With the Might of Angels (12 page)

Because if Daddy or Mama reads this, I am a skinned possum!

Last summer when Yolanda and I first set eyes on Prettyman’s baseball field, I was convinced that field was heaven’s front yard. I suppose heaven is a big place, ’cause today I stepped foot into heaven’s parlor — the Prettyman Science lab.

The first thing I learned from Mrs. Elmer, our Science teacher, is that the word
lab
is short for
laboratory.
It sounds so official, like where you can really learn important stuff.

The Prettyman Science
laboratory
has bottles and goggles and tubes and clips and counter-tops — and microscopes.

And there are four sinks for washing things, and for making sure our hands are clean. Sinks in a classroom! And microscopes!

THIS is why I will put up with kids staring at me like I’m some purple-headed carnival creature, and clucking after me like they’re the stupidest chickens in Lee County.

I’d bet every cent of my Christmas money that anyone who is a real doctor started out by learning science in a
laboratory.

Today our teacher assigned lab partners. My partner is a girl named Theresa Ludlow.

When Mrs. Elmer put Theresa’s name next to mine on the blackboard, Theresa was not happy. To squirm her way out of being partners with me, she told a tale taller than Paul Bunyan. Something about having a stomachache and needing to go to the school nurse’s office. Mrs. Elmer dismissed Theresa, but I later saw Theresa in the cafeteria eating a hotdog covered with enough sauerkraut to stuff a bed pillow. When I get to doctor school, I hope they teach me how to cure stomachaches with sauerkraut.

I really don’t care who my partner is in the Prettyman Science
laboratory.
And I don’t give a toe bone about Theresa Ludlow not wanting to work with me. What I care about most is learning how those bottles and goggles and tubes and clips can teach me.

Next to the names of Science lab partners, Mrs. Elmer wrote a list of study topics we’ll be learning this term — cells, germs, organs. And, just before Thanksgiving, we’ll be dissecting frogs.

But first, there is lots of reading to do to prepare for what Mrs. Elmer wrote on the blackboard before the class bell rang.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19 —
MIDTERM TEST

When I got to Mr. Dunphey’s History class, the desks were pushed back against the wall.
Democracy
was written on the blackboard.

“Don’t sit,” Mr. Dunphey instructed. “I want everyone to come to the center of the room and to stand in a circle.”

Mr. Dunphey looked pleased by whatever it was we were about to do. I was curious, but fretting, too. Alls I could think was,
I hope he’s not going to make us square dance.

Well — Mr. Dunphey didn’t start calling out steps for the Virginia Reel. What he made us do was worse.

He explained that we were forming a “Democracy Circle.”

“Let’s make this circle strong by holding hands,” he said.

Kids all joined up, clasping fingers and palms. But the “Democracy Circle” ended with me. I was wedged between two students whose names I didn’t know: a redheaded girl on my right, a buck-toothed boy on my left.

Not one of them would hold my hand. With the way Mama insists on me being cleaner than
clean, I knew there was no dirt on my palms, but I checked to make sure. There was not even a smudge from my pencil’s lead.

It didn’t surprise me, or make me mad that nobody wanted to hold hands with me. Truth was,
I
really didn’t want to hold hands with
them,
or anybody in this class. Just by looking, I could tell that boy’s ma did not make him wash his hands. Neither did the mother of the redheaded girl.

Mr. Dunphey was eager to see the circle come together. I waited on what to do next.

Mr. Dunphey came into the circle between me and the bucktoothed boy. He took my hand in his. This still left an open space in our “Democracy Circle.”

I tried to make the circle work by reaching for the hand of the redheaded girl. She flat-out refused to join hands with me.

I wiped my palm on the pleat of my skirt to get off any clamminess. Even I wouldn’t have wanted to join up with a fish-hand. But the girl wasn’t having it. She balled up her fingers and held her fist tight at her side.

Mr. Dunphey, he’s clever. He put a classroom chair between me and the girl, and told us to each
hold on to the back of the chair. The girl looked relieved.

Mr. Dunphey said, “By forming this circle, we represent the people of America, joined together under our nation’s guiding political principle — democracy.

