“Goddamn nigger scratched me,” he said, like it was a boast.
Miss Hattie snatched me up like a pullet.
“Get your sow’s butt into the truck.” Her voice was now garbled, as if received distantly over a radio, but I discerned clearly the fury, the shame.
“And Pudding, gather up those papers.”
The ride home seemed a journey to execution. I knew what to expect. Miss Hattie never glanced back at me, ramrod straight in the cab of Mr. Raymond’s truck, that gentle man mystified by her obdurate fury and getting no explanation. Pudding held onto his knees, barely acknowledging my presence over our ragged load of textbooks. I had never seen Pudding Reed at a loss for words; his silence was a fearful portent of what I was to shortly endure.
“She hits you, you cry. Cry like a baby, or she won’t stop.”
“She’ll stop when she’s ready.”
Pudding considered that a moment.
“And don’ let go that door,” was his final advice.
We got to school, I knew where to go. There is a doorless portal that leads from the corner room Miss Hattie calls her office to the wide, breezy hall outside. That’s where we got our whippings. We called them whippings because Miss Hattie rarely used a paddle.
She used a switch. Persons never chastised with a switch may not appreciate the difference between that implement and a paddle. Well, a switch is flexible, for one thing. You get hit on your back, it can wrap clear around. There are different kinds of switches. You could use a mulberry or a persimmon branch and trim it to the purpose. But the most feared switches came, as Miss Hattie well knew, from peach tress. The whole length of that flexible branch is knotted with junctures intended for blossoms and blooms and branches of new life. But trimmed, those notches bite like teeth on a saw.
When you were little there was a line to stand on, and you had to stand still while Miss Hattie switched your legs. If you moved, if you got off that line, she just started over. You got older, you stood inside the doorway, you reached up and grabbed the lintel. Shoulder blades opened up your back when you did that. Stretched the skin. Didn’t bother the boys too much, as they mostly wore work shirts. But for me in my gingham dress the assigned posture was dramatic. I would be as exposed for flaying as any shanghaied sailor.
I had stolen, surely, which was an awful offense. But it was not the sin of theft that moved Miss Hattie to her present fury.
“People in that school think we’re ignorant anyway,” she hissed, trimming a switch that looked as long as she was tall. “White folks see a colored child they think he’s got lice. See a Negro anywhere, think he can’t read or reason. See any black skin, think it filthy. So what do you do? I say WHAT DO YOU DO?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.” Genuine tears were pressed from my eyes.
She shoved the ripped sheets of music in my face.
“THIS! You just go on over there and show those white folks everything they already want to see in a Negro. What me and Miss Chandler and every teacher here are laboring with Jesus to keep hid !
“You shamed us, today, Cilla Handsom. And you make me ashamed. Over this ? Now. You know what to do.”
My palms came damply to press the lintel. I waited stretched out and exposed for what seemed forever. Where would the first blow come? The calves? My feet? Across my back. You couldn’t flinch. Could not take your hands off that lintel or Miss Hattie would just start all over. That had been the point of Pudding’s final admonition.
I heard someone weeping frightened in the hall, might have been Shirley Lee.
“YOU WANT TO TAKE HER PLACE?”
A cry strangled in some frightened throat. It was not normal for any student to witness another’s corporal punishment. Normally it was just you and Miss Hattie, there would not even be another teacher present. But Kerbo’s principal declared that my behavior had betrayed us all, every child and teacher at our school, and so my classmates had been made to leave their desks and come into the hall to see my punishment. Punishment, yes, and example.
They were all trying to look away from me, Shirley Lee, Pudding, Chicken—all of them. All the seniors, too. Something was moving deeply across Miss Chandler’s broad face.
“Miss Hattie…” she began, but it had already started.
I kept my hands on that lintel. I told myself I would not squall. I stood and gnawed on my nigger lips till my back was wet. Eventually somebody cried out. Begged even, I heard her. Then I felt something warm between my legs, gushing. Miss Chandler’s voice hailed from some distance and it ended. I slid down the door’s ancient frame, grateful to find the waiting floor, shameless in a mixing of blood.
Chapter five
“White IQ vs. Negro IQ ” by Jon J. Synon
— The Clarion
I was sent home from the whipping, my back and legs cut to the pattern of shoelaces. People on their porches interrupted their daily chores or indolence to point, to stare. I was dizzy, the sun baking my bare head, and crying out freshly as sweat seeped into my open wounds, that added duress offering some distraction if not relief from the failure of my mossy napkin. Menstrual blood had ruined my skirt, run down my thighs, and Miss Hattie would not allow a wash.
“Git you butt home,” was her unquestioned command.
