The Silver Star (17 page)

My English teacher, Miss Jarvis, a thin-lipped young woman who got very excited about the readings she assigned, told us that she thought we ought to discuss what had happened at the game.

“The whites started it,” said Vanessa Johnson. “Throwing that Coke at my sister.”

“Stuff always gets thrown at games,” said Tinky Brewster, a kid from the hill. “It’s just like you all to make it a racial thing.”

“We’re not simply going to trade accusations here,” Miss Jarvis said. “But I’d like people’s views on what we can do to make integration a success at Byler
High.”

White kids started saying the problem was that blacks were always carrying on about prejudice and slavery, even though blacks were freed a hundred years ago. And blacks could have black pride,
but if you started talking about white pride, all of a sudden it was racist. How come we can’t use the N-word, but they can call us honkies? Anyway, a bunch of the white kids from the hill
said, none of their families had owned slaves. In fact, they went on, most of their great-great-grandparents had been indentured servants, but you never heard people complaining about the Irish
being enslaved. I was looking around guiltily to see if anyone was going to mention the old Holladay cotton plantation. No one did, and I sure wasn’t about to bring it up.

Slavery might have ended a hundred years ago, the black kids replied, but until recently, they couldn’t eat in the Bulldog Diner, and even today, they got glared at when they did. They
started getting hired at Holladay Textiles only a few years ago, and they were still given the worst jobs. The real problem, the black students said, was that whites were scared that blacks were
taking over sports and music. They wanted blacks to shut up, stop demanding their rights, and go back to cleaning toilets, washing clothes, and cooking food for white people.

“Well, we’re not going to resolve this issue in a day,” Miss Jarvis said. Instead, she wanted us to read a book about racial conflict in a small Southern town. It was called
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

I liked
To Kill a Mockingbird,
but I didn’t think it was the most amazing book ever written, the way Miss Jarvis did. The best part, I thought, wasn’t the
stuff about race but the way Scout and the two boys snooped around the big haunted house where the scary recluse lived. That really reminded me of being a kid.

For all of Miss Jarvis’s singing its praises as great literature, a lot of the kids in the class had real problems with the book. The white ones said they knew blacks shouldn’t be
lynched, and they didn’t need a book preaching to them about it. Some resented the way the book divided the town into good respectable whites and bad white-trash types. The black kids, for
their part, wondered why the hero had to be a noble white guy trying to save a helpless black guy and why the head of the lynch mob was described by the noble white guy as basically a decent man
who happened to have a blind spot when it came to hanging innocent blacks. They also didn’t like the way that all the good blacks knew their place and made their children stand up when the
noble white guy walked by. It was all that Stepin-Fetchit-yass-suh-no-suh stuff.

“No one’s challenging the system,” Vanessa said.

“This discussion isn’t going the way I’d anticipated,” Miss Jarvis said. What she wanted us to do, she went on, was to put our thoughts down on paper.

When Uncle Tinsley heard about the assignment, his eyes lit up. “
To Kill a Mockingbird
is a fine book in its own way,” he said. “But if you really
want to understand Southern race relations, you need to read the great historian C. Vann Woodward.”

Uncle Tinsley was sitting at his desk in the library. He pulled out a book from the floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind him and passed it to me. The title was
The Strange Career of Jim
Crow
.

I started reading, but the writing was so complicated that I got bogged down on the very first page. Uncle Tinsley grabbed the book back and flipped through it, eagerly explaining the ideas and
quoting sentences while I took notes.

Because blacks and whites in the South had lived together under slavery, Uncle Tinsley said, they got along better after the Civil War than blacks and whites up north, where the races
hadn’t mixed nearly as much. Legal segregation started first in the North and it was hypocritical of Northerners to blame it all on the South. In fact, the Jim Crow laws began in the South
only at the turn of the century. Around that time, outsiders started using what C. Vann Woodward called “negrophobia” to turn poor whites against poor blacks, when the two groups should
have been natural allies.

Uncle Tinsley helped me write up the paper—basically dictating large chunks of it—and had me read it to him. A little way in, he cut me off. I needed to throw myself into the
presentation, he said. He’d been in the drama club at Washington and Lee, and he showed me how to gesture for emphasis and use what he called pregnant pauses.

