“Well, what’d ya expect me to do? I couldn’t let her think I was goin’ up there ’cause I like to, could I? She’d’ve killed me!”
“And good riddance,” I thought, promising myself that if he ever pulled anything like that on me, I’d knock his block off.
We were nearing the second crossroads, where deep gullies lined both sides of the road and the dense forest crept to the very edges of high, jagged, clay-walled banks. Suddenly, Stacey turned. “Quick!” he cried. “Off the road!” Without another word, all of us but Little Man scrambled up the steep right bank into the forest.
“Get up here, Man,” Stacey ordered, but Little Man only gazed at the ragged red bank sparsely covered with scraggly brown briars and kept on walking. “Come on, do like I say.”
“But I’ll get my clothes dirty!” protested Little Man.
“You’re gonna get them a whole lot dirtier you stay down there. Look!”
Little Man turned around and watched saucer-eyed as a bus bore down on him spewing clouds of red dust like a huge yellow dragon breathing fire. Little Man headed toward the bank, but it was too steep. He ran frantically along the road looking for a foothold and, finding one, hopped onto the bank, but not before the bus had sped past enveloping him in a scarlet haze while laughing white faces pressed against the bus windows.
Little Man shook a threatening fist into the thick air, then looked dismally down at himself.
“Well, ole Little Man done got his Sunday clothes dirty,” T.J. laughed as we jumped down from the bank. Angry tears welled in Little Man’s eyes but he quickly brushed them away before T.J. could see them.
“Ah, shut up, T.J.,” Stacey snapped.
“Yeah, shut up, T.J.,” I echoed.
“Come on, Man,” Stacey said, “and next time do like I tell ya.”
Little Man hopped down from the bank. “How’s come they did that, Stacey, huh?” he asked, dusting himself off. “How’s come they didn’t even stop for us?”
“’Cause they like to see us run and it ain’t our bus,” Stacey said, balling his fists and jamming them tightly into his pockets.
“Well, where’s our bus?” demanded Little Man.
“We ain’t got one.”
“Well, why not?”
“Ask Mama,” Stacey replied as a towheaded boy, barefooted and pale, came running down a forest path toward us. The boy quickly caught up and fell in stride with Stacey and T.J.
“Hey, Stacey,” he said shyly.
“Hey, Jeremy,” Stacey said.
There was an awkward silence.
“Y’all jus’ startin’ school today?”
“Yeah,” replied Stacey.
“I wishin’ ours was jus’ startin’,” sighed Jeremy. “Ours been goin’ since the end of August.” Jeremy’s eyes were a whitewashed blue and they seemed to weep when he spoke.
“Yeah,” said Stacey again.
Jeremy kicked the dust briskly and looked toward the north. He was a strange boy. Ever since I had begun school, he had walked with us as far as the crossroads in the morning, and met us there in the afternoon. He was often ridiculed by the other children at his school and had shown up more than once with wide red welts on his arms which Lillian Jean, his older sister, had revealed with satisfaction were the result of his associating with us. Still, Jeremy continued to meet us.
When we reached the crossroads, three more children, a girl of twelve or thirteen and two boys, all looking very much like Jeremy, rushed past. The girl was Lillian Jean. “Jeremy, come on,” she said without a backward glance, and Jeremy, smiling sheepishly, waved a timid good-bye and slowly followed her.
We stood in the crossing gazing after them. Jeremy looked back once but then Lillian Jean yelled shrilly at him and he did not look back again. They were headed for the Jefferson Davis County School, a long white wooden building looming in the distance. Behind the building was a wide sports field around which were scattered rows of tiered gray-looking benches. In front of it were two yellow buses, our own tormentor and one that brought students from the other direction, and loitering students awaiting the knell of the morning bell. In the very center of the expansive front lawn, waving red, white, and blue with the emblem of the Confederacy emblazoned in its upper left-hand corner, was the Mississippi flag. Directly below it was the American flag. As Jeremy and his sister and brothers hurried toward those transposed flags, we turned eastward toward our own school.
