Dear D.L. Robinson,
Your story is incredibly realistic. You have captured so much emotion, both good and bad, and expressed it to your reader through excellent dialogue, vivid descriptions, and a wide variety of sensory information. You not only tell us what things look like, but you tell us colors, textures, sounds, smells, etc! I loved the simile in which you compared Trudy's father to a "blowfish with a sunburn". It is so vivid and humorous, yet such an apt comparison when you think of the emotional explosion he just experienced!
I also like that, although your story is written from the third person perspective with an omnipotent narrator, you allowed each of your main characters to tell us their feelings, after which you supplied additional background information so that we would understand a little better why they acted the way they did. For example, Mr. Robbins opens his mouth and slings out a whole list of racially stereotypical statements and then marches off making an insulting remark regarding his wife. Instead of her staring after him and shaking her head in disgust wondering what she ever saw in the man, you tell us the story of where they came from, the history of racial prejudice in Mr. Robbins' family, and a summary of their courtship and the events that led them to that day.
Although your story deals with a mature and difficult subject, you have not made light of it, been biased or judgmental in your coverage, or lectured your readers as to what you think the solution should be. You introduced your characters, set a problem in front of young Trudy, and allowed us to follow her as she came up with her own individual solution. That is not an easy thing to do, and I commend you on doing it superbly!
Now...just a few technical points. To make things easier to understand, I am going to call each small section within your story a chapter and each chapter will start with paragraph 1. That way we don't have to keep recounting paragraphs all the way from start to finish.
Chapter 1
 Chapter 1, paragraph 2: "...Clowns vs. The Board of Miscegenation is more like it!"
The "the" after "vs." does not need to be capitalized.
 Chapter 1, paragraph 8: "...tell you somethin,' he said with a stern look on his face. There ain't nothin' funny..."
Mr. Robbins is speaking here. First, the apostrophe is misplaced in "somethin'" and then you are missing a couple sets of quotation marks. Here is that portion with the apostrophe adjusted and quotation marks added: "...tell you somethin'," he said with a stern look on his face. "There ain't nothin' funny..."
 Chapter 1, paragraph 10: "All right..." is one word: alright.
Chapter 2
Chapter 2, paragraph 7: In the second sentence you said that Mr. and Mrs. Robbins got married and moved to south Florida. Florida needs to be capitalized.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3, paragraph 2: Trudy is speaking to her mother. "Mama" is an incomplete sentence. It can be combined with the question Trudy asks by changing the period to a comma: "Mama, why..."
Chapter 3, paragraph 12: Trudy is here relaying to her mother a conversation she had with her father. As she does this, the portions of that conversation that Trudy quotes need to be enclosed within sets of single quotation marks. You did this with the final statement in the line but not with the other. The first part of what Trudy tells her Mom is an indirect quotation and doesn't need the quotation marks. In the following portion I have made corrections in red.
"He said all of it doesn't come off. So I said, ‘Well there won't be enough to make me black all over so then how come I haven't ever seen anybody who was black and white?’ Then he just said, 'Trudy Jane, watch TV.'"
Chapter 4
Chapter 4, paragraph 2: In this paragraph you have the phrase "That was a lot of es's..." Usually "es's" is written "S's". I love this section. Your descriptions of Mr. Buttersmith and his nickname are so true to life. Excellent writing!
Chapter 4, paragraph 3: The first sentence of this paragraph, although grammatically correct, is very awkward. Also "the arm of her sleeve" is redundant. Was it the sleeve of her dress, her coat, her blouse? In all actuality, it doesn't even matter what garment the sleeve belonged to. The simple fact is that she used her sleeve to wipe her face."Akillah did an about face, wiping the arm of her sleeve across her face, and sauntered to her desk, then slid into it directly in front of Trudy's." There is a lot of activity being described in that one sentence but a simple rearrangement of statements and a removal of the redundancy mentioned above can make it easier for the reader to understand: Akillah did an about face, wiping her sleeve across her face, sauntered to the desk directly in front of Trudy's, and slid in. There are many other ways you can change it, but that is up to you.
Chapter 4, paragraph 3: The next sentence tells us of two more actions that Akillah took. She untied her scarf and she put her lunch into her desk. You have joined the two with "then". It reads much more smoothly with "and" or "and then" since it is a list.
 Chapter 4, paragraph 3: In the last sentence of this paragraph you missed a letter in Mr. Buttersmith's nickname: "Ole’ Butterspay".
 Chapter 4, paragraph 7: In the second sentence: "Mr. Buttersmith practically threw Akillah’s paper to her." I can just imagine this happening, and as angry and agitated as old Butterspray was with Akillah, it is more likely that he threw the paper AT her, not TO her. It has a little more impact on what the reader sees in their imagination and it fills out your character's attitude just a tiny bit more. It tells us that he is racially prejudiced as well as religiously prejudiced, neither of which attributes are desirable in a teacher. It's just a thought I had as I read.
