Manuscript Continued
Not long after his first day in her class one of James’ sisters got their snacks from the refrigerator. She removed the plastic wrap that covered it on the plate and placed it, celery stuffed with peanut butter on the table and sat down. As they all sat at the table, Ciara, watching James said, “What’s wrong with you?” Then to Nikki “What’s wrong with him?” Then she asked, “Did you get in trouble at school?” She watched him suspiciously.
James sighed and sat quietly, staring at the food. Nikki, intent on her task, split the snack into three piles, and placed it on three placed and handed a plate to each sibling.
James stared at his plate. “Mrs. Jones shook me on the first day of school.” He liked celery and peanut butter, and he licked the peanut butter off of each stalk, using his tongue like a plow on the inner trench of the stalk. Then he lined up the cut stalks of celery on his plate, sprinkled salt on them, preparing to eat them while his sisters watched. He sank back in his chair and slouched.
“Why did she shake you?” asked Nikki. Did she shake you hard?”
James pushed the plate of celery away, pressed his fists on his eyes and rubbed them. He cried out suddenly, “How come they didn’t put raisins on the top of the peanut butter! Mother did it that way yesterday! Father doesn’t know how to make the snacks right. See?” he said, holding up a piece of celery.
Nikki got up and put a hand on his shoulder, and asked “How come she shook you?”
He shook my head. “I don’t know!” He yelled, his shoulders starting to shake.
“Junior,” Ciara said, “you can’t be crying. The other kids will pick on you if you’re sissified.
Nikki said, “It’s OK. You can cry.”
“No he can’t,” said Ciara, “he’s a big baby.”
“He can cry,” said Nikki. “No one’s here.” Nikki continued questioning here. “Were you reading all of the time? A lot” James nodded. She said, “In school, you have to read what they tell you. Alright?” James nodded again. She slid his plate closer to him. “Eat your snack. It’ll be OK. You can’t stay home tomorrow. Mom will know you got in trouble, Okay? You have to keep your library books in your bag and read after school. Okay?” James nodded. “You can’t act smart. You’re teacher is one of those mean ones. They don’t like it if you act smart. Understand?” James nodded. “You’ll be alright,” she said.
“Get tougher,” said Ciara.
“He doesn’t need to do that. He just got one of them mean teachers.”
The after school program existed so that they would not be children with a key on a string around their necks, all alone while their parents were off at work, but they still wore the keys, and James stayed after his half day of school until his sisters picked him up, and the walked home to their empty house. They always waited until Mrs. Scott came and got them instead of them going to her after they ate their snacks.
Mrs. Scott baby-sat children for the length of James’ memory. James stayed at her house before he began school for many hours of the day. Mrs. Scott was old. She looked like she could be his parents’ parent. The children never knew her first name. She had grey hair in two braids that wound around her head, and she had no toys so the children brought their own. James played in the yard with a plastic bat and ball, or he sat in the grass and read his books. As she watched the children, she ordered them to stop doing things they weren’t supposed to be doing like beating the rose bushed with sticks, or yelling at each other. Sometimes, she sat on the porch and watched them as she pealed carrots, or alternately, she stood at the sink and glanced at them from the window as she washed dishes. If the other kids from the block came into her yard and behaved badly, she came out and scared them off with her threats of telling their parents. She stood staring and waiting for the child to decide to say something back. The children on the block had parents who responded to her authority by disciplining their children.
James’ sisters dawdled until Mrs. Scott came knocking on the door. Their tiny house seemed huge when James was five. On one day that James told his sisters about his kindergarten teacher, he ran to the front room in an instant, as soon as he heard Mrs. Scott’s knock. His head rested just above the windowsill and he could smell the peeling paint. His sisters still sat at the table, fussing or arguing, forgetting to leave. James looked out of the front window at Mrs. Scott on the porch. His sisters came up behind him, shoving him aside to look out of the window. James didn’t say anything, under the weight his school years stretched out before him. He swung the door open and stared up at her without saying anything. His sisters fell in line next to him, staring mutely.
Mrs. Scott stood in her ancient, long grey coat that she always wore outside of her house, as though she had an eternal chill, even during eighty-degree summers. She stood silent with her gray braids wound on her head, arms folded across her chest, her face neither smiling or scowling, just unchanging. She was small compared to other adults, but she looked very large in her coat. Four very large four-holed buttons situated in a square on her chest were always fastened. The padded shoulders of the coat made her wide.
The girls squealed and ran outside the door past her. She yelled after them, “I know you girls were over here wasting time trying to get out of being babysat! I’ve raised children of my own and you all don’t fool me!”
“Yes, Mrs. Scott.” they sing-sang, waiting for her at the curb.
“And you don’t fool me with that, ‘yes, Mrs. Scott.’ I’m not one of your school teachers!” She took James’ hand and closed the door behind them. “Come on, James,” she said.
