The Book of Lost Friends(100)
Why is he looking at us like that?
A shrill whistle pierces the air behind me and bisects the chaos. I turn to see Sarge striding around the school building. I thought she was tied up babysitting tonight, but I’m insanely glad that reinforcements have finally arrived.
Her second whistle rises above the din and splits eardrums. It achieves an admirable degree of crowd noise reduction. “All right, you oxygen thieves, it’s cold out here, and I’ve got better things to do than stand around and watch you morons jump on each other. If this is the best you’ve got, you are a waste of time. My time. These ladies’ time. Ms. Silva’s time. You want to act like losers, then go home. Otherwise, clamp your jawbones to the tops of your mouths, and do not release them unless you have raised your hand high and Miss Silva has called on you. And do not raise your hand unless you have something intelligent to say. Is that understood?”
There’s complete silence. A pure, unadulterated hush of glorious intimidation.
The kids hover on a razor’s edge. Leave? Go do whatever they’d normally be doing on a Saturday night in October? Or knuckle under to authority and cooperate?
“I can’t hear you,” Sarge demands.
This time, they answer in an uneasy, affirmative murmur.
Sarge rolls a look my way, grumbles, “That’s why I’m not a teacher. I’d already be grabbing ears and knocking heads together.”
I pull myself up like a rock climber after a fall to the bottom of a canyon. “Well, do we quit here, or do we go on? You guys decide.”
If they leave, they leave.
The reality is that nobody expects much at this school, anyway. Pick any hall, half of the teachers are just coasting by. All that’s really required is that the kids are kept from making too much noise, wandering loose, or smoking on campus. It’s always been that way.
“We’re sorry, Miss Pooh.” I don’t even know which boy says it. I don’t recognize the voice, but it’s one of the younger ones, a seventh grader, maybe.
Others follow once the logjam is broken.
A new direction takes hold. Sarge’s oxygen thieves turn away without further instruction, and take up their tea light lanterns, sort out their tombstones, and find their places on the field.
My heart soars. I do my best to hide it and look appropriately stern. Sarge stands at ease and sends a self-satisfied nod my way.
We progress along with the program, not like a well-oiled machine, but we sputter through as I walk around, simulating an audience.
Lil’ Ray has crafted two tombstones for himself. He is his five times great-grandfather, born to an enslaved mother at Goswood, eventually becoming a free man, a traveling preacher. “And I learned to read when I was twenty-two and still a slave. I sneaked off in the woods, and I paid a free black girl to teach me. And it was very dangerous for us both, because that was against the law back then. You could get killed and buried, or whipped, or sold off to a slave trader and marched away from all your family. But I wanted to read, and so I did it,” he says, and punctuates the sentence with a definitive nod.
He pauses then, and at first I think he’s forgotten the rest of his story. But after the barest breaking of character and a slight twitch of a smile that says he knows he has the audience enrapt, he takes a breath and continues. “I became a preacher once black folks could have their own churches. I was the one who built up many of the congregations in this whole area. And I’d ride the circuit to different ones all the time, and that was very dangerous, too, because, even though the patrollers of slavery days were gone away, the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia were on the roads instead. I had a good horse and a good dog, and they’d warn me if they heard somebody or smelled somebody. I knew all the places to hide and all the people who would hide me, too, if I needed it.
“And I married the girl who had taught me to read. Her name was Seraphina Jackson, and she used to worry to death when I was gone from our cabin in the swamp woods. She’d hear the wolves sniffing and digging around the walls, and she’d sit up all night with a big rifle we had found by a stone fence on a old battlefield. Sometimes, she’d hear gangs of troublemakers go by, too, but they did not menace her or my children. Why? Because the reason she was a free woman before emancipation is, her daddy was the banker.”
Lil’ Ray alters his posture, puffs his chest, puts on his top hat, and changes tombstones. His lashes droop to half-mast and he eyes us down his nose. “Mr. Tomas R. Jackson. I am a white man and a rich man. I had seven slaves in my big house in town, and years later when it burned down, that’s the land where the Black Methodist Church and the library got built. But I also had three children with a free black woman, and so they were free, too, because the status of the child followed that of the mother. I bought a house for them and a sewing shop for her because the law wouldn’t let us marry. But I didn’t marry anybody else, either. Our sons went to college at Oberlin. Our daughter, Seraphina, got married to a freedman she taught to read and so she became a preacher’s wife, and she took care of me when I got old, too. She was a good daughter and she taught lots of people to read until she got too old and couldn’t see the letters anymore.”
By the time he’s finished, I can’t help it, I’m in tears. Beside me, Sarge clears her throat. She’s got Granny T on one arm and Aunt Dicey on the other, because they insisted on coming out here, and she doesn’t want them to take a tumble.