Coming of Age in Mississippi (32 page)

“What’s goin’ on out here?” she asked.

When she said that everyone pointed to Inez’s grits. Miss Harris looked. “What’s wrong with the grits, they’s a little too done?” she asked.

“Look a little closer, Mama. We’re just admiring your latest ingredients,” some wise guy said.

She leaned over, almost sticking her big nose into the grits.

“Watch out, it’ll bite you!” someone screamed in mock fright. This really cracked everyone up.

When she finally saw the maggot she turned angrily on the crowd and demanded, “Who’s playin’ jokes out here?” She glared at one of the boys who was still laughing. Everybody suddenly shut up. Miss Harris stood there with her hands on her hips, blowin’ and a puffin’ like she was about to blow us all away. I could feel everyone tense up and grow angry. Suddenly I noticed one of the girls who helped in the kitchen motioning frantically and pointing toward the pantry. I walked very deliberately past Miss Harris toward the kitchen.

“Where you goin’, Moody!” Miss Harris yelled as I neared the kitchen. “You stay outta that kitchen! You don’t work down here any more!”

“Yes, but I am a student here and I do have to eat this
shit!”
I shouted back. By that time the others had seen the girl beckoning too and a lot of them began following me to the kitchen.

“What’s goin’ on here! What’s goin’ on here! Calm down! Stop it!” Miss Harris screamed, running after us. “Come outta that kitchen, Moody! Somebody go get President Buck! Moody, I’m goin’ to have you sent away from here yet!”

I knew exactly where the grits were kept from the time I had worked in the kitchen. I went straight to the pantry and saw that there was a big leak from the showers upstairs. The water was seeping right down onto the shelves.

“How long has this been leakin’ down here?” I called to the girl who had been motioning to us. But now that Miss Harris was standing there she was too scared to answer.

“That’s okay. I’ll find out,” I said. “You want President Buck?
I’ll
get him,” I yelled at Miss Harris, who was standing there fuming. I went angrily by her once again, followed by several students. We were about to go over to President
Buck’s house, which was right next to the dorm, when somebody remembered that he was in Vicksburg for a big meeting.

“O.K.,” I said. “We don’t eat until he gets rid of Miss Harris and that leak is fixed!”

We were just outside the dining room door and a couple of the guys stormed back inside, hollering, “Boycott! Boycott!” One of them started yelling, “Maggots in the grits, maggots in the grits! We ain’t gonna eat this cooked-up shit!” Then students began to walk out, leaving their plates on the tables right where they were. (Usually we were required to empty our own trays.) Then we all gathered in front of the dorm. Some of the students were arguing. I could tell that a lot of them weren’t too hot on boycotting. One of the guys came up to me.

“Okay, Moody,” he said so everyone could hear, “you runnin’ this shit! How we gonna eat? I don’t have one penny in my pocket!” Several of the others joined in with him. “Yeah, Moody, what’s your bright idea now? How we gonna come up with some money?”

“Just ’cause you ain’t got no money, you gonna go down there and eat that shit? I would
starve
first!” I shouted. There was a mixed reaction of yells and boos. The same guy who had come up continued the debate.

“O.K., so we don’t go to the kitchen! You tell us how we’re goin’ to eat!”

“I got some money,” I said quickly, thinking of my ninety dollars. “Who else got some?” There was dead silence.

“I got twenty bucks,” Inez yelled out.

“Ain’t nobody else got some money?” I asked.

“Fuck money, man!” one of the guys shouted. “Let’s telegram Buck and tell him to come back here and take
care
of this shit.”

The crowd cheered.

“O.K.,” I said. “But meantime, stay outta that dining room!”

We tried to telegram Buck but we couldn’t get him. Since
it was Saturday and Mrs. Evans was going to march us into town shortly I took fifty of my ninety dollars and gave twenty-five of it to the boys. I told them to buy enough food to last a couple of days. Then a group of girls and I went to town as if we were going to do our regular Saturday shopping. Instead, we borrowed a couple of hot plates from students who lived in the city and bought enough food to last us for a while.

