by Anne Moody
When I got to the auditorium, the seniors from Willis High and the other schools had arrived. There were about three hundred seniors standing around in caps and gowns. The whole scene was a barrel of confusion. I stood back looking at everything as if I were not a part of it. Once all the students were there, the teachers went through a big ordeal about which class should lead the march. It was finally decided that the Willis High seniors would lead. Then the seniors at Johnson High objected and the whole thing started all over again.
We were about two hours late. About five hundred restless people were sitting in the auditorium and Mr. Willis was pacing the stage nervously. The teachers who were lined up to march ahead of us shouted to our teachers in an attempt to rush them into a decision as to how we would march. At about ten o’clock the pianist started playing. I don’t remember which class marched in first or who led the lines. But somehow we all got seated. I was so tired that I fell asleep as soon as I sat down.
When everything was over with, one of the students tapped me on the shoulder and told me we were about to march out. Marching down the aisle half asleep, I spotted a woman who looked just like Mama sitting next to the aisle in back of the auditorium. At first I had thought she was Mama but as I got closer she looked much too old. I couldn’t make up my mind if it was Mama or not. As I passed, staring at her, she whispered, “Essie Mae, wait on me outside.” I stopped, holding up the entire line as I took a good look at her. I saw that it was Mama and I was too hurt to say anything. I just walked away as tears began forming in my eyes. Instead of continuing the march outside with the rest of the students, I cut out of line and ran to the ladies’ rest room. I stayed in there a long time crying and blaming myself for the way Mama looked. When I left home, I hadn’t written her once even though I knew she worried about me. I was so concerned about getting my feelings hurt that I forgot that she even had feelings. At that moment, I hated myself for the way I had treated her.
I must have been in the rest room a long time, because when I got outside, everyone was leaving. A long line of cars and buses moved slowly off the school grounds, and a steady flow of people walked alongside them. There were only a few people left standing in front of the auditorium. I looked for Mama among them. When I didn’t see her, I almost panicked. I thought she had left. If she had, I knew she was terribly hurt because I didn’t wait on her. I ran down the walk toward the road.
“Essie Mae! Essie Mae!” I heard her calling me.
I looked around but I still didn’t see her. “Essie Mae! Essie Mae!” I heard her voice again and started running up the road.
“Girl, where you runnin’ to?” a voice called out of a pickup truck moving slowly along beside me. I turned my head slightly and kept running. “Essie Mae!” This time Mama’s voice sounded as if it came from the truck. I turned and there was Mama leaning over Junior waving at me.
“Where you runnin’ to? Kin we give you a lift?” she said jokingly. Junior stopped the truck and I ran around and jumped in beside Mama. She was grinning as if she was so glad to see me. She looked at me as if she wanted to hug me but she didn’t.
“How you gonna git out to Emma them?” she asked me.
“I was gonna catch a ride back with Cousin Hattie.”
“Hattie them done gone. I thought you was going back wit’ them. But they said they hadn’t seen you.” Mama paused for a while, then asked, “Why don’t you come go spend the night wit’ me?” I didn’t answer, I just looked at her. She dropped her head and said, “You don’t have to stay wit’ us, you kin spend the night with Alberta and come see me tomorrow.…” I looked at Mama again and she seemed even older, she had lost weight and an air of sadness surrounded her. I sat there feeling so guilty.
“O.K., Mama,” I said at last, “I’ll go but I can’t stay but a couple of days because I want to go to New Orleans and get my job at the restaurant.”
Mama smiled and for a second she looked young again.
Part Three
COLLEGE
Chapter
EIGHTEEN
Two days after graduation, I arrived in New Orleans hoping to earn enough money at Maple Hill so I could go to one of the inexpensive colleges there. I had spent all my little savings while living with my daddy. After Emma was shot, Daddy was the only one bringing in any money and he had cut off my ten dollars a week allowance. I was afraid to work for the whites in Woodville, so I just lived off my savings.
But now I found myself in a real mess. Business in the restaurant that summer turned out to be worse than usual. For some reason, many of the regular summer school students hadn’t returned. Every evening, I got sick as I counted my tips. I was averaging only two or three dollars a day. At this rate, it would take me a whole year at the restaurant to save enough money for college, and I was scared to take the chance of being out of school that long.
In a panic I wrote Coach Dunbar. He had said that I had a good chance of getting a basketball scholarship to one of the junior colleges in Mississippi that had a girls’ team. I hadn’t even considered going to college in Mississippi and I was tired of playing basketball. But now I had no other choice. I received a reply from Coach Dunbar about a week later, saying that the Natchez College coach, Mr. Lee, was considering me for a scholarship and would write me soon. While I waited to hear from him, I didn’t even count my tips. I just threw them in a big cigar box and prayed that Mr. Lee would say that I was accepted.
