The Penny (20 page)

Please God,
I prayed.
If you could hear me praying about Garland, you’ve got to hear me about Daddy, too. Please God. Don’t make me have to hear the things he says about me anymore.

But Daddy kept right on telling me I’d amount to no good, he kept telling me I was dense, that I kept sticking my nose in where I wasn’t wanted, the whole time the members of Antioch Baptist Church kept stopping by and telling him what a fine daughter he had. If God had a sense of humor, this was absolute proof of it: Daddy accepting thanks and blessings from the Crocketts. Aunt Maureen brought us over a ham and homemade biscuits. T. Bone Finney brought Mama and Daddy tickets to the Blue Notes’ show over in Westlake Park. Darnell dropped off a box of pullet hens which Daddy promptly added a FOR SALE sign to and left out in the front yard for the neighbors to disperse.

Garland missed three days of school—not because the doctor could find anything wrong with him, but because Aunt Maureen wouldn’t let him out of her sight. Mr. Lancaster, out of sheer lack of space in his remaining prefabricated classrooms, combined the portable second-grade class with the portable third-grade class. On the fourth day, when Garland returned, Aunt Maureen marched up the school steps with the same dogged cadence as a soldier, holding Garland’s hand, ostrich feathers trembling atop her purple hat, emphasizing the importance of her mission. I’d have given my eyeteeth to have been able to slip inside the principal’s office and listen as she started with her first question, pointed and solemn: “Would my son have ended up in harm’s way on your campus, Mr. Lancaster, had he not been a colored child?”

Mr. Lancaster’s face turned almost the same hue as Aunt Maureen’s Sunday hat. He looked incensed that she would dare pose such a question at all. “Your child is attending an integrated school, Mrs. Crockett. I don’t think you can ask for any more than that.”

“Yes,” Aunt Maureen insisted. “I
can
ask. I will continue to do so. You are responsible for
all
of your students, Mr. Lancaster, not just half of them.”

In spite of Mr. Lancaster’s indifference, or perhaps because of it, our days at Harris School went by uneventfully. Almost before we noticed it, autumn had begun dwindling toward an early winter. A cold snap had sent everyone scurrying to their cars for heavy jackets during the Friday-night football game. A crisp pair of cement mixers moved in during science period one morning, their revolving drums making such a racket that Mrs. Huffines had to shut the windows and shout to be heard as she described the reproduction practices of amoebas. She finally gave up and assigned us protozoan crossword puzzles, while the trucks clambered and workmen hammered wooden forms together outside.

The end result, by the conclusion of the day, was nine perfect concrete slabs poured at various angles. By the time the slabs had dried several days later, a derrick crane moved in, and we watched while each portable was wrapped in a web of chains and hoisted from its grass-bound lair to be set firmly in place on a concrete foundation. I didn’t see how this helped much, though, making the portables permanent when everybody who’d protested by carrying signs had wanted them moved out altogether, not cemented down.

I guessed there were different ways of fixing things.

When an editorial appeared on page two in the
Post-Dispatch
discussing the color line at Harris School and the one girl who had overlooked the social order, Daddy charged me with humiliating not only our family but the entire neighborhood as well. Every time he glowered across the room at me, his mouth formed a grim line. I kept waiting for him to thrash out and send me sprawling with broken ribs or a black eye, but he held back.

He left to install a chain link fence around an empty lot and returned that night with heavy footfalls, telling Mama how Tom Leeper had shamed him good in front of the fence crew when he told everybody how I’d gone to the hospital to visit a colored boy. “Doesn’t your girl know she’s better off staying with her own kind?” Daddy mimicked. “Doesn’t she know it’s how we keep the peace, making sure everybody stays apart?”

“You looked like a fool.” If Daddy said it once, he said it a hundred times. “Why did you have to go and make a spectacle of yourself?”

I wanted to make a spectacle of myself. I wanted to do something right for a change.

