Big Ma threw herself in her chair and squeezed the envelope even more. “A mercy, Lord,” Big Ma sobbed. “A mercy. A mercy.”
Then Fern ran straight into me, ramming her head above my belly. She cried hard, almost biting me, while Vonetta went, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”
Then Pa walked in whistling, the blanket folded up in his arms. He saw Big Ma in the chair, put the blanket in my hands, and went to Big Ma. “Mama, Mama. What’s the . . .” He saw the envelope and took it from her hands. “All right, Mama,” he said calmly. “All right.”
The envelope was still sealed, but crushed like Big Ma had been holding on to it for hours, waiting for us to come home. The hush over the house lay heavy, like snow sitting on our rooftop.
I felt bad news coming but I didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to hear it. And that was all I could fit in my prayer. That I didn’t want to hear what the letter had to tell us.
Pa closed his eyes for a second. When he tore open the envelope, Big Ma cried out like he was tearing a part of her. Vonetta put her arms around Big Ma’s neck while Big Ma shuddered and cried. Before my eyes, Big Ma seemed to shrink inside her housedress.
“A mercy, a mercy. A mercy, Lord. A mercy.”
To God, I said:
Don’t let him be dead.
Don’t let him be dead.
Don’t let him be MIA. Or dead.
Then Pa said in his plain, warm voice, “Darnell’s coming home.” When he laid the envelope down on the stereo, I read the address in the corner: DEPARTMENT OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY. It had come special delivery and was addressed to THE FAMILY OF PFC DARNELL L. GAITHER. No wonder Big Ma had been afraid to open it.
Pa had to say it again: “Darnell’s coming home, Ma.” Finally she gasped for air, like a baby gasps before its first cry. Now Big Ma was all-out crying.
Fern unstuck her head from me and dried her face with my top.
After we’d gotten excited about the good news, Pa added, “He’ll be in the hospital in Honolulu for two weeks. That’s all.” His voice sounded old, like when Cecile left us, and not light, like a man who whistled “My Girl.”
I tried to ease myself back into normal breathing, but I imagined all the things that could have happened to him at war. Watching the soldiers and the people in Vietnam on the six o’clock news was the only time I was glad we didn’t have color TV. They showed a lot on the news: Dead soldiers. Prisoners of war. Wailing children, broken old people, bombing, and blood all came in sharp enough in black-and-white. The news anchor always said, “Parents, send the children out of the room if they’re nearby.” I was the only child in the room but I watched anyway.
Big Ma was now quietly sobbing, but Vonetta and Fern danced a hula because Pa had said “Honolulu” and I had to tell Heckle and Jeckle again to quit it.
“What happened to him?” I asked my father. “Did he get shot?”
“Shot by the enemy?” Vonetta added.
“Is Uncle Darnell almost dead?” Fern asked. “I thought he was dead.”
Big Ma cried even more.
“Hush up,” I told my sisters.
“You’re not in charge. You can’t hush nobody,” Vonetta said.
“Surely can’t.”
“The two of you, hush up,” Pa said.
Vonetta and Fern hushed.
Last year Mrs. Peterson asked our class if we were for the war or against it, or like the evening news anchor said, “hawks” or “doves.” I said I was a hawk for my uncle Darnell and the soldiers he slept in foxholes and trampled through jungles with. But I didn’t tell my class that I sometimes prayed at night that my uncle and the soldiers would kill the Vietcong who were trying to kill them. I didn’t tell them how I prayed the same news anchor who told parents to shoo the kids out of the room would say, “Gather round, everybody. The war is over. The soldiers are all coming home.”
But then they showed Vietnamese children shot up dead. And they showed bony Vietnamese people older than Big Ma, pointing to the sky and to the hills in the distance. Pointing to clouds of smoke and helicopters. They were never pointing at doves.
The Mummy Jar
Big Ma went to bed early that night. The US Army envelope coming and her thinking the worst about Uncle Darnell had been too much. I remembered what Miss Marva Hendrix had said. Self-fulfilling prophecy. I figured she was saying that if you think something, it will happen.