It was well past midsummer before I got a letter and all Mr. Lee could say was that he was “considering” me. I began thinking that maybe I was stuck in the restaurant and that I would probably never get to college. But finally late in August, a second letter came, telling me that I had gotten a scholarship, and that I was to report to school in two weeks. I ran to my cigar box and was surprised to find that I had saved nearly four hundred dollars. I still didn’t know whether I’d gotten a full scholarship, so I was scared to spend any money. I bought only a few cheap clothes, and since I had always wanted a suitcase of my own, I splurged on a three-piece eighteen-dollar luggage set.
All the way from New Orleans to Natchez, I was excited and anxious. I sat on the bus dreaming about Natchez College. I had seen all of the colleges in New Orleans with their beautiful spacious campuses, large modern dormitories, and many new buildings. The only thing I knew about Natchez was that it was a Baptist school. That didn’t impress me one bit. I just hoped it was a rich Baptist school and that it would be modern like the schools in New Orleans.
When the bus arrived in Natchez, there were lots of cabs lined up waiting. I grabbed the first one I saw. As the cabby headed for the college, I checked myself over. I thought I was looking real good with my little blue luggage set and the matching blue dress I wore. I leaned back in the seat and ran my hand admiringly over the largest piece in the set, which lay on the seat beside me. I stroked it gently, feeling proud that it was mine. Suddenly my eyes jumped. My hand had come to a big hole in the side of the suitcase. My pajama top was sticking out of it. I felt like I had been wounded and that what was showing through that hole was my own insides. “Look at this,” I thought. “Eighteen dollars for three pieces of cardboard.” I didn’t feel so pretty anymore as I tried to glue the cardboard back together with spit. I got so wrapped up in trying to fix the suitcase before getting to the college that I didn’t realize we were there until the cabdriver said, “O.K., miss, this is it.”
“Is this Natchez College?” I asked as I sat there looking out of the cab at an old two-story red brick building, on which was engraved “Women’s Auxiliary.”
“You never been here before?” the driver asked as he opened the door for me.
“No, it’s my first year. Is this all there is to the school?” As I stepped out of the cab, I could see only three little old brick buildings.
“Sho’ is!” he said, pointing to the red brick building. “This is where the women live.”
When he said that, I felt like jumping right back in the cab and going b
ack to New Orleans. I didn’t want to get involved with this place. I didn’t even want to see anyone connected with it. I was so upset I walked off without paying the man. I was halfway up the walk with my eyes fixed on that “Women’s Auxiliary,” thinking how it sounded so religious and looked so dead and dull, when he called after me, “Hey, miss! The fare is thirty-five cents.”
I walked back and handed him a dollar, telling him to keep the change. I never would have given him such a big tip if I hadn’t been so depressed.
“So this is what I left New Orleans for,” I thought, walking toward Women’s Auxiliary again.
When I got inside the building an old lady came up to me and said, “I’m Mrs. Evans, the matron, and you is …?”
“Miss Moody,” I said.
“Just bring in your luggage and follow me,” she said. Her speech was too proper. I could tell that she was one of those uneducated women who get this kind of a job and try to pretend that they’re educated. “They always give themselves away with those broken verbs,” I thought as I listened to her. “I bet the teachers here don’t even have college degrees.”
Mrs. Evans showed me to a room, told me where the showers were, and said I could rest until dinner. She asked me so many questions and seemed so concerned about me that I got a nice motherly feeling from her.
I didn’t see any other girls around, and I began to wonder if I were the only student there. I put some of my things away and went to take a shower. When I looked out of the window in the shower room, and saw a big beautiful school building down the hill from the dorm, my mood changed. “Oh, that’s where we have our classes,” I thought happily.
When I went down to dinner that evening, I discovered that more students had arrived. I asked one of them about the new building I had seen. My gay mood disappeared when the student said, “Oh, that’s a high school. I wish it was a part of this place.”
As soon as I took a look at the food I got an urge to take over the kitchen. I met the cook and told her about my restaurant experience. She asked me if I wanted to work in the kitchen and I told her I would love to. Later I found out that all students on full scholarships had to work part-time. I was glad that I had found something to do that I really liked. However, after working in the kitchen for a while, I found I couldn’t stand it or Miss Harris, the cook. I had thought I could really help improve the food, but I came to realize there wasn’t much you could do with baloney and potatoes, our two main dishes.
What was even worse than that was the fact that Miss Harris was the biggest Uncle Tom on campus. I soon discovered the main reason she liked me. She wanted me to be her stool pigeon and tell her everything that was happening in the girls’ dorm. Every morning she would ask me something personal about one of the girls. I wouldn’t tell her anything so she started being nasty. She would crack little jokes about my looks to the other girls in the kitchen and always found some criticism of me. One morning I got up feeling a little sick. When I got to the kitchen a few minutes late Miss Harris was cursing and slinging spoons everywhere. She threw a spoon at me and told me to stir the grits. I threw it right back at her and walked out. I went straight to the Dean’s Office and asked for another work assignment. That morning I started work as an assistant librarian.
