by Jeri Watts
We didn’t have reference books in our classroom. Do you have reference books in your room? Maybe even encyclopedias? I love encyclopedias — you can learn all manner of stuff collected right in one place! That could be one good thing about integrated schools, if I could see and use some reference books in class.
For now I go to Miss Anne Spencer’s library near downtown Lynchburg. I know I told you she was a poet. She must love words aplenty — writing them, reading them, and surrounding herself with them in every way. Only white folks can use the city library — well, of course you know that, but it bears saying because what I am going to say next is so amazing. Miss Anne (we call her Miss Anne as a sign of respect, even though she is married and has children) has been inside of the white library once — I don’t know if she was allowed in somehow or she just sneaked — and she says it is a building full of light, books, and knowing.
Her family’s house, which is where our library is located, is dark in the rooms where she keeps the books, so they’ll stay in good shape for longer. She has her life going on in that house amid the books. It’s a busy place, a tumble of life and knowledge, fun and facts. So it may not be light, but it is a place of books and knowing.
I’d like the light, though.
I have a lot to tell you, so I went and got more paper! (By the way, I like how our letters are crossing each other in the mail — this way it isn’t just straight answering each other’s questions — we had pen pals once, from a class all the way over in Campbell County, and my pen pal had about as much imagination as could be in Shag’s toenail! All she could do was answer a question, then ask the same question back at me. It was like talking to a wall. This way is much better. I never know what you will say to me, and I’m betting you likely never know what I will say to you.)
Today Shag and I went into the woods to round up kindling. It’s a job that needs doing every so often, and it was a good way to get out of helping with the garden, which is flat-out hot this time of year.
Shag likes work such as this. She herds me toward big piles of sticks, which makes my time more useful. I create big, big piles and then guide my brother to them with his wheelbarrow. He’ll gather them, pile by pile, and we’ll have kindling for the winter.
I had a substantial pile building — and Shag was all over the place, bouncing here and there, yapping to me when she saw good kindling — when I saw that Frank Charles Feagans coming. I already mentioned him, and I bet you know him, being as he is white and you teach at the white school.
I don’t know if you say bad things about your students or not, but I have to tell the truth. Frank Charles is just a pain in my side. (He might even be a teacher’s pet, like a couple of people I have already mentioned in here, but I wouldn’t know, since I haven’t been in class with him. I wouldn’t put it past him, though.) He lives on the next farm over, and even though we have farmed our place for nigh onto three generations (my ancestors got it fair and square after the war), Mr. Feagans doesn’t take kindly to having darkies (that’s what he calls us, and I really hate that word) living so close. He even moved his homeplace across his land and built a whole new house so as not to have to see our land when he gets up of a morning. I wonder how Frank Charles feels, seeing cows in his old living room and hay stored up tighter than a tick on a dog’s head in the whole upstairs of his childhood.
I’ll admit I’m still holding it against Frank Charles that he was a part of me getting this scar. I don’t care so much about being pretty — I’m not one of those prissy girls, you know — but who would want to be stared at all of life instead of being able to blend in when it’s useful? I can’t ever blend in.
I saw him and all my bad feelings started boiling under my skin, so I turned my back to him and pretended I didn’t see him. Granny Bits says this is a message, body language, but apparently it is a foreign language to Frank Charles. He just kept on coming, calling out as he closed in. “My daddy says you aren’t supposed to be stealing our kindling. These woods are Feagans land.”
“Your daddy is a liar and you know it, Frank Charles Feagans. You’ve got a fence you climbed to get here, and that borders your farm plain as day.”
“He’s gonna be mad when he finds out.”
Shag slid between us like nightfall to keep Frank Charles away from me. She is very keen, noticing the tones of people’s talk. She knew he was mad at me and I was mad at him.
“Call off your dog.”
“She won’t hurt you, s’long as you don’t hurt me. I’m just picking up kindling, so I ain’t bothering you.”
