“Is dinner ready?”
“Yes, indeed. Go get your mother. But tell her she can’t come to the table unless she’s clean,” which is Gran’s way of saying Mama had better put that cigarette out.
A few minutes later, Mama and Gran and me are sitting around the table, holding hands. Gran’s eyes are squeezed tight shut as she says, “Heavenly Father, bless this food to our use and us to Thy service. We beg for Christ’s sake. Amen.” I am watching Gran, who looks so holy when she is conversing with the Lord. Mama is gazing out the window. She probably has Mr. Titus and double shifts and other work things on her mind.
When the blessing is over we dig into the food. I don’t know how Gran manages to put together our meals day in and day out. Mama, she earns the money for what food we have to buy, but Gran, she is in charge of the cooking, and as far as I can see that is some job. I reach across the table and give Gran’s hand a pat.
“Now, what is that for, Belle Teal?” she asks me with a little smile.
“Nothing,” I say, with a smile back.
Mama looks up and smiles at both of us. Then she says to me, “All ready for school?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You got enough pencils and things?”
“I think so.”
“And you finally have Miss Casey.”
“Yes!”
“Who all is going to be in your class this year?” Gran wants to know.
“Oh, you know. All the regulars,” I say. “Clarice. And Little Boss. And Chas and Vernon.” I make a face.
“Belle Teal . . .” says Mama with a warning in her voice.
“I am not judging Chas and Vernon based on their appearance,” I tell her. “I am judging them based on what’s inside. I know their insides and they’re mean.” I think for a moment. “Mama, is it wrong to hate someone —” I start to ask.
“It is wrong to hate anyone,” Mama replies quickly.
“But is it wrong to hate someone because that person hates other people?”
Mama sighs. She looks like she wishes she had a cigarette. “Hate just creates more hate,” she says finally.
I think of those school meetings Mama went to over the summer. The meetings the parents held after it was announced that the colored students would be going to Coker Creek in the fall. Mama couldn’t get to all the meetings, but she got to some of them. And she came home from them looking tired and a little angry. She said she didn’t think she was a very popular person. But when Mama believes something she sticks to her guns about it. And she speaks up. Says the Lord gave her a mouth and she intends to put it to good use.
“Sounds like everyone is putting their mouths to good use,” I told her after one meeting. “Only most people have something different to say than you do.”
“I know.” Mama didn’t talk too much about those meetings.
And eventually it didn’t seem to matter who thought what, because it turned out the colored students were going to go to Coker Creek in any case. “It’s not the parents’ decision to make,” said Mama. “It’s the law. Although I’m sure the parents will have more to say on the subject.”
Now Gran puts down her fork and directs her gaze at Mama. “You don’t think there’ll be any trouble at school tomorrow, do you?” she asks.
Mama shakes her head. “Nope. It’s all died down. Besides, this isn’t Little Rock.”
“Little Rock? The Little Rock Nine?” I say. Everyone has heard about the Little Rock Nine, the nine colored students who were chosen to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, a few years back.
“Those poor children,” murmurs Gran. “Heavens. What they went through. . . . Oh! Adele, honey, I just remembered. We are almost out of sugar. Tomorrow could you stop and pick us up another bag?”
I look at Mama with my mouth hanging open, but I know enough not to say anything. I can’t bear to hear Mama patiently answer Gran, though, so I scoot my plate over to the sink, grab my journal, and head for the front porch.
“Belle Teal!” Mama calls after me. “The dishes.”
“Can I write first, please? Before the sun goes down?”
“Yeah, precious. Okay.” Mama only sounds a little exasperated.