On Sunday, the next day, we all sat around on the campus eating fried chicken that we cooked ourselves. It was like a big all-day picnic. Miss Harris had a girl from the kitchen telling the students there was lots of chicken, ice cream, and homemade cake in the dining room, but the students just called her an Uncle Tom and told her to get lost.

Monday morning, just as my alarm clock went off at six-thirty, Mrs. Evans knocked on my door and said that President Buck was in the lobby to see me. When I got down to the lobby, he was standing with his back to me looking outside. He didn’t look like a little fiery dragon this time.

“Mrs. Evans said you wanted to see me,” I said to his back.

He turned quickly as if I had frightened him out of his thoughts. “Look here, Moody, I came in last night at two o’clock and found Miss Harris and Mrs. Evans sitting on my doorstep waiting on me. I’m getting pretty tired of you upsetting everybody around here.…”

I stood there listening until he had his say. Evidently, Mrs. Evans and Miss Harris hadn’t told him anything about the maggots in the grits or the leaking shower. They just told him that I had started a boycott and hadn’t any of the students eaten since Saturday and barrels of food had gone to waste.

When he finished I told him what had happened. Then I denied that I was responsible for keeping the other students out of the dining room. I told him that I could only account for myself and that I would never go back down there and eat Miss Harris’ cooking. When he said that he would get the showers fixed immediately and have Miss Harris throw out
the grits, I told him that it wasn’t only that but that Miss Harris herself was nasty—she knew the grits weren’t any good and she cooked them anyway.

By Wednesday the showers were fixed and the spoiled grits had been thrown out but Miss Harris was still there so none of the students went back. I split my last forty dollars with the boys and we bought food to last till the weekend, hoping that Miss Harris would be gone by then. But she wasn’t. On Sunday, President Buck called a special chapel meeting. He got up and made a lot of excuses for Miss Harris. He said that she had reported the leak over two weeks ago to him but that he was so busy running around trying to get money for the school to
buy
food for us that he had forgotten about it. The students didn’t really believe his sob story, but since all our money and food were gone, the students slowly began to drift back, one by one. I didn’t go back at all, but one of my friends told me that now Miss Harris was wearing a snow-white uniform and a hair net every day.

I managed to get by for a while on what friends brought me from the city. But I started losing so much weight and got so hungry all the time that I wrote Mama and told her what had happened. She and Junior came up and brought me a couple of cartons of canned food to last the remainder of the semester.

At mid-semester when our averages were tallied, I had the highest average in the class. Soon after the averages were posted, I was called to President Buck’s office. He asked me if I had any plans for going on to college next year. I didn’t know what he had up his sleeve so I came on very cool with him in the beginning. But before our meeting was over I could tell that he really liked me in spite of all the disturbances I had caused on campus. So I broke down and admitted my worries about going on to college. Then he told me that I could probably get a full scholarship with my high grades. He said that a test would be given in a week or so for scholarships to a
couple of the colleges in Mississippi and that he wanted me to try for them.

The following week, the registrar from Tougaloo College, the best senior college in the state for Negroes, came down. I took the test, and a week before school ended, I received notice that I had received a full-tuition scholarship.

I could barely wait until September, when I was to enroll in Tougaloo College as a junior. Meanwhile, I tried to find out as much as I could about the school. A girlfriend of mine at Natchez, after learning of my scholarship, told me that Tougaloo was not for people my color. When I asked her what she meant, she merely said, “Baby, you’re too black. You gotta be high yellow with a rich-ass daddy.” At first, I thought she was jealous because she didn’t get a scholarship. But then I thought of the high-yellow registrar who had given me the scholarship exam. So I went back to my girlfriend for more information. She tried so hard to convince me not to go, I ended up by accusing her of being jealous and we had a big fight. A few days later she came to my room.

“Look out that window, Moody, I want to show you something,” she said, pointing at a white student out on the lawn talking to some of the guys. “She’s a student at Tougaloo and she ain’t white either,” she said, and left my room. I didn’t believe her—that girl was as white as any woman I had ever seen. I went right downstairs and asked her if she was a student at Tougaloo. When she said, “Yes, I go there,” without
even looking at me, I just walked away thinking that Tougaloo wasn’t the place for me, after all.

