“Hog Cholera Alert for County”
— The Clarion
M y country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty. Of thee I sing,” flowed in a beautifully chalked hand across Miss Chandler’s blackboard. Miss Eunice Chandler was my teacher at Kerbo School, Colored Town’s only schoolhouse. Mr. Raymond said the cypress timbers in those rooms were a hundred years old, and had been milled by a black man at Fort McKoon. I don’t know about that. I had visited Fort McKoon, that flinty shelf stretching across the Suwannee and saw no sign of a sawmill. But I could see that my schoolhouse was very old, its beams notched Roman fashion and stacked in walls to rival Fort Ticonderoga. Kerbo School was built to last, but with no conveniences. No electricity. No restrooms. Even the blackboards were add-ons.
Grades one through twelve matriculated two grades to a room. Miss Chandler started her junior and senior class most every morning with something related to language or reading, usually something learned rote and drilled in class. It almost always started on the board.
“Miss Priscilla, are you with us?”
“Yes, Miss Chandler.”
I was not. I was thinking about the boy at the train depot.
“I’d appreciate your interest.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
That was just like Miss Chandler, to ask. Now if it was the school principal, Miss Hattie, teaching there wouldn’t be any asking. You didn’t inspect your thoughts in Miss Hattie’s class, or doze off, or betray any hint of inattention or fatigue, else that old sparrow of a woman would wrap a phone book ’round your head. Miss Chandler was as big as Miss Hattie was tiny. She was built heavy in the haunches, like a bear. Her jowls hung with flesh, like a basset hound. Her eyebrows were thick and not level on her forehead. Her nostrils flared wide as a heifer’s.
“Ugly done got hisself a name, boys,” Pudding said when first he saw Miss Chandler.
But of course neither Pudding, or anyone else, said anything about Miss Chandler’s face to her face.
“Miss Cilla,” she was surprisingly light on her feet for such a big woman.
“Yes, ma’am,” I roused myself.
“To the board, please.”
I didn’t want to get up. I was in my period and had no napkins. I had no rags, either. The sanitary napkins I’d slipped inside my shirt at Mr. Land’s SafeWay were so much easier I’d got used to them and forgot to boil rags and so now I’d run out all I had were some strips of linen and moss. I was petrified I would shame myself. That somebody would see.
“I have to get up, Miss Chandler?”
She took one look.
“You may remain seated, Miss Cilla.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I sighed relief.
“Let’s all direct our attention to the board, please. ‘My Country Tis Of Thee.’ Cilla, why don’t you start with ‘Of thee I sing.’”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“First off, is this a sentence or a phrase?”
“It’s a sentence. Just like ‘I sing of thee’.”
“Good. So the word ‘sing’ is what part of speech?”
“Must be a verb.”
“That’s correct. Does it take an object?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Which makes it?”
“Intransitive.”
“Right again. And as a verb it has no person, case, number or gender. What about the ‘I’ in this sentence, Mr. Reed?”
“I’s tired,” Pudding cracked, and Chicken Swamp guffawed.
“Maybe you need to run see Miss Hattie. See if she can wake you up.”
“No, ma’am.”
Pudding was suddenly straight in his desk.
“All right, then.” Miss Chandler put us to work parsing sentences and turned her attention to the seniors sitting an arm’s length away.
Juniors and seniors and everyone else did most of our work at our desks, in class, because Kerbo had no textbooks for students to take home. If I had homework in mathematics, I had to copy the problems at school. And how can you study history or biology, or write a report, without books and without a library? What do you do?
We drilled. We memorized. We improvised. And this was not altogether a bad thing. Miss Hattie, to give her credit, forced us early to commit works of literature to memory. I had not even held a complete novel in my hand by my junior year, but I could recognize long passages from Pilgrim’s Progress , or The Deerslayer or Huckleberry Finn . I could recite entire poems by Longfellow, “Under a spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands….” Or from Tennyson’s Ulysses :
…for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
We took the same approach to every subject, memorizing multiplication tables, for instance, names of states, presidents. By my junior year I could figure interest on any bank loan, could compute the area under a triangle or the volume of a cone. The New England states came as trippingly to the tongue as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
The law of the land had long held that segregated schools were inherently unequal, which was undoubtedly true, but as a junior in high school I had little sense of that deficit. You don’t miss Bunsen burners in a place where there is no science lab, electricity, or indoor plumbing. The only thing I coveted from the white school was their piano. Kerbo had no piano, or any other instrument. I used to imagine what it would be like to come in at noon or recess and just sit down with a sheet of music at a piano, all by yourself. Play anything you like.
