Chapter 1

Flossie Pendergast struggled, her arms full, to reach the doorknob and open the door to the old building. She hooked the knob with her fingers and twisted, pushing against the door with her shoulder and knocking off a few more paint chips. The door stuck, and she had to put everything down and then pull, twist and push in just the right order before the door creaked open. It was the same every day as she entered the decrepit schoolhouse where she was the teacher, teacher’s aide, and janitor, all combined into one. In private, she called herself the Principal of the school, but she couldn’t say it out loud. That would bring the kind of scorn and derision she was so used to, but which ate at her guts like a rat inside a dead possum.

She surveyed her kingdom, such as it was, her eyes falling on the scarred and tilting desks, with their built-in chairs that required a student to slide into the seat from the left side. There were fifteen of those desks, neatly lined up, facing the wall with the blackboard on it. One forlorn wooden, straight-backed chair, two slats missing out of the back, sat by the board. Other than that there was no furniture in the one room that made up the structure. There was no desk for the teacher. What few materials she had scraped together were in cubby holes that had been nailed to the wall, patched together from odds and ends of lumber that had been scrounged from the surrounding area. A former student had done the work.

The school was in a region of the United States that was south of the Mason Dixon line, and East of Texas - exactly where isn’t all that important - and most of the reason that the school was in such poor repair was because the building had once been used to house thirty people who, in these modern days, would gently be called ‘migrant workers’. In the old days, though, the workers didn’t have the luxury of moving from place to place to pick the cotton, or tend the tobacco. If they felt compelled to move from one place to another, shackles took care of that.

Due to the ‘unsettling conflict’, as the locals called it, which had ended just under a hundred years earlier, that building could no longer be used for its intended purpose. It had housed ‘employees’ for another half century, and In roughly 1930, it had been converted to a school house when the plantation house it had been behind was destroyed by a tornado. No one thought it was ironic that the storm had reduced the big house to splinters, while the old slave quarters had been untouched. It provided what most people thought of as an appropriate place for the nigger brats to receive just enough education so they could read.

Since then, of course, as towns grew, new schools had been built. One had been built in Catfish Hollow, in fact, but it was for whites only, and it had burned down, six years ago. This was the backwater of Callaway County, though, where, in 1960, the tax base was not only small, but poor as well. The people who had money didn’t see the point in spending taxes on a new school, particularly since the only teacher they could draw to the area was Flossie.

Flossie was a black woman, and her students were a mixture of black and white children of sharecropper families. The Catfish Hollow Public School, though it had no sign on the front to proclaim it as such, was quite possibly the only integrated school in a six hundred mile radius.

Flossie was one of the few women of color who had the chance to escape Calloway County, and actually go to a four year college. That was the result of her bachelor uncle, a man who had seen the world, and who had seen that a better life could be had than what could be found where he and his only niece were born and raised. It was a struggle to pay her tuition, but he had made many sacrifices for other people already, and his personal needs were few. He had learned to live with very few amenities during the war to end all wars, and had saved his pay. He was used to going without, so to him there was little difference.

For Flossie, though, the difference was phenomenal. Almost all the faces around her at Spelman college, in Atlanta, had been as black as hers, but these were the cream of the crop, so to speak, and her imagination had been fired with the fervor of finding a place where she was not only considered equal as a human being, but was appreciated for her intellect, and given a chance to prove what she could do. Further, in her second year of college, when she met a man named Howard Zinn, she learned something about white people she hadn’t really known before this. That was in 1956, when the white professor, hired for $4000 a year, came to Spelman to be the first white man to teach at the school. Upon his arrival, he had been ostracized by landlords and everybody else because he was white and was teaching blacks. His sacrifice, and that of his family in joining him, fundamentally changed the way a lot of black students thought about whites in general, and the state of racial equality specifically.

Her return to Calloway County had been intended to be triumphal. She was going to change things ... get respect ... make the little part of the world where she had come from a better place to live and work. Besides ... she had the full weight of the Supreme Court of the United States behind her ... right?