Big Ma, Pa, Vonetta, Fern, and I had all thought the worst, but now everything was all right. Uncle Darnell would be home in two weeks. We would be under one roof on Herkimer Street. Except for Cecile.
Later that evening, I stood by the entrance of the kitchen after supper. “Where y’all going?” I asked Vonetta and Fern. I folded my arms and tapped my foot to show I was serious.
“To brush our teeth,” said one.
“And play Old Maid,” said the other.
“You have a table to clear and dishes to wash and dry,” I said.
“You have a table to clear and dishes to wash,” one said.
“And dry,” said the other.
“Oh yeah?” I asked.
“Oh yeah.”
“Okay,” I said calmly. “Then you can’t be in charge of saving money if you don’t have any money to save.”
“We get an allowance,” Vonetta said.
“Surely do,” said the other. “Allowance.”
“That’s only if you do chores.”
There was no comeback from the other side. I folded my arms and tapped my foot. Vonetta and Fern stood across from me and poked out their lips.
“You might be in charge of saving, but I’m in charge of giving out chores,” I said. “And there’s no allowance if I don’t tell Papa you’ve earned it.” I could have added, “So there,” but my foot-tapping was good enough.
“What am I in charge of?” Fern asked.
“Everything else,” I said.
I brought the serving platters and the Kool-Aid pitcher into the kitchen. Vonetta brought in the plates and made another trip for the glasses. Fern brought in the forks, spoons, and butter knife. I washed, Fern put the dishes in the rack, and Vonetta dried.
For everything we did, I put a check mark on a sheet I kept in my letter-writing pad.
When allowance day came, I found one dollar in quarters on my dresser next to my talcum powder. I kept two quarters for gum and Good & Plenty. Instead of putting the rest in my savings passbook, I gave Vonetta the other two quarters to put away for the concert.
Not to be outdone, Vonetta had made her own chart. The Jackson Five at Madison Square Garden was printed on top, all words spelled neatly and correctly. She had taken a ruler to make three columns and wrote our names at the top of each. She wrote 50¢ under my name, 5¢ under Fern’s, and 10¢ under her own.
“I’m in charge of saving,” Vonetta announced as if that was news. “So when you get allowance money and birthday money, you have to put it in the Madison Square Garden savings jar.”
She sat an empty dill pickle jar on the table next to her savings chart. It made a nice, sharp knock against the table. She drew and colored a picture of five guys with Afros and glued that over the dill pickle label. The lid with its slot cut into the top was taped with many rounds of masking tape to the glass. It looked like a mummy jar instead of a savings jar.
“How’d you make that slot?” I asked, and ran my finger along its two-inch opening.
“She didn’t slot it,” Fern said. “Papa did it.”
“Papa did that for you?”
“Yep,” she said. “I taped the lid to the jar so no one can steal the money.”
“Hope you washed out that jar real good with hot water and soap. Hope you washed away the dill-pickle smell.”
“Smelly dill pickles!” Fern said. She found that to be funny.
“I’m the saver, Delphine. Stop trying to be in charge,” Vonetta snapped. “I figured it out and we’re doing it my way.” She laid a sheet of paper next to her mummy jar. “Y
ou can’t just drop money into the Jackson Five at Madison Square Garden savings jar.”
“Surely can’t.”
“You have to deposit it like at the bank,” she said. “The Jackson Five concert is in December. That’s four months from now. So when Papa gives us our allowance, you write how much money you’re putting in by your name next to ‘week number one.’ Every week I, the saver, add up what we put in. Then I minus that from the twelve dollars. That’ll be our magic number. How much we’ll need for the concert.” Papa had promised to pay for the other half.
I couldn’t believe she had thought up all of that. Vonetta hated doing story problems in the third grade. She had even written Take some of Fern’s money as her answer to a homework question about not having enough money to buy two bags of popcorn.
It nearly choked me to say it, but I did. “That’s good, Vonetta.”
“See, Delphine. You’re not the only one good at being in charge.”
