M.C. Higgins, the Great

by Virginia Hamilton

  “Have to be awful big,” Ben said.

  “I’m smelling me a smell,” Jones said, staring at Ben.

  “Yessir,” Ben said softly. “M.C. caught him a skunk and I had to get it out of there. I went home and washed and changed.” Gray eyes on Jones. Frightened, innocent.

  M.C. watched, his hand tight on the knife. If Ben had to outrun Jones, M.C. knew he would throw the knife to wound. Ever so carefully, he shifted the knife and held the blade point between thumb and finger.

  But he’s your father.

  Not if he runs off Ben.

  Absently, Jones scratched at the mosquito bite on his arm. It had become infected and swollen. He squinted at Ben and a ripple of movement seemed to pass over him from head to foot. A shudder of revulsion that he could no more help than he could help picking at the mosquito bite. A moment hung over all of them in silence as Jones, in one great effort, seemed to pull himself together. He cupped his hand over the mosquito bite—it must have been hot with fever. He did not scratch it again.

  “Should of let M.C. take care of it. Skunk is worse than anything to handle,” Jones said evenly.

  “Yessir,” Ben said. “I take care of the traps for M.C. when he’s busy.”

  “For M.C.—and you didn’t mind the smell a-tall,” Jones spoke solemnly.

  “No sir, I didn’t mind it.”

  Jones ran his hand over his face once. He smoothed the toe of his shoe over the bare earth, wiping the packed dust clean. Without another word, he went inside the house.

  M.C. grinned at Ben. Ben grinned back.

  “Want to help?” M.C. said. Ben squatted next to him.

  “You’re going to break that knife—she give it to you?”

  “Left it for me before she went, I guess,” M.C. said.

  They studied the knife. The edge was not so sharp now.

  “I’m going to dull it good,” M.C. said.

  “We can fix it,” Ben told him. “Daddy has a grinding wheel at home, but better not use it anymore.”

  M.C. stood. His back was stiff, but he had no thought of quitting. He held the knife close to his eyes for a moment. Then he wiped it clean, leaving dirt streaks across the front of his shirt.

  “She didn’t say good-by to me either,” Ben said.

  The children were watching him. They had shied away in a close bunch as soon as he had come near.

  “Do I smell real bad?” Ben asked M.C., looking over at the children.

  “Not near as bad as this morning,” M.C. said. “Anyway, skunk is most like anything else in the woods. I never minded it.”

  “Me neither,” Ben said. They grinned again.

  M.C. took his shirttail and tenderly wrapped the knife. Carefully, he twisted it up until it stayed.

  Jones came out the back door, calling the children for lunch. They were glad to go. Each walked away, looking back at Ben and M.C. as they went.

  “I’ll eat later,” M.C. called to Jones. Jones said nothing, but held the door for the children.

  “They don’t much like having me around,” Ben said.

  “They’ll get use to you. Now,” M.C. said. He looked at the shovel and bent down to touch the blade. He tested out the shovel, pushing it down into the earth with his foot the way Jones had. He brought up a good-sized pile of stone and soil and heaped it on the mound. Ben moved quickly to shape it.

  “Might as well put in the branches and stuff Daddy brought,” M.C. said. Heaving the shovel again, he dug and Ben molded and they built.

  The lonesome talking inside M.C. quieted down. He no longer had to listen to it every minute, as the memory of Lurhetta’s voice became less clear. Her knife was not forgotten. Safe next to his skin, it still had an edge that could cut deep; but it was not as keen as it once had been.

  The children soon joined M.C. and Ben again. Never ones to shy away for long, they came closer and closer. Soon Ben’s red hair and his pale, freckled skin seemed not so strange. Even his hands looked almost ordinary. They thought to help by dragging car parts from the wrecks around the pole. And where they struggled, Jones came later to stand a moment before going off on his search for work.

  Jones shifted his weight from one foot to the other, as though he wished to be on his way, but he couldn’t yet leave for some reason. That look of closed stubbornness seemed to melt from his face as he glanced over where M.C.’s back was bent to his task. For an instant his eyes were full of pride. Then he stood utterly still; that mask of closed aloneness fell into place again.

  Jones went over and crawled under the porch. The children stopped their work to stare.

  “Daddy, what are you doing?” Macie asked.

  No reply. The question and the silence that followed caused M.C. to turn. He paused to watch. He could see only Jones’s ankles. After some time Jones slid out again, dragging something. His hair was full of dust. On his knees, he brushed dust from his trousers and from his face. On his feet again, he strained under the weight of the thing he carried, lurching over to M.C. And there he lay it on the mound of dirt.

  “Just one,” Jones said, breathing hard. “That’s all I can give you today.” He turned and walked through the children, around the pole and on down the side of Sarah’s.

  The children came near. No one spoke as M.C. ran his hand over the stone slab. It had markings on it.

  “A gravestone?” Ben asked.

  “Yes. He didn’t have to do that,” M.C. said, in the faintest voice, “but I’m glad he did.”

  “Let me see it,” Harper said.

  “See it,” M.C. said. “It’s Great-grandmother Sarah’s.” The markings were worn but the name was still readable.

  “Why did your father bring it?” Ben wanted to know.

  “Because,” M.C. said. He thought a long moment, smoothing his hand over the stone. Finally he smiled. “To make the wall strong.”

