by Wingshooters
He was standing in the hallway across from the row of third grade lockers, reading something that was posted on the wall. He seemed amazingly tall, although in retrospect he was probably no more than 6’1” or 6’2”, and he was younger than I’d expected—maybe thirty. He was the brown of dark chocolate, a lush earth-brown, and the loose-shouldered way he carried himself suggested that he was friendly. What struck me most, besides his darkness, was that he was wearing a jacket and tie, which was more formal than what the rest of the teachers wore.
I must have stood there staring at him for ten whole seconds before he turned and saw me. From the front he looked slimmer but still solid and fit, like he might have been a track star in high school. And then I saw his face—the broad cheeks and strong jaw, the warm brown eyes, the hair cut almost military short. And I remember thinking, because I didn’t understand white people yet, especially white men, that Mr. Garrett’s good looks and physical impressiveness would make people like him better.
“Good morning,” he said, and his voice was resonant and deep; his smile revealed a set of brilliant teeth. He gave a little wave and I saw his mammoth hands, the long fingers, the lighter flesh of his palms. He seemed more relaxed than a man in his situation should have been, almost amused with himself.
I wanted to say something—like, it doesn’t pay to be friendly, Mr. Garrett, or, I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into—but I was terrified. Not of him, exactly—there was nothing threatening about him—but of something his presence was bringing out in people. And so I turned without speaking and ran back to Miss Anderson’s class, hearing him laugh gently behind me.
I don’t know what Miss Anderson talked about between recess and lunch, but none of us paid attention. While she tried to give her lesson, my classmates whispered and passed each other notes. I heard someone say that no one in Mrs. Hebig’s class had spoken all morning, that the colored teacher had just kept talking as if he didn’t notice. No one had actually seen him yet except for me—he’d gone back to his room by the time they came in—and had I shared my encounter, I could have enjoyed my classmates’ attention for a while. But I didn’t. It didn’t even occur to me.
At lunchtime, after I received my tray of pizza burger, French fries, and milk, I went to my regular seat. There was a corner table that the other students avoided, maybe because it was too far from the gossip and food fights that usually occurred during lunch. That was where I sat every day by myself, and from there I had a clear view of the rest of the cafeteria. But because I usually kept my eyes down and concentrated on my food, it took me several minutes to realize that Mr. Garrett had entered—and I noticed only because the room had grown so quiet. He sat in another corner, across from me, eating his pizza burger and reading the paper. I wondered why he wasn’t eating in the teachers’ lounge—was he on lunch duty? But there he sat, among three hundred students, who all whispered and stared, the whole mass of curiosity, energy, and attention directed completely at him. He must have felt it—it was like the electricity in the air before a thunderstorm—but maybe that was why he had placed himself there, to get the shock all over with at once. And he had that same ease about him I’d seen in the hallway—the inexplicable calm, the near-enjoyment of the stir he was causing. Again I wanted to warn him—I knew he was trying to act normal, but he had to be careful. After he finished eating, he carried his tray to the dishwashing lady and handed it to her, smiling. She received it as if he’d given her something dead. Then three hundred sets of eyes followed him as he brushed his hands on his pants and walked out of the cafeteria.
As soon as he was gone, there was an explosion of noise. I couldn’t make out clearly what anyone said; their voices and sneers and laughter all blended together. In Miss Anderson’s class that afternoon, the boys kept telling her they’d seen the Negro teacher—and she kept saying yes, I saw him too; yes, he eats the same food as us; now please pay attention and open your books.
That afternoon, our phone rang off the hook. Bob Grimson called to report that his son had seen the nigger, who’d actually had the nerve to eat with the students. Junie Scott, whose granddaughter was in Mrs. Hebig’s class, called to tell Charlie that her little Melanie had sat in the room with the Negro for hours and that she seemed to be developing a fever. Ray Davis called to say that people were asking if there was anything he could do legally to keep the fellow from teaching.
“Well, is there?” Charlie asked. “How’d he get hired in the first place? Why couldn’t they have brought in someone else?” He stood by the window with the phone to his ear, the furrow in his brow getting deeper. “Well, someone needs to talk some sense into that principal. For Christ’s sake, he grew up here, he should know better.”
I needed to get out—away from the talk of Mr. Garrett, and away from the tension. So as soon as I finished helping my grandmother with the dishes from supper, I took my bike and the dog and rode out into the country. It was a beautiful September evening, the sky still blue and endless, and the breeze felt good against my skin. I pedaled easily, taking the back roads behind the bank, the one-screen theater, the A&W drive-in, the trailer park, and the baseball diamond where the Deerhorn Bombers played. I rode to the state park just outside the town limits with the dog trotting steadily behind me, then took the road that looped for a mile around the middle of it. Here, in a large, protected pasture that was part of a wildlife preserve, dozens of bison grazed peacefully. Two white-tailed deer raised their heads, saw us, and darted off into the woods.