“You might be, if it’s kindling I came here to get.” But he took a step back, I noticed.
Frank Charles watched Shag herd me over to a nice hill of kindling, tucked under moss and fallen half-rotted leaves. He nodded and said, “That there dog is some kind of dog. She just pushes you along.”
I nodded. “She’s amazing, sure enough.” Since he seemed to have calmed down, I intended to tell him about the latest thing Shag’s learned: how to herd our cow Sassafras into the milk stall, which is no mean feat, since Sassy hates to be milked. Additionally, Sassy has rather suddenly developed epilepsy and will occasionally collapse into a fit when she gets angry about getting milked, and Shag has to be especially mindful of this, darting out of the way of the heaving mass when Sassy goes down. Our vet taught me to pop in and slide Sassy’s head to the side so she won’t choke on her tongue or suffocate against the wall — but once you get the hang of it all, I think Shag is doing the hard part, staying out of the way of that huge falling cow.
A thundering voice cut me off. “Get away from that darky, Frank Charles. Don’t you bother talking to her.” Frank Charles’s daddy appeared, large and looming, his overalls smeared with sweat and rich loamy soil. “Get offa my land,” he barked at me, his body tense and big. I swear I could feel the ground under my feet change — a sudden shift from standing on sturdy Virginia dirt to perching on a layer of eggshells. Careful where you step, careful. . . . I felt myself trying to get lighter, trying to keep the shells of this white man’s temper from breaking.
Shag immediately stepped toward him and stopped him from nearing me more. I stood up straight and firm. “I’m on my daddy’s land, Mr. Feagans. He sent me to get kindling piled. That’s all I’m doing.”
“Your daddy says it’s his land, but it ain’t.”
“He’s got a deed that says it is his,” I said. Shag’s hair on her neck bristled, and she eased her lips up, showing some tooth. She snarled low and sank on her front legs, a pre-attack look for sure.
Mr. Feagans and Frank Charles backed up a bit. “Yeah,” Mr. Feagans said. “Yeah, he does, but paper can lie just like any darky.”
I let him get that last word, because I could tell he wasn’t going to take any chances with Shag around. Still, I didn’t linger. I know at least as much as our dumbest milk cow. Where’s there barking, sooner or later, there’ll be a bite.
Oh, my gosh! Thank you so much for the creamy paper you sent for me to write you on! Holding it’s like being rich! I don’t know that I really want to write on it, but I know that is what it’s for, so I am doing it right now. I didn’t show anyone but my family this gift. It seemed too special, too incredible that you would do this. Mama says you are not to send me stationery like this anymore, but thank you for doing it this one time, because I feel like I am a fairy-tale princess or something.
I thank you kindly for writing back to me again. And letters to all the students! It is all over the community, how all of us got those creamy letters. Mrs. Warren is walking around like she made the world move — your letter to her was the topper, and she has shown it to everybody, and she told the preacher he would need to have parts of it in his sermon on Sunday. Granny Bits is filling our house with all sorts of bad talk about how pride goes before a fall, but Daddy says never mind, Mrs. Warren deserves a good chance to show off, since she is working hard for the children of the community and she gave up her job to help it happen
. (I didn’t think much about how Mrs. Warren had to give up her job — since she’s as old as Methuselah, I just thought she might want to stop working. She ought to want to stop working.) I got to say, that did make Granny Bits hush in a hurry.
I know how the others are feeling. Before you wrote, I’d never had a letter from a teacher before. It’s a little like getting a letter from God! Don’t tell Granny Bits I said that, though — I’m pretty sure I’d get a switching for that! Those must be some great schools, that teach all the teachers. Y’all’s handwriting looks exactly the same, you and Mrs. Warren’s, and I admit, it is always easy to read, not like my scribble-scrabble. It’s almost like a handwriting machine, churning out same-shaped letters and numbers. I’ve watched Mrs. Warren write on our papers before, and she is as precise as any farm machinery we own, all sharp and sure, taking the time to touch lines and form those loops. I don’t think I’ll ever have that kind of patience, but it sure is like watching an artist at work. Did it take you hours to write all those letters?
