Walter A. Jones and his devoted editor, R. Swanson, worked diligently on their article about Klan activity in Warwick County. I’d never seen Ruth so buoyant, exhilarated by our mission. It was my idea to start the article with the rock-throwing incident at the Negro barbershop, to set a scary scene that would hook the reader. “Hook” was a term I’d learned in English class. Ruth talked Langston into bringing the barber to her house one evening for an interview, after dark. It was all very undercover. My inner spy was elated. Reverend Swanson was out at a meeting of the church finance committee; the girls were asleep in their beds. Langston rapped once on the back door, like a secret agent.
At first the man sat stiff and suspicious on Ruth’s couch, but gradually his shoulders settled and he ate a piece of sponge cake. Then he described the incident: the sound of the idling car—sputtering, rattling—that brought him out from the back room that night. He’d been closing up, sweeping one last time and putting away his barber’s tools; he’d been about to turn out the lights. But the idling drew his curiosity, and as he approached his front window, something struck it. Instinctively, he ducked. He wondered if someone had shot a gun at him. Then another object struck the glass, this time shattering it. Still crouching, he watched the car labor away, and he recalled thinking how moronic it was for these men to be hiding inside hoods—everyone knew Chuck Doyle’s car.
In a hushed tone Ruth asked, “What did the police say?”
We all stared at her. Eventually she asked, “Did you call the police?”
“No, ma’am,” the barber replied. “I put up a board across the window to keep the bugs out. Got a piece of glass comin’ from Norfolk.”
“Oh.”
The next day I wrote the opening for our article—two entire pages packed with suspense, mystery, fright, and trepidation. I described the barber hunkering fearfully on the barbershop floor, with waves of sweat pouring copiously down his trembling facial muscles. I described the car engine growling demonically in the shadowy street and eerie crickets chirping in the nocturnal darkness. Ruth read it with sinking eyebrows, and when she finished she picked up a pencil and deleted all the adverbs. Then she crossed out the adjectives. Then she sighed and rose and wobbled into the family room to get her newly arrived copy of Life magazine.
“Okay,” she said, all business and efficiency. She turned to an article and showed me how the “lede”—that’s what it was called—was chock-full of basic information: the wheres, whats, whos, and hows all crammed into that first sentence. In fact, the whole paragraph was just one sentence.
“Mrs. Beale told us a paragraph has to be five sentences!” I cried and lost all respect for Mrs. Beale.
Ruth and I rewrote the first paragraph together. It did sound more like the lede in the magazine, but secretly I preferred my version. We continued writing until we had the whole article done. After the first paragraph, it seemed to pour out of us—the nighttime meetings in the cornfield, the plans to disrupt Negro graduation parties, the veiled rage of the Klansmen toward anyone who was not like them.
Sitting in Ruth’s kitchen, waiting while she went down the hall to check on the girls, I wondered: What kind of person needs everyone else to be exactly like him? Why did a person need to see himself mirrored in everybody around him—the color of his skin, the texture of his hair, his thoughts and beliefs—all reflected back every way he turned? It had to be someone who felt so weak inside he needed constant reassurance, who felt so afraid in the world he needed to imagine himself replicated into a sizable tribe. My father, who had once seemed so strong to me, was, in reality, a fearful, fragile man.
In our article, Ruth and I did not name names, but we gave an approximate number of men involved and emphasized that they came from many walks of life, including “the professions.” We spent a few more days polishing the sentences and getting the commas in the right places, and then Ruth wrote a cover letter, and the reverend signed “Walter A. Jones” in a masculine hand, and we mailed it to the Virginian-Pilot.
In the meantime, Lou Waller abruptly resigned as superintendent of the Warwick County Schools, withdrawing his application for reappointment. Apparently he had a sudden longing to spend more time with his wife on her family farm in South Carolina. I asked Langston if he’d heard any rumors about Lou Waller and a colored girl, but he hadn’t. Magnanimously I said, “If you do hear anything, don’t believe it. It’s a lie.”
