Skim through the following passage looking for the words listed in the 3-Column Vocabulary chart (below passage).  Read around each word.  Then write a predicted or real definition for each word in the chart.

 

When my mother woke me up that morning before school, I was feeling completely optimistic.  I was certain that nothing was going to go wrong because I had prayed to God the night before, and He makes everything all right.  So I got out of bed, showered and dressed in my new shoes, and went down to breakfast.  Momma was at the stove cooking and my older brother, Robert, sat reading something at the table.  When I came in, he stashed it away, but something in the way he did it made me think that he wasn’t just hiding a love letter or something else embarrassing.

            “Robert, what’s that?” I asked pointing to the pocket he’d folded the paper into.  All he did was shrug.  Momma turned quickly to glare at him, but I managed to catch the look between them.  “Momma? What’s going on?”  I said, feeling a queasy feeling starting to grow in my stomach.

            “Just something we found under the door this morning.  Nothing to worry about on your first big day,” Momma said turning back briskly to the bacon on the stove.

            I was puzzled and feeling more unsettled, but if Momma said not to worry, then I’d try not to worry.  I had been fighting butterflies every day since I’d agreed to participate in the integration of Central High School, but I was determined not to let them get the better of me today.  Just because a lot of people said that I didn’t belong at Central didn’t mean they were right.

            I carefully ate my breakfast, not wanting to get my new blouse dirty before school, then went to gather my school supplies.  Momma was planning on driving me to school.  We both knew it’d be too dangerous for me to walk there with all the segregationists crowding near the school trying to keep me out.  They were the ones who said I didn’t belong, but I was going to show everyone that I was just like anyone else, not a pariah who should be kept out because I looked differently than all the other kids at Central.

            When we stepped outside to go to our car, all our neighbors were out on their porches watching our house, most of them standing back with their arms crossed and shaking their heads.  I felt like I was an ant under a magnifying glass.  Their eyes seemed to burn through me with disapproval just as the sun would beam down through the glass to crisp an ant in the middle of a summer’s day.  Just then a neighbor girl, Esther, came running up to me.  We’d gone to school together last year.  In between gasps of breath, she clutched my arm and asked anxiously, “Did…did you get the note?  It’s real important.  You shouldn’t go!”  She looked around at all the staring eyes as if afraid and then took off back to her house before I could even answer her.

“Momma? What did that note say?  Please tell me,” I begged my mother who was already at the car ready to go.

“Honey, don’t be concerned.  It just seems that some of our neighbors don’t think you should be going to school today.  They’d rather you stay with your own kind at your old school.”  The queasiness I was fighting earlier held back no longer.  It flooded my stomach, and I found it hard to breathe.  Imagine!  To be ostracized by your own community on such an important day, such a difficult day!  No one in my community liked the segregationists, liked living with Jim Crow, liked being treated as second-class citizens.  Why wouldn’t they support me on this?

My head reeled and the rest of my optimism drained from my body.  There was no hope for today, and the day had just begun.

 

 

3-Column Vocabulary—Important Concepts in Warriors

 

Concept Word	Predicted or Real Definition	New Sentence Using the Word or Examples of the Word from Reading
Optimist
Integration
Segregationists
Pariah
Ostracized
Jim Crow