Winter Birds

by Jamie Langston Turner

  Mindy has had no contact with Prince for over two months. His case has not yet been heard. Steve checks regularly to make sure he is still in jail. So far he is. Steve and Teri hope that Mindy will never see him again. One cannot tell what Mindy hopes, for she rarely talks. In the six weeks since Veronica’s death, Teri reports that Mindy has spoken less and less.

  One night recently Teri wrote her a letter and slipped it under her door. It was a love letter. “I knew I’d bawl my eyes out,” she told Rachel, “if I tried to say it all to her face.” The next day she saw the letter in a trash can, torn into small pieces.

  The restrictions are still in place. Mindy has no computer, no car keys, no telephone. Though Prince is offstage for now, there are other friends Steve and Teri do not trust. “Bad apples,” Teri calls them.

  Patrick does not believe in luck, good or bad. I have heard him say this. He gave a talk about it at a cottage prayer meeting, a talk he titled “Luck or the Lord’s Will?” He made reference to many things: lottery jackpots, job promotions, Veronica’s death, tsunami disasters, disease. He did not mention the kidnapping and murder of his children twenty years ago.

  Perhaps it is luck, perhaps not, but the fact is that today’s lesson in Mindy’s literature book is relevant to her life in a number of ways. Whether she is attuned to the relevance cannot be determined. Perhaps it is luck, perhaps not, but two of the four poems in today’s lesson are commentaries about young black men: “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks and “Cross” by Langston Hughes. The other two poems are relevant in other ways: “Toads” by Philip Larkin and “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Two black poets and two white poets all have something to say to Mindy Lowe in Greenville, Mississippi. Whether she will listen is another matter.

  Metaphor and irony are two aspects of figurative language covered in today’s lesson. Besides the meaning of these two terms and a rudimentary appreciation for the singing of a skilled poet, I will set down in plain prose what an old woman would wish four poets to tell Mindy in the space of an hour.

  Tell her, Gwendolyn Brooks, that youthful follies are deadly. Tell her, Langston Hughes, that the ones who give you life are not to be cursed. Tell her, Philip Larkin, that one can never escape the demands of labor and conscience. Tell her, Edwin Arlington Robinson, that people are not always what they seem to be.

  After she takes the quiz over today’s assignment, I say, “How did you like the poems you read?” I try to imagine her saying in a Tony the Tiger voice, “They’re Gr-r-eat!”

  But Mindy’s response is a shrug and “Okay, I guess.”

  Perhaps it is luck, perhaps not, that an incident from my past comes to mind. Perhaps I should pause to question its relevance, but I do not. Instead, I say to Mindy, “Before we start, I want to tell you something.” Her eyes, full of suspicion, dart to mine, then back to her book.

  I tell her about my father’s posting flyers advertising for an assistant at his printshop in Methuselah, Mississippi, in the year 1954. I was teaching in nearby Clarksdale by then. I tell her about four boys who applied for the job. Three were white boys from prominent local families. The fourth was a black boy whose mother did white people’s laundry. “This is the boy he hired,” I tell her.

  No one was surprised, since my father so often used his printing press to speak out against racial injustices in the South, but my mother was worried that the white boys’ families would be upset. The Negro boy, whose name was Fillmore Deal, had a speech impediment that made people think he wasn’t bright. He had a hard set to his mouth and eyes that said, “Unfair is all I’ve ever known life to be, and I don’t expect anything different from you.”

  Mindy is picking at a fingernail as I talk. Perhaps she is listening, perhaps she is not. Perhaps she will erupt when I finish, calling me an idiot. Perhaps she will refuse to come to her lesson tomorrow. Perhaps she will tell her parents I do not stick to the literature book but go off on rabbit trails. I know I am taking a chance in departing from the text, especially since I cannot give a clear reason for doing so. But there are times when one must brave dangers. I have read of birds that invade the nests of bees. Sometimes a person must do this, also. He must go forth suddenly and put himself at risk for something he values. I look at the years ahead of Mindy, and I value them for her sake.

