The Right Thing

CHAPTER 6


“Because President Kennedy wants you to, that’s why.”

Miss Bufkin, my pretty second-grade teacher whom I usually adored, said this to me with a layer of exasperation over her habitual cheerfulness. The President’s Council on Physical Fitness had sent out a directive for all of us schoolchildren to live our lives with vigor. John F. Kennedy himself had walked fifty miles to inspire the American public, and today our class was doing its part by running the fifty-yard dash.

“Yes’m,” I muttered, and got back into the line of kids waiting their turn.

I didn’t see the point of sprinting the length of the softball field while Miss Bufkin timed me with a shiny stopwatch, certainly not more than once. The bright, cold October afternoon was perfect for kickball, a sport I was really good at. Besides, the time tests were humiliating since I was slow, slower than everybody else except for Laddie Buchanan and the girl with the back brace. Even lumbering Lisa Treeby was faster than I was, for Pete’s sake, and that was just plain insulting.

Starr, however, had outrun Roger Fleck, the fastest boy in our class, and what’s more, she was handicapped by her shoes. Looking as though they had come out of a Goodwill bin, those brown lace-ups, with their thick soles and clunky heels, must have weighed a pound apiece. If she’d owned a pair of Keds like mine, she probably would have been able to fly.

Not so me. After what seemed like my fifty-fifth trip up the softball field, I was finally allowed to collapse in a panting, disgusted heap under the pine tree behind the wire-mesh backstop. Starr was still speeding down the field, now in contention for the fastest kid in the whole second grade, not just Miss Bufkin’s class. I watched with a dawning envy as she proceeded to trounce the other class’s finalist.


“Running is for boys,” said Julie Posey, sitting next to me under the pine tree. The most popular, and therefore powerful, girl in the second grade, Julie adjusted the full skirt of her pink dress and made a face. “That girl”—she pointed at Starr—“thinks she’s so great, running with the boys. Well, she’s not.”

Nearly two months into the school year, Starr was not fitting in. Her clothes showed the unmistakable stigmata of her mother’s absence: unironed, petticoat-less dresses and a telling lack of hair ribbons. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, her sorghum-thick accent marked her as surely as if she had “hick” mimeographed across her forehead in purple ink. Even lovely Miss Bufkin didn’t seem to care for her much. Starr was never asked to clap erasers or carry notes to the principal’s office. She wasn’t called on in class, nor had her artwork been displayed on the classroom walls. Basically, it was like her desk was an empty one. Julie, Lisa, and I got our names written on the chalkboard for being good students, but Starr, whose grades were identical to mine and who was always quiet and well behaved, hadn’t had her name up there once this year and it was almost Halloween.

This injustice rankled since it was the first time I’d ever had a front-row seat witnessing an adult’s unfairness—other than my grandmother’s, that is—and even though I very much wanted to take Miss Bufkin to task for her discrimination, I knew better. It was just a matter of time before my name was in her slim green ledger-book with the rest of the problem kids. The miracle was that I’d masqueraded for nearly two months as a model second-grader. Sooner or later, Miss Bufkin would find me out and any leverage I might have accumulated would vanish faster than Starr could run, so I kept my thoughts on justice to myself, hoarding my spurious capital.

“Hey,” Starr called. She was trotting across the patchy grass of the softball field, victorious from her rout of the entire second grade. Reaching the backstop, she threw herself to the ground beside me. “I guess I won,” she said with a satisfied grin.

Julie sniffed and made a big point of looking away. I had a hard time returning Starr’s smile myself. Up until today, in the country of our friendship we’d been equal citizens, with me being a little more equal than she when it came to clothes, other stuff, and an assured place in the second grade’s ruling class. With Starr’s newfound celebrity, the status quo had shifted, and I was far from comfortable with this development.

Starr didn’t seem to notice. She fell backward on the thick, fragrant carpet of brown pine needles, arms clasped behind her head, a blissful smile on her face. “Yep,” she sighed in contentment. “I whupped everybody.”

“Show-off,” Julie sneered.