“You couldn’t do anything right if you tried, Jenny.”

Let me tell you, when a voice just keeps needling at you, it can have the same effect as a steady drip of water wearing a rock into sand.

“You’re worthless.”

“You’ll never amount to anything.”

“You’ve made us into the laughingstock.”

The more a father tells you he’s ashamed of you, the more you start to believe it.

But God had a way of making sure I heard another voice, no matter how Daddy worked to degrade me. As I carried my lunch tray toward a vacant table that Wednesday, Mrs. Henderson—the teacher from across the hall—laid a penny on my tray.

“It matters, Jenny,” Mrs. Henderson said. “I want you to know how proud I am of you, standing up for what you believed the way you did.”

I stared at the penny Mrs. Henderson put on my tray. How could she know that pennies meant something special to me? I remembered the times I had given pennies away to other people, thinking how I’d wanted to help them because of what God had done for me. I guessed maybe somebody had told Mrs. Henderson about it.
If somebody told her about it,
I thought,
maybe it did make a difference.

I jostled past a crowd of kids and, as if in answer to that thought, another penny appeared on my tray. Then another. And another.

“What are you doing?” I said to all of them. “Why does everybody keep giving me pennies?”

“You’re something, you know,” said Tyler Jackson, one of my classmates.

“You did something really hard,” Connie Martin agreed.

“None of the grown-ups would do it,” Dennis Smith said.

The lunchroom lady who wiped tables clean dropped three or four pennies on the table beside my elbow. Mrs. Tate set a few pennies down and said, “There’s those of us who think you did the right thing, young lady.”

Then Cindy Walker set a penny down in front of me without saying a word. Pruett Jones gave me a penny and said, “You gave me one of these and it made my head not hurt quite so much because I knew you cared about it.”

Mrs. Dahlberg said, “I sure needed cheering up that day at the grocery store. I’d just put my best friend on a bus and I knew I wouldn’t see her for months. You made me smile, putting that penny where you knew I would find it.” She dropped a whole fistful of pennies on my tray.

“Remember the day you gave me a penny because I made a bad grade on my math test?” Cheryl Witsitt asked. “Giving me that penny was such a small gesture,” she said, “but it gave me so much hope.”

Hope welled inside my heart, too. My small acts of kindness had not only made
me
feel better, they had made a difference with other people. That’s what everybody was telling me. They
had.
People I didn’t even know went to fishing in their pockets. Everywhere I went, people started walking up and handing pennies to me. Pennies poured toward me from every direction. From everywhere I turned. From people I barely knew.

In spite of Daddy’s jeering, I began to rejoice, too. I saw that no matter how he tried to beat me down, there could be a different answer. Reaching out to hurting people even in small ways helps to heal our own hurts. I heard the message of the pennies louder than I heard my father’s scoffs. His actions worked to steal my hope, but God kept giving it back to me.

I felt satisfied and grateful, and rich beyond all measure.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I
t can be catching, believing in miracles. I believe I saw a miracle the night Miss Shaw let me sleep against her bare hand. I believe I saw a miracle the morning Eddie Crockett jostled me awake at the hospital.

I kept an eye on my wristwatch that next Monday, waiting for it to be time for the Ville kids to be out for recess. When the clock read 10:45, I told Mrs. Huffines, “I can’t wait; I have to go.” She scribbled a hall pass for the girls’ room. Instead of going to the girls’ room, though, I slipped out the front door and found Aurelia perched on the steps with Garland. I watched over her shoulder while her dark fingers folded a slip of paper into the shape of a heron.

Aurelia’s hands, slender and nimble, reminded me of a sculptor’s hands. Here was a girl willing to push and poke and remodel things until she got them to her liking. Maybe she’d never be able to get me to where she liked me all that much. But I couldn’t imagine the ache of living without her anymore, without her pushing and prodding me.

She presented the finished origami bird to Garland and he held it in the cup of his palm, surveying it.