On our porch I sit in the old lawn chair, the one with the scratchy green and white strips that are coming apart. I draw my legs up underneath me and open my journal in my lap. I don’t lift my pen right away, though. I take in a deep breath and look out over our hills. I think how Gran has lived in these hills all her whole life. She can tell you everything about them — their weather and their trees and their animals. Gran, she reads the weather with one finger and her nose. Every morning she stands on the porch, holds up one thin pointer finger, and sniffs the air. “Hot today,” she’ll say. Or, “Snow coming.” Or, “No rain yet.” Lately, though, her predictions haven’t made much sense. For instance, this morning she stood here in the little light summer nightie that is the only one she’ll wear anymore, put her finger in the air, sniffed, and then looked at our broken thermometer, the one that’s been stuck on forty degrees for three years now. And she said, “My land, only forty. It’s going to be downright chilly today.”
Now Gran knows as well as Mama and me that that thermometer is broken, so I don’t know what’s got into her head. It’s a good thing I pick up on facts pretty easy, because these days I have to sort out the facts from Gran’s new brand of fiction.
I pick up my pen. I start to write about how I don’t look a thing like Gran. Gran is all skinny and birdish. Tiny too. And before her hair went white it was pure blonde. I’ve seen pictures of her as a girl. Me, I’m darker, like Mama, and I’m a bit on the plump side, which I guess I take after my daddy. Plus, I’m growing fast as a weed right now. Soon I’ll be taller than Gran.
I am writing all this when behind me I hear Gran ask Mama about that sugar again and I want to leap up out of the chair and shake Gran by her bony shoulders. Then I think to myself about what Mama has said to me so many times: “We have faced lots of hardships, Belle Teal. You and your gran and I. But we can take care of ourselves. We do whatever is necessary. We have strength and patience.”
I look up at the sky. I don’t know if there is a God up there or not. Gran is sure her Lord resides there, but I am still making up my mind. I know I get some comfort from looking at the sky, though. So I gaze at the streaky clouds turning salmon pink as the sun drops low, and I tell myself to have strength and patience where Gran is concerned. While I am at it, I wish that a little strength and patience would flow into the minds of the people who are making judgments about the colored students, and then I wish for extra strength and patience for the colored students themselves.
I write a few more sentences in my journal. Then I go inside to do my chores and get ready for my first day of fifth grade.
The sun wakes me the next morning. I jump out of bed in a big hurry. It is going to be another blazing hot day, and I imagine sticky seats and desktops, and heavy air hanging in our classroom. But mostly I think about Miss Casey and how wonderful fifth grade is going to be. I pull on my green shift, the one Gran made for me in the spring. It wasn’t the best-looking shift then, and five months later I am starting to pop out of it in a few places. I jam my feet into my old brown boots. They are the only shoes I ever wear, no matter what the season, when I bother with shoes at all.
“Precious, why don’t you let me braid your hair?” is Mama’s greeting to me as I sit down to Gran’s breakfast of eggs and biscuits.
“Oh, Mama,” I say. Braiding always takes so long.
“Just for your first day of school,” she says.
I think of standing there while Mama tugs and pulls. “I look okay,” I tell her finally, and Mama gives up.
I suspect I am not looking my best for the first day of school. I don’t think Miss Casey will mind loose hair, though.
When breakfast is over (I always eat a good, big breakfast), I rush around gathering up the things I will need for school: note
book, pencil case, changepurse, lunch in a bag.
“Bye, Mama! Bye, Gran!” I call as I run out the door. I fly across our yard and wait by the road. I can see the school bus wheezing up our hill.
The bus draws to a stop and I wave madly at Bernette, the driver, before she even opens the door.
“Hello, Bernette!” I cry as I board those three steps.
“Welcome back, Belle Teal,” she says, and she flashes me a wide grin.
Bernette and me, we never get to see each other over the summer.
I give Bernette a peck on the cheek and then I stand at the head of the aisle and look at the faces in the bus, trying to spot Clarice. Just as I see her waving to me from the third row of seats I hear something like a little snort down at my side. Sitting in the very first row of seats, directly behind Bernette, is a girl I have never seen before.
Lordy, she is proper looking.
