Francie

by Karen English

  Today they were wearing thin cotton dresses with the waistlines heading up toward their armpits, and scuffed, laceless shoes. I straightened my shoulders and crossed the yard, eased past them where they were trying to crowd the doorway. The Butler brothers were taking seats in the back. I sat down at the desk next to my friend, Serena Gilliam, who smiled at me. She’d been over in Florida helping her sister take care of her new baby for the last two weeks. Serena was a good friend but I only got to see her at school, I had so much work to do all the time.

  “Hey, Serena.”

  “Hey, Francie. We got Miss Lattimore today.”

  “Ugh.”

  Just at that moment, as if our thoughts had served her up, Miss Lattimore bustled in, carrying a bulging leather case that she grasped under the bottom and by the worn handle at the same time. She ignored us while unloading the bag onto her desk: workbooks, thermos, coffee mug …

  On the chalkboard, in big expansive strokes like she was painting the side of a barn, she wrote the date. Finally, she whipped out a handkerchief from her pocket and mopped at her face.

  “Let me tell you this right off.” The sudden sound of her deep, booming voice made everyone jump. Serena’s brother Billy, who’d been busy whittling on a piece of pine, looked up and dropped his mouth open. “I won’t take no mess from none of y’all. And if you know what’s good for you, you won’t test me.”

  I frowned.

  “Something wrong with you?”

  It took a minute for me to realize she was talking to me. “Ma’am?”

  “You look like somethin’s botherin’ you.” Augustine and Mae Helen snickered.

  “No, ma’am.”

  Miss Lattimore continued and I let out my breath slowly. “I want to see where you all are in your studies. Do these problems I put on the board.” She began to cover it with arithmetic problems. Then she pointed directly at me. “You. Get on up there and do the first problem.”

  It was long division. A snap. Daddy Mama Sister Brother, I thought to myself—Divide, Multiply, Subtract, and Bring down. I finished it in a flash, because I knew my multiplication tables and division tables without hardly thinking about them.

  She called Forrest Arrington next. He labored through a subtraction problem, but he got the right answer, and when Miss Lattimore said “Correct!” he beamed.

  When she got to Augustine Butler, only the easiest problems were left. Slowly and heavily Augustine made her way up to the chalkboard like she was going before a firing squad. She stood a moment, facing the problem. Then, as if it might bite her, she reached for the chalk. It was three-column addition. I found myself running down the ones column in my head. Easy. With the tip of the chalk, Augustine touched the first digit, then tapped the second, lingering. With her left hand, down by her side almost hidden in the folds of her skirt, she tried counting her way to an answer.

  There’s nothing more pitiful than a big bully of a person being revealed as lumbering and stupid. The beads of sweat on her neck and her oil-stained collar made her meanness all the more pathetic. I almost felt sorry for her.

  “You’re too big and too old to be countin’ on your fingers, missy,” Miss Lattimore barked. “You should know your facts. They should come to you as fast as this!” She snapped her fingers. “Sit down. I have no patience for laziness.”

  Augustine made her way back down the aisle, her eyes on the floor until she passed my desk. At that point, she glanced at me, a quick flicker filled with awful intent. She hated that I was smarter though a year younger.

  As usual, the Butlers had no lunch. The boys and their baby sister, Ernestine, played while the rest of us opened our pails and dug into our corn bread, butter beans, and grits. Augustine and Mae Helen sat off by themselves on the tire swings, twirling themselves this way and that to show they didn’t care. No past effort on Miss Lafayette’s part had got them to accept a handout. They were poor but proud. Long ago I’d even tried to share my lunch with them—but they wouldn’t have it. I’d learned that wasn’t the way to go with the Butlers.

  Augustine Butler was hissing at me. I was pretending not to hear. Miss Lattimore sat at her desk at the front of the class, correcting papers. Every once in a while, her head snapped up, so she could snag anyone who was crazy enough to cheat on her math test.

