Kizzy Ann Stamps (4 page)

Anyway, you can see why the school was and is so important to my people. Granny Bits says this building was put up before some folks had their own homes. We’ve used the same building ever since. It doesn’t have a floor to speak of, just swept dirt. Mr. Felix, our custodian, who I swear is two hundred years old, is supposed to keep the place clean and tidy. He comes in every day. He’s bald-headed and shrinking away as he ages, his eyes getting more and more stuck out with every year, and he looks around the room like it has gotten bigger every day. His head sticks out of his shirt like an old turtle — you know, those old tortoises that are hundreds of years old? He pokes his head into this corner and that corner and says, “Looks pert clean to me, no cobbsywebs here, no cobbsywebs there.”

What he knows is that Mrs. Warren cannot abide dirt of any kind, and she will get so fed up with the dirt and the cobwebs that she will get out that broom and clean it herself every day and then he won’t have to do it! Then off he goes, to wherever he hides, to smoke or whatever, his old eyes smiling because he has tricked her again. That old dirt floor gets cold come winter, but we all bring wood for the chimney, and Mrs. Warren can build a mean fire, let me tell you. She lays that kindling in first thing of a morning and keeps the fire stoked so that it never dies out. The earliest learners get a bit hot, as they sit closest to the fire, and the high-schoolers are farthest out, so they can get a mite cold, but those of us who sit middlin’ are nice and toasty. I guess I’m lucky I haven’t learned all there is to learn just yet!

We had a heater donated two years ago by Ganell Woodruff, the biggest success story around here, who invented something I don’t understand but lives in Detroit and writes letters to Mrs. Warren regularly, telling her how great he is. This time, instead of a letter, he put his money where his mouth is and actually sent a heater. It had instructions, and Mr. Felix was going to hook it up. He started on a Saturday, but it took him forever and he was still finishing up on Monday morning. It clung to the low ceiling like a weighty beetle, which is not what any of us expected. Mrs. Warren would not let us sit at our desks, made us all stand behind her like little chickens behind the hen when Mr. Felix went to light it, him perched on this little three-rung ladder while she stood nearby and we peered around her, anxious to feel the heat pulsing out of the great warming box.

“Do you have any idea what you are doing, Felix?”

“Reckon I do, ma’am,” he answered.

“Then light the contraption,” she commanded.

He lit it.

It blew up.

Well, not completely. But it sparked and went
boom.
Mr. Felix jumped off that ladder like he was a spry sixteen, his legs filled with energy he probably never knew he had. Mrs. Warren spread her arms to shield us, her protective instincts mother-henning us, and we, the little chickens, herded behind her and ridiculously tried to fit behind her huge bottom. What a sight we must have been. The heater slowly, sadly sagged, then belched, then plopped onto the dirt floor.

“You all right, Mr. Felix?” Mrs. Warren asked.

Mr. Felix had his eyelashes, eyebrows, and what little hair had been on the front of his head singed right off. But he’d squeezed his eyes closed, and so, yes, besides having the bejeebers scared out of him and losing all his hair, he was all right. Mrs. Warren gave him the rest of the day off, telling him we’d “work around that monster for the rest of the day.” I heard she got her husband to come up that evening and heave it off to the junkyard. Next day, we just all brought wood again, and that was the end of the hanging heater.

I hope you don’t have a heater hanging from your ceiling!

I know I shouldn’t do this, but I’ll go ahead because you know I talk about everything. . . . Bathrooms. We have an outhouse — we have to go outside. I’m guessing you don’t, but that’s where the problem comes in, because James says we’re not going to get to use the bathroom with the white kids. I know I can’t ever use the ones in town, no matter how bad I have to go. I’ve just got to hold it or find a place in the woods. Am I going to have to hold it all day?