Now, Julie Posey was the biggest show-off ever. She already had a boyfriend in her Sunday school class at the First Baptist Church, brought a purse to school, and boasted about sleeping in hair rollers so her mouse-brown ponytails would hang in bouncy ringlets. Last year, Julie’s mother, Squeaky Posey, put her daughter’s picture in the Jackson paper, the Clarion-Ledger, for her piano recital. Julie even brought her Shetland pony to show-and-tell and gave a favored few rides around the softball field. Having been one of those kids clutching the horn of Socks’s miniature Western saddle, I knew from show-offs and Starr wasn’t one of them.

Still, I didn’t say anything, but idly scratched my name in the red dust with a twig while nascent envy poked its head into the light like a sly Johnson weed in a rose bed.

Already wise to the Julies of the world, Starr shrugged her thin shoulders. “Want to go get a ball and practice kicking?” she asked me. “Miss Bufkin said we could since the time tests are done.” I didn’t answer, but Julie did.

“Let’s go get a drink of water.” She put her hand on mine. “I’m thirsty.” All three of us got up, brushing the dust from our skirts, but Julie said, “No show-offs allowed.” She smiled an unpleasant smile. “Only Annie and me are going.”

Starr’s face fell. She looked at the ground, stricken. “Oh.” Her voice was small, and she looked even smaller in her faded blue dress and clodhopper shoes.

“C’mon, Annie,” Julie said loftily. And for my everlasting shame, I went. To this day, drinking-fountain water—lukewarm, flat, and metallic—tastes like a mouthful of guilt to me.

But envy, that robust weed, shot up another rank inch or two when, after recess, Miss Bufkin announced Starr was the president’s winner in front of the whole class. Everybody clapped, except for Julie and her circle of carefully blank-faced friends.

And me.





After the ban was lifted, Starr and I had walked home together every day after school, but that afternoon I was yanked into Julie Posey’s orbit forthwith. For six blocks she talked of nothing but what a show-off Starr was, how she was just downright trashy, and anyway real girls didn’t run as fast as boys.

For my part, I was mostly silent, wishing I had never fallen in with Julie’s assumption that I’d walk home with her. I kept thinking of how hurt Starr had looked, and how it was I who had done the hurting. It wasn’t even worth the effort of trying to lay the blame on Julie Posey because ever since kindergarten she’d been like a tornado that way—destructive by nature, impervious to the damage she wreaked. Before Starr, I’d been a mere bystander observing the hurt feelings, the petty horrible-nesses she left in her wake like smashed cars and flattened houses. By denying Starr, however, I’d become another member of Julie’s flock of sycophantic parakeets.

“See you tomorrow,” she said when we reached my house.

“Yeah,” I said in a low voice, my hand on the gate. “See you tomorrow.”

For once, my mother was home when I let myself inside the big front door and came into the entryway. Wearing a nubby Harris Tweed suit, she was sitting in the Queen Anne chair in the living room and talking on the telephone. Her crocodile pumps were kicked under the coffee table, her stockinged feet resting on the old-fashioned, fringed hassock. In front of the fireplace, she was backlit by the early fire that was crackling on the hearth. As I passed in the hallway, she waved a hand distractedly, indicating that I should come in and sit down. I slouched over to the camelback sofa and threw myself into its down-filled cushions, dropping my book bag at my feet.

“The Snow Ball?” My mother’s face glowed with an animation I hadn’t seen for quite a while. “Of course, Squeaky. I’d love to!” In the last week or so, there’d been a thaw in the winter of her exile from Jackson society, the phone had rung often, and she’d been lots more cheerful. Today, the loud person on the other end of the line, Julie’s mother, yodeled on at length while my mother listened, twisting the phone cord in her slim fingers. I leafed through my health book. The drawings of boys and girls dutifully brushing their teeth and making wise choices from the food pyramid did nothing for my tortured conscience.

At last, my mother put the phone down in its black cradle. She lit a cigarette with the cut-crystal lighter on the table beside her. “Well,” she said, “that was Squeaky Posey. I’m back on the Ball committee.”

I grunted.

“I saw you walked home with Julie. That’s nice.”

I didn’t answer, but closed my health book with a loud sigh.


“You certainly seem to be crossways with the world this afternoon.” My mother began to slip into her high-heeled pumps, then stopped. Her green eyes narrowed, and she inhaled a drag on her cigarette. “Annie Banks,” she said, “are you in trouble?”

“No, ma’am,” I mumbled.

