Come a Stranger (16 page)

The second day of school, Mr. Bryce, the principal who also taught them Social Studies, came in to administer a battery of achievement and aptitude tests. He took the class with painful slowness through the filling-in of their names and school, their ages and the date. Then he started to explain about the rules, how they weren't allowed to talk or ask questions, how they had to concentrate and do their best work because these tests were going to be used for placement, now and in the high school.

Mina never minded tests. But Rachelle, sitting next to Kat, raised her hand. Mr. Bryce went on talking, about going back to check if you had time at the end of each section, about how to erase the answers so the machines that corrected the tests wouldn't get it wrong. Rachelle sat there, with her hand up. Mr. Bryce looked at her occasionally, but didn't call on her. Finally, Rachelle called out, “Aren't these tests biased in favor of the whites?”

Mr. Bryce, who was of course white, looked at Rachelle for about half a minute. “I hope,” he finally said, “that you're not in the habit of speaking before you're called on.”

“I was just wondering if that got considered, in the scoring,” Rachelle asked. Her voice wavered a little bit, like a violin losing the note. “Because if it's not, I wonder if I should take this.”

“I don't think you have any choice if you're in this school system,” Mr. Bryce said.

Uh-oh, Mina thought. He wasn't any too pleased with that question, or with Rachelle. “Let's just take it, 'Chelle, and get it over with,” she said.

Mr. Bryce's eyes turned to her, and he wasn't too pleased with
her either. Rachelle shrugged and didn't say anything more. Mina got set to get to work. She knew what Rachelle meant. There had been magazine articles about how these tests were designed for people who had grown up in the white environment. But Mina didn't see what they could do about that. She felt helpless, because there weren't any tests designed for blacks that she'd heard of, so the only tests there were were biased toward whites, and you had to take the tests. There wasn't anything she could do about the situation, and she didn't like that feeling, not one bit. But she didn't think they could give her any test she wouldn't do well on. They hadn't yet. She felt powerful, sitting there with the two sharpened pencils in front of her, waiting to begin. Maybe the test was biased, but they weren't going to be able to trip her up with it.

Mina went up to Rachelle during recess, to apologize for butting in. “Yeah,” Rachelle said.

“I only did it because he was threatening to expel you,” Mina explained.

“He was not. He couldn't do that.”

“I don't know if he could, but it's what he was thinking. Don't you think, Kat?”

“Do you think that's what he meant by ‘in this school system?'” Kat asked.

“I think,” Mina said.

“I was so angry, I barely listened,” Rachelle said. “Although, come to think of it, I'm not so sure I care. We're just diddling our days away in school. Letting them think they can have it all their own way.” Rachelle was short and round and liked a fight.

“You know what the Bible says: ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's,'” Kat reminded her.

“That's okay for you,” Rachelle said, “but my father's sick,
and my mother can't find work and they keep jiving her about welfare . . . as if they owned the world.”

“I know how you feel,” Kat said. “I'm really sorry.” Kat meant what she said. It was in the tone of her voice, she really did feel sorry for Rachelle, and in a good way, not a pitying way. “My mother says there are some times so bad, you don't know how you'll get through them.”

“Your mother? Really? But she looks like—” Rachelle didn't finish that sentence.

“Well, they don't own me,” Mina said. “I'm just glad we only have one class a day with Mr. Bryce.”

“Tell me about it,” they both said. Then they all laughed and linked arms, to stroll together on around the playground.

Mina had other things to think about than school, or her own stormy feelings, for a while after that. Miz Hunter took sick, and the sickness settled in her chest. She was dying. She knew it, but she still didn't want to go into the hospital. Mina's mother nursed her, and a lot of the older people came to sit with her when Momma had to go off to work. Mina was needed at home. She kept a supply of food going over to the little house and kept their own house running. Louis helped out, as much as he could. The second Saturday of school he spent the whole evening working with her to make up coffee cakes for the next morning. But Miz Hunter died that night, just slipped away in her sleep, Momma reported. It was a good death, after a good life, Momma said. Mina, despite feeling a sadness like slow, steady rain, knew what her mother meant. It was as if Miz Hunter came to the end of her road and stepped off onto the next.