* * *
The Great Faith Elementary and Secondary School, one of the largest black schools in the county, was a dismal end to an hour’s journey. Consisting of four weather-beaten wooden houses on stilts of brick, 320 students, seven teachers, a principal, a caretaker, and the caretaker’s cow, which kept the wide crabgrass lawn sufficiently clipped in spring and summer, the school was located near three plantations, the largest and closest by far being the Granger plantation. Most of the students were from families that sharecropped on Granger land, and the others mainly from Montier and Harrison plantation families. Because the students were needed in the fields from early spring when the cotton was planted until after most of the cotton had been picked in the fall, the school adjusted its terms accordingly, beginning in October and dismissing in March. But even so, after today a number of the older students would not be seen again for a month or two, not until the last puff of cotton had been gleaned from the fields, and eventually most would drop out of school altogether. Because of this the classes in the higher grades grew smaller with each passing year.
The class buildings, with their backs practically against the forest wall, formed a semicircle facing a small one-room church at the opposite edge of the compound. It was to this church that many of the school’s students and their parents belonged. As we arrived, the enormous iron bell in the church belfry was ringing vigorously, warning the milling students that only five minutes of freedom remained.
Little Man immediately pushed his way across the lawn to the well. Stacey and T.J., ignoring the rest of us now that they were on the school grounds, wandered off to be with the other seventh-grade boys, and Christopher-John and Claude rushed to reunite with their classmates of last year. Left alone, I dragged slowly to the building that held the first four grades and sat on the bottom step. Plopping my pencils and notebook into the dirt, I propped my elbows on my knees and rested my chin in the palms of my hands.
“Hey, Cassie,” said Mary Lou Wellever, the principal’s daughter, as she flounced by in a new yellow dress.
“Hey, yourself,” I said, scowling so ferociously that she kept on walking. I stared after her a moment noting that she would have on a new dress. Certainly no one else did. Patches on faded pants and dresses abounded on boys and girls come so recently from the heat of the cotton fields. Girls stood awkwardly, afraid to sit, and boys pulled restlessly at starched, high-buttoned collars. Those students fortunate enough to have shoes hopped from one pinched foot to the other. Tonight the Sunday clothes would be wrapped in newspaper and hung for Sunday and the shoes would be packed away to be brought out again only when the weather turned so cold that bare feet could no longer traverse the frozen roads; but for today we all suffered.
On the far side of the lawn I spied Moe Turner speeding toward the seventh-grade-class building, and wondered at his energy. Moe was one of Stacey’s friends. He lived on the Montier plantation, a three-and-a-half-hour walk from the school. Because of the distance, many children from the Montier plantation did not come to Great Faith after they had finished the four-year school near Smellings Creek. But there were some girls and boys like Moe who made the trek daily, leaving their homes while the sky was black and not returning until all was blackness again. I for one was certainly glad that I didn’t live that far away. I don’t think my feet would have wanted that badly for me to be educated.
The chiming of the second bell began. I stood up dusting my bottom as the first, second, third, and fourth graders crowded up the stairs into the hallway. Little Man flashed proudly past, hi
s face and hands clean and his black shoes shining again. I glanced down at my own shoes powdered red and, raising my right foot, rubbed it against the back of my left leg, then reversed the procedure. As the last gong of the bell reverberated across the compound, I swooped up my pencils and notebook and ran inside.
A hallway extended from the front to the back door of the building. On either side of the hallway were two doorways, both leading into the same large room which was divided into two classrooms by a heavy canvas curtain. The second and third grades were on the left, the first and fourth grades on the right. I hurried to the rear of the building, turned to the right, and slid into a third-row bench occupied by Gracey Pearson and Alma Scott.
“You can’t sit here,” objected Gracey. “I’m saving it for Mary Lou.”
I glanced back at Mary Lou Wellever depositing her lunch pail on a shelf in the back of the room and said, “Not any more you ain’t.”