I was only glad Miss Hendrix wasn’t around to smile and say, “You see, Delphine. You were the oppressor. You tried to keep your sisters down.”
Grade Six
I put on my new jumper. The one Lucy had shoved in Big Ma’s hands. I felt ready for the sixth grade and couldn’t wait to be in Miss Honeywell’s class. She was the youngest, nicest teacher in the school and the best dresser. She assigned her class fun science, art, and history projects, and she wasn’t a yeller like the other sixth-grade teachers.
I walked Fern down to where the second graders lined up. Vonetta broke away from us and ran off the minute she spotted her friends from last year. I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t wait to be away from my sisters and among my classmates. Although Frieda Banks lived a few blocks around the way from us, off Atlantic Avenue, we joined hands and swung them like we hadn’t seen each other in ages. Then Lucy raced over, and so did Evelyn and Carmen and Monique and Rukia and the rest of the girls. The same old boys showed off trading cards and clowned around nearby. All except for Ellis Carter. Ellis was nowhere in sight, and I thought how lucky it would be if his family had moved to Queens or Staten Island.
I didn’t care about the boys in my class but was so happy to be surrounded by the girls. Most of us were still eleven while some had already turned twelve. All of us wore hairstyles slightly different from our fifth-grade ’dos. Except for Rukia Marshall, a Malcolm X muslim whose hair was always covered by a scarf thing. Evelyn’s and Monique’s jumpers were like mine but in different colors. Lucy said it was about time I wore good clothes, but she didn’t spill the beans that she had picked out my jumper two weeks ago. It was a sign that things were starting off right.
When the first bell rang, we formed two lines behind the cheese-gold “three” painted into the asphalt. Lucy, Frieda, and I couldn’t wait to see what outfit Miss Honeywell wore and how she styled her hair. But instead of Miss Honeywell, a short, dark-skinned man stood facing our lines. “Classroom three,” he said, “follow me, please.”
We murmured as we followed him inside the building, up the steps to the sixth graders’ floor, and into our new classroom. While we found seats, he wrote Mr. Mwila on the board, then pronounced it for us. Mwee-lah is how Miss Merriam Webster would have broken down his pronunciation. Mwee-lah. Although the letters of his name couldn’t be said without showing teeth, I got the feeling he didn’t mean to smile. Only to say his name.
“I am your new teacher,” he said. “Welcome to grade six, classroom three.”
There was some giggling because he didn’t say it the right way—welcome to the sixth grade, class six-three—but also because he spoke with two accents. One was probably an African accent, and the other was like the queen of England’s, but not like Ringo Starr’s or Mick Jagger’s.
Lucy spoke up for the rest of us. “Where’s Miss Honeywell?”
“Didn’t you hear?” Danny the K said. “She doing time, man.”
“I’m not a man,” Lucy said. “And she’s not hardly in prison.”
“Decorum, class,” Mr. Mwila said sternly.
Of course no one knew what he’d just said, but the sharpness of his tone got our attention. He didn’t answer Lucy’s question, but instead said, “Now, class three. You have two minutes to find your seat for the school year. Once I call ‘time,’ your seat will be your permanent seat.” He raised his watch, waited, and then said, “Class three, find your seats.”
The class went crazy with chairs scraping and kids running, colliding, and laughing. Any boy who was on the right side of the classroom got up and ran to the left side. Any girl who sat on the left side ran to the right. Boys pushed their neighbors out of whatever desks they chose while Mr. Mwila looked on at the whole spectacle, nodding to himself. Rukia found out Monique wasn’t her friend when Monique told her she couldn’t sit there. That seat was for Carmen. Rukia took the desk nearest to the front that no one wanted. I was already on the girls’ side of the room, so I stayed put. As long as Anthony, Ant, Danny the K, Enrique, the Jameses, the Michaels, Upton, and all of the other jokers were on the boys’ side, I was fine. The desk to my left remained untaken, but with Lucy in front of me and Frieda at my right, I breathed easily. I was safe.
