Chapter 2

Flossie spent the rest of the morning dealing with the negative atmosphere Harvey Wilson had left behind. Her students were well acquainted with racism, of course, both black and white. The white students “knew” they were better than the black ones, at least when Flossie first got there. Since then, however, her instruction, and the fact that she could identify almost as many people of Negro heritage, who had invented or done something important in history, as she could White, had slowly resulted in a condition where the children had begun to view each other as just ... other children. The racism wasn’t gone, but it was much weaker. Each of her students had some kind of talent, and she encouraged all of them to recognize the talents in the others.

While she didn’t know it yet, her efforts had already succeeded beyond her wildest hopes.

Three of her students were a girl, named Johnnie Sue, and two boys, named Luthor and Jesse.

Johnnie Sue was a fourteen year old white girl, who could best be described as a tomboy. She could fish and hunt as well as any man and her wiry body would stand the rigors of just about any job that didn’t involve lifting anything too much over her body weight, which was eighty pounds. Johnnie Sue was, to her immense chagrin, developing the body of a young woman. Periods had been bad enough, but now she was sprouting breasts and hair and everything, and she was not impressed.

Luthor was also white, was a year younger than Johnnie Sue, and also a good fisherman and hunter. He was tall for his age, standing at just over five feet eight inches. Had one compared his body with Johnnie Sue’s, the only real difference, other than the obvious sex differences, would have been that he grew less hair under his arms and between his legs than she did. Otherwise, their bodies looked remarkably similar.

Jesse was different in obvious ways from the other two. He was of the Negroid race. He was twelve, with a wiry underfed looking body. He was a couple of inches shorter than Luthor, and about the same height as Johnnie Sue. If his skin color wasn’t taken into account, his muscles looked just about like those of his two best friends.

That was the secret Flossie didn’t know about.

Johnnie Sue, Luthor and Jesse were best friends. They had taken that decision very seriously one night, when it was too dark to work, and their parents were resting, spent from a long day’s labor. All three families worked land that belonged to Jasper Cummins, who owned the sixty acres planted in cotton, and twenty-five acres planted in tobacco that, together, they farmed. It was farmed on shares, Jasper receiving half. The other half was split evenly between the three families who actually did the work. Money only showed up when the crop was actually sold, so money was tight for most of the year. As a result, the children didn’t have store-bought toys. They made their own fun playing with each other, hunting, fishing, and just dreaming.

The three youths had come together not so much by choice, but because they had to work together. Johnnie Sue earned the respect of both boys because she could work just as hard as either of them. The boys recognized, in each other, a determination to excel that almost, but not quite, led to competition. Even those whites at the bottom of the totem pole didn’t compete with blacks in those days. The superiority of whites was just assumed.

But, as the young people spent time together, growing up, they recognized in each other the things they liked, and while, on the surface, they kept their places in the social order, in private, they did something unusual. They accepted each other as equals. That led to the sharing of confidences, and that led to friendship. During the last school year, once they learned of the practice from their teacher, they couldn’t resist the romantic notion of engaging in the time-honored ritual of blood brotherhood.

The very night after they sat, rapt with attention, as Flossie described how the Indians of the old Wild West had exchanged blood oaths, they entered into their own blood oath. Using a piece of broken glass, each pricked his or her finger, and those fingers were pressed together with great solemnity, each swearing that they would be linked for life, and would give their lives for each other if necessary.

After that, the differences that society used to separate them, not only black from white, but male from female as well, seemed to make less and less sense to them. They still met secretly, to be sure, with Jesse coming and leaving by different ways than the two white kids, but that was only to preserve the secret. By the time in their lives that this story is telling, they had already decided that adults had some very strange and stupid ideas, which they planned on completely ignoring whenever possible. That did not mean they misunderstood how they had to act in public. In public, stupid adults made the rules. But they rarely believed what any adult said, black or white.

There was one possible exception. When Flossie Pendergast said something, they believed it. She was their idol ... a person who seemed to know almost everything, and never lied about it if she didn’t. She was an adult they could trust completely. Even so, they were still too young to realize the irony of the fact that their idol was a social outcast in the world in which they lived. All they thought was that adults were too stupid to see what their children had recognized.

And it was for that reason, that they recognized Harvey Wilson for the bigoted asshole that he was. When Harvey left the building, he had three new enemies he didn’t even know about.

So did his children, and they had never even met them.