“Aurelia,” I said. “I want us to be friends.”

She didn’t look up. “Well, you sure got a fine way of showing it.”

As she eyed the paper creature in her cousin’s hand, Aurelia asked, “Are you ever going to tell me why you were standing there shoving Garland’s classroom back and forth right alongside Rosalyn?”

Maybe I ought to have pretended I didn’t know what she meant.

“Are you ever going to tell me why you didn’t want me at your house when I came over?”

I told her I had my reasons, but they didn’t have anything to do with her.

She told me no matter what my reasons were, I still had to answer for them.

“Are you ashamed of me?” she asked. “Are you ashamed of being my friend?”

No, I’m not ashamed of you. I’ve never been ashamed of you. But you’d have every right to be ashamed of me if you knew what I was hiding inside.
“What do you think, Aurelia?” I asked sarcastically.

But she had me. “I think you’re the only one around here trying to keep people from seeing who you really are. You’re the only person around who thinks you aren’t worth much.”

When she accused me of that, I knew she was right. My heart pounded. I knew the time had come to explain to her why I saw myself that way. I waited until Garland took the tiny bird she’d folded and ran out onto the playground with it. That’s when I said at last, my voice shaking with fear that this would make her pull away from me forever, “Daddy does things to Jean and me, Aurelia. Daddy does things to us that a father shouldn’t do to his daughters. That day when you came, I was scared he would do something to you.”

Aurelia stared at the step and clasped her hands around her knees. I could see she was as shocked by my admission as I had been when Miss Shaw explained to me about her hands.

“That’s why you wouldn’t let me come inside?”

I gripped her arm. “That penny I showed you? That day at church? When I found that penny, I think God spoke to my heart that my life could change.”

“That’s why you wouldn’t put it in the offering plate.”

I stared off at the trees and nodded.

“You were trying to protect me from your daddy?”

I nodded again, then glanced sideways at her to see her reaction. I saw my face reflected in Aurelia’s sympathetic tears, and I saw the truth, too. Aurelia didn’t intend to pull away from me.

“I can’t even begin to imagine what that would feel like, Jenny.”

I could scarcely speak past the knot in my throat. “It’s been hard.”

I guess that’s all it took to get us on even terms again—letting her upbraid me about it, telling the truth about Daddy, talking about the penny. After that, after classes had been released every day, Aurelia started sidling up to me with the advice and secrets she wanted to share while she waited for Darnell to pick her up.

She told me that Darnell thought one of the girls in his class at Sumner High School was real handsome and did some fine talking. She told me how Eddie Crockett said he caught himself running scales with fingers he didn’t have anymore. She told me Mr. George at the barbershop had offered Eddie a job because he thought he would make a first-rate chin scraper with his one arm.

I taught Aurelia how to make a Grace Kelly chignon in her hair, but no matter how many bobby pins I used, it didn’t stay more than five minutes before it started poking out in every direction like a chimney brush.

She showed me how to use Aunt Maureen’s Finishing Touches gel before I put rollers in my hair, which was finally starting to grow a little, and my curls came out as tight and tamed as snail shells.

Our friendship cemented for good in November when Mr. Lancaster decided he would prove once and for all to the St. Louis Board of Education that Harris School was taking the call to integrate seriously. Mr. Lancaster recruited students from the Ville to perform our annual presentation of the first Thanksgiving. Garland badgered us for weeks, trying to come up with an authentic costume because he didn’t want to be just any Indian—he wanted to be from the Pontiac tribe.

“We
cannot
do a children’s production with a grown man in the middle of everything,” the teachers lamented when Mr. Lancaster got last-minute nerves and decided he needed to monitor the program from on stage in case anything got out of hand.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” he said. “I’ll take the part of Plymouth Rock and squat in the corner with paper over my head. No one will even know I’m there.”

