With the Might of Angels (10 page)

I can
do
this. I
can
do this.

Daddy got very quiet after he finished reading today’s paper. He folded it into a small, hard square, and set it on top of Mama’s sewing basket for her to read. I got to the paper first, when Mama was busy with laundry.

I saw it right away—an advertisement from the owner of Sutter’s Dairy, where Daddy works.

It said:

Reverend Collier gave a sermon today about the Sutter’s Dairy advertisement that was in the paper.

He asked all of us at Shepherd’s Way Baptist, “What
is
right in God’s eyes?”

Every eye in the place was on me and my family.

I have kissed my molasses lunch tin good-bye! Prettyman has a
cafeteria.
With hot food. And varnished floors. And windows big enough to show off the trees that wave hello from outside.

And buttered corn nibblets.

And mashed potatoes.

And meat loaf.

And Jell-O!

There was not a fried pickle in sight, but that didn’t matter. Mama’s fried pickles are the only ones worth eating.

Two ladies served the food, both Negroes. They smiled with quiet pride when I came through the line. They introduced themselves as Miss Cora and Miss Billie.

Thanks to Miss Cora and Miss Billie, my lunch plate was piled with more food than any other child’s plate in that cafeteria. I got two Jell-O squares — red
and
green.

But as sweet as Jell-O and a plate full of corn nibblets can be, food doesn’t taste good when you’re eating all alone.

Daddy came home from work before Goober and me even went to bed. That’s usually when he’s
at
work. When he pulled up to the house in his truck, he didn’t come in right away. He stayed outside for a long while. “Is that
Daddy’s
truck?” I asked Mama. “Why’s he home?”

Mama only half answered. “He likes to let the motor run. Keeps the truck warm before turning it off.”

She hurried Goober into the bathtub.

In my bedroom, she brought me a clean nightgown. “Why’s Daddy home?” I asked again.

“It’s time for bed, Dawnie” was all Mama said.

It’s bad enough having Bobby Hatch in my homeroom, but it’s triply bad having to go to school with all three Hatch brothers. Cecil Hatch is in the sixth grade. Jeb’s in fifth. Even with the grade differences between them, those boys seem to somehow travel in a pack.

They must have each been born under a full moon, ’cause goodness knows they
are ugly as wolves, and just as mean.

The Hatches made today’s walk through Prettyman’s halls far from quiet. Those boys don’t know a thing about whispering. As I was coming into the building this morning, they were ready to make some noise.

I walked in hugging tight to my books. Jeb’s nose was running. He gave a hard sniff, rattled back some snot. Wiped his nose with his knuckles.

The boys let me pass with not a word from their mouths. But as soon as my back was to the three of them, they started howling after me.

“There goes Dawnie chicken lips,” Cecil called.

“Got a chicken head, too, that girl,” said Jeb.

Bobby said, “I’m still not sure she
is
a girl. With the way she handles a bat and runs bases, I think that chicken-lipped colored has got some boy in her.”

I wanted to ram a bat at Bobby’s head right then. He just wouldn’t shut up. “No real girl can play baseball like that,” he said.

Bobby’s too dumb to know he was paying me a compliment about my ball playing. And he’s too dim-witted to realize there was envy wrapped in his words. He was plain jealous of how good I am on the field.

Bobby’s mouthing off encouraged the other kids standing around to start clucking. Alls I heard were their chicken noises spurting up in back of me.

Daddy says smart feet are feet that walk away from trouble. But something made me turn around right then to get a good look at those clucking kids.

For a good long minute, I watched them at the other end of that long hallway, clucking and carrying on.

Maybe it was the same something that encouraged me to turn around that also put a serious tickle on my funny bone. I had to work hard to keep from laughing! The Hatch brothers and everyone with them looked stupider than stupid, acting like chickens! And did you know that raccoons
eat
chickens? I should have brought Waddle to school!