The park was where I always came when I wanted to be alone. Maybe because Deerhorn was surrounded by so much country, maybe because the townspeople saw animals as things to hunt and use, not observe and protect, it did not have many visitors, except for the swimmers and fishermen who went to Treman Lake in the summer. This was incredible to me. Having spent my first eight years in a dense, overcrowded city, all this space and quiet was a luxury. When I’d first come to Deerhorn the year before, there were things I’d had to adjust to, things that felt strange and disorienting—the heavy food; the way people gave full voice to their joy or anger; the sheer size of everything from houses to cars to residential streets, which were twice as wide as our little alley in Tokyo. But the landscape was an easy adjustment. I’d taken to the park immediately—to the whole countryside, really—and my love for it only grew the more time I spent there. Often I seemed to be the only human within its limits, and I didn’t mind this, in fact preferred it, for I felt an ease and a companionship out here in the country that I never felt in town. My father had thought differently about the country, I knew. All the open space made him feel restless, uneasy; he craved sidewalks and street noise, the sounds of human interaction. But I belonged out here, where there were no other people, only the trees and lakes and rivers, and grazing animals.
Brett belonged here too, and out in the country in the fading light, I loved to watch him run. Charlie had said he was from a line of dogs bred for conformation as well as hunting, and that careful breeding showed. He ran with a beautiful economy of motion, legs reaching forward and swinging back just as far as they needed to, no more and no less, in perfect synchronicity. The black of his coat looked like a blanket thrown over his body, but the hair on his chest was white, as if he were wearing an apron with ties that reached over his shoulders and met at the back of his neck. His head was mostly black but his muzzle was white, and a strip of white shot up between his eyes. When he stopped to look at something, he posed as if for a picture—chest out proudly, head up, long ears rippling in the breeze like a lion’s mane. His front legs were planted firmly and his back legs extended and set, like he would stand his ground in the face of an oncoming army.
But when we got out into the open fields, he’d break out of his perfect trot and bound like a puppy, bouncing from rear legs to front and back again in an uncontained expression of joy. Because his field trial career was over, Charlie let his hair grow out, and his long black-and-white feathers hung from his legs, ru
mp, and chest nearly all the way down to the ground. Every two or three days, I would brush him out—standing him up at first while I ran the brush through the long hair, which attracted any number of branches and burrs; and then rolling him over to expose his stomach, where I separated mats while he watched me, sober and trusting, pressing one paw against my face when I pulled too hard.
There was another reason I liked to have Brett around, and that was for my own protection. While he was loving and gentle with my grandparents and me, and playful with the neighborhood’s female dogs (he would prod them with his snout or stick his nose up their butts until they snapped at him or hit him with a body check, which made him break out into a huge, panting grin), he was also protective. If we were outside and someone suspicious approached, he would shift instantly into a posture of challenge, tail raised and circling, low rumble in his throat. He had a deep, loud bark which could make people or other animals back away in fear. No loose male dog could approach without Brett chasing him off, and he once followed a boy who’d been teasing me all the way back to his house, grabbing a mouthful of the boy’s shirt for good measure. It was always startling to see the transformation of that goofy, affectionate spaniel into a dog that was capable of doing harm. But he never did—he never had to. The threat was enough.
I rode the loop twice, leaving the main path a couple of times to take side roads through the woods and fields. Brett ran back and forth in front of me, nose to the ground. Because of his hunting training, he never ventured more than about twenty yards in front of me or fifteen yards on either side, always staying within shooting range. That afternoon he startled a lone fat grouse; it made a sound like the click of a key starting the ignition, then the whirring of a motor as it flew away. He looked back at me as if to ask, why didn’t you shoot?—and then turned around and moved on. From there we went over to Six Mile Creek, which ran along the border of the park. When the water was high, Brett would make spectacular leaps from the bank and then swim back and forth happily, tail circling fast as a propeller. But it was low that day—there hadn’t been much rain in the summer—so he just ran down to the edge and took a quick drink. A bit further on there was a small gorge with a log as thick as a wine barrel lying across it. Brett ventured out onto the log, lost his footing, and slipped halfway off. He held on with his front legs while his back legs dangled free and circled the air like a cartoon character’s; then he fell rump-first to the ground. He caused a sizable thump when he landed, scattering leaves and small branches and a few irritated birds, and I was scared for a moment that he’d hurt himself. But he jumped right up, shook himself, and ran over to me, grinning.
We’d been out there for over an hour, but whatever it was that compelled me to ride was not yet spent that day, so we left the park and continued down the two-lane road that led farther out into the country. There were farms on either side of us, with cornstalks as tall as people that time of the year. I saw cows in the fields, and the ones closest to the road looked up as we passed, their big faces with expressions blank as dinner plates. There were a few horses too, whinnying and shaking their heads, and I thought, what a fine thing to be such a beautiful creature, posing in the light of the fading sun.
