ЕГЭ по английскому языку (аудирование №17: детальное понимание текста)

Childhood

Nature and history conspired to make the place where we lived when I first entered school a wonderland. Glaciers during the Ice Age scooped the soil out the Great Lakes to the north, pushed it south, and left our region a heap of hills and valleys, creeks and rivers that was a young boy’s dream. Snow piled up in the narrow valleys in winter, and when it melted it flooded the town each spring. When I was old enough to get a job delivering newspapers, we delivered them in a rowboat to the houses near the rivers.

The town was located where the Muskingum River flows into the Ohio. It was a trading post for American Indians, who built several sacred mounds there. When whites settled, they named the town Marietta for Marie Antoinette, the French queen at the time of the American Revolution. Marietta was settled in the 1790s by war veterans whose graves remain there still. The county, the main street, the elementary school I went to, and many other sites were named for the president of the country at the time, George Washington.

The Ohio River divided the free from the slave states before the Civil War, and Marietta was a station on the Underground Railroad. It helped slaves from Virginia, across the river, escape to northern cities and to Canada. A small number remained in town, though they were always in danger of being recaptured, until after the war.

Elementary school was a time of fun and adventure. I had a small boat, but it leaked so badly I couldn’t take it on the river without a friend along to bail out the water. I fell in love in the fifth grade with a girl who had beautiful green eyes. They were crossed, but that didn’t matter to a fifth grader. I had a wonderful dog, a Samoyed, a Siberian sled dog, who slept on my bed and followed me everywhere. Once she followed me to my girlfriend’s house and ate one of the family’s chickens. That was the end of my romance.

There were a few black students in our school, but at that age we didn’t have a name for them. They were our friends, some better athletes than we were whom we greatly admired. Two events led me to think that adults knew something we didn’t. In the 4th grade when we were practicing for the May Pole Dance, a black boy in my class was allowed to dance with a black girl in another class. The rest of us couldn’t do that, so I didn’t think it was fair. Another time I wandered into a barbershop that served blacks, and I got a bad haircut. My father took me back to have it cut again, but turned around when he saw which shop I’d gone to.

The days of innocence ended with elementary school. Our family moved to a racially divided southern city, where I learned that one name often used for my black friends was nigger. Culture shock set me adrift. Later in life I studied history and social science, still trying to learn why my Southern white friends felt as they did about my Northern black ones.