Anyway,
they
were supposed to be making fun of
me,
but, Lord, did they look funny. I spent the rest of the day with a bust-out laugh roaring up inside me, every time I thought about Prettyman’s chickens.

I couldn’t let that laugh free, though. I didn’t want to give the Hatches anything to get riled
about. I kept my bust-out laugh trapped somewhere deep in my belly.

Nothing to laugh about tonight.

Daddy’s lost his job.

“How come?” I asked Mama.

“Folks have threatened to boycott Mr. Sutter’s business if he keeps Daddy as a worker.”

I blinked.

“What’s wrong with Daddy’s work?”

“It’s not Daddy’s work that’s in question. Customers don’t want to support a business that employs a man whose daughter is integrating their school.”

“
I
made Daddy get fired?”

“
You
make your father proud. It’s the fear of ignorant people that’s pushing Mr. Sutter.”

“I’ll go back to Bethune, then,” I said.

“Stop talking nonsense, Dawnie.” Mama was just short of snapping.

I shut up, but it was hard for me to not keep talking. I wanted to tell Mama I was serious about going back to Bethune. As much as I like all the pretty stuff at Prettyman, I’m messing things up for Daddy by being a student at that school.

I hate my school job! I hate it because it’s stupid. I hate it because it’s not fair. And I hate it because it means I miss recess, so I won’t ever get to play on Prettyman’s baseball field.

There are two parts to my job, which really means I have
two
jobs.

Part 1 — The Sponge:

I dip a spongy clump in the wash bucket and trail it, top-to-bottom, on the blackboard. That sponge is as big as Goober’s head, and it takes a lot of two-fisted wringing to keep it from dripping all over the place.

Out the window I watch kids pushing past each other to get to the school yard. While they run, I sponge, then take the bucket down the hall to the sink in the janitor’s closet, where I pour out the chalky water. That bucket is bigger than a Buick, and it bangs my leg when I walk with it. And hoisting it to the lip of the sink is no picnic.

Part 2 — Erasers:

I take them out back, near the school yard. This being my first day on the job, I started off slow. Every time the black pads slapped together, they sent out a soft thud, then a dust cloud of chalk.

Bam — pooof! Bam — pooof!

I don’t do anything halfway, so I was not going to let that swelling dust get to me. But soon the
bam — pooof!
was spreading more and more
pooof
into my nose and eyes, and all around my head. A white film dusted my hair. And eyelashes. And neck. And clothes. More dusty than Mama’s talcum powder.

Even though I can run a 50-yard dash without getting winded, I could hardly breathe. My coughing was louder than the hacking of a sick dog.

When I got back to class, the other kids were coming in from recess. They were shoving, and happy, and laughing from getting to be in so much fresh air.

And here’s what else isn’t fair. Because he’s a Negro, Daddy’s lost his job. Because I’m a Negro, I have to keep mine.

Leave it to Mama to find a way to get chalk dust off my clothes and out of my hair. Her methods are always easy for her, but hard on me. Today she came at me with a ribbon of flypaper and pressed its sticky strip all over my clothes.

That definitely pulled up the chalk dust, but snatched at the backs of my hands near the ends of my sleeves and any other skin I had showing. For my hair, Mama made me stand by our summer house fan to let the chalk dust blow off.

And, oh, did it blow.

And, oh, did I not like it.

Mama’s added something new to my Saturday chore list — raking leaves. I spend my school days beating erasers and emptying slop water, and my Saturdays doing yard work. Do kids have fun anymore?

For all the staring — or clucking — kids do when I walk through the halls at school, in Math class I have the opposite problem. Mrs. Hughes, my Math teacher, ignores me.

In Mrs. Hughes’s class, I’m as invisible as a ghost.

I admit, Math is my hardest subject, but I try at least. Today, each time I raised my hand, Mrs.
Hughes looked right past me. I can see that her glasses are as thick as the bottom of a pop bottle, but I know Mrs. Hughes is not blind.

