The Third Life of Grange Copeland

  The school had three rooms One room on the end near the well was for the first, second and third grades. The middle room was for the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh grades, and the one on the other end was for the rest of the grades, including the twelfth. The building was raised off the ground on a foundation of cement blocks and underneath was a cellar of sorts where some of the older boys took some of the older girls. There were tall steps at each end of the building as if the schoolrooms formed a second story. Ruth climbed the steps to the platform-porch which led to the middle room with a mixture of anticipation and dread. She was in the sixth grade and her classroom contained classes four through seven. Her teacher was Mrs. Grayson. Mrs. Grayson would also be her teacher for another year until she passed into the room next door and to a teacher named Mrs. Little. Mrs. Grayson was a handsome, dark brown woman with meticulously manicured nails, and processed hair. She was in the habit of wearing everything gray, and of straightening the seams of her Red Foxx stockings with a spit-daubed finger when she thought no one was looking.

  The first subject for the four classes was Health, and Mrs. Grayson walked from one group of desks to another lecturing about the care of "our clean minds and bodies." The next subject was Citizenship, and Mrs. Grayson lectured back and forth about the importance of having "forthright patriotic minds for use in service to your country." By ten o'clock, above the bored humming of the other three classes, she was talking about the importance of studying history. History, Mrs. Grayson said loudly and with great precision and straining of her vocal cords, taught you what had gone on in the world. Eli Whitney, the cotton gin, Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, George Washington and the Minutemen. American History was more important than any other kind, she said. And why was that? she asked. Then she answered herself: "Because it is the history of you and I, the proud history of a free people! We have fought to remain free," she shouted, her shrill voice reverberating off the pasteboard walls. "Our history teaches us what has been done for us, as Negroes, and what we have done for ourselves." Pearl Harbor, she said, rhetorically, and the Civil War. History, she beamed, struggling to rise above the noise in her room and the noise from the rooms on each side of her, tells us where we are and shows us how we got there and how important history is to the total enlightenment of the world!

  She had to leave from in front of their class for a few minutes because someone in the fourth grade raised his hand from the back of the room and said he couldn't hear what she had said. Ruth heard her, like a recording, ask the small boy personally, "Why is it important to study history?" The boy said sullenly, "I don't know." Then Mrs. Grayson said, clapping her hands in time to her words, "Because history lets you know what has gone on in the world!" The boy said, "Oh, yes, ma'am." And Mrs. Grayson was called across the room to someone in the fifth grade who asked wasn't it also true that George Washington was the father of our country. When last Ruth listened Mrs. Grayson was congratulating the child for having already read this from his new history book.

  To Ruth, Mrs. Grayson never made sense. She mouthed all the words in the textbooks but they did not come out coherently as they appeared on the page. When she interpreted a paragraph to the class you could never tell how any of it fit together. Between the few words you were able to catch over the noise and Mrs. Grayson's own abstraction there was little that could be gleaned and put to use. However, having had Mrs Grayson the year before, Ruth feared her for her ability to keep track of who was shutting her out. She could pounce on an unsuspecting dreamer the minute his mind strayed. And then it was a beating or you were sent to the principal for discipline. The principal always sent you home for a week, usually without looking up from his desk or without interrupting a pupil's recitation in his classes.

