JULY HAD COMPLETELY MELTED AWAY, AND WE WERE more than halfway into August before we heard from Mama up in Chicago. The cotton-chopping season had ended, and I had nothing to do except work like a donkey around the house while Queen sat around acting like, well, like a queen.
God had sent ol’ Gabriel down with more buckets of blazing heat. And being as faithful as the Bible describes him to be, ol’ Gabe poured that heat on us good. Everything around us was as parched as a winter peanut. Except the cotton. It was growing strong.
Papa prayed every day that it wouldn’t rain. Rain would ruin his crop. Sun would help it prosper. And every day, it seemed, a wide, dark cloud hovered right over the cotton field, then suddenly poofed away without leaving a trace of water. Every night, Papa fell on his knees and thanked God for holding the rain in the clouds for one more day.
It was too hot to do anything besides work in the house anyway. So there I was, down on my knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor, my hands chafing from lye soap, while Queen relaxed on her lazy behind in the parlor, lost in the wonderful world of radio soaps.
School wouldn’t start for another two weeks. And I couldn’t wait. Folks said the colored school was haunted, said it was built over a cemetery. And since the white folks who built it didn’t bother to relocate the sixty-nine Negro corpses that rested beneath it, angry ghosts appeared randomly throughout the day to scare away the intruders. Papa said it just wasn’t right to disturb a sacred space that way, said he didn’t blame the haints if they showed up. “Wouldn’t want folks stepping on my grave either,” he said.
Personally, I never saw any haints, unless you count the little round white man with the doughy face who visited on occasion to make sure “you folks have all you need ovah heah.”
But I didn’t care that the school was haunted. I only cared that it was new, even if everything in it was raggedy junk from the white school. At least we had a school. Most colored children weren’t lucky enough to even go to school, especially the ones who lived on somebody else’s land. With cotton-picking season right around the corner, they were expected to work. Luckily for me and Queen and Fred Lee, Papa allowed us to attend school even during the harvest season. Ma Pearl, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less.
Grade school was considered a decent education by most folks in the Delta anyhow. But not for me. I wanted more. I needed more. I couldn’t be like Papa and spend the rest of my life working in a cotton field. Nor like Ma Pearl, cleaning up after and serving white women like Mrs. Robinson. I would turn into a madwoman if I had to be surrounded by all the fanciness of a white woman’s house all day, then return home and try to find contentment with the drabness of my own.
If only for this reason alone, I wanted—?no—?I had to do like Levi Jackson and some of the others. I had to finish up high school and head off somewhere to a college. Except Levi would never again set foot in a college, thanks to the fool who put a bullet in his head. But at least his younger brothers would have a better chance than he did.
Right after Levi’s funeral and before the cotton chopping was all done, Mr. Albert and his wife, Miss Flo-Etta, took their younger sons and joined their older sons in Detroit. He said he was done with Mississippi and would never set foot on that demon soil again. Perhaps Fish, Adam, and Mr. Albert’s other young sons would get to go to one of those fancy schools up north, where they claimed white children and colored children sat in the same classrooms—?something I figured I would have to see for myself to believe.
My seventh-grade teacher, Miss Johnson, had said that would eventually happen in Mississippi. But she also said it was the actions of people like the NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers who got us that new colored school built. She said that Mr. Evers had first gone to Alcorn, the colored college where Levi had gone, and studied business. After that, he tried to go study law at that fancy white college they call Ole Miss. Miss Johnson said that as long as colored folks tried to force their way into white schools, white folks would spend money to build colored schools. That way they could claim colored children had the same privileges as white children, and they wouldn’t be forced to integrate like they had done in Topeka, Kansas.
But she and Reverend Jenkins both said that they could build all they wanted, but a change was still coming to Mississippi, and soon. Reverend Jenkins himself had attended a funny-sounding colored college named Tougaloo, where he studied literature. So besides preaching, he was also a teacher at the colored high school, and he sold life insurance policies on the side. Hallelujah was planning to study medicine when he went to college. I wanted to learn important things like that too—?medicine, or maybe even business or law like Mr. Evers.