Midnight Without a Moon(18)

But I didn’t care that the school was haunted. I only cared that it was new, even if everything in it was raggedy junk from the white school. At least we had a school. Most colored children weren’t lucky enough to even go to school, especially the ones who lived on somebody else’s land. With cotton-picking season right around the corner, they were expected to work. Luckily for me and Queen and Fred Lee, Papa allowed us to attend school even during the harvest season. Ma Pearl, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less.

Grade school was considered a decent education by most folks in the Delta anyhow. But not for me. I wanted more. I needed more. I couldn’t be like Papa and spend the rest of my life working in a cotton field. Nor like Ma Pearl, cleaning up after and serving white women like Mrs. Robinson. I would turn into a madwoman if I had to be surrounded by all the fanciness of a white woman’s house all day, then return home and try to find contentment with the drabness of my own.

If only for this reason alone, I wanted—?no—?I had to do like Levi Jackson and some of the others. I had to finish up high school and head off somewhere to a college. Except Levi would never again set foot in a college, thanks to the fool who put a bullet in his head. But at least his younger brothers would have a better chance than he did.

Right after Levi’s funeral and before the cotton chopping was all done, Mr. Albert and his wife, Miss Flo-Etta, took their younger sons and joined their older sons in Detroit. He said he was done with Mississippi and would never set foot on that demon soil again. Perhaps Fish, Adam, and Mr. Albert’s other young sons would get to go to one of those fancy schools up north, where they claimed white children and colored children sat in the same classrooms—?something I figured I would have to see for myself to believe.

My seventh-grade teacher, Miss Johnson, had said that would eventually happen in Mississippi. But she also said it was the actions of people like the NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers who got us that new colored school built. She said that Mr. Evers had first gone to Alcorn, the colored college where Levi had gone, and studied business. After that, he tried to go study law at that fancy white college they call Ole Miss. Miss Johnson said that as long as colored folks tried to force their way into white schools, white folks would spend money to build colored schools. That way they could claim colored children had the same privileges as white children, and they wouldn’t be forced to integrate like they had done in Topeka, Kansas.

But she and Reverend Jenkins both said that they could build all they wanted, but a change was still coming to Mississippi, and soon. Reverend Jenkins himself had attended a funny-sounding colored college named Tougaloo, where he studied literature. So besides preaching, he was also a teacher at the colored high school, and he sold life insurance policies on the side. Hallelujah was planning to study medicine when he went to college. I wanted to learn important things like that too—?medicine, or maybe even business or law like Mr. Evers.

I was almost finished with the kitchen floor and was about to get started on sweeping the back porch when Ma Pearl yelled from the parlor. “Rose Lee! Come read this.”

I scrambled up from the floor and dried my hands on a dishrag. I welcomed the break from my work, even if it was only to read the mail. Ma Pearl was one of the reasons I knew I had to get as much schooling as possible. She’d been born in 1899, her mama and papa were former slaves, and she couldn’t read or write a lick. She couldn’t even read the mail when it came in. Papa, however, had taught himself to read when he was a boy. He told me that while his mama cleaned the white woman’s house, he read the white children’s books, figuring out the words by studying the pictures. He couldn’t read all that good, but at least he could read some. Good thing too, since he studied that Farmer’s Almanac like it was the Bible. His favorite reading, however, was the three-day-old Memphis Commercial Appeal, a white-owned newspaper that the Robinsons passed on to Ma Pearl. Papa read the paper in the late evening, after what he called a hard day of cotton-field meditation. He said that after spending a whole day looking inside his own head, it was nice to take a break and look inside someone else’s.



I knew before seeing it that the letter in Ma Pearl’s hand was from Mama. And I also knew, from the sour look on Ma Pearl’s face, that the letter didn’t contain that lil’ something Mama had promised to send as soon as she got settled.

When Ma Pearl thrust the letter in my face, she cussed under her breath and said, “See what that heffa got to say.”

Mama shouldn’t have promised money she couldn’t deliver. Now Ma Pearl would be in a dark mood all weekend. And with her not having to go to Mrs. Robinson’s again until Monday, I dreaded the three-day wrath we all had coming.

As I studied the letter before I read it out loud, it broke my heart. The penmanship was so poor I couldn’t tell whether it had been written by my twenty-eight-year-old mama or my six-year-old stepbrother. Mama had had to quit school at fifteen because she was “in the family way.” Despite her age, she had still gotten only as far as sixth grade. Ma Pearl said she was too busy studying Johnny Lee Banks instead of studying her books.

But even with a sixth-grade education, I would think Mama could do better than the mishmash of so-called words I was staring at. Mama’s spelling was so bad it read like some kind of secret code.



Dear Mama and Papa,

How ya doin. Fin I hop. We fin to. Pete got lost wen we got her. He went to the rong bildin. A white girl told us we was on the rong side a the free way. She tol us go a cupa mo blocs soth. She was nic. We fond our bildin. It so tall. It bout the talless thing I eva seed. Our partmint aint nar bout big as the hose in Grenwood. But at lees it got a bafrum. We aint got to go otsid. And we got swichs on the wall for the lites. We aint got to pull no strng to trun them on. And we got closit to put our cloths in.