During our Math lesson today, Mrs. Hughes asked us to give an example of an
integer.
Nobody raised their hand. Not one kid knew how to answer. I sort of knew how to answer, so I put my hand up, and I held it up.

The answer — I think — is that an integer is a whole number, not a fraction or a number that has a decimal. An integer can be positive, negative, or zero. The numbers 12, 3, –42, and a million are all integers. I think.

At first I thought Mrs. Hughes was giving some of the other students a chance to answer, but not one kid took the chance. I could feel the blood running from my hand. My arm started to get tired, but I was not putting it down till she called on me, or at least looked in my direction.

Mrs. Hughes repeated the question. “Can anyone give an example of an integer?”

Nobody said anything.

“Do I have any volunteers?” asked Mrs. Hughes.

Do I have any chance of getting called on?
I wondered.

The room had fallen silent. No one wanted to
take a chance with the answer. They all saw my hand up. I think they were hoping Mrs. Hughes would call on me so that she wouldn’t call on one of them.

Bobby Hatch burped, and everyone giggled.

We were nearing the end of the period. Mrs. Hughes went on to a new question. An easy one that even the stupidest kid could answer.

Mrs. Hughes asked, “What is a real number?”

This sent ten hands flying up. I didn’t bother raising mine. It was clear I was not getting called on, even though I know that a real number is the kind of number people normally use, such as 1, 89, –37. I stayed quiet.

Here’s what else I know — I have now figured out the answer to the real problem in Mrs. Hughes’s Math class.

It all adds up to this:

1 white teacher + 1 Negro student + 28 white kids = 1 invisible Dawnie Rae Johnson.

Or, here’s another answer to a Math class problem:

1 teacher – 1 iota of kindness = makes me feel less than zero.

P.S. This being Columbus Day, I’d have thought we’d have had the day off. But it was
probably Mrs. Hughes who said, “Let’s keep school open so I can make Dawnie feel smaller than a baby ant.”

In Mrs. Ruth’s English class I am far from invisible. Mrs. Ruth
loves
to call on me, even when my hand is not raised. But it seems
my
understanding of English is different than Mrs. Ruth’s understanding.

I mean, we’re both saying the same thing — at least that’s how I see it. But to Mrs. Ruth’s way of thinking, every answer I give is wrong.

Today, with how Mrs. Ruth was treating me, I wondered if I was even speaking English. She asked me to name the parts of speech. Easy.

“Verb, noun, adjective, adverb, pronoun,” I said. I thought for a moment. There were more, but I couldn’t remember them all. “And preposition,” I added.

“That’s wrong, Dawnie,” Mrs. Ruth said. “There are
eight
parts of speech — verb, noun, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition,
and
conjunction,
and
interjection.”

Mrs. Ruth was right. There
are
eight parts of
speech. I’d forgotten two. But did that make my whole answer wrong?

For the next question, Mrs. Ruth singled me out again. She didn’t seem to call much on other kids. Some of them even wanted to answer, but I’m the one who got all the attention. And I’m the one who got slapped down every time I spoke.

“Dawnie, what is a synonym?”

Another easy question, but I thought carefully before answering. I asked myself,
Are there eight parts to a synonym?

I said, “A synonym is a word or a way of saying something that means the same thing as another word or another way of saying something.”

That was the right answer. I just
knew
it.

“Wrong, Dawnie,” said Mrs. Ruth. She looked pleased to be saying those two words together.
Wrong Dawnie.

“A synonym is a word
or expression
that has the same meaning as another word
or expression
,” Mrs. Ruth proclaimed.

Alls I could think was,
Isn’t that what I just said?

Mrs. Ruth asked, “Dawnie, are you paying attention?”

Mrs. Ruth, are YOU paying attention? This is English class, right? Are WE speaking the same language? Because
I am SAYING the exact same thing you’re saying, but saying it different, and forgetting just one small part. But—like a synonym—we MEAN the same thing.

Are YOU paying attention, Mrs. Ruth? Are YOU? How about if I call you Wrong Mrs. Ruth?