So my father became one of two finalists for the superintendent job. His lone rival was a man from Richmond. There was talk among the teachers about the value of “new blood.” To make matters worse, the man from Richmond was also a blue blood—one of a half dozen sons of a wealthy peanut farmer descended from an actual First Family. My father fretted over this genuine Virginia gentleman wooing the members of our rural, rinky-dink school board. Though the board was stocked with our own landed gentry—Dardens and Moreheads—they were a definite notch below First Families. My father didn’t know what to do. He bought a new suit and shoes and tried entertaining. He hosted luncheons at the country club for school board members and their wives, and for three weeks my mother lived in a panic, frantically accessorizing her Easter dress, borrowing dresses and hats from Patsy’s aunt.
I couldn’t stand the thought of my father being promoted. I couldn’t bear the thought of him bursting into the house with his good news, calling us all over to flutter around him and buzz with admiration. I pictured my mother’s bright, adoring face pressed against his, him sucking in all her light. I wanted him to suffer as many disappointments as he’d inflicted on me. Now that I’d abandoned the scheme of ruining his reputation by pretending to be involved with a colored boy, I needed a different plan.
Had I thought logically about it, I would have realized my father would never get that superintendent job. But my unformed adolescent brain was obsessed with action, and generally oblivious to the concept of consequences—I had to do something to ruin his chances. I had to be an active participant in his downfall. Unwittingly, my former best friend Becky Campbell put an idea in my head.
With less than a month before school let out for summer, Becky’s new friends dumped her. Apparently, she was not clique worthy after all. At lunch now she sat alone at the end of a table of seventh graders, earnestly reading a book, her hair slowly morphing back to its natural wild state. Two tables away sat Donna Bowman and her gang, making a show of looking over and laughing at her, wallowing in the pubescent thrill of destruction.
One day, Joe Pedicini asked me, “You want to invite her over?” Florence Whipple and Sue Bates, fearing they might be expendable, scrunched their eyebrows at me. Did I want Becky back? I had to think about this. What I really wanted was to travel back in time and ride bikes with her and climb trees and eat peanuts and plan our futures. Too much had changed. How could I ever trust her again?
“Maybe tomorrow,” I replied.
Then it occurred to me: Becky, daughter of the town photographer, may have access to something I could use. Polaroid had invented a new model that printed a picture all by itself immediately after you took it. You didn’t have to bring the film to the drugstore to get it developed. I’d seen the ad in the Sears catalogue. My busy brain jumped into hyperdrive: What if I could get my hands on a camera like that? What if I rode my bike over to Franklin while my father was paying a visit to Mrs. Doris Wallace and snapped a few photos? What if I then put the photos in an anonymous brown envelope and mailed them to the offices of the school board? I could end his bid for superintendent. I could snuff out his greatest ambition. The blue blood from Richmond would be hired, and, I reasoned, Kingsfield would inch closer to desegregation—to the aristocratic mind, there would not be much difference between the coloreds and us white small-town hicks.
The next day at lunch I paused beside Becky, who was already seated pathetically with her book, and invited her to join us. A smile overwhelmed her face, and she followed me. I pulled out a chair for her, next to my usual spot, and Florence looked a little devastated, but I grinned at her and she was happy again, peeling the wax paper from her tuna sandwich with the crusts hacked off. Beside her sat mute Sue, who’d taken to covering her acne with a thick layer of taupe pancake make-up, slathered only to edge of her jaw, a shocking contrast to the goose-white skin of her neck. Joe was on his way over with his tray stacked with food. He caught my eye and made a show of tilting the tray back and forth, pretending it was so heavy he was about to drop it. The plates slid riotously from edge to edge; his roll wheeled toward the lip of the tray. I laughed so hard my jaw ached. He sat on the other side of Becky, and when everyone was settled, their food organized, I asked Becky what was new. Her parents had promised her a puppy, she said, a beagle dog like Snoopy.
“What will you name him?” I asked, not caring at all.
“I don’t know!” She was so excited. “Maybe Snooky.”
“Snooky’s good,” Joe said, and I nodded, though I thought it lacked all traces of imagination.
I watched her take a bite of bologna sandwich and asked, “How’s your dad’s photography business?”
