Authors: Jamie Langston Turner
“And look,” she says, pointing to another picture on the page. “Ernest T. Bass died, too. Patrick used to laugh so hard at him.” She looks more closely. “Howard Morris, I never knew that was his name.” She points again. “And that actor on
Green Acres
, too. Eddie Albert. Why, it says he was ninety-nine years old.”
“One shy of an even hundred,” I say. I can’t help wondering how close Eddie Albert was to his hundredth birthday. I wonder if he was trying to hang on until then or if he was ready for the camera to stop rolling.
Rachel shakes her head. “Well, I guess TV got hit hard last week, didn’t it?” She finishes with my other sock and then my slippers. She uses the edge of the sofa to hoist herself to her feet, then sets about returning the basin and other things to the kitchen. On her last trip, after she brushes the pile of nail trimmings into her cupped hand, I speak her name. She stops and looks at me.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Oh, you’re welcome,” she says. “But it’s such a little thing.”
“It is not a little thing, Rachel,” I say, lifting my feet. “Now I can dance all night.”
She smiles. “You’re funny, Aunt Sophie.”
It would be tempting to foist some religious symbolism upon the scene just past, for I have read the Gospel According to John in the red Bible. I have read of Jesus girding himself with a towel and washing the feet of his disciples. I have read the words he spoke to his disciples: “If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.” Had Patrick been at home to observe, no doubt he would have seized upon the ceremonial nature of Rachel’s act. Perhaps he would have written a story about it for his creative writing class. Had he done so, I would have found a way to rip it apart.
And how do I explain what Rachel has done? If I had thought for a moment that she had simply purposed in her heart to obey a commandment, that she set her jaw to the task and humbled herself as an emblem of Christian piety, I would have kicked over the basin and drenched her with the liquid indulgence. No thank you, I would have said, I do not care to be part of a religious reenactment.
I do not dare to say that she washed my feet because she loves me. I am an old woman with no blood ties to her. She will get no more money at my death for having done this deed. In the end I have no explanation that makes sense. It is a mystery.
When Mindy arrives for her lesson, her hair is braided. She is wearing denim shorts from which long frayed strings hang. Her shoes, flimsy affairs, make flipping noises as she walks to the round table. For the month of May my wall calendar features a picture of a river otter with the caption “Learning to Turn Work Into Play.” Mindy has not learned the otter’s lesson, for she enters my apartment with the air of a slave.
I do not know how the mind of a high school student works. Besides Mindy, my closest contacts have been with two boys who pointed guns at people I loved. When I lived in Carlton, Kentucky, a neighbor boy of sixteen beat his grandfather with a hammer during an argument. The daughter of a colleague at Tri-Community College ran into another car while intoxicated and killed a pregnant woman. I look at Mindy and see a blank wall. Yet sometimes there are small cracks in a wall through which sunlight can filter. Sometimes things can grow behind a wall.
Mindy has had no contact with Prince for over two months. His case has not yet been heard. Steve checks regularly to make sure he is still in jail. So far he is. Steve and Teri hope that Mindy will never see him again. One cannot tell what Mindy hopes, for she rarely talks. In the six weeks since Veronica’s death, Teri reports that Mindy has spoken less and less.
One night recently Teri wrote her a letter and slipped it under her door. It was a love letter. “I knew I’d bawl my eyes out,” she told Rachel, “if I tried to say it all to her face.” The next day she saw the letter in a trash can, torn into small pieces.
The restrictions are still in place. Mindy has no computer, no car keys, no telephone. Though Prince is offstage for now, there are other friends Steve and Teri do not trust. “Bad apples,” Teri calls them.
Patrick does not believe in luck, good or bad. I have heard him say this. He gave a talk about it at a cottage prayer meeting, a talk he titled “Luck or the Lord’s Will?” He made reference to many things: lottery jackpots, job promotions, Veronica’s death, tsunami disasters, disease. He did not mention the kidnapping and murder of his children twenty years ago.
