The new Kingsfield Elementary School was completed just in time for my last year of elementary school. At least I’d get to spend eighth grade in this incredible, space-agey place—the building so modern it didn’t look like a school at all. The exterior was like a wide orange shoebox crouched low on the landscape, not the traditional stone-gray haunted asylum style. The interior was bright, with wall-sized windows. The library had pale-wood tables that rolled around and molded plastic chairs. The cafeteria walls were painted yellow, and the main office had a green-and-purple checkerboard carpet. I’d never seen so much color in a school. The auditorium had seats that snapped up, just like in a real movie theater, and it was air conditioned. The classrooms were luminescent with clean right angles, free of weird nooks and jumbled closets and old woodwork loose on the door frames. Here there were no cobwebbed ceilings, no cracked plaster walls, scuffed floors, or distracting whorls of dust mites hovering in shafts of sun. The main corridor was wide and lined with metal lockers rather than coat hooks. This was for our safety, my father said; a few years earlier there’d been a grisly school fire in Chicago, which had raged down the corridor coat by coat, incinerating dozens of children. We were all issued shiny combination locks with bright green faces, and we had to practice turning the dial one way, then the other way, then back again, then yanking on the horseshoe to open it. It was harder than it looked.
The old Kingsfield Elementary School was renamed Washington Carver, after the peanut guy, and given to the colored children. For a while it was feared we’d have to build a new school for the coloreds. I’d read articles about it in the Tidewater Times. One article included an architect’s drawing: six small separate buildings in a circle, serving as five classrooms and an office. The architect argued that if you didn’t have interior corridors, you wouldn’t have to heat them in winter. But someone pointed out there’d be the extra cost of all those exterior walls, and other people were confused over where the bathroom would be, and it all seemed like a series of problems with no solutions until someone thought of building a new school for the white kids and giving the old one to the coloreds. A new elementary school for whites could be located near the new white high school, built two years ago at the epicenter of the white region of town. The old elementary school was at the edge of town, closer to the encroaching colored neighborhood. It would never make sense for the coloreds to come all the way across town into the white neighborhood for school. So everyone was elated with the solution, except for a handful of clergy, who wrote a letter to the editor urging town leaders to start planning for integration—white kids and coloreds in the same building, together. The letter generated a notable silence. But as a kind of concession, apparently, the editors included the Coloreds in the News section, which was an occasional insert, in the very next issue. Pictures of happy colored children outside the old school filled its page.
The first day of school arrived with fluster and noise and nervous energy. I was eager to embark on my quest for straight As, though now every day I’d have to see my former best friend, Becky Campbell, who’d heartlessly dumped me at the end of seventh grade. We’d been best friends since the middle of second grade, when her family moved up from Charlotte, and I thought we’d be best friends forever. Becky was different from the other girls—she was smart and funny and tall. She had thick unruly waves of hair and a way of floating across a room, pitched forward on the balls of her feet. Her father had opened the first photography studio in town. He took fancy portraits of brides and families at Christmas and important men. Becky wanted to be a photographer for National Geographic when she grew up. I was going to write the articles. That was our plan. We ruminated on all the exotic places we’d see, all the animals she’d take pictures of: giraffes and gazelles and cheetahs.
I made her promise we’d do this—promise she’d never change her mind. I was sure I’d never change mine. I wasn’t going to just get married and be a wife. I was going to be somebody. I intended to do something important with my life. I told her this time and again.
Then one day, in the middle of seventh grade, Donna Bowman started giving Becky advice about her hair. She could use this or that shampoo and she could put it up in a ponytail and get bangs—wouldn’t that be cute? Suddenly Becky and Donna were going to the beauty parlor together, and then they were shopping for outfits at Peeble’s, painting each other’s fingernails, and walking home from school without me. By March they were including the ridiculous Toy Bracey in their shopping trips. So I told Becky her new friends were vapid—a word I’d recently learned—and she told me I was annoying and critical, and that I felt sorry for myself, and also I was getting too big for my britches—talking about doing important things with my life and being some big important person someday. I was conceited, she said; I thought I was better than everyone else. And that was the end of our friendship.
I cried so hard that night I woke Barb on the other side of our room. She came to sit on the side of my bed and pet my shoulder. The moonlight was bright on the surfaces of our maple dresser and the nightstand between our beds. “It’ll be okay, Will,” she said again and again. “You’ll make new friends.”
But most of the kids at school—kids I’d known since kindergarten—were already cemented into their cliques. Nancy Vaughan and Tammie Hines were the popular girls, always pretty in their store-bought clothes, with loyal followers Claudia Holland, Judy Pretlow, the Debbies, and half a dozen other girls. Cathy Parker and Eleanor Barnes were the athletic girls everyone wanted on their team in gym class. Of course all the boys were friends with each other. There were a couple of loose kids on the fringes. One was Florence Whipple, with a personality as unpromising as her name, who’d appeared at our school in the sixth grade, having moved down from Newport News so her father could work at Kingsfield Ham. In two years she had managed to make zero friends.
Inevitably, I ended up beside her at lunch. She was nice enough, and thrilled to be with me, but she was slow witted, devoid of charisma, describing in great detail how her mother mixed up the tuna salad for her sandwich and whacked off the bread crusts with a meat cleaver. After a few days, the knobby-elbowed, acne-scarred Sue Bates joined us at lunch, as did Joe Pedicini, the fat kid from Greensboro. I’d become the rounder-up of misfits. Because my social status was slightly higher than theirs, they viewed me as their leader, imitating my mannerisms and way of speaking, which was flattering. Between this tolerable human contact and my focus on work, school life without Becky was endurable. Still, I thought about her, and I missed her, not just at lunch, not just that year at school, but for decades to come.
