Chapter 3

The next few weeks went better than Flossie would have hoped, had she any hopes at all. She had been around enough racist white people (and black people too, for that matter) that she believed racism was a disease that ran too deep to be “cured” in anything less than generations. And, her teaching methods did not change. Harvey Wilson might eventually get what he wanted, but she was quite sure that, without a new building, and more affluent students, the possibility of them luring a white teacher to this small town was non-existent. And it would take time for Harvey Wilson, or anybody else, to convince anyone that a new building was worth the expense.

It did, in fact, take Harvey two more years to drive through agreement that a new school was needed. By that time, though, his interest had waned somewhat, since, by the time it would actually be built, his own children wouldn’t ever see the inside of it.

But that’s for later in the story. Right now, you want to know what happened during those two years.

That night, when Flossie got home, she wrote a letter to her uncle. She explained the situation, and asked him if there were any documents or other proof he could send her that would establish, beyond doubt, that he had been a fighter pilot in the war.

Flossie’s plan to educate the Wilson children wasn’t really any more radical than what she had planned for the education of all her students. She used her copy of the text book written by Henry Baker to identify a number of Colored people who invented many of the things that almost everyone used in some situations, and which had made striking differences to the way farming was done in Calloway County.

The next bit of what would someday be called “Black History” was about George Washington Carver. There was a grainy old-time photograph of him in the book too, and she showed it to the class, listing how, as an agricultural chemist, he discovered three hundred uses for peanuts and hundreds more uses for soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes. Among the listed items that he suggested to southern farmers to help them economically were his recipes and improvements to or for: adhesives, axle grease, bleach, buttermilk, chili sauce, fuel briquettes, ink, instant coffee, linoleum, mayonnaise, meat tenderizer, metal polish, paper, plastic, pavement, shaving cream, shoe polish, synthetic rubber, talcum powder and wood stain.

This time, all three Wilson children participated in looking at the book, running down the list of the man’s inventions as if they didn’t quite believe what they were hearing. Seeing has a strong impact on believing.

There was discussion between all the students on how these things had affected their own lives, and the lives of the farmers throughout America, and not just in the South. Flossie capped it off by announcing that, On July 14, 1943, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt honored Carver with a national monument dedicated to his accomplishments, and that Carver was offered an annual salary of $100,000.00 to work for a white-owned company, making him the highest paid Negro in America up to that time.

“A hundred thousand dollars!” sighed Bernadette. “I can’t even imagine that much money in the whole world. I heard my Pappa talking about a loan he approved - it was to build a whole new house - and it was only for twenty-five hundred dollars!”

Then Flossie switched into a math session, where the children had to cipher out how many houses could be built with a hundred thousand dollars, and how many mules, or cars could be bought with that kind of money. Soon the children were squealing as they thought up other products, most of which cost less than a dollar, which made the quantities seem astronomical to them.

The next day, when Nathan trooped into the room, his face was tense.

“Daddy wants to talk to you,” he said to Flossie. “He said to tell you to get your nigger ass out there, because he ain’t ... I mean isn’t coming in here.”

“All right,” said Flossie.

She went out, passing a subdued Bernadette and Hilda Mae, who looked almost frightened. She walked around to the driver’s door of the station wagon, to find Harvey Wilson scowling at her through the open window.

“What’s all this horse shit about some nigger making a hundred grand a year?” he snarled.

“We talked about George Washington Carver yesterday,” said Flossie simply. She noticed that Luthor, Johnnie Sue and Jesse were approaching the school house together, and had stopped to listen to the exchange.

“I don’t need my children asking me questions like how much money I make in a year, just to have them tell me some Northern nigger makes ten times as much. You stop filling their heads with hogwash, you hear me?! I will not have some nigger whore telling my God damned children that their God damned flesh and blood can’t do better for his God damed family than some uppity coon who takes credit fror something he probably didn’t invent nohow!” He finished with a scream that left his lips actually flecked with spittle.

Flossie turned on her heel and walked around the front of the car, wondering if he would run her down or not. She walked stiffly back into the building as dirt and gravel sprayed in a half circle that peppered her back, and the front of the school house.

When she got inside, the three Wilson children were standing in a line. They looked anxious.

Bernadette’s voice was shaky as she spoke. “We were just talking at supper, and Hilda Mae asked him what his salary is. Then he wanted to know why she wanted to know and when he found out he just got crazy! He sent us all to bed right then and there! He was yelling at Mamma about how he was going to get rid of you if it’s the last thing he ever does. We were afraid he was going to kill you out there!”

“Well, he didn’t,” said Flossie stiffly.

“He said it ain’t right for a ni ... I mean for that George Washington man to make that much more than a white man,” said Nathan.

“Each person has worth to his fellow man,” said Flossie, as Johnnie Sue and the two boys came in the door. “In some cases that worth is more highly valued than in others. That’s why you want to become the best person you possibly can, so you are worth more to other people, and they’ll reward you for that.”

“I’ve never seen him that mad before,” said Bernadette. “You’d better be careful.”

“I know,” sighed Flossie. “I know.”

That night, a skunk somehow found its way into the Wilson household in the middle of the night, while the family was sleeping. The odor woke them all, and they all got out of bed to investigate. The animal was found in the kitchen, where it was going through the overturned trash can.

The skunk obviously felt threatened when Harvey Wilson decided to eject him. Harvey got a direct shot, some of which got in his eyes.

The next morning, Luthor, Jesse and Johnnie Sue were at school when Flossie arrived herself. They looked so freshly scrubbed that Flossie noticed it. As she approached, she got a whiff of skunk odor.

“Don’t you three know enough by now to stay away from a skunk?” she asked, laughing.

“What skunk?” asked Johnnie Sue, looking around as if there might be a skunk in sight.