Chapter 5
Chapter 5, paragraph 8: "They filed into the classroom and everyone who brought their lunches retrieved them from the slot in their desks, then they all lined up to walk to the cafeteria."
A reader may lose interest in your story if you use the same phrases over and over. Then they did this, and then they did that, and then they did this...etc. Sometimes it's difficult to find other words to replace these, but it is well worth the effort, especially to your reader. It may mean that you have to break up longer sentences that list several activities and make shorter sentences that describe each one individually. At other times, you could join shorter phrases describing the activities into compound sentences using a colon or semi-colon. In this case, you might add a little more action. Here's an idea I had: Mr. Buttersmith waved his arm to beckon his students back to the classroom. Those who brought their lunches retrieved them from their desks and joined the others in line and waited to walk to the cafeteria.
Chapter 5, paragraph 8: "Trudy, Marjorie and Janet..." In this list of three names, there should be a comma after Marjorie. Otherwise it appears as though someone is speaking to Trudy about the other two girls.
Chapter 6
Chapter 6, paragraphs 3 and 4: These two paragraphs have run together. They just need a blank line between them.
Chapter 6, paragraph 8: "...at least they're dead, and what's that smell."
Here the girls are in the cafeteria whispering about Akillah's lunch. They say that the "bugs" in her bread are dead and then they move on to how it smells. The transition here would make more sense as "but..." Also, "what's that smell" is a question and should be punctuated as such:
"...at least they're dead, but what's that smell?"
Chapter 6, paragraph 11: First, you make a comment about Marjorie's grand-aunt cackling at funerals...sometime needs an s: sometimes.
This is also a very long sentence that could easily be divided. It begins with "Not only" but by the time the reader has read the first part comparing Trudy to Marjorie's aunt, they have forgotten it, which makes the statement about how the two girls felt about Trudy's behavior and the name she called them a little confusing.
In that section is this awkward statement: "...called them something they didn't know the meaning of, but didn't sound good." Simply changing the tail end of that phrase to "didn't like the sound of, either" would make it more easily understood and easier to read.
Chapter 6, paragraph 11, 12, and 13: The narrative statement telling the reader that someone is going to speak is at the end of paragraph 11 and the dialogue is paragraph 12. Just a slight rearrangement will fix this.
After Marjorie's remark Janet makes one of her own to show her agreement. The explanatory narrative statement of which character is speaking should be with the words that character says. In addition, this is another one of those places where you could use another phrase besides "then...." or simply drop "then" and make the statement.
These paragraphs could be easily amended as follows:
"They looked at her like she had gone mad; she cackling the way Marjorie's "touched" grand-aunt did sometimes at funerals. Not only that, but she had just called them something they didn't know the meaning of, but didn't like the sound of, either. Trudy herself was only repeating something she heard her mom say to her dad one day when he was on one of his rants about how in twelve years he couldn't get his own wife to cook him a ham.
Marjorie looked down her nose at Trudy and said, "Well, excuse me, Ms. Brainiac. At my house we don't eat that crap."
Janet followed with her own stamper, "Yeah, what's wrong with eating Wonder Bread and Oscar Meyer like other normal people?"
Chapter 7
Chapter 7, paragraph 1: Near the end of this paragraph you use the phrase "gestured to move". While not technically incorrect, I'm not sure that "gestured" is the proper word here. It typically refers to a movement of the hands or the body that is either descriptive or emphatic. I've been trying to think of something you could use in place of that. Tried, attempted, started...any of those would work. You could rephrase it to something like "tried to get up" or attempted to walk over" etc.
Chapter 7, paragraph 7: Trudy's mom says, "I wonder where you've heard that at before." The "at" is unnecessary.
Chapter 8
Chapter 8, paragraph 4: "But the way everybody kept to their own color, following some unwritten code, you might have thought so. As if there was some type of silent initiation that involves the transfer of data through osmosis called "the rules".
These two sentences provide the reader with quite a bit of information but it sounds broken up or detached. A little bit of reworking could make this read a lot easier and get the same point across. Here is an idea I had:
But the way everybody kept to their own color, it was as if they were following some unwritten code, as if "the rules" had been implanted through osmosis during some type of silent initiation.
Chapter 8, paragraph 5: The last two sentences of this paragraph could be combined into a compound sentence by replacing the period with a semi-colon and fixing the capitalization.
Chapter 8, paragraph 7: In the second sentence the word "besides" should be "beside".
Thank you so much for sharing your work here at WDC. It was a pleasure to read. I hope that this review has been helpful. I will be back again tomorrow to finish "raiding your port"!
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Have a great day!
Deborah
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