Old Spirit
When you make a fervent prayer, or a plea to your deities or gods, it is one in a countless succession of pleas and prayers for the same thing. Before the petition leaves your lips, it is an echo from another lifetime, a request that has come and come again, continuing down through time. It is a reiteration of an intent that you came into this existence with. Before this existence, your soul set itself up for this life. Please god. I don’t care what it takes. No matter what. Then you got sent on. And since you don’t remember any of this, drama ensues, bits of your soul-personality trailing around with you. Your destiny sent you down in the same company of souls to get a little closer to where you had been headed for a very long time, even if this is your first human incarnation. Karma, what goes around comes around, this it isn’t a punishment, it is the next part of life.
Of course you are upset with your parents, your kids, your sisters, your brothers. ‘Why isn’t there a plan?’ you ask in reaction to the plan. ‘Why does everything about being alive involve so much suffering?’ you lament. ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ ‘Why does every living thing have to eat every other living thing? That can’t be a good plan, not by a loving god. And when, you ask, is the charade of humankind going to end and leave the poor earth at peace?’ I can’t tell you anything without kicking up a dust storm of more confusion and questions, with or without god in the story. I can only tell you that after enough time passes, you will gain the capacity to see. And I can tell you that everything gets easier when you learn exactly what love is.
Comes Home
My Little girl Mary had two little girls. Pearl and Mamie. Pearl grew up to have a little boy, Jimmy. Around the time little Jimmy was four or five, Pearl died. I was gone on by then. I would talk to my Mary during this time, when she had to witness the death of her baby, and she heard me when her heart was broke open by her grief. My mother and her sisters, they were there, too, even though they never left the land north. They came through in spirit to be with kin. All of us let her know that it all works out for a reason, but you got to know that, and you got to hang on to the voice of the oldest living spirit.
My granddaughter Mamie lived to be old. She helped to raise little Jimmy, and she and little Jimmy went up north and out west for jobs for a war. I don’t think they went to help in the war so much as they went to have something more that just scraping by. Some times the leaders of the country of the United States would say ‘we’re great and we shall win,’ but we all felt they were saying it in a ‘for some time’ kind of way instead of a ‘we are all part of this’ kind of way. Especially when it was over and the whites, especially the ones who didn’t have anything went back to not getting enough of hating us.
Little Jimmy went into the war, and after, he and got himself a little business from learning how to build things in the trade school that he got to go to from being a war veteran. There were so many machines in that war, big machines, and metal boats, that they had men who were wealthy made more wealthy making factories to build these machines. Hundreds of factories with hundreds of folks inside. In the last battles of the Indian war, their Calvary killed my mama’s kin with Gatling guns, a hundred men at a time with a thing that spit out bullets one after another, just like that, and women and children, too. But that was not enough killing for this war of the world, they called it.
Mary
My mama got took away from her folks when she was tiny. And then she went back to her folks when she was around twenty-five, I suppose. I was nine, I reckon. They let my Mama’s folks stay on some land they gave them after they took my mama. So that’s how come Mama never knew her folks. She married my daddy when she was fifteen. My daddy was half Choctaw or Cherokee, I suppose, I don’t remember. But he was half colored too, so he was a slave.
My mama told us that after they took her to the school where they took all the Indian children to learn, they threw her on a bed and cut off her hair. They told her, “you ain’t nothing.” I reckon they said that to anyone who wasn’t white. They was like that.
They gave her the name of Lidia. Mama never remembered the name her own people gave her. My mama couldn’t be a good Indian for them whites. She wouldn’t say she was a Christian. She always said she was Indian and so they made her clean the house of the man who ran the school. She had to run off when she was fourteen so he wouldn’t mess with her.
If I was still breathing, I’d be around about a hundred and twenty. Since I been dead, I like being an ancestor, coming in and out, where I can see things going on with my kin. I ain’t got nothing else to do. I can see my little great grand baby Rayne grown up and headed on with her life. I know all what happened with Rayne. I know my mama watched over her, too. My mama’s kin was watchers like that. The African folks liked to do it, too, but after so much time under the yoke, sometimes we come to forget how. So, my mama liked to come to my great grand baby in dreams, and sometimes, her mother came, too.
My mama wanted to help Rayne to know her proper place under the sky but it was difficult for Mama to understand her own people because she didn’t know her own people. She didn’t have a chance to know who she was. When I was little, she told me, “I remember the name of my people.” She could talk like them, they way they drew out their words. And she stopped the sound off in her throat because that was the way they had of speaking some of their words. When she came to Rayne she told Rayne exactly what she told me. Mama’d say about how she went crazy and ran away when she was twelve, then again when for good when she was fourteen.
© Ann Marie Davis 2020 all rights reserved