from “The Cotton Field Madonna,”  by Kevin Kittredge:

 

Bayou country, Mississippi Delta, circa 1984.  

 #

 On a fine morning  in September, I walked into the front office of Oak Tree High School and stood there smiling amiably.  The receptionist, one Miss Julia Lovejoy of Robeyville, glanced up from her cluttered desk and then down and then up again, finally lowering her glasses to stare at me over the tortoise shell rim.  I kept smiling.

“Ya-as, Mr. Steven?  May we help you?”

When people say “May we help you?” in my experience, it often means you are someplace you do not belong.  This was no exception.

No, if there was any place I did not, in the new order of things, belong on opening day, it was in the office of Oak Tree High School, which had been integrated by court order the previous spring – and as a consequence was now 100 percent black, since the whitefolks of Oak Tree County had hurriedly built a private school of their own.

One hundred percent.

It would soon be slightly less than that:

“I would like to enroll for classes, please,” I said. “The college track.”

Miss Lovejoy’s brown eyes blinked above the glasses.

“Say what?”

“I’m not too late, am I?”  I suddenly, belatedly, felt fear.  Had I missed a deadline, broken a law?  Was this all for naught?

Miss Lovejoy took the glasses off completely.  “Steven Warner, I’ve been knowing you all my life, and your daddy, too.  And your great granddaddy.  And I know your daddy and your great-granddaddy’s ghost both want you over at that new academy this morning, just as sure as the sun came up.”

“My father believes that a man should make his own decisions in life,” I said.  I felt my confidence return with battle – much as, in the years ahead, the butterflies would leave my stomach the first time some murderous safety laid me out flat on the gridiron.  Life is a contact sport.  “And it is my decision to attend the public high school.”

True, it was a decision that I hadn’t mentioned to Daddy yet.  And it was a decision that he would certainly be surprised to hear about, as not ten minutes earlier, Daddy had let me out of his red Ford pickup truck at the very doorstep of the spanking new academy which he and the other planters had worked like the devil himself to throw together in time.  It was a pathetic little blond brick one-story building a mile to the south of the public high school in whose office I now stood, with its very own gridiron out back, neatly limed.  Given the paltry pool of white football talent Oak Tree County had to draw upon, however (blacks outnumbered whites in Oak Tree County on the order of three to one) it was unlikely to be the setting for any memorable athletic performances, unless they were memorably bad.  

Besides, Half Pint, my quarterback, was here.

And so it was that the moment Daddy’s pickup truck disappeared down Yazoo Street, I had left the clutch of white kids on the Academy sidewalk (ignoring the inevitable teenage abuse:  “Don’t go away mad, Warner, just go away” “Look, Warner’s going to take a whiz!”), and walked rapidly and purposefully around the pristine building and across the green football field, with its quavering, heartbreakingly earnest new stripes, past the little pipe and plank bleachers, through a hedge of rhododendrons, over the pretty footbridge that spanned Alligator Bayou, which was flanked by sighing willows (on that very bridge, barely a week before, I had enjoyed a galvanizing smooch with 14-year-old Hillary Denton, my first) and from thence onward across Steven J. Warner Memorial Park (a quarter acre of Johnson grass-plus-memorial plaque with the predictable boiler plate:  ‘Founder of Oak Tree County,’ ‘First citizen,’ blah, blah, and a bench) and up Delta Street to the U.S. highway, along which the public high school was by then visible some 200 yards to the north.

In contrast to the Academy, where students were sparse as the hair on a mangy elkhound, Oak Tree High School that morning was a big, black wooly bear.  Kids in bright first-day clothes and hi-top sneakers and attenuated Afros (the Afro, in fact, was stylistically on the wane in those days, while dreadlocks were still too weird for the Delta, although a few of the girls did wear their hair in beaded strings) turned to me with narrowed eyes – eyes that my overwrought consciousness interpreted at that moment as hostile, although in retrospect I believe they only reflected an inner struggle, the critical faculty wrestling with the senses which have just served up incontrovertible evidence of the utterly impossible.  That is, in the vernacular of the time, I blew their minds.