  “Fillmore was a quick learner,” I say. “Somehow between his mother and my father, he avoided the things that a lot of the boys his age got mixed up in. He worked hard and grew up to be a good man. Later on Daddy took him on as a partner, and eventually he ran the whole business. It was Fillmore’s idea to start the daily newspaper in Methuselah. He married a nice girl and built a house for his mother next door to his.”

  I stop. Mindy is still picking her fingernails. The look on her face says, “So what?” And in the silence that follows, I must ask myself the same thing. So what? It is a question for which I have no ready answer. Perhaps I see in this story some suggestion of the four lessons I want the poets to teach Mindy today. Perhaps I want her to see that there are fair-minded adults in the world who want to help teenagers.

  I look at Mindy’s beautiful hands, her long slim fingers. The same hands that braided her blond hair. The same ones that tore up her mother’s letter. I think of the words of Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona: “Oh hateful hands, to tear such loving words!”

  “‘Injurious wasps,’” I say to Mindy, “‘to feed on such sweet honey and kill the bees that yield it with your stings.’”

  She stops picking her fingernails and looks at me with a mixture of astonishment and fear, as if I am a rabid animal and she has not had her tetanus shot.

  “Those are lines from Mr. William Shakespeare,” I say. “They are spoken by an impetuous young woman who says and does things her own heart warns her against.” I lean forward and speak slowly. “I have heard that a drowning man may fight the one who tries to save him. I have seen little children kick and scream when put to bed for the rest they need. Take care, Mindy. Fix your eyes on things of lasting value, things outside yourself. Broaden your mind. There is safety within the gates, where a garden may grow. Sunshine and rain come from above. Those whom you consider to be your jailers desire to set you free.”

  I have opened my mouth, and nonsense has spilled out. I wonder which of us is more astounded. Surely this is as jumbled a speech as has ever been given. Mindy’s lips are parted as if she is about to say, “What the . . . ?” But she says nothing, and her eyes grow suddenly unreadable again. It comes to me that I must sound like Patrick. I have a woeful thought: Perhaps he is rubbing off on me. Were I to keep talking, I wonder what else would pour forth. Perhaps I would speak of hedges and forts, lost sheep, and long-range implications.

  “Now then,” I say briskly, “let us look at the four poems for today. We have much ground to cover.” Mindy glances at the clock and opens her book with a sigh. “Sometimes,” I say, “there may appear to be a wall around a poem. But with patience and persistence, we may discover cracks through which to enter.”

  Chapter 29

  To Burn This Night With Torches

  The scientific name of the mockingbird, Mimus polyglottos, means “mimic of many tongues,” a fitting name for a bird that can imitate dozens of his feathered friends as well as other creatures such as crickets and dogs. The mockingbird is a fearless fighter during nesting season, taking on larger birds and even cats and snakes.

  “What do you remember about your early days of teaching when the schools were segregated?” This is the question Potts asks me when the four of us sit down to eat at the kitchen table. It is the twentieth day of May. Here are some of the things I tell him.

  In the year 1955, a year after my father hired Fillmore Deal to work in his printshop, I was confronted by the parents of one of my fifth graders in Clarksdale, Mississippi. They both appeared in my classroom after school one day, dressed as if they were going to church. The man held a hat in his hand, and the woman wore one on her head—a little blac
k cloche with a tuft of short red feathers.

  Their son’s first name was Cameron, but I don’t recall the last name. I do remember, however, that Cameron’s name bore the Roman numeral IV at the end of it. Though the Supreme Court had passed the landmark decision concerning integration the year before, the public schools in Mississippi were still segregated for years thereafter. Where there’s a will there’s a way, as my father liked to say.

  Cameron’s parents sat in the two chairs I drew up beside my desk, and the father, Cameron number three, spoke first. He worked at the bank and owned half of the land in Clarksdale. I was seen by some of the parents, he informed me, as too ardent a sympathizer with the American Negro. “We’re all for fair treatment around here,” he said to me in his deep voice, “but we think you’re pushing ideas onto our children that would best be left to their parents to discuss with them.”

