Original Sins (21 page)

Her parents and Emily looked at her and said nothing.

“Hell, I ain't going to school with no jigs,” Jed announced, concerning the rumors that had been sweeping through school all day. They were walking along the sidewalk to Sally's house.

“Who says they even want to in Newland?” pointed out Sally. She clung to his hand, seeking from his fingertips assurance that he still respected her, would protect her reputation, would eventually marry her, and would love her forever. That didn't seem like too much to ask. She had dark circles under her eyes. She'd been awake all night. Was what they had done a sin? She was pretty sure it was. What if he wanted to do it again? Should she say no? If she didn't, what would happen as punishment? He was wearing one of those rubber things. Would that for sure keep her from getting pregnant? How could she find out? Did he really enjoy it? She liked kissing and petting a lot better herself.

“Our niggers got more sense than that bunch over at Donley. They better
not
go getting any smart ideas. They go to school with us, next thing you know they'll be dating our girls and taking up all the spots on our ball teams. Before you know it, they'll be wanting to work in the mill and live next door to us.” He laughed incredulously. He used to stop by their ball field and watch them scrimmage when he was doing Raymond's paper route. They had some top-notch ball players. No question about it. He didn't know how he'd fare in competition with them for a spot on the line. He hoped it'd never come to that. As for the girls, everybody knew about niggers—they humped like rabbits. But any nigger who dared so much as look at Sally was one nigger looking for an early grave. He slipped his arm around her shoulders. She snuggled up against him.

They were walking past the Castle Tree. “Remember how we used to spend all day up in that tree, Jeddy—you and me and Raymond and Em and Donny?”

“Yeah, we used to do a lot of dumb things.” He just couldn't believe he'd spent his first ten years hanging around with a jig, two girls, and a fairy. It was a wonder he still had a pair.

Donny and Kathryn sat in the armchairs as Ruby cooked. The local news included clips of the burning dummy at Donley. They watched in silence. Afterward Kathryn said, “I was talking with Mr. Dupree over at the luncheonette today. He says he's getting a committee together to go talk to the school board about enrolling some of our students in the white high school next fall.”

Donny raised his eyebrows to indicate boredom.

“He asked if you'd be interested. If you're really not going back to New York with me.”

“Why is it always me going back up at New York City, Mama? What's to stop you staying here?”

“Won't nobody give a Negro nurse no job down here.”

“You try?”

“Are you crazy? I don't go out of my way to get humiliated. But you're changing the subject What about going to the white high school?”

“Me? What I want to go over there for, Mama? I like it just fine right here.”

“Somebody's got to.”

“How come ‘Somebody's got to'?”

“It's coming, Donny. It's gon happen. Whether anybody likes it or not. So you might as well decide to like it and help it along.” The Pine Woods part of Kathryn hated every word she was saying and longed to be the Kathryn of five years ago who had felt no responsibility except to keep food on the table. It was enough then to feel the sun on her back as she molded clay on the pond shore with the little children.

“Humph,” said Donny. “I ain't studying to get myself cut up. You see those pictures on the TV?”

“But Donny, honey, they're people, just like us.”

“Then how come you got to go out convincing people to go to school with them?”

“Their schools are better than ours. They spend more on them. You're my son. I want you to have the best education possible.”

“Since when you worrying bout what's best for me, Mama?”

“Let's not get into that again, Donny. I explained myself as well as I could. You can accept it or not, but don't let's keep beating each other over the head with it.”

“All right. Yeah. I'm sorry. But anyhow, the answer is no. I don't wanna go to no white high school.”

“But there's nothing they can do to us they haven't already done. You might even be pleasantly surprised.”

“I ain't scared, Mama. It's just that I like it here. My friends are here. The basketball team and all like that.”

“You can't play basketball all your life, Donny. What you gon
do
with your life?”

“What you mean what I gon
do
with it? I gon
live
it, what you think, woman?”

“To live you need money. How you gon get it?”

“Well, shoot, Mama, I gon get me a job. What else?”

“What kind of job you gon get in this town?”