“Then what on earth is the matter?” Her tone was impatient as she exhaled a long ribbon of smoke.

“I did something mean today,” I said, not able to look at her.

“Mean? Did you punch Laddie Buchanan again?” She sounded alarmed. If my grandmother got wind of any further Laddie assaults, there’d be hell to pay.

“No.” I shook my head. “I was mean to Starr, but it wasn’t fair—she’s going to get a medal and I didn’t get anything. And, and . . . Julie said Starr was a show-off. I didn’t say it.” I was defiantly miserable, seeking the solace of confession but unable to force myself to get around to it.

“So what did you say?” my mother asked. She mashed her cigarette out in the ashtray.

“Nothing.” I swallowed. “But that was the mean part.” I hugged my health book to my chest. “I shouldn’t have not walked home with her either. That was mean, too. Starr had to walk by herself.”

My mother’s face was thoughtful. She must have seen the opportunity lying there like a twenty-dollar bill in the street: she must have understood that there wouldn’t be a better time to sever my undesirable connection to Starr once and for all.

But instead, she said, “That doesn’t sound like you, Annie. Are you ashamed?”

I nodded, relieved to get the whole awful business out in the open. “I want to make it better, but I don’t know how.” My mother motioned to me to come to her. I put my health book down, slowly got up, and walked over to the chair beside the fire.

“Sit in my lap,” she said. When I was comfortable, my head resting against her soft tweed bosom, she said, “When you do something mean, you should apologize.”

“I can’t.” I hid my face in her shoulder. “Starr’ll be so mad at me.”

“I bet she’s not,” my mother said. “I bet if you run over there, she’ll be glad to see you.” She stroked my hair and kissed the top of my head. “I know you’ll do the right thing, Annie.”

I could have sat in her lap forever, peacefully breathing in the combined scents of her perfume and fire-warmed tweed, but with a brisk pat on my leg my mother eased me to my feet.

“Go on.” She smiled. “The right thing’s always easier if you get to it straight away.”





Outside on the front steps, the air smelled of wood smoke from our chimney. I passed through the front gate with dragging feet, dawdling in an aimless way toward the end of the block. Somehow, it didn’t seem right to go to Starr’s house through the backyard, over the Allens’ fence. Instead, I intended to turn left and go the long way around the block, turning down Poplar and then over to Gray Street. The days were getting shorter now, and the afternoon’s shallow light was sinking fast into the west’s cold blue sky. It would be Halloween soon.

Somewhere far away across Fortification Street, the raised voices of what might have been a particularly physical touch-football game rose and fell in the chill October evening. I recognized a stentorian bellow of bloody intent: Buddy Bledsoe, the fourth-grade terror of Fairmont Street. Even Joel Donahoe avoided Buddy, the biggest kid in the neighborhood who wasn’t in junior high. Back before the calamitous bridge party, back when our mothers had been on speaking terms, Mrs. Bledsoe had referred to her son as “husky,” an inapt expression for an oversized troglodyte with a pit bull temper. This past summer, he and his cohorts had been at Boy Scout camp, but now it was fall and they were back to slaughtering the kids unfortunate enough to fall afoul of them. Yes, Buddy and his gang were feared and loathed, but it didn’t do any good telling grown-ups. Buddy wore a different face to them, a guileless face of pie-eyed boyish charm, but behind their backs, the approach of Buddy Bledsoe was like witnessing an Illinois Central locomotive come to juddering life, a locomotive with savage fists and feet. Nobody messed with Buddy Bledsoe.

Still, focused upon my apology, I didn’t give the boys and whatever they might be up to much thought as I turned the corner onto Gray Street to walk the long stretch before Starr’s house. In passing the Bledsoes’ three-story brick Colonial, though, I crossed the street to give their yardman, Tate, a wide berth. Tate Barlow, Methyl Ivory’s grandson, also worked for my parents sometimes, doing odd jobs like cleaning out the gutters, mowing the lawn in the summertime, and hammering the garage back together after I’d run the Buick into it. A tall, taciturn man, his wide shoulders straining the faded blue straps of his bib overalls, Tate intimidated me with his black, closed face, even though he’d never had two words to say to me. He reminded me of the shadows living in my closet, the ones who claimed the corners of my room after the lights were out, the ones that scared me witless even though I was too big to be afraid of the dark.