  As she always did when Mrs. Grayson turned her back for a minute, Ruth put on a look of concentration and fiddled intently with the books on her desk. This was her cover while she began to dream. Today she looked at the new world history book the classes had been given that morning. The new book was the main cause of Mrs. Grayson's history lecture. Before they got it from the white school they hadn't had a history book. Only a speller, a geography and a reader. Ruth had read these months before and could recite every one of them by heart because she had read them so many times. Now she looked through the new book, at the pictures, some in color but most in black and white, and at the worn brown cover which had a pretty city scene on it with blond round-eyed children crossing a street under a bridge and across from a towered clock. In small lettering to one side was written "London." But then she opened the cover, not the pages of the book, but the cover, before the pages began. On the right-hand side of the book there was another girl's name, Jacqueline Paine, and under her name was written, Baker County Elementary School, the name of the white school. All their books came from there so this did not surprise her. But then she looked down at the rest of the page and gasped. For on this page and across the entire front inside covering of the book was a huge spread drawing called at the top in big green letters, "The Tree of the Family of Man." And on this tree there were all kinds of people. At the top, in pale blue and yellow, there were the white people. Their picture showed them doing something with test tubes, the lettering on one of their jackets said "Scientist." Behind them were drawings of huge tall buildings and cars and trains and airplanes. Jacqueline Paine had written underneath their picture: Note: Americans, Germans, People who live in the extreme Northern part of Europe. In parentheses she had written (England). Below the "Americans" were people drawn in yellow, and they were wearing funny little straw hats and were driving huge water buffalo. Behind them were a lot of pretty small objects made of jade and bamboo. Under their picture Jacqueline Paine had written in her round script: Note: The Yellow Race. Chinese, Japanese, etc., and people who live far away from us, in the Far East. Beneath them was a drawing in red of American Indians. They were sitting placidly, one old man smoking a long feather-covered pipe. Some women were sitting next to him making beautiful rugs and pottery and baskets. Underneath their picture Jacqueline Paine had written: Note: Our own American Indians. We saved from disease and wild primitive life. Taught them useful activities as pictured above. They have also been known to make beads. But it was the last picture she saw on the page that made her gasp. For at the very bottom of the tree, not actually joined to it but emanating from a kind of rootless branch, there was the drawing of a man, in black, with fuzzy hair, fat grinning lips, and a bone sticking through his nose. He was wearing a grass skirt and standing over a pot of boiling water as if he expected, at any moment, a visiting missionary. Underneath his picture Jacqueline Paine, in her neat note-taking script, had written just one descriptive word. She did not even say whether he had made his own grass skirt. It leaped out at Ruth like a slap in the face. Note: A nigger.

  When she could pull herself out of her daze, dreaming no longer, she knew something was wrong. All the children from all the classes around her were looking at her. Looking at her and snickering. Before her eyes they turned into ugly grinning savages and she gave them her most disdainful scowl. But then she looked up just in time to see the strap coming down across her shoulders. It came down again and again and the snickering was quieted by the strap's thick whistling. They knew what it felt like. Slowly, in a rage, Ruth stood up, flinging the book to the floor. Mrs. Grayson's voice sounded hysterically in her ears. "You're just like the rest of them," she shouted. "You'll never be anybody because you don't pay any attention to anything worthwhile!" Ruth walked slowly toward the front of the room. "Where do you think you're going?" yelled Mrs. Grayson, picking up the history book and dusting it off. "All people like you do is tear up other people's property! You come right back here and sit down!" But Ruth's hand was already on the door. She turned to see Mrs. Grayson advancing with the strap; over her shoulder the delicious excitement of her classmates rose so thick it could be tasted. A pure and simple lust for diversion. A pure and simple lust for blood. Her blood. "Y
ou goddam mean evil stupid motherfucker!" Ruth hurled at her from her huge stock of Grange-inherited words. Mrs. Grayson and the classes stopped together and took a long indignant breath. "What did you say, young lady?" Mrs. Grayson finally demanded, advancing more menacingly than before. "You heard me," Ruth said, trembling. "And if you touch me just one more damn time, my granddaddy and me will pull this piece of junk right down on your head and cram planks and bricks down your lying dumb motherfucking throat!" Quickly she pulled open the door and fled down the steps. It was not until she reached the woods that she began to cry, the tears hurting her so much she thought she'd never survive them. "Was this what Grange meant?" she asked herself over and over, wishing she were dead.

