Flossie's Revenge - bookapy
Robert Lubrican
Foreword
This is a story about revenge, and as such, it is dark in many places, particularly in the beginning. It is set in a part of American history that wasn't very pretty, and the language used, while historically accurate, isn't very pretty either. The fact is, though, that these words and attitudes were used with great regularity, and still are in some places. That is fact, and I don't apologize for the use of those words, however uncomfortable they may make the reader.
While it's a story about revenge, that revenge wasn't planned, though, and some readers may decide that "justice" would have been a better word to use in the title. Titles aren't the author's strong point. That's also a fact.
Facts out of the way, readers are reminded that this is a work of fiction. As a work of fiction, this story has everything needed to make just about everybody unhappy. If you're a racist, you may like the first chapters, not counting the Prelude, but you won't enjoy this story after that. If you're not a racist, you'll be offended by the first chapters, and may never get to the part you'd be happy with.
So ... why read it at all, you ask?
Well, It's a story about human suffering, and triumph over suffering. It's a story of rags to riches. It's a story about doing the best you can under a given set of circumstances and learning that just because life has been shitty in the past, doesn't mean life still has to be shitty in the future. It's a story about learning how to be happy, and learning how to let yourself be happy. And ... it's a story about love.
All of us can identify with those situations. That's why I think this is worth reading.
Oh yeah ... there's another reason you might want to read it. It eventually has some pretty hot sex in it too. (grin)
Read the prelude. It's important.
Thanks for reading.
Bob
Cast
Cast List
As this story has a lot of characters in it, the following list of the most important ones is provided to help you keep track of who is who. The ages provided are as of the beginning of the story.
Flossie Pendergast: Teacher, 26, black
Harvey Wilson: Banker and father, 44, white
Marian Wilson: Harvey's wife, 34, white
Nathan Wilson: Eldest child of Harvey and Marian, 16, white
Bernadette Wilson: Elder daughter of Harvey and Marian, 15, white
Hilda Mae Wilson: Younger daughter of Harvey and Marian, 13, white
Other Students in the school:
Curtis Lee Waggoner, 17, black
Moses Finshaw, 15, black
Johnnie Sue Thorpe, 14, white
Luthor Cripps, 13, white
Jesse Hawthorne, 12, black
Prelude
On May 18th, 1954, a sunny and otherwise perfect day in the southern states of the United States of America, the day was completely ruined for hundreds of thousands of citizens, who opened their newspapers and read what was plastered across the front page of every newspaper in the nation.
Dateline: Washington D.C., May 17, 1954. "In a unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court, concerning Brown VS the Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, the following announcement was made:
"Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of Negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racially integrated school system"
Accounts then followed, describing how the Supreme Court also instructed the federal district courts to require the local school authorities to develop and carry out plans for integration "with all deliberate speed". In southern papers, it was pointed out, often in larger type, that this decision, only affected the segregation of public schools and did not abolish legally sanctioned segregation in other public areas. In northern papers, the follow-on stories proclaimed that it did declare that permissive or mandatory segregation that existed in twenty-one states was unconstitutional.
One citizen who read the newspaper that day was William Jefferson Pruitt, a middle aged man who, until this date, had not distinguished himself in any way, shape, or form in the tiny community in which he lived, called Catfish Hollow. Pruitt was a white man who had two children. Those children attended the Catfish Hollow Public School, one of two schools in the town of about three hundred population. The other school didn't have a name.
When it sank into Pruitt's head that, according to the paper, when school started up again in 1955, there would be children with dark skin going to school at the Catfish Hollow Public School, instead of that other school where they now went, he was enraged beyond measure.
In that reaction, he was not alone.
Pruitt's mood was foul after reading the newspaper, so he did what many men in the community did when they were in a foul mood. He immediately went to the porch of the General Store, meeting other men who had read the paper and were equally motivated to "discuss" the catastrophic announcement. Pruitt's mood got worse.
Sometimes, when men gathered at the General Store, action was taken, and Pruitt wanted to see action taken. But, on this day, while all the men who gathered there were upset about the court's decision, the vast majority of them had what, to them, were bigger problems. Primary among those problems was growing enough tobacco and cotton to make enough money to keep the wolf from their door and feed their families. And, by and large, the men who gathered there were law-abiding men. They didn't like what had happened, but it didn't appear that there was much that could actually be done to counter the court's directive to integrate the Catfish Hollow Public School.
They couldn't even take out their anger on any of the black citizens of Catfish Hollow at that particular time. That was because no black citizen was foolish enough to show his face in town that day.
William Jefferson Pruitt, however, decided to do something about it. He was alone in that decision, at least in the town of Catfish Hollow, and because this story is about that town, we will disregard what happened elsewhere, at least initially. Suffice it to say that, if Pruitt had known that the court's order wouldn't actually be obeyed for at least ten more years, he might not have done what he did.
But, of course, he didn't know that. He thought that his precious Liza Jean might have to sit next to a dirty little nigger boy in school, the very next year.
He began drinking around ten in the morning, and stayed at it until after dark. His alcohol-fogged brain worried at the problem without any answer coming to mind. Then, when he realized he'd lost an entire day of farming because of the situation, he decided to prepare his tractor for the next day's work by filling the gas tank. It was while doing that that the answer came to him.
By the time that answer came to him, the five gallon gas can in his hands was only half full, the rest having gone into the tractor's tank. Looking around blearily, he saw another five gallon can, this one containing kerosene, and he topped off the gas can with that. Then he set off for the Catfish Hollow Public School.
The building wasn't locked. No one locked anything in Catfish Hollow. He distributed the five gallons of gas-kerosene mixture by simply tipping the can and shaking it while he staggered around the four rooms that made up the building. The pant legs of his overalls and his scuffed brown leather shoes soaked up perhaps a couple of pints of the fuel. His right hand, supporting the top of the can and shaking it, also got wet with the mixture.
Pruitt was cackling aloud, thinking about how no nigger children could defile a school house that didn't exist any more, when he struck the match ... with his right hand.
To say that William Jefferson Pruitt burned down the Catfish Hollow Public School is to put too fine a point on it. He intended to throw the match and exit the building. The problem was that, in his drunken stupor, the door he chose to exit the building through turned out to be the door from one room into the next, and not the exit to the building. Further, while the match did ignite one splatter of the flammable cocktail on the floor, the primary thing it lit on fire was ... William Jefferson Pruitt. It was the torch that Pruitt became that then distributed the fire more or less evenly throughout the building as he ran, screaming, and bouncing off of walls.
By the time he reached the actual exit to the building, where he had dumped the majority of the fuel mixture, there was that perfect distribution of vapors in the air that is similar to what firemen call 'flashover' or 'backdraft, ' though it was technically neither of those conditions.
The results were, in one sense, all that Pruitt might have hoped for. By the time anyone else got to the site, it was clear that no one would be going to school in the burnt-out shell that was left. The volunteer firemen cranked up the old fire truck, but by the time they got any water on the blaze, all that was left were two walls and a pile of something that was eventually identified as the remains of William Jefferson Pruitt.
It's also a pretty fair bet that those remains, buried in a child's coffin, (because they would fit and it was cheaper), were turning in his grave almost as that coffin was lowered into the ground of the white-only cemetery outside of town.
That is because, during the meeting of the town fathers that followed, their decision was that it would be too expensive to build a new school. Seeing as how the only white students in the school were the children of share-croppers, and since those children had worked and played with the children who went to that other school all their lives anyway ... and with what had been published in the paper and all ... it was just decided that they'd all have to go to the only remaining school in town.
In effect, William Jefferson Pruitt advanced the cause of de-segregation in the Catfish Hollow Public School a good ten years. Had he left the building alone, nothing much would have changed in the town. People were too used to things the way they were, and, truth be told, no outsiders would have pushed the issue, even had both schools been kept open and operating in thoroughly segregated fashion. Catfish Hollow was too small, too poor, and too far away from the big wide world to show up on the radar of any damned Yankee, or any of the damned nigger-lovers who were causing all that trouble.
There were two other casualties of the incident that night.
One was Mable Crosby, the school teacher of the school that burned down. When she was informed that she would start school in 'the other school' the next year, she suddenly decided to accept the marriage proposal of Morris Fullbright, a traveling salesman who had been sparking her for three years on his infrequent visits to town, trying his best to get into her thick, sensible panties. She moved away to be with her new husband.
The other was Elsie Toombs, who was the teacher of the other school. She wanted no part of writing grades on the report cards of white students. One of the girls she had just graduated, named Flossie Pendergast, was actually going to go to a real college the next fall, and that, as far as she was concerned, was the apex of her career. It could only go downhill from there. She had a sister who had gone North, and she went to visit her. She never came back.
It took the town fathers four years to find another teacher, and that's when William Jefferson Pruitt's bones began whirling in his grave like a dust devil.
Chapter 1
Flossie Pendergast struggled, her arms full, to reach the doorknob and open the door to the old building. She hooked the knob with her fingers and twisted, pushing against the door with her shoulder and knocking off a few more paint chips. The door stuck, and she had to put everything down and then pull, twist and push in just the right order before the door creaked open. It was the same every day as she entered the decrepit schoolhouse where she was the teacher, teacher's aide, and janitor, all combined into one. In private, she called herself the Principal of the school, but she couldn't say it out loud. That would bring the kind of scorn and derision she was so used to, but which ate at her guts like a rat inside a dead possum.
She surveyed her kingdom, such as it was, her eyes falling on the scarred and tilting desks, with their built-in chairs that required a student to slide into the seat from the left side. There were fifteen of those desks, neathly lined up, facing the wall with the blackboard on it. One forlorn wooden, straight-backed chair, two slats missing out of the back, sat by the board. Other than that there was no furniture in the one room that made up the structure. There was no desk for the teacher. What few materials she had scraped together were in cubby holes that had been nailed to the wall, patched together from odds and ends of lumber that had been scrounged from the surrounding area. A former student had done the work.
The school was in a region of the United States that was south of the Mason Dixon line, and East of Texas - exactly where isn't all that important - and most of the reason that the school was in such poor repair was because the building had once been used to house thirty people who, in these modern days, would gently be called 'migrant workers'. In the old days, though, the workers didn't have the luxury of moving from place to place to pick the cotton, or tend the tobacco. If they felt compelled to move from one place to another, shackles took care of that.
Due to the 'unsettling conflict', as the locals called it, which had ended just under a hundred years earlier, that building could no longer be used for its intended purpose. It had housed 'employees' for another half century, and In roughly 1930, it had been converted to a school house when the plantation house it had been behind was destroyed in by a tornado. No one thought it was ironic that the storm had reduced the big house to splinters, while the old slave quarters had been untouched. It provided what most people thought of as an appropriate place for the nigger brats to receive just enough education so they could read.
Since then, of course, as towns grew, new schools had been built. One had been built in Catfish Hollow, in fact, but it was for whites only, and it had burned down, six years ago. This was the backwater of Callaway County, though, where, in 1960, the tax base was not only small, but poor as well. The people who had money didn't see the point in spending taxes on a new school, particularly since the only teacher they could draw to the area was Flossie.
Flossie was a black woman, and her students were a mixture of black and white children of sharecropper families. The Catfish Hollow Public School, though it had no sign on the front to proclaim it as such, was quite possibly the only integrated school in a six hundred mile radius.
Flossie was one of the few women of color who had the chance to escape Calloway County, and actually go to a four year college. That was the result of her bachelor uncle, a man who had seen the world, and who had seen that a better life could be had than what could be found where he and his only niece were born and raised. It was a struggle to pay her tuition, but he had made many sacrifices for other people already, and his personal needs were few. He had learned to live with very few amenities during the war to end all wars, and had saved his pay. He was used to going without, so to him there was little difference.
For Flossie, though, the difference was phenomenal. Almost all the faces around her at Spelman college, in Atlanta, had been as black as hers, but these were the cream of the crop, so to speak, and her imagination had been fired with the fervor of finding a place where she was not only considered equal as a human being, but was appreciated for her intellect, and given a chance to prove what she could do. Further, in her second year of college, when she met a man named Howard Zinn, she learned something about white people she hadn't really known before this. That was in 1956, when the white professor, hired for $4000 a year, came to Spelman to be the first white man to teach at the school. Upon his arrival, he had been ostracized by landlords and everybody else because he was white and was teaching blacks. His sacrifice, and that of his family in joining him, fundamentally changed the way a lot of black students thought about whites in general, and the state of racial equality specifically.
Her return to Calloway County had been intended to be triumphal. She was going to change things ... get respect ... make the little part of the world where she had come from a better place to live and work. Besides ... she had the full weight of the Supreme Court of the United States behind her ... right?
That she was installed in the same school as she had grown up in was no surprise. She had lived in Catfish Hollow the summer after the white school burned, and knew that no new school was planned. What ended up being the surprise was that, even though her students hadn't been to school in four years, and that she not only caught them up, but their grades were the best anybody had seen in twenty years, no one seemed to care. In the two years she had been teaching, the kids got excited, as she exposed them to learning, but that excitement was thoroughly squashed when they got home at night. Several parents, almost always white, had verbally abused her for "putting notions" in their children's' heads, about making a better life for themselves.
Knowing there was a better world out there, though, kept her going, and kept the fire in her teaching. The children, over those two years, began to become less and less susceptible to the dark predictions their parents made about their futures. Two of the young men (one white and one black) who had graduated had gone off to join the service, learning from Flossie that opportunity (and escape) was possible.
That didn't endear her to the local population much. While everyone was proud to have a son in the military, it also meant the loss of strong backs and hands to help do the work that still had to be done.
Flossie soon learned that she had to choose her battles very carefully. One of the things she had argued for, for instance, was a new building, which was laughed at by almost everyone. She also argued for a full day of school, instead of the half day that let the children spend more time at home, working, alongside their parents, making the few wealthy people in the little town of Catfish Hollow richer. All she got was an extra hour while the weather was good. On days when no work could be done in the fields, she got to keep the children longer.
Her argument to start sending the children to school at age six, instead of the routine eight or nine, got blank stares, until she suggested that they would be able to read earlier in life. Because many of their parents couldn't read, that made sense to them and she got what she wanted.
Her plea for books got her nothing. She had a blackboard, and they bought her a box of chalk every year. That should be enough.
She got an indoor bathroom patched onto the side of the building by the simple expedient of claiming that the children wouldn't get sick as often, and require bed rest, which kept them out of the fields. That the commode in the leaky bathroom simply drained out into the field behind the school, about twenty yards away, was something she couldn't do anything about. There were times when she felt lucky that the water in the single spigot that jutted from one wall, and off which a branch was installed for the toilet, worked at all. The toilet, of course, was a hand-me-down from the town plumber, who had removed it from the store owner's house during a renovation. He donated it, in lieu of paying part of his county taxes.
While the men worked on the bathroom, she had managed to talk one of them into splicing an old extension cord into the single light fixture on the ceiling, and run it to another light fixture one of her students had proudly scavenged from a trash heap. That gave them two light fixtures. There were no outlets, of course. Why would something like that be needed?
She looked critically at one corner of the room, and arrived at the conclusion that the crack in that corner had widened a bit. She had stood outside, before, looking down one wall, noting what she was sure was a slight tilt. She didn't look along that wall any more, because it depressed her. The whole building was leaning to the North, and it was getting worse.
As she began to write the day's lesson on the board, Flossie felt that pang of sadness that had been returning more often lately. Her grand plans were not working out. Nothing would change. Catfish Hollow would remain the same, and she would probably grow old and die here with nothing to show for it. There wasn't even a man to lighten the burden by loving her. All the men her age were already mated with other women, producing babies as quickly as possible so that there would be more hands to do the work. Her father had worked himself to death and, while her mother was still alive and living in the shack Flossie had grown up in, she wasn't interested in life. Flossie still visited her regularly, but it was depressing. Her mother would never change either, and still claimed college had been a waste of good money.
Her wages just went in the bank, because her living expenses were so little. In a moment of weakness, the town fathers had provided a house that went with the teaching position. That was only because they couldn't get anyone to teach in the broken down school when the previous teacher left. That, and the fact that the property provided had been taken for back taxes, even though it had been bought and paid for, for years. The old black man who had owned it, but who had grown too old to work and pay his taxes, had moved in with one of his daughters, but had died shortly afterward.
Now, other than some that went to her mother, about all Flossie used her money for was buying things for her students to use in the learning process. She bought a new dress now and then, but she hated having to go into the store, where she had to enter in the back door, marked "Colored". The white owner ogled her, and the white women acted as if she wasn't even there. It was bad enough shopping for food. And every place she went, there were the hated "White Only" signs that she had taken for granted as a child, but learned to loathe as a college student. She couldn't even take a sip of water, or use the bathroom in most places in town. As a result, she tried not to go into town unless it was absolutely necessary.
She'd thought about leaving ... going North, where there might be an opportunity to live a better life. But she didn't know anyone up North ... didn't know where to go, or how to find a place to go, and a lifetime of being told where to go and what to do and even how to feel had settled into her bones much more deeply than she believed. Her uncle would help, of course, but he had given her too much already, and he wasn't far enough north to make all that much difference in how she would be treated.
She was writing, the chalk rasping on the board, when the door creaked open and someone came in. She expected one of the students, but when she turned her head it was a white woman, who stood, looking around in what was plainly horror.
"Can I help you?" asked Flossie.
"This must be the wrong place," said the woman. "I must have gotten turned around. I'm looking for a school."
"This is the Catfish Hollow Public School," said Flossie.
"I meant the white school," said the woman.
"This is only school that services Catfish Hollow," said Flossie, patiently.
"You must be joking," said the woman. She was suddenly pushed forward, and, as she stepped into the room, two girls and a boy followed her. They were in their mid to late teens.
The older girl stopped and looked around.
"This is the school, mamma? I don't want to go to school here!" There were murmurs of agreement from the other two youths.
"This has to be some kind of mistake," insisted the woman. "Where's the teacher?"
"I'm Flossie Pendergast," said Flossie with dignity. "I teach the children here."
"Damn!" snorted the younger girl. "A nigger teacher! Mamma, you can't make us go to school here!" She stomped her foot and shook her blond curls, an angry set to her face."
"Oh my," sighed the woman. "Oh, dear me." She looked at Flossie, and then at the room, and then back at Flossie. "My husband got transferred here by the bank. We just moved into town. Surely there's another school for the white children."