Tate had raked the Bledsoes’ fallen leaves and pine straw into the gutter and heaped everything into a pile. As I passed by, he picked up a long-tined pitchfork and began hefting leaves into the high-sided, homemade trailer hitched behind his truck, never once turning his head in my direction. Starr’s house was in sight now, however, and Tate Barlow abruptly was replaced with my real worry. What if Starr was too mad at me to accept my apology?

Walking past the Allens’ big white Victorian, a tiered wedding cake of dormers, turrets, and string work towering over the rental house next door, I almost turned around and went home. I imagined ringing the bell, Starr coming to the door and then slamming it in my face. Still, I kept putting one foot in front of the other, remembering my mother saying, Do the right thing, Annie. And even though I was practically walking backward, too soon I was at the rental house, standing on the cracked front step with my finger on the doorbell. The pack-like howls of the boys were growing closer. I hesitated. Buddy Bledsoe’s voice was braying something. It sounded like, “Get her!”

More apprehensive than ever now, I rang the doorbell anyway. It buzzed with a dusty clatter. After waiting a moment, I pressed the bell again. The driveway was empty except for a big oil stain and an overflowing garbage can. No one came to the door. I’d turned away and was ready to head home, apology unuttered, when Starr rounded the corner of the house, sprinting pell-mell into the weedy front yard.

“Annie!” she cried. “Run!” She grabbed my hand on the fly, and we ran like scalded cats.

I didn’t ask her why we were running—I didn’t have to. Buddy Bledsoe’s shouts and those of the gang were closing in; they were almost upon us. We bolted down the hill between Starr’s house and the Allens’ sloping backyard, down to the end of their lawn, to the fence. Behind us on the other side of Starr’s house, the boys bayed like coyotes with the quarry almost in view.

“C’mon!” Starr panted. We didn’t have time to scale the fence, but doubled back and ran up the slope into the Allens’ front yard and down Gray Street faster than ever I ran the fifty-yard dash. The boys still hadn’t caught sight of us, but when they did, we’d be done for. In front of the Bledsoes’ house, Tate’s leaf-burdened trailer sagged on its old axles. Tate himself was nowhere to be seen. The street was deserted, but now the boy’s voices were in the Allens’ backyard. Thinking fast, I tugged Starr’s hand and pulled her toward the trailer.


“Quick!” I gasped. “Get in.” Like squirrels we clambered over its high sides, diving into the leaves, burrowing under the big pile. We were barely covered and didn’t dare even to sneeze as the gang of boys exploded around the corner of the Allens’ house. In a hooting pack, they chased our trail up Gray Street. Starr’s hand trembled in mine. I squeezed it back and closed my eyes, praying to the infant Jesus that they’d pass Tate’s trailer by.

There’s rarely an adult experience like the thump-in-the-guts terror constantly lurking beneath the still-water ordinariness of a kid’s life. Hidden under a heap of pine straw and musty-smelling oak leaves, Starr and I knew down to the soles of our feet we were going to be killed outright if we were caught. That knowledge didn’t ease when the gang pounded to a stop at the Bledsoes’ house, massed on the sidewalk right beside Tate’s trailer.

“Where’d the little bitch go?” That snarl was Buddy Bledsoe’s. I was positive I could smell the animal reek of his sweat, like a hog gone bad and murderous.

“She must’ve run up this way,” another boy offered, sounding out of breath. “Sure was fast.”

“Yeah,” Buddy’s voice agreed. “She shouldn’t’ve spied on us. We’ll get her, and then we’ll stick cherry bombs up her bagina.” The other boys reacted with muffled guffaws.

“Then we’ll—” Buddy’s plans for further violence were cut off when the front door of the Bledsoes’ house opened.

“Boys?” High-heeled shoes clacked down the brick path, and Mrs. Bledsoe’s happy, drawling voice said, “Buddy! How nice you’ve brought your fuh-riends over to play. Y’all want to come inside, have a Co-cola and some tater chips?”

The pack shuffled its collective feet. “No’m,” Buddy said. “We’re going to . . . uh, play some more football. Thanks anyway, Mom.”

