Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry (12 page)

We trooped down the sidewalk toward University Avenue without talking much, me toting my backpack with Grandma's envelope and Indri hauling her giant pink purse with all of her art supplies. She had her hair pulled back, and her dark ponytail looked almost blue in the hot sunlight as we broke from the tree cover and turned right, onto the main sidewalk. She was happy today, judging by her pink sun pants and flowered shirt, and she kept smiling as we got closer to the old building. Across the street, six or seven art students sat with sketchpads, and I knew they were trying to capture its angles and spires, and probably the way it looked almost like a church or a small castle.

“Think you could draw this building?” I asked Indri.

“I don't do very well with structures. Better with trees and flowers and nature stuff. But I bet all the ghosts in Ventress are in that turret.” Indri pointed up and to the left as we got to the front door. “Where the graffiti is. Do you think Dr. Harper will let us up there?”

I shrugged. “The dean let me look, back before all the renovations. You can peek in the door any time, but you can't see much from the bottom. It's nothing special. Just a windy, twisty staircase with writing all over the walls.”

“It's historical.” Indri sounded incredulous. “A Civil War vet wrote on the walls—and students since 1911.”

“It just looked like scribbled-on plaster and spiderwebs to me.”

“You have no artistic sensibilities, Dani.”

“I know.”

We went inside, and the air-conditioning felt like diving into ice water. I shivered instantly as the door closed behind us. The building's entry hall looked so polished now, with its beige walls and white trim, and the paint still smelled new, even though it was a few years old. The whole building had to be remodeled when I was around nine or ten, after pipes exploded and flooded everything.

Dr. Harper had retired from the history department, and he worked for the College of Liberal Arts now, in student services. In addition to being notorious for his silly gags, everybody talked about how he worked twelve and sixteen hours a day like a new professor trying to get tenure, especially since his wife died. A sign told us his office was up the main staircase, so Indri and I followed the rust-colored carpet runner up the steps. She had to stop on the middle landing, where the stained glass window was, and stare at all the colors. I had seen it before, a lot of times, and it reminded me of being in church, with all the gold and blue glass.

“Hey,” Indri said, grabbing hold of my arm. She pointed at the glass. “Those soldiers. I just realized—those are
the
soldiers, right? The ones from Ms. Manchester's ghost story.”

I looked at the glass. The gray uniforms, the hats—it was the University Grays, the Ole Miss students who had all died or been wounded in the Civil War, during Pickett's Charge.
“Weird,” I said. “I've looked at this glass so many times—why didn't I get that?”

A soldier seemed to stare down at me with wide eyes and round, smooth cheeks. He had a sword over his head that seemed to be made out of blue light, and at his feet, other soldiers lay wounded or dying. The whole scene made my stomach jittery, and I moved away from it, backing up the steps.

“It's amazing,” Indri said, then realized I wasn't standing beside her anymore. She hurried up the stairs after me. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing. It's just seeing what they looked like, it's kind of eerie.” I turned around, but I felt the dead soldier's glass eyes on my neck, and goose bumps rippled across my shoulders.

“Slow down, Dani,” Indri said as we got to the top of the stairs. “It's just more history.”

“History is creepy. That whole window—it's probably why this stupid building is haunted. The Grays fought for the Confederate side. The pro-slavery side. I feel like we should be ashamed instead of proud.”

“They thought they were doing the right thing,” Indri said.

“Well, they weren't.” My heart kept beat-beat-beating too fast the whole time we stood there. It didn't help that Indri was giving me a you-big-dummy look. Whatever. I reserved the right to be squicked out by dead soldiers made out of painted glass, and worried about whether or not we should give them a memorial.

“Not that way,” I told Indri as we left the stairs and she tried to turn through the first open door. “That goes to the tower.” I pointed inside, to an open door behind a desk. A very busy-looking lady sat at the desk on her telephone, typing at the same time.

Indri stared at the tower entrance, and I could tell she wanted to go in really, really bad.

