“When you gonna have a baby?” Opal Ivers, a student in my fourth-period chorus section asked abruptly one Friday as I waited to begin class. Opal was a petite, brown-skinned girl, who might have been pretty if she’d gotten braces when she was younger, but now her teeth were bucked and seemed to part comically with each passing week. The kids had a habit of teasing her, but that didn’t stop Opal. She loved being the center of attention and took their laughs as encouragement.
Sitting at my desk behind the shaky piano I dared not ever use, as not one key was in tune, I frowned and dismissed the bold girl’s question with my eyes, but she was reading my mind. In what had become a habit of late, Evan had hinted about a baby over breakfast just that morning. He’d pointed out that I was about to turn thirty-three that Sunday and that my own mother kept saying it was time. “My mama said a married woman got to have a baby,” Opal went on. “That’s why you get married in the first place. Your husband rich, too!”
“Opal,” I started as the room continued to fill up with faces, “not all women want to have children ... or can. And as far as my having a baby, that’s private.”
While I did want children, I just wasn’t sure if it was time for me to take that step in my life. Yes, like Opal and her mother had pointed out, I was married and had a wonderful husband and home, but I still had other things to figure out. That, and not to mention, there was a school full of other babies that needed my attention.
The bell rang and a few stragglers came rushing in without apologizing—as I would never have done when I was in high school. But a lot had changed since then.
Last to arrive as usual was Zenobia Hamilton, a mother and second-year sophomore whose child’s father—a second-year senior—was expecting another baby this summer with Patrice, another one of my students (luckily, she was in first period). Zenobia walked into the room with an air of marked carelessness; her feet were angled at a lazy ninety degrees and her lips were turned under into a nasty frown. Her short hair was undone and standing all over her head as if she’d just rolled out of the bed and onto the school bus.
“Ms. Hamilton,” I said, signaling for her to come to my desk. I unbuttoned my suit jacket and slid it onto the chair behind me.
“Ummm-hum?” She was trying her best to communicate attitude in her voice. She rolled her eyes and balanced her weight on one of her ducked feet. This kind of unnecessary and unwarranted anger so early in the day used to perplex me eight years ago when I started teaching at Black Warrior, but now I’d figured out that mistreating me and mistreating their education, which for most of the students in the poorest school in the county pretty much made up the only structure they had in their day, was simply how they dealt with the emotional minefields that had been titled their life. Zenobia knew she was wrong for most of the things she did, but being bad and stepping out of line was the only thing she thought she could control. If I was fifteen, poor, and had a child with a high school student who was now expecting another baby with my classmate, I might be duck-walking and rolling my eyes, too.
“First, it’s, ‘Yes, Mrs. DeLong—’ ”
“Yes, Mrs. DeLong,” she said under her breath, repeating my words with no trace of sincerity.
“And second, what’s wrong with your hair?”
“I ain’t felt like combing it today.”
“But you knew you had to come to school, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but my mama took my braids out last night and then my auntie ain’t come over to braid it.”
“Personal situation aside—what’s the rule about hair grooming at the school?” I asked. The classroom grew quieter with each exchange. I didn’t want to embarrass her, but the hair was really standing up high and now that she’d mentioned that she’d just taken out braids, I noticed that it hadn’t been combed out and drifts of dandruff cradled her balding edges.
“I know the rule. We can’t come to school without our hair combed.”
“You know I have to send you to the office.”
“It ain’t my fault,” she said. “I told my mama my auntie wasn’t coming. She took my mama’s money and went to smoke it.”
It seemed every student knew what she was talking about—some had drug addictions of their own—and it was no longer a hidden Southern secret, not something these children felt they should be ashamed of. Zenobia hadn’t lowered her voice.
“Ms. Hamilton,” I whispered, leading her to the door. “I can’t allow you to sit in my classroom with your hair like that.”
“I know.” She crossed her arms and shifted her weight again.
“Then, if you know, why would you—” I stopped myself. I could hear my voice becoming frustrated. “Just go to the bathroom and comb it. Put it in a ponytail or something and—”
“My hair don’t fit in no ponytail. I ain’t got no gel ... no weave.”
“Well, just comb it down and come back.”
She sucked her teeth and flicked a red, widetoothed comb out of her back pocket. One she could’ve used hours ago.
“Fine,” she snarled. “I’ll be back.” She turned and waddled through the doorway and as she exited, I saw the promise of a firm belly imprinting the edges of her oversized T-shirt. I closed my eyes for three short seconds to say a little prayer of “no” and “God, please, no” over the pudge before turning back to the students.
“Let’s do a quick warm up and then we’ll pick back up where we left off on Thursday with ‘Swing Low’—we have only five more weeks to get this perfect for graduation,” I said, looking up at the other students in front of me. Some were other Zenobias, others were coming close, and fewer, Opal included, were fighting their best to escape it. The rest simply hadn’t come to school.