Outside of three new faces, not a whole lot had changed since Mrs. Peterson’s class. It was as though someone had decided that we were family and couldn’t be separated. The only difference was that the head of the classroom wasn’t a woman in snappy, mod clothing but a short man in a dark suit who wasn’t from Brooklyn.
Mr. Mwila raised his hand, his palm side showing and fingers spread wide. “Time.”
It was at that moment that the classroom door opened and Ellis Carter walked in looking lost and happy and confused all at once. Lost after having wandered the hall. Happy to see his old boys from last year. Confused to see Mr. Mwila and not Miss Honeywell. His arms and legs seemed extra gangly and he loped around like he didn’t know what to do with the extra inches he had grown.
“Do you belong in grade six, classroom three?”
Ellis shrugged, but Mr. Mwila didn’t like that. “I don’t understand this,” Mr. Mwila said. He imitated Ellis’s shrug, but sharper. “Either you belong in grade six, classroom three, or you belong elsewhere.”
Ellis was a shrugger. He did it again. The boys laughed, thinking he was talking back, but with his body. “Here. I guess,” Ellis said meekly enough to save him from walking the paddle mile to Principal Myers’s office.
“Find a seat,” Mr. Mwila said.
Ellis circled around long-legged and doofy. We all laughed through sealed lips to keep from laughing full out.
The only desks available were on the girls’ side. Ellis probably thought if he circled around long enough, a seat would magically appear next to Danny the K or by one of the Jameses. He was out of luck on the boys’ side, so he turned toward the desk all the way in the back of the class, behind Yvonne. Ellis Carter knew what was best for him. He didn’t want to see the side of my face any more than I wanted to see the side of his squirrelly face from now until June. His jaw probably still stung every time he looked my way. He took a step to the back, but Mr. Mwila stopped him.
“Right here, young man,” Mr. Mwila told him in a voice that said Don’t test me. “The time for choice has passed. You’ll sit where I tell you to sit and you’ll be on time for the start of class.”
The boys broke out into, “Oh-ho, snaps!” Then Mr. Mwila shushed them without making a sound. Just a sharp eye and a finger to the lips.
“But . . . I don’t want to sit with these . . . girls.” Ellis looked like he was about to cry. He crunched himself down into the desk chair. One sneaker in each aisle.
Like it or not, I couldn’t look to my left, in the direction of the teacher’s desk, without seeing Ellis Carter.
The Subject Was Zambia
Usually the teacher played a name game on the first day of class, or she made name cards for our desks. Mr. Mwila placed a sheet on Rukia’s desk. He told her to write her name in the first row, fir
st column, then pass the sheet to the person behind her.
I waited for the sheet to reach my desk. There were only two male teachers in our entire elementary school, and none of us expected to have one until junior high school. I couldn’t see why we needed a male teacher. Male teachers were for classrooms with rough and rowdy boys who needed a firm hand to keep them in line. The boys in our class were bigger pests than they were rough and rowdy. Last year Mrs. Peterson kept them in line easily with her pine “board of education.” Mr. Mwila didn’t carry a pine board. There was something about his voice that made the boys in our class straighten up and sit taller. Except for Ellis Carter. The sloucher.
He looked to Lucy and said, “Miss . . .”
“Lucy Raleigh,” she said, happy to be called on.
He nodded. “Lucy Raleigh. You asked about Miss Honeywell. Now, I’ll answer. Have you heard of exchange students?”
“Yes,” Lucy answered. “When a student from here, the US, switches places with a student from another country.”
Mr. Mwila clapped his hands once. “I couldn’t have said it better.”
Lucy blew on her nails and dusted her collar.
“Your Miss Honeywell and I have switched places,” he said. “We’re exchange teachers. She’s in my country, Zambia, and I’m here with you.”
Sounds of amazement spread across the room. Miss Honeywell was in Zambia, sharing her fun projects with students who didn’t know how lucky they were. It wasn’t fair.
“It is only for a year,” he said. “I’m excited about this opportunity, but I’ll be glad to see my wife and children this time next year.” Then Mr. Mwila finally gave us a real smile as if he was embarrassed or had said more than he meant to.