  “Number four …” Augustine whispered. I stopped writing for a few seconds, then stubbornly went on with my test, an awful anger growing in me. I was determined not to turn around.

  Miss Lattimore stood up. “Do I hear talking?” We all held our breath. She squinted at us suspiciously, then sat down slowly.

  I handed in my test first, picked up the class dictionary off the bookshelf, and went back to my desk. The only free-time activity Miss Lattimore allowed was reading the dictionary. As I began to get lost in the words, I felt a hand on my arm. Serena was slipping me a note—not from her, but from Augustine, who sat behind her.

  Your gon to get it, I read. I folded the note, slipped it in my pocket, and glanced up at Miss Lattimore. She’d be of no help. I looked back at Augustine. She sat there glaring at me.

  “Time’s up. Francie, collect the papers in your group. Ernestine, collect the papers in yours.”

  Augustine held on to her test a second, then gave me a slow nod full of threat. Her paper was smeared with pencil smudges and erasures.

  After dismissal, I washed down the blackboard, watered Miss Lafayette’s plants—I wanted to keep them healthy and happy while she was away—and clapped the erasers out the window, all the while looking around the school yard for Augustine, but she wasn’t among the kids who were playing before heading home.

  “Come on, Francie,” Prez said from the doorway. “I’m ready to go.”

  “Then go on,” I said.

  “Mama wants us to walk together.”

  That was a stupid rule, always having to walk with Prez. I could tell he was mad because Perry had gone ahead without us. I thought of something. “Come here, Prez.” He took his time getting over to me, sensing I needed him. “Go see where Augustine is and come back and tell me.”

  “She’s gone home.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I seen her leave.”

  “How do you know she ain’t somewhere waitin’ on me?”

  “I don’t.”

  Miss Lattimore looked up from her desk and I lowered my voice.

  “You go on,” I urged.

  “You comin’?”

  “Git!”

  “Well, where you going, Francie?”

  “Never you mind.” I knew where I wasn’t going—down that road toward home so Augustine could jump out at me from behind a bush.

  Prez looked at me a second longer, shrugged, and turned to go.

  “Anything else you need done, Miss Lattimore?” I had swept the floor and dusted the shelves. I had corrected the math tests and straightened the books.

  “I think you done all there is to do, Francie.”

  I left the schoolhouse and stood for a moment looking up the road as if it led directly to hell. I walked in the opposite direction. Toward town.

  I kept meaning to turn around and go the other way—where Mama’s chores were waiting for me, where there was dinner to cook and the house to clean—but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. The farther I walked, the more I was resolved not to take any chances.

  Town felt strange. Walking along Lessing Street, I just then realized I’d never been there before on a weekday during the school year. Clusters of white schoolchildren took up the walk. I had to step off the curb for children who barely noticed me. I stopped at Diller’s Drugs and looked in the window, past the display of electric irons and mixers and toasters, to the pictures of malteds and french fries above the counter.

  I wished I had some money. I wished I’d thought to get a nickel out of my savings in the can under my bed. I could go sit in the colored section and have me a Coke. I could sit there all relaxed, forgetting my cares. If I was rich and had money to spar
e I could get me another Nancy Drew, since I’d soon finish the one Miss Lafayette had given me. If only I had me seventy-five cents.

  Clarissa Montgomery stood with a bunch of other girls at the comic-book carousel. Holly Grace, Mrs. Grace’s blond, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth daughter, said something to Clarissa, then moved over to the cosmetics aisle. She lifted a lipstick out of a socket display, opened it, and ran the tube across the back of her hand. She stared at her hand for a moment, looked around, then recapped the lipstick and slipped it into her pocket.

  My mouth dropped open. Did I see what I thought I saw? Holly Grace—that Mama all the time had to be hearing about when she served at Mrs. Grace’s biweekly book club? Holly’s piano recitals, Holly’s citizenship awards and perfect attendance—stealing lipstick?

