AUGUST COMING, AGNES LAFAYT THOUGHT, AND I AM FINALLY prepared. Hurrying through the heat of early evening, she regretted that she was a little late to school—as though she wanted to make a grand entrance with her gift. Her shopping bag rustled noisily against her knee as she hurried. TJ had come, but he wanted to just stay with the car; he said he’d doze while he waited.
Agnes could see through the windows that the other students were already inside, and Mrs. Taylor, who was wearing her white jersey dress with the black and brown circles printed all over it, was standing up talking to the group. (Christine Taylor didn’t need to wear such a middle-aged dress.) And there was the wheelchair and Miss Cat Cartwright, poor little soul so crippled up she could hardly write her own name. But they were just getting started.
“Now if you all would just pipe down,” Mrs. Taylor was saying.
Agnes slipped in the door, held her shopping bag up high and pointed to it.
“What is it, Mrs. LaFayt?” Mrs. Taylor asked her.
“First off, I apologize for being late. I am so sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Mrs. Taylor said, “for just this once.”
“I thought everybody would be pleased, I brought us some hand fans.” She reached in her shopping bag and brought out the one with her favorite picture: Jesus, the Good Shepherd. He was sitting on a rock, wearing blue and red, with a shepherd’s crook leaning against the rock. Jesus held a little white lamb up in his arms, and all around scattered on the green grass were other sheep. Agnes had everyone’s attention. She added, “Courtesy of Brooks Furniture Company in downtown Birmingham. They asked me to say that—”
Mrs. Taylor spoke sarcastically, “In case you can’t read the advertisements on the back.”
Agnes remembered how generously the fans had been piled into her shopping bag. The lady hadn’t even stopped to count them;she’d just asked if that was enough, and Agnes had said, Well, maybe just a few more, if you got ’em to spare, please.
“The store lady asked me to say please come in and look at their complete line of air conditioners, if you in the market for air conditioners.”
“You may hand them out,” Mrs. Taylor said, “while I explain about the practice tests.”
“I guess these will be our handheld air conditioners,” Cat Cartwright said, and she chuckled at her own joke.
Agnes thought, Suppose she can’t flap no fan, and the thought pierced Agnes that she might have pointed out the nice girl’s disability. Agnes quickly sat down.
“Everybody say ‘Thank you’ to Mrs. LaFayt,” Mrs. Taylor instructed.
A group of the young men said in obedient unison, “Thank you, Mrs. LaFayt,” and smiled like good boys.
Mrs. Taylor began again. “How can I explain anything with y’all interrupting? ‘How’d I do?’ ‘Answer my question?’ Just please shut up and listen. If you can’t answer a question and you can’t eliminate one possibility as being wrong, then you go on to the next question. That’s what I’m trying to get across. You don’t just lay down and die. You keep going. Now there’s not but one person in this room who did any good at all on that practice test. And you know why she did good? ’Cause she paid attention to what I been trying to teach you every week about how to take a test.”
“Was it me, Mrs. Taylor?” a quiet little guy asked.
Agnes thought, Most of these boys paid by Neighborhood Youth Corps to come to school, but they trying.
“No, it was not,” Mrs. Taylor said. “It was Mrs. Agnes LaFayt.”
Agnes felt faint with pride.
“Stand up, Agnes.”
She got to her feet. Agnes tried not to grin. She looked humbly down at the floor. But her heart had speeded up. She felt her arms dangling at her side, limp and amazed. Jesus the Good Shepherd hung from one hand. Maybe she would be able to pass the real test when the time comes.
“Now, Mrs. LaFayt,” Mrs. Taylor said, “you tell everybody how you went ’bout taking this test.”
Oh, how her heart was racing. Did she dare to tell? Agnes always told the truth. She kept her gaze on the floor, but she turned her head a little on one side. Sort of aimed the top of her head toward Mrs. Taylor. All the students and teachers looked at her standing up among the wooden desks. The walls with blackboards, the banks of big windows on each side, were waiting. Waiting for Mrs. Agnes LaFayt to tell them.
