Witness

Leonora Sutter is a 12-year-old Black girl living in a mostly white rural Vermont town in 1924. Her classmates torment her because of the color of her skin; the girls won’t dance on the same stage as her during recitals, and the boys complain of the “stink of her” (4) in class and show her ads for racist minstrel shows. A boy named Merlin is especially mean to her, and when she glares at him, he runs away, thinking she’s casting witchcraft on him. Only Esther Hirsch, a six-year-old Jewish child from New York, is friendly toward Leonora. When another boy at school, Willa Pettibone, tells Leonora that the Klan will burn up her and her father, she walks out of school into below-zero weather without her coat, boots, or hat. Sara Chickering, a farmer in town, finds Leonora on her porch, half-frozen. Sara quickly contacts Constable Johnson, the town constable, and he brings Leonora’s father to bring her home. Sara wonders at the fact that she has never had a “colored girl” (12) in her kitchen before.

Esther came from New York last year to live with Sara for the summer—“to be a fresh air girl in vermont” (5).