Flossie felt heat suffuse her face, and was glad her skin was so dark that her blush didn't show. "As I said, ma'am, this is the school for Catfish Hollow." She folded her arms under her breasts. "All of Catfish Hollow," she added.
"Mamma, this ain't right," said the boy. "They can't make us go to no school with no nigger teacher."
"Young man," said Flossie sternly. "It is plain that whatever school you have been going to hasn't taught you much. Your language is atrocious."
All four of the other people in the room stood with mouths open in shock.
"Mamma, that nigger just said Nathan is stupid," gasped the older girl.
The woman, who Flossie would later learn was named Marian Wilson, closed her mouth with a snap, and her brow furrowed. "Well I never!" she said. "We'll just see about that!"
She hustled her children back out the door, like a mother hen, and Flossie sighed. This would probably bring trouble. Then, with a wry smile, she wondered what kind of trouble anybody could make for her. They needed her in this town, even if they didn't admit it. The teaching position had gone unfilled for four years when it was vacated, and the children had missed that much school. Of course that didn't really matter to the sharecropper families. They just went on with life, working sunup to sundown, and the children worked right along with them.
Flossie suddenly wondered what the search for a teacher might have been like had children like those she had just seen been in the student body. THOSE children would be interested in going to college, or at least getting a good, solid High School diploma to go out into life with. Missing even one year of school for them would have been viewed as a disaster.
Her regular students began arriving, and the smiles on their faces, both black and white, gave her the shot in the arm she needed to get going again. Her students might be poor, and have no real prospects in life, but they had been bitten by the bug of discovering new things ... interesting things ... things they might never see or use, but were fascinated by anyway. They now loved coming to school, and they applied themselves when they got there.
Much of Flossie's teaching was done story-telling style. She hadn't been taught that in college, but it was the best tool she had. Not only had she grown up in a world where story tellers were common - she had sat for hours, entranced by a good story - it gave her a way to transmit information that should be available to the children in text books, which they didn't have. Flossie had her own collection of books, though, and by teaching what was in them story-teller style, and passing the books around so they could see the pictures, the job got done.
That style worked well for the children too, since story tellers were revered in their world. Story tellers knew everything - everybody knew that - so Flossie's credibility was taken for granted, at least by the children.
She was a couple of hours into a description of the history of the middle ages when the door banged open and a sweating white man in suspenders, with his suit jacket hanging limply from one arm, stomped into the room. He was a big man, probably weighing two-fifty or more, and his ample belly was topped off by a head that looked too small, and was bereft of hair on top.
As if they were all controlled by some machine, the heads of all the children turned toward the man. No sound was uttered.
"You must be this Miss Flossie I've heard so much about," boomed the man, his bow tie wiggling against his Adam's apple as he spoke.
"I'm Flossie Pendergast," said Flossie, her voice carefully neutral.
"Asked around about you," said the man, looking for someplace to hang the cream colored woven hat he removed from his head. It had a stark red band on it that went with the red suspenders. It was clear he didn't remove it as a sign of respect when he wiped his brow with the back of his hand and then put it back on. "They say you went to college and everything."
"And you must be the new banker," said Flossie, confidently.
"Well, you're pretty smart for a ni-gruh woman."
The man smiled, and Flossie knew it was a professional smile that was supposed to make her comfortable. It didn't. His corruption of the word "Negro" was his plain attempt to let her know that, while he was "too cultured" to use the more common "nigger" he still considered her sub-human. His language went with his constant contact with the public. Despite appearances, there were people in the world who didn't approve of the use of "nigger" any longer.
"I am, in fact, Harvey Wilson, president of Farmer's Bank," he said proudly.
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Wilson," said Flossie calmly. "I believe I met your wife and children earlier."
"Don't this beat all," smiled Harvey, his smile as patently false as it could be and still resemble a smile. "Imagine a ni-gruh woman teaching school."
Flossie's smile was strained, and she felt like she was actually baring her teeth at the man. "I've been teaching for two years, Mr. Wilson. I don't have to imagine that."
"Uppity, aren't you?" said the man heavily. "But, I s'pose you'll just have to do ... until we can get a real teacher in here." He looked around. "You've let the place go to seed, I see." His head swiveled and he didn't give her time to respond. "We'll just have to do something about that too. My children deserve a real education in a real school."
Flossie knew there was very little she could say in this situation that would accomplish anything. Still, her anger wouldn't stay inside her, and she spoke almost automatically.
"I'm sure there are a number of private schools available ... Mobile? ... Atlanta perhaps? ... Maybe Charleston?"
Harvey shot her a dark look. He might be the president of a bank, but it was a bank in Catfish Hollow. Harvey Wilson was not going to live in the lap of luxury, regardless of what he thought should happen. He knew that, and the fact that this uppity nigger obviously knew it too, and actually felt like she could mock him, made his gut boil.
"I'd rather build a decent school right here in the community," he said. "With a decent teacher. But, until that happens, I suppose we'll just have to get by. You mark my words, though. My young'uns had better be taught well, or there'll be hell to pay."
"I teach all my students well, Mr. Wilson," said Flossie tightly. "If you've been asking around, you should know by now that the grade point averages of my students are quite impressive."
"That don't mean they know a damn thing," snarled Harvey. "All that means you give 'em good grades. You just actually teach my young'uns something while you're still here, and I might arrange to give you a half decent recommendation when you go looking for another job teaching trash like this." He looked triumphant, as his eyes raked over the sons and daughters of tenant farmers. His chin went up a little. "My kids will be here tomorrow morning. You make sure you're on time, and they don't have to wait outside. And they'll be going to school all day, not like ... these children here." He gave her a sickly sweet smile. "So don't plan on going off and lying in the shade in the afternoons. You hear me?"
Flossie could hardly keep a sneer off her face, but she managed. This man could cause her real trouble. She had her savings, but they were in his bank, and she still didn't have any place to go on short notice.
"I'll be here at seven," she said simply.
Chapter 2
Flossie spent the rest of the morning dealing with the negative atmosphere Harvey Wilson had left behind. Her students were well acquainted with racism, of course, both black and white. The white students “knew” they were better than the black ones, at least when Flossie first got there. Since then, however, her instruction, and the fact that she could identify almost as many people of Negro heritage, who had invented or done something important in history, as she could White, had slowly resulted in a condition where the children had begun to view each other as just ... other children. The racism wasn’t gone, but it was much weaker. Each of her students had some kind of talent, and she encouraged all of them to recognize the talents in the others.
While she didn’t know it yet, her efforts had already succeeded beyond her wildest hopes.
Three of her students were a girl, named Johnnie Sue, and two boys, named Luthor and Jesse.
Johnnie Sue was a fourteen year old white girl, who could best be described as a tomboy. She could fish and hunt as well as any man and her wiry body would stand the rigors of just about any job that didn’t involve lifting anything too much over her body weight, which was eighty pounds. Johnnie Sue was, to her immense chagrin, developing the body of a young woman. Periods had been bad enough, but now she was sprouting breasts and hair and everything, and she was not impressed.
Luthor was also white, was a year younger than Johnnie Sue, and also a good fisherman and hunter. He was tall for his age, standing at just over five feet eight inches. Had one compared his body with Johnnie Sue’s, the only real difference, other than the obvious sex differences, would have been that he grew less hair under his arms and between his legs than she did. Otherwise, their bodies looked remarkably similar.
Jesse was different in obvious ways from the other two. He was of the Negroid race. He was twelve, with a wiry underfed looking body. He was a couple of inches shorter than Luthor, and about the same height as Johnnie Sue. If his skin color wasn’t taken into account, his muscles looked just about like those of his two best friends.
That was the secret Flossie didn’t know about.
Johnnie Sue, Luthor and Jesse were best friends. They had taken that decision very seriously one night, when it was too dark to work, and their parents were resting, spent from a long day’s labor. All three families worked land that belonged to Jasper Cummins, who owned the sixty acres planted in cotton, and twenty-five acres planted in tobacco that, together, they farmed. It was farmed on shares, Jasper receiving half. The other half was split evenly between the three families who actually did the work. Money only showed up when the crop was actually sold, so money was tight for most of the year. As a result, the children didn’t have store-bought toys. They made their own fun playing with each other, hunting, fishing, and just dreaming.
The three youths had come together not so much by choice, but because they had to work together. Johnnie Sue earned the respect of both boys because she could work just as hard as either of them. The boys recognized, in each other, a determination to excel that almost, but not quite, led to competition. Even those whites at the bottom of the totem pole didn’t compete with blacks in those days. The superiority of whites was just assumed.
But, as the young people spent time together, growing up, they recognized in each other the things they liked, and while, on the surface, they kept their places in the social order, in private, they did something unusual. They accepted each other as equals. That led to the sharing of confidences, and that led to friendship. During the last school year, once they learned of the practice from their teacher, they couldn’t resist the romantic notion of engaging in the time-honored ritual of blood brotherhood.
The very night after they sat, rapt with attention, as Flossie described how the Indians of the old Wild West had exchanged blood oaths, they entered into their own blood oath. Using a piece of broken glass, each pricked his or her finger, and those fingers were pressed together with great solemnity, each swearing that they would be linked for life, and would give their lives for each other if necessary.
After that, the differences that society used to separate them, not only black from white, but male from female as well, seemed to make less and less sense to them. They still met secretly, to be sure, with Jesse coming and leaving by different ways than the two white kids, but that was only to preserve the secret. By the time in their lives that this story is telling, they had already decided that adults had some very strange and stupid ideas, which they planned on completely ignoring whenever possible. That did not mean they misunderstood how they had to act in public. In public, stupid adults made the rules. But they rarely believed what any adult said, black or white.
There was one possible exception. When Flossie Pendergast said something, they believed it. She was their idol ... a person who seemed to know almost everything, and never lied about it if she didn’t. She was an adult they could trust completely. Even so, they were still too young to realize the irony of the fact that their idol was a social outcast in the world in which they lived. All they thought was that adults were too stupid to see what their children had recognized.
And it was for that reason, that they recognized Harvey Wilson for the bigoted asshole that he was. When Harvey left the building, he had three new enemies he didn’t even know about.
So did his children, and they had never even met them.
The “war” as Luthor, Johnnie Sue and Jesse called it, began that very night. After their chores were done, they gathered, as they did almost every night. Their first act of war was to avenge being called trash by the new banker. There were old boards and bits of wood lying around all over the place, many with nails stuck through them. Such hazards were always carefully cataloged, if they couldn’t be removed, since the threat of lockjaw - and death - was quite real.
The three located the weapons they would employ in this battle, and ran to town together.
These days, a twelve year old running four or five miles in the dark would seem strange in the extreme. For the trio of blood-brothers (these young warriors wouldn’t consider naming Johnnie Sue a blood ‘sister’ - who’d ever heard of one of those?) it was something they did three or four times a week, and they were only slightly winded when they arrived at their objective.
It hadn’t been hard to find out where the new banker lived. Five minutes after they found the place, a small chunk of wood, with a rusty nail protruding from it, had been wedged under the back of the right front tire of the station wagon parked on the street out front of the house. Another one was wedged under the front of the left rear tire ... just in case. No matter which direction the car went in the morning, it would suffer a flat tire.
The run back home was even easier, due primarily to an excess of adrenaline in the bloodstreams of the young troublemakers.
Class had been in session for two hours the next day, when the Wilson children arrived for their first day of school in Catfish Hollow. They were a bedraggled lot, their fine clothes dusty and sweat stained. These young people didn’t run anywhere, and the two mile walk to school had taxed them heavily.
Flossie, of course, didn’t know about why the three teens were late. She was surprised not to have heard a car deliver them.
“You’re late,” she noted, as they trooped in.
“That’s because this stupid town has boards with nails in them lying around everywhere,” said the older girl. “My Daddy got two flat tires this morning, before we even went a block!”
Apparently he had moved both forward and back while leaving the house. There were giggles from the line of students, seated quietly at their desks, but Flossie couldn’t identify who had been so amused.
“Well, find a seat and introduce yourselves,” said Flossie.
“I ain’t gonna sit where no nigger has sat,” said the boy belligerently.
Flossie looked at him, her face set.
“Well, then, I suppose you’ll just have to stand, young man.” Her eyes strayed to the girls. “You young ladies may either sit, or stand, as you wish. Now, what are your names, please?”
That the three Wilson children responded to her request, is a thing that is difficult for folks to fully understand in these modern days. This is because the social setting of the day was almost laughably convoluted. While many white women adhered to the belief that Negroes were lazy, stupid, untrustworthy, and even dangerous, they thought nothing of hiring black women to raise their children. Part of that was because, when one had servants, one felt like she was in an elevated social position. There weren’t many white women who were willing to become servants, so that void was filled by black women, who not only bathed, fed and supervised their young white charges, they were often the primary source of the early knowledge that was put into those young white heads. What, today, is often done by Sesame Street and such television programs, was done primarily by Negro nannies back then.
So, white children were often well acquainted with the idea that a black woman could have authority over them. The Wilson children had, in fact, been raised by a middle-aged black woman named Annie - they never knew her last name, nor cared. But Annie’s authority was convoluted as well. The children could (and often did) demand things from Annie, and she had to accede to their demands ... unless those demands contravened orders from the parents. What that led to were situations that were unclear, in which a child might demand something one minute, and get his or her wish, and then demand something else the next moment that was denied.
Everyone involved had to learn to walk that tightrope. Sometimes a cry of “I’m gonna tell my Mamma” was cause for the adult to quail, while at other times it might result in “You just go ahead and whine to yore mamma, child, and see what it gets you!” At the same time, Anna had been there to kiss the scratches, and soothe the hurt feelings, and nurture the children in ways that, without servants (or daycare) a mother would normally have done. Over the years, Anna had forged a relationship with the three Wilson children that was as complex as inter-office politics are these days ... on both sides of the group. As hard as it is to believe, that relationship was based about half on fear and intimidation, and half love and respect.
Anna, however, had not moved with the family She stayed in Atlanta, where she would, no doubt, take under wing another group of spoiled white brats, to earn her living. This left the Wilson children without the social support they had had all their lives. For another black woman to be placed in a position of authority over them, even if she was much younger, was something that wasn’t, in one sense, strange. And for that reason, perhaps, her request was granted.
“I’m Nathan Wilson,” said the boy. “And these are my sisters Bernadette and Hilda Mae.”
His response was typical of a well-to-do white boy in that situation. It was a complex mixture of being polite - he introduced the females - mixed with an almost unimaginable lack of concern, when he didn’t indicate which girl was which. That resulted from his arrogant expectation that the others in the room would somehow know.
“We are pleased you could join us,” said Flossie politely. “Let me introduce the other children to you.”
She started to do just that, but had gotten only through three names before she realized that none of the Wilson children cared what the names were, of the others in the room. Hilda Mae was carefully examining her dress to see if it was dirty. Bernadette had carefully sat just on the edge of one of the empty desk seats, and had removed her shoe to rub her foot. Nathan was looking around the room, with what might pass for a look of disgust on his face.
As luck would have it, the history lesson for the day dealt with World War II, and the role that aviation had played in the outcome of that war. All the children had, of course, seen airplanes flying about. The ones they were most acquainted with dusted crops, and dipped and weaved into and out of the fields in ways that Flossie was able to use to explain what dogfights must have been like.
And, as luck would have it, Flossie had even better information about the air war and the role fighters had played in it. The same uncle who had sent Flossie to college was also a Tuskeegee Airman, with three confirmed kills over Europe. As she spun the tale of the life of the fighter pilots, even the Wilson children began to pay attention. Both Hilda Mae and Bernadette had claimed seats, unwilling to stand while the others sat. Nathan stood for long minutes, until the ache in his feet drove him to sit on the very edge of a chair.
All went well until Flossie got to the part about her uncle, and described the fighting he did as he had described it to her.
“That’s a lie!“ shouted Nathan suddenly.
While those words had been heard in the school house before, they had never been directed toward the teacher. Not Flossie, at least. Every head in the room swiveled to look at Nathan, even those of his sisters, who looked on interestedly.
“What seems to be the matter?” asked Flossie calmly.
“There wasn’t never no nigger who flew a fighter like that and killed a German. That ain’t possible!”
“Why wouldn’t that be possible, Nathan?” asked Flossie. The tone of her voice was carefully neutral.
“Everybody knows niggers can’t use machines like an airplane,” said Nathan, as if he were explaining something to a small child. “They’re too complicated.”
Flossie went to her bag, and pulled something out of it.
“I’m going to pass around this photograph,” she said, ignoring Nathan. “It was given to me by my uncle, the one I told you about. It’s a picture of him standing beside his fighter.”
She started the picture out with the smallest child, as was her custom. Whenever pictures were displayed, the little ones got to see them first, and then the older children. It was one way of making the little ones feel important. The students, whether consciously or not, passed it among themselves, somehow never remembering to hand it to any of the Wilson children. There were oohs and aahs from some of the older students.
The last to receive the picture was Curtis Lee, a young black man who was the son of a woman who ran a laundry service in town. His father was dead, lynched when Curtis Lee was only four. It was said that his father had whistled at a white woman, embarrassing her in front of her friends. Men had come for him in the night, and his body had been found hanging from a lamp post where the incident was said to have taken place.
Because his mother performed a service in town that no white woman wanted to do, and was therefore relatively well off, Curtis Lee did not have to work in the fields. He had therefore received more instruction than the other children, and when he wasn’t in school, he read anything he could get his hands on. He wasn’t allowed to check books out of the tiny library that Old Miz Hopkins ran, but she didn’t mind if he sat in the back and read the books that were on the shelves. Over the years, he had run a number of errands for the old woman, and she had become fond of him. He had also read almost everything the library owned.
Curtis Lee looked at the photograph carefully. “P-51” he announced. “I read somewhere that The Tuskeegee group painted the tails red, and that the bomber crews started asking for them to fly cover during bombing missions.”
“My uncle said the same thing,” said Flossie, beaming. If ever she was proud of a student, it was Curtis Lee. She would give anything to be able to get him into a college. She reached out to receive the photograph back from Curtis Lee, but Nathan jumped out of his seat and snatched it first.
“Lemme see that,” he said. He looked at the picture and sneered. “That don’t mean nuthin’. He prob’ly just put on that outfit and had one of his nigger friends take that picture.”
Then, with great deliberation, he tore the picture in half, and threw it at Flossie’s feet.
Flossie felt an almost explosive surge of anger, but controlled it.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Nathan,” she said, her voice tight. “That’s an irreplaceable picture, and it belonged to me. You don’t have the right to destroy other people’s property.”
