Yankee Girl (3 page)

“You need to learn to iron.” Mama showed me how to funnel distilled water into the steam chamber and set the temperature dial. She showed me how to dampen clothes with water from a 7-Up bottle with a sprinkler top.

“Why do you do that?” I asked. Not that I cared. Maybe if I asked enough dumb questions she would lose patience and do the ironing herself.

“A little water helps smooth out the wrinkles.” Uh-oh. Mama thought I was
interested
. “Let's start with something easy.” She poked around the laundry pile until she found a wad of plain white cotton squares. Daddy's handkerchiefs.

“Why don't we do yours?” I asked. At least Mama's were pretty, with lace and embroidery.

“They're too easy to scorch.” Mama flapped a wet white square across the board. “Now, watch me.”

Ironing was even more boring than I expected. Press the hanky out flat. Fold and press again. Fold and press again. All the corners had to match up exactly. I must have re-dampened and re-ironed each one four times.

A million hours and a crick in my neck later, I finished. All that work for a little stack of folded linen. No wonder Mama hated ironing!

“Nice job, Alice,” said Mama. “Now, if you would put them away for me, you can go play.”

I looked around Mama and Daddy's room, wondering where Daddy kept them. I started at the top of his dresser, yanking out drawers. Nope. Shirts. Nope. Socks.

I pulled open the middle drawer.

A gun in a holster was nestled among Daddy's undershirts.

A rattlesnake in the dresser couldn't have shocked me more.

I slammed the drawer shut. I knew that Daddy carried a gun for his job, but I had never seen it. He had always left it at the office.

“Guns don't belong in a house with children,” he said, when I asked him once.

But that was years and years ago. Up North.

In Mississippi, Daddy had a gun in his undershirt drawer.

That's why he didn't let me hug him when he came home from work.

He didn't want me to feel the gun holster.

He didn't want me to know.

We needed a gun in the house.

In Chicago, school always started the day after Labour Day.

But not here. Not this year.

Daddy came in one night and tossed the evening paper onto the breakfast bar. “The Jackson schools are being integrated. School won't start for another two weeks,” he announced. He pointed to the newspaper headline.

Terrific! In two weeks, I would own
all
the Monopoly properties, a new world's record, I was sure.

Mama slammed the oven door on the pot roast. “You didn't know about this any earlier?” she said.

“I did not.” Daddy sounded annoyed. “The school district has been fighting integration all summer. They just lost their last court appeal, and now they need time to get ready.”

“Ready for what? Should we be worried?” Mama nervously flapped the oven mitts against the kitchen counter. “Will it be safe for the children?”

Images from the news flashed before my eyes. Police dogs. White hoods. Burning crosses. My stomach did a cartwheel. That headline was about
my
school. Something that was going to happen to
me
. Now
I
would be part of current events.

“Look at the trouble those Negro children in Little Rock had,” Mama pointed out.

“That was seven years ago,” Daddy said. “Civil rights leaders have learned a thing or two since then.”

“Such as?” Mama folded her arms across her chest.

“Such as avoiding confrontation. The parents will probably keep their children home a few days until all the fuss dies down. That won't stop the protesters, but maybe they'll get tired of it after a while.”

“Why do Negro kids want to go to a white school?” I asked. “Schools are all pretty much the same, aren't they?”

Daddy shook his head. “Negro schools are mostly old and falling apart. They get the white kids' leftovers. Old textbooks. Broken equipment. Beat-up desks. Wouldn't you rather go to a shiny-new school with all the advantages, if you had the choice?”

My school in Chicago had been shiny-new. I couldn't even imagine one that wasn't. I wondered what Parnell School would be like.

I found out the following Wednesday, when our mothers took Jeb and me to register.

“How come you had to register?” I asked Jeb as we walked up the school steps. “You went to school here last year.”

Jeb shrugged. “I don't know. Mama said everybody has to register whether you're new or not. Bet it has something to do with the nigras coming to school.”

I blinked in the dim hallway, my eyes adjusting after the bright outdoors. I breathed in and relaxed. Parnell School was somewhere between falling apart and shiny-new. It smelled the same as my school in Chicago. Like the green soap in the bathrooms, sweeping compound, and pencil shavings, all mixed up with last year's vegetable soup.

