Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 70429 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70429 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
“I couldn’t agree with you more.” Caspian said.
“Millicent loved her some babies… some little kids… and teenagers. Loved ’em all. ’Specially the smart ones. She had a mental attraction to smart children. It did somethin’ for her. She said it was all that potential—she wanted to see it used and cultivated. If the kid made bad grades, that didn’t mean he wasn’t smart, she’d always say. It meant he was distracted or wasn’t taught right. I hadn’t nevah met nobody like her, Caspian.” His face wrinkled. “She was… strange sometimes. Some things she’d say or do that I ain’t too much understand. At first, I just didn’t get why she wasn’t happy bein’ at home.
“She needed to be out there at that school. It was her lifeline. I thought she’d go ’nd teach, then clock out and that would be the end of it. But no… She lived it, breathed it, slept with it. Teachin’ was a way of life for her. She had to be workin’ or thinkin’ about workin’. She said she’d die if she couldn’t teach. And I know she meant it. But I saw her go through so much mess, just to gain so little!” He hissed. “The racism! It was nonstop… a fly-covered slice of watermelon on her desk… a monkey doll in her car… an index card that read, ‘Go back to Africa.’ My baby wasn’t from no damn Africa! She was an American! Born ’nd raised right here! All Black folks ain’t alike!” He raised his voice, drawing attention as he lost his cool. “She wasn’t scared of the unknown, of failin’ or fallin’. She was scared of never even tryin’…” He blew his nose.
“That’s what she’d always tell us boys, that we only fail if we never even try. In fact, she told the whole class that.”
“Mmm hmmm. She just kept on truckin’. That made the White folks who didn’t think she deserved to be where she was at in life even more upset. She was also helpin’ the Devil’s rejects—the kids the rest of the school gave up on, ’specially if they was smart. You and them other boys was dangerous… too smart for yer own good. Didn’t matter that y’all was White, she said she could relate.”
A flash of some emotion crossed the old man’s face. His eyes darkened as he raised his chin higher.
“So she could spot her own kind?”
“That’s right.” He nodded. “She could. Like you and yo’ friends, she too had a hard ways of it, growin’ up in a mean world, only she wasn’t born wit’ your privilege. That White skin. She was a Black woman in the South.” He pounded his fist against the table, his voice rising again. “In a field that showed off ya smarts… a teacher. How dare dis Black woman go and get herself further than a high school education, then march into a majority White school ’nd try to teach these poor churrens. Didn’t matter that most of the kids in y’alls school was poor and strugglin’, they still thought they was better than my Millicent. Bottom of the totem pole.”
“Who hired her?”
“The principal, of course.” He looked at him quizzically. “Said she was the most qualified to teach that history class. From my recollection, he was from up North…”
“The one time I heard a kid call Mrs. Florence a nigger, a bunch of us jumped on him until he was bleeding from everywhere possible. So many of us attacked him that none of us got suspended ’cause they didn’t know who’d done what first, and none of us were willing to snitch. He was hurtin’. Beyond that,” Caspian shrugged, “I’d never seen or heard about her being treated badly, specially ’cause of her color.”
“Well, it happened all the same. She took it and tucked it away. Kept it to herself. She’d been harassed. Assaulted. Hit. Smacked. Threatened. You woulda thought we was back in the 1960s, but we weren’t. This was right here, in Louisville, Kentucky, just twenty-three years ago. When she was gettin’ her Masters, the professor told her she was a dumb Black bitch and she should go be a maid or housekeeper. He’d gotten flustered because she corrected somethin’ he said, so he wanted to argue then found out she was right. She had to beg me not to go up to that there college and shoot him in his head!”
Spit sprayed out of his mouth and he dabbed at his lips with his napkin. His small dark brown eyes were now wild and wide, as if he was reliving a trauma that never completely left his mind. “That professor was upset they let someone in his class that knew more than he did… and she just so happened to be Black. They didn’t care though… he was later promoted.”