“Oh, all right.” Mrs. Bledsoe sounded disappointed. “Well, if y’all change your minds, there’s puh-lenty of snacks in the kitchen. Don’t be too late now—it’s almost dark.” And Starr and I listened with sinking spirits as our one faint hope of a reprieve clacked its way up the front steps and shut the door.

“So where’d they go?” somebody asked.

Before Buddy could issue new search-and-destroy orders, heavy footsteps shuffled across the desiccated lawn and onto the sidewalk. Starr and I clung to each other’s hands, exhausted with fright. I wondered who the new arrival was but couldn’t risk breaking cover to find out. Maybe another boy, maybe another indifferent adult, the situation was the same: we were trapped.

“Hey, nigger,” Buddy said. The other boys chimed in.

“Nigger, you get home.”

“Yeah, nigger.”

Tate had returned to his truck and trailer. Without a word to the taunting boys, he tossed the pitchfork into the bed of the truck with a thud and a clang. The truck’s door opened, rusted hinges groaning. The trailer settled as Tate got inside the cab. He cranked the engine with a series of gagging coughs, and a dense, fuel-rich fog of burning oil and gasoline filled the air, competing with the smell of the leaves, the pine straw, and Buddy.

“Get out, nigger!”

The boy’s harsh voices faded as the truck and trailer loaded with dry leaves and two terrified girls pulled away from the Bledsoes’ house. Too soon, the truck was chugging down the street, too fast for us to jump out. It seemed we were out of the frying pan and into the Hinds County dump. A layer of leaves swirled upward into the cold rush of wind.

The trailer slewed right as the truck turned the corner, and Starr rolled through the pine straw until she was next to me. “Where’s he going, Annie?” she whispered in my ear.

“I don’t know,” I whispered back. Tate’s truck turned right again and after a short distance slowed to a stop. The scratchy-sounding radio was playing over the truck’s sputtering engine, someone singing about a love that wouldn’t die. I thought my heart would leap out of my chest it was pounding so hard. Cautiously, I parted the leaves over my face to the deep-violet dusk shot through with wood smoke. As I sat up, Starr poked her head up out of the pile, too, her curls wreathed with brown oak leaves and pine straw. The truck idled as we peeped over the high plywood side of the trailer.

We were in front of my house.

“Hurry,” I whispered. “He might come back.” We climbed out of the trailer and down to the sidewalk, brushing the leaves out of each other’s hair and off our clothes. Still trembling with the aftershock of our near-death experience, I jumped when the trailer began to pull away from the curb. Behind the wheel of the truck loomed a great shadow: Tate.

But he’d saved us. Impulsively, I ran down the middle of Fairmont to catch up with the truck. It slowed, rolling to a shuddering stop. On tiptoe I looked through the open window into the cab, into the mild brown eyes of Tate Barlow. His face betrayed nothing except a stolid weariness.

“Thank you, Mr. Tate,” I faltered. “Thanks for the ride home.”

He nodded once and shifted the truck into first gear. Then he drove away.

Back on the sidewalk in front of my house, Starr and I walked through the gate. We sat down on the cold limestone front steps, our shoulders touching.

“I’m sorry,” I began. “I shouldn’t have . . .” My voice trailed off.

She brushed away a stubborn oak leaf caught in the laces of her shoe.

“It’s okay, Annie,” Starr said simply.

And with that, it was. Everything was okay again. When you’re seven, an apology is a magical potion, a prince’s kiss, a shiny golden lamp with three whole wishes in it.

The long day was nearly done, a fat half-moon hanging low in the evening sky. My daddy was home from work, his car in the driveway. Starr and I trotted down the side of the house, past the boxwood maze to the Allens’ fence.

“What did you see?” I asked after I helped her over the wire. “I heard what Buddy said, that you’d been spying on them.”

“Oh,” Starr said, her eyes round as silver coins in the dusk. “The boys were lighting farts in the old garage down by the railroad tracks! I went for a walk and came up by ’em on accident.”

“Lighting farts?” I was mystified. How could anyone manage such a thing, and why would you want to?

“I’ll tell you about it tomorrow,” Starr promised. “I’ve got to go now. G’night, Annie.”

“ ’Night, Starr.”



That afternoon I learned that I could run almost as fast as Starr—given sufficient motivation—and that my mother had told me the truth, that doing the right thing is always easier when you get around to it straight away.

The next day, I learned that methane gas is flammable.