The “war” as Luthor, Johnnie Sue and Jesse called it, began that very night. After their chores were done, they gathered, as they did almost every night. Their first act of war was to avenge being called trash by the new banker. There were old boards and bits of wood lying around all over the place, many with nails stuck through them. Such hazards were always carefully cataloged, if they couldn’t be removed, since the threat of lockjaw - and death - was quite real.

The three located the weapons they would employ in this battle, and ran to town together.

These days, a twelve year old running four or five miles in the dark would seem strange in the extreme. For the trio of blood-brothers (these young warriors wouldn’t consider naming Johnnie Sue a blood ‘sister’ - who’d ever heard of one of those?) it was something they did three or four times a week, and they were only slightly winded when they arrived at their objective.

It hadn’t been hard to find out where the new banker lived. Five minutes after they found the place, a small chunk of wood, with a rusty nail protruding from it, had been wedged under the back of the right front tire of the station wagon parked on the street out front of the house. Another one was wedged under the front of the left rear tire ... just in case. No matter which direction the car went in the morning, it would suffer a flat tire.

The run back home was even easier, due primarily to an excess of adrenaline in the bloodstreams of the young troublemakers.

Class had been in session for two hours the next day, when the Wilson children arrived for their first day of school in Catfish Hollow. They were a bedraggled lot, their fine clothes dusty and sweat stained. These young people didn’t run anywhere, and the two mile walk to school had taxed them heavily.

Flossie, of course, didn’t know about why the three teens were late. She was surprised not to have heard a car deliver them.

“You’re late,” she noted, as they trooped in.

“That’s because this stupid town has boards with nails in them lying around everywhere,” said the older girl. “My Daddy got two flat tires this morning, before we even went a block!”

Apparently he had moved both forward and back while leaving the house. There were giggles from the line of students, seated quietly at their desks, but Flossie couldn’t identify who had been so amused.

“Well, find a seat and introduce yourselves,” said Flossie.

“I ain’t gonna sit where no nigger has sat,” said the boy belligerently.

Flossie looked at him, her face set.

“Well, then, I suppose you’ll just have to stand, young man.” Her eyes strayed to the girls. “You young ladies may either sit, or stand, as you wish. Now, what are your names, please?”

That the three Wilson children responded to her request, is a thing that is difficult for folks to fully understand in these modern days. This is because the social setting of the day was almost laughably convoluted. While many white women adhered to the belief that Negroes were lazy, stupid, untrustworthy, and even dangerous, they thought nothing of hiring black women to raise their children. Part of that was because, when one had servants, one felt like she was in an elevated social position. There weren’t many white women who were willing to become servants, so that void was filled by black women, who not only bathed, fed and supervised their young white charges, they were often the primary source of the early knowledge that was put into those young white heads. What, today, is often done by Sesame Street and such television programs, was done primarily by Negro nannies back then.

So, white children were often well acquainted with the idea that a black woman could have authority over them. The Wilson children had, in fact, been raised by a middle-aged black woman named Annie - they never knew her last name, nor cared. But Annie’s authority was convoluted as well. The children could (and often did) demand things from Annie, and she had to accede to their demands ... unless those demands contravened orders from the parents. What that led to were situations that were unclear, in which a child might demand something one minute, and get his or her wish, and then demand something else the next moment that was denied.

Everyone involved had to learn to walk that tightrope. Sometimes a cry of “I’m gonna tell my Mamma” was cause for the adult to quail, while at other times it might result in “You just go ahead and whine to yore mamma, child, and see what it gets you!” At the same time, Anna had been there to kiss the scratches, and soothe the hurt feelings, and nurture the children in ways that, without servants (or daycare) a mother would normally have done. Over the years, Anna had forged a relationship with the three Wilson children that was as complex as inter-office politics are these days ... on both sides of the group. As hard as it is to believe, that relationship was based about half on fear and intimidation, and half love and respect.

Anna, however, had not moved with the family. She stayed in Atlanta, where she would, no doubt, take under wing another group of spoiled white brats, to earn her living. This left the Wilson children without the social support they had had all their lives. For another black woman to be placed in a position of authority over them, even if she was much younger, was something that wasn’t, in one sense, strange. And for that reason, perhaps, her request was granted.

“I’m Nathan Wilson,” said the boy. “And these are my sisters Bernadette and Hilda Mae.”

His response was typical of a well-to-do white boy in that situation. It was a complex mixture of being polite - he introduced the females - mixed with an almost unimaginable lack of concern, when he didn’t indicate which girl was which. That resulted from his arrogant expectation that the others in the room would somehow know.

“We are pleased you could join us,” said Flossie politely. “Let me introduce the other children to you.”

She started to do just that, but had gotten only through three names before she realized that none of the Wilson children cared what the names were, of the others in the room. Hilda Mae was carefully examining her dress to see if it was dirty. Bernadette had carefully sat just on the edge of one of the empty desk seats, and had removed her shoe to rub her foot. Nathan was looking around the room, with what might pass for a look of disgust on his face.

As luck would have it, the history lesson for the day dealt with World War II, and the role that aviation had played in the outcome of that war. All the children had, of course, seen airplanes flying about. The ones they were most acquainted with dusted crops, and dipped and weaved into and out of the fields in ways that Flossie was able to use to explain what dogfights must have been like.

And, as luck would have it, Flossie had even better information about the air war and the role fighters had played in it. The same uncle who had sent Flossie to college was also a Tuskeegee Airman, with three confirmed kills over Europe. As she spun the tale of the life of the fighter pilots, even the Wilson children began to pay attention. Both Hilda Mae and Bernadette had claimed seats, unwilling to stand while the others sat. Nathan stood for long minutes, until the ache in his feet drove him to sit on the very edge of a chair.

All went well until Flossie got to the part about her uncle, and described the fighting he did as he had described it to her.

“That’s a lie!” shouted Nathan suddenly.

While those words had been heard in the school house before, they had never been directed toward the teacher. Not Flossie, at least. Every head in the room swiveled to look at Nathan, even those of his sisters, who looked on interestedly.

“What seems to be the matter?” asked Flossie calmly.

“There wasn’t never no nigger who flew a fighter like that and killed a German. That ain’t possible!”

“Why wouldn’t that be possible, Nathan?” asked Flossie. The tone of her voice was carefully neutral.

“Everybody knows niggers can’t use machines like an airplane,” said Nathan, as if he were explaining something to a small child. “They’re too complicated.”

Flossie went to her bag, and pulled something out of it.

“I’m going to pass around this photograph,” she said, ignoring Nathan. “It was given to me by my uncle, the one I told you about. It’s a picture of him standing beside his fighter.”

She started the picture out with the smallest child, as was her custom. Whenever pictures were displayed, the little ones got to see them first, and then the older children. It was one way of making the little ones feel important. The students, whether consciously or not, passed it among themselves, somehow never remembering to hand it to any of the Wilson children. There were oohs and aahs from some of the older students.

The last to receive the picture was Curtis Lee, a young black man who was the son of a woman who ran a laundry service in town. His father was dead, lynched when Curtis Lee was only four. It was said that his father had whistled at a white woman, embarrassing her in front of her friends. Men had come for him in the night, and his body had been found hanging from a lamp post where the incident was said to have taken place.

Because his mother performed a service in town that no white woman wanted to do, and was therefore relatively well off, Curtis Lee did not have to work in the fields. He had therefore received more instruction than the other children, and when he wasn’t in school, he read anything he could get his hands on. He wasn’t allowed to check books out of the tiny library that Old Miz Hopkins ran, but she didn’t mind if he sat in the back and read the books that were on the shelves. Over the years, he had run a number of errands for the old woman, and she had become fond of him. He had also read almost everything the library owned.

Curtis Lee looked at the photograph carefully. “P-51” he announced. “I read somewhere that The Tuskeegee group painted the tails red, and that the bomber crews started asking for them to fly cover during bombing missions.”

“My uncle said the same thing,” said Flossie, beaming. If ever she was proud of a student, it was Curtis Lee. She would give anything to be able to get him into a college. She reached out to receive the photograph back from Curtis Lee, but Nathan jumped out of his seat and snatched it first.

“Lemme see that,” he said. He looked at the picture and sneered. “That don’t mean nuthin’. He prob’ly just put on that outfit and had one of his nigger friends take that picture.”

Then, with great deliberation, he tore the picture in half, and threw it at Flossie’s feet.

Flossie felt an almost explosive surge of anger, but controlled it.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Nathan,” she said, her voice tight. “That’s an irreplaceable picture, and it belonged to me. You don’t have the right to destroy other people’s property.”

Chapter 3 »