We passed the office where the custodian was fastening a nameplate on the door that read PRINCIPAL BENNY THIBODEAUX.

“I'm going in here to see about transferring your records,” said Mama. “Why don't you go with Jeb and meet your new teacher?” She disappeared into the office.

I nudged Jeb. “Is that how you spell Tippytoe?” He shrugged.

Mrs. Mateer turned her head. “It's a French name,” she said. “Young fella from downstate, I heard.”

We passed a poster-painted banner: WELCOME TO OUR SCHOOL. The last two letters of “school” crawled sideways up the end of the paper.

“Second graders.” Jeb's lip curled. “They mess up everything.”

“Sixth grade, right here.” Mrs. Mateer hustled us into a room labelled 6A.

I stopped dead in my tracks. Hanging over the chalkboard were three flags. The American flag, one that I had learned was the Mississippi state flag, and a…

“Is that a rebel flag?” I whispered to Jeb, pointing to the third flag. “What's that doing there?” Up North, we learned in social studies that the rebel flag stood for evil slave owners who seceded from the Union. I sure never thought I'd see a rebel flag in a schoolroom.

“It's the Confederate flag,” Jeb corrected me. “It's a symbol of our glorious heritage.” I could tell he had heard some adult say that.

What glorious heritage?
I started to say.
You guys lost the war
. But I decided that might not be the smartest thing to say to a boy named for a Confederate general.

A young woman with perfectly flipped silver-blonde hair sat at a long table covered with cards and papers. She looked up at Jeb and me standing in the doorway.

“Y'all come on in.” The woman smiled like we were the best thing that had happened to her all day. “I'm Miss LeFleur. In French
la fleur
means ‘the flower'.”

It seemed like a good name for her.

She wore a madras shirtwaist dress, penny loafers, and silvery pink lipstick. She couldn't be a teacher; teachers weren't this young and pretty.

“Are you the new sixth-grade teacher?” asked Mrs. Mateer. “I heard Miss Carpenter retired.”

“Yes, I'm taking Miss Carpenter's place.” Miss LeFleur flashed a quick smile. She had dimples! “However, Miss Gruen is still here. She retires at the end of the school year.” She handed Mrs. Mateer a sheaf of papers. Miss LeFleur's fingernails were painted pink; her silver charm bracelet tinkled faintly. I hoped that I would get Miss LeFleur and not some cranky old teacher who was tired of sixth graders.

“Where is Miss Gruen?” Mrs. Mateer fanned herself with a registration card.

“She's…uh…at a meeting at the Central Office.” Miss LeFleur suddenly found something fascinating in a stack of papers.

“This wouldn't have anything to do with that integration business?” Mrs. Mateer asked sharply.

My insides squirmed. Was there going to be trouble after all?

Miss LeFleur shuffled through her cards, bracelet jingling. “Please keep your voice down.” She dropped her own voice to a whisper. “Some coloured girls are coming to school here. I really can't say more.” Her nostrils flared, as if she smelled something bad. It was an ugly look on a pretty face. Then it vanished as quickly as it had come.

“Any of them going to be in the sixth grade?” Mrs. Mateer clicked open her purse and pulled out a gold fountain pen.

Miss LeFleur turned about six shades of red.

“It doesn't matter to me,” said Mrs. Mateer, her pen moving across the registration papers. “Nigras have to go to school somewhere. I just don't want any trouble, know what I mean?”

I think I knew what she meant. I felt sorry for these Negro girls, whoever they were. Last Wednesday, during my visit to Dr. Warren, I had gotten a taste of how it felt, not being wanted.

“You Yankees,” shrilled Dr. Warren's nurse. “Y'all come down here thinking you can tell us what to do with our nigras.” She waved the patient information form, where Mama had written “FBI Agent” next to “Spouse's Occupation”. Everyone in the waiting room put down their magazines and stared at us like we were Martians. “Why don't y'all go back where you came from? There's plenty of crime up North. Ain't none of y'all's business how we treat our nigras.”

I tried to disappear behind a copy of
Life
, but it didn't work. Waves of hate came right through the magazine. These people didn't even know me.

I cringed at the memory as I watched Miss LeFleur paging through the registration cards. “Yankee, Yankee, Yankee go home” her charm bracelet jangled.

But I
was
home. Mississippi was home now.