Mr. Raymond said the courts were trying to shut down Kerbo School. “Alla colored children gone be sent to the white school,” he told us, with unconcealed disapproval. But Mr. Raymond also talked about hurricanes and communists and all sorts of things and nothing ever happened. Which was fine by me. I had no great urge to leave my neighborhood school. But then one morning Shirley Lee Lewis had caught me just as Miss Hattie was ringing us in off the playground.
“You know Miss Chandler going over to the white school?”
“Miss Chandler? Who tole you that?”
“Daddy say. Say in the paper the court gonna make us all go over.”
“But Shirley Lee, don’ white folks run the courts?”
“Surely.”
“Then, girl, rest assured we ain’ gone nowhere.”
There were only about a hundred children at Kerbo, from the very first grades through seniors in high school. Why couldn’t we just stay where we were? Why couldn’t we remain in our own, lamplit rooms? With our own teachers?
“Miss Chandler,” I burst out.
I had interrupted her but Miss Chandler remained composed. She just turned that big head like an owl until my face was all in hers.
“Why they want to shut down our school?”
A dead quiet ran through the classroom and I could tell I was not the only one who had heard the news. Miss Chandler folded the book she was holding in her lap.
“A lot of very powerful people don’t want our school shut down at all.”
“Then we can stay?”
“It’s not settled,” Miss Chandler replied. “And it won’t affect our seniors. But you juniors need to prepare for the possibility of integration.”
“Innagration?”
“When black students and whites share a school it’s integrated.”
“They gonna mix us up? Why?”
“You deserve a better education than you can get here,” Miss Chandler answered simply. “You need to move on.”
“I don’t want to move on.”
“That’s understandable. Kerbo is familiar to you, Cilla. Familiar to all of you. I’ve heard Reverend Dipps remark that the Devil’s been so long in Hell he’s got comfortable. Even Hell can get familiar. But there are opportunities away from here, away from Laureate, that will pass you by if you stay comfortable.”
The class fell silent. I could see Miss Chandler picking her words very carefully.
“Did you know that President Roosevelt built the school in Laureate? Yes, he did. He built it with tax money collected from everybody, black and white. So you remember it’s not their school over yonder. It’s not theirs . It’s our school.
“Now, I’m glad you brought this up, Miss Cilla. And come Civics class we can visit here again. But remember what the Good Book says—leave the day’s troubles unto itself.”
You couldn’t argue with the Good Book, I supposed. Nor Miss Chandler.
But I wondered what I would do in the white folks’ school if I was bleeding and had no napkins? Would they let me go out at noon beneath some water oak and gather moss for myself? Would they let me cut strips of gingham from my dress for ties? To bundle a napkin?
Come lunchtime Pudding and Chicken Swamp had every boy on the yard recruited for baseball. The boys had no field, of course, no bats or gloves or balls, but that circumstance did not seem to dampen their enthusiasm. A broomstick served for a bat. You didn’t need a glove, everybody played barehanded. Balls were trickier. What was required was something roughly spherical, tough and resilient. The heads of dolls were favored. Baby dolls, in particular, being larger, were preferred. Those bloated white faces. Sightless eyes. The boys would rip the head off a doll, pull the hair, and go to town. Chicken Swamp was famous for the curve he could put on one of these improvised baseballs. He was out there, now, fondling the stitches of his jerry-rigged ball, getting ready to deliver a blue-eyed strike.
Pudding was at bat, his slender slugger weaving like a cobra.
“Come own, Pudding! Put one outta here!”
Younger children cheered their elders about a makeshift diamond. Bare feet running to bases of burlap sacks.
“Come own!” Pudding challenged the pitcher. “Lessee some smoke!”