The next day, when it was my turn to read my essay to the class, I didn’t know if the other kids would be interested in or even understand what Uncle Tinsley had helped me write—I
barely understood it myself—and that made me so nervous, the paper was shaking in my hands. It didn’t help that Uncle Tinsley had me throw in fancy words and phrases like “white
man’s burden” and “negrophobia.”

I tried to use the gestures he had shown me, but I forgot the pregnant pauses. Instead, I started rushing through the essay, and my gestures got a little wild. When I finished the paper, I
looked up. Some kids were whispering or doodling, and a few were smirking, but most seemed bewildered.

Tinky Brewster raised his hand. “What’s ‘negrophobia’?” he asked.

“You don’t have to know what it means to know it’s a highfalutin word for people who don’t like black folks,” Vanessa piped up from the back of the class.
“Bean, you one crazy-ass white girl.”

The entire class cracked up.

“Now, Vanessa,” Miss Jarvis said, starting to get teacherly, but then, looking at the class, she changed her mind. “Well, at least you’ve finally found one thing you can
all agree on.”

Liz and I
were scrounging around in the attic one afternoon, opening trunks and chests to see what was inside, when we came across
an old guitar. Mice had chewed at the neck, but Liz toyed with the tuning pegs and declared that the sound wasn’t half bad. When we brought it downstairs, Uncle Tinsley told us it was
Mom’s first guitar, from when she was about Liz’s age and decided she wanted to become a folksinger. Liz took the guitar into the music shop in town, where the clerk put on new strings
and tuned it. Liz started spending afternoons in the bird wing, strumming away on it.

Mom had tried to teach us both to play the guitar. I was hopeless. Tone-deaf, Mom said. Liz showed real potential, but she couldn’t take any sort of criticism, and Mom was always telling
her what she was doing wrong and moving her fingers to the correct position. Great musicians bent the rules, Mom said, but before you could bend the rules, you had to learn them, so she was always
badgering Liz to practice and Liz finally said, “I’ve had it.”

Now, since Mom wasn’t around looking over her shoulder, Liz could have fun picking out notes and chords, following songs on the radio, and figuring out what worked and what didn’t
without someone getting exasperated every time she hit a wrong note.

After a while, Liz decided she needed a guitar in better working condition. The music store in Byler had a used Silvertone in the window for a good price—at $110, the clerk said it was a
steal—and Liz decided to buy it with the money in her passbook savings account. Since the peach-fuzz business, I had wanted to avoid Mr. Maddox, so I hadn’t been working much, but Liz
was still doing his filing and helping in his office, and she had socked away nearly two hundred dollars in her account.

One Monday afternoon in November, shortly after I’d read my “Negrophobia Essay”—as everyone in class had taken to calling it—Liz biked into town with plans to go to
the bank, withdraw the money, and bring back the guitar that day. The guitar had a strap, and she was going to bike home with it slung upside down across her back. She was pretty excited.

By the time the light started fading, it was chilly enough to see your breath. I had put on a navy pea coat of Mom’s that I found in the attic—unlike most of the
stuff, it didn’t look old-timey—and was out in front of the house raking leaves into big piles you could jump on when Liz came pedaling up the driveway. She didn’t have the
guitar.

“What happened?” I asked. “Did someone else already buy it?”

“My money wasn’t in the bank,” Liz said. “Mr. Maddox took it out.”

She parked the bike under the carriage overhang, and we sat down on the front steps. After going to the bank, she’d gone over to the Maddoxes’ to find out what the heck had happened
to her money. Mr. Maddox told her that he’d moved the money out of her account, since the interest rate was so low, and instead invested it in T-bills, which had a much higher rate of
interest but couldn’t be liquidated until maturity—one year out. It was a shrewd move, he said, and if he hadn’t been so busy, he would have explained it to her before. When Liz
told him she wanted the money to buy a guitar, Mr. Maddox said she was a fool to waste her money on a passing fancy. Most kids who decided they wanted to play a musical instrument lost interest
after a couple of months, he said, and they or their parents were out the cost of the damn thing while it just took up space in a closet.