A new math teacher had arrived in Kingsfield: young, broad-smiling, curly-haired Mr. Marcus, from Baltimore, who wore his shirt sleeves rolled up on his ruddy, muscly forearms. After two days of math review, he gave us a surprise test, which enraged everyone but me; I didn’t think it was that hard. Thursday morning, he announced that only one person in the entire eighth grade had achieved a one hundred percent—Willa McCoy. He turned his fabulous smile toward me, and my heart jumped into my skull. Three purple-inked mimeographed pages of solved math problems were presented to me by Mr. Marcus’s manly hand, attached to the virile forearm, and at the top of the first page was a bold, red, shiny “100%.” I was awash in happiness. But I would have to wait through the rest of the long day, and then until I got home from the Swansons’, to show my father. Willa McCoy: “100%.” Better than anyone else in the eighth grade.
At lunch I propped the test up between my two little cartons of milk, and my fan club heaped praise on me. “I’m going to be famous someday!” I burbled at them, and they heartily agreed. When Becky walked by with Donna and Toy, I couldn’t help but catch her eye—and in a wordless plea begged her to see my worth and like me again. Instead, she shot me a look of disgust: there I was once more, showing off. I slid the test back into my binder and trudged through the afternoon. By my last class, history, I was just tired, slouched at my desk with a drooping head.
My history teacher that year was the infamous Miss Cooke. Renowned for being old and loony, she was a lumbering woman who wore sack dresses patterned with giant blossoms or geometric shapes or paisleys—designs you’d upholster furniture with. Her cheeks wobbled when she talked, her chin like a cork afloat on a sea of neck. Rumor was she’d lost her fiancé in the war—not the Second World War, but the First—and that he’d died, not in some great battle, but of the flu on the ship going to France. For decades, young adolescents speculated about what they would have done with the body. Put it in a giant icebox? Dump it into the ocean? After this tragedy, Miss Cooke lived with her parents, and when they died she inherited their house on Witchduck Lane, which had needed a coat of paint since 1947. Even the adults wished she’d retire, but no one wanted to suggest it for fear of being rude. Today she sat behind her desk telling stories about the War Between the States, her favorite war. She was prattling on about the Battle of Smithfield, in which gallant Virginians refused to surrender to the Northern invaders and sank the USS Smith-Briggs. I already knew about this. I’d been to Smithfield and seen the plaque. So my mind wandered.
Through the iridescent glass was sunshine, grassy slopes, the low branches of elms. Two summers ago Becky and I had spent hours sitting on tree branches, discussing our action-packed futures and eating peanuts. We squeezed open the soft brittle shells, shaking out the nuts, raining peanut dust onto the ground. Triple peanuts were lucky and we could make a wish on them. I wished for fame and adventure. She wished for more practical things—for her dad’s business to pick up, for her mom’s laryngitis to get better soon. Had I thought her wishes were too small? Once I’d said, “Oh, c’mon! You gotta think big!” Now I regretted it. I’d been pushy and bossy, and I’d lost her. I was wholly absorbed in my sorrow when the pitch of Miss Cooke’s voice startled me back to history class: “Now we got mobs of coloreds marchin’ on Washington!” she was screeching, rising from her desk, massive and pyramid shaped. “Hordes of ’em! Singin’!” She added in disgust, “Why do they have to sing?”
I knew vaguely what she was referring to. I’d seen some footage on Walter Cronkite—crowds of coloreds, some white people too, oozing through the streets of Washington, DC—before my father jumped up to turn off the Jew media. Miss Cooke railed on: “Mobs of coloreds in our streets and everyone just sittin’ around doin’ nothin’, doin’ nothin’ because why? Why? Because everyone is too stupid to know their history, that’s why!” Her voice dropped to a deep, menacing tone: “Who here knows the story of Nat Turner’s insurrection?”
The class went dead quiet. I did not know the story, and if anyone else did, they were hardly going to raise their hand and risk being wrong. Miss Cooke lurched toward the front row. Fortunately, I was three rows back, behind the coiffed strawberry-blond head of Claudia Holland.
“Not one of you!” Miss Cooke raged. “You kids get stupider every year!”
I’d heard this complaint from teachers before, and I’d always wondered about it. Here was the human race, inventing television, developing vaccines for polio, building spaceships, yet, according to teachers, each generation was dumber than the one before. Much later I would figure out it wasn’t the kids getting dumber, it was the teachers getting smarter—every year they acquired another year’s worth of knowledge, while their students stayed the same age.
Miss Cooke grumbled on, “People just sittin’ around knowin’ nothin’ while the federal government passes all kinds of laws tellin’ us what we can and can’t do.” Then she hollered, “Negro rights! Negro rights!” She paused, apparently to get a hold on her emotions, and in a frightening near-whisper said: “Let me tell you a little story about a slave, named…” Pause for effect. “Nat Turner.”
She began: “Not ten miles from here lived a slave named Nat Turner, treated kindly by his masters. Treated like a prince! Not once whipped. Taught to read. Allowed to go rabbit huntin’ and keep some of the rabbits. Given decent food, decent clothes. Given good solid Bible instruction—so much he fancied himself a preacher. But was he grateful? Was he?”
We shook our heads no, which was the obvious answer. She tilted toward us; the hem of her dress swung forward over her flabby knees. “Do you think he ever said thank you?” Again heads shook. “Did he live out his life like a loyal servant obeying his master, like the Bible says?” A few soft no’s were vocalized by a couple of boys unable to control themselves.