“Fine.”
“You know what I saw in the Sears catalog? A Polaroid camera that prints pictures instantly all by itself. Did you know there was a camera like that?”
“Sure. My dad got one last year.”
“Really?”
Florence and Sue listened wide-eyed, munching slowly, continuously—like horses. Joe was scooping mashed potatoes into his mouth.
“Yeah,” Becky said.
“I bet he doesn’t let you touch it.”
“Sure he does. He lets me use all his cameras; you know that.”
In earnest Florence commented, “It must be complicated.”
“Yeah,” Sue added, succeeding in saying something.
“Not really,” Becky replied.
“Do you really know how to use it?” I prodded.
“Of course I do. I’ve been working cameras since I was six years old. You know that.”
Sensing how I wanted to conversation to go, Florence said, “Yeah, but can you work this new one?”
Through a mouthful of Salisbury steak, Joe spoke: “She keeps sayin’ she can.”
Becky turned to me. “Come to the shop and I’ll show you. I’ll take your picture. It’s really neat.”
“Maybe. I’m pretty busy these days.”
The conversation paused as we all took bites. Then Becky said, “You could all come over and I could take a picture of everyone. A group picture.”
“That sounds fun!” Florence exclaimed.
I took another bite of my cheese sandwich, so Becky would have to wait for my response. Finally I said, “We’re all goin’ to Virginia Beach after school lets out next month.”
“My mom’s drivin’ us!” Florence said.
I turned to Joe. “You’re goin’, right?”
He nodded, and I smiled at everyone in turn: Joe, Sue, Florence. Then I took another bite.
“Well,” Becky said. “If I went along, I could bring the camera and take everyone’s picture at the beach.”
“Oh boy!” Sue bubbled.
I said, “Your father would never let you take that new camera to the beach.”
“Of course he would. He trusts me. I’m basically his assistant. You know that.”
“Would he let you show me how to use it?”
Florence interjected, “I bet he wouldn’t.”
Becky was irritated now, shooting Florence an annoyed glance. “Sure he would.”
“You’d let me take a picture with it?” I pursued.
“Sure.”
“Is it heavy?” I asked. “Does it make loud noises? Would it fit in my purse?”
Even Florence looked startled by this, but after a moment Becky replied, “What, that purse there? Sure.”
I smiled. “Okay, let’s all go to the beach! That’ll be so much fun.”
I spent the afternoon thinking the plan through. I did not intend to steal the camera—that would be cruel—but I was willing to let Becky and her father spend a miserable few days believing it was lost at the beach: the tide sweeping it out to sea, sand kicked over it by running feet. And then it would turn up again somehow—how? I worked on that dilemma through English class. If Mrs. Beale said anything important, I missed it. I could say I’d wrapped it in a towel for safekeeping and forgot about it, and the towel went into the hamper. Or I could sneak over to Becky’s at night and slide it into the lilacs by their front step.
The bell rang and I traveled with the crowd to Miss Cooke’s class. It would be easy enough to ride my bike to Doris Wallace’s house, but how would I take the pictures? I’d need to climb up on something to see into her windows. Were there bushes alongside her house? I tried to recall. We all settled into our seats, and Miss Cooke started her rambling monologue—something about George Washington—and my train of thought ran off onto another track.
You’d think that, after beginning the school year with the War Between the States, we’d have moved forward in time, learned a thing or two about World War I and World War II. Instead, we’d gone backwards, through westward expansion and the savage Indian attacks, through spunky Andrew Jackson and the War of 1812, and now, yet again, I was studying the American Revolution. For the sake of my A, I dutifully memorized names and dates—Cowpens, January 1781; Yorktown, October 1781—but I could barely stand it. Miss Cooke adored the founding fathers. Her favorite, predictably, was George Washington. Miss Cooke was not someone who thought outside the box. She spoke of the Constitution the way people spoke of the Bible—as a sacred text demanding complete obedience. To deviate from or question it would be heretical. I wondered why the same people who worshipped the founding fathers also despised the government, which was, after all, what the founding fathers had founded. Of course, in Miss Cooke’s mind, the whole plan had been corrupted. Today she was explaining how our remarkable forefathers had the wisdom to allow only white, propertied men to vote. Yet here we were, she said ominously, letting all sorts into the “voting pool,” which of course made us all envision a swimming pool, where no one wanted colored people.