I was too young to realize what hard times country people were having then. Family farms that had existed for several generations were being squeezed out by the big industrial operations, or, more mundanely, losing their children to cities and towns and simply fading out. But the evidence was everywhere. Some of the old farmhouses were sagging and frayed, as if they were as tired as their people from the unrelenting effort it took to keep the farms running. Rusted tractors and other machinery sat unused near collapsing barns, and the silos, which must once have been filled with harvested corn or wheat, looked empty and forlorn. I biked past farm after farm, each one in worse condition than the last, turning down smaller unpaved roads to get deeper into the country, and kicking up dust and gravel in my wake.
And then, without warning, we arrived at a cluster of trailers. I knew from driving around with my grandfather that there were little groups of trailers tucked away in all manner of wood and field. In town there were actual trailer parks, and also single trailers on private land, where people were reluctant or unable to build houses. Neither of these arrangements was strange to the town—Uncle Pete and Aunt Bertha lived in a trailer on three acres just outside the town limits, and their son and his family lived in one of the trailer parks. And while the trailers were unsafe in volatile weather (once, a freak tornado hit while Pete and Bertha were at the store, and they came home to find their trailer upside down in the street), there was no particular stigma attached to the people who lived in them.
But the trailers in the country were another matter. If the trailers in town were discarded as people moved on to bigger trailers or houses, this seemed to be the place where the old ones ended up. The trailers I saw that evening were like taped-together scraps of metal, many of the panels not matching in color or even fitting together properly. Some of them didn’t even have steps in front—a bucket or a pile of bricks had been placed where the stairs should have been—and many of the windows were covered with plastic or cardboard. And the children who played in front of them were dressed in torn, faded clothes, their faces and arms streaked with dirt. They were skinny—their knobby knees were broader than their thighs—and their faces seemed collapsed somehow, absent of light, as if they were miniature old people rather than children. I knew these children existed, because a few of them were bused to school in town, including Billy Coles, who was in the other third grade class. They received baths there once a week because some of their trailers lacked running water, and they were regularly deloused.
But it was one thing to see an occasional skinny, unkempt child at school or in town; it was another thing altogether to see them here. I kept riding, a bit embarrassed, as if we had caught them naked. Brett ran along beside me and glanced over at them, but then kept his head down. The children just stared as we went by, but left us alone—to them, we might have been a ghostly vision. But I saw them all clearly, and could not look away—the dullness of their eyes, the unhealthy yellow tinge of their skin. People in town rarely mentioned these cast-off people, and when they did, it was in hushed tones of disapproval, not compassion. Even though I now work with teenagers who live in the inner city, I have never seen anything close to such poverty. These set-aside people were isolated, ingrown, removed from the life of town. As far as everyone else was concerned, they might not have even existed.
The next day, ten students from Mrs. Hebig’s class were absent. There seemed to be an illness circulating among them that bypassed the rest of the school. But from what I could tell from the proud postures and self-conscious gaits of the fifth graders at recess, those who remained with Mr. Garrett were enjoying the attention. Since no one would talk to him, and no one else except for me had heard him speak, Mrs. Hebig’s fifth graders were subjected to all kinds of questions from both children and adults: What does he talk like? Does he have any smell? Does it make you feel scared when he looks at you? And the teachers, for their part, seemed strange and agitated. They saw him but wouldn’t talk to their students about it, despite the persistent questions. Did anyone sit next to him at meetings or in the lounge? Would anyone touch the coffee pot after he had touched it first? There was excitement and curiosity in everyone’s questions, as well as the edge of something else I couldn’t quite define. And there was anticipation too, the awareness that sooner or later something had to change, had to give.
The next day, and the next, there were fewer and fewer students in Mrs. Hebig’s class, until by Friday only eleven reported to school. What I wonder now is not why parents kept their children at home, but why other parents let their children continue to go. I’d like to believe it was a decision that came out of deliberate thought, the strength to do what was right in the face of the town’s small-mindedness—that was the choice I know my father would have made. But more likely
the children who remained in class had nowhere else to go, or had parents who somehow didn’t know or care that the regular teacher was gone. Whatever the case, the other teachers spent more and more time talking to each other on the playground and after school, and Miss Anderson seemed more nervous every day. On Friday morning, as she was handing back a spelling test from the day before, she stopped at my desk and cleared her throat. And since she so rarely looked at me or talked to me directly, I knew I was in trouble.
“Michelle,” she said, looking down at me, “why don’t you write in small letters?”
I just stared at her, not knowing what she meant. She waved my test in my face, the red marks of correction vivid and harsh, exposed for everyone to see.