“No, he did not! Do you know what he did instead?” Her face turned red as a beet. By now we were all riveted to our seats, hands gripping the edges of our desks. “He organized a bunch of wild coons to rise up against their masters! Nat Turner and a horde of wild coons went rampaging through the countryside, slaughtering good Christian men and women—and children!—not ten miles from where you are sittin’ at this very moment in time.” I shifted. Ten miles was, in fact, not all that far. “Butchering children just like yourselves, children and babies slaughtered like hogs, innocent children with their throats split open and their heads chopped off. Right here in Southampton County! Hundreds chopped to pieces! Have any of you seen a body with its head chopped off?”
Surely no one had.
“Imagine,” she went on. “You wake up in the night to the sound of your mama screamin’. You run out of your room, and there’s a horde of big Black bucks whacking her to death with hatchets, chopping her up into bloody bits, pullin’ out her intestines all over the floor. Then they go after your sisters, hacking them to pieces, whacking off their heads. And then, then, they come after you. Imagine that.”
We all were imagining it, and undoubtedly would be all night long, too terrified to close our eyes.
“Nat Turner’s last victim,” she gasped, “was a beautiful young lady named Margaret Whitehead. Kind and loving, charitable to all, caring for the sick and the old folks. Murdered in cold blood! Lovely young girl, Margaret Whitehead, who loved poetry and animals. Ironically, she was concerned with the condition of slaves in Virginia. Ha! What did that get her? Butchered. Sliced through by Nat Turner himself, the beast! First he ran her through with a saber, then he bashed in her skull with a fence rail.”
Soundless and still, many of us forgetting to breathe, we heard the ticking of the clock—a shiny sunny circle rimmed in silver, mounted over the door. Miss Cooke glared at us, and then, perhaps satisfied we were all suitably terrified, continued in a more instructive tone: “Coloreds need to be kept in their place. Strict rules and discipline. Coloreds aren’t capable of moral judgment, no more than gorillas in the jungle. Now, we have some gorillas here in the civilized world, don’t we? And where are they? Locked up in cages in the zoo. That’s where they belong. But there are people in this country wanna give the gorillas rights. Rights. They think gorillas ought to vote and eat in restaurants with us, swim in our pools, go to the same schools as you. You just think about that. You think about Nat Turner, treated so well by his masters. Didn’t matter how he was treated because he wasn’t a man, he was a gorilla. Soon as he could, he got out with the other gorillas and murdered hundreds of good Christian people! You think about that.”
I did. It was just more proof of what my father always said: it was a scientific fact that colored people were inferior to whites. The colored brain was different, smaller and less developed, incapable of advanced thought or moral reasoning. That’s why coloreds did all the terrible and stupid things they did. Science had established the inferiority of the Negro. Obviously my father would know this, having a master’s degree in science.
Still, something pricked at my brain. Even then—young as I was, immersed as I was in the quagmire of my culture—something seemed wrong to me. I felt my hand float up into the air. Miss Cooke looked surprised. “Yes?”
“Were there other slave rebellions in Virginia? Besides Nat Turner’s?”
“No,” she replied with a moral finality. “No, there were not.”
“Why not?” I said. “I mean, you’d think the ones treated badly would rebel, wouldn’t you? Why weren’t there more rebellions?”
“I’ll tell you why.” She squinted her eyes at me, the flesh enveloping all but her pupils. She raised an index finger to emphasize her point. “Because coons are cowardly by nature. They don’t have the courage or the fortitude of good white Christian men.”
Again something rankled in my head, a kind of subtle alarm set off by that part of my brain that noticed adults’ inconsistencies, their lapses in logic. The voice that had spoken up before, which had pointed out I could not be as stupid as my father believed, suggesting the adults around me might sometimes be wrong, wanted to speak again.
I said, “So, if they fight back, they’re monsters, and if they don’t, they’re cowards?”
I recall the room filling up with silence. Like a glass filling with water, it seemed to start at the floor and rise over our heads. Slowly it occurred to me I’d challenged the teacher. I don’t think I’d meant to. Nervous now, I looked at Miss Cooke. But her face did not look angry; instead, she began to smile and nod. “Exactly,” she said, victorious. “Exactly.”
What? She returned to the Battle of Smithfield, and I sat worrying I was the one who didn’t understand, that there was some principle of logic I hadn’t grasped. I kept working the idea around in my head—whatever the slaves did, rebel or not rebel, was a sign of moral inferiority. I worked it around some more, but back then I wasn’t able to see the connection; I couldn’t carry the principle forward. Everything colored people did was taken as a sign of inferiority. Yet when white people did something wrong—stole something, struck someone—it was not taken as evidence of the entire race’s lack of morals. It was never a thing done or not done that we hated about Black people; it was simply the fact that they were Black. We just pretended otherwise.
When the final bell rang, I leaped up with my classmates, and in the frenzy of grabbing stuff and racing toward the exit, I forgot about Miss Cooke and Nat Turner. Instead I remembered my stellar math test, and my thoughts turned to glory ahead.
Through the Swansons’ screen door, I spotted Julie and Annette sprawled on their tummies on the tile floor, with coloring books and a box of twenty-four Crayola crayons between them, their legs bent at the knees, all four little feet waving like flags on a lazy breeze. “Knock knock,” I called out, as my mother always did.
“Willa!” said Julie.
“Wumma!” said Annette.
