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Show Bauman Says Operation Headstart By J. BAUMAN (Editor's note: In this first of a three-part series dealing deal-ing with race problems in general and the Head Start Program (for which he taught this summer) in particular, Bauman presents his impressions of the people for whom Head Start was created. Tomorrow he will discuss the efficiency of that program.) Of the fifty states of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, one is called Maryland. It is as typical of the Union as any. Of Maryland's counties, one typical of Maryland is called Worcester. Worcester County, population 23,733, stretches along the Delmarva Penninsula from south Delaware to north Virginia. It is Southern in character and economically eco-nomically backward; it possess few towns of any significance. There is almost no real industry. The area's main produce is poultry and pigs, corn and beans. There are a few large chicken-processing plants and one small college. There is little school integration. integra-tion. Worcester's typical Negro family lives in a dil lapidated two-story frame house; the remains of an ancient automobile or L two rust amid the weeds of the front "i8 vard- The unpainted porch sags, the f- boards having given up long ago; 'L-v faded washing hangs limp in the many-layered heat of the afternoon. ' , V " y Near the house there is a high- way. From the highway comes the 7 sharp singing whine of hard hot rub-1 rub-1 ber rolling fast on asphalt and above those wheels there is a blue station wagon (chrome aeral bent in the wind, sun blazing from its roof) and behind the car there is an 18-foot Chris Craft with a smooth white hull blue-lettered at the bow and above the bow there is a tiny American flag that snaps in the breeze. Then the car is a shinning bug rounding a curve in the hazy green distance and "the dry corn gray-brown near the shack stops rustling and slumps hot and dusty beneath be-neath the brassy sun. A purple bus slows and stops before the house; a tiny black girl hops from the bus to the asphalt. She has dirty sneakers (laces broken and ret.ed in several places), no socks, empitigo sores on her slender brown legs, red coruroy shorts, a rumpled old blue shirt, a thick-lipped serious face, flatfly black, a scrap of faded red ribon in her ratted brown-black hair. The sun is shining white on that hair, each wiry strand bristling stiff and unruly from that rough ratting. Her name is Abra and she is nearly four years old. She has is Abra and she is nearly four years old. She has an innocent beauty. Abra has never seen her father; her mother kills chickens at the processing plant. Abra will probably prob-ably also work in the chicken plant someday. She clutches her picture (torn from a Superman coloring book and scribbled on with thick crayons at the Head Start center), scuffs through the dust and the weeds and the heat toward her home. Abra knows about dreams. She has seen plenty of Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers. She has seen his Typical American Thanksgiving Tableau: Tab-leau: the distinguished old gentleman (Granpaw) poses at the head of the linen-clothed table with a large fork in one hand, a carving knife in the other. His expression: somewhere between pious thankfulness thankful-ness and gowing expectancy. Dad and Mom, conservatively con-servatively dressd, just unfolding their hands after grace, also looking 'obnoxiously holy, flank two children (fresh, clean, combed). She has a soft blue ribbon in her blond hair; Junior is short a front tooth and exposes that gap with a freckled grin. The table is heavy with good china and brimful milk gobblets and bowls of fruit and stuffing and silver salt cellers and sugar bowls and mellow green var.es complete with goldenrod. A beautiful scene. But it has, somehow, an air of unreality. Yet it must be fairly representative; Abra has seen the same group repeated, with minor differences in expression and setting, in thousands of television shows and magazine photograps. She has seen them walking hand in hand to church (high white steeple), opening lavishly-wrapped Christmas gifts, picnicing in parks. She has seen them and knows they must exist; but she doesen't know where and she doesen't know why. She does know that Head Start has vaguely, subliminally, promised her that good life. |