Aurelia and I scraped what we could together and paid Garland a whole quarter to deviate from the script and talk real loud about how much turkey he’d eaten and how he weighed about a thousand pounds, and then go sit down on top of Plymouth Rock. That got so many cheers from the audience when it happened that Mr. Lancaster never dared to complain. And when the principal gave Aunt Maureen a wary tip of his hat across the room, Aurelia and I could hardly contain ourselves anymore.

We felt so full of victory that we even worked up the gumption to ask her what riot act she’d read Mr. Lancaster when she’d visited his office that day.

“I didn’t read him any riot act,” she told us. “I came to tell him I had forgiveness in my heart. That’s what I figured the good Lord wanted from me. Our Lord said, ‘Forgive them, Father, because they know not what they do to me.’ He was talking about forgiving all his children—that’s what I told Mr. Lancaster.”

Let me tell you, Aunt Maureen could preach sometimes. Aurelia and I just rolled our eyes.

“I’ll bet his jaw hit the floor,” I commented with self-satisfaction as we walked home from the Thanksgiving presentation. Garland had let me wear his paper-sack vest on which Darnell had inscribed Pontiac symbols, even though it was way too small for me.

Aunt Maureen said, “His jaw hit the floor when I told him that whatever treatment he thought the coloreds deserved, it wasn’t okay with me anymore. I told him it wasn’t okay with me that he treated half his school like second-class citizens.”

“Sister.” Eddie Crockett had been rambling along beside us. He stopped dead in his tracks and looked her over. “Maybe it’s too much, you talking like that.”

“It isn’t, Eddie.” With certainty, she said, “Somebody’s got to talk about it, don’t they?”

It was so cold, I could see Eddie Crockett’s breath in the air. I could tell he felt the need to herd his sister along toward their car, concerned her zeal might ignite another discussion with the principal.

“Maureen, why don’t you climb on in the car and we’ll go home?”

“Maybe you don’t think it’s right for me to be human, Eddie, feelings and all, but God does. Too many people in the world believe we ought not to say what we think. If I’m hurting about something, Jesus loves me enough to want me to talk about it. I have to take stock that Jesus loves me just the way I am.”

Aunt Maureen always said the best things. When I heard her get excited like that, her words made ME look inside myself, way past any hurt I’d been able to hide behind before. I thought about the day I’d finally worked up the guts to tell Aurelia about what Daddy did to us. I liked thinking how Jesus cared about me and didn’t want me to cover up my feelings. Thinking about it that way gave me a new, gentle sense of peace.

Miss Shaw asked if I’d be willing to help some at the shop in December since gift-wrapping kept her busy that time of year. I knew why she wanted me—I knew she’d seen me tie beautiful gift-bows and miter-smooth corners. I couldn’t help feeling prideful at her request. That was the first talent I was able to see in myself: I was good at wrapping.

I told her Saturdays would be perfect.

The first Saturday after Thanksgiving, Del Henry stopped by with a jar of jam from his neighbor’s pantry and a book about how the world’s first brick arch was discovered in the ruins of Babylonia. He wore his best Boyd’s suit, a summer suit although winter had beset us. He also sported a fedora, which he lifted and set down so many times, it might’ve been attached to his head with a hinge.

When Miss Shaw asked him if he wanted to buy another charm for his granddaughter’s bracelet, he took off on a different tack, a strange story about a friend of his who had come in third place at the St. Louis County Fair for being fastest at dicing six cabbages.

“This is a lovely jam, Delbert.” Miss Shaw took it from him with her gloved hands. “Strawberry, isn’t it?”

Glue must’ve clogged his tongue again.

“It’s good of you to observe the beginning of gift-giving season like this.”

“Oh, I wasn’t observing any season,” he rushed to clarify.

You’re observing hunting season,
I wanted to comment as I polished the counter mirror where he had once examined his hat on his head at least eighteen times.
Hunting a companion. And I sure wish you’d get to it.