I walked in. None of the lights were on. I could hear the chug of the whole-house fan in the hall ceiling, and propped on a metal TV tray next to the girls was a roaring box fan.
Ruth appeared in the kitchen doorway and wafted toward me through stripes of shadow. “It is so hot,” she said, with her slanting grin. “Thank goodness it’s finally September—cool weather on the way!” I didn’t have the heart to tell her September in southeast Virginia was pretty much like August. Cool weather arrived around Halloween.
The girls were on their feet now, bouncing. Ruth said, “Yes, Willa is here to play with you, but first she has to do her homework. Keep coloring please, and don’t bother Daddy while he’s working.”
I glanced into the living room. Reverend Swanson, gawky-limbed and unkempt, was reclining on the couch, reading one of the books from the giant bookcase. Emanating from a record player beside him was the soothing drone of cellos and violins. Ruth stood watching me. “Ready?” she said, meaning we should go to the kitchen table now to start my homework. But I couldn’t wait.
“Look!” I unfurled the math test, its glorious ruby “100%” as thrilling to me now as when I first saw it.
“Oh! Congratulations!” She took the paper. “Wow! Look at all this fancy math!” And she did; she stood and read every question and every right answer, basking in my accomplishment. I’d never felt so acknowledged, so attended to. My parents were always too busy for me, and here was this stranger, giving me all these moments, looking. She got to the last question about diameters and tangents and let out a sigh. “I’m not sure I ever knew this kind of math! Good for you! Straight As here we come! What do you have today?”
“An essay.”
“Oh, thank goodness. Something I know how to do!”
“I have Mrs. Beale for English,” I said, tucking away my math test. Ruth turned and headed toward the kitchen. I followed. “Everyone says she’s a real stickler,” I continued, but at least she wasn’t crazy like Miss Cooke. Mrs. Beale was a real war widow, whose husband had died on Omaha Beach, and also she was stylish, coming to school in suit dresses and paneled skirts in colors like peacock blue and berry red. We all wondered why she’d never remarried. “She gets very excited about grammar.” Once Stevie Hedgepeth claimed he saw the edge of a black bra strap peeping out from her sleeveless blouse. “Today she was talking about ‘the joys of gerunds.’ At first I thought she—” Abruptly I stopped. There, at the kitchen table, with books and loose-leaf paper spread before him, sat Langston Jones, the colored lawn-mower boy.
Ruth chirped, “You remember Langston!” I heard parts of the explanation that followed: joining us for homework…senior at Trackton High… As she talked, her energy returned. “And he’s planning to go to college!” College? I must have known there were colleges for colored people—there was a colored dentist in town. Ruth sat and motioned for me to sit too, next to her, across from the boy. She was saying, “Langston’s mother is the teacher at the Negro school outside of Courtland. Did you know that?”
Of course I didn’t know that. How would I know that? Sitting, I noticed my hands trembling. I tried not to look at Langston’s face, but he was right across from me. I had to turn my head unnaturally to keep my eyes on Ruth, who burbled on, “It’s an old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse, with all ages, up to junior high. Right?”
“Yes’m,” Langston said, and my eyes couldn’t help but twitch toward him. He had a steep chin and thick straight eyebrows. He looked as uncomfortable as I was. What did Mrs. Swanson think she was doing?
She said, “Hey! You’re both teachers’ kids! No wonder you’re both so smart! Willa just got a one-hundred percent on a math test!” she told Langston, then turned to me. “Langston got straight As in chemistry last year!”
I wondered what kind of chemistry they taught at the colored high school. Maybe something to do with farming. I couldn’t help but look at him again, his forehead sloped and shiny, a scrubbed russet potato.
Ruth’s voice jumped an octave. “Isn’t it a shame you two don’t go to school together!”
At this, our heads rotated toward her, mirror images of each other. I did not say out loud that if the schools were integrated, Langston’s mother would be out of a job. Colored teachers wouldn’t be hired to teach white kids. Then I thought of my father, enraged when anyone brought up desegregating the Kingsfield schools. He hadn’t worked hard in college and gotten a master’s degree in science to teach a bunch of porch monkeys how to sit still.
Silence coagulated, making us all motionless. Then Ruth burst out, “All righty! Let’s write essays! Willa, what’s your topic?”
Dry-throated, I croaked, “What I did over my summer vacation.”
“Oh my goodness, are they still assigning that awful topic? Langston, what’s yours?”
He nodded once and mumbled, “Same.”
“Is there no creativity left in the world? Well, okay. Let’s bounce ideas off each other.” She turned her ebullient eyes on me. “What did you do, Willa?”
I’d gone to Virginia Beach with my family for a week. We swam in the ocean and got sunburned. Billy thought he got stung by a jellyfish but he didn’t. Ricky wanted to surf, but the waves weren’t big enough. The pimply counter boy at the Dairy Queen got a crush on Barb. This was going to make a very dull essay.
“Hmm,” Ruth said, then asked Langston the same question.
Langston had gone to North Carolina with his family to see his grandmother. They swam in a lake. His little brother stepped on a nail but it didn’t go into his foot and he made too big a deal about it.
“That’s just like Billy!” I blurted and was horrified at myself. Ruth bowed her face to conceal a smile. I did not appreciate being tricked.
Langston said, “My summer vacation was as dull as hers,” meaning me.
“Maybe you don’t have to write about these trips,” Ruth proclaimed. “Years from now, looking back on this summer, what will you most remember?”