“Well, first I read the question. And then I read the answers. And then I close my eyes and I says, ‘Oh, Lord, is it A, B, C, or D?’ and the Lord tells me, and I write it down.”
The room erupted in laughter. Agnes was mildly surprised, but she had spoken the truth. “Not for every question,” she tried to say, but they were laughing so loudly they didn’t hear her. She wished Mrs. Taylor would tell her to be seated. “Just the hard ones when I don’t know,” she said. Even Mrs. Taylor was smiling big, like the joke’s on her. Everybody was grinning—
Then a cherry bomb exploded on the porch of the building.
Every smile disappeared. Everyone was frozen at the desks.
Then the bullhorn voice: “Niggers…niggers.”
Everyone became quiet.
“We see you all got some white women teachers in there with you. We think you better tell them teachers it’s time to go back where they belong. We don’t want to see no white teacher out here, come another night.”
Everyone sat in stunned silence. Miss Cartwright and Miss Silver stared straight ahead.
The lights went out. No one moved. Jesus, help us, Agnes silently prayed.
Then Mrs. Taylor spoke calmly into the dark. Just her voice. “Charles, you and Joe go to the circuit box in the entry hall and turn the lights back on. Mike, you go round and tell Mr. Parrish to call the police and then to come here.”
She’s brave, Agnes thought. She’s a brave woman. Agnes heard the three biggest boys get up, saw them moving toward the door. What if the bullhorn was to shoot, soon as somebody goes out. But Mike and Sam and Charles walked out safely.
“Anybody got a match or a cigarette lighter?”
Agnes recognized Arcola’s voice, knew Arcola was talking to add to the calm.
“Wait!” That’s Miss Silver. “They might shoot at a light.”
But Christine—there she was, at the front, just where she was—flicked on her cigarette lighter. She tried once, twice, to turn the little wheel. Sparks fluttered and then it was on, like a little candle. The flame lit up Christine’s face and neck. She looked pretty, like Jesus in the dark, in the fan illustration “Behold, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light.”
Christine smiled a sweet smile, her mother smile. Yes, Agnes had learned Christine had three little ones at home. Christine said, “They bluffing. You all just hold on now.” Christine lit a cigarette. Absolutely against the rules. Christine was calmly defiant. She drew on the cigarette like a man, not touching it, and it glowed bravely in the dark, a little spot of red. Yes, Christine had to be daddy and mommy to her kids. She knew how to act like a man.
“We gonna learn,” Mrs. Taylor said in her smooth strong voice, the red spot wagging. She took the cigarette from her lips, held it out in the narrow V of two rigid fingers. “And someday, sooner or later, everybody in this room gonna have his or her—that’s right, you don’t say ‘their,’ not ‘everyone gonna have their diploma’—everybody in this room gonna have his or her high school diploma.” Just like a preacher, she put in a silence, so they’d all look at her, let the words sink deep in. Nobody butted in. Mrs. Taylor held the room like a bowl of silence. “Now, Stella,” she said, “let’s conjugate one of your verbs.”
And Miss Stella said, “I am at school.”
And we all answered, “I am at school.”
And she said, “You are at school.”
And we repeated it: “You are at school.”
And she said, “He, she, or it is at school….”
There’s always another verb to conjugate, and after “to be” Miss Stella start in on “to have” and we say it like we mean it: “I have friends, you have friends, he, she, or it has friends; we have friends, you have friends, they have friends.”
Agnes heard herself say softly, “Now we ’bout like a family ready to sit down for Thanksgiving.” She was glad to sit again in her desk.
Miraculously the lights came back on. Everyone looked at the faces around them as though they had just been born anew into life. Christine sat down in her chair.
JUST BEFORE THE August heat hit, the bullhorn man turned a classroom of codeine-nipping boys, young white and black women, and one woman about old enough to be a grandmother into a group of friends.