In high school, I had thought that Johnson High had the biggest girls on any basketball team. But the Natchez College team had the biggest girls I had ever seen on or off the basketball court. One girl was six feet four. She was so big she could hardly move. There was only one girl on the team shorter than me. All the rest were five feet nine and over. At first I was a little frightened of playing on the team but Dunbar had spread the news through Mr. Lee, the boys’ coach, that I was good. I found out after a few days’ practice that all the girls were scared of me.
The coach of the girls’ team, Miss Adams, was a well-built young woman in her late twenties. Mr. Lee had worked with us for a few days then turned the team over to her. Most of the girls didn’t like her because she was real tough and was the Dean’s secretary and suspected secret lover. She set up a lot of stupid rules for the basketball girls and was always crying to the Dean if the girls got out of hand and wouldn’t obey the rules. She was jealous of every girl the Dean looked at and the Dean looked at plenty. She was especially suspicious of me because the Dean was always giving me “bad eyes.” Oddly enough she was not suspicious of the two girls who were actually known to be screwing the Dean. In fact, the three of them were almost buddies. They all probably had the same attitude where the Dean was concerned. “He doesn’t want any more from her than from me,” was the way one of the girls had put it.
The Dean was a tall, slim, well-preserved mulatto in his late forties. He liked tall shapely girls and seemed to like me a lot. He had told one of the boys that I had one of the most beautiful bodies he had ever seen in a pair of shorts. He even went so far as to tell him he knew that I was scared of men. He often came over to the gym when we were practicing. He would sit and look at us like a sex maniac who hadn’t had a woman in years. Every time I passed him he would stare at me and I would look away, then he would laugh like a lunatic.
Some of Miss Adams’ rules were just too much. I constantly felt like I was in prison. We couldn’t even go out of our rooms at night. We were only allowed to room with basketball girls. And I turned out to be the odd player without a basketball roommate. We always practiced a couple of hours before dinner. Then we had a compulsory study period from seven to nine, during which time Miss Adams checked to see if we were studying; at ten she would check again to see if we were in bed.
One day I was feverish and stayed in bed all day. The next day, I met Miss Adams on my way to class.
“Did you check the bulletin board to see what your assignment is, Moody?” she asked.
“No. What is my assignment?” I asked, thinking to myself, “What in the hell have I done?”
“Check the board and see,” she said, switching away.
I went back to the dorm to check the bulletin board. There she had posted her punishment list, and my name headed it. “Moody—wash windows in the library,” it said. I got furious. I ran all the way from the dorm to her office. She was sitting behind her typewriter when I opened the door.
“Don’t you know to knock before you enter an office if the door is closed?” she scolded.
“What did I do, Miss Adams? Why have I gotta wash all those library windows?”
“Don’t come asking me what you did! You know well enough!”
“If you don’t tell me what I did, I ain’t gonna wash no windows,” I snapped.
“Look, Moody, don’t you come screaming at me! You know damn well you had company during study hour last night.”
“And where was I?” I asked.
“You were in bed with your back turned to me!” she shouted.
“I was in bed because I was sick! I didn’t even go out of my room all day. And I am not gonna wash no windows!” I said, really getting worked up. “I noticed one thing on the board, Miss Adams. You assigned me to do the windows and all the other girls gotta do is sweep a floor or dust a chair or something. Yet I gotta wash a whole library full of windows when I didn’t even do anything. I wouldn’t get up on a ladder and be embarrassed before all the other students even if I had done something!”
“Stop shouting at me, Moody! Who do you think you are? Are you going to obey the rules or not?” she shouted.
“I am not gonna do it.”
Without saying another word, she got up from her desk and rushed past me into the Dean’s office. She seemed glad she finally had an excuse to see him about me.
I went back to my room and got in bed. I was so mad I didn’t even feel like going to class. A few minutes later, Mrs. Evans knocked on my door and said the Dean wanted to see me downstairs in the lounge. When I got downstairs, he was standing in the door. He glanced at me freshly then quickly changed to his official look.
“Miss Adams tells me that you just cursed her
out and said you were not going to obey her basketball rules. What’s your story?” he asked suspiciously.
“My story is this,” I said, and went on to tell him what had happened. I made it clear to him that I thought Miss Adams’ rules for the basketball girls were very unfair.
When I had finished talking, he said, “Well, your story is interesting, but are you gonna wash the windows? I think you ought to since Miss Adams said you should.”
“Even if I didn’t do anything, but just because she said I gotta wash some windows, I gotta do them?” I asked angrily.
“Well, in a dispute between the teachers and the students, the teacher is always right,” he said stuffily.
“Well, I don’t see things that way and I am not going to wash those windows.”
“We’ll see! Let’s see what the President has to say about this!” he said. I was sure he was bluffing.
“You do what you gotta do!” I said angrily, and walked away. I went on back upstairs and got in bed again. About an hour later, Mrs. Evans knocked on my door and said the President wanted to see me. I went downstairs and there he was, standing out on the walk waiting. He was rared back with his hands on his hips and his pot belly in the air. I walked up to him and looked down at his greasy slicked-down hair. I was more than a foot and a half taller than he was.