Immediately I thought, Being alone. This was my first summer without Becky. I’d ridden my bike by myself, down every road and path in a five-mile radius, my tires thudding over gnarly roots, my legs pumping hard along the dirt. Thank goodness for my bike—as hurt as I felt, at least I could still be out in the world; I could feel myself strong and alive, despite being alone. My bike became my best friend. But what I’d remember most about this summer was the absence of Becky. I said, “Most of the summer I was just by myself.”
“Oh. Why was that?”
I shrugged. “I need new friends.”
“Ah.” Her gaze rested on my fidgeting hands. “Then you should write about what it felt like to be alone. Take one ordinary day and relive it on paper—everything you saw and heard and smelled and felt and thought. What do you think?”
I nodded. What a weird idea. We were supposed to write about something unusual, then attach a moral to it, like, “I should not have eaten my ice cream in the car,” or, “I should be more patient with my little brother.” I was hardly going write something different and risk my A.
She turned to Langston. “What about a typical day in your summer?”
His walnut-colored face lowered and began to smile. He tried to suppress this smile, but it broke loose, broad and full of big beige teeth, peach-pink gums showing above them. Ruth tilted toward him, her forearms folding together on the table, and half-laughing said, “I think you found a new friend.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, trying to get the smile under control.
“Does she have a name?”
“Daisy.”
“Daisy! What a cheerful name. I love that name. Tell me about Daisy.”
My skin grew hot. I had no interest in hearing this colored boy talk about his girlfriend. But once he got going, it was hard not to get drawn in. Daisy was a year below him at Trackton. She’d recently moved down from DC to live with her grandma outside of town; her mother had died of lung cancer. Daisy kept a photo of her mother in a fold of cardboard in her purse and showed it at every opportunity—a smartly dressed woman who’d worked as a clerk typist for the government. As he spoke, I kept my eyes on the slope of his broad shoulder, not wanting to accidentally make eye contact. Daisy, he said, was just a little thing, short and thin, but she went down the halls like she owned the place, all determined and focused. She wore big dangly earrings. All the girls liked her too, because of her confidence and her way of encouraging them to speak their minds.
The more Langston talked, I realized, the more he relaxed, and the more intelligent he sounded. He started pronouncing the ends of words, conjugating verbs correctly, using past tense, including the “s” on plurals. He kept talking because Ruth Swanson kept listening, nodding at him, inviting more. He continued. All winter he’d wanted to ask Daisy on a date but he was too nervous. He snuck around and stared at her and his friends teased him. Finally a friend of his told a friend of hers and one day Daisy found Langston on the front steps at school and struck up a conversation.
“What did she say?” Ruth asked.
“She said, ‘Hi, I’m Daisy Wheeler. You’re Langston Jones.’” He paused to chuckle joyously. “I said, ‘That’s right,’ and she said, ‘I believe there’s something you want to ask me.’” Again, the chuckle. “So I said, ‘May I walk you home today?’ and she said sure, and so I walked her—two miles out of my way!” Then he laughed mightily at himself. I imagined the story told and retold to future generations, an aged Langston and Daisy tittering together in wooden rockers on a sloping porch, surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Then I remembered Nat Turner. I remembered Miss Cooke’s arms flailing and her pasty face growing scarlet. Nat Turner, that vicious beast, educated and fooling everyone, playing the well-behaved darky, then leading a pack of wild coons in the slaughter of hundreds of white people—she said hundreds—including people who showed him kindness, like Margaret Whitehead. My insides contracted. Just like Ruth Swanson, sweet and well-intentioned, stabbed and battered to death.
Mrs. Swanson should not have this boy in her house. She didn’t know what these coloreds were capable of. I appreciated she was trying to be a good Christian—she just didn’t know. I turned intentionally and stared at Langston Jones’s face, examining him for traces of barbarism. His eyes were acorn-brown, flickering with light as he talked about Daisy, his smile waxing and waning but never disappearing, powered by the ecstasy of his new love. He seemed genuine, but you couldn’t trust him, you wouldn’t want to trust him. Coloreds were like a different species; there was no way to really understand them. I stood up. “I’m gonna take the girls outside.”
Ruth looked surprised. “Oh, I’m sorry! We got completely sidetracked! My fault! Sit down, sweetie, we’ll all get a start on the essays.”
I was already walking away. “It’s okay, I know what to write. I don’t want to keep the girls waiting.”
Ruth seemed to believe this. She turned an appreciative grin toward me and nodded, and she and Langston resumed their excited discussion of Daisy.
At home I found my mother and Barb in the kitchen, my mother stacking pieces of fried chicken onto a plate, Barb dumping succotash into a bowl. I stood in the doorway, relieved to be home and safe. “Just in time!” my mother sang out. “Table!” Setting the table was my great responsibility.
I asked, “Where’s Daddy?”
“Backyard with Billy.”
“I have something to show him.”
“Table first!”
I ran around the table shoveling plates and silverware and napkins into their approximate spots, then grabbed the math test, crinkled now by all the admiring, and ran to the back door. Appearing from nowhere, as she tended to do, my mother asked, “What is it?”
Barb hovered behind her. I showed her my test score.
“Oh, well, look at that!” my mother said, without really looking at all, calling out to my father and Billy, “Supper!” Barb peered at the test and rolled her eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“No one likes a know-it-all, Willa. And don’t tie up the phone tonight—Jim Darden’s gonna call.”
This seemed intentionally cruel. She knew I didn’t have any friends I wanted to talk to on the phone. I shrugged and watched my father amble toward the door, Billy moseying at his side, swinging his bat. Softball with Billy, tennis with Ricky—my father made time for the boys, made sure to be a role model for them. He’d expect wives to attend to girls, of course. Still, I couldn’t wait to show him my test, and when my mother attempted to herd me to the table before I had the chance, I wouldn’t go.
