Nina Revoyr

by Wingshooters

  The exchange reminded me that two of the men had children or grandchildren who were in school with me. Uncle Pete’s were older. Although it was hard to imagine him as anybody’s father, he and Bertha had a grown son, Pete Jr., and his granddaughter Becky was in high school. But Ray Davis’s oldest boy, Dale, was in the third grade. And Earl Watson had two sons—Jake, who was sixteen and a sophomore in high school, and Kevin, who was in the fourth grade. The seven years between them made people wonder if Kevin had been an accident, and the few times I ever saw Earl with the boys, he behaved as if Jake were his true son and Kevin an afterthought. One night the previous summer, not long after I’d come to town, my grandfather and I went with Earl and his boys to watch the Deerhorn Bombers, the local minor league baseball team. And while Earl patiently explained to his older son what the pitchers were doing, describing fastballs and changeups and screwballs that moved away from the lefties, his younger son kept tugging at the sleeve of his work shirt, insisting that he was thirsty. I don’t know if Jake even cared about this lesson; he spent most of his time drinking and smoking with his roughneck friends—but Earl didn’t brook the interruption. After one last tug from his younger son, Earl whipped around and yelled in a voice so loud several players looked up from the field, “Goddamn it, Kevin! Can’t you see I’m busy here? Go drink from the goddamn fountain!”

  Now, Earl made a sound that was almost a hiss and said, “They’re coming at us from every direction.”

  “Well, it sure as hell better not be my boy’s class …” said Ray.

  “Damn mayor and his goddamn clinic.”

  “It’s Boston,” Ray said. “That judge and his crazy busing plan have given people all kinds of stupid ideas. It’s a good thing they’re not trying to pull that kind of stunt in Wisconsin.”

  “Well, if you ask me, they’ll never last the week.” This was Uncle Pete, and after he spoke there was silence for a moment.

  Then Earl spoke again, angry and deliberate. “What makes them think they can move here, just like that? What makes them think that people are going to stand for it?”

  “We’ve got to do something,” said Ray. “Charlie, what are we going to do?”

  And the men went silent now, awaiting my grandfather’s word. It was a measure of the respect that people had for him that Ray Davis, the police chief, was asking him what they should do. I imagined all the men leaning forward in their seats, looking anxiously at Charlie.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing yet. Pete’s probably right. They’ll get the message that they’re not welcome here, and it will probably take care of itself.”

  There were grunts, whether of agreement or disapproval I couldn’t tell, but it was clear the discussion was over. He had spoken. And soon all the men but Jim stood up and made their goodbyes, Pete kissing my grandmother on the cheek and pinching my ear as he left.

  Sitting at the table later, eating the now-dried steak and lukewarm vegetables, I wondered what they’d been discussing. They were upset about someone coming, that much I understood—I pictured an invader of some sort, riding into town on a horse, cutting people down with a sword. And someone connected to this trouble-some presence might even be at my school. I wondered if I should be worried, and if someone would tell my father—maybe this news would even hasten my parents’ return. I was filled with a vague but chilling fear, and I wondered what could possibly be so dangerous and threatening that it so upset the strongest men in town.

  TWO

  I found out the next Monday at school. Like every other child in town between the ages of five and ten, I attended Deerhorn Elementary, the old, one-story brick building on the other side of town. It had always been a trial for me to get there. Although I’d figured out the safest routes by now, I sometimes still encountered kids who jumped out from behind trees to scare me or who tried to keep me off their streets. The most persistent of these was a girl named Jeannie Allen. Her house was situated in the cradle of a Y whose right arm led to the school. If she was out in her yard, she’d try to turn me around or chase me down the left side of the Y, adding a half a mile to my trip.

  Jeannie wasn’t outside her house that morning, but arriving at school was no relief. As I entered the hallway, someone shoved me hard from behind, and I couldn’t tell whether this contact was accidental, or a special Monday morning greeting just for me.

