Betsey Brown (10 page)

“They're paving the way for those yet to come, Jane. There's thousands of lives that depend on our children having the courage to go somewhere they've never been accepted, or wanted, when they have a right to go and a right to the best education our taxes pay for.”

Jane took the deck of cards and mechanically dealt herself a hand of bridge. She played every hand. Greer listened to Miles Davis and Art Blakey, while his wife, who'd been round white folks all her life, decided her children's futures.

Hesitantly, but ever so seriously, Jane spoke.

“All right. They can go, but at the first sign of trouble of any kind, they go to the Catholic school . . . is that understood?”

Greer nodded yes, and the two of them were quiet together, praying no one of theirs would be hurt or pierced to the quick by some flying words outta peckerwood mouths. Jane and Greer knew about these things. They'd been chastened since birth by the scorn and violence the race had known. They'd been brought up on lynchings and riots, name-calling and “No Colored Allowed.” The neighborhood had saved them, they thought. With the Negro-owned businesses, the hairdressers and laundry, the schoolteachers and the shadows of the great trees, the neighborhood had sheltered them from what they knew was on the outside: the white people.

All the usual commotion of an ordinary evening in the Brown house was stilled. Even Charlie wasn't bad-mouthing the girls or telling tales of his exploits. Margot and Sharon weren't playing make-believe. Betsey wasn't reading about anything. The children knew the morning brought a new way of living, another realm into their lives, one they'd been taught was dangerous and hostile. The white people. A classroom full of white people. No Twandas, Veejays, and Charlotte Anns. No Willettas and the rivalries tween Sumner and Soldan. Nothing familiar. Maybe not even any dill pickles wrapped in brown paper or candies like Mr. Robinson's. What could you talk about with them? What would they want to talk about? What they knew awready was shouts, bottles, and catsup. This no one mentioned out loud. Only Allard crawled on his bed crying: “I don't want to go. I don't want to go off with no white folks. They gonna kill me. Mama, they gonna kill me.”

Jane reassured her babies as best she could. Greer let everyone play the conga drums, but they all knew their lives would
never be the same. Betsey couldn't understand why they weren't good enough already. Why did she have to take three different buses to learn the same things with white children that she'd been learning with colored children? How was she going to keep her friends if she never saw them? Why didn't the white children come to her school? Let
them
get up at dawn and take a trillion different trolleys. Why did the Negroes have to do everything the hard way? Why weren't they good enough already?

Jane prayed through her sleep. Greer did his best to quiet her fears, the anxious look in her eyes, how her limbs crouched beneath his, taut, ready to run.

Betsey slipped from her bed to her window. Through her tree she could see the stars and clouds that were so lithe the moon shone through them. She wondered if the white children saw things like that. Did they search the skies at night for beauty and answers to wishes? The darkness was a comfort to her. The window slid open without so much as a creak. Betsey went over to the tree limb that was toughest, the one that could hold all her weight, grabbed hold and pulled herself up. This was one night she would see all the stars and the moon as the sun rose, when there was that peculiar mingling of past and tomorrows, when the sun glanced cross the sky to the moon hoverin over the telephone wires, and everyone else was ignorant of the powers of light and the dark.

Jane had never been in and out of the refrigerator so much in her life. Nobody wanted anything they usually ate.

“I never eat baloney, Mama,” Margot pouted.

“I do, I eat it all the time,” Allard said.

“Y'all shut up, and get out my way. I've got to see if my bus is coming.” Sharon pushed her way to the window, paper bag lunch in hand.

“You in that much of a hurry for the crackers to spit on you?” Charlie asked.

“But, Mama, I don't like tuna.” Margot still hadn't found a luncheon meat that satisfied her taste. “I don't want cheese, either.”

Betsey was roaming among them like a prelate. “It's the law. Integration is the law.”

Jane reached her limit.

“This is it. Here are your lunches. It's the law. Go to your bus stops and have a good day.”

Greer lifted Allard off the floor to the ceiling and let him play Spiderman. Allard was frightened, one could tell by the solemn gleam in his eyes.

