Boo Nanny returned with a full pie tin of olive shells, angel wings, baby’s ears, kitten’s paws, and jingle shells in shades of silver, gold, and black. “Looky here,” she said, and held up a hank of seaweed that had, tangled in its fronds, a black leathery pouch with horns at the four corners. “This here’s a devil’s purse. For baby skates. It keeps the little ones safe till they hatch.”
I had seen the odd-looking fish washed up on shore. It was shaped like a kite and had a stiff spike for a tail. Was it possible that this huge fish started out life in that tiny pouch? Boo Nanny showed me the slit along the side of the case where the baby fish escaped when they were ready.
She grew up on a plantation by the ocean and knew an awful lot for someone who couldn’t read or write. She taught me things that Daddy, with all his degrees, didn’t know: that the full moon pulls the tides higher; that star formations appear in different parts of the sky depending on the season; that conch shells hold the sound of the ocean inside them; that the tiny beads of silver that twinkle at the water’s edge are actually alive.
“How do you know these things?” I asked, carefully unhooking the devil’s pouch from the seaweed. I would dry it out and add it to the treasures on my windowsill.
“I use my own two eyes. All you gots to do is look. Now, your daddy could talk a possum out of a tree, but sometimes he can’t see what’s dead straight in front of his nose if it ain’t in a book. Knowing’s first and foremost ’bout seeing what’s in front of you,” she said.
The walk to the shore was always easier than the walk back. Each year the journey got a little harder for Boo Nanny, and this year was the hardest of all. We had to stop many times to rest. Even with all her potions and tonics, she was getting weaker and more bent over. I wasn’t sure how many more years she would be able to make the trip.
“I likes it when you read to me. Makes the work go nice and easy-like,” Boo Nanny said, speaking through teeth clamped over several wooden clothespins.
I could hardly see the print for the sweat in my eyes. After I finished the story, I closed the book and used it like a pillow as I stretched out in the shade of the hanging clothes, hoping the edges of the wet sheet would graze my face. There was not a whiff of breeze, and the air was sticky and buggy.
“When can we start our lessons? After school starts, I won’t have much time,” I said, gazing up at the white panels above me. All summer, I’d been trying to convince her to let me teach her to read, but she was better at finding excuses than I was at avoiding Sunday school.
“Cocoa Baby, I loves you to pieces, but you’s gone be the death of me with you crazy ideas,” she said after removing the remaining clothespins from her mouth.
“Why don’t you want to learn to read?” I asked.
Daddy believed that the only way to improve our race was through education. But if I mentioned Daddy to Boo Nanny, she would take the opposite side, for no other reason than to be ornery.
“I’s too set in my ways and don’t see no call for it, at my age.”
“Suppose you wanted to go to the drugstore instead of the shoe shop.”
“I be old and bent, but I ain’t stupid. All I gots to do is look in the window. If I sees a line of leather high tops, I’m right nigh certain I ain’t gone be buying no borax there.”
“But if the shades are down.”
“Then I just looks at that big old shoe cut out of wood over the front door and knows this ain’t the place.”
She was trying my patience.
“Wouldn’t you like to be able to read the street signs?”
“I knows every street in this town that I be wanting to walk on.”
“What about the Bible? Wouldn’t it be nice to read it on your own?”
She folded a sun-starched pillowcase and held it to her chest. The glare off the white sheets made her damp face shine.
“I ain’t rightly considered that,” she said, and for a moment I thought I had won her over. But then she waved a pillowcase at me and said, “Now shoo. I be pure-t tired of your nattering.”
That evening, I talked to Daddy out of her hearing. “For every reason I come up with, she has an excuse. What is it she’s afraid of?”
“Failing,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s hard for you to understand, son, but try to put yourself in her shoes. She grew up as a slave, when it was against the law to teach Negroes to read and write. She spent her formative years in bondage. Your grandmother is an amazing woman, but when you’re bought and sold like a mule, treated like dirt, told you’re inferior, and taken advantage of in ways you can’t begin to imagine, it’s hard to develop any self-confidence.”
I was dumbfounded. Did Boo Nanny have any idea how much Daddy respected her? Maybe her conflicts with him were all in her mind.
“What should I do, then?” I asked.
“Ask her for fifteen minutes a day. Anyone can find fifteen minutes.”
“She’ll think of some reason she doesn’t have the time.”
“Okay, then tell her I’ll do the supper dishes for her.”
“You’d do that?”
“Of course.”
I ran to tell Boo Nanny about Daddy’s offer, and for the first time in the eleven years I’d known her, she was without words. Finally she smiled broadly and said, “That man be willing to put his hands in de suds for this here cranky in-law?”
“That’s what he said.”
“That’d be a sight for sore eyes.”
“I take it that’s a yes.”
She nodded, then said, “He better not go ruining those cuffs I starched so nice and stiff for him.”
