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CFA Dialogue Assessment

Last updated about 6 years ago
6 questions
Note from the author:
Dialogue Common Formative Assessment
“Maxwell, is it?” I asked without shifting in my chair. He huffed. “Take a look,” he replied in that gravelly baritone of his, and he nodded at the folder on my desk. I picked it up, opened it, and inspected the contents in their entirety. It took all my restraint to mask my surprise. I've always prided myself on maintaining the composure proper to the editor of a major paper. But what I saw was frankly shocking. In the folder were six photos that appeared to show Waylon Thatch, Albany's then-mayor and a close friend of mine, in what we in the business call a compromising position. The photos seemed to all have been taken around the same time, and judging by the mayor's appearance, it couldn't have been long ago. In them, Waylon was with one of the suspected crime leaders in our area, exchanging a mysterious package. It was suspicious, to say the least. I asked Maxwell where he had gotten the photos. He said it came from a contact of a contact, who claimed to be part of a local cult. He claimed the secret society was composed of the city's elite. Perhaps his contact had an axe to grind with the mayor, who knew?
What a fool I was. I chased that scandal doggedly, with everything I had. I was young and brash. I envisioned a career-defining story, an editorship with the New York Times, a nightly show on CNN. I was blinded to the obvious. The photos, of course, were fakes, brilliantly edited fakes. And though I've never been able to prove it, I am ironclad in my conviction that Grady Maxwell was not just another overeager reporter swept up in the ruse. He was in on it. He may even have been its principal architect.
Who but Maxwell emerged from the scandal unscathed? When the dust had settled, when the guillotine's echoes had faded and the rolling heads, mine chief among them, had ceased to roll, who still had a job? Maxwell.
Albany politics were a very shady affair. Someone had an axe to grind with me, that much now is clear. I had no idea how deep the corruption ran, and I still don't. I never will.
I am content merely to pass the rest of my days in quietude, sheltered from people and ignorant of politics. Let the country sink in its own mire, see if I care. Let the Grady Maxwells of the world scrabble tooth and claw for a seat at the feet of the mighty. See if I care.
1

Read the following sentences: “Let the country sink in its own mire, see if I care. Let the Grady Maxwells of the world scrabble tooth and claw for a seat at the feet of the mighty. See if I care.”

Based on the repeated phrase, “see if I care,” what conclusion can you make about the narrator?

1

The narrator believed that an article about the scandalous photos of the mayor would improve her career. What evidence from the story best supports this conclusion?