I glance at my shift with the stitches popping apart and the stain on the hem, and at my dusty boots. Then I look at the new girl again. Her blonde hair is silky and shiny and pulled back from her face with a yellow-and-white-striped ribbon. And she is wearing an outfit I think I might have seen in the Sears catalog — a yellow skirt-and-sweater set, very soft looking. And black shoes that are patent leather like Mama’s belt. And white tights. By lunchtime this girl is going to be roasting.
I can’t help myself. I stare at her. I look at her hair ribbon, and then my eyes glide all the way down to those shoes, then back up to the ribbon.
The girl looks me in the eye and snorts again. Snorts like a pig.
I frown at her.
“Nice dress,” she whispers as I start to pass by her.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“I am Vanessa Mathers, and I come from Mechanicsville.”
“Nice to meet you,” I reply. I head for Clarice.
While this has been going on, Bernette has been engaged in the daily struggle that takes place in front of my house. She has to turn the bus around. I am the only kid who lives up here on the hill, so after Bernette reaches my stop, she groans and pants and lets out sighs that puff up her gray bangs while drips of sweat form on her temples. She turns and turns and turns that steering wheel as she swings the bus into our drive, backs it up, and heads us down the hill again.
I am fully settled next to Clarice before Vanessa Mathers realizes what Bernette has been up to. Vanessa turns around and glares at me. “You mean we had to drive all the way up here just to pick you up?” she asks.
I think about my conversations with Mama the night before — about being nice to new kids and hate creating hate and all. I don’t want to judge Vanessa on her appearance, but I believe she is judging me on mine. Which I don’t like it. Chas and Vernon, for instance, they got to know me before they showed their mean selves. Still, I decide to hold my tongue for the present. I just smile sweet-like at Vanessa Mathers.
Vanessa, she makes quite a face at me before she swings her shiny hair around and rides the rest of the way to Coker Creek Elementary with her eyes fixed on the back of Bernette’s head.
Clarice and me shrug our shoulders at each other. Then we start gabbing away. Mostly about Miss Casey, but also we try to figure out what will happen on The Edge of Night this afternoon. We manage to ignore Chas and Vernon, who are sitting in the very last row of seats throwing spitballs down the bus aisle. One hits Vanessa Mathers and I know she feels it, because she squirms her head just a little, but she will not turn around and look. Only when Bernette glances at the boys in the enormous rearview mirror and says quietly, “Enough,” do the boys finally stop. That Bernette, she could be a principal or something.
By the time Bernette pulls up in front of Coker Creek Elementary, Clarice and me are busting with excitement.
“Let’s try to sit in the first row,” I say. “Next to each other. And right in front of Miss Casey.”
“Okay.”
We wave good-bye to Bernette and skitter off the bus.
Then we come to a screeching halt.
Parents — I guess they are parents — are lined up along the walkway to the front doors of Coker Creek. Me and Clarice will have to pass between them, like we are in a parade.
Clarice frowns at me. She pushes her blue glasses nervously up and down the bridge of her nose. “What’s going on?” she asks.
“Don’t know.”
The parents are standing there, watching the kids that stream off the buses or climb out of cars. They are not saying a word, but their faces are thunderclouds. A few of them have handmade signs, which they are not holding up yet. I try to read them upside down. I think I see a lot of words that begin with N, but I am afraid to stare at the signs for too long.
I feel my face grow warm, like I’m embarrassed, even though I haven’t done anything. And I know the underarms of my shift are turning a darker shade of green because now I’m sweating. I jam my hands down at my sides so no one will see.
“Come on,” I say to Clarice, and we walk fast inside the building, and directly to room 6.
The door to our classroom is open, and someone has hung a huge yellow paper sun on it. Written on the sun is:
Room 6, Grade 5
Miss Casey
WELCOME!
All those questions that were forming on my tongue — the ones about the angry parents and their signs — melt away at the sight of Miss Casey at her desk. Clarice and me, we zoom into the room and slide into two seats next to each other, right in front of Miss Casey. We can barely see her, though. A bunch of kids are clustered around her and she’s talking quietly to them, smiling.
“Hey.” A soft voice behind me. A nudge on my shoulder.
