After the Flag Has Been Folded (21 page)

I was wearing a blue skirt with a patchwork pattern, a common style in those days. I didn't answer because white girls like me were told to never speak to blacks, under any circumstances. Fran and I stepped around them as we headed down the stairs.

“I think that is about the ugliest skirt I've ever seen!” another girl called out. Then they laughed.

Now, that made me mad. Whipping my head over my shoulder, I called out, “I don't rightly care what you think!”

Fran was mortified. “You shouldn't have done that, Karen,” she said.

We kept going. The hallways were empty. The bell hadn't rung yet, and most kids were still in class or eating lunch. Fran waited as I turned the combination lock on my locker and reached for my history book. All of sudden, we were surrounded on either side.

“Hey, girl, what did you say to me back there?” The girl asking the question towered over me. Her buddies were glowering at the two of us. I think Fran quit breathing. But I wasn't about to back off.

“I said I didn't care much what you think about my skirt,” I answered, trying to feign a coolness I didn't feel.

She moved her head in closer to mine. “Well, you ought to care,” she hissed. Her girlfriends snickered.

I wasn't that good at math, but it only took me a moment to do the counting and to figure out that I was about to get my butt kicked. I wasn't worried too much about myself; I'd been in some dogfights before when I lived at Lake Forest. But I was pretty sure
Fran had never been in one and would never talk to me again for involving her.

But in one of those saved-by-the-bell moments that honestly do happen, it rang, and the hallway was flooded with kids. The four girls turned and walked away, their glares still fixed on me in warning.

“That was so dumb of you,” Fran said. She spoke in a whisper full of exasperation and relief, the kind of tone a mother might use in a hospital emergency room. “They could've killed you. Don't you know you never talk back to blacks?”

About a month later I heard that same remark when a black girl came up to me in the school bathroom after I backhanded a black boy in homeroom class because he wouldn't quit playing with my hair. “Whoowee, girl!” she said. “Don't you know better than to slap a black man? Nobody slaps a black man and lives to tell about it—especially not a white girl!”

The ruckus had started shortly after I'd taken my seat. The pudgy-faced boy sitting behind me fingered the ends of my hair every single day. It annoyed me like all get-out, and I'd told him so on several occasions. I started out asking him to “kindly leave my hair alone,
please.
” But he kept doing it. To avoid a confrontation, I'd lean forward as far as I could, out of his reach. Or pull my hair down around my shoulder as I hunched over a book. He would laugh and continue messing with me and my hair.

After a couple of weeks of this, I grew downright pissed. So one day when he reached up and began playing with my hair, I turned around and backhanded him across the face. “Leave my hair alone!” I screeched.

Momentarily stunned, the boy jumped to his feet. He grabbed me up out of my chair and slapped me with powerful force across my left cheek. Before I could reach up to my face, hot and flushed, he grabbed my right arm and twisted it up behind my back, between my shoulder blades. The whole time he was screaming at me. “Stupid bitch!” he said. “I'll teach you to hit me.”

He was pushing me down the aisle.

Miss Patch, a new teacher, was on her feet, her face as flushed as mine.

“Stop it! Stop it!” she yelled. “Let go of her now!”

The boy ignored her cries.
“I'm going to throw this dumb bitch out the window!”
he yelled back as he shoved me toward the open windows that faced the school's courtyard. We were on the second floor. The courtyard was mostly concrete. I was struggling to break free, but I wasn't about to hit, slap, or kick the kid again. I looked at Miss Patch, my eyes pleading with her to do something.

She pulled out a silver laser device. With one flash of that laser pen she could activate an emergency call to the front office. The burly security staff, typically retired or off-duty firemen and police officers, would be at the door within minutes. The class of onlookers who had only moments before been yelling “Fight! Fight! Throw her! Throw her!” grew silent. Nobody had ever been in a situation that required activation of the laser pen. All eyes were upon Miss Patch. Would she really do it?

“LET GO OF HER RIGHT NOW!
” Miss Patch yelled, pointing the pen toward the call box bolted to the far wall. She had yet to activate the laser.

The boy dropped my arm, but he didn't quit quietly. “Don't you ever touch me again!” he said. “I'll kill you.”

