Gettin’ Merry
Page 28
Forget my previous discussion points. I only had two items on the agenda tonight. One: to calm the fears of the parents so that they would feel confident to allow their children to return to school. Two: to find the source of that poison killing the peace of mind of these children and draw it out with a vengeance.
A light tap at my door. “Mr. B?”
“Come on in, Norah.”
Norah Gilbert poked her head in the door. “I think everyone who’s going to show is here, Mr. B.”
“I’m ready.”
“I don’t see how,” she commiserated. “I don’t think anyone saw this coming. Who could believe it? I mean the holidays are coming up, for Pete’s sake. Peace, love, good tidings toward all. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?”
I flashed her a get real look. If things were all so peachy-keen in the state of Mississippi, we wouldn’t be arguing at a state level on whether we should continue to fly the Confederate flag—a flag that evoked as much passion as it did pain.
Breathing deeply to steady myself, I reminded myself that we were not here tonight to espouse political views. We were here to discuss the implied threat to our children.
“We’d better go on in.” Norah gestured toward the door.
“Right behind you.”
The corridor was still packed with meeting crashers as we made our way to the gymnasium. When Mayron had seen the number of cars heading for the school, he’d quickly arranged for the bleachers to be extended.
Sitting at the table were Iain Wilson, a representative of the board of education, and Jolene. Jolene smiled at me, but she was busy talking into a cell phone, giving instructions to her kids. Her finger was jammed in the other ear to drown out the multiple conversations echoing in the gym around us.
She looked at me apologetically, put her hand over the receiver, and said, “This’ll only take a minute, Bear.”
“Like I’m really in a hurry to start this,” I retorted. Sitting down in a chair beside her, I clipped to my tie the wireless microphone that had been conveniently provided. The folding table sat in the center of the gym floor. Right in the middle of the painted school mascot—the Johnny Reb soldier.
The irony didn’t escape me. This was the very center of our problem—or rather, my problem. I had issues with the image the mascot projected. And since I was the head of the school, my problem was everyone’s problem. One that I planned to resolve very quickly. If not at this meeting, then at the next. One way or another, I was going to personally lead the initiative to get the mascot changed. Not like I hadn’t tried. I’d been trying since I became principal here. Met with resistance every step of the way. Change didn’t come easily to Calhoun County. It had its traditions, yes. But sometimes, tradition was just another word for laziness. It was much easier to let things stay the way they were than face the discomfort of change. But I wasn’t going to give up.
I took not a small amount of pleasure in knowing that though I was the seventh principal in the school’s history, I was the first African-American principal at Gilbert Aubrey Calhoun High School.
Built in 1952, the school had a long history but few administrators. Once you were hired to hold that job, you didn’t leave it. Not unlike being appointed as a judge of the Supreme Court. Principals who came here stayed here. Made the state’s educational policy into their binding law. A few had retired from the job. And more than one principal of the school had died while still principal. I guess that’ll be me someday, too. Because they’re going to have to pry the reins of this school away from my cold, stiff, six-feet-under fingers.
But up until now, all of the principals had been Caucasian. And for the most part male. Lonnetta Paine, the principal before me, and my mentor, had broken the cycle. She’d taken the job in 1983. Almost twenty years later she was ready to retire. But she wasn’t ready to let be undone all of the changes she’d implemented since she’d taken the job. Updating the curriculum, bringing in a guidance counselor who’d steer capable young women into the science and technology fields, making certain that theater arts got as much attention as athletics—this was the legacy that Lonnetta left me. The least I could do was leave a legacy of my own. Tearing down some of the traditional images that supported the school would be that legacy.
I wondered if Mayron had been responsible for setting the table exactly in this position. Knowing how I felt about the school mascot, it would be like him to exercise his unique, rather twisted sense of humor. Would the Association of Southern Students appreciate the humor of my black butt positioned in the face of their beloved mascot?
Jolene looked at me oddly when I laughed without an apparent reason. She exchanged glances with Norah and then turned back to her conversation.
Moments later, Jolene folded the phone, set the ringer to vibrate only, and dropped it onto the table.
“Whew!” She blew back a curly red lock that had fallen into her face, then clipped a microphone to the lapel of her blouse. “What a night!”
“It’s just started,” Iain Wilson remarked, reaching for a pitcher and a cup. He looked underneath bushy white eyebrows at the crowd gathering before him. “Almost make you wish that there was something stronger than water in this carafe.”
“You don’t need a drink, Iain. By the time you work up a good buzz, we’ll be out of here. Short and sweet, folks,” I reminded them. “You know the drill. Don’t let them get a chance to get up a good head of steam.”
My mentor had taught me that. To keep control of a meeting, you let the parents have their say, but you should always have the last word—if only just to say good night. Yours should be the last voice they heard to close the meeting. The final voice of authority.
“Then let’s get this circus on the road,” Iain said.
Jolene leaned over and whispered to me, “Where’s Kirby?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, scanning the crowd for her face.