Nathan wasn’t moved an inch.
“An you don’t have no right to show lies around to people neither!” His jaw jutted out.
Flossie kneeled and picked up the two halves of her uncle’s picture and she put them in her bag. Things looked even more disastrous than she had imagined.
“Tell you what,” she said quietly. “I’ll write to my uncle. He flies a crop dusting plane for a company up in Missouri. If he can prove to you that he actually flew in the war, will you apologize to me?”
“Apologize to a nigger?!” Nathan’s voice was incredulous. Then he snorted. “Sure ... why not? I know you’re lying ... and him too. There ain’t no way a nigger could fly any kind of airplane. I’ll believe it when I see it!” He smiled a gratuitous grin and sat back down.
That afternoon, when the children left, and the Wilson children opened up the box lunches that had been sent with them to school, only they and Curtis Lee were left. Flossie generally spent the afternoons with Curtis Lee, talking about whatever he wanted to pursue. Sometimes that was something he’d read about, and wanted to explore in terms of the science or math that was involved. Sometimes they leafed through Flossie’s few text books, purchased at great expense while she was in college, and saved as precious sources of knowledge.
Having the Wilson children there, though, changed all that. The first thing Flossie decided to tackle was English, in an attempt to improve Nathan’s speech in particular, and that of the girls in general. To start, she handed a dog-eared copy of “The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz” to Bernadette.
“Have you ever read this story?” she asked.
Bernadette looked at the faded, but still colorful illustration on the front of the book and shook her head.
“It’s a really wonderful story about a girl, maybe a girl like you, who has a fantastic adventure in a magical place called Oz,” Flossie explained. “Please read from chapter one.”
Bernadette opened the book, and began reading. She stumbled occasionally on this or that word, but did reasonably well. After ten minutes Flossie had her hand the book to her younger sister, who also read well. Hilda Mae’s voice took on that special characteristic of a storyteller who is enthralled with the story as she read about the tornado, and how the house flew and circled in the storm. At the point where it was clear the house had landed on top of somebody, Flossie indicated that the book should be passed to Nathan.
“I don’t want to read,” he said. “Hilda Mae is a good reader. Tell her to go on.”
“Hilda Mae is, indeed, a good reader, but the purpose of this is to let everyone contribute and learn. Please read.”
It was clear from the very beginning that Nathan was far behind his younger siblings in his reading and English skills. Flossie had suspected as much from his language, but hadn’t expected a privileged white boy to be as far behind as he was. After half a page he stopped, his face flushed with anger, and shoved the book toward Flossie.
“You read it!” he growled.
Curtis Lee’s hand appeared from nowhere, and grasped the book, pulling it gently from Nathan’s hand.
“I’ll read for a while,” he said softly.
“You can read?” asked Nathan, sounding skeptical.
“Sure,” was Curtis Lee’s quiet reply.
Curtis Lee read the same way that Hilda Mae read, his voice changing from the soft southern slur that was all any of them had heard, and taking on life as the descriptions in the story were read flawlessly. Flossie glanced at the girls, both of whom were wide-eyed, astonished at what they were hearing. Nathan’s face was pale, his eyes dark with shame and embarrassment.
When Curtis Lee stopped and looked up, he slumped, becoming again the soft-voiced youth. He held the book out to Bernadette, but she just sat there.
“You read good!” she said, awe plain in her voice.
“Well,” corrected Flossie. “He reads well.”
“You knew what I meant,” said Bernadette, stiffening.
“Of course I did. All I’m doing is teaching you proper English. You want to sound educated, don’t you?” Flossie smiled.
“All right,” Bernadette sighed. “He reads well. There, are you happy now?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I’m happy or not,” said Flossie. “I’m here to teach you things ... English ... math ... science.”
“Why do we have to learn science and all that,” complained Bernadette. “We’ll never have to use all that stuff.”
“Education helps us understand the world we live in,” explained Flossie patiently. Knowing science may help you understand a machine you need to use, or keep you safe from some danger. What are you going to do when you grow up and leave home? If you know science, you might invent something important.”
“Me?!” laughed Bernadette. “Invent something? Women don’t invent things!”
“They most certainly do,” said Flossie. “Women have invented hundreds of the things that make our lives much happier.”
“Like what?” asked Hilda Mae, leaning forward. “Bernadette doesn’t care. She just wants to get married and have babies. But I like science.”
Flossie went to a box, nailed to the wall, and opened the lid, reaching inside. She brought out one of her favorite books, written by a man named Henry Baker. Henry Baker, a black man, was an assistant patent examiner at the U.S. Patent Office in 1900 who was dedicated to uncovering and publicizing the contributions of Black inventors. It happened as a result of the Patent Office conducting a survey to gather information about black inventors and their inventions. Letters were written to thousands of patent attorneys, company presidents and newspaper editors, among others, to gather information about things that had been invented or designed by Negroes. There was legislation that addressed whether patents could be held by slaves, or freed men, and court battles about the same thing. Baker compiled his findings into four huge volumes, and then wrote a simple text book based on that. Even fifty years later, his information was still being used in ongoing court battles about patents and rights.
There was an entry in the book she had used before, and was prepared to use again now.
“Where did you get all those lovely curls in your hair?” asked Flossie as she leafed through the book.
“What?” asked Hilda Mae.
“Your hair is curled. Bernadette’s too. Is that natural, or did someone have to curl it for you?”
“Mamma took us to the beauty shop with her,” said Bernadette. “She says we have to set an example in our new town.”
“And does your mother let you wear cosmetics?”
“Cos ... What’s that?” asked Hilda Mae.
“Powders and creams and lipstick ... things like that, that you put on your face?”
“We’re not old enough for that yet,” sighed Bernadette. “Mamma uses it and she’s so beautiful it makes my heart burst.”
“Here we go,” said Flossie, turning the book around so the girls could see the grainy photograph of a woman in old fashioned clothing, wearing a flamboyant hat. The picture was of a Negro woman. Flossie didn’t have to read. She knew the facts by heart.
“Madame C.J. Walker, born in 1867, worked for a woman in a beauty shop. She noticed that some women had a problem that made their hair fall out. She invented a scalp conditioner and healing cream. It was so successful that she opened her own business in Denver, Colorado, and then established schools for women to learn how to do all those things they do in that beauty shop your mamma took you to. She went on to invent all kinds of cosmetics. She also invented the machine they used to put all those lovely curls into your hair. When she died her estate was worth over a million dollars. Knowing something about chemistry is why she was able to do all that.”
Flossie stopped talking. Both girls were staring goggle-eyed at the picture in the book.
“A nigger woman did all that?” gasped Bernadette.
“A Negro woman did that,” corrected Flossie. “Let me ask you a question, Bernadette. How would you feel if I called you a whore, or a slut?”
Bernadette’s eyes opened as wide as they possibly could, and her mouth gaped open. She was so flabbergasted by the question she couldn’t even speak.
Flossie went on. “I’m not calling you either of those things, but if I did, it would hurt your feelings, would it not?”
“I’d kill any nigger who called my sister a whore!” shouted Nathan, standing up.
“Calm down, Nathan,” said Flossie, hoping she could pull this off. “I’m making a point here. I’m teaching.” She turned back to Bernadette. “Would that hurt your feelings?”
“Well of course it would!” the girl gasped.
“I am a Negro, or colored woman ... a citizen of the United States of America,” said Flossie. “My ancestors were slaves, but I am not. I have a college education, and I teach children important lessons. The word ‘nigger’ is a word just like the word ‘whore’ - it is intended to make someone feel bad. When you call me a nigger, it is like you are calling me a whore or a slut. It hurts my feelings, and it hurts the feelings of any Negro person.”
Bernadette looked shocked. “But it’s just a word!” she said.
“So is ‘whore’,” pointed out Flossie. “I’m just trying to help you understand how what you say can affect other people.”
“But everybody calls niggers ... niggers...” Hilda Mae’s voice sounded puzzled.
“And everybody calls a whore a whore,” said Flossie. “Some people call a women a whore when she isn’t, though.”
“So are you saying that some niggers are niggers, and others are Ni-gruhs?” asked Bernadette, pronouncing it the same way her father did. “What’s the difference?”
“I’m saying nigger is a word that hurts feelings. It’s a derogative word that is meant to hurt, just like the word ‘whore’ is meant to hurt. No one uses the word ‘whore’ and means anything positive by it.”
“Oh,” said Hilda Mae. “I guess that makes sense.” She looked puzzled. “Except that I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings. I don’t really care what you think.”
The innocent truth of that statement was what Flossie knew went to the core of racism. If you didn’t care what a person thought, you didn’t care what happened to them either. And if you didn’t care what happened to them, then your natural sense of right and wrong could get skewed so badly that you did things that would normally have gone against your conscience. While Hilda Mae would never think about calling a white friend a whore, because she would instinctively know that was wrong, because she had never cared about a black person, it didn’t matter what you called one of them.
Flossie, though, saw the tiny crack she had just caused in the armor that was wrapped around Hilda Mae’s racist upbringing, and went on ahead.
“And, while we’re on the subject,” said Flossie, “there are many other names for people that are meant to hurt. Has anyone ever called you a cracker?”
“Not to my face,” snorted Nathan, like he was miffed at being left out of the conversation.
“Well, what I’m telling you is that, if you want to be polite, you just won’t use those kinds of words. I’m not a coon, or a nigger, or a Sambo. I’m a Negro, or a colored person. And it’s Nee-Grow, not Ni-Gruh, by the way.”
“That’s what Daddy calls them ... you,” said Bernadette.
“Your father doesn’t like Negroes, does he?” asked Flossie.
“No,” said Bernadette easily. “He says they’re lazy and stupid and we ought to send them all back to Africa, where they came from.”
“That’s a discussion for another day,” sighed Flossie. “For now, let’s just say this. You know that saying ‘ain’t’ isn’t correct English, right?”
“Yes,” admitted Bernadette. “Mamma yells at us all the time for saying that. She says it makes us sound common.”
“OK, just like ‘ain’t’ is a corruption of ‘am not’ or ‘is not’, ‘Nigruh’ is a corruption of ‘Negro’. It isn’t polite, and it makes the user sound ... common.”
Both girls looked pale at the thought that anyone, at least outside their family, might think they sounded ... common.
“So, what I intend to do, is teach you to speak properly, so you’ll never sound common in your whole life. Isn’t that something you’d like to learn?”
Both girls nodded, almost reluctantly. Nathan wasn’t impressed, though. He snorted.
“And you, young man, are going to learn to read as well or better than Curtis Lee,” said Flossie, reminding him that he fared very badly when compared to the performance of someone he called a nigger.
Before Nathan could explode, though, Bernadette sat up straight and she looked at Curtis Lee.
“How did you learn to read so good?”
“Well,” prompted Flossie.
“So well!“ said an exasperated Bernadette.
“I just practiced,” said the boy quietly. “At first I read out loud because it was easier to say the words. After a while I didn’t do that any more. And then, when Miss Flossie was teaching reading to the little ones, I helped, and started reading out loud again.”
“So if I practice ... I can read as good ... I mean well,” she shot a look at Flossie, who smiled, “ ... as you do?” she finished.
“I don’t see why not. You read pretty well already,” said Curtis Lee.
“Nathan will never read well,” snorted Hilda Mae. “He’s too lazy and stupid. Pappa even told him so last night.” She jumped to avoid the blow she knew was coming from her brother, and put a desk between him and her.
“He did not!“ shouted Nathan.
“He did so!“ shouted Hilda Mae right back. “You told him you wanted to be a doctor at supper last night and he said you were too lazy and stupid to ever do that!”
“Your father is mixed up about several things, I imagine,” said Flossie, interrupting the argument.
Nathan turned on her. “My Daddy is not mixed up about anything!”
“So,” said Flossie quietly. “He thinks niggers are lazy and stupid ... and he called you lazy and stupid...” She didn’t have to finish. Nathan’s face became pale as shock gripped him.
“I suspect you’re neither lazy nor stupid, Nathan,” said Flossie, standing up. “You just haven’t been taught well, or maybe you decided not to pay attention in school. Either of those problems can be solved easily. If you want to be a doctor, you just have to decide to be a doctor, and then work toward that goal. There’s no reason in the world you can’t be a doctor, if that’s what you want to do.”
For the first time Nathan was speechless. Annie, his old nanny, had been another black woman who had sympathized with him when his father shouted at him when he was younger. He tried everything to win his father’s approval, but nothing worked. Annie had held him as he cried into her ample bosom, telling him that he was a fine young man, and would grow up to do wonderful things. It occurred to him now that here was another hated nigger, who was doing close to the same thing, and that no white woman had ever said he’d amount to a hill of beans.
Nathan underwent a strange ... almost bizarre, if admitedly microscopic, transformation in those few seconds. He remembered Annie’s comforting arms, and the softness of her bosom as he cried into it. He had hated her for seeing him cry, but she had always been there for him. Later, he had let her cuddle him just because it felt good sometimes. He had loved to press his face to the softness of her bosom. His eyes went to Flossie, and for the first time he looked at her as a woman, and not just another nigger. She was short and slim, and her breasts didn’t push her dress out like Annie’s had. Still, she was nice to him. He was old enough to know exactly what the word ‘nigger’ was used for. He used it intentionally, specifically to cause hurt. Yet, this woman was still civil to him, and not because she had to be. His father had already announced his intention to have her replaced, and his father always got what he wanted. His father was a powerful man, with the purse strings of the whole town firmly in his grasp. With something akin to horror, Nathan Wilson realized that this woman, and Annie before her, treated him better than his mother and father ever had.
It was an epiphany that would cause him many sleepless nights in the months to come. It would also redirect the anger he nurtured inside him ... anger that now would be less and less directed at those of lower station in life than his own, and more and more at those with power, who tried to deny him a share of that power.
Chapter 3
The next few weeks went better than Flossie would have hoped, had she any hopes at all. She had been around enough racist white people (and black people too, for that matter) that she believed racism was a disease that ran too deep to be “cured” in anything less than generations. And, her teaching methods did not change. Harvey Wilson might eventually get what he wanted, but she was quite sure that, without a new building, and more affluent students, the possibility of them luring a white teacher to this small town was non-existent. And it would take time for Harvey Wilson, or anybody else, to convince anyone that a new building was worth the expense.
It did, in fact, take Harvey two more years to drive through agreement that a new school was needed. By that time, though, his interest had waned somewhat, since, by the time it would actually be built, his own children wouldn’t ever see the inside of it.
But that’s for later in the story. Right now, you want to know what happened during those two years.
That night, when Flossie got home, she wrote a letter to her uncle. She explained the situation, and asked him if there were any documents or other proof he could send her that would establish, beyond doubt, that he had been a fighter pilot in the war.
Flossie’s plan to educate the Wilson children wasn’t really any more radical than what she had planned for the education of all her students. She used her copy of the text book written by Henry Baker to identify a number of Colored people who invented many of the things that almost everyone used in some situations, and which had made striking differences to the way farming was done in Calloway County.
The next bit of what would someday be called “Black History” was about George Washington Carver. There was a grainy old-time photograph of him in the book too, and she showed it to the class, listing how, as an agricultural chemist, he discovered three hundred uses for peanuts and hundreds more uses for soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes. Among the listed items that he suggested to southern farmers to help them economically were his recipes and improvements to or for: adhesives, axle grease, bleach, buttermilk, chili sauce, fuel briquettes, ink, instant coffee, linoleum, mayonnaise, meat tenderizer, metal polish, paper, plastic, pavement, shaving cream, shoe polish, synthetic rubber, talcum powder and wood stain.
This time, all three Wilson children participated in looking at the book, running down the list of the man’s inventions as if they didn’t quite believe what they were hearing. Seeing has a strong impact on believing.
There was discussion between all the students on how these things had affected their own lives, and the lives of the farmers throughout America, and not just in the South. Flossie capped it off by announcing that, On July 14, 1943, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt honored Carver with a national monument dedicated to his accomplishments, and that Carver was offered an annual salary of $100,000.00 to work for a white-owned company, making him the highest paid Negro in America up to that time.
“A hundred thousand dollars!” sighed Bernadette. “I can’t even imagine that much money in the whole world. I heard my Pappa talking about a loan he approved - it was to build a whole new house - and it was only for twenty-five hundred dollars!”
Then Flossie switched into a math session, where the children had to cipher out how many houses could be built with a hundred thousand dollars, and how many mules, or cars could be bought with that kind of money. Soon the children were squealing as they thought up other products, most of which cost less than a dollar, which made the quantities seem astronomical to them.
The next day, when Nathan trooped into the room, his face was tense.
“Daddy wants to talk to you,” he said to Flossie. “He said to tell you to get your nigger ass out there, because he ain’t ... I mean isn’t coming in here.”
“All right,” said Flossie.
She went out, passing a subdued Bernadette and Hilda Mae, who looked almost frightened. She walked around to the driver’s door of the station wagon, to find Harvey Wilson scowling at her through the open window.
“What’s all this horse shit about some nigger making a hundred grand a year?” he snarled.
“We talked about George Washington Carver yesterday,” said Flossie simply. She noticed that Luthor, Johnnie Sue and Jesse were approaching the school house together, and had stopped to listen to the exchange.
“I don’t need my children asking me questions like how much money I make in a year, just to have them tell me some Northern nigger makes ten times as much. You stop filling their heads with hogwash, you hear me?! I will not have some nigger whore telling my God damned children that their God damned flesh and blood can’t do better for his God damed family than some uppity coon who takes credit fror something he probably didn’t invent nohow!” He finished with a scream that left his lips actually flecked with spittle.
Flossie turned on her heel and walked around the front of the car, wondering if he would run her down or not. She walked stiffly back into the building as dirt and gravel sprayed in a half circle that peppered her back, and the front of the school house.
When she got inside, the three Wilson children were standing in a line. They looked anxious.
Bernadette’s voice was shaky as she spoke. “We were just talking at supper, and Hilda Mae asked him what his salary is. Then he wanted to know why she wanted to know and when he found out he just got crazy! He sent us all to bed right then and there! He was yelling at Mamma about how he was going to get rid of you if it’s the last thing he ever does. We were afraid he was going to kill you out there!”
“Well, he didn’t,” said Flossie stiffly.
“He said it ain’t right for a ni ... I mean for that George Washington man to make that much more than a white man,” said Nathan.