“This circle represents what democracy stands for — that we are all equal. None of us is higher or lower than the other. Democracy is the standard that makes America’s government unique. The chair I have set between Dawnie and Jennifer represents the seat of government, the place where a government exercises its authority. It’s where key political decisions are made. America’s seat of government is Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital.”

I was glad to have my hand on the seat of government, but there was no kind of
democracy
at Prettyman that I could see.

When Mr. Dunphey gave my hand a gentle squeeze, I felt something I have not ever once felt for a teacher. I felt sad for Mr. Dunphey. He really believed what he was trying to teach us about democracy.

But when you go into a store and can’t try on the clothes, when water fountains won’t
let you drink from them, and when you’re the only Negro student in a school where every day you eat lunch alone, democracy is as far off as the moon.

Tonight I looked up
democracy
in my dictionary. Here’s what I found:

Democracy:
A fair and equitable government by the people.

Heaven’s parlor has lost its shine.

Today in the Science laboratory, we got to use our microscopes to look at cells.

To see the cells, we had to put blue liquid onto a glass slide, then place the slide under the microscope’s viewer.

Theresa and I had to share a microscope. Even though I was super-eager to see the cells, I let
Theresa go first. I don’t think she even cared about looking at the cells. She put her eye to the viewer, blinked, and said, “Your turn.”

I pressed my eye to the microscope’s viewer. Those cells were beautiful clumps of jewels, swirling together in the pocket of blue liquid that brought them into view.

I watched the cells dance and play together. But the party ended when I felt something warm and wet, then burning, pouring onto my lap.

It was the blue liquid we’d used to put on our microscope’s slide — all over the front of my skirt! Snatching at my thighs, making them itch, heating my skin.

I sucked in a hard breath. Cut my eyes at Theresa.

I raised my hand. Mrs. Elmer must have seen me wincing. She came right over. She looked at me sharply, then at Theresa.

“It was an accident,” Theresa said.

Accident, my eye!

Tripping on a tree root coming up through the dirt is an accident.

Going to the wrong address ’cause you wrote the number three instead of the number two, that’s an accident.

Theresa Ludlow pouring blue cell juice onto the front of my skirt is no accident.

It’s what Daddy calls
intentional
— Theresa meant to do it.

Mrs. Elmer brought a cold compress. She gave it to me to wipe the burning blue from my thighs. “Don’t worry, it’s not dangerous,” she said.

The cold cloth soothed my legs right away, but
I
was still burning.

I spent the rest of today going from class to class with a blue splotch down my front, putting up with kids’ snickers.

When I came home from school, Mama gasped. I told her all about the “accident.”

Mama tried every way possible to get that stain out of my skirt, but even she couldn’t get rid of the blue.

“Wool holds on,” she explained. With disappointment and disgust both tugging at Mama’s expression, she told me to throw the skirt away. “Even if I could get it clean, I do not want that memory in my house.”

I thought I would die from chalk dust today. I have made a decision — another
intention.
I will do
whatever studying it takes to earn my way to that Bell Ringer job.

More flypaper from head-to-toe, getting the chalk off my clothes. Hair blowing in the wind of our house fan. How does Mama think of these things?

It’s warm for November. I have just come in from being outside, at the tree mop, where I beat that stringy thing silly with my baseball bat. Half past ten, that’s the time. Lights-out is long gone. Everyone’s asleep.

The moon is a softball, pitched high up into the curtain of black sky that hangs over our house. If my bat could reach, I’d swing and knock that ball free until it fell and tumbled to the place in our yard where the tree mop swings from its raggedy rope.

For now, I’ll let that softball moon spread its white light, right here into my bedroom, giving me the light I need to fill your pages with my determination.

I miss Bethune. I don’t miss the broken toilets and the stopped clocks. But I miss learning in a place where teachers talk to you, and smile, and say “honey” and “darlin’” when they speak your name. And I miss just
being
at school, not
being a Negro
at school.

I miss teachers who call on you in class and work hard to help you get the right answers. And who know you’re paying attention and trying your best.

Those are the same teachers who can always find a way out of no way. Even with ripped books, they taught us somehow. I miss the simple dignity everyone has at Bethune, and the self-respect we were made to have by our teachers.