I hope you don’t mind if I write you about something different from school. I didn’t want to end my letter on that question of the bathroom — that seemed just too awful, you know? So, I thought I’d talk about what we do for fun. We go to baseball games. We don’t go to the Lynchburg games. That’s a long way into town, for one thing, and it is kind of awkward anyhow, with James. He gets all mad, because there’s nothing but white players on the Lynchburg team. Since Jackie Robinson integrated major-league baseball, you’d think minor-league teams like Lynchburg would be mixed, and they
can
be, but they’re often not, and it drives James crazy. So, he’s no fun for any of us to be around, and it’s just not worth it. There’s plenty of action out here in Bedford. We find lots of teams playing out here, and we watch them. You just drive around the county until you find a game and there you go. James used to play on a team, but he’s decided he wants to work on just football and basketball, the two sports he likes better.

We actually watched a game by your school the other night — what do you think of that? I looked at the school and I got shivers, I tell you. I know some kids been trying to go to your school for years — parents can request for a black kid to go to a white school, but it has to get approved. And somehow or other, it just never gets approved. Like the paperwork didn’t get turned in early enough. The next year, it’ll be that the paperwork got turned in too early. The next year, it’ll be that the signatures are on the wrong line. The next year, it’ll be that the wrong person signed the paperwork or it got turned in to the wrong person. Mostly folks just quit trying. I’ve seen some families try for seven kids, and they never get one kid in that school! But they keep trying — that’s how bad they want for one of their kids to go to your school. That’s how much better they think your school is, compared to the black school.

And now we get to come. But I’m still shivering. Even if you are nice.

Thank you for your nice letter to my folks. You were the talk of church this week, everybody showing around their letters to parents (and Mama is pleased as punch that you called me a budding writer in your letter to her). I especially liked that you included a special note for me. Unless I’m wrong, it looks as if I’m the only one who wrote to you as Mrs. Warren commanded. That must be funny to you, as I said we all listen to her — that I’m the troublemaker — and then I’m the only one who does as told. But I think they all meant to. They just felt afraid when they put that pencil anywhere near paper. I hope you won’t think poorly of my classmates. They really do try hard for a teacher.

(Thanks for the word about the one stall out of three in each bathroom set aside for the black kids — that’s more than fine — we only had a one-seat outhouse for all of us to share, so this is a step up in the world for us! But maybe don’t spread that around, okay?)

I had no idea it would make Mama happy to think of me writing words down. It seems she has always taken a shine to writers! After your letter came, Mama had me help her shell peas for dinner and told me how she used to go listen to Miss Anne Spencer read some of her poetry sometimes when she had a break at her maid work with Mrs. Patsy Westover. Mama said, “You know, Miss Anne is a published poet, and she has famous men like Langston Hughes and W. E. B. DuBois at her house. You could grow up and write like her.” I asked Mama to tell me more about Miss Anne Spencer and her poetry. I kept my head down, looking at those beans piling up in my bowl, the round of discarded shells growing at my feet. But Mrs. Patsy didn’t like Mama going to hear Miss Anne on her breaks — not that I can see why, because it wasn’t like Mama was reciting poetry when she came back — but when Mrs. Patsy doesn’t like things, that means it has to stop. Mama had no more to say. She just looked at me and nodded, then said, “You could write like Miss Anne Spencer, Moon Child.”

I don’t know why, but poetry is one kind of writing that I’m not real interested in. . . . Poetry’s like a secret that I don’t understand the meaning of. But I didn’t tell Mama that. I just shrugged. It seems like a good answer, to shrug, when I know I don’t want to say yes to what my mama wants me to do. I gathered up my bowl of peas and slipped past the screen door into the house.

You might be thinking my mama shouldn’t have to maid for a white lady when we have a farm, and I wish you were right, but our farm doesn’t make enough money every year. My mama is a maid, and my granny does ironing for folks and some sewing for folks, and we all help on the farm. It works out.

James was sitting at the kitchen table, drumming his fingers on the wood. He is not a sitter, if you know what I mean — he is a mover. Not many people can be sitters when a farm has so many things need doing. One look at his face told me to keep my mouth shut, though. My brother is usually an easygoing person, but lately, he only has to hear one word to feel an anger that sets his body shaking. I went to my granny with the peas. She dumped out what I’d shelled and returned the empty bowl to me.