  His wife, clutching her pocketbook with gloved hands, nodded in agreement. “Cameron told us what you said about that Negro boy that died earlier this year.”

  “Do you mean the boy who was killed by the two white men?” I said.

  “The boy who made overtures to a white woman,” Cameron number three said.

  “The boy who was beaten and mutilated?” I asked.

  “The jury acquitted those two men,” Cameron’s mother said.

  “Do you mean the jury of twelve white men?” I asked. “The jury that deliberated for just over an hour? The one that would have returned the verdict sooner if they hadn’t stopped to drink some Coca-Colas?”

  I could see the pulsing veins in the neck of Cameron the third, just above the starched collar of his white shirt. He was a big man. He could have strangled two boys at the same time by snatching them around the neck, one in each hand.

  “Miss Langham, we don’t want you trying to brainwash our boys and girls.” He leaned forward and looked at me sternly. “Maybe you have your own reasons for saying these things.” He stressed the word reasons as if to indicate that they were somehow shameful. “But we’ve come today,” he continued, “to let you know that none of us parents like what you’re doing, and we’re giving you fair warning before we take it further.”

  I was tempted to ask if their taking it further would include burning crosses and white hoods, but I kept my silence.

  His wife glanced at him quickly, deferentially, to see if he was finished. Then she spoke softly but emphatically. “We don’t want things to get ugly, Miss Langham, but we’ve got our reasons, too. We don’t want any trouble getting stirred up in Clarksdale. Things are nice and quiet here, and we want them to stay that way.” Most likely what she meant was that she wanted to keep her Negro housemaid and cook in their places.

  “I have no intention of stirring up trouble,” I told her. “But I want to teach my pupils more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. I want them to know the history of their country and the vision of its founders. I want them to understand what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States say about the rights of all men.”

  “Well, Miss Langham, that all sounds real pretty,” Cameron the third said, “but you can leave your personal opinions out of the classroom. We don’t pay our schoolteachers to undermine what we’re teaching at home.”

  “I am teaching freedom, sir, and respect for all human beings,” I said. “Is that different from what you’re teaching at home?”

  He stood up so fast that the chair almost tipped over backward. His wife stood up, too. “And one more thing,” he said. “Cameron tells us you’ve started reading a new book to the class after recess.”

  I nodded. I had finished a biography of Booker T. Washington the week before and had started one about Mary McLeod Bethune the next day.

  “It looks like to us, Miss Langham, you could find a book about a white person and read that to our children,” Cameron the third said. “In fact, we would strongly suggest that you do just that the next time around.”

  The truth was I was already beginning to wish I had not started Mary Bethune’s biography. Hers was a story with far too much religion in it. In the chapter I had read aloud that day, in fact, Mary had announced as a little girl her desire to go to Africa to be a missionary. But no white man, banker or not, was going to tell me what book to read to my class. I would finish the book now even if I had to clench my teeth through phrases such as those I had already encountered: “God was on their side” and “The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord!” and “to take the gospel of Jesus to lost souls.” To be sure I would survey my choices more carefully in the future.

  At the end of that school year I resigned from the school in Clarksdale and moved to Greenville, where I taught for the next five years. During that time there were no black students at Carrie Stern Elementary School. This was the school where we sang the state song at the end of each weekly assembly program. “Way down south in Mississippi,” it ended, “folks are happy they have been born.”

  My father wrote a piece about the state song around that same time and printed it up on handbills that he distributed and posted around Methuselah. He sent me one through the mail. The title of his article was “Way Down South in Mississippi, Are ALL the Folks Happy They Have Been Born?” Daddy dealt specifically with the various ways Negroes were discouraged from voting in elections. He was fond of using irony, which many of the local readers did not comprehend. He suggested that in lieu of a poll tax Negroes could be made to pay for the privilege of voting by giving up a finger each time. Once their fingers were used up, they could start on their toes.