  “Morning, niphead,” a fifth grader offered as he passed, and the girls around him giggled. The week before, a group of fourth graders had pushed me against a wall and made me count to ten in Japanese, but today I made it to my locker without further incident. I saw that there were fresh ink marks on the front of my locker, black scrawlings that were supposed to be kanji. The janitor had painted over them several times before finally giving up, and now things just collected, layer upon layer of jagged black marks, spelling out my difference.

  “Your daddy’s a Jap-lover!” a girl hissed behind me.

  “Yeah,” said her friend, “I heard her mama’s a geisha whore.”

  “That can’t be,” said the first girl. “’Cos geishas are pretty. And Michelle’s butt-ugly—just look at her.”

  I didn’t reply—I never replied—and fought the urge to turn and face them. After I got my books, I walked quickly to class and kept my eyes trained on the floor.

  Although technically, as a nine-year-old, I should have been in fourth grade, the school officials had decided when I arrived the year before that my reading and writing in English were spotty enough to keep me back a grade. It hadn’t helped that I’d lived in Deerhorn for more than a month before I’d gone to school; because my grandparents didn’t think I was staying, it hadn’t occurred to them to enroll me. By the time it was clear I wasn’t going anywhere, I’d missed several weeks of the school year already and was way behind my class. So now I was assigned to Miss Anderson’s third grade class, a year below the rest of my age group.

  Penny Anderson was a tall, dark-haired woman in her late twenties. She was completely unlike the teachers I’d had in Japan—both the stern, daunting teachers in the Japanese school, and the friendly but firm teachers at the English-language school. Miss Anderson always seemed nervous, starting to venture one way in conversation or movement, and then pausing and changing direction. She had a way of half-laughing that made it hard to believe she was really amused; her anger, usually accompanied by an almost comically furrowed brow, was equally unconvincing. Miss Anderson’s one distinguishing feature was her beautiful voice. She sang in the church choir, and even when she yelled at you, it sounded like a lullaby. Often, in the mornings, she lingered at her doorway on the chance that the principal, Mr. Baker, would pass by. Everyone knew that Mr. Baker and Miss Anderson were boyfriend and girlfriend, even though he had a wife.

  That morning, though, when I entered the classroom, Miss Anderson was sitting at her desk looking troubled. I wondered if Mr. Baker was absent this morning, but as all the children settled into their seats for roll call, the usual morning jokes and light chatter that went on before the bell rang were replaced by a strange and different murmur.

  “He’s supposed to come tomorrow? But my mom said Mr. Baker wouldn’t let him.”

  “My dad said he’d come over himself, if that’s what it took to stop it.”

  “I’ve never seen one before, have you? What do they look like?”

  “I’m glad I’m not in fifth grade,” said Brady Grimson, whose parents ran a diner on Route 5.

  “Yeah,” said Tommy Fry, the pharmacist’s son, “and you’ll never get there, either.”

  Finally, the bell rang and Miss Anderson stood up. “All right, children. Settle down. Did you have a good weekend? What did you do?”

  Everyone went silent and rapt with attention, and this, more than anything, made me realize that something was wrong.

  “Well, what did you all do?” Miss Anderson asked again. “Did anyone go on a car trip?”

  Slowly, tentatively, Missy Calloway raised her hand. She was the smar
test girl in class, a no-nonsense, stocky, bespectacled child whose farm parents treated her with bewildered respect, as if she were a visiting alien. Missy didn’t waste her time on the childish topics that occupied most of our classmates, and I always listened to what she had to say. “Miss Anderson,” she said, after the teacher acknowledged her, “is it true we have a Negro teacher coming?”

  Miss Anderson started to draw herself up straight, and then fell back into a tired slouch.

  “Yes, Missy, it’s true,” she answered, and the room exploded into chaos, thirty voices speaking all at once. Miss Anderson put her hands up to call for silence and the noise subsided a little. “The teacher’s name is Mr. Garrett, and he’s going to be substituting in Mrs. Hebig’s class until after she has her baby.”

  Now everyone was silent. Finally, Brady Grimson spoke without raising his hand. “But … why is he coming?”

  “I just told you. Mrs. Hebig is out because she’s having a baby, and—”

  “No, I mean, why is he coming to Deerhorn?”