“Come on,” she whispered and pulled the paper from my hand. “We’ll show them all at supper.”
I thought, Yes! We’ll show them all. That was exactly what I wanted.
We sat and said our prayer. Then came my father’s pop quiz: “Name one species of bird found in the Great Dismal Swamp.”
Billy called out, “Wood duck!”
Ricky drawled, “Warbler.”
I said, “Pileated woodpecker!”
Then my mother asked Billy to tell us about his day at school, and he embarked on an endless chronicle, from the morning bell to dismissal—a shapeless, meandering narrative, devoid of rising action or a climax or a point, his feet apoplectic under the table, his spoon gently pounding his succotash into mush. When finally his story wandered to something like an end, Barb asked Ricky if he was going to call Cindy Poole. He didn’t know. He didn’t want Cindy to get the wrong idea, and anyway, he was busy with tennis. The conversation then leaped to the topic of tennis. My father and Ricky spent several minutes recollecting Budge Patty’s forty-six career titles. Ricky didn’t think Rod Laver was anything special—he was no Pancho Gonzales. My father let out a kind of moo, a vocalization he made at any foreign-sounding name, and in the dip of silence, my mother burst out, “Willa has good news!”
She produced my glorious test and passed it to Barb, who passed it to Ricky, who looked annoyed and passed it across me to Billy, who gulped and gasped dramatically, then gave it to my father. My father had been smiling and kept smiling as he took the paper. Then the smile grew neutral, perfunctory—his anticipatory smile in the process of becoming a different kind of smile. His eyes focused and proceeded down the page line by line, steadily shrinking to a squint. The smile, at last, became a smirk.
“Well, I hope you got a hundred percent on this,” he said. “This is all seventh-grade math. You’re in eighth grade.” He passed the test to my mother and resumed eating.
I shrank in my chair. My mother gave the paper back to me and began buttering her biscuit. Barb and Ricky looked at me with actual sympathy.
Of course, my father was right. It was all review: ratios, percents, decimal notations, parallel lines. I was the only one in the eighth grade to get a perfect score, but suddenly that didn’t seem to matter. It only underscored how dumb my classmates were. Abruptly, my mother chimed, “She’s off to a great start!”
“Yep,” my father agreed, concentrating on a drumstick, turning it one way and the other in search of the meatiest side. Then our phone rang, and Barb bolted from the table.
My mother whispered to my father, “Jim Darden,” and they exchanged triumphal grins.
Still, I told myself, I was off to a great start. Yep!
Quietly my father asked Ricky, “Ready for tonight?”
“What’s tonight?” I said too fast.
My mother replied, “Just a few of your father’s friends comin’ over for pie.”
I knew what that meant. The Klan leaders were meeting. My father was treasurer of his klavern, though of course his ambition was to be Klaliff someday, so he had the meetings here as often as he could. I forgot about the stupid math test, snarfed down the rest of my supper, and then jumped up to clear the table. I had to be ready too.
There was an hour to kill before the meeting, so I sat with Billy for part of the Thursday Night Movie. Cowboys were herding cattle and squinting around the horizon for Indians, whose savage whoop finally rose from behind a lump of hills. When the doorbell started to dong, I crept into the closet to take up my spying post. Pleasant greetings were exchanged: “Hello, hello, come in, come in, what can I get you?” I heard Dr. Vaughan, the optometrist: “Hello, Trudy.” I recognized the voice of Jerry Owens, one of the peanut farmers; and Mr. Doyle, the football coach and gym teacher at the high school. Other voices I didn’t recognize. I listened as the men settled into chairs and my mother clacked from living room to kitchen and back again, bringing them coffee or tea and pie. When she excused herself for good, the voices deepened to their getting-down-to-business tone, their conversation punctuated by the dinging of dessert forks against dainty plates.
Mr. Owens said, “I’m thinkin’ it’s too soon.”
My father’s reply was sharp. “This’ll be their third meetin’.”
“Y’all don’t think the march’ll stop all that?”
Dr. Vaughan cut in. “They weren’t even there, did you see ’em there? I didn’t see ’em there.”
“They would’ve heard about it.”
“I’m with Jerry. Too soon. The march got the point across. I say we lay low for a while and give folks time to think on it.”
“Think on what?” My father’s voice rose. “About the fact they’re meetin’ again despite the march? We need to keep up the pressure, show ’em we’re still in charge and we’ve got guts. Ricky here’s eager to be nighthawk.”
Nighthawk? Ricky’s voice mumbled something. I didn’t know what “nighthawk” was, but it sounded daring and heroic, something requiring speed and strength and cunning. I wanted to be it. I wanted to be nighthawk. If Ricky could do it, I could.
Mr. Owens’s reply was tepid. “I don’t know, Dick.”
“Dick’s right,” snapped Dr. Vaughan. “Whites and coloreds meetin’ together. You want jigaboos goin’ to school with your daughters? You want tar-babies in your family?”
Someone else said, “Virginia’s got a strategy for dealin’ with that. Maybe other states don’t, but we do.”
Mr. Doyle’s voice grew irate. “You think the federal government’s not gonna come in here and force this down our throats? You know Kennedy listens to coons and you know who’s whisperin’ to those coons? Commies. Coloreds too dumb to do all this organizin’ themselves. It’s the Commies. Kennedy’s so stupid he don’t see it. Federal government’s gonna march right in and force us to desegregate our good schools. Government’s already makin’ us pay these coons minimum wage. Government’s gonna destroy our economy! Commies an’ coons! You want them in our schools? Destroyin’ our economy? Next thing you know our taxes’ll be through the roof!”