  The summers offered her shelter. From May until October she was free. Free to play in the cabin they built far back in the woods, free to read comics and books Grange cunningly stole from the white library; and for confusion, she was free to read the Bibles "wherefore, hereat, thereto--lo, lo, lo!" The winters were cold and cruel, and although she loved learning she hated school. When she had lived with Mem it had not been bad at all. It had even been fun. She and Ornette and Daphne had walked to school together, laughing and gossiping, sometimes throwing sand at the white school buses that passed them. But now her mother was dead and her father was in prison. Where exactly "in the North" her sisters were remained a mystery. She could not imagine the North except as an enormous cold place full of buildings and people where birds had no place to move their bowels. This picture she got from Grange who said you could take the North and make the Southerners eat it without sauce for all he cared.

  As painful as it was to her to have to admit it, she was considered a curiosity after her mother's death and though all the children at the school were poor she was considered the poorest because her father was a murderer and she had no mother. Mothers, she learned very soon, were a premium commodity among her classmates, many of whom had never known a father and if they had could no longer even remember him. She got no consideration either for living with her grandfather, who was believed to be a strange, "funny" old man. Good at cards he was, the children admitted, but too quiet to be trusted, they said. Had anybody ever heard Grange Copeland laugh at one of their fathers' jokes? they asked. Nobody had, except Ruth, and her classmates did not admire her for it. At times she was sorry she giggled in church with Grange, the community being such a pious, scorekeeping one. Snubbed and teased she was from the month she went to live with Grange, and it became almost like a game. Children would be playing "Sally Go Round the Sunshine" or "Hey, Miss Liza Jane" and she had only to show her composed melancholy face for all merriment to cease and a harsh silence to fall. There was a rumor going around the school when she was eleven that if she ever got anybody to walk with her in the woods (she was often seen walking in the woods and talking to bushes and that was certainly odd) he would never be seen alive again. They said she had a gun that she kept hidden in the woods and that she used to shoot people's heads off so she wouldn't have to see their eyes. Eyes, they said, reminded her of her mother. Ruth knew, when she overheard this rumor, that whoever started it must have been at Mem's funeral and seen the botched up job of the undertaker. But what could she say? Her only delightful times were when new children who didn't know the story came to the school or when she discovered by accident old ones who had either missed the gossip or not been able to attend the funeral. She was not the only one gossiped about. Josie came in for heavy slander too, as did everyone in the family. By the time she was in the fourth grade Ruth had begun to walk with her head down; she brought it up gradually during the fifth grade, and by the time she reached the sixth grade it was said of her that she didn't even know she had a head, it was stuck so far up in the clouds.

  As she grew older, she was even more ostracized and neglected. By the time she was thirteen everybody knew she was the daughter of a murderer (and it was not just that he was a murderer that they minded--many of their own relatives had killed--but for a father to kill a mother was a thought that shook them) and although the overt harassment had gone--nobody taunted her any more--the tension remained. Then her father was released from prison, and was seen in town. The same week he was released Josie left the house she shared with Ruth and Grange and went to live with him. A fresh wave of gossip and ridicule swept through the school. Before they had teased her and shunned her for being the daughter of a murderer, now they taunted her for being the "wife" of her grandfather, who was so different from their own palsied and placid progenitors. The day after Josie left she must have done a lot of blabbing in curious ears, for the rumor was that Grange preferred his granddaughter to his wife and so she had left the two of them to the uninterrupted enjoyment of each other, Josie made their cabin, which Grange had built only as a playhouse for Ruth, sound indecent. She just had no idea what really went on down there between them, Josie was heard to say. Her classmates shied away from Ruth more obviously than ever, in a derisive, suspicious way.

  Rossel Pascal was the only person at school she liked, and Rossel had never spoken to her. A brooding, beautiful girl with satiny skin and dark curly hair, Rossel was the only child of an alcoholic father. He never recovered from his wife's death, people said, and, unfortunately, they also whispered, his wife had not been worth such bother. The teachers regarded Rossel with a distinct chilliness, which aroused Ruth's fury and compassion, though Rossel herself never seemed to notice.