Here’s what else I miss — every man, woman, and child at Bethune has beautiful dark skin, same as mine. They are all shades on the colored rainbow—everything from butterscotch to baker’s chocolate, all sweet. Nobody looks at you funny at Bethune.

And — every man, woman, and child who steps foot in that school takes pride in knowing about Mary McLeod Bethune and what she
accomplished and stood for. I miss that, too.

If you ask any kid at Prettyman who their school is named after, they’ll tell you that Ronald Prettyman was a rich Virginian who made his money in the pork rind business and built the school so he could have a building named after himself.

As bad as I want to learn what it takes to be a doctor, and as keen as I am to someday get myself into college, I am doing it by attending a school built from the skin of pigs.

Daddy’s still out of work. Mama’s taken in extra laundry. Our house is filled with sheets and table linens and collars and cuffs. After school, I help Mama hang shirts to dry.

“Two clothespins at each shoulder,” she told me today, pressing the pins onto the bleached cotton corners, showing me how it’s done. “There’s more wind at this time of year,” Mama said.

Our wash line has become a parade of sleeves, waving at the Virginia breeze, flapping hello in the cold.

Today when I emptied the chalk water in the janitor’s closet sink, I set eyes on the best sight ever. It was a small thing, but a big thing, too. I don’t know where it came from, but there it was, tucked into the crevice where the sink meets the wall — a Jackie Robinson baseball card, same as mine!

Oh, and now I know why the hall floors of Prettyman shine so brightly. Our janitor, whoever he is, has got five mops, standing proud as a parade, in his closet.

The only time I’ve ever heard Mama and Daddy argue was when Daddy told Mama that from now on he was only putting a penny in the collection plate at church because he had a feeling that some of his hard-earned money was going into the gas tank of Reverend Collier’s Pontiac.

Tonight, after the dishes had been cleared and washed, Daddy and Mama had angry words between them.

Goober and I had long since gone to bed, but I hadn’t been able to sleep.

Too much on my mind.

Daddy said, “White folks have been against us for too long, Loretta. When I was a boy, they humiliated my own daddy, and he felt powerless. My father couldn’t keep whites from undermining him. And nothing’s changed. Now
I
feel powerless. I can’t get a job because of the hatred of those people and their feelings about Dawnie integrating Prettyman. With her at that school, how am I supposed to earn a living and keep my integrity as a man?”

Mama was quick to speak. “Curtis, this isn’t
about
you!”

Daddy tried to get in the next word, but Mama wasn’t having it.

“Loretta —”

“
I’m
talking now!”

Daddy got quiet.

Mama said, “What do you mean, nothing’s changed?
Everything’s
changed, and Dawnie’s making that change possible. Our daughter wants this. She’s as smart and as capable as any of those white children, and she deserves what that school has to offer. Have you seen the books she’s bringing home? The materials are better at Prettyman. That
school’s got higher-level math. And a Science lab.”

That made Daddy even madder. “Somebody needs to go into that Science lab and whip up a peace potion that will make all kinds of people get along.”

Mama said, “Where’s your faith, Curtis? I’m taking in extra laundry. We’ll make ends meet. Work at Sutter’s Dairy, or any job, doesn’t give you your
integrity as a man.
Dawnie is being watched over with the might of angels, and so are we. I believe that. The Lord has chosen our child to be at that school.”

Daddy snapped, “I know it’s not Dawnie’s fault, but where were those angels when I lost my job?”

Now Mama was really yelling. “Enough, Curtis!
Enough!
”

Goober must have heard Mama and Daddy fighting. He came into my room. Folded himself into the corner near my night table.

Without looking, he reached up, fished around the night table’s top. He slid my pink curlers onto each one of his fingers.

“They hurt,” he said.

Today Daddy walked me to school, like always.

Waddle was waiting. She watched and listened to me and Daddy talk.

I blurted, “It’s because of me that you got fired, isn’t it? I’m going back to Bethune.”

I started to cry, but yanked in a hard breath. Bit hard, too, on my lip.

You would have thought a baseball had smashed through the front window of a car. Daddy stopped walking. Just like that. He knelt down to where he could look me in my face.