We started in the living room that evening when there was still plenty of light.
I got out a pencil and tablet and wrote the first letter of the alphabet, printing it on two lines. “This is an A. And this is a B,” I said, and repeated myself several times.
I pointed to the first letter and said, “What’s that?”
She squinted and pulled the paper so close her nose was almost touching. Then she held it at arm’s length and squinted.
I made the letters bigger. “Can you see that?” She shook her head. I tried again, this time using six lines. “What about that?”
“Chile, my tired ol’ eyes can’t get down that small.”
Suddenly I realized: she was practically blind. For all I knew, she had been that way for years, and no one noticed because she left the sewing and darning to Mama.
“No problem,” I said cheerfully. “I know just what we’ll do.” I refused to give her any cause to quit. No way was I going to let her fail.
“This won’t take long. I’ll let you know when I’m done,” I said.
She picked up a dust rag while I grabbed some newspapers from the back porch. We saved them to use as kindling and for private business in the privy. Ever since the Record went from a weekly to a daily, we couldn’t use the papers fast enough, and they piled up on the back porch.
I cut out both capital and little letters for the first five letters of the alphabet, then laid them on the rug. The capital letters were about a foot high. When I was done, she sat back in the chair. Because she was bent over, she was at the perfect angle to see the letters. I went over the names and sounds with her several times.
“Now de big C and de little c, that makes perfect sense. One be de spittin’ image of t’other, like a mama and her baby chile. But that mama A ain’t nothing similar to the baby a. Same goes for the e.”
I knew if I showed any impatience she would refuse to go on. “Do you ever ask yourself why the color red is red?” I asked. “There’s no reason. That’s just the way it is. Same with the alphabet. If you think too hard, you’ll get yourself all tangled up. So just try to memorize it.”
I decided to simplify and work only with capital letters.
After she learned the first five, I cut out a duplicate D and moved the floppy newsprint letters around to form words: BAD, BED, DAB, DEAD
.
I went over the words, and she repeated them. When I rearranged the letters to spell DEAD, she stared at them for a long time, then said, “That don’t make a lick of sense. It oughta be DED, just like BED.” She removed the A from the letters I had assembled on the rug.
“Well, it’s not.”
“Well, it oughta be.”
I returned the A to its original place. I wished I hadn’t chosen that example, but I was having trouble coming up with words that used only the first five letters of the alphabet. “The correct spelling is D-E-A-D. Dead.”
“You is sure?”
“You have to trust me,” I said, but then started to doubt myself. The more I stared at the letters on the floor, the stranger they became, like no word I’d ever seen. My mind was playing tricks on me.
I opened up the dictionary to check the word. There, in the Ds, I found a dollar bill stuck in the crease. I held it up for Boo Nanny.
“Here’s the last of Mama’s organ money. We hid it in the dictionary,” I said.
“You mean to tell me if I done took it into my head to educate myself afore this, I might find myself in possession of a raft of cash money?” she said.
“Here it is … d-e-a-d. Correctly spelled,” I said, and held my finger under the word in the dictionary, but her eyes couldn’t focus on anything that small.
“When they lays this old sack o’ bones belowground, I want my gravestone to read: Josephine August. D-E-A-D. And that’s what I’s gone be, Cocoa Baby, if we don’t stop this lesson right now.”
I was surprised to see that almost an hour had passed.
The following day, I was tickled when Boo Nanny wanted to have two sessions. After lunch, I started cutting out the next five letters of the alphabet. As I cut into the newspaper to make an H, an article caught my eye. It was an editorial by Alex Manly, the owner of Daddy’s paper, in the August 18 edition. I put down the scissors and started to read.
The editorial was titled “Mrs. Felton’s Speech.” I had never heard of Mrs. Felton—I guessed she was the wife of a representative from Georgia, judging from the editorial. What caught my eye was the part of her speech that caused Mr. Manly to respond in an editorial. I read it several times, trying to understand: “If it takes lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand times a week if necessary.”
I was stumped by the phrase “dearest possession.” As for lynching, I had heard the word and knew it was something bad, but didn’t know exactly what.
I opened the dictionary and marked the place with the dollar bill. The definition—to execute without due process of law—put me no closer to understanding. I depended on words to be a window on understanding, but it was proving to be a mighty cloudy window.
“Ain’t you got no upbringing?” Boo Nanny said when I closed the dictionary and returned to the article. “Read that article out loud.”
Stumbling over some of the words, I read: “Every Negro lynched is called a big, burly black brute, when in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers and were not only not black and burly but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them.”
Rocking in her chair, Boo Nanny murmured, “That ain’t gone sit well.”
I was perplexed by the meaning but continued, as the editor addressed Mrs. Felton: “Tell your men that it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman than for a white man to be intimate with a colored woman.”
“Sweet Jesus.” Boo Nanny frowned and shook her head. “Big trouble’s a-brewing.”