Mr. Doyle’s thinking seemed a bit all over the map, but I admired his passion. Mr. Owens tried to turn the conversation. “Let’s explore all our options. Doesn’t have to be a cross burnin’.”
Dr. Vaughan retorted, “Symbolism’s important here. Christians on fire for the Lord. Takin’ back our country.”
Ricky’s voice squeaked out: “Aren’t the Harlans Christian?”
Finally I knew who they were talking about. The Harlans were a Quaker couple who’d been organizing meetings for whites and coloreds to discuss the integration of the schools in Franklin, a town no more than eight miles from us.
In a kindly tone, someone explained to Ricky, “Quakers no more Christian than Catholics, son.”
“What other options are there?” someone else asked.
Dr. Vaughan said, “Don’t they have a dog?” with a deep, soft laugh.
My father snapped, “We aren’t hurtin’ anyone’s dog.”
Our beloved dog, Buddy, had died a year and a half ago of old age, and we were all still devastated, especially my father, who’d spent long evenings in his chair scratching Buddy’s ears. Buddy was part collie and part something shorter, and he was the best dog in the world. After a pause my father added, “Maybe a few apes, but no dogs.” The men chuckled. Though I saw the source of the humor and chuckled too, I did not believe my father or his friends would actually hurt anything—not a dog or a colored. My father didn’t even go hunting; he didn’t have a gun. His friends sometimes went hunting for ducks, and everyone went fishing. That was all. They talked tough to keep the coloreds in line but that was all.
Someone said, “Mighty nice pie.”
Mr. Owens piped up, “We oughta think on it, take it up at our next meetin’.”
“We don’t wanna wait too long,” someone else said. “Weather’ll get cold.”
“Not that long.”
“Next month. We’ll decide next month.”
“No use waitin’ till it’s cold.”
“No.”
“We oughta think on it a bit.”
The conversation rambled on. My father and Mr. Doyle complained about the lily-livered superintendent of schools, who was just waiting around for the federal government to tell him what to do. The governor was not much better—what were people thinking electing him? Someone asked about the new Reverend Swanson, where did he land on the issue of desegregation? My father didn’t know; he’d never heard Swanson talk about it specifically. Mostly Swanson preached on the Gospels and brotherhood, in an analytic sort of way, my father said. Once he gave a peculiar sermon all about Martin Luther—peculiar because we weren’t Lutherans—and every time Swanson said “Martin Luther” you couldn’t help but think “Martin Luther King,” but my father didn’t read anything into that.
I thought of Reverend Swanson lying on his couch with a book, seeming remote from the world of politics. But then I thought of Langston Jones sitting at his kitchen table. The reverend obviously knew he was there. Then I thought of Ruth, leaning toward Langston and smiling, opening her home to that boy. Then I thought of Nat Turner.
As the men began to leave, I stayed sweating in the closet, the story of Nat Turner echoing in my mind. In my imagination, he looked just like Langston—tall, with a jaw sloped at a sharp angle. Hundreds of white people slaughtered. My stomach churned. I needed to know more. I’d feel better if I knew more: print on a page was always calming. I slipped from the closet into our family room, where our encyclopedia was packed onto the bottom shelf of the bookcase. It was the 1960 edition—as up-to-date as you could get. I read along the spines and extracted vol. 22: TEXTILE to VASC. I rested the weight of the book on my bare legs, the cover feeling textured, a little greasy, and flipped to “Turner.” There were a couple of Turners in the encyclopedia. On page 628, I found “TURNER, NAT (1800–1831)”:
…Negro leader of a slave insurrection in Virginia, known as the “Southampton insurrection.” Having studied the Bible, Turner became a Baptist preacher of great influence among Negroes. In 1828 he told companions a voice from heaven had announced, “the last shall be first,” which he interpreted to mean the slaves should seize power. On the night of Aug. 21, 1831, he and seven other slaves entered the home of his master, Joseph Travis, and murdered him and his family. Turner and his marauders then stole guns, horses, and liquor and invaded other houses, sparing no one. Recruits were added until the group numbered about 60. On Aug. 22, they were vanquished by a small force of hastily gathered whites. In all, 13 men, 18 women and 24 children had been butchered. Turner made a full confession. He was tried and hanged along with 19 accomplices. The insurrection led to stricter slave codes.
I let out a puff of air. That was it? “Turnip” had a longer entry than this. I added up the number of victims listed—fifty-five. Miss Cooke had said hundreds. At first I thought the encyclopedia was wrong, but of course Miss Cooke was more likely in error. I checked the index of my history book for “Nat Turner”: Tobacco; Tories; Traveler, General Lee’s horse. Under “N” I found Negroes, first brought to Virginia; New Market, Battle of; Newport, Christopher.
Then I recalled a book written by a retired school principal, the now ancient Worrell Bunkley, about the history of southeast Virginia. My father had brought home an autographed copy. I found it in our bookcase, a slim gray volume titled One Hundred Years of Virginia History: Southampton, Warwick, & Isle of Wight Counties, 1760-1860. My father said Mr. Bunkley was working on a sequel, 1861-1960, but had gotten bogged down in the War Between the States. I took the book to my room, closed the door, and propped myself against my pillow.