I ran from the school, stopping only in our rude playground to snatch up the burlap bag that had been second base. I held that sackcloth in a sarong about my waist, hoping to hide my shame. But the burlap was insufficient armor for a gauntlet of porches and prying eyes.
“Look like Corrie Jean’s girl got herself a whupping good-fashion!” Miss Dollie Lamb whooped delight.
“Got some other embarrassment, too!” Lester contributed from the deep recline of his brother’s porch. I could see Lester’s hands working beneath the bulge of his trousers. “Ain’ she a woman for sho?”
My face was hot. I felt sick to my stomach. The cramps. I stumbled, fell, got up and ran again. The gentle breeze generated by my running scoured my back anew, but I would not stop. Neighbors stared or jeered or chortled. That is how we treat the disgraced in Colored Town.
My dog was the only creature showing me comfort. Meeting me at the boundary of our yard. Whining.
“Grandmama!”
Grandmother Handsom made some kind of liniment. From the blossoms of a dogwood, she said. She said when Jesus died on a dogwood cross he made sure it would never be used to hurt anyone, ever again.
And I thought that must be true because I had never seen anybody cut a switch from a dogwood tree.
“Go lay down,” grandma said.
I took Mama’s mattress. It was easier. A fresh breeze, normally welcome, drifted like sandpaper over the wounds that crisscrossed my back.
“Oh, Lord!”
I slept anyway. I don’t know whether it was the effect of the liniment or my ordeal or simple exhaustion, but I slept till way past sundown. I woke and saw mother there before me.
“Mama!”
A child’s instinct, I suppose, to sit up and reach for one’s mother.
“OH!”
The wounds on my back opened to fresh perspiration.
“Oh, Mama!”
She put her hands out to me, both of them. She knew, then, that I was injured? She was offering comfort?
“It’s all right, mama. I’ll be fine.”
But then Corrie Jean pulled her tin cup from beneath her mattress.
“Wawa,” she said.
Water.
And I realized that she was not reaching for me at all.
“Grandma?!” I called weakly but got no answer.
So there I was, alone in the house, with my mother. And no water.
“Wawa! Wawa!” Corrie Jean waved her tin cup.
“PUT THAT DAMN THING DOWN!”
I slapped the cup away. Mother scurried from me like a field mouse from a cat. Huddled in the corner.
I did not move to console or comfort her.
“Wawa?” a whimper came from the corner.
How could I be expected to get water? To go once more in front of my neighbors? In front of Mr. Raymond? Or Lester?
“GET IT YOU OWNSELF,” I screamed and mother trembled like a leaf in a bad wind.
“LEAVE ME ALONE!” I begged and put my head down.
About that time the six-thirty feeder hooted into the station. You could hear the whistle climbing. A couple of short toots from the engineer, then that long, whippoorwill salutation. I’d have give anything to be on a train that moment, any train headed anywhere, as long as it was out of Colored Town. I closed my eyes. The steaming whistle suffocated in the spiced and heavy air.
“…. Cilla?”
That the Lord called Samuel: and he answered.
Here am I .
And he ran unto Eli, and said, Here am I; for thou calledst me.
And he said, I called not.
“…Cilla?”
Here am I.
I called not, my daughter, lie down again.
“Cilla Handsom!”
A voice. But you can ignore voices in a dream, grandmama said.
“Cilla, wake up!”
Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth. “Wake up!”
The mattress beneath my face was damp. So now I was drooling, too. Just like my mother. Mother? Where was she? I raised my head. There. Banished to the corner of our pine-box room, curled fetal and snoring. Something stabbed at my heart.
“Cilla, you up yet, girl?”
I knew that voice—Joe Billy! But where?
“At you window,” he whispered hoarsely.
I turned and there he was, framed in the open sill and backlit like a movie star by a rising moon.
“I’m not decent,” my voice slurred with recent slumber.
“I heard,” he replied solemnly. “You want, I’ll grab me a stake and drive it through that bitch’s vampire heart.”
A laugh bubbled up from some place I didn’t even recognize and I realized I was smiling. “What’s a vampire?”
“You don’ know?”
“What if I don’t?” I replied with some defiance.
“Thass better.”
A mouth filled with teeth in that narrow face, those half-dollar eyes catching the moon like saucers. Hair processed straight and combed back.
“Come on out,” he peered into my room.
“I cain’t come out,” I said. “I got to clean and get somethin’ fresh to wear, and we all out of water.”
“Not no more you ain’t.”
His head disappeared. I heard a curse, a grunt, and then Joe Billy hefted a silver pail of water onto my open sill.
“What have you gone and done?” I asked amazed.
“Heard you were untoward, thought I’d haul some water,” he said modestly. “Got a barrel for you, too. Fifty gallon’s worth. I figure we clean it up, fill it, save you-all some trips.”