“Each person has worth to his fellow man,” said Flossie, as Johnnie Sue and the two boys came in the door. “In some cases that worth is more highly valued than in others. That’s why you want to become the best person you possibly can, so you are worth more to other people, and they’ll reward you for that.”
“I’ve never seen him that mad before,” said Bernadette. “You’d better be careful.”
“I know,” sighed Flossie. “I know.”
That night, a skunk somehow found its way into the Wilson household in the middle of the night, while the family was sleeping. The odor woke them all, and they all got out of bed to investigate. The animal was found in the kitchen, where it was going through the overturned trash can.
The skunk obviously felt threatened when Harvey Wilson decided to eject him. Harvey got a direct shot, some of which got in his eyes.
The next morning, Luthor, Jesse and Johnnie Sue were at school when Flossie arrived herself. They looked so freshly scrubbed that Flossie noticed it. As she approached, she got a whiff of skunk odor.
“Don’t you three know enough by now to stay away from a skunk?” she asked, laughing.
“What skunk?” asked Johnnie Sue, looking around as if there might be a skunk in sight.
“What have you been up to?” asked their teacher, sensing immediately that there was mischief afoot.
“Must have been a skunk that went through some of the grass we walked through,” said Luthor. “I thought I smelled skunk somewhere back there.”
They all turned to see the Wilson station wagon edging down the dirt path that led to the school house. Today their mother was driving. When the car stopped, and the Wilson children climbed out, she got out and stood by her door.
“We had a little trouble last night,” she called out, stiffly. “I did everything I could, but I don’t think it did any good. I’m sending the children to school anyway. You’ll just have to live with the smell. Lord knows we had to live with it all night.”
Then she got back in the car and drove away.
The smell of skunk coming from Nathan, Bernadette and Hilda Mae was overpowering. Their eyes were still red from running almost constantly. They stood in a morose little group, heads hanging.
“A skunk got in the house,” said Nathan. “Daddy had to get the doctor out of bed because he was blinded. We didn’t get no sleep at all last night.”
“Didn’t get any,” corrected Flossie automatically. Her eyes went to find Johnnie Sue and the two boys, but they were gone ... vanished as if they had never been standing there only moments before. She frowned on the outside, but was grinning on the inside. Still, she’d have a word with the three in private. What they had done was undoubtedly a great adventure for them, but it could be very dangerous too.
It was then that she realized all three of them had smelled of skunk, and that Jesse must have been involved too. Her heart shrank as she thought about what would happen if he got caught doing something like that to a white family. She couldn’t wait until later.
She handled it by announcing that they would have class outside that day, where the wind would help. She ordered Johnnie Sue, Jesse and Luthor to stay inside and “help her get ready.” As soon as the Wilson children had gone outside, she lit into the three best friends with a hushed vengeance. When they started carrying desks outside, the two white children were as pale as ghosts, and Jesse looked almost gray.
Flossie saved L. Frank Baum’s book for the afternoons, when she worked primarily on diction, and language skills. Curtis Lee might as well have been her teacher’s aide, had there been such a thing back then. His reading and language skills so outclassed those of the Wilson children that it was plain, even to them, that his level of intelligence was beyond anything they’d ever seen in a boy his age, white or black.
Flossie didn’t make any assault on the vernacular they used that first year she taught them. Just getting them to practice good enunciation and expand their vocabulary was sufficient for her. Slowly ... very slowly ... the Wilson children lost the knife-edged unrelenting hatred for those that they could no longer deny had talents of one kind or another. There was no friendship extended, to be sure, and their attitude of superiority accounted for other “accidents” that seemed to happen around the Wilson home, or to their property, but nothing could be traced to any intentional act by someone outside the household. Flossie inquired of Johnnie Sue, Luthor and Jesse, but they swore they had given up after her lecture. It was quite possible there were other people in town unhappy with Harvey Wilson. Bankers were never easy to like, it seemed.
Sadly, perhaps the brightest spot of that first year was that the Wilson Children intentionally quit talking, at home, about what they learned in school. When they got questions like “What else has that damn nigger teacher taught you that I have to unlearn you about?” they simply looked at their father with bland faces and said they studied math, or reading. Their father tested them, making them read out loud from the Bible, and do numbers long hand in front of him. And, though he was actually impressed with the advancement of his children, he never uttered a word of encouragement to them. The only reason they even knew they were doing well was when he presented them with the kind of math that was done in the bank.
“Harvey Wilson!” his wife scolded him. “You know well and good that these children can’t do that kind of ciphering! They’re doing quite well and you know it. You’re just itching for a reason to get that woman fired.”
In fact, Bernadette thought she might be able to figure out how to do the math, which involved interest percentages. But she never got the chance. Her father gave out a snort and snatched the paper from in front of her.
“Of course they can’t do proper math,” he snarled. “They’re too stupid from being schooled by a nigger!”
When, the next day, Bernadette wrote the problem she remembered seeing at home, on the board, and asked if she could try to solve it, Flossie was delighted, and gave her free rein. She had to correct the decimal point in two places, but otherwise the answer was correct. Bernadette glowed, and sat back down smiling.
There were tight, tiny smiles on the faces of her brother and sister as well.
That began a process that was built in fits and starts. Flossie was able to go much deeper into math with the Wilson children, and Curtis Lee, than she had dreamed of. The younger students weren’t interested, so that extended learning happened in the afternoons.
But the success of the older students in understanding the concepts led to requests on their part for other deeper learning. The Wilson children became expert at asking just enough at home, about this or that field of knowledge, to get either a partial answer from one or the other of their parents, or a statement that the answer to the question wasn’t important. The latter comment soon became a clear indicator that the adult asked didn’t know the answer, and the children took delight in then getting the information at school.
Children, at least those in their teens, have always thought their parents were clueless about most things. Harvey Wilson’s stubborn pride, and his wife’s meekness ... unwillingness to give an answer that her husband didn’t know (or, heaven forbid, correct him in front of the children, ) just nurtured that belief on the part of his offspring.
They never let on that they were becoming much better educated than their father was. He would snarl, “Ask your nigger teacher!” and then, later question them on what she had said. Their answers always seemed to come back to “I still don’t know, so I guess it’s not important,” and that fed his own feeling of superiority.
Teens, everywhere, have always seemed to have some special desire to make their parents’ lives a living hell, if they can do so without getting in trouble for it. The Wilson children chose to remind their parents often that, in Catfish Hollow, there was nothing for them to do, and no one of their station to visit. Picking at the sore wound that was Harvey’s fate made them feel better, even though, in their own minds, they didn’t actually lack for much. Now that “Miss Flossie” as they had taken to calling her privately, had widened their horizons, and they could all read much better, they almost always had a book hidden away that they could crack open and while away the hours with.
The upshot was that, unconsciously, the children knew that their teacher was also better educated than their father and mother. The fact that she was more than willing to give them the knowledge drew them closer to her.
And, every time Harvey got on his soap box about how the town needed a new school, and a decent teacher, he got stony faced silence. As far as the rest of the men in the town felt, he already had all their money in his damn bank ... and now he wanted them to cough up more just so his little darlings could have a nice building to fritter away their day in?
As far as lessons in English went, as it turned out, the Wilson children usually knew the proper usage of a word, but just spoke in the same vernacular of their parents, or other relatives. That caused some discussion about appropriate language.
“You need to know how to speak in different settings,” explained Flossie. “When you’re home, you use one kind of language, but if you’re in another setting, you need to be able to speak that language, to fit into That environment.”
“But it’s all just English,” complained Bernadette.
“Actually, it’s different dialects of the same language,” said Flossie. She dropped into the vernacular that older Negroes often used when they were alone. “I’s fixun to mebbe go fishin’, boss.” she drawled. Then she switched to a high-pitched voice with inflections so typically Southern white male that the children stared at her. “I cain’t unnerstand what all them niggers air talkin’ bout.” She went right on to sound like a typical white woman in those parts. “You know, Ah do declare, it’s just swelterin’ in here! Ah’d just give about any-thin for a breath of cool air!” Not stopping there she changed her voice to a dry, clipped diction that all the children recognized as Yankee. “Well, the fact of the matter is, that not a single one of those relapsed Confederates south of the Mason Dixon Line can speak a word of proper English!”
She stopped to see what the reaction was.
“I understood everything you said,” said Hilda Mae. “And you used that word, too, by the way!” She raised her chin. “That word you said was a hurtful word.”
“It’s a word people use,” said Flossie. “It’s a hurtful word, but I’m sure you’ll hear that word used many many times in your life. The point is that, depending on who you’re with, you may want to be able to change the way you speak so that you fit in better. That Means you need to study language in all of its aspects, and be aware of how you, and others around you, are speaking.”
“There was this man,” said Nathan. “He came to our house selling brushes and all sorts of things. He was from someplace up North. I remember I couldn’t hardly understand a word he said. Mamma wouldn’t even let him in the house.”
“It’s very uncomfortable when you’re around people who speak differently than you do,” said Flossie nodding. “It can be frustrating too. That man would sell a lot more brushes if he learned to speak like the customers he was talking to.”
She got a nod from Nathan, which, to Flossie, seemed like a real accomplishment.
“If you never leave Catfish Hollow, you could speak like you do now for the rest of your lives,” said Flossie. “But, if you’re going to see the world, or look for a job somewhere else, it will pay you to learn how to speak properly so that people don’t stare at you, or make fun of you.”
“I’d just die if I had to stay in Catfish Hollow for the rest of my life,” said Hilda Mae, looking forlorn. “But darned if I know what I could do anyplace else.”
There was one incident, that year, that resulted in intense excitement. When Flossie had written to her uncle, Daniel Pendergast, and had told him about Nathan’s reaction to her re-telling of his exploits in the war, she had asked him to send pictures, or some other kind of evidence she could use to convince the white students that a Negro could fly. He did her one better.
Daniel, after the war, wanted to keep flying. He could find no job as a pilot, since people still wouldn’t hire a black man. But he had made some white friends in the war, and, together with one of them, they started their own crop dusting company. They found an old beat up plane, renovated it, and went into business. The white partner was the “face” of the company, dealing face to face with customers, most of whom were white. Daniel flew the plane. Nobody on the ground knew the difference. The business prospered, and they bought more planes. Eventually, Daniel flew because he wanted to, and not because he had to.
When he got Flossie’s letter, he simply chose the plane he wanted, got into it, and flew off. He had grown up in Catfish Hollow, and gone to the same school his niece was teaching at, so he knew exactly where he was going, and exactly what the terrain was like, assuming no major changes had been made. He didn’t expect any.
He buzzed the school house, grinning behind his goggles, and then worried that the air turbulence and vibration of his passage might have just knocked the building down. He went into a tight left turn, climbing steeply and looked down to see the building still standing, and small dots of people running out of it. He buzzed them again, this time going well clear of the structure itself, and coming to within twenty feet of the ground. He wagged his wings and went through a series of acrobatics that were second nature to him now. He ended up with a few low level barrel rolls as he flew directly over the heads of the people in the yard. He had already noted which direction the dust drifted after one of his low level stunts kicked some up, so he lined up and landed, rolling to a stop twenty feet from the cluster of people.
He hopped out, pulled off his goggles, and strode over to give a grinning Flossie a hug.
“How’s my favorite niece?” he asked.
“I’m your only niece,” she grinned, slapping his arm. She turned. “Children, I’d like you to meet my uncle, Daniel Pendergast. I told you about him during our session on the air war.”
The reaction was all that either Flossie or Daniel could have hoped for. Nathan was stunned, completely speechless. When the plane had rocked the whole school building during that first pass, and dust and plaster had dropped from the ceiling, accompanied by a roar that shook their bones, there had been general panic. Running out into the yard had been instinctive for all of them. Then the plane came by again, wind from its passage washing over all of them, flipping skirts up, making hair fly and generally scaring the pee out of them. Shouts of “Who is it?” and “What’s he doing?” rang out. Then, as the acrobatics commenced, Nathan had uttered the fateful words.
“Now that’s a pilot!” His eyes had never left the dipping, turning aircraft as he went on. “That’s the kind of thing no nigger could ever do!”
When Daniel landed, and got out of the plane, Nathan’s world had fallen apart.
Flossie didn’t rub it in. She acted, in fact, as if he had never said anything.
“Anybody want to take a ride?” asked Daniel, grinning.
For poor children in the South, even getting to see an airplane up close was a treat of the first magnitude. The thought of getting to be in one, and off the ground caused bedlam.
It wasn’t much, in terms of how we’d think about a ride today. He packed two or three kids in the extra seat, belting them all together, took off, flew in circles for a few minutes, and then landed. When the first group, which consisted of Curtis Lee, and two eight year olds, got back safely, and Curtis Lee couldn’t wipe the almost painful looking grin off his face, Bernadette and Hilda Mae insisted on going next. They went together and were chattering non-stop upon their return. Daniel didn’t do anything radical with the kids on board. He just flew them around for a bit, banking sharply so they could see the ground. That was more than sufficient. Nathan objected when his sisters went up, but they ignored him. In the end he and Flossie were the only ones left who hadn’t flown.
“Anybody else?” Daniel said, looking around as if there were tens of others who hadn’t gone yet. All of the children who had already ridden jumped up and down, their hands in the air, begging to go again.
“I couldn’t leave the children,” said Flossie, looking yearningly at the airplane.
Curtis Lee stepped forward. “Ruth Ann and I can watch them,” he offered. “And Nathan too, if he doesn’t want to go.”
Curtis Lee’s statement could be received in two ways, if someone tried. It could be received as “Curtis Lee, Ruth Ann and Nathan will watch the others” or “Curtis Lee and Ruth Ann will watch the others and Nathan”. The second way, of course, suggested that Nathan needed watching, and that’s how Nathan heard it.
“I don’t need to be took care of by the likes of you!“ he said angrily.
“If Nathan wants to go, I’ll stay here,” said Flossie, ignoring the outburst.
“You can go fly in that thing if you want to,” said Nathan sulking. “I’m staying right here on the ground where it’s safe.”
So Flossie got her ride, during which Daniel put the plane through its paces again, doing barrel rolls as it flashed over the screaming kids. Flossie could also be heard, very faintly, screaming at her uncle. When they landed, a laughing Daniel had to help her walk because her knees were so shaky. As they approached the children, she was heard to say “I think I need to change my pants!”
Something twisted inside of Nathan as the plane rose from the ground, bumping over the ground of a fallow field next to the school house, and lifted into the air one last time. He had wanted badly to get in that airplane, and see what the world looked like from up there. His pride had kept him from it, though, and he was quite aware of that. As the plane wagged its wings one last time in farewell, and lifted higher, he wondered if that pride was worth it.
About then the constable drove up in his battered 1938 Chevrolet. He got out, hat firmly on his head, and waddled over to the group.
“Saw the plane from town,” he said shortly. “Thought there might be some problem.”
“Not at all,” said Flossie, still a little breathless from her ride. “The pilot was helping the children understand how airplanes work. We’re studying flight in school this week.”
She lied right in front of the children. All of them knew that they weren’t studying flight at all, and never had. Most of the children knew why she lied. If the townspeople found out she had let the children go up with a Negro pilot, all Hell would break loose. It wouldn’t matter that everyone had gotten back safely. All that would matter was that the pilot was a nigger.
“Quite some pilot,” commented the constable.
“Yes,” said Flossie as if everything were completely normal. “I met him while I was in college. He was nice enough to show the children all about the plane. He flew in the war.”
“Thought so,” said the constable. “Flew like my nephew talks about. He was a fighter pilot in the war, Harry was. He might know the feller that was helping you out. What’s his name? I could ask Harry.”
“What theater did your nephew fly in?” asked Flossie, instead of answering the question.
“Flew Corsairs in the Pacific,” said the constable.
“I don’t think this man would know him then,” said Flossie calmly. “He flew Mustangs in Europe.” She turned around. “Well! Now that the fun is over, I ‘spect we’d best get back to work! Inside, children.” She turned to the constable. “Thank you for your concern. I’m sure that if there had been a problem we would have needed you. It’s good to know you are vigilant as usual.”
The man grinned, hitched up the belt around his waist, upon which hung a .38 revolver, and actually tipped his hat. Then he got in his car and rolled away. Flossie faced the receding car, waving, until it went out of sight, while Curtis Lee and Ruth Ann started herding the children back into the building. Nathan hung back.
“Why did you lie to him?” asked Nathan.
“I lied to him because he’s just like you ... or like you were before Daniel landed here. He would never believe that a Negro could fly a plane, or take the children for a ride safely. Had I told him the truth, it would have caused a lot of trouble.”
“Oh,” he said, unsure what to say. He was seeing things from a black perspective for perhaps the first time in his life. “I guess so.”
“It would still cause problems if you told your parents about it,” said Flossie, her heart in her mouth. She went on, despite her nervousness about taking this chance. “That would give your father everything he needs to have me fired.”
Nathan thought about the last few things she had said. She had just assumed that he thought about things differently now than he had in the past. That was true. He couldn’t deny that. When he said “no nigger could fly like that” he was aware that he had used a word that he was trying to stop using. Then, when he was too proud and embarrassed to take a ride, she had gone, even though it was clear the idea frightened her. He had heard her screams in the plane ... heard that she was clearly terrified ... yet she had clamped down on that terror, and recuperated quickly. She had stood and lied bald faced to the law, which put her in danger, and had trusted all the students not to betray her. And they hadn’t. Not a one. Not even himself! Every one of them knew it was wrong to lie, yet not one of them had said a word to gainsay her. Yet, she had lied only as little as she had to. That too was obvious. Many of the things she had said were carefully true. She had just left out the things that would cause trouble. And he knew that he lied sometimes, and that, when he lied, it was usually for the purpose of staying out of trouble too. He also thought about how wrong he had been. Even the constable had seen how skilled the pilot was. Nathan Wilson felt something very close to shame.
“I won’t tell them,” he said finally. “I’ll make sure my sisters don’t either.”
“Thank you, Nathan,” said Flossie gently. She didn’t remind him that he owed her an apology.
Chapter 4
It would have been natural for the other children to needle Nathan about his comments about how “niggers couldn’t possibly fly a plane”. Flossie didn’t want any of that, so she simply used the whole incident as an example of how, if you don’t have all the facts, you can sometimes come to a conclusion that is in error.
“Just because you’re wrong about something doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world,” she said. “It can cause trouble because you’re operating on a basis that is false, but, if you’re willing to learn and change, you can correct problems like that. Nathan had an opinion that was in error. He has learned some things, and his opinion has changed accordingly. That’s what education is all about.”
