Finding My Thunder

by Diane Munier

  Mrs. Spencer laid the chalk on the ledge and turned slowly toward the class.

  She lifted her chin. “Danny has gone off to fight for his country. Shame on you for speaking about him that way.”

  I looked around a bit and my eyes landed on the boy who’d made the comment about the jocks. I didn’t know him but he looked like Abby Hoffman with the white guy fro hair. Definitely a reader or someone who could spout a speech on the evils of the establishment.

  Maybe he’d been near me when they’d pushed me after assembly. Maybe he’d been one of the kids who’d also dropped books. But his arm was up, his long bony hand in the air. “Mrs. Spencer,” he said in a voice that demanded her attention.

  “Yes,” she said leaning against the board.

  “Are we going to learn the chemical properties of LSD in this class?”

  She was blinking and staring.

  Everyone broke into laughter then, and Mrs. Spencer looked ready to cry. She ended up throwing her eraser and screaming for us to quiet down.

  Maybe there was hope for us yet. Rebellion was in the air. You could smell it along with the other smells, the bad lunches and the cleaners and the nervous sweat, too many perfumes that didn’t mix, all combining to make up the smell of boredom and rage.

  At lunch I ran to my locker to switch out books even though it was past time for doing this. Tahlila and Lauren were mid-way down the short aisle, also at their lockers. I hurried and threw books in, took others out. I was bent over and someone shoved me from behind and my head crashed into my open locker door. They were laughing when I stood and rubbed my head. Before I could stop myself I said, “Bitches.”

  It’s like the world stopped then. One of them, a big girl, Ronnie, came back toward me. “You call me that?”

  We were all yelled at then by one of the teachers. We needed to get out of the area. The time for visiting lockers was over five minutes before and we were in violation….

  They went to the lunchroom, moving in a pack, Ronnie flipping me off and mouthing, “later.”

  I almost laughed. Then I did something…I don’t know where it came from. I marched up to her and said, “I don’t do violence. I don’t pick on people because I can. You got something to say to me about ‘later?’”

  She wasn’t prepared for me speaking to her. I was supposed to look terrorized and scurry off, I guessed.

  “Get away from me blackie,” she said and someone laughed.

  “Keep your hands to yourself,” I said and I looked at them all.

  They laughed then, a couple of them moving off, Tahlila turning away and Lauren. Ronnie looked after them and followed. But she turned back to me, confident. “Little black Sambo,” she said. They guffawed at that.

  I stared after her for a minute, and they walked off casually, still laughing.

  Then I went to the art room and watched out the window. My heart was racing. I heard Naomi again, about the immorality of receiving poor treatment from the hands of the oppressor. She would quote from the bible and reason, You do all you can, then you stand.

  I wanted to stand. In my boots. I laughed to think they were made for walking, like the dumb song Nancy Sinatra sang that got in you if you listened. But I’d never had a voice with those girls…in their midst. They were older this year. We were older. Was there conscience in there? Black Sambo? I supposed this came from living with Naomi. I couldn’t allow her to suffer for taking me in. I had to stop this here…at the school. And if I couldn’t….

  They had my bag. It made me furious.

  I tried to think of what Danny was doing, and if he thought my love note was stupid or weird…or if he got it, if he’d put it somewhere and when he needed to feel something of home…or me…the time we’d shared, the words…it would stand for that, like a presence. I remembered how it felt just yesterday to put my arms around him. I could do anything, work out any problem. I wasn’t going to let them take that from me today. Or ever.

  When I went to my locker after lunch it was dumped there, my bag from the airport. My locker door was open and over everything…my stuff. All of it was damaged—my book torn, my money ripped to shreds, lotion, lid-off, empty, candy bar just a wrapper, clean T-shirt ripped cause I’d brought it just in case, toothbrush snapped in half, transistor radio crushed. Of course they took the battery. Stupid stuff. The bag itself had been ripped through with scissors. This bag had been Mama’s.