Miss Daisy Crocker, yellow and buckeyed, glared down at me from the middle of the room with a look that said, “Soooooooo, it’s you, Cassie Logan.” Then she pursed her lips and drew the curtain along the rusted iron rod and tucked it into a wide loop in the back wall. With the curtain drawn back, the first graders gazed quizzically at us. Little Man sat by a window, his hands folded, patiently waiting for Miss Crocker to speak.
Mary Lou nudged me. “That’s my seat, Cassie Logan.”
“Mary Lou Wellever,” Miss Crocker called primly, “have a seat.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Mary Lou, eyeing me with a look of pure hate before turning away.
Miss Crocker walked stiffly to her desk, which was set on a tiny platform and piled high with bulky objects covered by a tarpaulin. She rapped the desk with a ruler, although the room was perfectly still, and said, “Welcome, children, to Great Faith Elementary School.” Turning slightly so that she stared squarely at the left side of the room, she continued, “To all of you fourth graders, it’s good to have you in my class. I’ll be expecting many good and wonderful things from you.” Then addressing the right side of the room, she said, “And to all our little first grade friends only today starting on the road to knowledge and education, may your tiny feet find the pathways of learning steady and forever before you.”
Already bored, I stretched my right arm on the desk and rested my head in my upraised hand.
Miss Crocker smiled mechanically, then rapped on her desk again. “Now, little ones,” she said, still talking to the first grade, “your teacher, Miss Davis, has been held up in Jackson for a few days so I’ll have the pleasure of sprinkling your little minds with the first rays of knowledge.” She beamed down upon them as if she expected to be applauded for this bit of news, then with a swoop of her large eyes to include the fourth graders, she went on.
“Now since there’s only one of me, we shall have to sacrifice for the next few days. We shall work, work, work, but we shall have to work like little Christian boys and girls and share, share, share. Now are we willing to do that?”
“YES’M, MIZ CROCKER,” the children chorused.
But I remained silent. I never did approve of group responses. Adjusting my head in my hand, I sighed heavily, my mind on the burning of the Berrys.
“Cassie Logan?”
I looked up, startled.
“Cassie Logan!”
“Yes, ma’am?” I jumped up quickly to face Miss Crocker.
“Aren’t you willing to work and share?”
“Yes’m.”
“Then say so!”
“Yes’m,” I murmured, sliding back into my seat as Mary Lou, Gracey, and Alma giggled. Here it was only five minutes into the new school year and already I was in trouble.
By ten o’clock, Miss Crocker had rearranged our seating and written our names on her seating chart. I was still sitting beside Gracey and Alma but we had been moved from the third to the first row in front of a small potbellied stove. Although being eyeball to eyeball with Miss Crocker was nothing to look forward to, the prospect of being warm once the cold weather set in was nothing to be sneezed at either, so I resolved to make the best of my rather dubious position.
Now Miss Crocker made a startling announcement: This year we would all have books.
Everyone gasped, for most of the students had never handled a book at all besides the family Bible. I admit that even I was somewhat excited. Although Mama had several books, I had never had one of my very own.
“Now we’re very fortunate to get these readers,” Miss Crocker explained while we eagerly awaited the unveiling. “The county superintendent of schools himself brought these books down here for our use and we must take extra-good care of them.” She moved toward her desk. “So let’s all promise that we’ll take the best care possible of these new books.” She stared down, expecting our response. “All right, all together, let’s repeat, ‘We promise to take good care of our new books.’” She looked sharply at me as she spoke.
“WE PROMISE TO TAKE GOOD CARE OF OUR NEW BOOKS!”
“Fine,” Miss Crocker beamed, then proudly threw back the tarpaulin.
Sitting so close to the desk, I could see that the covers of the books, a motley red, were badly worn and that the gray edges of the pages had been marred by pencils, crayons, and ink. My anticipation at having my own book ebbed to a sinking disappointment. But Miss Crocker continued to beam as she called each fourth grader to her desk and, recording a number in her roll book, handed him or her a book.