  Everyone looked at Miss Anderson, waiting, more interested and attentive than they ever were when she was talking about biology or math.

  “I’m not sure, Brady. But I hear that his wife is a nurse over at the clinic.”

  The room was quiet while we digested this information. The one other time the classroom felt this way—tense, strange, uncertain, unbelieving—was when we heard that Mr. Greene, our P.E. teacher, had been paralyzed in a boating accident.

  Miss Anderson tried to teach that morning, covering a lesson on plants and oxygen, but no one was paying attention. My classmates whispered to each other when her back was turned, and for once she didn’t really seem to care. Finally, at ten-thirty, she let us out for recess, and while the other kids all shifted easily into their out-of-class selves—chasing each other and yelling, jumping on the monkey bars and swing sets—I was still thinking about what Miss Anderson had told us.

  A Negro teacher was coming to teach at our school, and his wife was a nurse at the clinic. A black couple had moved to Deerhorn, a town that, before my own arrival the year before, had never been home to a soul who wasn’t white. In that town, in 1974, this was as dramatic and inconceivable as deer starting to speak or a flock of ducks flying backwards. To my grandparents and their friends, black people lived elsewhere, in big-city slums or remote country settings, deep in the backwater South. Blacks, they believed, were lazy and ignorant, and if any one Negro had not run afoul of the law, it would only be a matter of time before he succumbed to his basic nature and robbed a house or assaulted a woman. To them, the voting and housing laws of the 1960s and ’70s must have seemed like capitulations, the equivalent of handouts from a weak-willed government and directly counter to the natural order of things. Blacks could be useful, yes, in other parts of the country, to work as field hands or nannies or cooks. But they were certainly not meant to be employed there in Deerhorn. They were not meant to live among whites.

  This unthinking racism was so accepted and prevalent that people didn’t even bother to disguise it. One of the reasons why people were discouraged from visiting places like Chicago and New York was that those places were known to be “dark.” If a teenager stole a car or committed a petty crime, he was said to be acting “colored.” The only black men who were respected were athletes—Dave May of the Brewers, MacArthur Lane of the Packers. But even they were only acceptable in their prescribed public roles—as sports heroes removed from everyday life. And there were limits to the admiration. Many people, including Charlie, had been unhappy that spring when Hank Aaron had broken Babe Ruth’s home run record.

  That morning, several teachers gathered near the steps that led down to the playground. Miss Anderson was there, and Mr. Sealer, who taught fourth grade. Mrs. Hood, the first grade teacher, stood next to him, and one step above her was the kindergarten teacher, Miss Gandt. Because I usually stayed on a bench near the steps and didn’t wander out to the playground, I could hear their conversation, although they made no real effort to keep their voices down.

  “… can’t believe it,” Mrs. Hood, the first grade teacher, was saying. She was a small woman in her forties who wore her blond hair in a bun and had a voice so high you thought she was pretending. “I know they’ve been telling us, but I never thought they’d actually go through with it.”

  “I’ll tell you, if Janie had known that this would happen,” said Miss Gandt, the teacher from kindergarten, who was dark-haired and gruff, “she never would have taken the time off. She would have stayed in her class till the second she went into labor.”

  “Fred says she’s all in knots about it,” said Mr. Sealer, the fourth grade teacher. He was in his fifties, with a paunch and very red cheeks, and he was known to keep a flask of whiskey in his desk. “This country’s going to hell and it’s happening fast. I told you that mess in Boston was going to affect us. It’s crazy—white children being bused into the ghetto, and those ghetto children let loose in white schools. The way things are going these days, with busing and all, it’s no surprise they’re letting niggers teach our children.”

  Mrs. Hood nodded and leaned forward so that Mr. Sealer could light her cigarette. “Not to mention his wife’s going to be working at the clinic.”

  “But at least we can avoid the clinic,” Miss Anderson said, sounding almost mournful. “With school, the parents don’t have a choice. What are we going to do about these poor children?”

  “Well, couldn’t you do something, Penny?” Miss Gandt asked intently. “I mean, couldn’t you talk to Steven?”