“What have you been up to?” asked their teacher, sensing immediately that there was mischief afoot.

“Must have been a skunk that went through some of the grass we walked through,” said Luthor. “I thought I smelled skunk somewhere back there.”

They all turned to see the Wilson station wagon edging down the dirt path that led to the school house. Today their mother was driving. When the car stopped, and the Wilson children climbed out, she got out and stood by her door.

“We had a little trouble last night,” she called out, stiffly. “I did everything I could, but I don’t think it did any good. I’m sending the children to school anyway. You’ll just have to live with the smell. Lord knows we had to live with it all night.”

Then she got back in the car and drove away.

The smell of skunk coming from Nathan, Bernadette and Hilda Mae was overpowering. Their eyes were still red from running almost constantly. They stood in a morose little group, heads hanging.

“A skunk got in the house,” said Nathan. “Daddy had to get the doctor out of bed because he was blinded. We didn’t get no sleep at all last night.”

“Didn’t get any,” corrected Flossie automatically. Her eyes went to find Johnnie Sue and the two boys, but they were gone ... vanished as if they had never been standing there only moments before. She frowned on the outside, but was grinning on the inside. Still, she’d have a word with the three in private. What they had done was undoubtedly a great adventure for them, but it could be very dangerous too.

It was then that she realized all three of them had smelled of skunk, and that Jesse must have been involved too. Her heart shrank as she thought about what would happen if he got caught doing something like that to a white family. She couldn’t wait until later.

She handled it by announcing that they would have class outside that day, where the wind would help. She ordered Johnnie Sue, Jesse and Luthor to stay inside and “help her get ready.” As soon as the Wilson children had gone outside, she lit into the three best friends with a hushed vengeance. When they started carrying desks outside, the two white children were as pale as ghosts, and Jesse looked almost gray.

Flossie saved L. Frank Baum’s book for the afternoons, when she worked primarily on diction, and language skills. Curtis Lee might as well have been her teacher’s aide, had there been such a thing back then. His reading and language skills so outclassed those of the Wilson children that it was plain, even to them, that his level of intelligence was beyond anything they’d ever seen in a boy his age, white or black.

Flossie didn’t make any assault on the vernacular they used that first year she taught them. Just getting them to practice good enunciation and expand their vocabulary was sufficient for her. Slowly ... very slowly ... the Wilson children lost the knife-edged unrelenting hatred for those that they could no longer deny had talents of one kind or another. There was no friendship extended, to be sure, and their attitude of superiority accounted for other “accidents” that seemed to happen around the Wilson home, or to their property, but nothing could be traced to any intentional act by someone outside the household. Flossie inquired of Johnnie Sue, Luthor and Jesse, but they swore they had given up after her lecture. It was quite possible there were other people in town unhappy with Harvey Wilson. Bankers were never easy to like, it seemed.

Sadly, perhaps the brightest spot of that first year was that the Wilson Children intentionally quit talking, at home, about what they learned in school. When they got questions like “What else has that damn nigger teacher taught you that I have to unlearn you about?” they simply looked at their father with bland faces and said they studied math, or reading. Their father tested them, making them read out loud from the Bible, and do numbers long hand in front of him. And, though he was actually impressed with the advancement of his children, he never uttered a word of encouragement to them. The only reason they even knew they were doing well was when he presented them with the kind of math that was done in the bank.

“Harvey Wilson!” his wife scolded him. “You know well and good that these children can’t do that kind of ciphering! They’re doing quite well and you know it. You’re just itching for a reason to get that woman fired.”

In fact, Bernadette thought she might be able to figure out how to do the math, which involved interest percentages. But she never got the chance. Her father gave out a snort and snatched the paper from in front of her.

“Of course they can’t do proper math,” he snarled. “They’re too stupid from being schooled by a nigger!”

When, the next day, Bernadette wrote the problem she remembered seeing at home, on the board, and asked if she could try to solve it, Flossie was delighted, and gave her free rein. She had to correct the decimal point in two places, but otherwise the answer was correct. Bernadette glowed, and sat back down smiling.

There were tight, tiny smiles on the faces of her brother and sister as well.

That began a process that was built in fits and starts. Flossie was able to go much deeper into math with the Wilson children, and Curtis Lee, than she had dreamed of. The younger students weren’t interested, so that extended learning happened in the afternoons.

But the success of the older students in understanding the concepts led to requests on their part for other deeper learning. The Wilson children became expert at asking just enough at home, about this or that field of knowledge, to get either a partial answer from one or the other of their parents, or a statement that the answer to the question wasn’t important. The latter comment soon became a clear indicator that the adult asked didn’t know the answer, and the children took delight in then getting the information at school.

Children, at least those in their teens, have always thought their parents were clueless about most things. Harvey Wilson’s stubborn pride, and his wife’s meekness ... unwillingness to give an answer that her husband didn’t know (or, heaven forbid, correct him in front of the children, ) just nurtured that belief on the part of his offspring.

They never let on that they were becoming much better educated than their father was. He would snarl, “Ask your nigger teacher!” and then, later question them on what she had said. Their answers always seemed to come back to “I still don’t know, so I guess it’s not important,” and that fed his own feeling of superiority.

Teens, everywhere, have always seemed to have some special desire to make their parents’ lives a living hell, if they can do so without getting in trouble for it. The Wilson children chose to remind their parents often that, in Catfish Hollow, there was nothing for them to do, and no one of their station to visit. Picking at the sore wound that was Harvey’s fate made them feel better, even though, in their own minds, they didn’t actually lack for much. Now that “Miss Flossie” as they had taken to calling her privately, had widened their horizons, and they could all read much better, they almost always had a book hidden away that they could crack open and while away the hours with.