  I left the store and moved on, feeling funny about my aimlessness but also a little excited by my newly discovered information. I wished I could be at that next book-club meeting. I wanted to be like a fly on the wall and watch Holly put on her usual airs. I wanted to hear Mrs. Grace brag on her.

  As I walked along, I daydreamed, my thoughts finally returning to Mama. She wouldn’t be back from the Montgomerys’ until just after dark. If I beat her home, I could say I was sick and couldn’t get the dinner and chores done because of that.

  Naw, I decided. That wouldn’t work. I didn’t have a fever and Mama could always tell when I was lying, anyway.

  Two little white girls came toward me, holding hands. I stepped sideways to get off the walk. That’s when I saw Mama coming out of Penny’s Grocers walking behind Mrs. Montgomery, loaded down with two brown sacks. It was too late for me to get out of sight. Mama looked me dead in the face with no expression at all.

  I dragged myself over to her with slumped shoulders.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Montgomery,” she said. She looked down at me. “Where’s Prez?”

  “He’s at home.”

  “Why ain’t you home?”

  Before I could answer, she said, “Come on.”

  We sat in silence in the back seat of Mrs. Montgomery’s big black sedan. When we pulled into the driveway, Mama gathered the packages and got out without a word. I knew to follow her into the house.

  “Sit down,” Mama said. She began to move briskly around the kitchen, putting away the contents of the sacks. When she was finished, she called to Mrs. Montgomery that she was going, got her hat off the hook by the back door, and put it on.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  It would be a long, quiet walk, because Mama didn’t reprimand in public. You acted up in town and she just dug a thumb in your forearm and whispered a promise of a whipping in your ear. Mama could wait hours before she acted, and the whole time you lived with an awful dread.

  Prez looked from Mama to me. “Where you been, Francie?” he asked me—to gain Mama’s favor, anyone could see.

  I ignored the question.

  “Francie went to town,” Mama said. “Now the chores ain’t done and we don’t have no supper.”

  “I was afraid,” I said quickly.

  “Afraid of what?” Mama looked at me full of suspicion. Neither one of us had sat down.

  “Augustine Butler was mad cause I didn’t give her an answer on our math test.” I pulled the note out my pocket, glad that I had saved it. “She passed me this.”

  “What’s it say?” Mama asked. She didn’t read.

  “‘You’re going to get it.’”

  “Come on over here, Prez, and read that note. Tell me if that’s what it says.”

  Prez squinted at the note and nodded his head. “That’s what it says, Mama.”

  “And you didn’t write it yourself, Francie?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Francie didn’t write that note, Mama. ‘Going’ ain’t even spelled right. It’s spelled g-o-n.”

  Mama thought about this. She was quiet. Then: “You’re not to go into town no more. You gonna have to figure out how to handle that ol’ bully, but I want your behind to come straight home—with Prez—after school. Straight home.”

  There was nothing to say to that. It gave me no answer to my problem, but I could tell by the tired way Mama took off her town hat and went to the basin to wash up that I wasn’t going to be punished.

  I woke up the next morning with my head filled with schemes of how to avoid Augustine. I’d start out early and cut through the woods. If she saw me already at school helping Miss Lattimore, she’d just think the teacher asked me to come early.

  Prez was trying to spoil my plan by not hurrying, determined to be hard to wake and slow about eating his oatmeal.

  “Come on!” I said, pushing his book bag at him.

  “I am,” he said, squeezing his foot into his shoe. “I ain’t even finished my breakfast good.”

  “I’ll let you have some of my lunch.”

  “What about Perry?”

  “We ain’t got time to wait for Perry. He’ll have to walk to school by himself. Now, come on!”

  The woods actually slowed us. We had to cross the creek by walking the flat stones without slipping in, and that took time and care and Prez’s constant bellyaching. “She ain’t got it in for me. Why I gotta go through the woods instead of on the road?”

  “Shut up.” Fear made me irritable.