I thought of raising my hand to ask if she meant women shouldn’t have gotten the vote, but before I could, surprisingly, the coif-headed Claudia Holland asked the question. Miss Cooke considered it with great seriousness, then said, “Only people of a certain level of intelligence and moral aptitude should have the vote. The problem now is too many stupid people votin’. Bunch of lazy illiterates, ignorant lazy criminals castin’ votes.”
Johnny Cobb raised his hand. “You mean coloreds, don’t you, Miss Cooke? Like Nat Turner.”
This was a game Johnny and his friends had begun several months ago—reminding Miss Cooke of Nat Turner. Inevitably she flew off on a hysterical tangent, and the boys loved to watch the tirade: the chin flab waggling wildly, the bottom of her dress undulating from side to side with increasing speed, her skin flamed to a bizarre shade of fuchsia. Off she went now, reiterating Nat Turner’s brutal acts—all the stabbing and bashing and hacking and beheading of innocent Christians and babies. Each time she told the story, there were more babies. You’d think the only inhabitants of Southampton County at the time were babies toddling around the countryside in fluffy white Christening gowns. Johnny and his friends tried to hide their snickers; the rest of us slumped in boredom. If no one stopped her, she’d go on for the rest of the class period. I raised my hand.
“Yes?” She’d grown tired of acknowledging me. She preferred to call on boys, whom she expected to be important someday.
I asked, “Do you know the story of Emmett Till? What was that about?”
“Emmett Till?” she said with revulsion. Faces swiveled toward me; no one else knew the story either.
“Tull? Emmett something. Do you know that story?”
“Of course I know it. Why’re you askin’?”
“Because I don’t know it. I was just curious.”
Faces turned back to Miss Cooke, who emitted a noisy breath. “Emmett Till was a thug from Chicago. That’s the kind of coons they got in big cities, thugs. Fourteen years old, he goes down to Mississippi to make obscene advances toward a white lady.”
I said, “Why’d he go to Mississippi to do that? Aren’t there white ladies in Chicago?”
Someone behind me giggled. Miss Cooke was not amused. “Maybe he was used to gettin’ away with it up there in that big city, but down in Mis-sippi the men caught that boy and brought him to justice. That boy was a big dangerous brute and the men feared for their lives, so they killed him.” Here Miss Cooke’s voice dipped to a contemptuous murmur: “Then, his mama took pictures of him in his coffin. Imagine. What kind of mama does such a thing? The coloreds don’t care about their children like we do. Pictures. Pictures of your own dead child in his coffin. Disgusting.” She jabbed a stubby finger at me. “The only reason you ever heard that boy’s name is because of those pictures and the Jew media. Jew newspapers got a hold of those pictures and published them. Disgusting.”
Debbie Beale pushed a shaky hand into the air. “Emmett Till murdered that white lady? Did he bash in her head?”
“No,” Miss Cooke snapped. “But you girls remember, some things are worse than death.” A dark silence followed, which she let fester. My breath rolled down my throat like a slow fiery rock. I glanced around. Half the girls were ashen, but the rest, including all the boys, wore a confused look of terror on their faces. Whether my classmates understood or not, everyone looked frightened.
As so often happened lately, I got angry. Why was Miss Cooke trying to make us feel afraid? What was the point of that? So far, none of us had been hacked to death—or “worse”—by wild marauding Negroes. Why was it so important to make us all scared of Black people? I knew I couldn’t ask this, but I needed to say something, so I raised my hand again.
“Yes?”
“Is the Tidewater Times a Jew newspaper?”
She snorted. “Of course not. We have a proper Southern paper.”
“What about the Suffolk Star? Is that a Jew newspaper?”
“No.”
“What about the Virginian-Pilot?”
“That’s enough.”
“Okay, but I really want to know if the Virginian-Pilot is a Jew newspaper.”