I didn't say a word.

Miss Patch pulled us both out into the hallway.

“I'm referring you both to the principal,” she said. She was visibly shaken. Her hands were trembling.

Fighting for any reason was cause for expulsion. I knew if I got expelled, Mama would send me to a boarding school for sure. But first, I figured, she'd take a shotgun to the school and put the fear of God into the boy who dared slap her daughter. I begged the principal not to call Mama. I told him she was itching to send me off to a private school, and this incident was all she would need to seal my fate. The
boy didn't say a word. He didn't care if he got expelled. He didn't care if the principal called his mama. I was pretty sure he didn't care if all the white girls at Columbus High got sent off to boarding school. It wasn't going to affect his life none.

The principal rubbed his hands through a thick fluff of his silver hair and lectured the two of us on the need for “everybody to be nice and get along.” He made us swear we'd leave each other alone from now on. And he ordered us to sit on opposite sides of the classroom. Then he dismissed us to our next class and told us he'd “study the matter some more” before calling our parents. Mama never did get a call, but I figured what she didn't know couldn't hurt me, so I never told her about the incident.

Mama might not like her kids going to school with blacks, but I don't ever remember her using the ugly slang, the
n
-word, that some of our kinfolk used. However, there was no question that she felt, then, that blacks and whites shouldn't run in the same circles or attend the same bars, churches, or schools. But she didn't put up a fuss about it either. And she would never join a segregationist group creating the ruckus at the district office. Mama was never the kind of woman to jump on a bandwagon for any cause. She was way too independent for such nonsense. Besides, she was too busy for marches or boycotts. She had much more practical matters to tend to—like finding her family a new home.

 

E
VER SINCE
A
UNT
C
IL
had died, Grandpa Harve had been shuffled around from pillar to post. First, Uncle Carl and Aunt Blanche took him home to Clinton, Tennessee. Carl's home wasn't big, but it was bigger than our trailer. And it was probably as comfortable as anything any of the Mayes family owned at the time. But Grandpa hadn't been there very long before Carl and Blanche decided he'd be better off in Oregon with Uncle Roy and Aunt Katherine. Mama wasn't involved in the decision-making process and wasn't even told about the move until after it was done.

She wasn't happy about it, but at the time there wasn't much she could do other than make plans to bring Grandpa back to live with us. As soon as Mama started bringing home a regular paycheck from her Medical Center job, she started talking to a Realtor about finding a house she could afford.

In the meantime, she gave Lewis back that big ole diamond ring he'd bought her and called off their engagement. Mama decided she couldn't marry him after all. Not because she didn't love him, but because she feared he didn't love us kids enough. And Mama simply could not bear to be hitched to a man who didn't adore us kids the way Daddy had. She broke the news to us casually over supper one night.

She'd brought home a bag of Krystal hamburgers. The steamed burgers were smothered in mustard and pickles and could fit in the palm of a kid's hand. Since they only cost a quarter each, Mama could buy a sack of twenty for five bucks. Still, a meal from Krystal was usually reserved for special celebratory events. As she stood at the kitchen counter, taking the burgers from the bag, Mama told us that she'd given Lewis his ring back.

“How come?” I asked.

“Just because,” Mama said. I knew better than to press her for any more explanation than that. The “Just because” answer meant all discussion was finished as far as Mama was concerned. I don't recall any of us kids being upset about Mama and Lewis breaking up.

A change was taking place in our lives. Once she finished school and started working full-time, Mama quit her honky-tonking. She was working the 11
P.M.
to 7
A.M.
shift. She'd start getting ready for work at about 9:30
P.M.
She'd leave at about ten-thirty and get home in time to see Linda and me off to school in the mornings. When we got home in the afternoons, Mama was up, the trailer was cleaned, the laundry was all folded, and dinner was being contemplated. Except for the obvious absence of men in our household, life seemed almost routine, like it had been before Daddy died.