  I thought of ways of doing Augustine in. I thought of beating her over her ugly head with a stick, or ripping her hair out, or pushing her off a cliff. Though we didn’t have any cliffs around, I could imagine the satisfaction I’d feel in my hands as I sent her over one.

  I peeked out from the deep coziness of the forest edge. The school yard was empty.

  “Come on,” I said, pulling Prez by the arm. We crossed the yard quickly to the classroom door. It was locked. I tried it twice, my heart sinking. Prez ran around to the window. He had to jump up to peek in.

  “She’s in there,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Miss Lattimore. She’s in there at her desk.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  He jumped up again. “Nothin’.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Just drinkin’ a cup of tea or coffee or somethin’.”

  I went back to the door and tapped lightly. I waited, listening. When the door opened, I stepped back, speechless. Miss Lattimore, with a steaming cup in her hand, looked annoyed.

  “What is it, Francie?”

  “I just wanted to know if you needed any help?”

  “Can’t say I do—right now. You go on and play.”

  How was I supposed to go and play? I sat down on the steps, feeling miserable. Prez was happy—he had the tire swing all to himself.

  Then I noticed someone coming up the road. I could tell by the loping walk it wasn’t Augustine. I shaded my eyes against the morning sun and closed my mouth, which had dropped open. It was a boy. A big boy. He walked right into the school yard, stopped for a few seconds to look around, and walked over to me, bold as you please.

  His kinky hair was brushed back and packed down like it had been under a stocking cap all night. His overalls and shirt were tattered but clean. He was darker than me, a reddish kind of dark. He didn’t look me in the eye.

  “What time this school start?”

  “In a little while,” I said. He put one foot on the bottom step and looked off like he was trying to cover up some embarrassment. Prez hopped off the swing and came over to stare at him. He was still young enough to get away with it.

  “Who are you?” Prez said.

  “Jesse Pruitt.”

  I was secretly happy that Prez was so outright nosy.

  “I ain’t never seen you before. Where you from?”

  “Over in New Carlton.” He stopped to give Prez the once-over. Then something seemed to smile in his eyes but not on his lips. “Ain’t no school in New Carlton.”

  “Everybody know that.”

  “Yea,” he said. Then there was silence all around.

  As soon as the yard began
to fill up, Jesse went over to a tree stump to sit and wait. Finally, Miss Lattimore came out and rang the bell. I dashed inside.

  From the safety of my seat, I watched my classmates file in, the strange boy hanging back, I noted, in the doorway. Each person looked up at him as they passed, wondering who he was and why he was there. Augustine finally arrived, and she stared openly at him even after she sat down, seeming to have forgotten all about me.

  Miss Lattimore took her seat, shuffled some papers, then looked over her glasses at the boy. “You here for school?”

  He didn’t look her in the eye.

  “Yes’m.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jesse Pruitt.”

  “Pruitt. I ain’t heard that name before. Where’s your people?”

  “We stay up by New Carlton,” he mumbled.

  “How old are you, Jesse Pruitt?”

  He didn’t answer right away. She waited, tilting her head to the side, like she was expecting him to lie. He said nothing. Augustine and Mae Helen snickered behind their hands. “Well, Jesse Pruitt, can you hear? I asked you a question.”

  “Sixteen,” he said quietly. So quietly that I didn’t know if I heard him right. Yes, there was something older about him and there was something serious, something weighing on him.

  “Come again?” Miss Lattimore said. Jesse would be in an age group all by himself.

  “I’m sixteen,” he repeated, his voice loud now as if he had a point to prove. I felt sorry for him standing there like he had no kin, no friends, not a soul in his corner.

  “You’re a big boy. Take that seat in the back. I don’t want you to be blocking the view from the little ones. Pass out the readers, Francie.”

  I got up to do as I was told. Augustine took hers out of my hand with a little snatch. I placed one on Jesse Pruitt’s desk and gave him a smile to encourage him. He looked at the book’s cover, leaving it as I had put it. Upside down. I knew at that moment he was like Mama. He couldn’t read.