Did you write letters of welcome to your white kids, too? I guess you have to, to make things fair, but I hope you didn’t. They are always welcome. We’re the ones trying something new, being made to go where we aren’t wanted and aren’t really wanting to go. But maybe I don’t really want you to answer the question, so don’t tell me, okay? I’m just going to pretend you wrote to only us. I know that’s kind of being a baby, but I think this one time I want to believe you’d treat us more special than the others.
It’s very interesting to hear more about you. I realize you’ve mostly just written to me about me in your other letters. I guess I thought you’d have come from far away, not grown up right over in Lynchburg. Still, I don’t think your world has been exactly like mine. I won’t hold that against you, though. I hope you won’t hold it against me.
Sure, I could tell you about our farm, since you asked. I tend to skip describing things sometimes — when I read a story, once I know where it happens, snap, I can figure out what it looks like and I don’t need the author to go on for four pages with all that flowery description, you know what I mean? But Mrs. Warren says some readers like to be “grounded in the place,” and I suppose you could be one of those readers. So, our farm has a smallish farmhouse built by Stamps folks over the years. The earliest part was just one room, built by the Stamps who got the land when they scraped together some money after they were slaves. That room is now the kitchen (they used it for everything back then, according to Granny Bits). The ceiling in there hangs low — my daddy is about six feet tall and he kind of stoops in there, but in a friendly way. The walls are a soft yellow, and it is my favorite room because it is always warm and it smells like toast and tomatoes even when nothing is cooking. Granny Bits spends lots of her time there, when she cooks and when she irons. We often seem to gather there to tell each other about our day after things have happened. We often go there to get a little silly talk. It’s where we play board games and where I usually get my homework done, since I don’t have a fancy desk in my room. The other rooms in the house sort of got added on as needed, so the house feels like a quilt to me. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s how it seems to me, like a quilt with pieces all patched together, fitted just so.
Our land is spread around twenty acres, and we have some crops, a garden, and some milk cows, a few pigs, chickens, a rooster, and one meat cow, sometimes two in a good year. I help with the crops, the garden, and the milking. The chickens and some of the cooking are my jobs too. Mama and Daddy respect that I don’t want to help much with the pigs and meat cows — I don’t want to get on a first-name basis with something I might have to eat later on. And of course, the rooster is ornery, so I avoid him all the time.
Phew! Is that enough describing?
Did you like football when you went to high school? I don’t care, particularly, but my brother, James, plays football at the high school. Well, that isn’t really the truth. He’s still practicing at the black school field. Football doesn’t seem to have gotten integrated like the school. The coach said there isn’t room at the high-school field for everybody, and he says none of the black boys are ready for the varsity squad because they haven’t faced the right kind of competition. So all the black players are on the junior varsity team, and it practices over at the old school. James says it is fine by him, ’cause it feels like normal. But I think he must be angry about it, because he’s a senior, and his dream since he was very little was to be the star of the homecoming game, and even though the coach says JV will have a homecoming game too, it isn’t the game.
Talking about this makes me feel right nervous about starting at your school, Miss. Plus, to be honest, I just don’t know if I’ll be able to work with all those white kids around. My mama says this is a chance for me to prove to Frank Charles and others that I’m just as good as they are.
I’ll tell you a secret: I sure hope they’ll see that I am.