  They all went back to work when M.C. started digging a place for the stone. He made a rectangle large enough and Ben fitted the stone in. M.C. shoveled dirt over it and all of them helped Ben pack it in.

  Sarah, good-by.

  All of this time, the day stayed gray. Sarah’s was gray. But as the afternoon wore on, the mist rose into gathering clouds from mountain to river. They hung low, crowding above the high steel of M.C.’s pole.

  M.C. never looked up, but he sensed the clouds massing. He knew his work was urgent.

  Lurhetta, good-by.

  Good-by, M.C., the Great.

  There began to take shape a long, firm kind of mound. The children fed it. M.C. shoveled and Ben packed it. In the immense quiet of Sarah’s Mountain late in the day, they formed a wall. And it was rising.

  A Biography of Virginia Hamilton

  Virginia Hamilton (1934–2002) was the author of forty-one books for young readers and their older allies, including M.C. Higgins, the Great, which won the National Book Award, the Newbery Medal, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, three of the most prestigious awards in youth literature. Hamilton’s many successful titles earned her numerous other awards, including the international Hans Christian Andersen Award, which honors authors who have made exceptional contributions to children’s literature, the Coretta Scott King Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship, or “Genius Award.”

  Virginia Esther Hamilton was born in 1934 outside the college town of Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was the youngest of five children born to Kenneth James and Etta Belle Perry Hamilton. Her grandfather on her mother’s side, a man named Levi Perry, had been brought to the area as an infant probably through the Underground Railroad shortly before the Civil War. Hamilton grew up amid a large extended family in picturesque farmlands and forests. She loved her home and would end up spending much of her adult life in the area.

  Hamilton excelled as a student and graduated at the top of her high school class, winning a full scholarship to Antioch College in Yellow Springs. Hamilton transferred to Ohio State University in nearby Columbus, Ohio, in order to study literature and creative writing.
In 1958, she moved to New York City in hopes of publishing her fiction. During her early years in New York, she supported herself with jobs as an accountant, a museum receptionist, and even a nightclub singer. She took additional writing courses at the New School for Social Research and continued to meet other writers, including the poet Arnold Adoff, whom she married in 1960. The couple had two children, daughter Leigh in 1963 and son Jaime in 1967. In 1969, the family moved to Yellow Springs and built a new home on the old Perry-Hamilton farm. Here, Virginia and Arnold were ableto devote more time to writing books.

  Hamilton’s first published novel, Zeely, was published in 1967. Zeely was an instant success,winning a Nancy Bloch Award and earning recognition as an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book. After returning to Yellow Springs with her young family, Hamilton began to write and publish a book nearly every year. Though most of her writing targeted young adults or children, she experimented in a wide range of styles and genres. Her second book, The House of Dies Drear (1968), is a haunting mystery that won the Edgar Allan Poe Award. The Planet of Junior Brown (1971) and Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982) rely on elements of fantasy and science fiction. Many of her titles focus on the importance of family, including M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974) and Cousins (1990). Much of Hamilton’s work explores African American history, such as herfictionalized account Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave (1988).

  Hamilton passed away in 2002 after a long battle with breast cancer. She is survived by her husband Arnold Adoff and their two children.

  For further information, please visit Hamilton’s updated and comprehensive website: www.virginiahamilton.com

  A twelve-year-old Hamilton in 1948, when she was in the seventh grade.

  Hamilton at a New York City club while she was a student at Antioch College in the mid-1950s. She often performed as a folk and jazz vocalist in clubs and larger venues.

  Hamilton with her brothers, Buster and Bill, and sisters, Barbara and Nina, around 1954.

  Hamilton’s head shots. The first was taken while she was a teenager in the early 1950s. The second was taken in her New York City apartment in the late 1960s, before she and Adoff built their house in Yellow Springs.

  Hamilton outside of her first New York City apartment, which she shared with Adoff, around 1960. The couplemoved to a below-street-level single room on Jane Street and, Adoff says, “thought we were such hot stuff, living in the Village and taking our places in that wonderful and long line of writers banging their heads against the wall…but in style.”

  Adoff and Hamilton in Gibraltar in 1960, after a hard day of shopping and climbing the rock seen in the photo. As Adoff recalls, “This was the first time I convinced Virginia to sell everything but the books and leave America forever. It was also our delayed honeymoon. We made our way from Bremen to Paris to Málaga to a residency in Torremolinos, Spain, where we worked on our manuscripts and took side trips. This was one of them.”

  Taken in 1965 in Argelès-plage, France, this photo shows the building where Hamilton and Adoff rented an apartment during what Adoff calls their “second time leaving America forever…”

  Hamilton, Jaime, and Leigh at a reception at the Yellow Springs Public Library in 1975 after she received the Newbery Medal.

  Hamilton at the publication party for Jaguarundi. She attended hundreds of conferences and book signings at schools and libraries around the country as each of her books was published.

  Hamilton, Adoff, Leigh, and Jaime at Leigh’s wedding in Berlin in 2001.

  Hamilton on Thanks giving in 2001. This photo was taken by her niece, Nina Rios, a professional photographer, after Hamilton’s last round of chemotherapy, only a few months before her death.

  All photos © 2011 by the Arnold Adoff Revocable Living Trust. Used by permission. Portrait courtesy of Jimmy Byrge.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1974 by Virginia Hamilton

  cover design by Georgia Morrissey

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-1388-9

  This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com