The book didn’t have an index or a table of contents. I had to flip through page by page. It began with a chronicle of our local battles in the American Revolution, then moved through a tedious recounting of crops, weather patterns, who lived where, who married whom, who got elected to what. Here were all the Wallers, Cobbs, Pretlows, and Moreheads whose descendants surrounded us today. I was nodding off when I came to a section called “Evil in Sunny Southampton: Nat Turner’s Insurrection.” I straightened up:
Nat Turner, born October 2, 1800, was the property of carriage-maker Joseph Travers. By all accounts, Nat appeared to be intelligent, albeit mentally deranged. Taught to read at an early age, Nat read the Bible and began preaching to his fellow slaves, calling himself “The Prophet.” Ignoring Bible verses that admonish slaves to obey their masters, Nat often repeated Matthew 20:16, The first shall be last and the last shall be first. On February 12, 1831, a shadow moved across the sun, which Nat took as a sign from God to kill white people. He spent months planning the brutal attack, which quickly failed.
On the night of August 21, Nat commenced his rampage with only a small group of slaves and free Negroes, apparently believing their numbers would increase as they went from farm to farm butchering white Christian families and liberating slaves. Nat’s band of killers armed themselves with axes, hoes, razors, knives, and blunt objects. After imbibing alcoholic cider, they went to the home of Nat’s master and hacked to death Travers, his wife, his infant son, and two young boys. The marauders then stole guns and traveled southeast, killing Salathiel Francis, the widow Reese and her son, Mrs. Elizabeth Turner and sister, an overseer, and others.
The killers then turned north, toward the widow Whitehead’s farm. Their final destination was alleged to be the town of Jerusalem on the Nottoway River, Nat likely mistaking it for the town in the Bible. On the roadside, they slaughtered the widow Whitehead’s son, a Methodist minister. Also butchered along the way was the Bryant family—Henry, his wife, child, and the wife’s mother. At the Whitehead farm, the killers axed to death Caty Whitehead, three of her grown daughters, and an infant grandson. Nat spotted a fourth daughter, eighteen-year-old Margaret, attempting to flee. He pursued her, stabbed her with his sword, then smashed in her skull with a fence rail.
The marauders continued north but then wound south, west, and north again in a nonsensical route from house to house, leaving carnage in their wake. Victims included Nathaniel Francis’s overseer and two children; John T. Barrow; George Vaughan; William Williams, his wife, and two boys; Mrs. John K. Williams and child; Mrs. Jacob Williams and three children; Edwin Drewry; Trajan Doyel; Mrs. Caswell Worrell and child; Mrs. Rebecca Vaughan, her niece, and her son; and Mrs. Levi Waller and ten children, who were found in a grisly pile of blood-soaked corpses on the Waller farm. In all, sixty-five white people were murdered. Many more would have died had it not been for the loyal slaves who protected their masters, hiding them or leading them to safety, thus showing gratitude for their masters’ care.
The rampage ended at noon on August 22, when the killers encountered a white militia with twice the manpower and three companies of artillery. The murderous mob was easily vanquished. White retaliation was swift and vigorous. After the bloody rampage, roughly 120 Negroes were killed in Southampton County alone. Negroes who participated in the insurrection were decapitated, and their heads were mounted on posts at a crossroads.
After the insurrection, rumors circulated across the South that Negro hordes were swarming down highways. Terrified white people were forced to kill many Negroes, until a US general issued an order to cease. Hundreds of Negroes may have died in the aftermath of the Southampton insurrection, representing a significant loss of property for white families.
The insurrection resulted in new laws restricting Negroes from assembly and prohibiting all Negroes, enslaved or free, from receiving an education. Nat Turner’s motive for initiating the bloody rampage was never established.
I closed the book and stared at the wall. Miss Cooke was right about one thing: a lot of the victims were children. But it was still unclear how many white people died. How could these sources contradict each other? And what did the author mean, Nat Turner’s motive was never established? Wasn’t that rather obvious? Until then, I hadn’t given much thought to slavery, but it struck me now that no matter how well your master treated you, being enslaved probably seemed like a problem.
It was early for bed, but I put on my nightgown anyway, brushed my teeth, wound the alarm clock, and climbed under the sheet. I tried reading an old, dog-eared Nancy Drew from my closet shelf, but phrases kept intruding: armed with axes, hoes, razors, knives…butchered…women and children…ten children…hacked to death… I dropped Nancy Drew on the floor. Murderous mob…carnage…a grisly pile of blood-soaked corpses. Fears swarmed through me like wasps in my stomach, crawling up my throat and into my brain. The first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Shuddering, I pulled the sheet over my head, closed my eyes, and saw the image of a monster, blue-black, broad-chested, wild-eyed. I saw a muscled arm raising a sword, a massive hand gripping the hilt. A blade sliced through the small, tender body of a woman—Ruth Swanson; the hand seized a plank of wood, dark and splintered, swung it back, aimed.
My bedroom door slowly squealed open and I heard myself gasp. It was just Barb strolling in, oblivious to all the dangers. Lovely young woman…head smashed with a fence rail…. I peeked over the edge of the sheet. She sat on her bed, glanced at me, and burst into a laugh. I’m sure I looked ridiculous.
Her rosy face and laughter sent a wave of reassurance over me. “Are you all right?” she said with big-sister sarcasm. Suddenly, I was: all was as usual, all was well. Barb was safe. We all were, I knew, because my father and the klavern protected us. My father, brave and wise, alert and primed, a leader of men. I imagined him standing stalwart in a firm-footed stance at the edge of our lawn, his sheer presence a repellent to the danger that hid in the blackness of night. I felt my body ease into a supple calm. My father was a savior, a savior of good people; and maybe someday, I could be too.