I turn around. There is Little Boss. “Hey!” I cry.
Me and Little Boss have not seen each other all summer. (There’s a lot of people I don’t see all summer.) I grin at him. We have been friends since he moved here just after third grade began. Not everyone likes Little Boss, but I do. Despite his faults, which are many. Whenever those faults come rearing up, I remind myself about what goes on at Little Boss’s house. Now, I have never actually been at his house, but in a town the size of Coker Creek, everybody pretty much knows everybody else’s business, or thinks they do, and a lot of what a person hears is true. Chas, he used to live next door to Little Boss. This was before Chas’s father started his painting business and made enough money to buy a house closer on in to town. Chas and Little Boss got to be friends, and Chas, he used to tell me and Clarice what he would hear on the nights Big Boss had been out drinking. I do not know how Little Boss lives with so much anger in his house, except that he doesn’t have any choice.
Clarice, she thinks it’s kind of strange that Little Boss and me wound up friends, and to tell the truth, I’m not even sure how that happened. All I know is that by the end of third grade, just about the time Chas’s family moved, me and Little Boss were talking on the playground almost every day. One thing about me is I am a good listener. That’s what Clarice says. Little Boss, he doesn’t usually tell me anything profound. Maybe it’s just that he knows he could if he ever wanted to.
“How was your summer?” Little Boss asks me now.
“Good. Yours?”
“Good.” He grins at me.
I am about to ask Little Boss what he did over the summer, knowing he’ll answer me with, “Nothing,” when there is a scuffle around Miss Casey’s desk. She is standing up and the kids who have been talking to her drift away to find seats. I sit down in my chair fast, proud of myself for having claimed a desk in this prime location. Then I give a wave to Little Boss as he heads for the back of the room with Chas and Vernon. I bet they won’t get away with sitting together there for long.
Miss Casey is straightening things on her desk. As I watch her, I feel like when I am in our yard and I see a rabbit or a toad or something and it doesn’t see me, and I have a chance to observe it up close. Miss Casey, she is wearing the most wonderful rose-colored dress with a string of pearls around her
neck. She has tiny gold bands on two of her fingers (not on her wedding band finger, though), and from back here at my desk I can smell a very light scent, which it must be her perfume from France.
I wonder all sorts of things about Miss Casey — where she lives, where she is from, who her friends are, what she eats for dinner, where she goes shopping. I have a tiny daydream about her in which she turns out to be my long-lost aunt.
I do love Miss Casey.
Suddenly I hear a low roar from outside, voices raised, and I turn to look out the window. Miss Casey stops fiddling around at her desk and looks out the window too. Over to the left I can see some of those parents. Now they remind me of a swarm of bees whose hive has been disturbed. I watch Miss Casey watching them until I realize that someone is sitting down at the desk next to me, not the desk Clarice has taken, but the one on my right. I turn my head.
Looking back at me is Vanessa Mathers.
“Oh.” I groan.
Vanessa gives me a large fake smile, smoothes her skirt across her lap, places her notebook neatly in her desk, then folds her hands in front of her.
I turn to Clarice and tug at her sleeve. “Guess who’s in our class,” I whisper.
But Clarice is not looking at me. She’s not looking outside either. Her eyes are glued to the doorway to our room.
“Clarice,” I whisper urgently.
Clarice glances at me, raises her eyebrows, and looks back at the door, so finally I follow her gaze.
Standing uncertainly in front of that yellow sun is a colored boy. Right behind him, with her hands placed gently on his shoulders, is a colored lady. “Excuse me,” she says, quiet-like. “Are you Miss Casey?”
Miss Casey turns away from the window. When she sees the lady and the boy, a wide smile spreads across her face.
“Mrs. Craig?” she says. “Darryl? Welcome. Welcome to our class.”
Darryl, say good morning to your teacher.” Mrs. Craig nudges him toward Miss Casey.
Darryl sticks out his hand. “Good morning, ma’am,” he says, solemn-like. “Pleased to meet you.”