“The lady won't let you go past,” I told her. “Sorry. Not unless the dean gives you permission.”

“That sucks,” she mumbled. “I should have gone up there a long time ago. And I
am
going up there, soon as I can convince my mom to get me the dean's okay.”

“It's just scribbles on walls,” I reminded her, and she groaned.

We moved down the longer hall and turned in to Dr. Harper's alcove. His office doors were open like he was waiting for us. A patterned rug covered the hardwood floor, and the walls were floor-to-ceiling bookcases, with huge windows in between them, and he had a big meeting table covered in books too.

Dr. Harper was sitting behind his big wooden desk in the middle of the room, bent over some papers. He had an unlit pipe in his teeth, a magnifying glass in one hand, and his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A pile of books blocked the right side of his desk, but on the left, he had a new tablet sitting up in a case. His famous tweed suit jacket hung on his wingback chair behind him. When he looked up at us, his
thick, snow-colored hair stuck out on both sides of his head, and he took the pipe out of his teeth, dropped it on the desk, and broke into a huge smile.

“Girls! Hello!” He pushed back from his desk and jumped so fast Indri startled. He grabbed hold of his suit jacket and struggled into it as he hurried toward us, even though he left his shirt sleeves rolled up. I couldn't figure out what—oh. Oh, yeah.

“Just let me—here. Out here,” Dr. Harper was saying.

I gave Indri an elbow, and she moved aside to let him out of the door, which he pulled closed behind him.

“Is he—” Indri started, making the crazy sign by her temple, but I put a finger to my lips, then pointed to the chalkboard beside the door.

Understanding dawned across Indri's face just as Dr. Harper opened the door and walked back in, looking much more organized with his jacket in place and his hair patted down. He beamed at us, his blue eyes warm and twinkly, then he went straight to the chalkboard.

Indri and I waited as he drew a coat hook on the board, and shaded it quickly with yellow, then white chalk. When he finished, he pulled off his tweed jacket and hung it on the chalk coat hook.

It fell straight to the floor.

Seeming delighted, Dr. Harper turned back to us. “Ladies, the day that coat hangs on that hook, I have to retire. Today is not that day!”

We both tried to look tickled, like we had no idea about his gag, even though it was a campus legend.

“Now then. Dani, your mother told me you had some papers for me to look at?” He motioned us to his meeting table, and pushed aside some book stacks to make room.

Indri and I sat down, and I pulled out Grandma's envelope and took out page five for him to read. “Grandma was working on something before she got so sick, and Indri and I have been trying to figure out what some of the notes mean. Your name is written on one of the pages, so we hoped you might be able to help us understand what she was trying to say.”

“Really, now.” He took page five from me and studied it. “Your grandmother is an astute scholar of history, young lady.”

“Yes, sir.” I kept a happy expression on my face even though I felt suddenly sad. Grandma wasn't able to be an astute scholar of anything anymore. Guilt prickled in my chest again. Why did I keep acting like she was already a ghost? Grandma wasn't dead.

“It's hard to believe that Ruth's memory has failed her.” Dr. Harper put down the papers and made eye contact with me. “Is she up to writing much anymore?”

“No, sir. Not now. But she wrote those pages when her mind was still sharp.”

“I see. Well, this time line makes perfect sense.” He smiled. “Of course. She always wanted to do this.”

“Do what?” Indri asked.

“Ruth thought the history of the Civil Rights Movement, particularly in Mississippi, had gotten too fragmented,” Dr. Harper said. “People could read bits here and pieces there, but an organized time line, from start to finish—with
everything
on it, for depth and context—that's hard to come by. She was afraid too much was being lost, so she wanted to preserve the details.”

I thought about this for a second, but I still wasn't sure why it mattered so much. “What about this?” I pointed at one of the phrases on page five. “Do you know what the Black Codes were?”

Dr. Harper eyed the passage and touched it with his fingertip. “The Black Codes were laws passed in the South, just after the Civil War, to keep Black citizens from exercising their newly won freedoms.”