“We need her. The kids need to see her. To feel assured that everything’s going to be all right.”
“Don’t worry, Jolie. She said that she’d be here.”
Iain turned on his microphone, stood, then held up his hands for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll take your seats . . . That’s right; come on in. Plenty of room.”
The meeting started as usual, with an obligatory welcoming speech and introductions. As quick as Iain was to get through the introductions, I could sense the crowd’s restlessness—a low muttering that felt a little like thunder, a threat of an impending storm.
Iain could feel it, too. He hurried through his introductions, then quickly handed the floor over to Jolene.
“I guess we all know why we’re here,” she said without preamble, and held up a copy of the flyer. “My Shelly had one of these in her backpack. Normally, I wouldn’t go through her things—”
That brought a round of reluctant laughter from the parents and some boos and hisses of disapproval from the students.
“OK, don’t let me lie,” she corrected. “Normally, I wouldn’t be caught going through her personal belongings. But this . . . this is something different. Something serious. You all believe that; otherwise you wouldn’t be here tonight.”
She had the crowd’s attention now. I knew that by the hush that fell over the room. Good ol’ Jolene. She always did know how to work a crowd. I guess that’s why she was head cheerleader for Calhoun High three years straight.
Jolene read aloud a few lines from each of the flyers that she had in her possession.
“ ‘Protecting the purity of our superior race . . .’ ”
She flipped to another flyer. “ ‘Sending the inferiors back where they belong.’ ”
Jolene then shuffled to another page. “ ‘Casting out the white devils . . .’ ”
Seemed as though there were several different flyers circulating around the school. Different organizations, with similar goals, all relayed the same messages. No matter how they phrased it, it all spelled hate. Even though I’d seen it
with my own eyes, it still amazed me how quickly and efficiently the hate groups mobilized.
I wasn’t naive. I knew that they existed. But I’d always thought of them as fringe groups—unable to really affect the normal, rational human beings. I won’t make that mistake again. Just seeing how quickly they infiltrated my school was my wake-up call.
“These pieces of filth are making their way into the hands of our children. Our children!” Jolene’s voice boomed for emphasis, sending a whine of feedback through the speakers. The crowd winced, as much from her vehemence as the squeal from the speakers.
“Now, I’m not going to stand up here and tell y’all who to like and who not to like. Who you want for your neighbors is your own business. But when crap like this infiltrates our school, interferes with the business of educating our children, setting them at each other’s throats, that’s something that we can’t tolerate. And it doesn’t matter the color of our skin.”
“All learnin’ don’t come from books, Jolene!” someone from the bleachers yelled out. “Some of us need to get smart and wake up to the fact that this school ain’t what it used to be.”
“Is that you, Eddie Lee Pickard?” She tilted her head to get a better look.
“Yes’m, it is.” A tall, blunt-jawed man in a dark blue Dickey’s work shirt, oil-stained denim jeans, and thick-soled work boots stood up to respond. He stared directly at me, contempt clearly written on his face.
I tapped Jolene on the arm, asking for the floor. “Let me handle this, Jolie,” I asked.
She sat down in her seat again. “It’s all yours.”
“You’d think that in over fifty years you’d want the school to change, Mr. Pickard,” I suggested. He was as brusque, as bullying, as he was back when we both attended Calhoun High together. He hadn’t changed a bit and was as resistant to change now as he was then.
“Not all change is for the better, Mr. Barrett,” he returned. “I don’t like the way things have changed around here. I was gonna pull my daughter out even before I heard about this race riot.”
“Your daughter is Angela Pickard, isn’t she?” I asked, searching the bleachers immediately around him for Angela’s face. She was a sweet girl, an average student but always trying hard to please. She was a member of the drill team. Co-captain, if I wasn’t mistaken. It had taken Angela until her senior year to gain the confidence and the popularity to try out for the high-profile position.
“That’s her,” he said cautiously, wondering where I was going with this conversation. Angela was his baby girl. The last child after five sons. He wasn’t about to see her held up to ridicule and I knew that. Not that I ever would hold up a student as an example of bad parenting. But in Eddie Lee’s case, I thought I could make an exception. I didn’t like him and he knew it.
“Seems a shame to pull her out of school, after she’d worked so hard for her achievement, don’t you agree?”
“What good are them achievements if she’s lying facedown dead, Mr. Barrett? Huh? I’m not going to see my baby girl shot up like them Columbine kids.”
Oh, Lord! What did he have to mention that unfortunate incident for?! The resulting cry of dismay and agreement that rose up drowned out any call for calm or quiet we three at the table could make. I had to get control back or I wouldn’t be able to reason with the parents as long as emotions clouded their judgment.
“Nobody is going to shoot up my school.” Stepping out from behind the table, I spoke each word with conviction, charisma. A year of Toastmasters had finally paid off. I held up my hands until the crowd had settled down again and I had their undivided attention. “Besides, that’s not what the flyers say.”
“It’s what they don’t say that worries me,” another parent called out. “We all know how these things escalate.”