The funeral was Tuesday. Both Mina and Kat missed school to sing in the choir for the service. The choir sang, “You shall reap just what you sow.” Poppa's eulogy was about Miz Hunter's whole life and the good things she sowed. He read it out to Mina
Monday evening, to hear how it sounded. She was looking forward to hearing him read it out in church.

Looking out over the solemn faces in the crowded church, Mina saw the door open. Mr. Shipp slipped into the room.

She saw Mr. Shipp and her heart flopped painfully over in her breast.

Mina stared at her father, not hearing a word he said. She just hadn't known, she hadn't even suspected. She had never figured it out, how much she had missed Mr. Shipp, even though she had noticed how he kept walking across her nighttime dreams. Her cheeks felt hot when she understood.

She didn't mind. Just the opposite. She was just surprised that she hadn't known that the hollow place she'd been feeling inside her wasn't an empty place at all—it was the place where her feelings for Tamer Shipp were waiting to be given their right name.

Now she knew what that was, she knew how she'd missed seeing him and his family, missed hearing his ideas, his mind laid out for her to understand in Sunday sermons. She always and every day wanted to watch him walk into a room, and maybe smile. She wanted to look into his eyes and see all the complicated and comprehending feelings he gave to the world.

Watching him, as he knelt for a brief prayer then sat back in his chair to listen, Mina wondered how the sky felt when a lightning bolt blazed through it. She thought that was about the way she was feeling, right then. She looked away from him, understanding: During the trip down from Wilmington that July afternoon, the long car ride, the long lunch, Mina had fallen in love with him. She'd fallen so fast, she didn't even know until now how deep she'd fallen.

She didn't know if Mr. Shipp looked at her, because she didn't dare look at him again. Besides, she thought, bringing her mind back to her father's eulogy, this wasn't the time or the place. She
brought her mind back to Miz Hunter, even though that was no less confusing than anything else in her life. She was sorry Miz Hunter was dead. She would miss the old lady's presence in the little house next door, she would miss their conversations. But Miz Hunter's trials were over now, and she was resting now.

When the choir stood up to sing Miz Hunter out of the church, it was “Deep River” they sang. They sang it
a cappella
—just the voices, singing. Mina's voice sounded to her all filled up with sorrow and gladness for Miz Hunter, over Jordan now, just like the song said, and with joy to see Mr. Shipp, and with belonging, here in her father's church.

“Where you going to, Missy,” she remembered Miz Hunter asking, all the time. Everybody was going someplace, she thought, singing out deep, watching the people follow the coffin out while the choir sang them on their way. Miz Hunter was just way on ahead now, over Jordan, sitting down to the gospel feast in the song.

Mina didn't know about this place where Miz Hunter had gone to, nobody did for sure. But she did know for sure that she'd go where she wanted to go—in this world that had Tamer Shipp in it. Not just go where somebody else said she had to because she probably wouldn't be able to do any better for herself, because she was black.

M
ina didn't know what Mr. Shipp thought of her, except that he approved. She knew he was a married man, and he loved his wife, and he had a family, and she was years too young for him. But that didn't mean she couldn't love him. But sometimes she wished she'd never met him, or he hadn't been the one to come pick her up that day in Wilmington. Sometimes she envied Kat the way she moved from crush to crush, with no boy ever really mattering to her for himself. Kat was having a good time growing up.

Sometimes, Mina just daydreamed about Tamer Shipp. Some of her daydreams were goopier than others. Often, he was there in her night dreams, and now she knew why. She wondered if she was ever in his dreams, although she doubted it. She wondered what he'd think of her and how she was doing in school. She thought he'd approve. Half the reason she was working like she was was for Tamer Shipp.