“Hell, I don't know. A job job. I gon be a U.S. senator. What you
think
I'm gon do, Mama?”

“You a real smart boy. You thinking bout college?” “Shit, no! I ain't thinking, period! Leave me
alone
, Mama.”

“If you ain't thinking, somebody's got to.” She shrugged. “You just hopeless, Donny.”

“Well, why don't you just go on back up North where niggers is men?”

Donny and Rochelle walked hand in hand that night through the streets of Pine Woods, past the ranch houses of the undertaker, some of the teachers, Reverend Stump, Mr. Dupree.

“I want me a house like that someday,” sighed Rochelle. “When I'm out of college and running me my library.”

“Well, I'll come visit you when I'm passing through your town with the Harlem Globetrotters.” Donny laughed.

“You do that. Maybe I'll even invite you to spend the night.”

He stopped and turned to look at her. “That'd be real nice,” he said, pulling her to him and kissing her as he ran his hand up and down the small of her back. On the basketball bus to out-of-town games one of the cheerleaders was always wanting him to sit with her and make out, but he always sat with Tadpole and fell asleep in the seat thinking about Rochelle home taking care of all those children.

He left her off and sauntered back to his grandmaw's apartment. People sat on porches in the hot dark night, as little children tumbled in the courtyard. Couples strolled on the sidewalks. A cluster of men laughed and talked by Dupree's Luncheonette. Women lounged around the door of the laundromat and exchanged insults with the men. Donny liked it here. He didn't want to go to no white school. He didn't want to go up at New York City. He didn't want to go nowhere. Now that he thought about it, he didn't even much want to go on the road with the Harlem Globetrotters. He'd just said that because he didn't want Rochelle to give up on him. He was trying to trick her into thinking he was some kind of go-getter or something. It probably wasn't fair. Maybe he'd become a go-getter, since that's what she seemed to want. But what could he go and get?

A car raced down the street from the highway. White arms reached out and heaved beer bottles at the curbs in front of the clusters of people. Shattered glass flew up. Most everyone ducked into doorways and alleys.

Donny stood frozen. A laughing red face appeared at a back window; a hand holding a bottle by its neck extended from the car. The arm bent at the elbow, preparing to hurl the bottle at Donny's feet. Donny's eyes met those of the laughing face. It was Jed. The brief seconds seemed to stretch into several minutes.

The arm, still holding the bottle, drooped and fell against the side of the car.

Chapter Six
Booklearning

Jed and Sally, the other Devouts and their dates, the Student Council officers, and members of the Citizenship Corps sat around the mahogany table in Sally's dining room at the monthly Devout Prayer Breakfast

Jed had a double reason for being there. He was Sally's date and also president of the Citizenship Corps. He carried a tape measure in his pocket, and it was his responsibility to measure how far off the floor the girls' hemlines were, and to issue passes for first offenders to go home and change if the distance was greater than eighteen inches. Repeat offenders got detention slips. Emily had maintained that this meant the shorter girls could wear shorter skirts than the taller girls. But he told her the Citizenship Corps couldn't play no favorites. Short or tall, you had to follow the rules, or they was no telling what outfits some of them girls from Cherokee Shoals might turn up in.

As Judy led them in a prayer for divine assistance in running Newland High, Jed opened his eyes just enough to see Sally, her eyes closed tight and her head bent. She was so pretty with her bouncy blonde hair, and she was all his now. She had given him her virginity, would open her legs whenever he wanted. His years of jerking off over
Playboy
, sneaking around with Betty Boobs, lusting and burning and not finding release was over. He reached under the table for her hand. She frowned. This was just not the place. He smiled at her with all the gratitude he was feeling. She smiled back with reproof.

He would protect her. No other boy would dare come near her with impure thoughts. Not if they valued having their teeth fixed in their gums. He would also protect her rep. No one would ever know they were doing it. Not even Bobby and Hank. Yesterday playing basketball, Hank had said, “What you grinning like a panting dog for, Tatro?”

“Nothing much.”

“Don't nobody grin like that without he got him some tail last night,” Bobby insisted, as he broke for a crip shot. “Ain't that so, Tatro?” he demanded as he returned to the ground.