That she was installed in the same school as she had grown up in was no surprise. She had lived in Catfish Hollow the summer after the white school burned, and knew that no new school was planned. What ended up being the surprise was that, even though her students hadn’t been to school in four years, and that she not only caught them up, but their grades were the best anybody had seen in twenty years, no one seemed to care. In the two years she had been teaching, the kids got excited, as she exposed them to learning, but that excitement was thoroughly squashed when they got home at night. Several parents, almost always white, had verbally abused her for “putting notions” in their children’s’ heads, about making a better life for themselves.

Knowing there was a better world out there, though, kept her going, and kept the fire in her teaching. The children, over those two years, began to become less and less susceptible to the dark predictions their parents made about their futures. Two of the young men (one white and one black) who had graduated had gone off to join the service, learning from Flossie that opportunity (and escape) was possible.

That didn’t endear her to the local population much. While everyone was proud to have a son in the military, it also meant the loss of strong backs and hands to help do the work that still had to be done.

Flossie soon learned that she had to choose her battles very carefully. One of the things she had argued for, for instance, was a new building, which was laughed at by almost everyone. She also argued for a full day of school, instead of the half day that let the children spend more time at home, working, alongside their parents, making the few wealthy people in the little town of Catfish Hollow richer. All she got was an extra hour while the weather was good. On days when no work could be done in the fields, she got to keep the children longer.

Her argument to start sending the children to school at age six, instead of the routine eight or nine, got blank stares, until she suggested that they would be able to read earlier in life. Because many of their parents couldn’t read, that made sense to them and she got what she wanted.

Her plea for books got her nothing. She had a blackboard, and they bought her a box of chalk every year. That should be enough.

She got an indoor bathroom patched onto the side of the building by the simple expedient of claiming that the children wouldn’t get sick as often, and require bed rest, which kept them out of the fields. That the commode in the leaky bathroom simply drained out into the field behind the school, about twenty yards away, was something she couldn’t do anything about. There were times when she felt lucky that the water in the single spigot that jutted from one wall, and off which a branch was installed for the toilet, worked at all. The toilet, of course, was a hand-me-down from the town plumber, who had removed it from the store owner’s house during a renovation. He donated it, in lieu of paying part of his county taxes.

While the men worked on the bathroom, she had managed to talk one of them into splicing an old extension cord into the single light fixture on the ceiling, and run it to another light fixture one of her students had proudly scavenged from a trash heap. That gave them two light fixtures. There were no outlets, of course. Why would something like that be needed?

She looked critically at one corner of the room, and arrived at the conclusion that the crack in that corner had widened a bit. She had stood outside, before, looking down one wall, noting what she was sure was a slight tilt. She didn’t look along that wall any more, because it depressed her. The whole building was leaning to the North, and it was getting worse.

As she began to write the day’s lesson on the board, Flossie felt that pang of sadness that had been returning more often lately. Her grand plans were not working out. Nothing would change. Catfish Hollow would remain the same, and she would probably grow old and die here with nothing to show for it. There wasn’t even a man to lighten the burden by loving her. All the men her age were already mated with other women, producing babies as quickly as possible so that there would be more hands to do the work. Her father had worked himself to death and, while her mother was still alive and living in the shack Flossie had grown up in, she wasn’t interested in life. Flossie still visited her regularly, but it was depressing. Her mother would never change either, and still claimed college had been a waste of good money.

Her wages just went in the bank, because her living expenses were so little. In a moment of weakness, the town fathers had provided a house that went with the teaching position. That was only because they couldn’t get anyone to teach in the broken down school when the previous teacher left. That, and the fact that the property provided had been taken for back taxes, even though it had been bought and paid for, for years. The old black man who had owned it, but who had grown too old to work and pay his taxes, had moved in with one of his daughters, but had died shortly afterward.

Chapter 2 »