Flossie's Revenge
Lubrican
Flossie's Revenge
by Robert Lubrican
Bookapy Edition
Copyright 2007
Second Edition 2023
License Notes
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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 some of the language used, while historically accurate, isn't very pretty either. That language is not politically correct, by today's standards. The fact is, though, that these words and attitudes were normal in that society, 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 at the end 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.
Read the prelude. It's important.
And if you get "triggered" by anything, stop reading, go to your safe place, and have some milk and cookies. The adults will stay here and read on.
Thanks for reading.
Bob
Character 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, unmarried, 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, 14, 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
Table of Contents
Chapters: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22
23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44
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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 literally millions 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 the Negro population of Catfish Hollow were intelligent enough to know not to show their faces 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 quart 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 anymore, 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 planned to exit the building from, 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 bounced 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, 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 One
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, neatly 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.
Flossie's 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 anymore, 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've got to 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 moved 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 half an hour 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. The fringe of hair around the outside of his head made him look a little like a middle ages friar.
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 ni-gruh teacher 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 catch on pretty quick 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 Two
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 as servants, 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 anymore. 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 admittedly 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 Three
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 dammed family than some uppity coon who takes credit for 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.