  There was a silence. Although Miss Anderson’s romance with Mr. Baker was general knowledge, it was rare that anyone referred to it so openly.

  “He can’t do anything, really,” Miss Anderson said after a pause. “He’s been talking and talking about how we need a long-term sub, and then this teacher comes along out of the blue. He’s qualified—over-qualified even—he has a master’s degree besides his credential. There’s no way Steven could deny him without it looking like discrimination. I mean, if worse came to worst, there could even be a lawsuit.”

  Mr. Sealer scoffed. “That degree’s probably not worth the paper it’s printed on, anyway. The female’s either. The schools are just giving diplomas away now, whether or not those people deserve it. I mean, who would ever trust a black nurse?”

  “Exactly,” said Mrs. Hood, her voice more squeaky than usual. “And anyhow, it’s not discrimination to want to protect our way of life. We should be able to have some say about who our children are exposed to. Besides—what if more of them come? What if they have children? Before you know it, it could get as bad here as Milwaukee or Chicago.”

  “You’re right, Gracie,” Miss Anderson said. “It’s about our way of life. We’re just thinking about what’s best for our children.”

  I walked home from school that day without anyone bothering me, maybe because they were so distracted by the news of the teacher. As always, I felt a sense of ease and relief when I turned the corner and saw my grandparents’ house. Like all the other houses on Dryden Road, their place had two stories, with a basement and an attic and a long yard stretched out behind it. There was a covered porch in front with a dozen shaded windows, a row of sleepy eyelids half-covering rectangular glass eyes. Between the garage and the back door stretched a small covered walkway, and that’s where I headed now. After I ran up the back stairs and into the kitchen, letting the screen door slam shut behind me, I gave Brett a quick rub on the head and went straight to my grandmother’s side.

  “Grandma, Miss Anderson told us a Negro teacher is coming.”

  She was cutting the ends off the string beans that Charlie had picked from the garden, and listening to Paul Harvey on the radio. Every day she spent hours on some such task—cutting, picking, canning, cooking—almost never leaving the house except for errands. She was an introverted woman, married to an outgoing and popular man—in pictures I have of my grandparents from the early years o
f their marriage, he is handsome and loose-limbed; she is tense and too severe to be pretty. They were an odd match in ways beyond their disparity in looks, and now I wonder if this fundamental difference in temperament—his ease with the world, and her discomfort with it—ever caused a rift in their marriage. Now she stopped cutting, knife edge flush against the wooden board. “That’s right, Michelle,” she said. “A Negro teacher.”

  “And his wife is going to work at the clinic?”

  “I think she’s already there.”

  She returned to her task, taking single green beans out of a white plastic bowl, snipping off one end, flipping them, then cutting the other. I stared at this procedure as if I had never seen it before. And although I knew what the answer would be, I asked, “Why is everyone so upset?”

  She sighed and put down her knife. “It’s hard to explain. But people don’t like to feel like they have no say over who lives amongst them. There’s no place here for people so different from us.”

  I didn’t point out the obvious, that she and Grandpa had someone different from them living right there in their house. But she picked up her knife and set her shoulders in a way that made it clear the conversation was over. I left the kitchen and went into the living room to drop off my backpack. My grandfather wasn’t there—twice a day, in the morning and then again after lunch, he walked uptown to Jimmy’s Coffee Shop. Earl’s Gun Store was right across from the coffee shop, and Deerhorn, in 1974, was the kind of place where Earl could leave the store unlocked while he had coffee at Jimmy’s, and walk back across the street if he saw a customer. Charlie had taken me to the coffee shop a couple of times in the summer, and although the men usually ignored me after nodding hello, I couldn’t have felt more privileged to be sitting among them if I’d been invited for a meal at the governor’s mansion. “You know,” Uncle Pete had whispered to me once; he often stopped by in the afternoon, “your grandpa, he brags about you all the time.” I couldn’t imagine what he said—I hadn’t done anything special—but I believed Uncle Pete, believed in my grandfather’s love; it was evident in the way his eyes softened when they fell upon my face; in the rough, gentle hand he rested on my shoulder.