She then went on to name several things that other children had believed, and which had been proven wrong. By the time she was done, it seemed like what Nathan had done was not only ordinary, but not worth talking about any more either.
That incident also led to a revival of identifying more black inventors in class. The first one popped into her mind as one of the children asked to use the pencil sharpener. She explained that a man named John Lee Love, whose parents had been slaves. He had improved the common pencil sharpener by enclosing it so that the shavings didn’t drop on the floor.
The next one came on what Flossie called a field trip. It was really just an excuse to get out in the air and get some exercise after a long session on Government that had been boring to most of the kids. She took them on a walk to identify native plants that were good for food and medicinal uses, and saw a man plowing a field with a mule.
“See the plow that man is using?” she asked. “Does anybody know what it’s called?”
“It’s a Beard plow,” said Luthor instantly. “My daddy has one, but we haven’t used it for a couple of years. He got one that goes on the three point hitch of the tractor and we use that now.”
Several other students said their parents had a plow like that too, some of them still in use, like the one they were looking at.
“It was invented by a man named Andrew Beard, in 1887. He was born a slave in Alabama. He took the money he got from inventing that plow and put it into real estate. He owned hundreds of properties, and was a very rich man.”
Of course she also talked about the inventions of white people, which weren’t hard to come by at all, but in the process also made sure to emphasize that they came from all different kinds of cultures, whether it be German, French, Russian or whatever.
Their study of planting cycles brought out that Benjamin Banneker, a black man, created the Farmer’s Almanac in 1791, and that almost every farmer, black or white, still used it religiously to this day.
In studying science, the subject of changes in food came up. Things had been canned at home for as long as any of them could remember. Now, though, there were new products showing up in the General Store. Meat in packages from the store lasted longer before it went bad, and store-bought ice cream didn’t melt quite as quickly as it did when you made it at home. The addition of chemicals, preservatives and processes to food production was discussed.
That gave Flossie an opportunity to talk about advances that women had made. She told them that the coffee filter, which was invented in 1908 by Melitta Bentz, a housewife in Germany. She invented it because she was tired of getting grounds in her mouth, that went from the brewing pot to the cup.
Hilda Mae commented that, at their house, coffee wasn’t brewed at all. They had a jar of Nescafe in the cupboard, and their mother just added it to hot water. Flossie suggested that she should research how instant coffee was invented, and make a report on that to the class. Hilda Mae wrote to the address on the coffee jar in her cabinet, asking for the information, and learned that Japanese American man named Satori Kato, invented instant coffee in 1901. He had noticed that the dregs of a cup of coffee, when they dried, formed a powder that could be reconstituted into dark liquid. Nescafe had invented the freeze drying concept in 1938, and it was their opinion that one could not tell the difference between a cup of fresh brewed coffee and their product. They sent her samples of their product, and their thanks for her interest.
That led to an experiment in school. A fire was built outside, and coffee was brewed normally. They didn’t have a filter - most people in those parts didn’t spend money on things like that - but Hilda Mae let the coffee pot sit, and then poured carefully to make sure no grounds got into the cup. Another pot had boiling water in it. She had Flossie help her add instant coffee to a cup of boiling water until they were about the same color, and Flossie said they tasted about the same. Identical cups were used, and, before they went inside, they changed cups back and forth several times, in case someone had been peeking through the window to see which coffee went into which cup.
Coffee was sipped, and opinions were formed. Nathan sipped the real coffee and said “Now that is the real McCoy.”
And THAT led to Flossie pulling out her book, and showing the class information on how a black man named Elijah McCoy, in 1872, invented an automatic lubricator for steam locomotives that freed the engineer from having to stop often to squirt or pour oil into the various parts of the engine. This was wildly popular with the operators of trains, because it improved efficiency and made the engines last much longer between rebuilds. Others tried to invent their own systems, but by 1880, train manufacturers were inundated with requests for “The Real McCoy” lubricating system. In his later life, Elijah McCoy became a consultant to the entire railroad industry.
Little by little, the Wilson children were exposed to information that altered many of the preconceptions they had about race, and gender, and the worth of people, regardless of both of those descriptions.
Thus passed the first year of the Wilson children’s exposure to the woman who would change their lives in ways they couldn’t comprehend, even had they tried.
The summer break between that first and second year was also momentous, though none of the children in the Catfish Hollow Public School would have said so. For most of them, it was a typical summer ... work hard all day, and play at night. For three of them, there was nothing to gauge it by, and they were more or less miserable.
Nathan, wanting like any young man to have some money in his pocket, wanted to get a job. From his viewpoint, he didn’t much care what he did. From his father’s, his choice of employment was critical.
“Don’t you go gettin’ no job that trash should do,” scowled Harvey, when Nathan first voiced is desire to enter the work force.
“In this town?” asked Nathan, his voice high. “What else will there be to do?”
“You don’t need a job!” was his father’s reply. “What would you spend money on anyway?”
“A car!” said Nathan instantly. “Maybe a record player.”
The girls approved of that idea, and approved loudly.
That got his father on another rampage. Even in the South, the radio played the Beach Boys, and Elvis Presley and all those other heathens who got youngsters wagging their asses around like a bitch in heat. He would be damned if his “precious babies” would sway their hips like a common whore, in front of decent people.
In the end, Harvey pronounced that, if Nathan had someplace to go that was suitable, and approved by his parents, he could take the station wagon. There would be no devil rock and roll music brought into the house.
And Harvey drove the wedge between himself and his children a little deeper.
One result of that was that the Wilson children dusted off their bicycles, which they hadn’t ridden for years. It was a way to get away from the house, without specifying a particular place they were going. Riding bikes was accepted by their parents as a healthy pursuit. They didn’t think about the fact that it also gave their children freedom to engage in other pursuits.
The other thing that happened, was of a much less violent nature, though its effects would be felt by the children for the rest of their lives.
Bernadette, while wandering through the small town library, picked up a copy of a Nancy Drew mystery, titled “The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion.” She was first drawn to it because of the picture on the faded hard-back cover.
The old woman who ran the library in the parlor of her house, looked up from the needle work she was doing.
“That’s a good one,” she commented. “I’ve got some more around here somewhere. Got ‘em in a box that was donated from up Wilksburg way.”
“Donated?” asked Bernadette.
“Yup, that Curtis Lee boy ast me one time where books go when nobody wants ‘em any more. I laughed, ‘course, cause I ain’t never throw’d a book out. But it got me to wund’rin, so I called up to the librarian up in Wilksburg, and ast her what they do when a book is wore out. Durned if she didn’t say they thow ‘em away! So I ast her if she’d start thowin’ ‘em away in our direction. I get a box full once or twice a year. They was a bunch of them Nancy Drew books in one of ‘em. They’s seen better days, but they’s mighty nice stories, and pop’lar with young’uns like you.”
So Bernadette checked the book out and took it home.
She was enthralled.
She was so enthralled that she didn’t respond when her sister came to the bedroom door and told her it was supper time. When Hilda Mae had to come back again, she was naturally curious about what was so fascinating. When Bernadette finished the book that very night, she was so effusive in her description of the story that Hilda Mae started reading it in the morning.
Both of them visited Miz Hopkins’ library that afternoon, to return “The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion,” and to get their hands on any other Nancy Drew mysteries she had.
There were, as it turned out, seven tattered books in Miz Hopkins’ collection, some of them printed clear back in the 1930s. All had hard backs, though, and other than having been handled by countless hands, and having loose bindings, they were imminently readable.
The girls checked out all seven. The titles, for the most part, don’t matter to the telling of this story, but two of them would have a far reaching impact on the sisters, and others in this story. Those were “The Secret in the Old Attic”, where Nancy searched a cluttered attic in a rundown mansion for valuable musical manuscripts, and the other was “The Hidden Staircase”, in which Nancy strives to find the “ghost” who is trying to drive the Turnbull sisters out of their mansion, and finds a hidden staircase.
Why it mattered was because three of the stories that had inflamed the imaginations of the Wilson sisters had to do with old, run-down mansions.
And the town of Catfish Hollow had its own mysterious mansion.
They found that out when they ran into Curtis Lee at Miz Hopkins’ library when they were returning some of the books. They hadn’t seen Curtis Lee since school let out, of course, and seeing the boy who had, in some small way, opened their eyes to Nancy Drew caused what could only be called, these days, as a feeling of friendship. It was a decidedly odd feeling for both girls ... to be ... happy ... to see a Negro.
But, being young and full of excitement about their newfound hobby they chattered to him about the books, and Curtis Lee told them about the mansion.
“Now don’t you go fillin’ the heads of those precious girls with all that nonsense,” drawled Miz Hopkins. “That old place is a-fallin’ down, and all that fiddle about ghosts is just horse pucky!”
“Ghosts?!” squealed both girls together.
The only way they could get any more information was to take Curtis Lee somewhere else. That presented a problem. No self-respecting white girl would walk down the street in the company of a colored boy, much less beg him for information.
And that led to their first secret meeting with a boy of the Negroid race.
To be truthful, both girls felt like they were amateur sleuths themselves, whispering to Curtis Lee that they had to talk to him, and then ordering him to identify someplace where they could meet in private. Curtis Lee, painfully aware of the danger he could be placed in, said the first thing that came to his mind.
“The school house,” he said.
“Now how in tarnation are we going to get all the way out there?” asked Bernadette in an exasperated voice.
“It’s only a couple of miles,” he said softly. “Walk.”
The assignation was arranged, but the girls weren’t willing to walk to get there. Truth be told, their bicycles would have solved that problem, but there was also a reluctance to meet a Negro boy alone.
So they decided to enlist their brother to borrow the car and take them. While neither of them had any particular fears concerning Curtis Lee, now that they had been around him so much, they just felt better knowing that Nathan would be along.
Truth still being told, there was another reason they wanted their brother along. Nancy Drew had Ned Nickerson to go with her sometimes, and while Nathan was a far cry from Ned, he was at least a male. It was part of their fantasy that an older boy would accompany them, watch out for them and be at their beck and call.
Getting Nathan to go along with the plan was easier than either of them had dreamed. Nathan wasn’t caught up in a summer long romance with Nancy Drew and her pals. Nathan was bored. And getting the chance to drive was all he needed. Of course they couldn’t explain where they were actually going, but when the girls told their mother they wanted to gather some wild flowers from “out in the country”, to press in their Bibles, they appealed to exactly the thing Marian had been hoping to see - some genteel notion of beauty and poetry in her daughters.
When it was discussed at supper that night, and Harvey’s expected objections to “an outing” were voiced, his wife reminded him that he had promised Nathan could practice driving, and that the girls could have a proper picnic along the way.
“Besides,” she muttered. “With the girls along he won’t be able to drive all wild and crazy.” She turned to the girls. “You’ll tattle on him if he does, right?”
Both girls grinned and curls flew everywhere as their heads nodded energetically.
The three of them walked down to the bank the next morning, picnic basket in hand, and Nathan went in to get the keys to the station wagon.
His father ignored him for as long as he could, obviously dragging out a conversation with a farmer who had come, hat in hand, trying to get money to try that new pesticide stuff that was being raved about so much.
“I’ll check into it, neighbor,” beamed Harvey finally, when it was obvious the man wanted to leave. “Check back with me in a day or two. I should know something about the risks and benefits by then.”
He scowled at Nathan, dragging the keys out of his pocket.
“Don’t you go spinnin’ the tires!” he barked. “That ve-hicle is the only one we got, and I won’t have you tearin’ it up!”
“I’m just practicing driving, Daddy,” whined Nathan, his eyes glued to the keys. “I’ll be careful.”
“An’ I’d better not have to walk home,” growled Harvey. “It wouldn’t be seemly for the town banker to be walkin’ home.”
“We’ll be back in plenty of time,” promised Nathan. “You can drive yourself home just like always.”
“Just see to it!” the man said sternly.
Harvey winced and almost ran outside when he heard the grinding of gears, and the car starting up again after stalling. But another customer came in and grabbed his elbow, anxious to talk about a late loan payment. He stared out the window with dismay on his face as the station wagon got moving and weaved slightly down the street.
For the Wilson children, it was an adventure of the greatest magnitude. The girls squealed and rolled down all the windows, hopping around in the back seat, while Nathan, grim faced and embarrassed, at first, slowly got more confidence and eventually grinned inanely. The drive to the school was short ... so short that Nathan had only gotten a taste and didn’t want to stop to listen to his sisters jaw on about some books they had read. They hadn’t told him about a mansion or ghosts, thinking he’d laugh at them. They had only told him that Curtis Lee was going to help them with some reading. By now, the thought of Curtis Lee helping them with reading didn’t seem odd to him at all. And he knew that both of them had had their noses pasted inside one book or another for the last two weeks. Their sighs and moans of excitement while reading those books had ... almost ... caused him to inquire as to what was so interesting. But he was the older brother, and whatever interested his baby sisters was surely nothing he’d be interested in.
“I’m gonna drop you off and keep practicin’,” he announced as he pulled up in front of the school.
“No! You can’t!” cried Bernadette. “We can’t go in there and be alone with Curtis Lee!”
“Why not?” asked Nathan, looking into the rear view mirror at them. He had no fears about Curtis Lee any longer either.
“Cause we’re gonna talk about a haunted mansion!” squealed Hilda Mae.
Bernadette slapped at her sister’s arm, which Nathan saw in the mirror. That caused him to turn around and demand to know more. In the end, he went in with them. His boredom played no little part in that too.
The girls weren’t the only ones who brought somebody else with them in the interests of security, or peace of mind. Curtis Lee was aware, despite the Wilson children’s general softening attitude toward colored folk, that meeting the girls alone could be a recipe for disaster. His reinforcements were in the persons of Luthor, Johnnie Sue and Moses Finshaw, a quiet fifteen year old black boy in their class.
Jesse couldn’t convince his father to let him have a day off to “go gallivanting around”. Moses’ parents thought he was off fishing. Luthor had used the same excuse, and Johnnie Sue had invented an invitation to the Wilson house. Her mother was more astonished than she let on, and elated that her tomboy daughter was finally showing an interest in the company of other girls, not to mention that the girls in question had such high station. Johnnie Sue also promised to pick up some thread at the store for her mother while she was in town.
So it was that there was a ‘reunion’ of sorts, involving all the oldest children in the class, with the exception of Jesse. That there was an almost immediate confrontational atmosphere didn’t seem strange at all. The Wilson children were still considered outsiders, (uppity too, in private) and they hadn’t seen any of their classmates for over a month.
“How come all of them are here?” Nathan asked Curtis Lee, his jaw jutting slightly as he pointed to the other three.
Curtis Lee felt anger begin to seep into him, and instead of answering he faced the girls and said “Why’d you bring him?”
“He drove us here,” explained Bernadette.
“Well it about scared the poop out of us!” said Johnnie Sue explosively. “When we saw that car coming into the yard we thought it was your Daddy and about died!”
Nathan, being reminded that he wasn’t out driving the car, got impatient.
“What’s all this about ghosts?” he demanded.
For the telling of this story, we’ll skip over all the part where the Wilson girls, intermixed with commentary by Curtis Lee, told the story of why they were all there. They all knew why they were there, but when a bunch of teenagers get together there has to be a lot of unnecessary talk for some reason. Once the preliminaries were out of the way, it still took an hour for the four relatively long-time residents of the town to cobble together the story of the mansion. That was because adults didn’t talk to children about the mansion. They simply forbade them to go near it. So, the information that each person had was only what had been gleaned from overhearing the adults talk about the place to each other.
The kids had, of course, compared notes to some degree, but for the most part the house, and what it had been, was more or less ignored by everyone in those parts.
The structure that had brought all these young people together on this day, defying social norm by a mixed-race meeting when it wasn’t required, didn’t even have a name. At least none that any of the kids had ever heard. It was an old plantation house, built before the “unsettling conflict” and which had been partially destroyed in that same war. It was a two story structure, classically antebellum, with four tall columns supporting the front overhanging balcony. An attempt by Union soldiers to burn it had fizzled when they had to leave before the job was fully done. One corner of the house had been virtually destroyed, though. The master of the house was reputed to have put up a stirring defense, but was killed. No one knew quite what had happened to the womenfolk, but there were dark stories about how the slaves were freed by the Yankees, but did not leave for some time. Those dark stories were of murder and rape, and were responsible for the additional belief that the ghosts of the victims still resided in the house.
That was the information imparted to the Wilson children on that summer morning. There was more that they were not aware of, and that might have tempered the subsequent decisions that were made that morning.
In fact, the surviving family members of the owner of the plantation had already fled when the Union soldiers arrived and killed the plantation owner when he fired upon them. They planned on taking what they needed from the place, and moving on, but when fired upon, they retaliated. Once they had killed the owner, and told the cowering slaves they were free to go, they did take what they needed, set fire to the house, and rode off to seek more men to do battle with. The slaves, having no idea what to do, hung around for days. They even kept tending the fields for a while. Slowly, the bolder ones drifted away in small groups. It took longer for the more timid to believe they could strike out on their own. None of them entered the mansion, or took anything, because they were quite sure they’d be killed immediately if found in possession of the master’s belongings.
More troops, from both sides, passed by the wreck, and were not so timid about taking what they wanted. Much of the furniture was used in cook fires. By the war’s end, the place was a wreck and the fields overgrown. Those fields were ‘annexed’ by the farmers who neighbored them, and it was in those farmers’ best interests that the owners never re-appear. Nor was it desired that outsiders have much interest in the property. Thus began the rumors that spirits with foul moods inhabited the structure. More parts of it were removed, including the slave quarters in total, as well as all other outbuildings, to facilitate the rebuilding of other homes in the area. Eventually all that was left was the falling down mansion house, surrounded by weeds and trees, a small ecosystem surrounded by fields. Eventually, property rights were re-established, and the small plot of land that nobody could show claim to was taken over by the county. Because there was no available tillable land around it, and no real way to get to it, and because the cost of clearing the land was more than any of the neighboring farmers was willing (or able) to expend, it lay in the county records until it was forgotten. On the face of it, there was almost nothing of value left in the place.
But, as was said, the children didn’t know those parts of the story. All they knew was that the war had emptied the place, and that people had died violent deaths there, and that strange lights and eerie sounds came from its haunted shell.
The Wilson girls, of course, having just read several stories about old mansions, and the amazing and valuable things that could be found in them, let their imaginations run free.
“We have to go there!” said Hilda Mae excitedly.
