One friday morning

(Langston Hughes)

The news did not come directly to Nancy Lee, but it came indirectly and finally pointed to one fact: she had won the prize! Nancy Lee's drawing was so good, her lines so sure, her colours so bright, that certainly no other students in the senior art class at George Washington High School was thought to have very much of a chance.

Nancy Lee was a coloured girl, a few years out of the South. But seldom did her high-school classmates think of her as col­oured. She was smart, pretty and brown. She stood high in scholarship, played a good game of basket-ball, had taken part in the senior musical in a soft velvety voice, so it was seldom even mentioned — her colour.

Nancy Lee sometimes forgot she was coloured herself. She liked her classmates and school. Particularly she liked her art teacher, Miss Dietrich, the tall red-haired woman who taught her to keep her brush firm and her colours clean. Miss Dietrich had taught Nancy Lee how to paint spring, people, everything on what was only a white piece of paper.

One wet rainy April afternoon Miss O'Shay, the girls' vice-principal, sent for Nancy Lee to stop by at her office as school closed. Pupils without umbrellas or raincoats stood in door­ways waiting for the rain to stop. Outside the skies were grey. Nancy Lee's thoughts were suddenly grey, too.

She didn't think she had done anything wrong, yet she be­came nervous as she came to Miss O'Shay's door. Perhaps she was failing in some subject and wouldn't be allowed to grad­uate.

She knocked on Miss O'Shay's door. "Come in," said her voice.

"Sit down, Nancy Lee Johnson," said Miss O'Shay. "I have something to tell you." Nancy Lee sat down.

"But I must ask you to promise not to tell anyone yet."

"I won't, Miss O'Shay," Nancy Lee said, wondering what on earth the principal had to say to her. .

"You are about to graduate," Miss O'Shay said. "We shall miss you. You have been an excellent student."

At that point there was a light knock on the door. Miss O'Shay called out, "Come in," and Miss Dietrich entered.

"May I be a part of this, too?" she asked, smiling.

"Of course," Miss O'Shay said. "I was just telling Nancy Lee what we thought of her. But I hadn't given her the news. Perhaps, Miss Dietrich, you'd like to tell her yourself."

Babylonia

The people of Babylonia were rich and powerful. They were also happy. They loved each other and they enjoyed working together. But one thing was lacking Men had only the earth to enjoy. God had kept heaven for himself and his angels.

The King of Babylonia decided that his people should have Heaven as well as Earth. So he ordered them to build a great tall tower. Six hundred thousand men began making bricks and mixing mortar and piling up a building higher and higher. All day every day men carried bricks and mortar up a stairway on the east side of the tower. Then they walked down another stairway on the west to get more loads. This went on for forty-two years until the Tower was twenty-seven miles high. It was so high that it took a man a whole year to carry bricks from the ground to the top.

Now the Tower had risen nearly to Heaven, and God saw that he would have to do something to keep the invaders out. Perhaps if he made it hard for people to co-operate, they would not be able to finish the Tower. To carry out his plan God sent seventy angels down to Earth. The angels had orders: first to take away the one language everybody understood, then to split the people up into groups, with each group speaking a new tongue of its own. In no time the men who made bricks couldn't talk to the men who carried them. And the men who carried bricks couldn't say an understandable word to the men who laid the bricks. Everything was a mess, and everybody blamed everybody else for not understanding. People no longer talked about the Tower of Heaven. Instead they talked about the Tower of Babel, which meant the Tower of Confusion. Work came to a dead stop. The builders went away carrying their new languages with them. That is how it happens that different tongues are spoken in different parts of the world.