“Come on, Allard. We don't want the white folks to say that a gifted colored child was late, now do we?”

“Daddy, do I have to go? I don't want to go!”

Vida wasn't much help. She cleaned behind Jane, who was folding the lunch bags, muttering, “I don't understand this. I just don't understand this.”

“Daddy, I am not colored. I am a Negro,” Allard announced while clinging to the ceiling.

“That's my boy. That's exactly what you tell them, too.” Greer chuckled.

Vida kept on, “I don't know why they have to go to the white folks' school. I just don't understand.”

Greer patted Vida on her shoulders, sighing, “It's the law, Mama. Remember, I told you separate and equal was not separate and equal, just separate? Remember that?”

Jane looked at every one of her youngsters. Were they all ready? Did they look nice and clean and just like she wanted to remember them? She mustn't think like that. Nothing was going to happen.

“Mama, my shirt don't fit.” Allard fidgeted.

“Your shirt doesn't fit,” Jane said.

“No. It don't.”

“No, it doesn't,” Betsey chimed.

“That's what I
said
,” Allard answered, indignant.

“Why does my child have to live round all these niggahs and talk so low?” Vida asked Jane in her most sincere voice.

“Mama, he's on his way right now to a white school.” Jane was getting mad with everybody.

“But he talks like a niggah.”

“Allard, you must be the niggah them white folks talk about. Grandma says you sound like one. Pickaninny. Blackie. Boot.”

“Charlie, you shut up. You're going to scare Allard to death.” Jane was ready for them to go now.

“I was just practicing, Aunt Jane. I was preparing Allard for what's coming round the corner.”

“All that's coming round the corner is the bus, Charlie. Stop filling the children's minds with mess.”

“Aunt Jane, it's not mess. Look at all these colored children being an experiment. What do you think those white folks gonna say? We aint nothing permanent. Niggahs come and go and die. Emmett Till was my age, Aunt Jane.”

“That's enough, Charlie. The Lord will see us through all this.”

“But Aunt Jane, you think they're gonna pass us by, cause Betsey's gifted or Allard's so smart, or Sharon's only so dark? You think we can't be lynched? You think they don't see us for who we are? That's being fool—”

“Hush up that nonsense, you hoodlum northern trash,” Vida interrupted.

“Mama, please don't say that. The children are agitated, that's all.” Jane pulled her hands through her hair, which was dampened with tears and sweat she'd been pushing up her forehead.

“Greer, let's go. Please, can we go?”

“The children don't seem so organized, Jane.”

“Dammit, Greer, between you, the Supreme Court, the buses, and the boys, I think I might die. I swear, I think I just might die.”

Charlie leaned over to Allard, whispering, “We gonna get some white tail and say we did it for Emmett Till.”

“Tail, I don't want any tail, Charlie.”

“Hush your filthy mouth, you hear me? Hush!” Vida shouted.

Jane pulled Greer close to her. “Let's get out of here.” As she went out the door, Jane turned and waved kisses back to her children. She wept on Greer's shoulder all the way to work.

Vida watched the children line up, military style, to go to their individual bus stops. She shook her head as the chant she heard them shouting reached into the quiet of the house.

“All they can say is it's the law
All they can say is it's the law
Do they do it? Do they do it?
Naw.”

Then Charlie's voice saying: “Does a peckerwood hit you in the head during math?” Margot echoing, “Do the police watch you count your own money at the store?” Then Betsey adding, “Do white boys pull up your dress to see a niggah's behind?”

“No, not to see your behind. To see if you got a tail,” Charlie answered. “It's the law and it's a mess. Hey, we gonna miss our buses,” Charlie cried, alarmed.

“So what?” Betsey shouted for the whole neighborhood to hear: “We misst our buses. Who would give a damn? White folks wish our feet didn't even touch their holy ground. So what, we miss our buses? Who you think gonna come, Eisenhower, Faubus? Po' white trash with guns gonna escort us to our classes and make us eat the flag, while they tell us how slavery really wasn't quite so bad.”

Off they went, belligerent, afraid, and feeling totally put upon.

The brigade scattered at Union Boulevard.