She paid attention in classes, not surprised that she knew any answer the teachers asked for. She did her homework, and then some. She did a lot of reading on the side and a lot of that was the books her sixth grade teacher had recommended to her, books about blacks and books by blacks. Math, Science, Literature, Language Arts, the perfect papers just kept rolling back to her. It didn't surprise Mina that it was so easy for her.

She also made sure that everybody in the class knew who she was, Mina Smiths, knew that Mina Smiths wasn't going to come in second to anybody, knew that Mina Smiths was someone to be reckoned with, t-rou-ble. They thought she had to be who they wanted her to be, but they didn't know anything about her.

Mr. Shipp knew something about her, she thought.

She wondered what he would make of Mr. Bryce and the Social Studies class. The course was the history of Maryland, with Fridays given over to current events, when everybody had to report on a newspaper article. She knew what she made of Mr. Bryce, who ran a military-strict classroom where everything had to be done exactly his way, even the place where the date went on your papers and the way the date was written, first the number, then the month, then the year. There was only one particular set of words that made an answer right. Social Studies met at the end of the day. Mr. Bryce came in expecting them to behave badly, seventh graders at the end of the school day, and he sat on anything he thought might be trouble before it could even begin.

Mr. Bryce was an overweight middle-aged man whose hair was thinning and who had the big belly of a man whose once athletic body hadn't been exercised for a long time. At first, he'd call on Mina, but after a couple of days he dismissed her questions, without seeming to hear them even though he was looking right at her. He ignored questions about blacks during the colonial period, whether there were free blacks as well as slaves in Maryland, about what legal rights a free black had. He didn't even call on Mina after the first few days. He didn't like her, he really didn't like her. The look on his face when he took attendance told her that he thought she was trouble, and she'd better look out.

She did look out, everybody did around Mr. Bryce, who was the school principal too; but that didn't mean she was going to
shut up. Mina thought about Mr. Shipp, and whether he'd let anybody treat him this way. She wondered if, if Mr. Shipp was in their class as a student, she'd let anyone treat him the way Mr. Bryce treated the black kids, barely taking the time to tell them they were pretty stupid. So Mina made a point of standing up for blacks in general, and the kids in her class too.

“What would your father say about your manners,” Mr. Bryce asked Mina one day, in front of everybody, when she had asked a question about three times, waiting for him to respond to her. “What would he say about how rude you are. He's a minister, isn't he?” Mr. Bryce added, looking around the class to make sure everybody got that point.

Mina didn't know how to answer him. She did know that she hadn't been rude, in any way, not even in her tone of voice and barely in what she'd been thinking about the man. She didn't want to answer his question, however, because it would look like a quarrel, whatever she answered. Mr. Bryce was setting up a quarrel.

“Well?” he insisted, staring at her in the front row, where he had moved her the third day of class.

He was pushing at her with the full force of his personality. Everyone got quiet, uncomfortable and a little eager for any kind of excitement, even if it was only somebody getting sent out. Mina didn't want to get sent out of the room for a discipline report. She also didn't want to apologize, because she didn't think she had been rude. She wasn't going to let him make her lie either, by forcing an “I'm sorry” out of her. But the way he'd asked the question, she couldn't think of what she could say without it looking like a quarrel, unless she lied.

Then she thought if there was going to be a quarrel, she wouldn't lose it. She was a match for this man, she thought, feeling the storminess building up in her. But she thought of what
Mr. Shipp would think was right, and even though she was afraid of a real quarrel she thought that for Tamer Shipp she ought to answer. So she tried an answer, looking right back into his unfriendly eyes, not smiling, not looking smart, keeping her voice level. “Yes, my father is a minister, over at the Oak Street Church. He takes a pretty firm line on rudeness, you're right.”

She wondered how he'd answer that, and she watched him wonder too. Mr. Bryce wanted to make an example of her, to make sure everybody knew he was in control. He wanted to put her down.

But if he kept on with it, everyone would know that it was him making the quarrel, by picking on her. Things were tense in the room, but not—Mina noticed—in her. Then one of the white kids raised a hand at the same time as two of the black kids did. Mr. Bryce called on the white boy, and Mina didn't let her expression give anything away.