Indri leaned forward and propped her chin in her hands. “Like?”

“Well, Black people couldn't rent property except within city limits, and they had to be able to prove they had legal homes.” Dr. Harper gestured to Grandma's papers. “Otherwise, they could be arrested and forced into low-wage labor agreements almost as bad as slavery. They couldn't quit jobs without arrest and heavy financial penalties. Basically, anything the community didn't like could be used to prove the person was a ‘vagrant' under the Codes, and that person could be placed into forced labor as a punishment. The same thing happened to Black orphans and mixed-race children—”

He broke off, gazing at me, and his eyebrows lifted. “Oh—um, sorry, Dani. And Indri. I didn't mean to use a disrespectful term.”

Indri grinned at him. “No big deal, Dr. Harper. I call myself blended—as in, perfectly blended.”

“It didn't feel disrespectful,” I told him.

He still looked uncomfortable. “Is there a preferred term these days?”

I had to think about that. My parents and I had talked about the issue, like Indri and her parents—her mom was from India and her dad was white like my mom. But really, like I told Dad, it just didn't come up. “Multiracial, I guess?”

“Multiracial.” He sounded happier. “According the Black Codes, being multiracial was considered an abomination in the eyes of God and the law. If two people of different races tried to marry, they were arrested. The penalty carried a life sentence.”

“So our parents would have been felons, just for getting married,” Indri said.

Dr. Harper nodded. “They would have been put in prison, and very likely, both of you would have been considered Black, and subjected to the Codes. It was the
Loving vs. Virginia
Supreme Court decision in 1967 that finally put an end to the anti-miscegenation laws—the ones forbidding interracial marriage. Still, Mississippi didn't remove those statutes until the 1980s, and I believe Alabama was the last to erase theirs, in the year 2000.”

“So my parents got married before Mississippi even changed its laws.” I felt sort of proud of them, and wondered what that was like. Then I wondered why they hadn't told me more about it.

I couldn't wrap my brain around that at all, so I went back to page five. My finger drifted along the page margin until I came to Grandma's math figures. “What about these numbers here?”

“Hmm.” Dr. Harper tapped on the figures. Then his smile faded. “Oh. Yes. I think I do know what these numbers stand for.”

Indri and I waited, but Dr. Harper didn't say anything. He glanced at Indri, then at me, and his cheeks colored at the top.

“What is it?” Indri asked.

My stomach got a little twitchy. Dr. Harper seemed to be debating something, until finally he closed his eyes and let out a breath.

“Just a moment,” he said. “I'll show you.”

Excerpt from
Night on Fire
(1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 303

Just when I thought Leslie understood how to behave herself in the Magnolia State, Aunt Jessie and I made the mistake of taking her by the Kream Kup on University Avenue. We chose it because it was close to Mt. Zion, and because vanilla ice cream just might have been born inside that old A-frame drive-in.

It was gray outside, but not sprinkling yet, and the air smelled like asphalt and rain. Leslie didn't put up a fuss when we told her we'd need to park someplace quiet and walk up separately, because White and Black in the same car was near enough to cause a street riot. Once we took to our feet, Aunt Jessie and I led the way, with Aunt Jessie fanning herself with a palm-frond fan she saved from Easter Sunday
service. There were two lines at the A-frame, and we got into the long one on the right.

Leslie looked uncomfortable, but I didn't dare glance at her. With a sigh, she gave up and joined the Whites-Only line on the left side of the Kream Kup. Her line got served first, so Aunt Jessie and I were still five folks back when we heard Leslie order her banana split. She stood at the outside counter waiting for her dish, staring first into the left-hand half of the building with its shiny tile and shuddering window air conditioner and bright lights and White faces. Then she stared into the right-hand side, with its open windows, dim jungle prints, and Black faces. There was a jukebox on both sides, but only the Black side played any music folks could hear, because the windows stayed open to let in a breeze.