Of course I knew them.  They knew me – though in that moment I suppose we realized we did not really know each other very well at all.  I threaded my way, grinning foolishly, through that forest – watchful, sibilant – of black humanity; I crossed the lawn, climbed the steps, walked down the broad hallway and entered the office where Miss Julia Lovejoy was now staring at me with her eyeglasses off.  I would like to think that in her farsighted gaze there was evidence of a little insurrection building in herself, a budding respect for the iconoclast.  Though probably not.

In any case the principal, apparently sensing a disturbance, soon loomed in his inner doorway.  He was a huge man in a dark blue blazer, whom I knew from the two paragraphs allotted him in the Oak Tree Gazette had a master’s degree from Michigan and a reputation for coaching championship high school football teams up in Detroit.  He could only have come here on a mission.  He had no doubt seen plenty of white boys in his life, and on a level playing field, too.  He smiled a patronizing smile.

“Yes, young man.  What can we do for you?”  His voice was all genial, booming condescension; it struck me dumb.

“I would like to go to school over here, please,” I squeaked on my second attempt.  Please sir, said Oliver Twist, I want some more.  I waited for the ladle on my skull.

Instead, his smile showed teeth.

“Well!  The gods are with us, Miss Lovejoy,” he said, looking at her significantly.  “We’ll do all we can to help this young gentleman.”

Poor Miss Lovejoy looked from him to me, and back again.  And back.

“Your daddy gonna disinherit you!” she ejaculated finally, settling her glasses firmly on her nose.  “I know it for a fact the mayor didn’t go to all the trouble to build a new school for white chllin just so’s his own could come here.”

In this Miss Lovejoy was exactly right.  It only broadened the big man’s grin.

“Mayor Warner’s boy!  Well, now.  This is something.  Buford Thomas.”

We shook hands.  It hurt.  Then I followed Buford Thomas into his lair.  In the outer office, meanwhile, students sucked in behind us as though our absence had left a vacuum – while the more timid ones peered in at the hallway door.  Buford Thomas turned to order them all in his stentorian voice to get along to class – which, not surprisingly, they did.

“So you’re ready to give it a try are you?” he said, sitting down at his desk without leaning back.  He looked like a man who did not sit down much.  He motioned me to a chair.  “Not afraid of cooties, are you?”  His stovepipe fingers drummed the desk top, boom-pity-boom, boom-pity-boom.  Buford Thomas was every bit as big as Seth Robey, and fifteen years younger and in better shape.  The sleeves of his blazer were tight around his biceps.

“Cooties don’t scare me, sir.  I have a sister.”

He made a noise in his chest like a kettle drum might make when it has heard a good one about the tympanies:  boom boom boom, heh heh heh!  “I do, too.  You have my sympathy, son.  You’ll get along fine in a few years.  Trust me.”

He seemed a decent sort.

“We’ll get you registered here in just a minute,” Buford Thomas said.  “You have hobbies?  Like sports?”

Now we were getting somewhere.

“I play football, sir,” I said, leaning forward in my chair, “Have ever since I was little.”  (Not that I am so damned big still.)  “I’m very interested in going out for the Oak Tree High School team.”

Buford Thomas looked me over.  It did not take long.  To his credit, he did not laugh.

“You mean it?”

“Oh, yes sir.”  The ‘sir’ business felt a little odd, at first.  In 1971 in Oak Tree, Mississippi, a white person did not call a black one “sir” without an overloud voice and the ghost of a smile.  It helped that Buford Thomas  was bigger than a cypress trunk.

“What position have you worked at?”  His coach’s gaze, I noticed, had already dismissed my green-grocer build and come to rest upon my smithy’s hands. He already knew.

“Wide receiver, sir,” I said – and Buford Thomas grinned again.

“I’ve got a feeling about you, son,” he told me, standing up, at the very instant that Miss Julia Lovejoy’s disembodied face appeared in the open doorway.  A spectral face, it seemed to me just then, and a harbinger of doom.  Her glasses had found their middle distance astride her button nose; the eyes above the rim were grave.  Alas, they were looking straight at me.

“The mayor is on the line,” Miss Lovejoy said, and her voice oozed meaning.

Buford Thomas snatched at the telephone on his desk.  “I’ll just be going now,” I mumbled without hope, but he raised a finger to stop me.