  Though Daddy became morose as he grew older, he never did lose his zeal for speaking the truth through the printed word. He never made much money from his business, at least by his report, but as it was a pastime that kept him away from home, my mother rarely complained. She suspected that he kept the profits a secret, that he had cash hidden somewhere in the shop, but I will say this for my mother: She knew how to keep her tongue. She was not a discontented, fractious woman. She had a boardinghouse to run, and she gave herself to it. It was the only world she knew.

  When Daddy died, Fillmore took her to the back room of the printshop and showed her the loose brick behind which Daddy kept a box. She used some of the money to bury Daddy. I never knew what became of the rest of it. She and Fillmore drew up an agreement whereby he could buy the business by means of monthly payments. I do not know where this money went.

  In addition to these things, I also backtrack and tell Potts the story I told Mindy the week before, of how my father hired Fillmore over three white boys, how they became in many ways like father and son.

  Patrick’s eyes are full of admiration when I finish speaking. It is clear that he approves of my standing up to Cameron number three, that he imagines he would have done the same as my father in hiring a Negro boy in the year 1954, that he is amazed and delighted over Fillmore’s good character.

  “Those would make such interesting experiences to write about!” he exclaims now. I suspect that he is already making plans to do so. In the wake of his creative writing class, he is struggling to write a story, which he hopes will make him famous. I have heard him read various false starts aloud to Rachel, then declare them too “derivative.” This is a new word Patrick picked up from his creative writing teacher.

  One thing in Patrick’s favor: Over the past months he listened to this teacher, who used the word derivative, among others, to describe Patrick’s story “Terror in the Afternoon.” Wordy and contrived were other words he used. The teacher wrote down a list of stories for Patrick to read and study on his own “to see the power of nuance in realism” and spoke to him at length in his office one night about the “two kinds of simplicity—one producing art and the other banality.” All of this Patrick repeated in painstaking detail to Rachel.

  Perhaps someday my nephew will write something of worth. Perhaps he never will. Perhaps his great love of words—of his own words—is a handicap he will never overcome. But each time I
hear him say to Rachel, “No, no. This won’t work. It’s too derivative,” I am reminded of the miracles I have read about. I envision myself among the multitudes, astonished to witness that the lame can walk and the blind can see.

  These are things I have read about the mockingbird: Though known as the King of Song, it is not a composer, only an imitator. It is said that besides other birds, the mockingbird can mimic sounds such as rusty hinges and factory whistles. Though having nothing new to say, it nevertheless gives full-voiced recitals all for the love of song. Perhaps Patrick is destined to be only a mockingbird.

  But perhaps he may one day trick some into thinking he is the real thing. And surely this is true: Though derivative, one mockingbird’s performance may be superior to another’s. One may develop a keener ear than another, produce a finer interpretation of the original piece. Well, we shall wait and see.

  Over dessert Potts unburdens his heart. To think that he has reserved this until now, that this has been lodged within him through the consumption of Rachel’s brisket, her rice and gravy, her lima beans is a remarkable thing to me. He has asked questions to be answered at some length, has listened to the answers with close attention and asked yet further questions, has waited until this moment when Rachel places before us what she calls chocolate molten lava cups. I cannot help wondering if Rachel feels, as he speaks, that a volcano has indeed begun to rumble.

  Perhaps he was wrestling with whether or not to bring up the matter, watching for signs to guide him. Rachel’s spoon is halfway to her mouth when he says, “I need your advice on a matter.” He glances first at Patrick and me but settles at last on Rachel.

  Since my husband shattered my illusions about life and love, I have found few people to like, fewer still to trust. Though an odd time for such a realization, it comes to me in a flash that I am sitting at a table with three people I trust. One of them I do not like very much, and one has served time in prison, but I trust them all. Cicero Potts, whom I both like and trust, holds Rachel’s eyes a moment longer and then speaks again. “My brother needs help.” I wonder if Rachel hears the difference between “advice” and “help” and if she senses in what is coming that something may be required of her.