“Ain't nobody's bidness.”

“That means yes,” Bobby explained to Hank.

They were doing a rotating prayer now. Each person in turn added a sentence.

“… we want to thank you so much, Lord,” Sally was saying, “for making the Ingenue Plantation Ball such a success this past weekend …”

The next boy said, “… uh, look down, Lord, on our graduating seniors with Thy favor, and hep em all to get good jobs, or to do good work at college, or whatsoever things they may want to pursue with their lives …”

Sally was feeling let down with no Plantation Ball to work for. She'd returned the last of the punch cups yesterday. They had had enough, hadn't had to fall back on plastic or Styrofoam. It had been such a relief. At least they could move right on into fund raising for next year's dance.

She wished Jed would stop looking at her like that. Someone would see. And during the prayer Honestly, he was like a little boy with a new toy. Couldn't keep his hands off her. She sort of liked knowing she could make Jed do whatever she wanted by simply giving or withholding her body. On the other hand, she couldn't withhold too seriously because her rep was at stake. If she got him angry, he might spread it around school, and she'd be done for. Devouts would demand her resignation. She only hoped Jed knew how to be discreet. The least tell-tale sign, and you'd had it. Like the night Eddie Tabor had seen Buzz Backer and Ellen Borgard at the Busy Bee Drive-in. She was combing her hair in the rearview mirror. He got out of the car and dropped a used rubber in the garbage can. It was all over school the next day.

Mr. Fulton, grey and stooped, was sketching the battle plan of Antietam on the blackboard. He stabbed with his pointer at a rolled-down map, and the map fell on his head. The class giggled as he struggled to disentangle himself. Raymond was the only one who'd been listening to how a few hundred Georgia sharpshooters stalled General Burnside and four divisions of Yankees for several hours. Two students were sitting sideways in their desks playing Hangman on a piece of paper. A boy in ducktails was carving his girl's initials in his arm with a switchblade, a small boy with big glasses was rolling cherry Life Savers down the aisle to a friend in the back row.

In the preceding weeks they had been lectured about the Boys in Grey wading through falling peach blossoms at Shiloh; about Jeb Stuart and his cavalry riding a circle around Yankee troops in the valley of Virginia; about Cold Harbor where Confederate troops charged twenty deep with their addresses pinned on their backs so survivors would know where to send their corpses; about General Armistead, his hat on his sabre, falling dead while reaching for the barrel of a Union cannon that terrible day at Gettysburg.

They had learned that slavery provided its beneficiaries with a better standard of living than that endured by free white factory workers in the North. That most slaves had been sold to slave traders by rival tribesmen. That many of the large houses on the Northern coasts were built by sea captains who made fortunes off the slave-rum-sugar triangle. That a couple of prominent abolitionists were descended from such captains. That many plantation owners had freed their slaves by the time of the war, and that many more wanted to if they could figure out how to keep them fed and clothed and housed. That eighty-five percent of Southern whites owned no slaves at all.

Raymond sat up straight and raised his hand. Mr. Fulton looked at him through watery blue eyes and nodded.

“Mr. Fulton, if we won all these battles, how come we lost the war?”

Mr. Fulton gazed at him with distaste. “Don't get smart with me, son.”

“No sir, I wasn't, sir. I was just …”

“Maybe if you stay after class and wash my blackboards, young man, you'll learn you some manners.”

Mrs. Dingus was giving an English test. Her husband was a highway patrolman. She was noted for hating students whose fathers earned more money than her husband. Mr. Dingus patrolled the roads, Mrs. Dingus patrolled the corridors.

It upset Sally to be disliked. It was a novel experience. Yesterday she'd gone out of her way to bring Mrs. Dingus a brownie from the Ingenue lunchtime bake sale. Mrs. Dingus took it as though picking up a turd, squinting her eyes in what was supposed to pass for a smile. Then she asked, “Now Sally, do you have you a pass to be in this hall during lunch hour?” Sally did not, so Mrs. Dingus issued her a detention slip.