“You’re all reading between the lines,” I said, with a nod toward Mayron.
“If you think that these things don’t pose a threat, then you’re not reading the writing on the wall, Mr. Barrett. My Darius was so scared that he threw up his Pop-Tarts this morning.”
“Man, Mama!” Darius Leary, a sophomore, sat beside his mother and looked as if he wished he could sink beneath the bleachers. “What you have to go and say that for?”
Some of Darius’s boys hooted at him, called him a mama’s boy.
“Abandoning the school is not the answer,” I insisted.
“I’m not going to let a bunch of trigger-happy rednecks go gunning for my Darius. He hasn’t done anything to anybody.”
“And I keep telling you that isn’t going to happen,” I said with all of the conviction I could muster.
“Can you say that with absolute certainty? Can you look me in the eye and tell me that I shouldn’t be worried?” Eddie Lee challenged.
“No,” I said truthfully.
“That’s what I thought. You can’t guarantee that. That settles it for me, then. We’re out of here.” Eddie Lee Pickard nodded to his sons, grabbed Angela by the hand, and started for the exit. For a moment the crowd milled, uncertain of what to do; then a few more started to climb from the bleachers. Then a few more.
“Wait a minute! Please!” A voice rang out from the crowd. Kirby’s! “Don’t you think the welfare of your children is worth a few more minutes of your time?”
She moved from the back of room, making an entrance. It had the desired effect. On seeing her, several students cried out in surprise, then pleasure. I heard her name ripple through the crowd, some voices as soft as a whisper. Other times, students stood up to wave to her.
The increasing flow of traffic for the exits slowed to a trickle. Some of the parents didn’t bother to stop but went through the doors anyway. Others paused by the exits, curious to know who that woman was.
But I was pleased to see that more than those two groups combined resumed their seats. I let the impromptu reunion go on for a few minutes more before drawing attention back to me.
“This is my school,” I said. “Every child in here belongs to me. Can I tell you that there is no cause for concern? No. I won’t insult your intelligence by doing that. But I can tell you this. No one is going to hurt my students. No one. Not while I have breath in my body. That includes all of you. You parents. Make no mistake. Pulling them out and adding to their anxiety hurts them even more than these flyers. From you comes the poison, from the most trusted source. Poison they can’t crumple up and throw away.”
I balled up one of the sheets of paper for emphasis and dropped it to the gym floor. By that time, it was so quiet in the gym that the sound of the paper hitting the floor resonated as loudly as a gunshot to me.
Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Mayron shaking his head. I’d probably hear it from him later—a custodian’s view of littering. But for now, I had the parents back where I wanted them. Listening. Not walking.
“I’m not pointing fingers,” I continued. “I don’t know if some of you out there helped to make these things or helped to organize these meetings. Can you look me in the face and tell me that you haven’t participated? If only just to spread the rumor, fan the flames of hate and dissent? Can you? Or you? Or you?” My gaze swept the entire room. I made mental note of who met my eyes and who shifted uncomfortably.
“Get to the point,” someone interrupted.
“The point is,” I said tightly, “to stop all of this bickering and let us get back to the business of providing a proper education for your children. I know some of you are worried, scared. You think that it’s not safe to come to school. I want you to know that we’ve heard you and we’re doing everything we can to make this a safe place. If you’re still not sure, want to talk to us about it . . . well, that’s what I’m here for. And that’s what Ms. Kayin is here for.”
I held out my hand, gesturing for her to step forward, to come to the center of the school floor. “Some of you already know Ms. Kayin. She was the school counselor here for four years. Those of you who don’t, I encourage you to stop by after the meeting to i
ntroduce yourselves.”
Iain Wilson then stood up. “Take some time. Come by the school. Chat with Ms. Kayin or take advantage of the teachers’ conference periods. If you aren’t satisfied with how we plan to resolve this, then you can start pointing fingers and laying blame.” He fielded a few questions from the crowd, talking off the top of his head about what could be done to ensure the safety of the students. But all eyes were on Kirby.
Chapter 6
For the next couple of hours, students, parents, and administrators surrounded Kirby—each with a million questions for her. I could hardly get close to her. So I didn’t try. Just hung back. Watched. Waited for my turn. A couple of times, her gaze caught mine above the heads of the crowd. She smiled at me, flush with the success of her return.
When the crowd thinned, I moved forward, one hand resting lightly, possessively, on her elbow. The other hand was tucked deep into my pocket, fingering the engagement ring.
Tonight. I would ask her tonight. I was taking a big chance. I knew she had commitments back in South Africa. I knew that she’d only planned to be here until after the New Year. But if I had anything to say about it, I would make her stay a permanent one. I would make her want to make her stay here a permanent one. Here was where she belonged. With me.
“Walk you to your car, Ms. Kayin?” I offered.
“Sure. Just let me grab my coat from your office.”
“See you later, you two.” Jolene waved, winking at me. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“You already have,” Kirby teased back. “That’s why you have four kids.”