“I can’t believe it,” Liz said. “That’s my money. Mr. Maddox can’t tell me what to do with it.”

The very moment Liz uttered those words, Uncle Tinsley came out of the house carrying a ladle. Dinner was ready.

“Mr. Maddox?” he asked. “Jerry Maddox? What about Jerry Maddox?”

Liz and I looked at each other. It was one thing to avoid telling Uncle Tinsley what we’d been up to. It was another thing to outright lie now that he’d asked point-blank.

“Mr. Maddox won’t give me my money,” Liz said again.

“What do you mean?” Uncle Tinsley asked.

“We’ve been working for him,” Liz said.

“It was the only job we could get,” I added.

Uncle Tinsley looked at the two of us for a long moment without saying anything. Then he sat down next to us, put the ladle on the step, and pressed his fingers against his temples. I
couldn’t tell if he was upset or angry, disgusted or worried. Maybe he was feeling all those things at once.

“We needed money for clothes,” Liz said.

“And we wanted to help out with the expenses,” I said.

Uncle Tinsley took a deep breath. “Holladays working for Maddoxes,” he said. “I never thought it would come to that.” He looked over at us. “And you kept it from
me.”

“We just didn’t want to upset you,” I said.

“Well, now I know, and now I’m about as upset as I could possibly be,” he said. “So you might as well tell me the whole story.”

Liz and I explained it all, how we hadn’t wanted to be a burden, so we’d gone looking for jobs and Mr. Maddox was the only one who’d give us work, how he’d set up the
passbook savings accounts but now when Liz went to get her money to buy the guitar, Mr. Maddox had invested it in these T-bills and so she couldn’t have it.

Uncle Tinsley took another deep breath and let the air out with a sigh. Now he seemed more tired than anything else. “If you’d come to me in the first place, I could have told you
something like this would have happened sooner or later with Maddox. It always does. He’s a vile snake.” He stood up. “I don’t want you to ever have anything to do with him
again.”

“What about my money?” Liz asked.

“Forget the money,” he said.

“But it’s two hundred dollars.”

“Write it off to experience.”

I’d been sharing
Liz’s room ever since the day I’d found out about my dad. That night, when Liz turned out the
lights in the bird wing, the moon was so full and bright, it cast shadows across the floor. We lay side by side in bed, staring up at the ceiling.

“I’m going to get my money,” Liz suddenly said.

“How?” I asked. “Uncle Tinsley told us not to have anything to do with Mr. Maddox.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “That money’s mine. I worked for it.”

“But Uncle Tinsley said—”

“I don’t care what Uncle Tinsley said,” Liz went on. “What does he know? He lives shut up in this old house, eating his venison stew. He doesn’t know what
it’s like to need a job. He never has.” She sat up and looked out the window. “That money’s mine. I need it. I earned it. I’m going to get it.”

After school on Tuesday, Liz got on the blue Schwinn and rode into town to see Mr. Maddox. I expected her back in an hour or two. By dinnertime, she still hadn’t
returned. I went into the kitchen, where Uncle Tinsley was opening a can of tomatoes to stretch out the stew. He dumped it into the big copper pot and gave the stew a taste. “Needs a little
zing,” he said. “Where’s Liz?”

“She had some stuff to do. She should be back soon.”

“I see,” Uncle Tinsley said. He poured some vinegar into the pot and then ladled out the stew.

I carried the bowls to the table. After he’d said his usual blessing and eaten a few bites, Uncle Tinsley put down his spoon. “What stuff?” he asked.

“What stuff?”

“You said Liz had some stuff to do. What stuff?” He was eyeing me intently.

I looked at my spoon, trying to figure out what to say. “You know, stuff.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Errands and things.”

“Bean, you’re a terrible liar. Absolutely terrible. Your eyes are darting around all over the place. Now look at me square and tell me where Liz is.”

I raised my eyes and felt my lower lip quivering.

“I guess you don’t need to tell me. There are only two things I’ve asked both of you not to do since you got here. One was not to get jobs, and you went out and got them. The
other was to forget the money, and the very next day, Liz goes to get it.”