“No, it is not.”
“Are they called Jew newspapers because they’re written by Jews, or for Jews?”
She did not reply. She lifted her chin and lumbered to the other side of the room and resumed her praise of the founding fathers.
When I arrived at the Swansons’, Julie and Annette greeted me alone. On the other side of the screen door, their grainy faces were solemn.
“Hey!” I stepped inside. The family room floor was strewn with crayons and pencils and half-drawn cats. “Where’s your mommy?”
They gazed up with sad cartoon eyes.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
Julie’s tone was stoic, like a broadcaster on the evening news reporting an unfortunate incident: “Mommy’s been in bed all day crying. She fell again last night and dropped the dishes and she’s been in bed crying all day.”
Annette burst into tears. Julie draped an arm over her shoulder and said in a tiny maternal voice, “It’s okay, Net-Net, it’s okay.” She ran an open hand down the length of her little sister’s hair, which filled it with static electricity. “Want a Coke?” Julie asked, and Annette’s cry softened. Hand in hand the girls marched toward the refrigerator. I rushed down the hall.
Ruth’s door was open a crack, undoubtedly so she could hear the girls; I pressed on it and whispered, “Are you awake?” The lamps were off and the shades were pulled, but the sun behind the fabric was strong enough to bathe the room in amber.
“Oh,” she replied, her face turned away. “Is it that late already?” She made such a small lump on the bed, like the lowest of sand dunes, lying on her side with her head sunk into a pillow.
“May I come in?”
“Of course.” She rolled onto her back and patted the empty side of the bed. I sat. Her face was mottled and swollen from crying.
I asked, “What happened?”
“Mm.” She heaved in a shaky breath. “My legs are getting worse. Last night I was clearing the table and nearly stepped on the cat and I couldn’t regain my balance and bam, crash. We’re running out of plates.” I grinned, but she began to cry again, in soft, slow gulps. “So, Matthew said I shouldn’t carry the dishes anymore. Then Matthew said he was going to buy me a cane—a cane! I’m twenty-eight years old! A cane! He tried to make a joke of it, said he’d get one with a parrot head like Mary Poppins’s umbrella, but I think he was annoyed with me. I don’t blame him. A minister needs a wife who can do things, like church bazaars, vacation Bible school, and at least take care of his children.”
“The girls are fine.” I reached across the bed and patted her shoulder. “They’re drawing. They have Cokes.”
“I’ve been lying here all day thinking, Why am I a minister’s wife in the first place? Is that what I wanted to be? I didn’t know what it’d be like—these ladies with their secret opinions of me, all this pressure to be perfect. I just can’t do it. I can’t be everyone’s role model. Sometimes, sometimes I get so mad at these judgy old ladies with their hats and their casseroles, talking about nothing, nothing and more nothing, and I want to scream! Then I think, how unkind of me! I think, is God punishing me for these unkind thoughts? Why did I get MS? And doesn’t God have more important things to do than zap me for unkind thoughts? I do love Matthew, I do, really, but why did I get married so young? I could’ve gotten a job for a few years, shared an apartment with another girl. All day long I’ve been lying here thinking, What happened to my life? I used to read great works of literature. I used to have real friends. We laughed all the time—what were we laughing about? I don’t remember! We’d go swimming in the lake and run along the shoreline. I was a fast runner. I always wanted to race my friends because I always won. Ha! Now look at me. It’s like my life is already over.”
She reached out and pulled me down next to her in a hug alongside her body. She squeezed me tight, like a daughter. My head found a hollow along her clavicle to nestle in.
She said, “Listen, sweetie. You figure out what kind of life you want, and then, no matter what, do not let yourself get talked out of it. Don’t let other people put reasons in your head for why you shouldn’t do exactly what you want. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She snuggled close to me. “Tell me, what do you want to do with your life?”
“Well, I want to be a newspaper reporter.”
“Yes. What else? What else do you want to do?”
“Travel.”
“Good!”
“And live in different places—not here.”
“Good.”