  “Who did this?” I jumped a little when I looked behind and Mrs. Spencer stood there.

  “I…don’t know,” I said. I knew it would be futile to accuse them.

  “You need to report this in the office,” she said.

  I didn’t answer, just kept cleaning.

  “Are…you friends with Danny?” she asked and my weird-o-meter went off. He’d said he’d been hit on by teachers.

  “Yes,” I mumbled.

  “I thought Tahlila and him…I thought they were…getting…married?” she said.

  I looked up at her. Way too much interest in her face. When I didn’t answer but just stared she seemed to get a little jumpy. “Well, clean it up,” she said, as if I wasn’t. Then she walked away.

  “Holy…cow,” I whispered. I gathered the pieces of money together in a pile and put those in my purse. People climbed over me to get to their lockers. I heard laughing. But several asked me what happened. I just kept my head down and kept cleaning it up and said, “Someone shredded everything in my bag.” A couple of them asked who and I said, “I can’t say.”

  When I was finished I took it to the trashcan in the hall and dumped it in there. I heard laughing again. “Look kind of natural dumping that trash there,” Ronnie said and others laughed.

  I went to the restroom and asked a girl to get off the sink so I could wash my hands. She was a lower classman so she slowly slid off and I washed and thought of how that bag looked in the trash, and a day when it was on Mama’s arm, a good day when we’d walked to the square, and she swung it back and forth sometimes and we were playing the movie star game we’d made up where I gave her three clues and she had to guess the movie star….the bell rang and I gathered my stuff and went back out.

  I walked swiftly to my next class, Advanced English. I had never had a class with Tahlila in my entire school experience and now I had two. Ronnie, who was my own age, was also in there and she sat behind Tahlila.

  I had a couple of girls come up to me before class started and express anger at what happened to me at my locker. They were seniors, but outcasts like me. They’d gone hippie over the summer looked like. “That’s bullshit,” one of them, Hannah, said loudly slamming her books on her desk. Hannah had developed early, got these huge boobs in eighth grade and she had suffered for it. I’d heard the ridicule in the lunchroom or at assemblies. She learned to walk fast, wear big tops and keep her books over her chest when possible.

  But something had happened to her, and she wore a peasant blouse and a denim skirt, and when she bent over you could see cleavage and she didn’t seem to care at all.

  “Someone needs to take those bitches down,” she said and her friend laughed like that was the best idea she’d ever heard.

  “Shut up,” Ronnie said, but Tahlila kept her eyes straight as if she had no idea who they were talking about.

  This was practically insurrection. I had never heard the jocks spoken against before today in two separate classes. The teacher entered and caught the tail end of it and asked what was going on. Hippie girl Hannah said, “Someone ruined everything in Hilly Grunier’s purse and dumped it all over her locker and on the floor cause in this school only a handful of people have all the rights and they do whatever the eff….they want.”

  “You will watch your language in this class young lady,” Mr. Tremont said. He was around forty and was so pale it was said he had leukemia. He did usually disappear from the classroom sometime in the year for mysterious absences. He usually sat during class and taught grand things like he didn’t even remember we were in the room
. I’d had him for English Two last year.

  We were all quiet then. As I looked around, with the exception of Tahlila and Ronnie, there weren’t any of their followers. There were probably a few who would do anything to be noticed by them, but they had not emerged in the conversation Hannah had opened up.

  Mr. Tremont was going through notebooks seeming to be searching for something. I thought he’d let the subject drop but he finally said, “And Hillary Grunier, that is you back there is it not?”

  Everyone looked at me. Hannah nodded at me like I needed encouragement to speak up. “Yes.”

  “Stand up,” he said.

  I stood.

  “You were the source of trouble in another classroom this morning?”

  Teacher’s lounge. They told each other everything. I had never had a platform before. I didn’t want to blow it. “No, I didn’t cause it,” I said and I could feel Hannah’s interest.

  “I suggest you remember you are here to learn and leave all the drama at home where it belongs,” he said, wiping over his mouth with a burgundy silk handkerchief.