As I returned from my trip to her desk, I noticed the first graders anxiously watching the disappearing pile. Miss Crocker must have noticed them too, for as I sat down she said, “Don’t worry, little ones, there are plenty of readers for you too. See there on Miss Davis’s desk.” Wide eyes turned to the covered teacher’s platform directly in front of them and an audible sigh of relief swelled in the room.
I glanced across at Little Man, his face lit in eager excitement. I knew that he could not see the soiled covers or the marred pages from where he sat, and even though his penchant for cleanliness was often annoying, I did not like to think of his disappointment when he saw the books as they really were. But there was nothing that I could do about it, so I opened my book to its center and began browsing through the spotted pages. Girls with blond braids and boys with blue eyes stared up at me. I found a story about a boy and his dog lost in a cave and began reading while Miss Crocker’s voice droned on monotonously.
Suddenly I grew conscious of a break in that monotonous tone and I looked up. Miss Crocker was sitting at Miss Davis’s desk with the first-grade books stacked before her, staring fiercely down at Little Man, who was pushing a book back upon the desk.
“What’s that you said, Clayton Chester Logan?” she asked.
The room became gravely silent. Everyone knew that Little Man was in big trouble for no one, but no one, ever called Little Man “Clayton Chester” unless she or he meant serious business.
Little Man knew this too. His lips parted slightly as he took his hands from the book. He quivered, but he did not take his eyes from Miss Crocker. “I—I said may I have another book please, ma’am,” he squeaked. “That one’s dirty.”
“Dirty!” Miss Crocker echoed, appalled by such temerity. She stood up, gazing down upon Little Man like a bony giant, but Little Man raised his head and continued to look into her eyes. “Dirty! And just who do you think you are, Clayton Chester? Here the county is giving us these wonderful books during these hard times and you’re going to stand there and tell me that the book’s too dirty? Now you take that book or get nothing at all!”
Little Man lowered his eyes and said nothing as he stared at the book. For several moments he stood there, his face barely visible above the desk, then he turned and looked at the few remaining books and, seeming to realize that they were as badly soiled as the one Miss Crocker had given him, he looked across the room at me. I nodded and Little Man, glancing up again at Miss Crocker, slid the book from the edge of the desk, and with his back straight and his
head up returned to his seat.
Miss Crocker sat down again. “Some people around here seem to be giving themselves airs. I’ll tolerate no more of that,” she scowled. “Sharon Lake, come get your book.”
I watched Little Man as he scooted into his seat beside two other little boys. He sat for a while with a stony face looking out the window; then, evidently accepting the fact that the book in front of him was the best that he could expect, he turned and opened it. But as he stared at the book’s inside cover, his face clouded, changing from sulky acceptance to puzzlement. His brows furrowed. Then his eyes grew wide, and suddenly he sucked in his breath and sprang from his chair like a wounded animal, flinging the book onto the floor and stomping madly upon it.
Miss Crocker rushed to Little Man and grabbed him up in powerful hands. She shook him vigorously, then set him on the floor again. “Now, just what’s gotten into you, Clayton Chester?”
But Little Man said nothing. He just stood staring down at the open book, shivering with indignant anger.
“Pick it up,” she ordered.
“No!” defied Little Man.
“No? I’ll give you ten seconds to pick up that book, boy, or I’m going to get my switch.”
Little Man bit his lower lip, and I knew that he was not going to pick up the book. Rapidly, I turned to the inside cover of my own book and saw immediately what had made Little Man so furious. Stamped on the inside cover was a chart which read:
The blank lines continued down to line 20 and I knew that they had all been reserved for black students. A knot of anger swelled in my throat and held there. But as Miss Crocker directed Little Man to bend over the “whipping” chair, I put aside my anger and jumped up.
“Miz Crocker, don’t, please!” I cried. Miss Crocker’s dark eyes warned me not to say another word. “I know why he done it!”
“You want part of this switch, Cassie?”
“No’m,” I said hastily. “I just wanna tell you how come Little Man done what he done.”
“Sit down!” she ordered as I hurried toward her with the open book in my hand.