I couldn’t believe the progress when Del noted, “Miss Opal, I just thought strawberry jam would be a good reason to stop by.”

“And such a nice book. It definitely looks intriguing.”

“Yes . . . well . . .” He cleared his throat and handed the book over.

Miss Shaw pressed her white glove demurely against her blouse buttons. “Thank you for both gifts, Delbert. I’ll read the book. And the jam is certainly a lovely gesture.”

“My neighbor will have honey jars available in spring.”

I about flipped.
Spring? So much for progress,
I thought.

This called for desperate measures.

When Miss Shaw left to get the mail that next Saturday, I about gnawed the end off the eraser before I figured out exactly what I ought to write on the Shaw Jewelers letterhead.

I kept thinking how Del Henry was a brickman.

“Dear Delbert,” I wrote in careful square letters. “I would like to go on a date with you. I would go to dinner with you if you’d ever ask me. Just in case you ever get brave enough to take me to Rigazzi’s, I have to tell you that I’ve never been to eat in the Italian neighborhood before. I like spaghetti
very much
.” (Well, I didn’t know if Miss Shaw liked spaghetti or not, but when you were as involved as I was by that time, you couldn’t write a letter without putting a part of yourself in it. I
loved
spaghetti.) “I would go with you to dinner if you would just
ask
.”

I underlined the word
ask
three times.

Everything was starting to get that falling-into-place feeling.

I dropped the note off in the mail that day. And by the following Saturday, I had the answer.

When Del Henry walked in that time, I couldn’t help noticing he had purchased a new, more appropriate all-weather suit. I looked on, admiring his tenacity, watching him straighten his tie in the reflection of the silver tea set display. Just when I expected him to ask after the shop’s proprietor, he strolled directly toward me.

“Well, my, my, but what is this, Jenny? I certainly do know your handwriting.” I stared at the familiar note that he held extended in his hand.

“I didn’t—” I shook my head. I wasn’t about to say “I didn’t write it.” But I couldn’t exactly say “I didn’t intend for you to know it was me,” either.

At the precise moment I needed her most, Miss Shaw emerged from the workroom where she’d been tightening clasps onto chains.

“Delbert?”

He yanked the letter out of his pocket and presented it to her soundlessly, color climbing his ears. “I hoped you’d written this,” he said simply. “But I doubt that you did.”

The blood pounded in my ears. I waited for Miss Shaw to turn on me and tell me I had committed a terrible mistake. But I should’ve known better.

“No, Delbert. I didn’t write it. But I
would
have if I’d
thought
of it.”

When Del Henry saw her smiling at him, his grin grew so broad it about pushed his ears off his face. “You would have?”

“Absolutely,” she agreed. “Since my young employee has written you a letter about how she loves spaghetti and would like to go to Rigazzi’s for Italian, and since she is only fourteen years old and I believe that fourteen is much too young for a date, why don’t I consider going along and the three of us could make it a party?”

So that Saturday afternoon we closed up the jewelry shop and went out with Delbert. We all devoured huge nests of spaghetti and then headed out to the brickyard.

“Did you know there are caves dug out everywhere beneath this city?” Del asked us. “They’ve been digging for red brick clay for so long, we’re living on a piece of land more full of holes than a honeycomb.”

Just as dusk began to fall that evening, Miss Shaw stopped beneath one of the brick arches Del Henry had been so knowledgeable about, and came up with an idea. “Delbert,” she asked him, “has anyone ever designed such a thing as an arched headstone?”

“Oh, yes!” And although I knew exactly what Miss Shaw must be getting at, Del Henry didn’t, so he went off on the French headstones that had been designed in the seventeenth century by the esteemed brickmaker Claude Mousset.

“My mother is buried in the Lafayette Park Cemetery, but her plot has no marker,” Miss Shaw said, with no more emotion than she might have said,
Fill it up with regular, please.
“I believe you’re the right person to do this, Delbert. Would you be willing to design a small marker for her?”