That summer, while working at the restaurant, I seriously started looking for a school to attend in New Orleans. Since L.S.U. was only thirty-five dollars a semester for off-campus students I thought of going there. But when I learned that it had just been integrated and that all the teachers were white, I talked myself out of going. I was afraid that those white students would murder me in class. I was an A student but those A’s were from Natchez. I didn’t have much competition there, I thought. Besides Natchez wasn’t anywhere near as good as L.S.U. I didn’t want the white students to act like they were smarter than me just because they had gotten off to a better start.

I kept thinking and talking to myself until September rolled around. By then it was too late to register in any of the schools in New Orleans, and I knew it. So I sent Tougaloo ten dollars to reserve a room for me and five dollars for my registration fee.

One morning in mid-September, my grandmother woke me before she went to work. I got up and made sure all my things were packed. Four hours later I was headed for Tougaloo on “good old Greyhound.”

By the time I arrived in Jackson, Mississippi, that evening, I was tired as hell. After wandering around the small segregated station for a while, I asked a little dark-skinned man with glasses how to get to Tougaloo. He smiled and asked, “Are you a freshman?”

“No. I’m a junior,” I said.

We introduced ourselves. He told me his name was Steve and that he was a senior.

“I’m waiting for a cab,” he said. “We could split the fare if you would like.”

All during the seven and a half miles to the college I was
dying to ask if he was the only black student there. But instead we talked about our majors. I didn’t like him because he tried too hard to impress me so I just sat back in the seat without saying much. At last, we came to a sign that said
TOUGALOO SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN COLLEGE
1/4 mile. Soon we were riding on campus, but by now it was too dark for me to see what it looked like.

The driver dropped Steve off first because he had about five suitcases and two trunks stacked in front of my luggage. When we stopped in front of the boys’ dormitory, some of the boys ran out to help with his suitcases. One of them looked inside the car and said, “I’m Jimmy. What’s your name, pretty?” I was so mad, because he was yellow, that I didn’t answer. I wondered how many of the other students were yellow, and probably with rich-ass daddies. Anyway, it pleased me to know that mulattos liked dark brown-skinned girls. Maybe some of the others would too, I thought.

A few minutes later, as I was carrying my own luggage into Galloway Hall, the girls’ dormitory, I noticed several girls passing in and out of the lounge and going upstairs. Not all of them were yellow, either. As a matter of fact, some of them were even black. This really pleased me. I was disappointed when I went to the room that had been assigned me and found one of those white-looking girls sitting on a bed, smoking a cigarette. “Hi. I’m your new roommate,” I said.

“I have a roommate,” she answered. “You mean you are
one
of my roommates.” I looked at her and wondered if the other one was as white as this one. If so, I couldn’t take this diplomatic shit.

“Trotter sleeps there,” she said, pointing to the lower half of the bunkbed against the opposite wall. “Therefore, you gotta sleep up there.”

“Fine with me,” I said, but I was thinking I would ask to be assigned to another room no later than tomorrow morning. Without saying anything more to her, I began to roll my hair
in big rollers. While I was looking in the mirror, I could see her smiling and sizing me up.

“My name is Gloria,” she said.

“Mine’s Anne,” I answered.

“Where are you from? I take it that you’re a junior since they put you on this hall.”

“Yes, I’m a junior. I’m from Natchez College.”

“My home is Natchez,” she said. “I lived down the street from the college.”

I was getting tired of her probing, so I simply said, “Oh.” I took my pajamas from a suitcase and got into bed—the top bunk.

“Trotter’s not coming until next week. You can sleep in her bed if you like.”

“Thanks,” I said, and went to sleep thinking how much I would hate the school.

The next morning I got up around six because I wanted to get a glimpse of the campus. After I had taken a shower and dressed, I went outside. I could not believe it—this place was beautiful. It was large and spacious. There was evenly cut grass everywhere and huge old oak trees with lots of hanging moss. Birds were singing, and the air was fresh and clean. I must have walked all over the campus in a trance before I realized I was hungry and went to find some breakfast.