On cue, they groaned and rolled their brown eyes as if they’d thought there was some chance I wouldn’t require them to sing—in chorus. Send them all home for not having combed their hair. Zippers unzipped and song sheets rustled as they were taken out to be held in front of the faces of the few kids who still had their copies or needed the words.
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was the traditional spiritual the choir had sung at every graduation since Black Warrior was founded for Negro students in the early 1900s.
“Let’s go.” I walked to the organ I’d placed in front of the old piano.
Hum.
Hum.
Hum.
Hummmm.
I keyed and sang each note for all of the sections to warm them up and just as they did whenever I sang in class, the students relaxed in their seats and looked on like babies being soothed to sleep by a lullaby. They requested the notes again and again and finally, I laughed and said it was time for them to sing.
“But we want you to sing,” Opal whined, and I shook my head no. But I was used to this. I’d grown up being a soloist in the choir at my father’s church and my mother always bragged that I had the voice of an angel. I wasn’t that confident, but when I was just a little girl, I realized that my singing could do things. My father would push me to the microphone and I’d sing nervously, watching as people fell to their knees and got saved right in front of me. Grown men and women would crawl on the floor and sing along with me, crying and praying, some speaking in tongues.
Hum.
Hum.
Hum.
Hummmm.
The sopranos. The tenors. The baritones. The altos. They sent waves of vibrating sounds through the oval-shaped room as I keyed the notes through the short warm up. Suddenly, the room went from dull and tired to a soothing rainbow of sound. The echoes from each group bounced around the room in a tide of confidence and calm.
Zenobia had come back, and we went on, charging at “Swing Low” so hard that it seemed as if the spirits of our ancestors, who rested on the very plantation that the school was built upon, were singing along. The children could feel this energy. All of them. And it came through in their voices. They were forgetting the past with song and living just in the moment in the wonder that we could sound
as one. Right now, who they were and where they were from really didn’t matter. When class ended, they would walk out and return to the world; but for now, singing and “Swing Low” held their spirits captive. In that moment, I was winning.
“Wow,” Billie exclaimed, her face appearing and reappearing in the waves of a sea of students rushing out of the room when the bell rang. My best friend since she stopped Angie Martin from beating me up on the school yard in second grade, Billie taught language arts at Black Warrior. “They sounded really good. I heard them all the way down the hall.”
“Thank you.” I sat down at my desk and sighed. “Let’s hope they sound that way at graduation.”
“Oh, they will. They always do. Anyway, let’s go get some lunch. I need to get out of here.”
“You know I can’t do that,” I said, reaching for the running sneakers beneath my desk.
“You’re working out today ... again? This is five days in a row. This is getting out of control.”
“Don’t be mad at me because I’m actually keeping my grown lady New Year’s resolution,” I said, and Billie rolled her eyes at my reminder of our New Year’s pact. At my parents’ annual New Year’s Day breakfast that year, Billie and I sat stuffed and sleepy in my parents’ den, talking about how fast time was flying by. It seemed that only days ago, we were twenty-one and just graduating from college—making plans neither of us would keep and feeling like the rest of our lives were in front of us. And then, just in a quick snap of time, we’d awoken and found ourselves grown up and feeling like the rest of our lives had already happened. The maps had been laid out and we were just biding our time at work and in the mall. We groaned and complained that we were too young to be so old. We weren’t in our forties, fifties, or sixties. We were in our thirties! And that was supposed to be the new twenties! So, why did we feel so ... over? Not young enough to hang out in the new nightclubs downtown, but not old enough to play bingo in the basement of the VFW either. Then Billie came up with an idea—we had to make “grown lady” resolutions. We had to set up three goals for ourselves for the new year and not let another year pass us by without moving on them. Billie’s grown lady resolutions came quick—letting go of her tumultuous relationship with Clyde and finally dating other men, going back to school to get her master’s, and getting a new car—she’d been driving the same red Eclipse since college. My resolutions took a little longer. I just didn’t know what I wanted. But finally, I decided that I wanted to start to travel—to see the world beyond the South, to start writing songs again, and to lose all of the extra weight I was carrying around.
“I’m just walking around the track outside for an hour.” I added, “You should come, too.”
“But it’s Friday!”
“And?”
“And ... it’s your birthday weekend. You’ll be thirty-three on Sunday.” She sat down in the chair next to my desk and whimpered helplessly. “We need to start celebrating now.”
“Celebrating what? It’s just another year.”
“You’re one year growner!”
“Growner?”
“More grown ... whatever.” She flipped her hand at me.
“Okay, English teacher.”
“Just ... why don’t you seem excited? Not even a little bit?”
“I’m excited,” I said, hearing the lack of enthusiasm in my voice.
“Then come eat with me, pleeeeassee,” she begged.
“But I have to walk today. I promised myself. I have to do something with these bad boys by summer.” I pointed to the round hips that seemed to be stretching my size eighteen slacks into the next cut. “I’m not trying to be the Southern cliché of a black woman—in the church, singing ... and big.”
“Please, J. You know the brothers love those country curves.”
“Not Evan.”