Chicken Swamp reared back and fired. The thwaaaaaack of a hard stick rang over a rude playground and, yep, there went a Kimmy or Baby or Sophie sailing for center field.
About that time Miss Hattie came quick-marching out the single door of our fort-like school.
“Miss Cilla.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I pulled awkwardly erect to jog alongside the school’s principal.
“I want you and Pudding to the office. Got a chore needs doing.”
I swear that woman could walk faster than I could run.
“Yes, ma’am…me and…Pudding.”
“‘Pudding and I.’ Meet me side of the yard. We’ll be taking Mr. Raymond’s truck.”
At about that point a gaggle of eager outfielders crossed our path, little Sarah Brock in ragged pursuit.
“Miss Hattie, Miss Hattie! Them boys got my baaaaby doll!”
“Sarah Brock hush that nonsense.”
Kerbo School’s principal never broke stride.
“Girl with any sense knows to leave her valuables at home.”
Within minutes Pudding and I were on the grounds of the school that Miss Chandler insisted did not belong to white folks. There were two wings to the main building. Grades one through six kept one wing. The other wing was designated for high school, which in those days meant grades seven through twelve. These two wings were linked in a single building that looked like a bomb shelter, a one-storey monolith of concrete shaped like a giant “H”, the exterior walls punctuated by heavy, jalousied windows.
As we approached I could see rows of yellow buses in a chain-linked enclosure off to one side of a playground generously shaded with yellowheart pine. The football stadium peeked into view. There was a cafeteria back there, somewhere, and a gymnasium and a band hall, all connected to the main building by shaded breezeways. I sat in the back of Mr. Raymond’s truck with no clue as to why we had been transported to this alien place.
Turned out we were there to haul books.
The school’s aging janitor, a colored man, was our envoy. Mr. Herman directed us to the breezeway outside the band room where dozens of textbooks used up by white students were crated for donation to Kerbo School. The books were in various states of disrepair. Some were completely ripped from their spines. All were marked or defaced inside. Nearly all had pages missing.
“Just load ’em up,” Miss Hattie commanded. “We’ll cull ’em later.”
I wondered briefly why white people were giving books to a school destined for extinction, but I knew better than to voice that question. Miss Hattie was already fussing over our labor, directing Pudding and I to unpack every box of books so that she could conduct a strict inventory. Four seventh grade math books. One book, Driver’s Education. Fifteen, no make that sixteen history books, eleventh grade. Twelve geometry books.
And so on.
It was lunchtime. There were no teachers or students in sight. Nobody in the band hall, either, which was disappointing. I would have liked to hear the band practice. Especially close-up. The only reason I attended football games was to hear the Marching Saints’ halftime performance. I would stand with Chicken Swamp and Pudding and Shirley inside the roped-off area where Negroes were allowed, wishing that I had my mother’s gift so that I could play by ear the marches and arrangements floating to me on the Friday-night air.
When we had loaded our second-hand charity to Miss Hattie’s satisfaction, she announced that she was required to check with the office before leaving.
“I won’t be a minute,” our principal declared tersely. “You two just stay with Mr. Herman by the truck.”
She tottered down the shaded walk toward the main building whose ponderous rear doors, I noted, were open to receive whatever breeze was available. I waited for Miss Hattie to disappear through those twin portals before I slipped off the truck’s tailgate. “Mr. Herman, I need a restroom.”
The old man seemed nonplussed.
“They ain’t nuthin’ fuh you here.”
“They’s a chinaberry tree ’round to the back of the band hall. That’ll do.”
“Reckon it’ll have to,” he replied.
I was familiar with the chinaberry tree and its location, of course. It stood between the Shaw’s watermelon field and the fire-door of the band hall which I hoped to find open. Public schools, particularly rural public schools, were nowhere near as concerned with security as schools are nowadays. Part of that had to do with air conditioning. You couldn’t stand to shut the windows anywhere once the weather warmed. The hallway doors were almost always open. Teachers routinely opened classroom doors to take advantage of any moving air.
So I was not surprised when I rounded the corner to see the band hall’s rear door propped open with a Coca-Cola bottle. I took a quick glance at the field behind me. Nothing but the rising waft of Bahia grass heating in the noonday sun. I strode quickly to the inviting entry, and stepped inside the band hall.
