Coming of Age in Mississippi (30 page)

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.

He looked up at me and asked, “What’s going on with you and Miss Adams them? The Dean tells me you just sacked out him and Miss Adams. What’s going on with you?” he said, puffing and blowing like a little dragon.

“Nothing is going on with me. I have been in my room sick for two days. Miss Adams came to my room last night and found another girl in there. I was asleep and didn’t even know she had been there or the other girl. I am not gonna wash those windows.…”

“What’s this about washing windows?” he asked.

“She got all these stupid rules made up about what basketball girls gotta do. I think they are absurd. First of all, Miss Adams don’t like me. Now you look, come on go in the dorm and look at what she assigned the other girls.…”

“Now don’t get excited,” he said. “Where is this here list?” he asked, following me up the steps.

“It’s right here on the bulletin board,” I said, going into the lounge. He stood on his tiptoes to read it. “When I leave
here,” I said, “I’m going back to bed. Now if you insist that I wash those windows, I’m going home.” He didn’t say anything, he just left.

A few days later, I found out that the President had scratched out all Miss Adams’ rules. Dean and Miss Adams were furious with me after that. Miss Adams immediately dropped me from first string to second to side girl. Then basketball became the biggest drag I had ever known.

After about two months of Natchez College, I was completely fed up with it. I had never in my entire life felt so much like a prisoner, not even when I worked for white Klan members at home. When I was home Mama had trusted me to take care of myself. She never told me I couldn’t go here or do this or that. During the summer when I went to New Orleans and Baton Rouge in search of work she never questioned my reason for going. Now at Natchez College, I couldn’t even go to the store a block away alone or without permission from the matron. She would always send two of us together and then time us. If we were gone longer than she expected, she would come after us.

Every Friday evening she would post two lists on the bulletin board in the dorm—one for movies and one for shoppers. Then she called the movie house on Saturday morning to find out when the picture started and ended. When we were all ready to go into town, on Saturday afternoon, our regular shopping time, she would line us up like cows and march us up Union Street. On Franklin, the main shopping street in Natchez, we all split up. We were usually given two or three hours to shop or see a movie. Then we were supposed to meet her at five on the corner of Franklin and Union so she could march us back to the dorm. She didn’t really have to come into town with us. It was just a front so the good sisters of the Baptist churches in Natchez, who supported the college, would see that she was protecting us from evil influences.

In spite of that big front Mrs. Evans put on, the faster girls put on an even bigger front. As soon as we split up in town, I would see them bopping around corners, hopping in cars and going here and there when they were thought to be in the movie. At the end of the shopping period, as Mrs. Evans and the rest of us stood on the corner waiting for them, they’d come running up smiling and blushing and out of breath. All the girls would look at them and know they had done something. But Mrs. Evans would give them her motherly smile and asked innocently, “Did you see a nice mooo-vv-eee? What was playing?”

“Mrs. Evans, it was such a
nice
picture. But they had a little trouble with the film, that’s why we’re a little late,” Bernice, one of the little fast sexpots, would answer sweetly. As soon as Mrs. Evans turned away, Bernice would give us a big wink and we would all crack up inside.

Sometimes Mrs. Evans would ask what the picture was about. One of the girls always knew the title of the picture and could make up a story about it. We would stand there hurting with laughter as we watched gullible Mrs. Evans nod her head and take it in.

As we marched back down Union Street to the dorm, we would pass the house of one of the little old Baptist sisters who always sat on the porch every Saturday. Mrs. Evans would nod and smile and the little old sister would smile back, giving Mrs. Evans her approval. A lot of the girls would smile and nod at her too. But Bernice always took the cake. Instead of smiling and just nodding like the rest of the girls, she would say something like, “How you feeling, Sister? It’s really a nice day, isn’t it?” The old lady would smile back at Bernice and look as if she wanted to say, “They sho’ got some nice girls over there at the college.” When she gave Bernice that little smile, Bernice, in her little short Saturday dress with the deep open pleat in the back showing half of her thigh, would switch away laughing.

Everything the girls did on campus was also supervised by
Mrs. Evans. Every evening after dinner, we were allowed to walk around on the campus in front of the dorm. Mrs. Evans always found some excuse to be in front of the dorm too. If she wasn’t out there picking flowers in the spring, she was raking leaves in the fall and feeding birds in the winter. Just before dark, she would go into the dorm and blink the lights. This was a signal for all the girls to come inside. She would blink the lights three or four times, then come out and stand on the steps to watch the boys walk the girls back to the dorm. “Come on in, girls, the social period is over,” she would call, just like a mother talking to a seven- or eight-year-old playing in the yard after dark.

The only times we went out of the dorm at night were on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Wednesday we spent an hour in prayer meeting and Thursday the library was open from seven to nine. Mrs. Evans would walk out with her Bible on Wednesday, and Thursday night she sat in the library knitting.

Once every two weeks on Friday or Saturday night, a social was given in the dining room. This was the only time boys and girls got together after six o’clock at night. The social usually started at seven and was over by nine-thirty or ten. We weren’t allowed to dance and the only games we could play were Bingo, Pin the Donkey’s Tail, Scrabble, and other word games. We couldn’t play any game that resembled a card game, not even Old Maids. But we were allowed to make up games and play them. One night one of the girls made up a game similar to Simon Said which went like this: