Manuscript and Bio Continued
“No, no. You’re on time,” the woman answered. Mother seemed surprised to see that this black woman wore still her hair in a TWA (teeny weeny afro). She had never even gotten used to naturals and would never think of not straightening her hair, not even back in the early seventies with Panthers in Oakland, not even as black became Proud.
The principal walked out of his office and greeted James and his mother. “Well, it’s not often I get a parent who comes to the principal’s office voluntarily!” He extended his hand and smiled small with his mouth, but James held his mother’s hand with both of his when he didn’t see the man’s face smiling. The man gestured toward his office door and James and his mother walked into the office as James loosened his hold on his mother’s hand.
As soon as his mother sat in the chair across from the principal’s desk James became curious and pried his hand away and started examining everything he could, books on the shelf, trophies and plaques, a collection of paperweights made out of plaster of brightly Paris, brightly painted and adorned with glitter and marbles and bits of gold tinsel. “Wow, Mother, look!” he said.
“Jamie!” His mother exclaimed. Then quietly, “don’t touch.” She looked at the principal to see if he was angry. The man only folded his hands on his desk and looked at Mother silently.
I whined. “I only wanted to see. That’s not touching.”
James’ mother came in before the school year had started, intent on convincing the man that James could read well enough to skip from Kindergarten to the second grade.
Several months before, she had also tried to get James moved ahead as she came down to the school to enroll him. She sat through the orientation with the other parents, and raised her hand at the end when the vice principal asked if there were any questions. The vice principal had already told her that children needed Kindergarten even if they could read at any level, because they were simply too lacking in social skills to mix with older children.
So, a month later in the principal’s office, James’ mother said apologetically, “I’m sorry, but, my little Jamie here reads as much as his older sisters, and they’re doing fine in their class work, getting good grades.”
The principal looked down at his hands as and took a breath. Mother went on, “He really does sit down and read books for an hour. He knows his numbers, too.” She looked down and fixed her eyes at something on the desk in front of her.
“Yes, I know, but we just don’t see that many exceptional children coming through here,” he explained. “It is important that we be realistic.” He leaned forward. “Wishful thinking doesn’t help our children, sister.” He played with his tie and leaned back in his chair.
“Wait, let me show you,” she said to him. Then to James, “Jamie, come read from your book.”
He smiled. “I’m not saying you didn’t teach him well. But we are trained professionals and we will make sure that he’s taught properly. We have special methods with teaching correct grammar that we don’t expect for a non-professional to know. And there is always comprehension to consider. We’ll make sure he is tested at the right time. I just hope that any habits he picked up don’t cause any problems.” The principal cleared his throat. “Is he disruptive?”
Mavis thought to herself, he might as well be white. “Well, no” she answered. “Well you know, he’s a boy, and you know how boys are. He gets into things sometimes,” she said.
The principal opened up a folder lying on his desk in front of him and wrote a note on a form inside. Mavis leaned forward a bit, her brows furrowing as she watched his note taking. “He’s normal,” Mavis said.
“Well there. Most normal boys his age don’t read books like the ones you have there.” He looked at the books on Mavis’ lap that she had brought to show him. He went on, “Not at his age. And just between you and me, most of that talk about revolution ended up hurting our children. Are we any better off? You just decide to do something and put your mind to it. That’s how we succeed. Right?”
Mavis never liked disruptive people. She worried it made black people all look angry, but now she sat back in her chair and looked at the principal and became quite still. “They are just books from a book club,” she said slowly. “A children’s book club to teach him to read. He’s a bright child, and not just because he’s mine!” Her voice began to rise.
“I was just saying.” he soothed, “we don’t want him growing up distracted.”
“OK,” she said slowly. Then she said, “Well. Maybe you think you know about things like this, but if he is special, it will come out. I want him to live out his potential,” she said.
“Of course you do Mrs. Washington,” he replied.
Two weeks into Kindergarten, the principal agreed to move James ahead to first grade after James’ father came to the school at the urging of his wife.
Mrs. Jones, James’ Kindergarten teacher of two weeks, did the best she knew how with the knowledge and wisdom she was given by birth and circumstance.
As I watch some of the things that go on around James, I am still Leaves Home. As I watch James at age five going to school, I am still made of flesh, and I still remember the last day I slept with my village, that day of no return. That person, that Leaves Home, wanted for Mrs. Jones or any white man to have never existed. That Leaves Home feels for the trembling baby boy that got pushed out of the birth canal by the muscle spasms. That flesh and blood person still cradles her manacled wrists and ankles and mourns the bruised and manacled neck chained to other women and men, and to children, our stunned and weeping babies as we walked across half the African continent. And she still lies numb in a dungeon at the shores of the Atlantic, waiting as the sun and the moons came and went, waiting as white men tried hard to break my soul. That surrendered to the Holy Spirit and it stayed with me. I know that the souls of all of the men who persecuted my flesh lost theirs.
During the course of those days as I waited, and after the wait when I rode on the slave ship, I cursed the men who captured me and the ones who bought me. I whispered, “I will hate them until the world is dead and ended. I wish a poison into their minds and bodies.” Then, I came to myself. I put down that curse and let my soul find me again.
And there is that other part of Leaves Home. The part of me that knows that James’ first school teacher didn’t know any better, knows that every hate she put upon James, was a thing that also hated her. Nothing that any of them did to me or my village or James do I defend. I just put down my ire. I take it out of me. I just know that this is all his kindergarten teacher could be.
Mrs. Jones pursed her lips did her job teaching the immigrants children, Negro immigrants from the southern states, from the Spanish (she calls them) countries, from India. Especially the Negros, because they were unruly, and that one child from an Indian reservation, was just too strange for her liking. Mrs. Jones waited patiently for Negros to stop coming into the schools, waited for them to to go back to the places where they came from, but they did not. Mrs. Jones remained in Oakland, as it was more and more clear to her, how being white was, without saying, better.
In 1984 age sixty-three, Mrs. Jones, Olivia Jones, was about ready to retire. On the first day of school, she looked at James’ class, and knew they were the last group of children that she would teach in her life. When she was ten years old, living in her home prairie state, she saw a lynching. She remembered one of the darkie’s fingers that her brother brought home for a souvenir. He kept it in a tin his closet until their mother made him get rid of the ghastly thing. In their Sunday best, after church, they ate Cole slaw and chicken out of a basket placed on checkered blanket in the grassed. Someone made a speech as the condemned man stood crying. “Poor devil,” Olivia’s mother called him, as he twisted, then shivered in the noose. But mostly folks cheered and whooped. Olivia’s mother leaned over her daughter and said, said “It’s Okay. They’re not regular folks like us. It seems harsh, but we got to do this.”
© Ann Marie Davis 2020 all rights reserved