The hall itself was layered in shallow terraces, like an amphitheater. I stepped through the rear door and into what I would later learn was the percussion section. Snare drums and cymbals and other instruments unfamiliar to me were arranged like lily pads at the highest level of the theater. Moving through that section I jostled a music stand and a drumstick fell onto a snare drum. It sounded like the shot of a pistol and I cringed—could the janitor hear? Or Pudding?
I had to make a quick decision what I was going to take and get out . I saw a trombone left carelessly beside a folding chair. A clarinet, first one I’d seen up close. The tuba stood massively on its stand, hard to sneak that one out. Other instruments were visible but locked behind a cage of heavy-gauged wire. Didn’t matter—I couldn’t take anything larger than I could stuff in my blouse or under my skirt. So what would that be?
I wended my way quickly through silent stands of music to reach a corridor outside. One step around the corner and there it was, the director’s office—‘James M. Pellicore’. Had a nameplate cut out of the same colored brass as the trombone. I nudged the door with my foot. It opened without a squeak and I knew I’d hit a goldmine.
The director’s cramped niche was junked with sheet music. There must have been a hundred folders stuffed in crates on the floor or lying loose on the director’s roll-top desk. Books of music all over. One composition was taped to the wall with cryptic directions for a variety of gridiron choreography.
“South Pacific,” I mouthed silently.
An upright piano crowded beside the roll-top desk. A folio stuffed with sheet music was opened for inspection. I perused the exposed and topmost sheet. God from Zion, how many instruments were scored here? I leaned over the piano and sighted the first half-dozen measures, then scanned them once more and my head began to fill with sound, a pattern nagging and familiar.
Yes! This was it! This was the exact same piece of music that had been cut short those weeks ago on Mr. Raymond’s radio. The snatch of music lodged in my memory spread before me now in full, eternally captured in bars and measures and notes, reproducible at will.
“Mow Zart.” I tried sounding out the composer’s name.
And the title?
Concerto in D Minor .
I pulled the folio from its stand and scanned the contents to find completely unfamiliar names—Chopin, Haydn, Mendelssohn. But I knew this was no ragtime. I scanned my trove of titles like a miser, completely absorbed in my good fortune, when the bell rang and I almost shit myself. This was no schoolyard bell, you understand; this was an electrically hammered clarion. A bank alarm. I jammed the folder of music inside my blouse, bolted out of the Director’s office.
And came face to face with Cody Hewitt.
I didn’t recognize Cody at first, in my panic. For one thing I’d never seen him up close. For another he was dressed good enough for church, not in the familiar jeans, T-shirt or football pads. Most importantly, my startled flight had put me eye-to-eye with Garner’s youngest son, a position so close as to blind recognition. Never, never would I of my own accord dare raise my head to look into a white boy’s eyes, but that was exactly where I was now.
“The hell you doin’ in here?”
A girl hung on his shoulder. Her hair dribbled down her shoulders like tallow off a candle. I stood there like a deer caught in headlights for a split second. Then I lunged for the door.
He caught me. I kicked and fought, but he had a fullback’s arms tight around my waist. The girl started screaming. I don’t know how many people started pouring in and I didn’t care. I kept clawing, kicking. Somebody ripped the sheet music from my hand and then my head snapped to one side and stars floated before my eyes. When my vision cleared all I could see was Miss Hattie Briar. Standing over me, her face pulled tight as if with wires.
“Git up,” her voice came like the hiss of a snake.
“Git up and get in the truck.”
I pulled myself off the floor.
“What’s that?” the tallow-haired girl pointed, and next thing I knew Miss Hattie had her hands inside my top and I saw my stolen sheets torn and scattered over the floor.
My music! My Mozart!
“ This what you doin’ in heah?!”
In anger my principal’s speech became colloquial.
“I…I just found it.”
She backhanded me, a hard, vicious slap, and once more I was seeing stars. I could hear the white girl’s startled gasp. Others, too. I could sense their forms, their voices. But only indistinctly. I wondered if this was what it was like for Mama, this nimbosity of perception. But then things cleared. Cody swam back into my vision broad-shouldered and golden-haired, a pair of welts raising red and parallel across an otherwise unblemished face.