“Most of all,” I went on, with mounting fervor. “Most of all, I want to be somebody important. I want to be an important person and prove everyone wrong—everyone who ever underestimated me, who thought I was stupid or incapable of doing things. I’m gonna show them. They’re all gonna eat my dust.”
She was silent. For several moments we lay listening to ourselves breathe. Then she said, “That sounds like something your father would want.”
“What? No, it doesn’t.” I was mortified. How could she say such a thing? I was nothing like my father and thank goodness! I was struck by this change in me: all my life I’d wanted to be like him; now hearing it, I felt profoundly insulted. Did Ruth really think I was? I said, “He’s the main person I want to show up.” My brain twisted into a knot, and I said, “I do not want to be like my father!”
“Okay.” Ruth stroked my arm with the tips of her fingers. “You don’t have to be. No one has to make the same mistakes their parents do.” The room dimmed, the windows filling up with clouds. She said, “I should get up. I should start supper.”
“I could call Langston. Maybe he can come over and we can cook for y’all. I’ll call Langston,” I repeated so I could say his name again. Liberty 44193.
She squeezed me again. “You are a sweetheart. It makes me so happy you’ve become friends with him. See? Already you’re not like your father.” She pushed herself into a sitting position. “I’ll be okay.” But she kept sitting, her hand remaining draped over the edge of the bed, as though unsure whether it could propel her upward. I wanted her to be happy again; I wanted to hear her praise me again.
I said, “I tricked Miss Cooke into telling us about Emmett Till today. I’m sure she got it all wrong. She told us Emmett Till’s mama took pictures of him in his coffin to give to the newspapers. That can’t be true.”
Ruth twisted toward me. “That is true. His mother wanted the world to see how badly he’d been beaten.”
“She did that?”
“She did.”
“Miss Cooke said he attacked a white lady. Is that true too?”
“He whistled at her.”
“He whistled? Well, that was stupid! Why on earth did he do that? Didn’t he know better?”
“People do stupid things all the time. They aren’t executed for them. If everyone who ever did a stupid thing was executed for it, there wouldn’t be anyone left on the planet.” She rose. “We don’t execute white men for whistling at white women, do we?”
“No.” But that was different. Why was that different? I worked it around in my head. Because white boys aren’t as dangerous and violent as colored boys? That’s what people like Miss Cooke wanted me to think. Because white men were supposed to get white women? I thought of Jim Darden pushing himself on top of my sister. She hadn’t wanted that, but somehow his doing it seemed normal and not really wrong.
Ruth stood up and took a few steps to look at herself in the mirror. She moved with a deliberate, heartbreaking slowness. She smoothed her hair, her little cap sleeves, her sides with hands anxious for everything to be normal.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She fastened her eyes on me and forced her lips into the crooked smile. “I’ll be fine.”
I worried about her all the way home. Even the girls could see her little upbeat comments were faked. But once inside our back door, I heard my father’s angry voice coming from above: he must have been talking on the upstairs extension. I crept up a few steps until I could hear: “I’m tellin’ you, he doesn’t get it—him and his dimwit cousin. Who else could it be?”
Then my mother called, “Willa! For Pete’s sake, come give me a hand.” She was in one of her kitchen frenzies, which meant company. I leaned over the railing to see who else was there—Barb and Ricky’s gang were all in the living room, and on a school night, which could only mean one thing: Jim Darden.
In the kitchen, my mother was speaking into the open oven. “This was a bad idea.” She pulled out a Chef Boyardee pizza. Pizza was an exotic treat at our house; making it for a Darden was a daredevil choice.
“Clear the kitchen table!” she cried out.
I turned, and there on the table was a copy of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. I stared. Its front pages were peeled back, its interior revealed, and below the fold was a block of text under a modest-sized headline: “Klan Activity in Warwick County.” Byline: “Walter A. Jones.”
I snatched it and ran upstairs.
“Willa!”
