Manuscript Continued
The story went on and on. See the man. The man is a farmer. She said it slowly. “Faarrm-err.” Over and over, boring him.
For the two weeks that James stayed in Mrs. Jones’s class, the girl sitting on the other side of him named Josette never said anything and played quietly during play time. She had big eyes and thick, fat, braids that stuck out of each side of her head and rested on her shoulders, with barrettes on the tips of each braid, to keep the braids from coming undone and to keep the masses of kinky hair from unfurling, similar to how his mother held down his sisters’ kinky masses of hair. One day, after coming in from the play yard, Mrs. Jones asked, “did you all use the bathroom during play period?” and Josette, like everyone else answered, “Yes, Mrs. Jones,” even though she held her eyes even bigger, as though she had not. He saw her look of fear, as if she answered yes because Mrs. Jones said, “when I ask the class a question, you answer, “Yes, Mrs. Jones.” He knew that Josette did not go to the bathroom, and then lied. She raised her hand and asked to be excused to go to the bathroom, and Mrs. Jones said, “No, you went during recess.
Before Josette peed her pants she sat very still for what seemed like a long time with her eyes squeezed shut and her head bowed, a tear occasionally escaping, to slide down her cheek. James only looked at Josette out of the corner of his eyes since Mrs. Jones had terrorized him on the first day. After Josette peed, she started trembling and sobbing silently. Mrs. Jones looked over at Josette. James was glad Mrs. Jones wasn’t looking at him, but when Josette sobbed, he grew afraid that Mrs. Jones might shake her, too. But she did not and James, almost having cried himself, let out a breath.
“How could you just sit there?” Asked Mrs. Jones. “Why didn’t you say something? Come here. You go straight down the hall to the Nurse’s office.” Josette stood up with her head lowered and walked out of the classroom.
When Josette came back, Mrs. Jones looked at her. “Now that you are in Kindergarten, you have to have enough sense to tell me that you need to use the restroom.”
James went to an after school program while his mother and father worked. Since the end of their first day, an older child with a crossing guard uniform came over to their classroom, and Mrs. Jones read the names of the kids that went with the crossing guard to the after school program. Mrs. Jones called their names, and they got up and stood in a row by the door. “Is everyone going to the after school program in line?” she asked.
“Yes, Mrs. Jones,” they chanted softly and melodically, in their kindergarten, sing-song voices.
***
James wished he had an older brother, like the crossing guard, so that he could look out for James, and James could talk to him. James’ father was too strict to understand that Mrs. Jones didn’t like him. As James left for the after school program, he felt as though he was being given back to a brighter, easy world.
James liked cardboard playhouse at the after school program, and he often crawled inside of it as soon as he got inside of the room. The program had a snack time, a reading time, an art time, and a mandatory nap time. The white lady there wasn’t like Mrs. Jones. She wasn’t smelly like rotten face powder, nor was she mean. No one said, “Yes, Mrs. Johnston” to her. James sat in the playhouse reading the book that Mrs. Jones warned him not to bring back to class. He kept it in his backpack and read it over and over. For James, it was an expansive enough time between the end of the school day, with its afternoon of freedom to sit and read in the playhouse, and the next morning of having to go back to kindergarten. He had another book to read, too, a book about going to the moon, but he still liked to come back to his favorite. Something in him knew that he would be a scientist one day and go exploring other worlds.
At the end of his school day, James and the older sisters, Nikki, and Ciara walked home together. They walked to and from school with all of the other children that lived in their neighborhood. We would eat a snack at home that one of their parents prepared for them. The older siblings each had house keys for around their necks. his sisters put their keys in little purses that they carried over their shoulders, even though they were supposed to wear them on a chain around their necks. There was a woman who lived across the street, Mrs. Scott, and it was her job to look out for them until one parent came home. Sometimes they went go down the street to another friend’s house. She had children their ages. But normally, they just went home, then across the street to Mrs. Scott’s backyard, and she would stand in the kitchen window cooking or cleaning and watching the children.
One of their parents always left them snacks in the refrigerator so Mrs. Scott didn’t have to bother with feeding them. James’ sisters sat across the table and conspired behind cupped hands talking about how they might stay at home and watch TV and talk to their friends on the telephone and never go across the street to be babysat. James didn’t mention his treatment by Mrs. Jones because is mother had instructed him not to get into trouble.
James and his sisters did not have parents who coddled or appreciated them excessively. Something happened my offspring and the enslaved black people when we left home and came to America. It had been over a hundred years since our people’s parents fore-mothers and forefathers were set free by the laws of the United States, and still, the cells in their bodies remembered and waited for catastrophes to come down on their heads, and that catastrophes also hovered above the children.
I, Leaves Home, only see these things that I tell you as I hear it from the Greater Spirit. She tells me things about humanity that I never knew as I walked the planet. I hear from her that memory endured in James’ parents, and their adherence to surviving the world falling down upon them lived on in the configuration of something called the neuro-pathways of their brains.
As each generation weaned itself off of the effects of the specific trauma of being considered nonhuman chattel, and the effects the oppressors’ emphasis on annihilating the peoples’ humanity. They found ways to let go of trauma that the other humans inflicted upon them to deny the evidence to the contrary (that they contained and were full of humanity) and the surviving generations acquired a habit of bracing their bodies for something, something no longer as clear and obvious as the sudden removal of offspring or partners, or unwarranted beatings, or the witnessing of or hearing about a meaningless death of a man or woman they never met, yet just as bound to each other by a psychological kinship. This disaster readiness had James’ parents treat themselves and their offspring in a way that was not comfortable as much as it was familiar. This clenching against physical or psychological insults had a way of loosening itself bit by bit with each successive generation, replaced with other gestures more appropriate to gaining or desiring or demanding freedom by any means necessary, and since the time that a critical mass of people first considered, ‘by any means necessary’ an option, this consideration gave a certain energetic providence free reign put the species of homo sapiens through any type of fortune or chance needed, including risking their own extinction in order to obtain freedom from its psychological chains of greed and materialism that replaced its instinct for empathy that the species had honed as a means of survival during its evolution.
It was as if the nervous systems of the offspring of the formerly enslaved were coached along by an internal guidance system that took orders from an outward facing one, a guidance that, if it could have been considered and named, it would have been called God, but only because of the inability of people to understand and remember that it was them, not a god, who decided that they should evolve for a reason. And the generations carried on like that until the day that there was something in enough of these survivors of the western culture, something akin to a spark igniting, with that spark being a way out of a spell believed by the men who outlined the culture at its inception to be an unbreakable one.
James would believe, upon reflection of his childhood decades later, that everything he endured during his short tenure under Mrs. Jones was his fault because he did not say something about her behavior. He believed that his parents might have done something. Perhaps, he mused, he was already trained to be afraid no one could do anything, any more than parents could do anything about black people being left out of the reading book. One day, sick feeling grew inside of his throat at the thought of going back to school, and he said something to his sisters.
© Ann Marie Davis 2020 all rights reserved