It was an act so generous and unexpected that I could not find words to thank him.
“A ‘thank you’ will do,” he supplied.
“You a mind-reader?”
“You an open book,” he returned.
“Gimme that water.”
I rose stiffly, crossed to the windowsill and hefted the slopping pail into my room.
“How long it take you to clean up?”
“Another month?” I quipped, and he practically doubled up laughing.
“Thass good, Cilla. Thass real good. But I cain’t wait no month.”
“You wait right there,” I told him. “And shush! ’Fore you wake somebody.”
“How long you gonna be?”
“I’ll be out when I’m out.”
I sponged off on the back porch, slipped some underthings off the line, a clean shift. Time I got back out to the front of the house, Joe Billy had Hard On sitting in his lap like he’d known him forever.
“You spoil my dog.”
“He need attention.”
“ You need attention. You a crazy boy.”
“Crazy ’bout you.”
“Don’t make fun.”
“I’m not makin’ nuthin’.”
“Everybody in this town laughin’ at me.”
He paused a moment. “Not everybody.”
I turned to the shadows. “Whatchu want here, anyway? Not figurin’ on some poontang, are you? ’Cause niggers don’ like no jelly roll once it’s bleedin’.”
“Now, thass nasty talk.”
“Yes, it is.”
“That how you usually talk? Well? Is it?”
“…No.”
He pulled Hard On gently off his lap.
“Are you a grown man?” I asked. “A boy? How old are you?”
“Old enough to be on my own.”
“Man on his own have to work. You working?”
“Got myself a business.”
“Hauling water?”
“I illustrate guitars.”
“Kind of business is that?”
“Can be pretty damn good,” he said. “Wanta see? I’ll show you.”
“Show me where? You livin’ on a back porch!”
“Not no more,” he beamed. “Got my own place. Take you there sometime. What about tomorrow? Right after school?”
“You in some kind of trouble. Aren’t you, Joe Billy?”
“We all in trouble, Cilla. Some of us just better at it than others.”
I can see, you can see, he can see. We can see, you can see, they can see…. Our penciled paeans to grammar were interrupted the very next morning with the arrival of a new student at Kerbo School. Joe Billy introduced himself awkwardly as Joseph William King to Miss Chandler, saying his family situation had changed and that he’d be a resident of Laureate for the foreseeable future.
Pudding snickered when Joe Billy said, “Laureate”.
“You in Colored Town, fool.”
“What was that, Peter?”
That got an open laugh. Everbody knew Pudding hated Miss Chandler using his given name.
Miss Chandler turned again to her newest student. “Where are you from, Joseph William?”
“Valdosta, born and raised,” Joe Billy replied with a glance to me. “Valdosta, Georgia.”
“Well, welcome to Kerbo School,” Miss Chandler smiled. “Now, somebody sharpen Joseph a pencil. We’re going to be working on some drills.”
I would have welcomed the arrival of any new student that morning, anything or anyone to deflect attention that otherwise would have been given me. Joe Billy, unfortunately, became the immediate target of the petty intimidations invariably inflicted on newcomers. By recess there was a fight. Then a paddling. Joe Billy was no big kind of thing. He would appear to be an easy target. But he returned from Principal Briar’s office with no apparent injury. Chicken Swamp, on the other hand, slinked in rubbing his ass with one hand and cradling his nuts with the other. Miss Chandler called the class’s attention to this latter predicament, pointing out that holding your privates was not polite behavior. Miss Chandler was a genius at using bad examples to good purpose.
I assiduously avoided any contact with my new classmate, plowing ahead through the day in a blur, intransitive verbs and the capitol of Vermont mere distractions, now, a prelude to the end of the day and my first invite-you with a boy.
“Meet me by the water tower.” Joe Billy had slipped me the note at lunch time. “After school.”
I first ran home to check on mama. She was fed and clean and Grandma was settled.
“Where you goin’?” Grandma asked when I skipped out the door.
“Mr. Raymond’s,” I lied.
I waited for Joe Billy beneath the white people’s water tower. We had not set up a specific time for our rendezvous, I realized, and immediately began to fret that this was a snooker, a tar baby, and that I would be waiting forever beneath the water tower’s crazy scrawl of graffiti. I had the greatest urge to pee, but was afraid if I left to relieve myself it would be at the very interval when Joe Billy chose to arrive.
I was also afraid
to be alone. Town Park was not safe for any person with skin darker than fresh milk. I was not supposed to be here. The town’s park was off-limits to Negroes, a reservation where white boys and their pale-skinned consorts could neck in anonymity. It was also a place for young toughs to race their trucks or drink or fight. I had no desire to be present for any of those entertainments.
The King of Colored Town Page 7