Varina(70)

Fifth Sunday





Saratoga Springs


—I HAVE QUESTIONS TOO, V SAYS. SUCH AS, WHERE DID YOU go after Miss Botume? You were with her . . . what? A year? Two years? What happens after this?

She turns to the end of the chapter called “Jimmie” in the blue book and reads, Finally the little boy drifted into Auntie Gwynne’s Home. This noble woman placed him where he was well trained in all ways, having the advantage of school, as well as a good practical education, until he was old enough to support himself.

—Drifted? V says. Like a tiny hobo carrying his bindle on a stick over his shoulder?

—I doubt it.

—So how was it? She dropped you off at an orphanage and said, So long? Or just found someone already going that direction to give you a ride? I don’t imagine she was under arrest by the Federal government at the time she let you go. Or had a gun to her head.

James waits a moment for her to settle. He draws a couple of breaths and then tells V he hardly remembers Auntie Gwynne’s orphanage, having been there only briefly. Before he found Miss Botume’s book, he couldn’t even recall the name of the place. For two years previous to arriving there, his world had changed radically month by month. Places and people blur. That orphanage rests in his mind as one picture—a room filled with lots of white children. That’s all.

But he does remember that soon he went to Thompson Island Farm School, a mile out in Boston Harbor. Wealthy people—particularly Universalists and Unitarians—paid for it as a way of making the world a little better. Not all the boys were orphans, so some went home for holidays. The school aimed to help those who needed help, but the boys had to be smart and promising and willing. The main building, a big white house, sat on an open hill looking over the water. They could see the city from the third-floor windows, but it felt like looking at the moon through a telescope—interesting to observe, but not your world. His world was the island, and most of his memories begin there.

He took classes in literature, mathematics, geography, history, logic, and science. And along with studying, all the boys worked for the good of their little community. The younger boys had jobs around the big house, so James started out helping in the kitchen and in the garden. Even now, he still grows a small backyard garden with greens in the cool months, tomatoes and squash and beans in the summer. All the boys lived on the third floor in big rooms like he remembers in Richmond with V’s children, except more beds and closer together. Lots of rules about laundry and personal cleanliness.

—Good, V says. Boys that age can never wash too often.

James tells her that the school had a big brass band. He played bugle. Sometimes they put on their uniforms and went out to the beach to greet passenger ships entering Boston Harbor, trumpeting marches to celebrate a successful crossing of the Atlantic. Passengers stood at the rails and waved handkerchiefs as they passed.

The island spanned enough land—good dirt—to grow orchards, hayfields, berry patches. The older boys each had a little flower garden to tend, and spring through fall, they kept the big house bright with reds and yellows and whites. Fat clams grew on the sandbars, and boys sometimes went out with buckets and spades to bring back dinner. Older boys lived in a sort of village of tiny white cottages with green shutters. They elected their own mayor and held community meetings to decide how to deal with problems, how to punish boys who wouldn’t work or who pilfered. One large room in the main building was the library, and James spent a lot of rainy Sundays in there. There were six long study tables, and the books were mostly donated, some quite old. He liked brown antiquated travel books describing trips that weren’t possible anymore—explorations of the Western Hemisphere back when much of it was still unmapped. Pretty days of spring, summer, and fall, he spent all his free time outside, either walking the island or sitting under a tree with a book.

—The headmaster and staff searched out our aptitudes, James says. And when I reached thirteen, I began teaching reading and arithmetic and geography to the youngest boys. In some form, it’s what I’ve done ever since.

Pretty days in late summer, though, he always volunteered for haying—forking the cut and dried hay onto an enormous wagon until the heap stood two shaggy stories tall, and then riding on top back to the barn, balancing on the shifting load, the fragrance of sun on cut grass swelling all around—itchy from the hay down your shirt, but feeling strong and tired and satisfied with the work.

He also tells her about winters when the wind blew in from the North Atlantic and the snow came sideways against the windows and the big house swayed and vibrated in the storms. How one winter the harbor froze solid and some of them walked over the ice to the shore, a mile away.

—So, not a bad place, V says.

—A very good place. A good school, plenty of teaching and learning, but also plenty of physical work. The boys learned how to take care of the buildings and the animals and the gardens and orchards. You were putting your food on the table. Literally. Not working to grow somebody else’s food, growing your own. Your responsibility, your work, your enjoyment. We sold surplus from the gardens and orchards, and the money went back into the school for our benefit and for boys to come. You felt part of something. Out of a hundred boys, fewer than a dozen weren’t white, but that rarely mattered. Teachers judged us by how much we learned and how much we contributed to the work, not on color. Boys who didn’t follow that same practice came and went quickly. Of course the teachers who ran the school and the rich benefactors who paid for it were idealists, and if you said that all of us—white and black—may have finished school at eighteen with a distorted and naive sense of the world off the island, you’d be right.