceptance and mutual respect was education. We supported efforts, some still necessary, to force America’s children into an integrated experience of public school. We sought to raise a generation more open-minded, fairer, and more respectful of differences than our own.
“Look at our work,” I wanted to say, as everyone joined hands to sing the national anthem, brown and white fingers hooked tightly together around the cardboard skirts of hundreds of candles. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Japan and Korea, India and Pakistan, Germany and France, Turkey and Greece, England and Ireland, Israel and Egypt have become husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, neighbors and friends now in America. Just as for us, their parents, there long ago ceased to be Polish-Americans and Irish-Americans; for these students, there are no Arab-Americans, nor Japanese-Americans, nor even African-Americans–just Americans.
Robert E. Lee (now John L. Lewis) High School was built in 1956. It strained and stretched to accommodate desegregation; it has sent generations of graduates off to war. Some of this year’s graduates will go too. But the students there, all of them now casualties of war, responded to September 11 with a call to love–by declining the opportunity to stir up old hatreds and legitimize new ones, by stepping forward, holding hands, and proclaiming E pluribus unum. At this moment, barely a month past the October SAT’s, the seniors are applying to colleges and universities throughout the United States. As a parent and as a teacher, I look at them and am filled with hope.
Staying Three 
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