  Rossel was in the twelfth grade when Ruth learned she planned to marry Walt Terrell. Walt was the richest black man in the county. He had returned a hero from World War II, with the remains of bullets in his legs and a chest full of carefully polished medals which he wore, at the drop of a hat, on any auspicious occasion, and even to Sunday School barbecues. The school was named after him, as it stood on his property, and everybody respected him. The schoolteachers fawned on him. Still, he was old, as old as her father, Ruth thought. Why would Rossel, who was no more than sixteen, marry him?

  At the graduation ceremonies Ruth watched as Rossel stood beside her future husband. Rossel's father stood close by, pale and abstracted, clearly not sober. Other people walked about and spoke, but he seemed to drift, like a chip, through the bright stream of Sunday dresses and children's voices. When his daughter's name was called his eyes brightened for a moment. Sitting beside Walt, who towered over him with his thick head and great shoulders, in that instant Rossel's father came alive. When Rossel sat down again with them she looked as if she might like to fling herself into her father's arms. Father and daughter gazed at each other with eyes like closing doors.

  "Rossel," Ruth said impulsively, as they walked carefully down the high school steps, "can I talk to you?"

  "Sure you can," said Rossel, deliberately careless and cool.

  They walked away from the men as if disengaging themselves from a battalion of soldiers. Ruth looked behind her and saw Grange holding forth with some of the men. Whenever she walked away from him and looked at him like a stranger he seemed grotesque, his long frame gangly, his hair bushy in a style that went out with Frederick Douglass, his hands doing a wild emphatic dance in the air between him and whomever he spoke to.

  "You're Mrs. Grange," Rossel said, and immediately Ruth felt an unbearable hurt, as if she had taken her cares to the Lord and he had asked if she was bringing his laundry. Rossel was smiling brightly, as if at her own drawl, which was an amusing one. Ruth herself spoke without an accent, at least she thought she spoke without one, even though she'd heard nobody talk in real life but Southerners. She did not know why she didn't sound more like them. It was true her mind tended to blot out or change to something fine and imaginative whatever Southerners said. That included everybody, except Grange, whose speech she found colorful and strong. But Rossel spoke just like a Southern white woman, with the same careless softness. And on her too the accent sounded charming and dumb. When the other children called her "Mrs. Grange," Ruth got angry, but with Rossel she felt only hurt.

  "My
name's Ruth," she said.

  "I know," said Rossel.

  They stood under some trees at the edge of the schoolyard. Behind them was the girls' outhouse, at the far side of the yard was the well. Several small children were waiting their turn for the dipper that was being passed around. A bigger boy stood by patiently, his hand holding the rope that held the big wooden bucket from which droplets of water fell and spattered on the ground.

  "By the time you're old as me," said Rossel, "you won't have to drink water from that dirty old well. You all can throw away that mossy bucket and that slithery communal dipper! That's gonna be progress--an' just a scant fifteen years behind the white folks."

  Ruth did not know what to say. She hated drinking from the dipper too, but hadn't heard anybody say one day they wouldn't have to. Rossel's face was grim as she looked out toward the highway. Cars full of white people passed by without slowing down. There was no sign indicating that a school was near, and children who had to cross the highway did so at a run. A boy had been killed trying to get across the road, and the state of Georgia had put up a white wooden cross as a "death" marker for motorists, but had not thought to put up a warning sign.

  Rossel was plainly bored; she looked questioningly at Ruth. It took all Ruth's courage to ask her what she had drawn her aside to ask.

  "Why you going to marry him?" she managed to blurt out finally.

  "Why not?" Rossel asked indifferently. "I'd rather marry the devil than get stuck with any of the stinking jobs they give you round this town."

  "Jobs?" asked Ruth. Her idea of marriage romantically included love. But she tried to imagine Rossel as a short-order cook in a hash house. Rossel was too lovely. She tried to see her as some woman's maid. Rossel was too close to needing a maid herself. Rossel was not meant to be among the wretched of the earth, and Rossel apparently knew it.