“Nobody goes there,” said Moses, wide-eyed.
“Why would you even want to go there?” asked Curtis Lee.
That led to a discussion about Nancy Drew, and another hour was taken up as the tales were retold.
“Who knows what kind of treasure could be hidden in that place?” asked Bernadette, almost panting with excitement.
“There’s nothing there,” said Johnnie Sue, her voice soft. She looked startled that she’d spoken, and Luthor elbowed her.
“What do you mean? How do you know?” asked Hilda Mae.
Johnnie Sue and Luthor were exchanging dark looks.
“We might as well tell them!” said Johnnie Sue.
“We swore we would never tell anybody!“ came back Luthor.
“Tell us what?“ came several voices.
Luthor looked around and gave a ferocious frown.
“Oh, go ahead then! You already opened up your big mouth!” he said to Johnnie Sue.
The girl beamed. “We went there one time!” she said excitedly. “I even went inside!”
She got round-eyed looks from everyone except Luthor.
“It was on a dare!” she went on animatedly. “Jesse dared me to go in there and I did it!”
“Jesse?” asked Curtis Lee instantly.
“Jimminy cricket, Johnnie Sue!” exploded Luthor. “Have you lost your mind?“
Johnnie Sue looked pale as she stared around the circle of faces ... staring back at her.
“Um ... we were going somewhere one day,” she said, her eyes darting around, “and we went by there. That’s all.”
“Where would you and Luthor and Jesse be going to that’s way out there?” asked Moses.
“Don’t you want to know what it was like inside that house?” asked Johnnie Sue, desperately trying to change the subject.
“I want to know what you were doing way out there together!” said Curtis Lee heavily.
Something in Johnnie Sue snapped. Fire came into her eyes. Luthor knew her as well as any brother would know his sister by now, and he groaned as she took a breath.
“We were out there together because we’re friends!“ she shouted. “We do all kinds of things together because we like each other! And we went there to have an adventure! And Jesse dared me to go inside and I did it! Now what are you gonna do about it?!” she ended up yelling.
“You’re friends with a nigger?” asked Nathan, his voice shaky.
He’s not a nigger you stuff shirted cracker!” screamed Johnnie Sue. “He’s a boy, and he’s nice and he can climb a tree quicker than anybody I know and I don’t care if the whole damn world knows he’s my friend!” She had screamed so long and so loud that her voice cracked at the end.
There is an intricate and complicated social organization among teenagers, something they don’t really understand, and which adults don’t think about all that much. It isn’t so much like layers of onion skin, as it is like spaghetti, with different strands of consciousness passing by others, sometimes touching, and affecting each other in small degrees. Part of that phenomenon involves a teen standing up for something he or she believes in. That is powerfully recognized by other teens. Especially when what she believe in flies in the face of social norm. That ‘renegade’ aspect in teenagers is quite commonly seen by adults as something undesirable. But it can often appeal quite strongly to other teens, especially when, in their own eyes, following the ‘norm’ isn’t all that appealing.
For Curtis Lee and Moses, the concept of having a white ‘friend’ was odd, certainly controversial, but not abhorrent. They liked most of the white children they knew, and not a few white adults. Curtis Lee, for example, had a great fondness for Miz Hopkins, even though she treated him with segregationist tendencies.
For the Wilson children the notion, of putting ‘Negro’ (to put it nicely) and ‘friend’ together as a concept, was just fantastic. It was something like saying you could eat ... octopus, for example. Who’d ever heard of such a thing?
Still, while racism was fully inculcated into their upbringing, the Wilson children had been exposed to blacks in the last year much more intimately than before that, and that exposure had affected them in ways they couldn’t have explained. It left them unsure about how to proceed.
“Why would you want to be friends with a ni ... Negro?” asked Bernadette.
Johnnie Sue’s anger had flowed out of her along with the breath it took to scream her emotions and beliefs. It had been replaced with a dread that now made her almost limp. If her parents found out she had been inside the haunted mansion, not to mention announcing she was friends with a black child, she’d be grounded for the rest of her life.
“I told you,” she said listlessly. “We go fishing together, and explore together,” She glanced at Luthor, who looked serious, and went on. “and Luthor is the same. I like doing things with both of them. We have fun together. I like Luthor, and I like Jesse. I just don’t understand why I’m supposed to treat Jesse different than Luthor.”
Curtis Lee turned to Luthor.
“And you knew about this?” he asked.
Luthor ground his teeth. But he’d sworn an oath, and he couldn’t break the part of it that was most important.
“He’s my friend too. We do lots of stuff together.”
“Wow,” said Hilda Mae. She looked at Johnnie Sue curiously, as if she expected to be able to see some difference in her, now that she knew this girl ... mixed ... with ... She didn’t even know what to call them any more, she realized. She found that curious.
“Why is that so hard to understand?” asked Johnnie Sue, revived a little by the fact that people hadn’t stampeded out to tell the world her secret. “Didn’t you three come here to talk to Curtis Lee? Why would you want to come talk to a ... nigger?” Her voice was harsh on the last word.
“That’s different!” said Bernadette, looking startled.
“Why?” asked Johnnie Sue. “Just because you wanted to talk about the mansion? When I go places with Luthor and Jesse we talk about stuff. What’s the difference?”
“I just ... I mean ... we were going to...” she trailed off.
“And didn’t you just sit here and tell us all about the books you read, and how cool they were?” asked Johnnie Sue. “You made me want to read those books. Weren’t we all standing around here talking ... like friends?”
“But we can’t be friends with you!” moaned Bernadette.
“Why ... because we’re trash? Because we’re niggers?” asked Johnnie Sue.
“You’re not a nigger,” blurted Nathan. “You’re a nigger-lover.”
“See?” shouted Johnnie Sue again. “Why do you have to say such hurtful things, just because I want to have friends? Me being friends with Jesse, or Moses or Curtis Lee can’t hurt you! Me being friends with you can’t hurt me.” She put her hands on her hips and tossed her head. “Though why I ever thought about being friends with you I don’t know!”
“But...” spluttered Nathan.
“But nothing!“ shouted Johnnie Sue. “Didn’t Hilda Mae say she wanted to go to the mansion? How are you going to get there? You don’t have the faintest idea where it is, and no grownup is going to tell you. You’d have to be taken there by one of us. And why would any of us want to do that? That’s what a friend would do, you idiot!“ she shouted, her voice cracking again.
“Damn!” said Nathan, frustrated by the logic in her argument.
“You better watch your mouth,” said Hilda Mae instinctively to her brother’s outburst.
Perhaps because she was the youngest Wilson child, and therefore the most adaptable, her opinion about all this was conflicted. Being reminded that she wanted to go see this haunted mansion, though, combined with the overload Carolyn Keene’s books had caused in her imagination recently, caused her to come down on this side of radical thought.
She went on, facing her brother. “You can just go drive around in circles. Bernadette and I want to go see that mansion.”
Bernadette looked confused, thinking about all these new ideas, and her own desire to see a haunted mansion.
“This is crazy!“ whined Nathan, not sure exactly which part of all this he was talking about.
“I told you ... there’s nothing there,” said Johnnie Sue.
“Did you go into the attic?” asked Hilda Mae. “Did you explore the whole house?”
“Well ... no,” admitted Johnnie Sue. “But I went in the front door and stood where the staircase used to be. It was creepy, though, so I left.”
“Maybe there’s a hidden staircase.” Bernadette’s imagination was re-fired. “You know, like the one in the book.” she suggested.
“I don’t know about that,” said Johnnie Sue uncertainly.
“Well, don’t you want to know?” asked Hilda Mae, pushing her advantage.
Then, as quite often happens when teenagers are involved, exceedingly strange concepts were pushed aside, to talk about something less troubling, and of more immediate interest. In the process of doing that, however, there was a hint of defacto acceptance that friendships could be made that, before this meeting, would have been considered impossible.
The conversation turned to logistics. At the upper levels of unconscious thought, as was common in segregated parts of the U.S., there were things that could be done openly, and things that couldn’t. All of the young people present had those thoughts firmly in their mind, albeit unconsciously, and, despite the fact that they were acting, more or less (and somewhat tentatively) as a group of friends, they knew that they could not do this thing publicly. The most momentous part of the whole process was that no one thought of the simplest solution to the logistics of getting a group of black and white youths together ... that of simply banning the blacks from participating.
For the Wilson Children, room to maneuver was the primary problem. They couldn’t drive to the property, because the roads had been plowed over decades ago and planted in crops. Even had the roads been open, trying to put the others in the car without anyone seeing them would be almost impossible. Their understanding of the time it took to walk or run somewhere was fuzzy, at best. They cold ride their bikes, but they didn’t know how long that would take either. So the primary logistical problem was in determining how long it would take to do the exploration, and when everybody could get that much time apart from families without raising suspicions. The thought of actually asking parental permission, of course, was not contemplated.
Sunday afternoon was the obvious answer. It wasn’t a work day, and the adults would all be sitting around relaxing.
“Mamma always watches Lassie,” said Bernadette, “and Daddy won’t miss the Ed Sullivan Show. If we rode our bikes we could move a lot faster, and go where there aren’t roads. Maybe we can be back by then anyway.”
It never occurred to them that the other children might not have bikes.
Then the discussion turned to what equipment would be needed to do the exploration. Johnnie Sue said that, if they wanted to get to the upper story, they’d have to have some way of climbing, because the stairs were missing. A ladder was dismissed immediately, but Moses said he had a rope he could bring. Luthor wanted to bring a hatchet... “just in case” ... whatever that meant.
“You’ll have to wear jeans,” said Johnnie Sue to Bernadette and Hilda Mae. “You do have jeans ... don’t you?”
“Of course we have jeans!” said an outraged Bernadette. “And I have tennis shoes too!”
“Well, all I’ve ever seen you in is a dress,” explained Johnnie Sue.
“Just because we dress like girls,” said Bernadette, glaring at Johnnie Sue meaningfully, “doesn’t mean we’re strange!”
And so, the grand adventure was planned. The following Sunday, assuming it didn’t rain, the event would take place. Johnnie Sue insisted on inviting Jesse, and that was agreed to without comment.
Chapter 5
On the fateful day, the Wilson children - Nathan included, even though he was having grave reservations about the whole plan - rode away from home and met Luthor on the front porch of the General Store. He had two fishing poles with him, as cover. It was all he could get together, but while people would expect Nathan to have one if he was in company with Luthor, walking someplace, they might not think it odd that the girls didn’t have poles.
The store was closed, of course, it being Sunday, and no one was around. Feeling like a spy of some kind, Luthor got off the porch when he saw them coming, and wandered off between the store and the barber shop, which was next door. Anyone who noticed them would have seen that it was obvious the three were following him, but thankfully, there was no one around to notice. He handed the extra pole to Nathan, just in case. Nathan understood instantly, and grinned. Then he couldn’t figure out how to carry the pole and ride his bike at the same time, and ended up having to give it back to Luthor.
Luthor set what would, for the Wilson children, have been a punishing pace, if they’d been on foot. He trotted, and even though they were on bikes, he got ahead of them about twenty yards or so and stayed there, looking over his shoulder occasionally until they were well outside of town.
“Hey!” called out Hilda Mae. She put on a burst of speed when he stopped and turned around.
“Why are you running?” she asked, breathlessly, while her sister and brother caught up. “And why are you staying up there ahead of us?”
“I didn’t think we were supposed to be together,” said Luthor, looking confused.
“Well, we are, so slow down,” groused Bernadette.
Still, while they stayed together from that point on, Luthor was too excited to slow down. To be honest, it wasn’t that he wanted to get to the mansion quickly. He was convinced that they’d turn around and leave as soon as they saw it. But the whole idea of doing something secret had him on pins and needles. He didn’t have many adventures in his life, and he was making the most of this one.
They saw the trees surrounding the place first, and Luthor led them into the tiny forest. They had to dismount then, and push their bikes. Their first view of the house was shocking, but not in the way Luthor had thought it would be. Some of the roof had fallen in. There was no glass in any of the windows. Creepers covered the ground and a whole tree was growing out of the part of the roof that was missing. One round column had fallen, and lay covered by vegetation. The corner of the house it had been on sagged downward at a tilt that made it obvious one couldn’t stand easily on the second story floor inside ... if it was even still there.
“Damn!” said Nathan.
“You sure are cussing a lot lately,” pointed out his younger sister.
“Well look at it,” said Nathan crossly.
“It’s so romantic,” sighed Bernadette. “Just imagine what it used to look like.”
They forged on ahead, getting to within twenty yards of the place before other teens started popping out of nooks and crannies all over the place.
“We weren’t sure it was you,” said Johnnie Sue, dusting off her buttocks.
“Who else would we be?” asked Nathan, staring up at the falling-down house. “I can see why nobody comes here.”
“We told you it was old,” said Moses, uncharacteristically speaking.
Jesse was there, but was standing off to one side, looking at the rest of the group nervously. When he heard Moses speak, though, he edged closer to the group. There was a rattling scrape from inside the house, only yards away, and everybody jumped away from the house, turning to face it.
“What was that?” asked Bernadette, her voice hushed.
“Just a branch in the wind, probably,” said Curtis Lee. “Can you believe there’s a whole tree growing inside?”
“So it wasn’t a ghost?” asked Hilda Mae, sounding disappointed.
“There isn’t any such thing,” said Moses. “Everybody knows that.”
“There might be,” said Hilda Mae stubbornly. “Nobody knows for sure.”
“You want there to be a ghost?” asked Jesse, speaking for the first time.
“Well ... no ... I suppose not,” she answered. “But it would be exciting. Ooooo I wonder if there’s any treasure. There has to be treasure!” she squealed.
Nobody moved for a few minutes, while they all looked at the rotting structure.
“Well ... are we going in there ... or not?” asked Johnnie Sue.
“I don’t think we should,” said Nathan, looking dubious.
“Come on,” wheedled Johnnie Sue. “You’re not chicken ... are you?”
“It don’t look safe,” said Nathan heatedly.
“It doesn’t look safe,” corrected Johnnie Sue, grinning.
“That’s what I said,” said Nathan, recognizing the bait, but not rising to it.
“Okay, then, we’ll just go inside the front door, like I did,” said Johnnie Sue, moving forward.
Peer pressure is strong. Not even Nathan was left behind when it became clear to him that the rest were going to go inside. One might have thought they’d stay in a tight little group, but, once inside the front door, they spread out like a S.W.A.T. team, moving away from each other to kick at this pile of dirt, or peer into that dim corner.
What they saw was like some kind of war zone. The entry room took up the middle third of the length of the house. The ceiling, or what was left of it, was two stories up. Originally, there would have been three sides to the room, with the kitchen, dining room and parlor downstairs, along with, perhaps, quarters for a butler. Above those, upstairs, would have been the bedrooms, their doors accessed by a balcony that went all the way around the three walls. Now, however, there were only two and a half walls left, the one to their right having burned and caved in at the corner. That was where the tree was growing. On the side across from that, two of the original supports for the upstairs balcony had been removed for some reason. The part of the balcony there had sagged until it was at a thirty or forty degree slope, and looked like some weird kind of slide. The railing at that part was broken too, and hanging outward, as if someone had been standing on the balcony when it sagged, and was thrown through the railing.
The flooring was mostly rotted away in the part of the house that was open to the elements, and pieces of the roof, upper room and its ceiling still lay in a jumbled heap around the trunk of the tree. Luthor went as far as he could on solid flooring and looked up at it.
“Hickory” he announced. “Must be at least forty years old.”
“How would something like this get inside a house?” came Bernadette’s voice. All the others turned to see her hefting a rock that probably weighed ten pounds. That was a puzzle none of them had an answer for.
A breeze shifted a branch of the hickory tree, and it scraped against the wall again. Everyone turned to look at it. They relaxed when they confirmed that no ghost was responsible for the sound. Elsewhere in the house there were creaks and a sound that was almost like a sigh, which ratcheted up their tension.
“It’s just the wind,” said Curtis Lee. He had moved to where there had been a staircase that led up to the second floor. It was obvious there had been a staircase, and that it had been curved.
“How could a whole set of stairs just vanish?” he asked no one in particular, looking around.
There was no answer for that either, but it brought to mind their mission.
“How are we going to get to the attic?” complained Bernadette.
“We don’t even know there is an attic,” said Nathan.
There ensued an animated discussion about the engineering that would be required to get someone up to the second floor landing, and then how that person could help the others up. The conversation was abruptly terminated when Moses walked into view on the second floor.
“There’s another staircase,” he called down softly. “Off the kitchen, I think.”
Nobody had seen him wander off, so it took a minute to locate the kitchen. It was a wreck too, with cabinet doors missing, and dirt covering the floor. Mixed in the pile were dry, white, scattered bones.
“What was that,” asked Hilda Mae fearfully.
Luthor got down and picked up several bones, making both the Wilson girls shudder.
“I’d say coon,” said Luthor, looking around. “It either died in here, or something brought it in here to eat it.”
“Eeeewwww” squealed Bernadette and Hilda Mae in tandem.
“Oh,” said Luthor, feeling proud suddenly, “that ain’t nuthin’. I seen bones all over the place around here. Once I saw...”
“Found it!” called out Johnnie Sue from an obvious doorway in one corner of the kitchen. She disappeared and they heard her footfalls as she climbed the stairs. “Careful,” she called back. “Some of the stairs are missing.”
It was dark in the close-walled servant’s staircase, and some of the treads were, indeed, missing. There were ominous creaks and groans as too many people, grouped too closely, climbed up stairs that were too old. All that did was make them group together even more closely. Maybe because of the groaning structure around them, no one noticed that black bodies brushed against white bodies in ways that, if done intentionally, and under other circumstances, would have caused an uproar.
Still, it was instinctive to spread out once they reached the open second floor balcony that had surrounded three sides of the entryway. That balcony ended abruptly in the corner of the house that had no roof. Elsewhere, though, it led to openings that suddenly looked like gaping mouths.
It only took them fifteen minutes to arrive at the conclusion that there was nothing of real interest in the house. All they found were empty rooms, full of plaster that had fallen from walls and ceilings. They could see through the gaps in the lath that remained on those ceilings and it was plain there was no attic.
There was plainly no treasure either. The disappointment was almost palpable as they gathered once again on the landing.
“There has to be something,” moaned Bernadette, her hopes dashed.
“There’s a really cool doorknob over there,” said Moses, trying to be helpful. He pointed across to one corner of the balcony, where a single door still hung on its hinges. It was beyond the sagging section of floor, and no one had thought it was safe to try to cross it just to see if anything was in that one room.