Satchel Paige was pitching in the Negro Leagues in California when he got the news he had been anticipating for two decades. Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey had just signed a Negro to a big-league contract—the first Negro in modern times. Word tore through America’s clubhouses and grandstands that October afternoon in 1945: a black man was going to be in the minors, then the Major Leagues. Jackie Robinson would topple baseball’s color bar. And Leroy “Satchel” Paige would not.
Earthshaking—almost like the emancipation of the slaves, integration supporters proclaimed. It was fitting “that the end of baseball’s Jim Crow law should follow the conclusion of a great war to preserve liberty, equality and decency,” wrote Lee Dunbar of the Oakland Tribune. A desecration of the natural order, segregationists shot back. “We live happier with segregation in athletics as well as all other activities,” argued Bud Seifert of South Carolina’s Spartanburg Journal. Bob Feller, the Cleveland Indians flamethrower with a golden arm and a tin ear, told reporters that if Jackie “were a white man, I doubt if they would consider him as big league material.”
The public listened to the cacophony of voices, but the one it wanted to hear most of all was Satchel’s. What did America’s best-loved black ballplayer—the man everyone had assumed would be first—make of the Dodgers’ historic move? “They didn’t make a mistake by signing Robinson,” Satchel said. “They couldn’t have picked a better man.” The words ate at him even as he uttered them. Not only was he being bumped, he was being bumped by his Negro Leagues teammate, an untested rookie who could not hit a curve, gun a throw to first, or land the job as the Kansas City Monarchs’ second baseman until an injury forced out the incumbent.
Other seasoned Negro Leaguers were resentful that the young slugger had never served his time in the sandlots and barnyards, eating dust and fending off slurs. Robinson had not proven himself against the best white ballplayers the way Satchel would do again that next night in San Diego against Feller’s All-Stars from the all-white majors. Rather than show deference to the old hands who had proven themselves, Jackie showed disdain. He complained about the seedy hotels. He objected to puny paychecks and uneven umpiring.
Satchel tried to be philosophical. He understood that he was aging and old-school, while the twenty-six-year-old Robinson was a college boy and Army veteran who Rickey felt could bear the ruthless scrutiny of being first. Jackie did not balk at Rickey’s plan to start him in the minors, in faraway Montreal. Satchel never could have abided the affront. Jackie had the table manners whites liked; Satchel was rough-hewn and ungovernable. Satchel realized he was a specter from the past rather than the harbinger of the more racially tolerant future the Dodgers wanted.
Still, it hurt. It was Paige who had proved during two decades of barnstorming across America and pitching in the shadow world of the Negro Leagues that white fans along with black would come to see great black ballplayers, and that proof was what pushed Rickey to rip down baseball’s racial barricades. Satchel threw so hard that his catchers tried to soften the sting by cushioning their gloves with beefsteaks, and had control so precise that he used a hardball to knock lit cigarettes out of the mouths of obliging teammates. Satchel was so dominating—especially when his teams were beating the best of the white big leaguers—that even good ol’ boys like Dizzy Dean could not help but be impressed. Major League owners noticed, too. One of them—flamboyant Bill Veeck of the Cleveland Indians—said he tried to sign Paige and other blacks in 1944, a year before Rickey’s deal with Robinson, but was blocked by the baseball commissioner. It was Satchel who brought this spotlight to the Negro Leagues, the amazing Kansas City Monarchs, and their first-year second-baseman Jackie Robinson.
Paige was savvy enough to know that Americans have room for just one hero at a time. If Jackie became the knight who slew Jim Crow, the roles of the real pioneers would be lost. Satchel felt sorry for all the great black ballplayers of the segregated era—from Fleetwood Walker and Rube Foster to Josh Gibson, the black Babe Ruth—and sorrier still for himself. He worried that he would be remembered as a Stepin Fetchit or worse, an Uncle Tom. Satchel never saw himself going to war over every racial slight, but he had stood up. He refused to play in a town unless it supplied lodging and food to him and his teammates, a defiance for which young civil rights workers would get arrested and lionized a generation later. Only a player of his stature and grace could manage that without getting his skull cracked open. It was painful, after all those years of hearing “if only you were white,” to be told now “if only you were younger.”
“I’d been the guy who’d started all that big talk about letting us in the big time,” Satchel wrote in his memoir. “I’d been the one who everybody’d said should be in the majors.” To be denied that chance hurt as badly as “when somebody you love dies or something dies inside you.”
When the pain ran that deep only one person could ease it: his girlfriend and confidante, Lahoma Brown. So cherished was her advice that Satchel recalled it word-for-word seventeen years afterward, when she’d become his wife and mother to his seven children. “They took that kid off our team and didn’t even look at me,” Satchel told her. “He’s young, Satchel,” Lahoma answered. “Maybe that’s why.” “He’s no Satchel Paige.” “Everybody knows that, Satchel . . . If they let one colored player into their leagues, they’ll be letting others. Maybe the major leaguers’ll come to you.” “They’ll have to come real pretty-like. They’ve been puttin’ me off too long to just wiggle their fingers at me now.” “Don’t you go sounding like you’re sour. When they come for you, you know you’ll go. You’ve been wanting it real bad for too long not to.” “Well, it still was me that ought to have been first.”
The sense of having been wronged never left him. Satchel Paige had etched his legend as a ballplayer and performer, but he was right about the public’s memory: when it comes to integrating baseball there is only one name that today’s children or even their grandparents know—Jackie Robinson. Satchel Paige had been hacking away at Jim Crow decades before the world got to know Jackie Robinson, laying the groundwork for him the way A. Philip Randolph, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other early civil rights leaders did for Martin Luther King Jr. Paige was as much a poster boy for black baseball as Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong was for black music and Paul Robeson was for the black stage—and much as those two became symbols of their art in addition to their race, so Satchel was known not as a great black pitcher but a great pitcher. Satchel Paige led blackball to the promised land of big-time baseball. He opened the national pastime to blacks and forever changed his sport and this nation.
1

Major League team owners were worried about how white baseball fans would react to a black baseball player joining their league.
What evidence from the text supports this statement?

1

“‘I’d been the guy who’d started all that big talk about letting us in the big time,’ Satchel wrote in his memoir. ‘I’d been the one who everybody’d said should be in the majors.’ To be denied that chance hurt as badly as ‘when somebody you love dies or something dies inside you.’”
Why might the author have included this quote from Satchel Paige’s memoir?