  Hannah was squirming and I could feel her getting ready to respond.

  “Mr. Tremont,” I said, “I’m not responsible for the actions of others when I have done nothing to provoke those actions. I’m here to get an education, not to be asked…if I still have my cherry, not to be called black Sambo, not to be pushed and shoved, and not to have the private contents of my “stolen” purse ruined and dumped all over my locker.”

  “Right on!” Hannah yelled followed by furious clapping. Her friend, Penny, also got involved and clapped with her. A couple of the quieter boys turned and grinned hugely at me. I wished white Abbie-fro was in there, but he wasn’t.

  “That’s the kind of crap we have at this school,” Hannah said. “I had my ass grabbed in the lunch line,” then to Ronnie she said, “by your Neanderthal jock-ass boyfriend. I puked by the way,” then back to the teacher, “I’m sick of this dump. Power to the people,” she said.

  “Get out,” Mr. Tremont said pulling onto his feet. His two hands were splayed against his desk. “Get to the office and tell them you used profanity in my classroom even though you’d been warned,” he said.

  “Happily!” she yelled. “Hope I get some extra credit!” Then she stopped at Ronnie’s desk, “You and your bitches did that to her purse. I swear you’ll get yours.”

  Ronnie stood, “Get away from me you whore.”

  Mr. Tremont got in between them and yelled for Hannah to get out.

  “She just called me a whore,” she said, her voice rising high with incredulity. “I’m not going unless she has to go with me.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” Ronnie scoffed.

  “Silence,” Mr. Tremont said. “You will go to the office at once, Hannah, or I will send for security and they will escort you down,” Tremont said.

  It was a stare off for a bit.

  Slowly Hannah slid down the wall beside Ronnie’s desk. From a seated position she said. “Send for them then. I’m staging a sit-in to protest the injustice in this school. If there’s a law it should be for everyone or it’s imperialism.”

  Penny quickly moved across the room and sat beside Hannah. I was next, but I heard a couple of others getting out of their desks.

  Mr. Tremont tried screaming at everyone to get back. He succeeded in chasing one of the girls to her desk before she could get very far. Then he told the same girl to go for Principal Brown and the girl said, “No sir.”

  Flustered, he had to grab one of the boys, tiny Tim Felan who had never really developed and Tremont practically threw him toward the door and said, “Get Brown and tell him to bring security.”

  And that’s how power to the people at Ludicrous High was born.

  Finding My Thunder 36

  The sit-in lasted until the bell rang for next class. In the meantime we sitters articulated our concerns over the unequal treatment of the students of Ludicrous High. Hannah was the most vocal. She was dating a college guy and that was the difference in her. She had attended various sit-ins over the summer and also engaged in lots of free sex and drug use, but that was secondary to her new understanding of the political, social and moral struggle people were experiencing all around us. She was eighteen and had been arrested in Memphis even. She was the immediate and natural leader.

  So when Principal Boxer came with one of the coaches acting as the security Tremont threatened us with, Hannah ended up speaking heatedly to these two from the floor, a dozen of us lined out alongside of her.

  “The class distinction in place in this school had to change,” she said.

  The principal reiterated his speech from assembly.

  Ronnie piped up and said, “I’m proud to be American and I didn’t come to school to be held against my will so a bunch of Communists could spew their hatred.”

  “Narc,” Penny coughed into her hand and everyone laughed.

  Tahlila silently cried and Principal Boxer patted her back right over the back of her bra.

  “Coppin’ a feel,” Penny coughed this time, and we got to laughing so hard we couldn’t control ourselves. Penny lay over on her side and just let go. We got very loud then.

  Principal Brown let Tahlila and Ronnie leave the room early.

  That made us laugh even more.

  Principal Brown demanded silence at once.

  He said he was separating us from some of our class leaders to protect us from one another.