Perhaps it is luck, perhaps not, but the fact is that today’s lesson in Mindy’s literature book is relevant to her life in a number of ways. Whether she is attuned to the relevance cannot be determined. Perhaps it is luck, perhaps not, but two of the four poems in today’s lesson are commentaries about young black men: “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks and “Cross” by Langston Hughes. The other two poems are relevant in other ways: “Toads” by Philip Larkin and “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Two black poets and two white poets all have something to say to Mindy Lowe in Greenville, Mississippi. Whether she will listen is another matter.
Metaphor and irony are two aspects of figurative language covered in today’s lesson. Besides the meaning of these two terms and a rudimentary appreciation for the singing of a skilled poet, I will set down in plain prose what an old woman would wish four poets to tell Mindy in the space of an hour.
Tell her, Gwendolyn Brooks, that youthful follies are deadly. Tell her, Langston Hughes, that the ones who give you life are not to be cursed. Tell her, Philip Larkin, that one can never escape the demands of labor and conscience. Tell her, Edwin Arlington Robinson, that people are not always what they seem to be.
After she takes the quiz over today’s assignment, I say, “How did you like the poems you read?” I try to imagine her saying in a Tony the Tiger voice, “They’re Gr-r-eat!”
But Mindy’s response is a shrug and “Okay, I guess.”
Perhaps it is luck, perhaps not, that an incident from my past comes to mind. Perhaps I should pause to question its relevance, but I do not. Instead, I say to Mindy, “Before we start, I want to tell you something.” Her eyes, full of suspicion, dart to mine, then back to her book.
I tell her about my father’s posting flyers advertising for an assistant at his printshop in Methuselah, Mississippi, in the year 1954. I was teaching in nearby Clarksdale by then. I tell her about four boys who applied for the job. Three were white boys from prominent local families. The fourth was a black boy whose mother did white people’s laundry. “This is the boy he hired,” I tell her.
No one was surprised, since my father so often used his printing press to speak out against racial injustices in the South, but my mother was worried that the white boys’ families would be upset. The Negro boy, whose name was Fillmore Deal, had a speech impediment that made people think he wasn’t bright. He had a hard set to his mouth and eyes that said, “Unfair is all I’ve ever known life to be, and I don’t expect anything different from you.”
Mindy is picking at a fingernail as I talk. Perhaps she is listening, perhaps she is not. Perhaps she will erupt when I finish, calling me an idiot. Perhaps she will refuse to come to her lesson tomorrow. Perhaps she will tell her parents I do not stick to the literature book but go off on rabbit trails. I know I am taking a chance in departing from the text, especially since I cannot give a clear reason for doing so. But there are times when one must brave dangers. I have read of birds that invade the nests of bees. Sometimes a person must do this, also. He must go forth suddenly and put himself at risk for something he values. I look at the years ahead of Mindy, and I value them for her sake.
“Fillmore was a quick learner,” I say. “Somehow between his mother and my father, he avoided the things that a lot of the boys his age got mixed up in. He worked hard and grew up to be a good man. Later on Daddy took him on as a partner, and eventually he ran the whole business. It was Fillmore’s idea to start the daily newspaper in Methuselah. He married a nice girl and built a house for his mother next door to his.”
I stop. Mindy is still picking her fingernails. The look on her face says, “So what?” And in the silence that follows, I must ask myself the same thing. So what? It is a question for which I have no ready answer. Perhaps I see in this story some suggestion of the four lessons I want the poets to teach Mindy today. Perhaps I want her to see that there are fair-minded adults in the world who want to help teenagers.
I look at Mindy’s beautiful hands, her long slim fingers. The same hands that braided her blond hair. The same ones that tore up her mother’s letter. I think of the words of Julia in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona:
“Oh hateful hands, to tear such loving words!”
“‘Injurious wasps,’” I say to Mindy, “‘to feed on such sweet honey and kill the bees that yield it with your stings.’”
She stops picking her fingernails and looks at me with a mixture of astonishment and fear, as if I am a rabid animal and she has not had her tetanus shot.
“Those are lines from Mr. William Shakespeare,” I say. “They are spoken by an impetuous young woman who says and does things her own heart warns her against.” I lean forward and speak slowly. “I have heard that a drowning man may fight the one who tries to save him. I have seen little children kick and scream when put to bed for the rest they need. Take care, Mindy. Fix your eyes on things of lasting value, things outside yourself. Broaden your mind. There is safety within the gates, where a garden may grow. Sunshine and rain come from above. Those whom you consider to be your jailers desire to set you free.”
