Long Division(4)

Mama taught over at Madison Community College and Principal Reeves took a politics course from her. When I first heard that my principal was my mama’s student, I thought I’d get away with everything. But it was actually harder for me to get away with anything since whenever Principal Reeves didn’t do her homework or answered questions wrong, she liked to talk to my mama about how I was acting a fool in school.

On Principal Reeves’s desk, you saw all kinds of papers flooding the bottoms of two big pictures of her husband, who disappeared a few years ago. No one knows what happened to him. Supposedly, he went to work one morning and just never came back. If you looked at pictures of Principal Reeves back in the day, you’d be surprised, because she looked exactly the same. She had the same curl at 62 that she had at 31, except now the curl was lightweight gray.

Principal Reeves also kept a real record player in her office. In the corner underneath the table were all these Aretha Franklin records. Mama loved Aretha Franklin, too, but she only had greatest-hit CDs, which she’d play every time she picked me up.

I invented calling Principal Reeves “Ms. Kanye” behind her back because even though she asked a lot of questions, you really still couldn’t tell her nothing. She asked questions just to set up her next point. And her next point was always tied to teaching us how we were practically farting on the chests of the teenagers on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee if we didn’t conduct ourselves with dignity.

Before Principal Reeves stepped her foot in the door of her office, she was saying my name. “Citoyen…”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Take this test,” she said, and handed me a piece of paper. “Don’t look at me with those sad red eyes. Just take the test.”

At Hamer, they were always experimenting with different styles of punishment ever since they stopped whupping ass a few years ago. The new style was to give you a true/false test if you messed up. And the test had to be tailored to what they thought you did wrong and what you needed to learn to not mess up again. The craziest thing is that it was usually harder understanding what the test had to do with what you did wrong than taking the actual test itself.

Name________Year_____True/False — Underline one

1. Desperation will make a villain out of you.

True/False

2. Only a fool would not travel through time and change their past if they could.

True/False

3. You were brought to this country with the expectation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

True/False

4. If you push yourself hard in the direction of freedom, compassion, and excellence, you will recover.

True/False

5. Loving someone and loving how someone makes you feel are the same thing.

True/False

6. Only those who can read, write, and love can move back or forward through time.

True/False

7. There are undergrounds to the past and future for every human being on earth.

True/False

8. If you haven’t read or written or listened to something at least three times, you have never really read, written, or listened.

True/False

9. Past, present, and future exist within you and you change them by changing the way you live your life.

True/False

10. You are special.

True/False

Bonus

11. You are innocent.

True/False


After I finished the stupid test, Principal Reeves put it on top of a stack of tests she hadn’t graded yet and started going in on me. “Citoyen, do you know who the great Brenda Travis is?” she asked me.

“Umm…”

“No. You do not know. Brenda Travis was a fifteen-year-old high school student from right up the road in McComb,” Principal Reeves said, and popped what looked like some boiled peanuts in her mouth. “That young lady canvassed these same streets with the SNCC voter-registration workers 50 years ago. She led students like you on a sit-in and, for the crime of ordering a hamburger from a white restaurant, the girl was sentenced to a year in the state juvenile prison.”

“Just a regular hamburger?” I asked her. “Not even a fish sandwich or a grilled cheese? That’s crazy.”

“That contraption holding your teeth in place, that’s the problem.” Principal Reeves sat at her desk and started ruffling through papers.

“I don’t get it,” I told her. “What contraption?”

“Your mouth, that contraption. It is going to be the death of you or somebody else,” she said. “Today is the biggest day of your life, Citoyen. You want to waste it calling your brother LaVander Peeler a ‘nigger’ and using a wave brush on school property? You know we don’t bring wave brushes to school at Hamer.”

The problem was that at Hamer, you used to be able to use your wave brush until the second bell at 8:05, but ever since Jerome Wallace beat the bile out of this cock-eyed new kid, Roy Belton, with a Pine wave brush during lunch, you can be suspended for something as simple as having a wave brush on school property.

“LaVander Peeler ain’t my brother,” I told her, “and I didn’t think I was wasting it. I’m ready. You’ll see.”

Principal Reeves just looked at me. I tried to look away toward the bookshelf so I wouldn’t have to look at her face.

“What’s that?” I asked her. “That’s so crazy.”