“A doorknob?” snorted Nathan, who was thinking that he could have practiced driving this afternoon, instead of coming to this broken down wreck.
“Well, it’s crystal ... or something,” said Moses defensively. “I’ve never seen anything like that before. It is an antique and all. Maybe it’s valuable.”
“How would we get it off?” asked Johnnie Sue. “We didn’t bring any tools.”
“I’ve got this,” said Luthor, holding up his hatchet. “We could just hack it out of the door.”
“That’s vandalism!” said Hilda Mae, her voice outraged.
“Oh, come on,” said Luthor, wanting to hack something. “Nobody lives here and nobody would care anyway. You’ve seen the place. If you wait another week it will probably fall off all by itself!”
Luthor edged toward the sagging portion of the balcony. As he put his foot down there was a groan and a cracking sound. He backed up immediately.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said to Hilda Mae.
“What a chicken,” snorted Nathan. If he was going to miss driving practice, at least he was going to have something to show for it. And maybe the doorknob was worth something as an antique. “Give me that thing.” he said, reaching for the hatchet.
Luthor gave the tool to the older boy and backed up.
“Nathan...” Bernadette’s voice was heavy with warning.
“I’m gonna get me that doorknob,” said Nathan, and started off toward his goal. “Besides, maybe nobody else has ever been able to get to that room either. Maybe it’s still got stuff in it.”
That appealed to the disappointed treasure hunters, and they watched him go.
He hugged the wall, his back pressed against it, and stepped sideways onto the sloping floor. There was another groan and creak, and one of his feet slipped on the dust, sliding toward the broken railing. He edged back off the damaged part and surveyed it.
“Just forget it Nathan,” said Bernadette. “It’s too dangerous.”
Nathan backed up. “I’m gonna GET me that doorknob,” he growled. Then he rushed forward, accompanied by the screams of all the girls present. We’ll call the sounds the boys made shouts, instead of screams, but all were in the highest registers those voices would produce. His intent was to vault over the sagging six feet of balcony, and land on the other side. It wasn’t actually all that bad of a plan. He was a fairly tall boy, with long legs, and the six foot jump wasn’t unreasonable.
What was unreasonable was expecting the floor on the other side to hold his weight as he crashed down onto the edge. That and the fact that he only made it five feet, instead of six. His feet landed where the balcony began to tip, and his weight drove both feet through the rotten boards. When the dust settled, half of Nathan Wilson was above the floor, and the other half was below it.
The crash and sound of breaking wood resulted in more screams, but they cut off as if hands had been put over their mouths as each youngster peered to see what had become of Nathan. There was a scraping sound as the hatchet, which Nathan had dropped during his descent through the floor slid down the slope. It almost stopped at the edge, but then gained momentum and flipped over, to land with a rattle on the floor below.
Nathan? screamed Bernadette.
“I think I’m stuck,” came his reply. He tried to twist his body around to look behind him, and there was more crackling of breaking wood sounds, along with a pained “Oww” from Nathan.
“Don’t move!” shouted Bernadette. “Are you okay?”
“You don’t have to shout,” came his disgusted reply. “I’m just stuck, that’s all.”
“What are we gonna do?” asked Moses, his mouth right by Hilda Mae’s ear. During the incident they had all migrated together, into a huddle somehow.
“We have to get him out of there,” said Bernadette. “If he falls through he’ll die! I just know it!”
“Calm down,” said Curtis Lee. “We’ll get him out. Just calm down.”
He yelled over to Nathan.
“We’re going to get you out, but don’t move around too much or you might fall on through.”
“There’s a board poking my stomach and it really hurts,” called out Nathan. “And I feel something wet on my side. I don’t know if it’s blood or not, but that don’t feel good neither.”
He tried to push himself up with his arms. There was another creak and a loud snap, as of some large piece of wood cracking. When he couldn’t push himself out, he sagged back down, this time going in even deeper. He felt a burning sensation on his side and howled.
I think there’s a nail digging into my side or something. You have to help me!” he yelled.
“I told you don’t move, boy! yelled Curtis Lee, getting angry.
Well do something,” pleaded Nathan. “I might bleed to death here!” he moaned.
There was a hurried conference. Everyone agreed that no one could jump the gap. All that would do was put more weight on the sagging area. Moses still had his rope, coiled and across one shoulder and under his other arm, bandoleer style. Their first attempt was to climb up into the rafters and lower the rope to Nathan so he could pull himself up and out of the hole.
That went fairly well, considering how nervous the kids were, and how much noise Nathan kept making about bleeding to death. Johnnie Sue climbed up onto Curtis Lee’s back while he knelt on all fours, and then climbed his back to his shoulders as he stood up. Once she was there, she pulled at the lath, which came away in her hands in dry, crackling pieces. Then, once she had a hole big enough to pull herself up through, she did that, standing on the rafters once she was up.
“Don’t you fall through too!” called up Hilda Mae anxiously.
They passed her up the rope and then ducked back as she walked from one rafter to another. There was a loud crack, and a piece of the ceiling sagged as there were more screams.
“I’m okay,” came Johnnie Sue’s muffled voice as she stepped quickly onto another rafter.
They went back out of the room, to watch as pieces of loose plaster and wood began raining down on Nathan.
“If she falls through there it will kill them both,” said Jesse, his voice hushed.
When Johnnie Sue smashed her fist through the lath above Nathan, they all jumped and shouted, but only her hand appeared. She lowered the rope through the hole, until it was in front of Nathan. He grabbed at it convulsively and pulled.
Stop! shouted Johnnie Sue, panic in her voice. I have to tie it off first!
Nathan complained some more while she did that, and then called down to him to try his weight on the rope. He pulled, but it did no good. He quit almost as soon as he started.
“I can’t pull myself up,” he cried. “I’m stuck too hard, and it’s ripping my side out!”
Now they were worried. Seriously worried.
It was Moses who saved the day. He had been thinking about how Johnnie Sue had broken through the ceiling to get up onto the rafters. He looked at the wall, which was similarly covered with thin cedar strips.
“Go get me Luthor’s hatchet,” he said absently to Jesse. “I got an idea.”
Jesse ran for the back stairway, and appeared on the main floor under Nathan.
“I bet Curtis Lee could reach his feet if he jumped hard!” he called up.
“Just bring me the hatchet!” yelled Moses.
He was fending off questions by the others, not sure that what he planned would work, but trying to think about that instead of talking to them. When Jesse ran onto the balcony with the hatchet, Moses took it and went into the nearest room. He attacked the wall, knocking chips of plaster and wood everywhere, and raising dust so that he could hardly see. He sneezed as he heard incredulous voices asking what in the world he was doing. He had to move to one side, but found a hollow space and flailed at it with the hatchet. It only took him minutes to step through the wall, and into the room next to it. Then he calmly walked across the room and opened the door, walking out on the other side of the sagging balcony, where he could approach Nathan on relatively solid flooring.
“What in tarnation is going on down there?” yelled Johnnie Sue.
Stay there, yelled Moses up to her. Can you let more rope down?
Johnnie Sue started to argue with him, but he shouted her down. She finally agreed that she could extend the rope another three feet and still have enough to tie it off, but still wanted to know why.
Just do that!” he yelled.
He got down on his hands and knees and crawled carefully toward Nathan, who was looking at him miserably, with streaks down his dusty cheeks where tears had made them clean.
“Help me,” pleaded Nathan.
“I’m going to, but you got to be strong, okay?” said Moses, his voice slipping into that tone that his mother used when he was hurt.
“Help me,” moaned Nathan again.
“Okay, here’s what you got to do, Nathan,” said Moses, crawling closer. The rope in front of Nathan went slack, and another three feet coiled in front of him. “Can you get that rope through the floor, right there in front of you where there’s a hole?”
Nathan looked down at the triangular shaped hole that he could see through right in front of his stomach. The board that was digging into his stomach painfully was on one side of that hole.
“Yes,” he gasped. “But what good is that going to do?”
“You have to hold onto that rope real tight,” said Moses gently. “You got to be strong. You got to hold yourself up while I hack the floor away around you. Then you can let yourself down on the rope.”
Nathan’s face was anguished.
“I can’t do it,” he moaned.
“Yes you can!“ hissed Moses.
“I’m too heavy,” whined Nathan. “I can’t pull that hard.”
“Just put the rope through the hole!” insisted Moses.
Nathan fumbled with the end of the rope and it dropped down, hitting his toe.
“Now, hold on tight,” warned Moses.
“I can’t do it!“ yelled Nathan, panic in his voice.
“You know what?” asked Moses in a perfectly calm voice. “You aren’t a cracker. You’re too weak to be a cracker. You’re one of them white niggers ... aren’t you?”
Nathan’s face froze, his eyes wide. Then his face twisted with hatred. He grabbed the rope and pulled, causing the wood around his waist to move and creak.
“You fucking nigger I’ll kill you when I get out of here!” he screamed.
“Hold on tight!” screamed Moses back at him, and he raised the hatchet.
From the other side of the gap, it looked like Moses was attacking Nathan with the hatchet. Based on what they’d heard, all the teens believed that was exactly what was happening. But as they drew breath for frantic screams, they heard the hatchet strike wood. Chips and dust flew everywhere as he flailed.
The only thing in Moses’ mind was that he had to hit the floor, and not Nathan Wilson. Nathan didn’t make it any easier, because he flailed too, and Moses had to slide the hatchet in sideways to avoid Nathan’s frenzied movements. Then a large section of wood gave way and suddenly Nathan was falling. The last thing Moses saw of him was his hands, gripping the rope tightly as it slid rapidly through them, and the tail of his shirt, caught on a nail at the edge of the hole. There was a ripping sound and then another scream.
Now Nathan’s agonized scream was for the heat in his hands as the hemp rope burned them. Still, he held on tightly, because in his mind the drop was two stories. He looked up to see his hands reach the end of the rope and watched helplessly as it slid through. Expecting to fall another story, he was taken completely by surprise when his loose-limbed feet hit the floor after only two or three more inches. The surprise was so great he simply crumbled and flopped into a heap.
There was general pandemonium as everyone stampeded for the back stairway, to get down to Nathan. Not a few of them thought he was probably dead, his sisters included. What they found, though, was a moaning young man, alternately trying to feel his body and not touch anything with his burning hands.
He’s bleeding!” yelped Hilda Mae, seeing blood on the side of her brother’s shirt and terrified that he would turn his head and show her gaping wounds from where the hatchet had scored his face.
Bernadette, oddly, had that special quality of being able to operate calmly in an emergency. She would break down in tears later, but for now she simply knelt and examined her brother. She, too, checked his face and shoulders first, and then pulled at his torn shirt to expose his side. There was an inch long puncture, that was bleeding freely. Away from that was a long, thin scrape that went to the hair under his arm.
“Oh for pity’s sakes!“ she gasped, relief flooding her chest. “It’s just a scratch“
“No it’s not!” moaned Nathan. “I’m gonna die!”
“You are not,” said his sister, her voice trembling. “Can you stand up?”
“I don’t know,” said Nathan, her voice convincing him that death might be further away than he thought. He sat up first, and wiggled his legs. Hands helped him, and he stood shakily up, looking around. He looked up, to see Moses grinning down at him, his head hanging out over the balcony between two broken uprights in the rail.
“I told you I’d get you down,” said Moses.
Shifting from foot to foot, still unable to believe he wasn’t seriously hurt, Nathan realized that if he hadn’t been so mad at the boy for saying what he did, he never would have had the strength to hold onto that rope, and would have dropped like a stone. And, with the pain gone from his stomach and lessened in his side, he felt a lot better. He looked down at his naked stomach, but the skin was only dented and scratched, not broken. He looked back up.
“Damned if you didn’t, Moses.” he said.
It was the first time he had addressed one of the black students by his name.
Chapter 6
Johnnie Sue made a bunch of noise about how she had been abandoned up in the ceiling, but they could all tell her heart wasn’t in it. Moses, since he was still up there, went to the hole in the ceiling and she let herself down to stand on his shoulders, jumping on down to the floor from there. Both ran for the staircase.
When they ran into the entry room from the kitchen, Moses was almost tackled by Hilda Mae, who threw her arms around him in a tight grip.
“I thought you killed him, but you saved his life!” she cried.
Moses tried pushing her away from him, automatically in terror that a white girl was pressed against his body. His hands pushed at her waist, but her grip was too strong. She was sobbing into his shoulder. Mixed in with the shock of her hugging him, was amazement at how slim her waist felt, and how hard the flesh was under her shirt. He had expected a girl to feel soft, but her skin was firm. Something else felt soft too, pressed against his chest, and it made his knees go weak.
“It’s okay,” he said, hesitantly. “He’s okay.”
She changed her hug to a grip on his biceps and shoved him back so forcefully that his head snapped forward before he could straighten it back up.
“He’s okay because of you,” she said, her eyes shining.
“Hilda Mae Wilson! What in the world has gotten into you?” came the strident voice of her sister. “You let go of that boy right this instant!”
Her usage of the word “boy” was not misunderstood by any of them present to mean “young man”.
Hilda Mae turned her head, her hands still clamped firmly on Moses’ biceps.
“This boy just saved my brother’s life, and I don’t give a damn if he’s a ... Negro!”
“What do you think Daddy would say if he saw you right now?” asked Bernadette, clearly flustered.
“I know what he’d say, but he isn’t going to ever find out about this, because if he did he’d know we were here, and if he knew that I’d have to admit that it was you that brought us here and almost got Nathan killed!“ shouted Hilda Mae.
She turned back around to Moses, who was staring at her, the whites of his eyes bright in his face. She leaned forward until her face was only inches from his.
“I’m not going to kiss you Moses, but I want you to know I feel like it. That’s how much I want to thank you for helping Nathan.”
Then she pushed him away and let him go. The young man stood frozen, his mouth open. Then as he realized he was holding his breath, he let it out in an explosive exhale and stumbled backwards away from Hilda Mae. He bumped into a wall and she laughed.
“You’re supposed to say I’m welcome,” she giggled.
“I’m welcome,” said the boy instantly, and Hilda almost doubled over laughing.
She turned around to find all the others staring at her.
“What are all of you looking at?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips.
Nathan was staring at her, much like Moses had been staring at her, but he didn’t say anything.
Suddenly, almost as if it was to change the subject, the discussion turned to how Nathan was going to get back home and get his shirt changed without his parents finding out what happened to him. He was in some pain, but it was manageable, now that the pressure was gone. His shirt, however, was hopelessly torn, and bloody to boot.
Johnnie Sue stuck her hand up in the air, like she was at school. When everyone looked at her she blushed and dropped her hand.
“I was just thinking,” she said, still discomfited by what she had done, “Just the other day, Mamma gave me a whipping because I tore one of my shirts on some barb wire while I was climbing through the fence. Maybe you could say that’s how you tore your shirt.”
The merits of that were discussed at length, the group being about evenly divided between those who thought no one in their right mind would believe a shirt could be completely destroyed by a fence, and those who insisted that the scrape along his side looked just like a fence had grabbed him.
They were still talking about it as they left, when Moses suddenly stopped. They all turned around to look at him. He looked at Luthor and said “Give me the hatchet.” Luthor, looking puzzled, handed it over. “Be right back,” said Moses, and he bounded back into the house. The rest drifted back toward the front door, but suddenly the overhanging balcony, with its missing supports, looked more unstable somehow than it had before and they stopped. Sounds of banging and crunching came from the house, and Johnnie Sue started for the front door. “I’m cuu-ming” came faintly from the house and she stopped. Seconds later Moses came tearing out of the house, the hatchet in one hand, and something else dangling from the other. He shoved the hatchet at Luthor and pulled up in front of Nathan.
“Here,” he said, holding out the other object. It was the doorknob, still attached to the metal body of the locking mechanism by a square metal shaft. There was another doorknob on the other side, this one made of some kind of veined blue stone. The lock was fitted to take a skeleton key.
Nathan accepted the gift, a look of wonder in his eyes.
“Since you got hurt and all,” said Moses in unneeded explanation.
“Thank you,” Nathan said quietly.
In the end, Nathan had the barbed wire story well rehearsed as he tried to sneak into the back door of the house while Bernadette and Hilda Mae went in first to distract their parents. They needn’t have bothered. Both adults were engaged in watching television, and paid no attention to any of their children. Nathan stuffed the shirt under his mattress and put on a new one. The door knobs were bulky, and the only place he could think of to hide them was in the top of his closet, under some extra pants. Then he went out into the living room as though nothing had happened.
The only response the Wilson children got from their parents concerning their outing was from Harvey. When, during the commercials that ran at the beginning of the Ed Sullivan Show, he noticed his children, he informed them that if they were so rude as to miss supper, then they could just go without.
None of them complained. Their parents didn’t notice that either.
It wasn’t until the next evening, when Johnnie Sue, Luthor and Jesse got back together for the first time since the trip to the mansion, that Johnnie Sue was able to tell them her secret.
Once they had gotten the Wilson children back to town, all the others had split to the four winds to run home. All had missed supper which, on a Sunday, wasn’t all that unusual, but all were nervous about the events of the day. Johnnie Sue was worried that the nail might give Nathan lockjaw. Curtis Lee insisted that, before the nail had been exposed enough to break Nathan’s skin, it had been embedded in wood, and was therefore not dangerous in that way. In all the talk about that, she had forgotten that she had seen something while she was in the ceiling of the mansion that she intended to tell them all.
So, when the friends got together, this time with Moses invited, she was anxious to tell them about it.
“I saw something in the mansion!” she said excitedly as Moses and Jesse walked up to complete the group.
She expected them to be excited with her, but they just looked at her. Then she realized that her words had not conveyed anything in particular.
“Up in the rafters,” she added, not actually telling them anything more. They still just looked at her expectantly.
Finally she calmed down enough to speak plainly.
“While I was up there I saw a wall, way back in one corner of the house. I think there is an attic up there. It can’t be very big, but it was definitely a wall. I meant to say something, but in all the excitement I forgot.”
She got a lot less enthusiasm than she expected. In fact, she got almost none. Jesse smiled, but that was it.
“Aren’t you excited?” she asked, temper creeping into her voice.
“I don’t think there’s anything exciting about that place,” said Luthor firmly.
“Oh, come on,” yipped Johnnie Sue, stamping her foot. “Who knows what might be up there?”