I have opened my mouth, and nonsense has spilled out. I wonder which of us is more astounded. Surely this is as jumbled a speech as has ever been given. Mindy’s lips are parted as if she is about to say, “What the . . . ?” But she says nothing, and her eyes grow suddenly unreadable again. It comes to me that I must sound like Patrick. I have a woeful thought: Perhaps he is rubbing off on me. Were I to keep talking, I wonder what else would pour forth. Perhaps I would speak of hedges and forts, lost sheep, and long-range implications.
“Now then,” I say briskly, “let us look at the four poems for today. We have much ground to cover.” Mindy glances at the clock and opens her book with a sigh. “Sometimes,” I say, “there may appear to be a wall around a poem. But with patience and persistence, we may discover cracks through which to enter.”
Chapter 29
To Burn This Night With Torches
The scientific name of the mockingbird
, Mimus polyglottos,
means “mimic of many tongues,” a fitting name for a bird that can imitate dozens of his feathered friends as well as other creatures such as crickets and dogs. The mockingbird is a fearless fighter during nesting season, taking on larger birds and even cats and snakes
.
“What do you remember about your early days of teaching when the schools were segregated?” This is the question Potts asks me when the four of us sit down to eat at the kitchen table. It is the twentieth day of May. Here are some of the things I tell him.
In the year 1955, a year after my father hired Fillmore Deal to work in his printshop, I was confronted by the parents of one of my fifth graders in Clarksdale, Mississippi. They both appeared in my classroom after school one day, dressed as if they were going to church. The man held a hat in his hand, and the woman wore one on her head—a little black cloche with a tuft of short red feathers.
Their son’s first name was Cameron, but I don’t recall the last name. I do remember, however, that Cameron’s name bore the Roman numeral IV at the end of it. Though the Supreme Court had passed the landmark decision concerning integration the year before, the public schools in Mississippi were still segregated for years thereafter. Where there’s a will there’s a way, as my father liked to say.
Cameron’s parents sat in the two chairs I drew up beside my desk, and the father, Cameron number three, spoke first. He worked at the bank and owned half of the land in Clarksdale. I was seen by some of the parents, he informed me, as too ardent a sympathizer with the American Negro. “We’re all for fair treatment around here,” he said to me in his deep voice, “but we think you’re pushing ideas onto our children that would best be left to their parents to discuss with them.”
His wife, clutching her pocketbook with gloved hands, nodded in agreement. “Cameron told us what you said about that Negro boy that died earlier this year.”
“Do you mean the boy who was killed by the two white men?” I said.
“The boy who made overtures to a white woman,” Cameron number three said.
“The boy who was beaten and mutilated?” I asked.
“The jury acquitted those two men,” Cameron’s mother said.
“Do you mean the jury of twelve white men?” I asked. “The jury that deliberated for just over an hour? The one that would have returned the verdict sooner if they hadn’t stopped to drink some Coca-Colas?”
I could see the pulsing veins in the neck of Cameron the third, just above the starched collar of his white shirt. He was a big man. He could have strangled two boys at the same time by snatching them around the neck, one in each hand.
“Miss Langham, we don’t want you trying to brainwash our boys and girls.” He leaned forward and looked at me sternly. “Maybe you have your own reasons for saying these things.” He stressed the word
reasons
as if to indicate that they were somehow shameful. “But we’ve come today,” he continued, “to let you know that none of us parents like what you’re doing, and we’re giving you fair warning before we take it further.”
I was tempted to ask if their taking it further would include burning crosses and white hoods, but I kept my silence.
His wife glanced at him quickly, deferentially, to see if he was finished. Then she spoke softly but emphatically. “We don’t want things to get ugly, Miss Langham, but we’ve got our reasons, too. We don’t want any trouble getting stirred up in Clarksdale. Things are nice and quiet here, and we want them to stay that way.” Most likely what she meant was that she wanted to keep her Negro housemaid and cook in their places.