The Book of Lost Friends(66)
“Sounds good.” But if I had to gauge his countenance right then, I’d say good isn’t an apt description. Goswood Grove hangs around his neck like an albatross; the questions of its future care and feeding and the difficult memories it embodies are things he wants to avoid.
I understand that better than he probably thinks I do. I can’t possibly explain the reasons to him, so I thank him profusely and then reconfirm our time.
As we part, I leave with the sense that he’s sorry he ever met me.
Traveling back to school, I try to imagine his life, shrimp boating and whatever else he devotes his time to down there in Morgan City. Girlfriend? Buddies? What does his normal day look like? How does he spend his evenings and nights? His sister has been dead only two years, his grandfather, three. Both passed away while living in that house. What am I treading on by dragging him back to Goswood Grove and a grief that is clearly still fresh?
It’s an uncomfortable question, and I do my best to push it out the Bug’s window, let it sail away on the breeze as I speed across town, a woman on a mission.
I’m so filled with anticipation about what I have planned for my high school classes that I catch myself watching the clock during the first two periods of the morning, wrangling seventh and eighth graders.
My guest speaker arrives right on schedule, at the end of my conference period. I do a quick double take as she enters my classroom, fussing with a small drawstring purse. She’s decked out in a white blouse with a high lace collar and a bow at the neck, an ankle-length black skirt, and short black lace-up boots. A jaunty, flat-brimmed straw hat crowns her thick gray hair, which is pinned into the same loose bun she wears behind the counter of the Cluck and Oink.
She smooths her skirt nervously. “How’s this look?” she queries. “It was my costume from the Founder’s Day float, back a few years. Put on a little weight since then. Too much barbecue and pie.”
“I didn’t mean for you to go to so much trouble,” I say, though I can hardly stand still long enough to talk. “I just want you to tell them the story of the library. How your grandmother and the ladies of the New Century Club were responsible for putting it there.”
She smiles and sends a quick wink my way, then adjusts the hairpins on her hat. “Don’t you worry, sugar. I brought pictures to show and a copy of the letter my grandmama helped write to Mr. Carnegie. But these kids oughta hear the story from my grandmama herself.”
Suddenly, the costume makes sense. I’m stunned and jubilant all at once. “That’s brilliant.”
“I know.” She agrees with a definitive nod. “You said you wanted these young folks to see history. Well, I’m about to give them a piece of it.”
And she does. She even hides in my supply closet until the class is settled in and I’ve taken roll. They’re suspicious when I tell them we’re having a guest speaker. They’re not enthusiastic. Until they see who’s here.
“Granny Teeeee!” They squeal like first graders.
She shushes them with one finger and a stern shake of her head. I wish I could do that. “Oh, no, not Granny T,” she says. “This is the year 1899. Granny T is a little baby named Margaret Turner, only one year old. And Baby Margaret’s mama, Victory, is a young married woman, and I am her mama, little Margaret’s grandmama. I was born in the year 1857, so that makes me almost forty-three years old right now. I was born into slavery, right out on the Gossett place, and it was a hard life when I came up as a child. Had to work picking cotton, cutting cane, and hauling water to the field by hand, but that’s a long time ago now. It’s 1899, and I just took my savings and bought a little building to start myself up a restaurant, because I’m a widow woman now, and I have to earn my way on my own. I have nine children, and some are still at home to take care of.
“Now, I don’t mind that it’s hard work, except there is one thing that does trouble me much. I promised my departed husband that all our children would be educated, but the colored school only goes six months out of the year here, and the town library is small, and it is just for the white folks. The only other library is a little closet-sized shed room out back of the black Methodist church, started about ten years ago. We’re proud to have it, but it ain’t much. Now, at the time, all the highfalutin’ ladies in town, the wives of the bankers and the doctors and such, have what they call the Ladies New Century Club and their project is to build a bigger library…for the white folks. But guess what?”
She bends forward in a dramatic pause, and the kids lean over their desks, their mouths hanging slack in concentration.
“That is not the library you children passed by on the school bus today, in nineteen and eighty-seven. No, sir. I’m going to tell you about the time a handful of ordinary women, who worked hard for their living, baked pies and took in extra wash and canned peaches and sold everything else they could get their hands on and fooled everybody and built the fanciest library in town.”
Reaching into her cart, she extracts a framed photo and holds it up for the kids. “And this is them on the steps of that beautiful library the day it was opened. These ladies here, they are the reason it happened.”
She gives the students several framed photographs to circulate as she goes on to tell them about the town’s New Century Club unanimously rejecting the notion of using one of the highly touted Carnegie grants to construct a new library, fearing that money came with a free use for all citizens stipulation, which could mean regardless of color. The ladies of their church applied for the grant instead, the black Methodist church donated land, and the Colored Carnegie Library eventually opened in a newly created building much grander than that of the other library in town. Thereafter, the Carnegie library’s founders took the liberty of naming themselves the Carnegie Colored Ladies New Century Club.