“Goddamn nigger scratched me,” he said, like it was a boast.
Miss Hattie snatched me up like a pullet.
“Get your sow’s butt into the truck.” Her voice was now garbled, as if received distantly over a radio, but I discerned clearly the fury, the shame.
“And Pudding, gather up those papers.”
The ride home seemed a journey to execution. I knew what to expect. Miss Hattie never glanced back at me, ramrod straight in the cab of Mr. Raymond’s truck, that gentle man mystified by her obdurate fury and getting no explanation. Pudding held onto his knees, barely acknowledging my presence over our ragged load of textbooks. I had never seen Pudding Reed at a loss for words; his silence was a fearful portent of what I was to shortly endure.
“She hits you, you cry. Cry like a baby, or she won’t stop.”
“She’ll stop when she’s ready.”
Pudding considered that a moment.
“And don’ let go that door,” was his final advice.
We got to school, I knew where to go. There is a doorless portal that leads from the corner room Miss Hattie calls her office to the wide, breezy hall outside. That’s where we got our whippings. We called them whippings because Miss Hattie rarely used a paddle.
She used a switch. Persons never chastised with a switch may not appreciate the difference between that implement and a paddle. Well, a switch is flexible, for one thing. You get hit on your back, it can wrap clear around. There are different kinds of switches. You could use a mulberry or a persimmon branch and trim it to the purpose. But the most feared switches came, as Miss Hattie well knew, from peach tress. The whole length of that flexible branch is knotted with junctures intended for blossoms and blooms and branches of new life. But trimmed, those notches bite like teeth on a saw.
When you were little there was a line to stand on, and you had to stand still while Miss Hattie switched your legs. If you moved, if you got off that line, she just started over. You got older, you stood inside the doorway, you reached up and grabbed the lintel. Shoulder blades opened up your back when you did that. Stretched the skin. Didn’t bother the boys too much, as they mostly wore work shirts. But for me in my gingham dress the assigned posture was dramatic. I would be as exposed for flaying as any shanghaied sailor.
I had stolen, surely, which was an awful offense. But it was not the sin of theft that moved Miss Hattie to her present fury.
“People in that school think we’re ignorant anyway,” she hissed, trimming a switch that looked as long as she was tall. “White folks see a colored child they think he’s got lice. See a Negro anywhere, think he can’t read or reason. See any black skin, think it filthy. So what do you do? I say WHAT DO YOU DO?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.” Genuine tears were pressed from my eyes.
She shoved the ripped sheets of music in my face.
“THIS! You just go on over there and show those white folks everything they already want to see in a Negro. What me and Miss Chandler and every teacher here are laboring with Jesus to keep hid !
“You shamed us, today, Cilla Handsom. And you make me ashamed. Over this ? Now. You know what to do.”
My palms came damply to press the lintel. I waited stretched out and exposed for what seemed forever. Where would the first blow come? The calves? My feet? Across my back. You couldn’t flinch. Could not take your hands off that lintel or Miss Hattie would just start all over. That had been the point of Pudding’s final admonition.
I heard someone weeping frightened in the hall, might have been Shirley Lee.
“YOU WANT TO TAKE HER PLACE?”
A cry strangled in some frightened throat. It was not normal for any student to witness another’s corporal punishment. Normally it was just you and Miss Hattie, there would not even be another teacher present. But Kerbo’s principal declared that my behavior had betrayed us all, every child and teacher at our school, and so my classmates had been made to leave their desks and come into the hall to see my punishment. Punishment, yes, and example.
They were all trying to look away from me, Shirley Lee, Pudding, Chicken—all of them. All the seniors, too. Something was moving deeply across Miss Chandler’s broad face.
“Miss Hattie…” she began, but it had already started.
I kept my hands on that lintel. I told myself I would not squall. I stood and gnawed on my nigger lips till my back was wet. Eventually somebody cried out. Begged even, I heard her. Then I felt something warm between my legs, gushing. Miss Chandler’s voice hailed from some distance and it ended. I slid down the door’s ancient frame, grateful to find the waiting floor, shameless in a mixing of blood.