  Hannah said he was protecting them and thereby empowering them to continue their persecution, racism, intolerance for anyone different, exploitation of the less fortunate, the more intelligent, and the individualistic, artistic, deep thinking masses they oppressed. Furthermore, he was a part of the oppressive system, he was the establishment the revolution was out to transform. She finished this with, “Power to the People, baby.”

  I was in awe and Principal Brown looked flummoxed.

  Shortly after that the bell rang and our sit-in was over. Everyone needed to pee after all that laughing. My head ached from where it had hit the locker and my elbow was killing me from first period, and I’d lost some personal property and had degrading comments made to me, but all-in-all it was turning in to a great day.

  On the walk home I was deep in my thoughts. My life had gotten so different from what I’d imagined it would be. I wondered what the future held but I wasn’t dreading it so much.

  Hannah and Penny along with Beuford made my school days fly. The girls were seniors though so that meant I didn’t see them as often as I’d like to. But in Mr. Tremont’s class Hannah kept us thoroughly entertained and informed and Ronnie had to keep her mouth shut or be shown up for the idiot she was.

  “Try reading something other than “True Confessions Magazine,” dimwit,” Hannah had said after Ronnie shared her life goal with the class of working with retarded children but only if they were little girls in pretty dresses.

  Of course Hannah had more to say, “You’re the retarded girl in the dress…and it ain’t pretty.” It was, however, Ronnie’s cheerleading uniform, the garment of the high priestesses of the school. But we were almost falling out of our desks laughing.

  I wished I could smoke again. Hannah and Penny smoked…everything, but also cigarettes. They were very free sexually as well. Hannah had an open relationship with her boyfriend and not the usual kind where he cheated and she sat home and cried, but one where if she wasn’t with him, or occasionally when she was, she was with another guy. “Love,” she explained to me and Penny while they were smoking and I was trying to get a whiff, “can’t be boxed…or contained.” I’d heard this before…like everywhere…and from Robert. “Our parents show us the repressive behavior of trying to spend their lives with just one person. Look how miserable they are. It never, ever works. It’s not natural and it breeds jealousy and betrayal and lying because we’re meant to love a lot of people. It’s built in. It goes all the way back to evolution and survival.�
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  She was very curious about my life. Everything that made me a reject with Tahlila’s crowd gave me a high pedigree with Hannah. I was part black, check. I lived with my black grandmother, check. She did good works in Snyder Town, check. I attended an all black church, double check. I was despised by the jocks, double check. I had suffered oppression and unlawful treatment by the jocks, triple check. My father had disowned me, cheated me out of my inheritance, and moved in a new family, quadruple check.

  Hannah’s life work was to ferret out injustice. In the bible, there is a powerful woman judge named Deborah. Deborah judges the entire nation of Israel under a palm tree. She calls it the Palm of Deborah. Naomi would say, “Leave it to a woman to judge a nation under a tree. Moses had to have a Temple it took thousands of people to build. But Deborah? Pull up some sand and tell me your woes and I will give you the wisdom of God Himself. With iced tea I make myself.”

  Naomi called her living room the Palm of Naomi when folks come to talk. “Come into the Palm of Naomi,” she says and she laughs and I can hear the ice clinking in the glasses.

  And Hannah, she reminded me so much of my grandmother the way she could put her finger on it and call it out. She was the Deborah of Ludicrous High.

  My first letter from Danny arrived fourteen days from his departure. I came home and checked the mail just like always. There it was, sitting in the box like God had sent me a golden goose who laid an egg and it was in the shape of that white envelope.

  I made a noise, some kind of squeal and took everything in the house and dropped it all and ran to my room and shut the door and kissed that envelope and jumped up and down. I carefully opened it because that return address was in the corner with his social security number that I’d have to use in every address on the front of the envelope and I memorized it before I had the letter out in his beautiful hand and I kissed the pages and a picture fell out. It was him slouching on a set of bleachers, laying back on his elbows and smirking at the camera. He wore a white T-shirt and fatigue pants. There was a bruise or scrape on his cheek. It was him. I stared at it…I don’t know how long, everything in me screaming love.