“Well, the Mr. Evan Deeee-Long is a different breed. Everybody has to be picture perfect around him—since he wants to be the first black president of the universe—”
“Well, Obama’s already on the way!” I said and we both laughed.
“Exactly. But I say, bump perfection ... when there’s a tasty sandwich shop waiting to feed us. Come on, girl!” She grinned and waved her hands rhythmically in front of my face to entice me.
“That’s easy for you to say; you’re a size 6,” I said, laughing as I slid off my shoes and began putting on the sneakers. One of the smartest, boldest people I’d ever known, Billie was the kind of pretty girl other pretty girls hated to walk into a party with. For her, beauty was something she didn’t have to work at. Billie’s chestnut skin, doe eyes, and slender cheeks made her an eyeful even when she was asleep—and I lived with her for four years in college at Alabama, so I knew.
“Size doesn’t matter when no one’s there to look at it,” she said, her voice sinking. “Sometimes, I feel like I could be a size 2 or 202 and that fool still wouldn’t notice.”
In high school, Billie was voted “Best Looking,” and we expected some Prince Charming from New York or Atlanta to come swooping down to see her beauty and take her far away from Tuscaloosa. But she had other plans. The love of her heart, Clyde Pierce, wasn’t from New York or Atlanta and he’d sworn long ago that he wasn’t ever leaving his father’s land. He graduated from Stillman College the year before we left the University of Alabama and took a job teaching gym and coaching the varsity football team at Black Warrior. No one was surprised when Billie signed up for a teaching job the following year—even though she was a finance major.
“Oh, Billie, don’t bring up Clyde. I thought you were finally moving on ... remember?” I said.
“I know, but it’s hard to have his shit just all up in my face like this, you know?” She leaned her elbow on the desk and rested her chin in the palm of her hand.
As coach of the football team, Clyde had been enjoying his own form of celebrity in Tuscaloosa. And for years, he’d had a long line of fans linked up behind Billie. The biggest problem he had was crowd control—especially with the other female teachers at the school. But Billie loved even the sweat that bubbled on Clyde’s brow, and while she usually wrote off his philandering and slipping in and out of janitorial closets as rumors, the last chitchat hit her like a bucket of his sweat in her face. Nearly a ringer for a younger Billie, the new physics teacher, Ms. Lindsey, was twenty-one, petite, and so cute the senior class voted to have her put on the list for their “Best Looking.” Last year, when word spread around the “grown people senior class”—that’s what we called the faculty—that Roscoe the janitor caught Clyde and Ms. Lindsey in his storage closet, giggling like teenagers ... and naked, Billie broke it off and she’d dedicated herself to finding a good man ever since. I was happy that she’d had the strength to move on, but also thrown off by the fact that unlike every time before, it seemed that this time the breakup was final. And not from Billie’s position either. Unlike the others, Clyde seemed serious about Ms. Lindsey. He paraded her around town, and sometimes I caught him looking at her the same way he’d looked at Billie when she was twenty-one and vibrant, her mind not caught up in the desires of a grown woman looking for a husband and family. This, of course, I never told Billie.
“How’s the Internet dating thing going?” I asked, trying to change the subject from Clyde.
“It’s great.” She perked up suddenly. “In fact, do you remember the guy I’ve been writing? Mustafa?”
“Mustafa?”
“Yeah, the hot Nigerian man? We’ve been chatting for like a month. Anyway, he’s coming to visit me this weekend.”
“Visit you? Did you check him out? Are you sure he’s not a part of some credit card scam or trying to marry you so he can get a green card? Did he ask you to transfer money into an account? I saw an e-mail about that.”
While I’d accepted the fact that the chances of Billie meeting a single man above the age of twenty-five in Tuscaloosa was nil, and that next to driving to Birmingham every weekend, the Internet provided the next best way for her t
o fulfill her grown lady resolution, I was still a bit nervous about the men she’d been meeting online.
“Don’t be so closed-minded, J. You know better. Mustafa is a good man. He has his own business and money. He’s single. No kids. Lives alone,” she rattled off but something in her voice was so rehearsed. I just couldn’t figure out what it was. “He has it going on. And with the shortage of good men over here in the States, a sister had to expand her options to the Motherland.” She started doing a ridiculous African dance and we both laughed.
“I’m just saying—he’s coming here to see you? All the way from Africa? Does he know anything about Tuscaloosa? This isn’t exactly a melting pot.”
“Well, he has a little extra money and neither of us wants to wait ... so, we figured ... why not? We’re grown.”
“That’s a good attitude, I guess,” I said, running out of questions. “At least you know he’s real and not some kid in Wisconsin with braces and a humpback.”
“And I’m bringing him to church, so you guys can meet him.”
“Bringing him to church?” I repeated. This was a serious “don’t” for a single woman in the South. Bringing a man to church came with too many complications, including aunties assuming you two were getting married now (and saying prayers out loud over that very thing) and other single women trying to steal him away before the service was over. “This seems pretty serious.” I stood up and began walking toward the door in my sneakers.
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