“Hurry!” Jessica called back as Felicia pulled the knot tight on one of her shoes. Felicia had carefully double-knotted them before they started walking, but the laces had come undone, as if of their own volition. They always did that. It seemed she couldn’t go an hour without having to retie them, and yet she tied them just the same as everyone else.
“Coming! Is the sky falling? Jeez!”
Jessica was Felicia’s best friend, but she could be incredibly bossy. Felicia was trying to take her mom’s advice and “calmly assert herself,” but wasn’t so sure she had a handle on the calm part just yet.
They turned off the street and started up the narrow path into the woods. Felicia felt herself relax instantly as she breathed in the fresh air and looked at the blanket of leaves overhead. This was her favorite time of year, when the leaves turned to tones of crimson, yellow, and orange.
The leaves crunched beneath her feet, and the birds sang their happy songs. The squirrels, chipmunks, and who knows what else zigzagged their way through the forest. The path wound to the right until they came to the river, which followed it to the left, wandering upstream along the dirt.
“Long or short?” Jessica asked when they came to a fork in the path. Left was the longer loop; right was the shorter one.
“Hmmm… I choose left,” said Felicia. It was crisp and sunny outside, the kind of day where the longer she stayed out, the better. Plus, heading home would mean heading back to the science report that had been sitting all weekend on her desk.
The girls walked in silence for a few minutes, and then they started singing their usual mash-up: a little bit of Grease, a little bit of Disney, and a little bit of the latest trending pop star. They were right in the middle of “Under the Sea” when Jessica stopped singing, leaving Felicia all on her own to belt out, “Life is the bubbles!”
“Check it out, Leesh,” said Jessica, pointing at the bushes beside them.
“Check what out?”
“Look! Right past those bushes!”
The girls had been certain they knew every inch of the woods, yet neither of them had ever noticed this path before. There was no clear route to get to it from where they were, but only ten feet of bushes stood between them and the new path.
“Well, we can’t just let it go unexplored. Let’s see where it leads,” Felicia said, scanning the bushes for the least intimidating way through.
“How about here?” Jessica called up from the ground, where she lay on her belly. “If we crawl, it’s almost like a little tunnel.”
Felicia crouched down and peered into the brush. “Whoa! It’s like a beaver tunnel or something, but in the bushes. Let’s do it.”
Felicia felt the tingle of adventure on her spine. It was the same tingle she felt when she jumped off the high diving board in swim class or neared the top of a giant rollercoaster drop.
They crawled their way through the tunnel, the bushes grazing their backs. When they made it through to the other side, Felicia stood up and brushed off her arms and legs. She smiled at Jessica, who giggled in return.
“Here you go, Mother Nature,” said Jessica, pulling a big twig and a handful of leaves out of Felicia’s long, curly hair.
The path dipped down a little hill and into a grove of pine trees. A flash of yellow stood out from the clearing behind the pines.
“A house all the way out here? Let’s go!” Felicia said, the tingle rising.
Their pace quickened from walking to jogging to full-on sprinting. Up close, Felicia saw that the house was a cabin. The cabin’s walls, which she imagined were once a bright, sunny yellow, looked dull and stained. A crumbling chimney peeked out from the roof. Chips in the door’s green paint revealed dark wood beneath. The windows were grimy, their corners covered in cobwebs.
“This has to be it, Leesh,” Jessica whispered, her eyes widening with excitement and concern.
“Be what?”
“The cabin Joey told us about over the summer. Don’t you remember?”
Felicia had pushed it to the back of her mind, but now she remembered. Jessica’s brother Joey was full of stories, mostly the kind you didn’t want to hear because they’d keep you up all night, worrying they’d make their way into your dreams.
They walked up to a cabin window and peered through the window, shoulder to shoulder. Inside, a rocking chair sat in front of a wood-burning stove with a tall pot on it. Cartons, bottles, and pieces of paper covered a table and a chair beside it. There was a sack draped over the back of the chair. Below their noses was a twin mattress, and a large trunk sat across the room from the window.
Felicia’s elbows and knees began to ache. Her stomach felt heavy, and her throat filled with fear. “What do you think is in the trunk?”
“Let’s find out. Come on. Joey showed me how to pick a lock with my bobby pin if we ever needed to.”
They didn’t need to. The door wasn’t locked, and it opened with a simple twist of the knob. Felicia stood, stuck in the doorway until Jessica grabbed her hand and tugged her forward. They stared at the trunk, both wondering what could be inside. Jessica knelt beside it and lifted the heavy top. It was filled to the brim with yellowing copies of the Tintown Gazette.
“They’re all the same,” Felicia noted, flipping through a stack. Each one was from 1964, and the cover story was headlined “Good Samaritan Cleans Streets.”
And then there were footsteps—loud, right-next-to-them footsteps. Felicia dropped the stack and fought for air. Jessica screamed. They turned to see who, or what, was in the doorway.
Jessica recognized the woman. “Margie?” It was Jessica’s mom’s friend.
“I see you found my uncle’s old stomping grounds. It needs some work, but I just couldn’t ever bring myself to clean through it after he passed. Insomniac Sam, they’d call him. It’s funny. He was so messy at home, and yet he never could pass a piece of litter on the sidewalk without doing something about it.”
1

Read these sentences from the text.
“‘How about here?' Jessica called up from the ground, where she lay on her belly. 'If we crawl, it’s almost like a little tunnel.' “Felicia crouched down and peered into the brush. 'Whoa! It’s like a beaver tunnel or something, but in the bushes. Let’s do it.' “Felicia felt the tingle of adventure on her spine. It was the same tingle she felt when she jumped off the high diving board in swim class or neared the top of a giant rollercoaster drop.”
Based on this evidence, how does Felicia probably feel about crawling under the bushes?

1

Read these sentences from the text.
“The girls had been certain they knew every inch of the woods, yet neither of them had ever noticed this path before. There was no clear route to get to it from where they were, but only ten feet of bushes stood between them and the new path.”
What does the word “route” most nearly mean as used in the text?