In fall 1972, Mama up and sold our trailer and bought a house. It was a three-bedroom brick home, just a block off Manchester Expressway, on Johnson Drive. It wasn't anything fancy, less than fifteen hundred square feet, but it was situated on a corner lot, which meant we not only had a front and backyard, but we had a side yard as well. And the house had a concrete foundation, instead of cinder blocks to hold it up. There were lots of windows and glossy hardwood floors in the living room and bedrooms, and a bathroom with a tub and shower. The trailer had cost $5,700. Mama sold it for $2,000 five and a half years later. She used that money to put a down payment on the house and financed $14,000. That was a great sum of money for a woman making less than three dollars an hour.

It didn't take us long to box up everything we owned. A bunch of the kids from Rose Hill got their parents' cars and trucks and helped us move. Mama appreciated that. All day long she kept humming that Roger Miller tune—“King of the Road”—“Trailer for sale or rent.”

Linda and I got to decorate our room the way we wanted. We picked out a pair of hot-pink curtains with ruffles on the valances and the hem. Our bedroom faced west, so when the sun set, its dappled light came right through our window. The afternoon sun drifting through those cotton curtains gave the room a rosy glow that seemed magical to us.

Mama's room was next to ours, facing east. And even though he wasn't living at home, Frank got a little corner room that was big enough for a twin bed and not much else. Every door had a glass doorknob, and there was even a dining room separate from the kitchen. The kitchen seemed especially spacious. I couldn't just turn and reach the refrigerator from the stove or sink. I actually had to walk across the linoleum floor to get eggs from the fridge. But the best thing about the kitchen was the picture window above the sink. It looked directly into the bedroom window of the very cute teenage boy who lived in the house next-door.

Rudy used to take off his shirt whenever he saw Linda or me
standing at the sink washing dishes. He'd pick a vinyl record and put it on the turntable and sit there flipping through a magazine and pretend like he didn't know we were staring at him. Other times he'd talk to us through the window screens. One night, when a fellow who had given me a ride home from church attempted to kiss me good night on the back stoop just outside the kitchen door, Rudy flipped on his bedroom light and scared the dickens out of the poor guy. That fellow never did try to kiss me again.

Lust wasn't the only fire to heat up that kitchen. Once while Mama was working, I was at the stove, fixing me and Linda some BLTs for dinner. I'd been cooking for years, so frying up a skillet of bacon was sort of a mindless chore for me. But on that afternoon, I turned up the front eye too high. I stood with my back to the stove, talking to Linda about something, when flames a half-foot high shot up from the pan.
“Karen! Look out!”
Linda screamed.

I grabbed the skillet's handle and moved the pan to the stove's middle. Then, forgetting everything I'd been taught in home ec about not throwing water on hot grease, I yelled at Linda to get me a glass of water. I poured it in the pan.

“Oh! Shit!”
I screamed. Too late. Bacon torch.

“Gimme a towel,” I said. Linda threw a dish rag my way. Smoke was filling the kitchen and streaming out the side door.
“Get outta my way!”
I shouted as I picked up the frying pan and ran with it to the sink.
“I need some flour!”
I yelled. Finally, the home ec lesson on cooking fires had kicked in.

Linda handed me the flour canister. I scooped up a handful, tossed it into the pan, and turned on the water at the same time. The fire in the pan died out, but the kitchen curtains above the sink were aflame. Linda ran out the side door and yelled at Rudy to call the fire department. I reached for the sprayer and drenched the blazing curtains. The flames were out when a fire engine pulled up in our drive. Rudy never had time to call them. Someone else in the neighborhood, seeing the smoke pouring out of our house, had already called the fire
department. Several firemen rushed through the side door, scaring the bejesus out of Linda and me.

“You girls okay?” one of the men asked as he stood in the middle of the kitchen assessing the damage. Smoke, black like a thundercloud, settled on the ceiling.

“Yes, sssir,” I stammered. I was certain Mama was going to go apeshit. I'd just managed to torch her new kitchen. The firemen insisted I call her before they left the premises. One of the men got on the phone with Mama and assured her we were okay, but that the kitchen had extensive smoke damage. Mama left work and came straight home. She didn't yell at me, but the next week she bought a four-hundred-dollar fire-alarm system from some man who she then ended up dating. Mama made Linda and me listen as the fellow gave us all a terrifying presentation on death by fire.