I’m anxious to see your school building, Miss Anderson. Our building is squat and square, slatted on the sides with planed boards the newly freed slaves slapped together in their excitement for a school the first time it was legal for my people to learn. While it is true that they put it together in a flurry, they tried to do it with some care because the school was an important place. It was important to my family, for sure, because some of my ancestors had already had some learning. Like Granny Bits told me about Rainser. He is one of my ancestors who’d had to learn in secret. He worked in the fields during the day, but at night, all secret like, he learned to spell and write his name. I don’t think he learned much else, but he learned that. I don’t know who taught him either, but it was dangerous for both of them, that’s for sure. There were others in the family — Granny Bits has a list of them, and I had to memorize them for her back when I was seven, to prove I appreciated my heritage and had respect for schooling. It was interesting to me anyway, I’ll tell you, but I do like choosing what I do outside of school, so it did rankle me, I admit, when she made me do it. Of course, I know better than to question Granny Bits — last time I did that, I couldn’t sit down comfortably for three days, so I kept that rankle to myself!
Anyway, you can see why the school was and is so important to my people. Granny Bits says this building was put up before some folks had their own homes. We’ve used the same building ever since. It doesn’t have a floor to speak of, just swept dirt. Mr. Felix, our custodian, who I swear is two hundred years old, is supposed to keep the place clean and tidy. He comes in every day. He’s bald-headed and shrinking away as he ages, his eyes getting more and more stuck out with every year, and he looks around the room like it has gotten bigger every day. His head sticks out of his shirt like an old turtle — you know, those old tortoises that are hundreds of years old? He pokes his head into this corner and that corner and says, “Looks pert clean to me, no cobbsywebs here, no cobbsywebs there.”
What he knows is that Mrs. Warren cannot abide dirt of any kind, and she will get so fed up with the dirt and the cobwebs that she will get out that broom and clean it herself every day and then he won’t have to do it! Then off he goes, to wherever he hides, to smoke or whatever, his old eyes smiling because he has tricked her again. That old dirt floor gets cold come winter, but we all bring wood for the chimney, and Mrs. Warren can build a mean fire, let me tell you. She lays that kindling in first thing of a morning and keeps the fire stoked so that it never dies out. The earliest learners get a bit hot, as they sit closest to the fire, and the high-schoolers are farthest out, so they can get a mite cold, but those of us who sit middlin’ are nice and toasty. I guess I’m lucky I haven’t learned all there is to learn just yet!
We had a heater donated two years ago by Ganell Woodruff, the biggest success story around here, who invented something I don’t understand but lives in Detroit and writes letters to Mrs. Warren regularly, telling her how great he is. This time, instead of a letter, he put his money where his mouth is and actually sent a heater.
It had instructions, and Mr. Felix was going to hook it up. He started on a Saturday, but it took him forever and he was still finishing up on Monday morning. It clung to the low ceiling like a weighty beetle, which is not what any of us expected. Mrs. Warren would not let us sit at our desks, made us all stand behind her like little chickens behind the hen when Mr. Felix went to light it, him perched on this little three-rung ladder while she stood nearby and we peered around her, anxious to feel the heat pulsing out of the great warming box.
“Do you have any idea what you are doing, Felix?”
“Reckon I do, ma’am,” he answered.
“Then light the contraption,” she commanded.
He lit it.
It blew up.
Well, not completely. But it sparked and went boom. Mr. Felix jumped off that ladder like he was a spry sixteen, his legs filled with energy he probably never knew he had. Mrs. Warren spread her arms to shield us, her protective instincts mother-henning us, and we, the little chickens, herded behind her and ridiculously tried to fit behind her huge bottom. What a sight we must have been. The heater slowly, sadly sagged, then belched, then plopped onto the dirt floor.
“You all right, Mr. Felix?” Mrs. Warren asked.
Mr. Felix had his eyelashes, eyebrows, and what little hair had been on the front of his head singed right off. But he’d squeezed his eyes closed, and so, yes, besides having the bejeebers scared out of him and losing all his hair, he was all right. Mrs. Warren gave him the rest of the day off, telling him we’d “work around that monster for the rest of the day.” I heard she got her husband to come up that evening and heave it off to the junkyard. Next day, we just all brought wood again, and that was the end of the hanging heater.