“Mayor Warner!  Buford Thomas here!  How are you this morning?  Just fine, sir, couldn’t be better, couldn’t be better.  I’ve got a young gentleman in my office here I think you may know.  Blond hair, plaid shirt, blue jeans.  Looks a little bit like an all-state wide receiver.  That’s right.  And I must say, sir, I think you’ve set a wonderful example for the people of Oak Tree, and all the rest of Mississippi, too.  As a matter of fact, I was just about to call a newspaper reporter I know up in Memphis, to see if he wouldn’t like to do a story about this.  Oh, yes, sir, absolutely!  I think your courage will inspire a lot of people, Mayor Warner, I truly do.”

At this my teeth began to chatter.  This was a phenomenon I knew from Daddy to be an animal response to a perceived threat; adrenaline, the body’s secret weapon, useful in fight or flight. It’s a damned nuisance, however, when you need to speak.  Which, unfortunately, was about to be the case.

“Yes, sir, you bet!  He’s right here.”  Buford Thomas was beckoning to me with that big finger now.  Sweat chilled on my face.

I spent a very long time walking across the room, five feet.  Thus do mutineers walk the plank.  The coach watched me like a proud new papa; but once I took the receiver he bounded from the room to tend to other business, leaving me to my fate.

“Daddy?”

“No, it’s the goddam Lone Ranger.  Tell me something, bucky-boy.  Did I or did I not drop you off at the Academy just half an hour ago?”

“It’s true, sir, you did that.”

“And did you or did you not give every indication that you meant to walk right in the door and go to classes there, like you damned well should have?”

“I kinda had a change of heart,” I mumbled.

“A change of heart.”

He let that one sit there for a minute, until the whole room reeked of it.  Meanwhile, I wracked my brain for a better excuse, but I lacked eloquence.

“Well,” Daddy went on at last, “that’s just fine.  You had a ‘change of heart.’  And so now you have me hanging on a limb like a crabapple in a goddam hurricane.  You know what that sonofabitch is going to do to me?  He’s going to call the Memphis newspaper.  He’s going to tell them how I sent my own lily-white son to the public high school while every other white kid within 50 miles was headed to the new academy – which, by the way, I busted my butt for six months and contributed no small pile of my own pesos to get built, buckaroo.  And they’re going to come down here, and they’re going to write a big front-page story that makes me look like a goddam hypocrite.”

“Your children will still love you,” I pointed out, disingenuously.

“Love begins with respect, fella,” Daddy replied, with justice.

“Nobody reads the Memphis paper down here,” I said, retreating to facts.

“Well, thank the good Lord for that.  But let me tell you something, kiddo.  I’m going to tell that newspaper reporter and anybody else who calls that you’re going to school there because I put you there.  And that you’re going to stay there, come Hell or high water, until you graduate, because I’m telling you to.  And that’s just how it’s going to be.  And don’t come to me complaining if you get your pale little butt kicked and don’t learn anything for four years, and don’t have a friend white or black in all of Oak Tree to call your own.  Because those are consequences, pal.  And you don’t do anything in this life without consequences.  I don’t know why you decided you just had to lie to your old man, and I don’t care.  But you’re going to learn one hard lesson out of this, I guaran-goddam-tee you that.  Now get on to class.”

He hung up.

Hmm.

Heavy stuff, here.

I had not, in fact, with the myopic reasoning characteristic of 15-year-old boys, given very much thought to consequences, aside from the putative glory I would enjoy as a star football player on a respectable team.  There were also the rewards, which suddenly seemed muted, of defying Daddy.

But as I sat in Principal Buford Thomas’ office holding the dead receiver, the dial tone still buzzing in my ear, the background chatter of the hallways grown silent and ominous in the terrible convocation of first-hour, first-day classes, the consequences flooded over me, sloshed uncomfortably across my face, up my nose, into my mouth and down my gullet in a salty and nauseating trip to my almost man-sized belly.  Fortunately, there was a little grit in there by now.  A little steadying sand.  Sand-in-the-belly: Daddy himself had seen to that.  I was beginning to get mad.  I knew if changed my mind, Daddy would be only too happy to recant.

Well, we would just see, by golly.

I hung up the receiver with great finality.  Then, to steady myself for the day, the year, I ran in place behind the principal’s desk, lifting my knees up high to touch my hands.  I shadowboxed, hunching my shoulders, jabbing out with my left.  I stood up straight, and took four slow breaths.  One for each year to come.  I held my hand out flat.

Still trembling.

What the Hell. I walked out of the office and into consequences, with my head held high.

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