I shoved the paper under my mattress, but I knew it had already been seen. I padded down the hall and hovered outside my parents’ room. My father’s voice, cooler now, said, “I understand what you’re sayin’. I know they won’t like it, ’specially Doyle.” There was a pause. “We don’t know that, but if nothin’ happens, we prove the article wrong. We make this Walter Jones and the Pilot look stupid. We show ’em all is well down here in Warwick County.” There was another pause, and my father laughed, deep and slow. “Yup, nothin’ but happy darkies here.”
Pressed against the wall, I realized, gradually, what it all meant: the Klan was canceling their attacks on the coloreds’ graduation parties. They were canceling—canceling because of the article, my article. We’d won. I’d won. The breath in my lungs turned to helium. I was ten feet tall, immense, a master, a superhero, a god. I couldn’t wait to call Ruth—but I’d have to wait until the phone was free. I galloped downstairs, wanting to tell everyone about my victory. Of course I couldn’t. But I imagined myself bounding in and singing out, “See? My words do matter! I matter!” I, I concluded, was all-powerful.
Somehow, I thought my win was permanent, that the Klan would now cease terrorizing Black people once and for all.
I found my mother in the kitchen sawing doggedly at the pizza pie with a butter knife. “Lord!” she exclaimed to no one and yanked open the sharp-knife drawer. She seized the turkey-carving knife and waved it over the pizza. “Run in and tell ’em just another minute.”
“Okay!” I bounced into the living room and delivered the message with an exuberant authority.
“Don’t you look like the cat who ate the canary,” Patsy said, poised again by the record player, herself looking luminous.
“School’s almost out,” I replied, and Warren Bunch, who was wandering around the room, punched his fist into the air and cried, “Forever!” Like Ricky, he’d graduate at the end of the year.
Jim Darden sat with a cigarette sagging from his lipless mouth, an arm stretched along the back of the couch, a grinning Barb tucked into his armpit. Cindy Poole sat in the rocker looking bored, and Ricky slouched in our father’s chair. Patsy said, “I’m happy, too, Willa. Guess what! They offered me a payin’ job this summer at the hospital! A dollar fifteen an hour!”
“That’s great!”
Barb remarked, “You’d think she’d been elected Queen Azalea.”
Ricky and Warren chuckled in sync. A 45 dropped onto the turntable. Love me do… Now apparently approving of the Beatles, Warren began rapping out the drumbeat on the back of my father’s chair, next to Ricky’s head, and Patsy wiggled her bottom a few times. Joyously she told me, “And I decided, when I graduate next year, I’m goin’ to nursing school. I’m gonna be a nurse!” She was so thrilled with the plan—to say it out loud, to make a commitment, to know her future. Her square face radiated dreamy joy. No one but me paid attention to her, and there I was, pumped up with my own sense of accomplishment, tingling with agency, ready to push the world off its axis. I said, “Or you could go to medical school and be a doctor!”
She smiled, surprised and embarrassed.
Ricky said, “Gaw, Willa, you have to be really smart to be a doctor.”
“Patsy is really smart,” I said.
“She’s smart for a girl.”
“She’s smart for anyone,” I barked back.
Warren said, “Oh Lord. Look out, y’all—Willa’s goin’ mental again.”
I said to Ricky, “You don’t think girls are smart enough to be doctors?”
Unexpectedly, the languid Cindy Poole came to life: “Mrs. Parker told my mama there’s a lady doctor comin’ to the peninsula.”
“Oh, please.”
“It’s true,” Cynthia said.
“See?” I said. “Girls are smart enough to be doctors.”
Jim Darden joined the discussion to correct me: “That’s one. One.”
Another 45 dropped onto the turntable, and Connie Francis belted out, Where the boys are…
“I’d never go see a lady doctor,” Warren said.
Cindy straightened her back. “Mrs. Parker said this lady doctor graduated first in her class from Johns Hopkins.”
Ricky’s spitting voice emerged, “Oh, I get it. I would definitely not want to see her.” Warren laughed and started to snort like a hog, which prompted Ricky to oink in a high pitch, simulating a lady hog. Jim snickered.
Patsy jumped in. “You don’t know she’s ugly. You don’t know anything about her. And you know what? So what if she is ugly!”
This caused Ricky and Warren to shriek hysterically. Jim gently shook his grinning face, and in a teasing voice, Barb asked him, “What, you don’t think a lady could be a good doctor?”