“Nothing is up there, Johnnie Sue,” said Luthor patiently. “You saw that place. There’s nothing left.”
“We won’t know that until we actually look,” she said stubbornly.
“You actually want to go back there?” asked her friend, looking amazed. “You’re starting to sound like that Hilda Mae!”
“She hugged me!” blurted out Moses.
To be truthful, all of them realized the import of that hug, but as for Johnnie Sue, all she could think about was that Moses’ comment was distracting them from what she wanted to talk about. She went to him and hugged him herself, squeezing him gently and then letting him go before he could react.
“There ... I hugged you too. Now, can we talk about the attic?”
Moses was round eyed. He had gone to bed the night before, thoughts of the feel of Hilda Mae’s waist and breasts uppermost in his mind. He had gotten hard thinking about that. He couldn’t do anything about it, because his younger brother was in the bed with him. Sleep had come with difficulty. Now he had felt another pair of those soft breasts being crushed into his chest. He found himself staring at them, pushing out Johnnie Sue’s shirt.
Johnnie Sue was looking at Moses when she made her not-so-veiled suggestion that they should be talking about the attic. When he didn’t answer, she noticed where his eyes were staring, and looked down. As she realized what he was looking at, a wave of heat started, just above those breasts, and crept upwards to stain her cheeks red.
“You’re looking at my titties!” she gasped.
Moses’ eyes jerked up, and a look of horror came over his face. He covered his eyes with his hands.
“I’m sorry!” he yelped. “I couldn’t help it!” He moaned and went from peeking through his fingers to closing them tightly.
Luthor laughed, breaking the tension. Johnnie Sue glared at him and he doubled over, laughing even harder.
“What are you cackling about?” she shouted.
She looked at Jesse, who was looking up at the trees above them.
“Well?!” she shouted impatiently.
Luthor got his breath and grinned. “Of course he’s looking at your titties. All of us look at your titties!” He started laughing again.
Johnnie Sue tackled him with a growl, taking both of them to the ground. She rolled with him until she was on top of him, sitting on his stomach. Luthor kept laughing as she pummeled him with her fists, and did nothing but try to ward off her blows. Finally she grabbed both of his wrists and put her weight on them, leaning over to put her face right in front of his.
“You take that back!” she demanded.
Instead, Luthor dropped his eyes to her chest, and stared at it pointedly. Johnnie Sue was almost incoherent as she realized her shirt was hanging open at the collar loosely. It was one of her father’s old ones, and she liked it because it was loose and comfortable. But, sitting like she now was, it gaped open and her breasts, unfettered because she hated bras, hung in plain view as she looked down the open collar ... just like Luthor was looking down the open collar.
She sat back up and raised her butt six or seven inches off of Luthor’s stomach. Then she dropped with every ounce of weight she could bring to bear. Luthor’s breath exploded from his lungs and she bounced again, taking great joy in the look of panic that came into his eyes as he couldn’t draw a breath. She put her hands on his chest and raised herself for another drop. His hands scrabbled at her arms.
“Just because I have ‘em, doesn’t mean you get to stare at ‘em,” she said, and dropped again.
Luthor was wheezing weakly now, his face turning blue, and she stood up suddenly, one foot on either side of him, looking down.
“You hear?” she snarled.
He nodded and rolled to curl up, just trying to get air into his lungs. She whirled to find Moses and Jesse staring at her, their mouths open.
“And you two mind where your eyes wander too ... got that?”
“Yessum” gasped Moses automatically.
Jesse, though, knew her better ... had known her better for a lot longer ... and he was able to make a grin come to his face.
“You goin’ to sit on me like that too?” he asked.
“I’ll neuter you like my pappa neuters a pig!” said Johnnie Sue, her voice heavy with scorn.
“Awww, come on Johnnie Sue,” pleaded Jesse, still smiling. “We didn’t mean nuthin’. You are a girl, after all.” Unconsciously, though, he cupped his hands over his groin.
It was seeing her friend protecting his ... manhood ... that caused the mood to lighten for Johnnie Sue. He looked funny, cupping his privates like that, and she suddenly laughed.
“Look at you!” She pointed to his hands. Luthor was still just trying to breathe, but both Jesse and Moses looked where she was pointing. “You actually think I’d hurt you!”
Jesse jerked his hands away from his crotch, and his already dark skin got a shade darker.
Johnnie Sue laughed some more. “What a bunch of sissy boys you are! Scared of a pore old little girl!” She thought that was hilarious, but was the only one laughing. She stopped as the uncomfortable mood made itself plain.
Luthor sat up, finally able to breathe normally.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he complained.
“You were looking at my titties!” she exclaimed. “What’s the big deal anyway?” she snorted. “So I got titties. Every girl has titties. Why are they so fascinating to boys?”
“If you think I’m going to talk about your damn titties when you just done that to me, you must be crazy!” panted Luthor, getting up and dusting off his clothes.
Johnnie Sue felt this new and sudden, but obvious, rift in their friendship in a way that was painful. Her feelings were conflicted. She had been mad that her friends would look at her ... that way. It was like a trust had been abused. And now it looked like all this was going to cause problems between best friends. That made her mad too. She couldn’t help it that the damn things grew on her chest. And lately they had grown so much that her mother was starting to insist that she wear a bra. She only had one, and it was way too small now. It was like her life was being taken away from her somehow, and she was helpless to do anything about it.
“Answer my question!” she demanded, frustrated so much that she almost danced. “You stared at them. You owe me an answer!”
“Moses stared at them too,” grumbled Luthor. “Ask him.”
Johnnie Sue whirled to confront Moses, who was edging backwards.
“Don’t you go anywhere Moses Finshaw!” she snapped. “You started this! You answer my question!”
“You hugged me!” babbled Moses, scared so much he started looking gray.
Johnnie Sue realized how frightened he was, and held up her hands. This was getting worse and worse, instead of better.
“Okay,” she said calmly. “I’m not going to be mad. But I want to know ... please?”
“You’re already mad,” said Luthor grumpily.
Johnnie Sue threw up her hands in frustration. Then she took a breath to calm herself.
“Please?” she asked.
“You really want to know?” asked Luthor, looking at her suspiciously.
“Yes, I really want to know.” she said.
Luthor looked at Moses and Jesse, both of whom were standing mutely, still obviously scared.
“Okay, I’m not real clear exactly what it is you want to know,” said Luthor. “Could you ask the question again?”
Johnnie Sue looked at him with a frown, but decided he was still addled by her bouncing on his stomach.
“Why are boys so interested in titties?” she asked evenly.
“I can’t believe we’re talking about this,” said Luthor. He saw Johnnie Sue drawing another deep breath and cut her off before she could yell at him again. “Okay, okay.” She subsided and waited for him to speak. He looked at Moses and Jesse again, and then back at the girl.
“They’re pretty,” he said uncertainly.
“Pretty?” Johnnie Sue said, looking down at her chest.
“Well ... sure,” said Luthor.
She turned to Moses, the question in her eyes. He still didn’t say anything.
“You can tell me, Moses,” she said, her voice sounding strange.
Moses’ eyes went in a quick circle. “You promise you won’t tell anybody?” he asked.
“I promise,” said Johnnie Sue, crossing her heart instinctively. She didn’t think about the fact that her finger was making that motion across the very breasts they were talking about.
“Soft,” he said.
“Soft?” she repeated.
“They feel soft,” he explained.
“But you didn’t feel them,” she said, confused, looking at his hands.
“Against me,” he added, touching his own chest. He held his arms out like he was hugging someone.
“That’s it?” she asked, sounding surprised. “They’re pretty and they feel soft?” She looked back at Luthor, who still looked tense. “You really think they’re pretty?”
He swallowed. “Well sure,” he said. “I mean I only saw them this once ... but they’re pretty.”
“You’ve seen them lots of times,” she insisted. “We’ve been skinny-dipping down at the creek a million times.”
“That was a long time ago,” said Luthor. “You didn’t have them the last time, when we went skinny dipping.”
Johnnie Sue thought about that. Her chest had seemed to just explode over the last winter and spring. And, now that she thought about it, none of them had seen each other naked for years. Her mother had insisted that she wear a swim suit when she started bleeding, and when she started wearing one the boys had just kept their shorts on too.
“That makes me feel weird,” she said.
“We won’t look any more,” offered Luthor. “I mean if that would make you feel better.”
“How can I feel better?” she complained. “If you think they’re pretty you’re going to look at them. You can’t stop yourself from looking at them. What do I get to look at? This isn’t fair!”
“Boys don’t have titties,” said Luthor. “We can’t help that either.”
Johnnie Sue frowned, but that slowly turned to something almost like a smile.
“No, but you do have something else I could look at.”
Luthor stared at her. She turned her head to look at Moses and Jesse. They were staring at her too.
“I can’t show you that!” said Luthor, his own hands going to cover his crotch.
Johnnie Sue felt power returning to her and loved it. She pointed at his hands.
“Look at that, Moses. Luthor’s afraid of me too!”
“I’m not afraid of you!” he argued. “I’m just not going to show you my ... I’m just not going to show it to you!”
“Why not?” she asked airily. “You saw my titties. Why can’t I see your root?”
“Root?” said Luthor.
“That’s what my Mamma calls it,” said Johnnie Sue.
“Well, whatever you call it, you can’t see it.” he said stubbornly. “My pa would whip me raw if I showed you my dick.”
“Well your pa would whip you raw if I told him you looked at my titties too ... now wouldn’t he? But your pa is never going to know about this anyway ... as long as I get to see something.” She looked smug.
“What about them?” Luthor gulped, thinking she would back off.
“They stared at my titties too,” she said simply. She turned to look at Jesse and Moses, who looked scared again. She misunderstood the fact that they were aware they were black, and she was white. “Look, I’m not going to castrate anybody, okay? I just want to see something so we’re even.”
“I cain’t show you my thing,” squeaked Moses. “Lightnin’ would strike me down iff’n I did!” His speech patterns degraded a little from the fright.
“All three of you stared at my titties,” she said stubbornly.
“I didn’t!” yelped Jesse.
She turned to face him, and his eyes automatically dropped to the bulges under discussion.
“You just did. So there! You have to show me yours too!”
“But Luthor saw them nekkid,” whined Moses, trying to find some way out of this fiasco.
Johnnie Sue fumed. This was just so unfair! Her hands went to her shirt and she lifted it, facing Moses and Jesse, pulling it above her round, jutting breasts. Both boys stared at her pale pink nipples, perched on round handfuls of lily white flesh.
“There!“ she shouted. “Now you’ve seen them naked too! Now you get those pants down around your ankles before I do something about it!” She jerked her shirt back down and put her hands on her hips.
“I can’t believe you done that!” gasped Jesse.
“Drop ‘em!” insisted Johnnie Sue.
When still nobody moved, she stamped her foot.
“If I don’t get to see somethin’ Really soon I’m gonna strip naked and dance around right in front of all of you!” she shouted.
Odd as it may seem to you, the modern reader, that galvanized the boys. All three of them jerked their hands to their waists and three pairs of pants dropped to show three pairs of white jockey shorts.
Johnnie Sue stood, frozen. Part of her mind hadn’t really believed they would actually do what she demanded. Her threats had all been bluff, and she thought they knew it. She had to make them though. The frustration of the situation was driving her crazy. Now, it appeared as though they might perform as commanded.
“The underdrawers too,” she said, trying to make her voice sound steely.
Slowly, almost like in a dream that was in slow motion, the three boys thumbs went into the waistband of their shorts, and that white cloth slid slowly down. Johnny Sue didn’t know where to look first.
“Get together!” she blurted.
All three boys looked like they were being taken hostage by men with guns.
Moses and Jesse hobbled over to stand beside Luthor. Johnnie Sue wanted to laugh, because the three boys standing there in shirts, with their legs bare and pants puddled at their feet looked ridiculous. But she instinctively knew better than to show any kind of mirth. She went and squatted in front of them, staring.
Moses’ penis stuck straight out. She noted that almost mechanically, not thinking about it for now. Luthor’s looked completely different, and not only because of the pink color. There was a well-defined knob at the tip of his, larger in diameter than the rest of what hung there limply. Both of the others, though, had a sheath of skin covering the tip. Johnnie Sue thought about her dog, Charger, who she had seen breeding bitches around the house many times. His was pink, and resided inside a sheath. But it was pointy at the tip, and these were round and blunt. Jesse’s was the smallest, only a couple of inches long, and looking almost forlorn hanging there.
“They’re so different,” she said, awe in her voice.
“Well of course,” said Luthor hesitantly.
“No, not that,” said Johnnie Sue. “I mean how they’re shaped and stuff. Moses’ is hard. How come yours isn’t?” she asked.
“It gets hard sometimes,” said Luthor defensively, feeling like he had been maligned.
“Why not now?” she asked.
“It started to get hard when I looked down your shirt,” he said, still trying to prove he was a man.
“When you looked at my titties it got hard?” she asked.
“It started to,” he said. “Then you almost killed me and it stopped.”
She looked up at Moses. “And is yours hard because I showed you my titties?” she asked.
He nodded, wide eyed. He couldn’t have said anything if he’d have been offered a hundred dollars.
She looked over at Jesse. “What about yours?” she asked.
“I’m skeered,” he moaned.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she chided. “Maybe you don’t think my titties are pretty.” she said, sounding mildly disappointed.
“Sure they are,” he gasped. “They’re the prettiest things I ever seen!”
“So how come yours isn’t hard?” she insisted.
“I don’t know,” he moaned.
“Maybe if you saw them again.” she said, standing up. Her fingers went to the buttons of her shirt and worked them quickly. She pulled the shirt open and stood, feeling foolish, in front of the boys. Their eyes were glued to her breasts, and for some reason, instead of making her mad this time, it made her feel better. Her eyes went downwards, and this time all three of them were hard. Jesse’s had lengthened amazingly, and was now even longer than Moses’ or Luthor’s, even though he was a year younger. She was fascinated. She also noticed that the sheath over both of the black ones had pulled back a little, and a shiny tip was pushing out.
“Look!” she pointed at Moses’, because he was standing next to Luthor. “Yours is all knobby,” she said to Luthor. “His isn’t.”
Moses, perhaps in some effort to show that they were the same, even though that seemed stupid, reached down and skinned his foreskin back, exposing his own knob. Johnnie Sue gasped.
“Doesn’t that hurt?“ she asked, incredulous.
“No,” said Moses, letting go. He was so hard that the skin stayed back, creeping forward only very slowly.
“Do yours!” she said to Jesse.
Following orders, Jesse pulled on his own prick, exposing the tip.
“Wow,” said Johnnie Sue softly. “Yours is bigger than theirs.”
“I don’t know why,” he whined.
“It’s okay,” she assured him. Then she looked confused and glanced at Luthor, whose eyes were still on her gaping shirt. “Isn’t it?” she asked.
Luthor’s eyes came back up to meet hers and he blushed.
“I guess so,” he said. His eyes darted back to her chest.
“You really do like looking at them,” she said, sounding surprised somehow.
“I sure do,” sighed Luthor.
“So what happens when they get hard like that?” she asked curiously. She knew what Charger did, but she didn’t think these boys did that.
“Ummmm” said Luthor, his eyes suddenly guarded.
“Nothin’,” yelped Jesse. His mother had caught him stroking his hard penis one time and thrashed him, saying that was heathen behavior.
Johnnie Sue heard the lie in his voice, and that just fueled her curiosity. “Come on,” she said, her voice wheedling. “I don’t have one, so how am I supposed to know.”
“We can’t talk about that,” gasped Luthor. He’d been around enough boys to know that most did what he did when it got hard like that. It wasn’t hard for him to believe that Moses and Jesse did it too, and include them in his statement.
“Why not?” she asked honestly.
“Cause it ain’t proper!” he said urgently.
“I know what Charger does when his gets hard like that,” said Johnnie Sue. “You don’t find you some dog and stick in her ... so what do you do?”
“Johnnie Sue!“ yelped Luthor.
“Well?” she insisted. “What do you do? You can’t just put it back in your pants. It would stick out a mile!”
“Damn, Johnnie Sue!” yelled Luthor.
“Don’t you curse at me Luthor Cripps!” she shot back, jerking around to face him full on. It made her breasts wobble and Luthor felt his knees go weak.
“We rub it!” he shouted, feeling like he was going to explode. “There! Are you happy now? We rub it!”
Jesse’s hand went to cover his mouth, even though he hadn’t said a word, and his other hand tried to cover his bobbing penis.
“Well why didn’t you just say so?” complained Johnnie Sue. She didn’t think rubbing anything could be so horrible. “What’s so bad about rubbing something? And why does that help anyway? You already said it doesn’t hurt.”
“It just makes it feel better,” whined Luthor. “I can not believe we’re talking about this!” he went on.
“Well okay, then,” said Johnnie Sue, disgusted now. She had expected to find out some kind of secret information, but if all they did was rub the things that wasn’t very interesting. She buttoned up her shirt.
“What are you doing?” asked Luthor, his voice choked.
“I’m covering up my titties,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We’re done.”
“What do you mean we’re done?!” begged Luthor. “What about us?”
Johnnie Sue looked confused for a minute, and then realized they were all still standing there, all still stiff.
“Well rub them or something,” she said, uninterested now. “I want to go look in that attic.”
None of the boys, though, were willing to masturbate in front of each other, much less Johnnie Sue, so instead of doing that they just pulled up their pants, folding things as comfortably as possible. Johnnie Sue watched.
“Gee, I guess they don’t stick out as much as I thought. Are you sure that doesn’t hurt, bending them around like that?”
“Damn, Johnnie Sue,” groaned Luthor.
“I told you not to curse at me, Luthor,” came her calm reply.
Johnnie Sue, not realizing she could actually have seen something very interesting, had she goaded the boys, tried to bully them into going with her look into the attic of the mansion. All three boys set their heels hard, though. It was too late that evening. Harvest was about to start, and they needed their rest to be ready for long, hard days of labor. And, it didn’t look good for the next few weekends either. During harvest, if the weather cooperated, Sunday didn’t mean nearly as much as it did the rest of the year.
Johnnie Sue would have to work too, though this year her mother had told her she’d be working in the kitchen, and taking meals out to the fields, instead of chopping cotton herself. She was relieved about that, in one sense, because chopping cotton was hard work. Then again, it would mean she was only with women, which, up to this point in her life, had seemed almost a punishment. As she trudged home, disappointed, she thought about the new power she suddenly had over the boys. Maybe she could learn something from the women about how to extend that power.