“I get the number four.”

“I'm catching the twelve.”

“I'm heading southwest.”

“I don't wanta go,” Allard pleaded.

“So what, niggah? It's the law.” That's all Charlie had to say. And they went their separate ways.

Vida wandered round the house picking up this and that: a ribbon, a crayon, a dustball. They got some nerve, those foolish urchins. They've got the honor of being Americans. They free and smart. They got good blood. And all they got on their minds is how it was in slavery times, as if we came from slaves. What a mess they've made of our genealogy, everybody knows we were freedmen. Then Vida stopped that train of thought, cause in order to be a freedman somebody would have had to be a slave and that concept did not compute.

When Betsey got to her new school, it loomed like a granite tomb over her head. Nobody spoke to her, so she didn't speak to them. It was like they were all dead. The white children weren't dirty or anything. They didn't even have red necks as far as she could tell, but they didn't smile at her the way she was usedta Susan Linda grinning at the corner of the schoolyard. This time Betsey had the whole corner to herself. Wherever she stepped, the other children found somewhere else to go. It was the first time Betsey knew she was someplace, yet felt no evidence of it. Maybe they couldn't see her. No, Betsey knew better than that. They chose not to, like the color of her skin was a blight. Betsey wisht it would rub off. She'd rub coloredness all over the damn place. Then where would they go to get away from the niggahs?

Mrs. Leon was the first person to address her by her name, Elizabeth Brown. In a linen suit and a tailored blouse with a
blue bow at the collar, Mrs. Leon looked like a big little girl to Betsey. But at least Mrs. Leon didn't seem to think there was anything strange about her.

“Class, this is our new pupil, Betsey, I think she likes to be called. Is that right?”

“Yes, M'am.”

“Well, you have a seat behind Jan there at the right, and we'll start our geography lesson. All your books should be in your desk. Let me know if you are missing anything.” Mrs. Leon smiled.

Betsey thought maybe Mrs. Leon wasn't white at all, maybe she was passing, like in that book
Imitation of Life.
Or maybe she was what Jane called “well-meaning white people.” At any rate Mrs. Leon broke the ice and the thrill of a new place and new faces came over Betsey as easily as the shadows had blackened her path.

It was luck or planning on Mrs. Leon's part, but the geography lesson had all to do with Africa. Greer had insisted that his children know every emerging African state's name and location, so Betsey was soaring with information. It turned out that the children didn't hate her actually, they just didn't know what to do with her. They'd never seen colored who didn't work for them or weren't playing in some part of town nobody wanted to live in. But as the words Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal rolled off Betsey's tongue, they sounded as romantic and elegant as France, Germany, Alsace-Lorraine, or Bulgaria. Nobody could sing the words to “Rockin' Robin” at recess, but they played hop-scotch the same. One girl with wavy blond hair kept kosher, which Betsey didn't understand. She'd ask Jane. Another girl with brown hair and blue-green eyes, Randa, asked if Betsey would show her how to jump double-dutch.
Betsey did her best, but the rhythm just wasn't coming from the rope-twirlers. Then the bell rang.

Betsey went back to Mrs. Leon with hopes things might get even better. The children who stayed away from her were as unswerving in their obstinance as Betsey was becoming optimistic about her new experience. Would she become one of them? Betsey often thought Susan Linda was most colored, cause she was too poor to be really white. There was the possibility of them rubbing off on her instead of her rubbing off on them. A fast trip to the girls' lavatory relieved Betsey of that dilemma. She'd go home just as brown as she'd arrived. Everybody at home would recognize her. No two ways about it. She was still Betsey Brown.

But the new school, Dewey School, would never be like her real school. It wasn't till the bus eased up Delmar Boulevard and the colored people were going on about their business, carrying things from the dry cleaners, going up the stairs to their apartments or the beauty shops, lingering by the corners exchanging tales, waiting in line for fried fish or shrimp, slinging barbeque sauce over ribs and burgers, playing honest-to-God double-dutch and liking it, that Betsey felt like she was at home. When she got off the streetcar Veejay and Eugene were waiting for her.