The grin widened as he began to explain. “A doctor has to have a level head. He has to be…levelheaded, to consider all the symptoms and make a diagnosis. He has to stay cool and…rational.”
“Exactly,” Warren said. “Girls are too emotional. They don’t think straight. They get all mad over nothing.”
Patsy snapped, “What do you mean?”
Ricky hooted and pointed at her. “Just like that! See? Just like that!”
Cindy said, “We get mad when y’all insult us!”
I was impressed, but the boys completely ignored this comment and filled the next several moments with lingering guffaws. Jim continued his instruction of Barb, apparently having thought of another word: “Logical. A doctor has to be logical, to make rational decisions. Men are more logical than girls—that’s a scientific fact.”
And there it was: the rationalization of privilege, the tyranny of self-aggrandizement. With enough hubris and intentional ignorance, you could mobilize entire academic disciplines to justify your oppression of half the human race. Another 45 dropped. Little Peggy March sang, I will follow him…
No longer was I bathing in carbonated joy. Fury surged through me in waves, gushed down every blood vessel in my body. My newly empowered self was not inclined to inhibit it. My voice rose on a crest and wildly, recklessly crashed out of me: “You boys think you know everything! You just wait and see. We are not inferior to you, and we’re gonna fight for our civil rights just like the Negroes are fighting for theirs, because we are just as good as you.”
In the confused silence that followed, plates were heard rattling on the dining room table behind me.
“Pizza!” chirped my mother.
No one moved.
She pattered up beside me. “Well! What’re y’all talkin’ about, everyone lookin’ so serious.” As she said this, she pushed her face down into a pretend, childish scowl.
Barb sighed. “Apparently Willa is gonna organize a girls’ march on Washington. Like the coloreds.”
“What?” my mother squeaked.
Warren let out a laugh again, big and loose and full of spit. “I can see it now—The Girls’ March on Washington!”
In a female falsetto, Ricky said, “Ow, ow, my feet hurt!”
Warren continued, even shriller, “These new shoes are killin’ me! Can you bring the car around?”
“Stop!” I yelled, and my mother clucked at me, “C’mon, Willa, they’re joking. Where’s your sense of humor? Y’all come on now and tell me how this pizza turned out!” She clapped and everyone rose and began to file past me, all attempting a nonchalant saunter to hide their unease.
Patsy paused and asked softly, “Mrs. McCoy? Do you have any more of that dietetic Dr. Pepper?”
“Let’s check,” my mother cooed, and they went together into the kitchen.
I started to follow when a hard grip on my arm stopped me. “Ouch!”
It was Ricky. I looked up into his face. His once-blue eyes, I realized, had matured into a dense gray, the color of pond water. There was a darkness beneath the surface, the shadow of something that doesn’t seek daylight. I repeated, “Ouch.”
He whispered, “What the hell you think you’re doin’?”
“What?”
“Talkin’ about Negroes and their rights. You listen to me, you little bitch. No member of this family’s gonna go around talkin’ like that.”
I swallowed. Something heavy oozed down my throat.
He hissed, “You hear me? You keep your goddamn mouth shut about coons and their rights; you keep your goddamn mouth shut, period. You remember your place.”
He released my arm and grinned and strolled into the dining room as though he’d said nothing to me. Around the table everyone stood happily tearing gooey slices off the pizza, tipping their heads back, like baby birds, so strings of cheese could dangle into their open mouths.
“Willa!” my mother’s voice called. “Run to the garage please and get a few bottles of that dietetic Dr. Pepper!”
I went out the back door. For a long while I stood and watched the sky grow from violet to purple to plum. Soon, I knew, my mother’s exasperated voice would holler for me to hurry up. What was I doing? What was I doing out there? Why wasn’t I doing what was expected of me? Hurry, hurry—someone had a desire, this is what women are for—to ensure no one was thirsty or hungry or uncomfortable or aggravated. But for a long moment now a strange calm was pooling in the center of me, and I stood in a pocket of silence, feeling the air thick with movement.