“That enough for supper, Granny Bits?” I asked.

“Keep shelling, Kizzy Ann,” she said. “We got hungry folk to feed around here.”

I must have brushed against James, because his hand shot out and knocked that bowl clear across the kitchen. Shag, always at my side, growled and moved at James. I put my hand up to keep her from trouble before I scrambled to grab that bowl. “Keep your temper,” Granny Bits warned my brother. James cut his eyes at me, then mumbled a sorry my way. He doesn’t usually snap at me, to be fair, Miss Anderson. Not like lots of brothers do. I suspect that thing about football has him a mite more than worried.

Yesterday I learned how you weren’t the teacher at your school last year, that you’re the new teacher. I heard the teacher who’d taught that grade quit because we were coming — how she wasn’t about to teach no “uppity black kids.” I heard a lot of teachers quit the white school and there are a lot of new young teachers there. I knew a lot of white kids had quit and were going to private schools, but I never knew that a lot of teachers had quit. Daddy is talking all the time about how Mrs. Warren had to give up her job, a job she fought to get, a job she worked so hard for, and there are teachers at your school just quitting at the drop of a hat because they won’t work with a certain type of kid. I never even thought that you wouldn’t want to be my teacher, Miss Anderson. I didn’t see that one coming — I told you right off how much I didn’t want to come and I guess I should have been thanking you for being there when I get there. Thank you, ma’am.

You asked how things are going for me, and I hate to sound like a whiner after that last paragraph, but I have to say, things are not good for me. My mother is trying too hard. She asked for some hand-me-downs for school from Mrs. Patsy. (Mrs. Patsy has a daughter a little bigger than me — maybe you know her, Laura.) Mama doesn’t like to ask Mrs. Patsy for anything, but she would do whatever she has to for me.

I wish she wouldn’t. Yesterday we tried on the dresses, three of them, and I’ll tell you, I felt a fool.

They’re frilly and satiny and my heart dropped to my knees when Mama pulled them out of the Miller & Rhoads shopping bag Mrs. Patsy had sent.

“Look, Moon Child, you are going to look like a strawberry sundae in this pink dress. And the green one will show off your lovely arms, with these cap sleeves. And oh, the white one! Like a dream.” She went on and on. My mama is usually a quiet soul, so when she’s prattling, you know something’s wrong.

I put them on, each in turn, and they fit pretty well, with Mama only having to pin a little here and there. As I told you, we only have a small mirror, just a sliver of shine, but I didn’t need to see my reflection to know how out of place I looked.

I haven’t written in a while because seeing myself in those dresses (even if it was just in my mind’s eye) threw me into a daze even Shag couldn’t pull me out from. The dresses meant this was really going to happen. Maybe dresses aren’t that much of a problem for you.

When I wore dresses to school with Mrs. Warren, I wore them because girls have to wear dresses to school and to church. Those are the rules. My granny makes most of my clothes out of leftover material she sews with, and so my dresses are just that, leftovers. I put them on of a morning and took them off as soon as I could to switch them for my work clothes. The dresses are brown or khaki or whatever material was left from what she had sitting around. They are shaped to hang down my body from the shoulders to my knees, and they cover me and that is that. I also have had other hand-me-down dresses, but never anything from someone like Laura Westover. My hand-me-downs before were just dresses from here and there — dresses from the church bazaar or yard sales, things Mama saw for sale for a nickel or something. Not like I’ve ever cared. I just put on whatever’s there that’s clean that Mama sets out. If girls could wear jeans to school, I’d wear jeans. I’m not frilly, not froufrou, not fancy. I am plain and down to business. I’m a no-bow girl, like Shag is a no-bow dog. I am not a strawberry sundae or a dream. I am just me. I am who I am. I am jeans, dirt on my hands, and my dog with me at the end of the day.