“Why?” I said, heading back to the dictionary.
“We take they jobs, it’s bad enough, but all hell’s gone jolt loose if we start marrying ’em.”
I looked up intimate in the dictionary. There were two entries—one a verb, the other an adjective, and each pronounced a different way. One meant “to communicate indirectly,” and the other meant “belonging to one’s deepest nature.” I puzzled over the two meanings. What did either have to do with marriage? I couldn’t square the definition with what I was reading.
I felt ashamed. I was supposed to be the championship reader, yet I couldn’t make heads or tails of the editorial even after looking up the vocabulary I didn’t know. And Boo Nanny seemed to grasp it immediately, though she didn’t know half the words.
Mr. Manly’s editorial ended with an address to white men: “You set yourselves down as a lot of carping hypocrites in that you cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you seek to destroy the morality of ours.”
“What’s that big book there say for hypocrite?” Boo Nanny said.
“I know that one. It’s like the churchgoer who talks about honesty and turns around and robs you blind.”
“Yep. The pews be filled with folks aplenty like that.” She smiled. “And the lot of ’em won’t have the foggiest what I be talking ’bout if I calls ’em that.”
That evening over dessert, I brought up the editorial and asked Daddy to explain it. He asked me how I knew about it, and I told him.
“This be the first I heared of it,” Mama said.
“You remember Alex Manly, the paper’s editor? The man who showed you the printing press?” he asked me.
I nodded.
“Well, a society woman made a speech that was reprinted nationwide, and Mr. Manly took issue with what she said. He responded with an editorial that hit a raw nerve in the white community.”
“What is lynching, Daddy?” I said.
“Jack,” Mama said with a note of warning in her voice.
“It’s part of his education, Sadie,” Daddy said, wiping his mouth and placing the napkin by his plate.
“Leave that boy be a boy. There’s time aplenty for him to learn unpleasant things,” Mama said, but Daddy didn’t listen.
“Sometimes men get together in groups, and a herd mentality develops and they do things they wouldn’t do individually,” he said. He spoke slowly, considering every word. “You’ve probably seen that on the playground, with children ganging up and bullying a schoolmate. Alone, it’s harder for an individual to be hateful, eye to eye, to his fellow man.”
He had said something similar when I apologized to that Dry Ponder for stealing his son’s bike. That man was plenty hateful, and it didn’t make a lick of difference that I was eye to eye with him.
“When men attribute qualities to others that take away a person’s dignity—words like brute or beast—it’s easier to treat that person as less than human. A mob can develop a mind of its own and act in ways that fly in the face of justice,” Daddy said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“That child don’t need to know about such hateful things,” Mama said.
“I’m trying to explain lynching in a way that makes sense,” Daddy said.
“You find that way, you be sure to let me in on de education,” Boo Nanny said.
“So why did this white society woman suggest lynching?” I asked, still unclear exactly what lynching was.
Daddy took a deep breath. “Well, Mrs. Felton thought that white men needed to do a better job of protecting their women in the countryside from the, um, unwanted attentions of black men.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said.
“She was talking about violent attentions.”
“You mean rape?” I asked.
Mama gasped.
“Do you know what that word means?” Daddy asked.
I shook my head no.
“Well, it involves unwanted sex.…”
“Hush up. That ain’t no thing for young ears,” Mama said.
“He deserves to have his questions answered,” Daddy said.
“Jackson …” When Mama gave Daddy that dark look and drew out the syllables in his name, I knew she would not be refused. She turned to me and said, “Run along now, Moses. You be excused.”
There was no reason to treat me
like a child. I knew about sex; Lewis had told me. Men and women got together and had sex and made babies. Lewis’s next-door neighbor, a white woman named Mrs. Roberts, was a sex maniac, because she had six children and had done it six times.
I made a big deal of shutting the door to my room but remained in the hall. After a few moments, I flattened myself against the wall by the kitchen door and listened, but they had moved on to other topics.
“All of the white advertisers pulled out to protest the editorial,” Daddy was saying.
“What you doing depending on white folk for?” Boo Nanny said. “Feed you with de corn, choke you with de cob.”
“It’s a good deal for them. Our paper helps them reach a whole new market. We’re the only Negro daily in the South.”
“You stay in awe of de white man, he got you round his thumb, just what like in slavery,” she said.
“We need to find people in our community to pick up the slack. Josephine, would you be willing to ask your minister if he could take out an ad temporarily, until the ruckus dies down?”
“You ain’t seed fit to darken the door, but you come with you hat in hand when you’s in a pickle,” she grumbled.
That was a regular cause of bickering between Boo Nanny and Daddy—she went to Sunday school and church every week, and he refused to go.
“If we don’t find more ads, the paper’s going to have to shut down. You wouldn’t believe the uproar this has caused. Letters have poured in, demanding that Alex be horsewhipped and run out of town.”
“Jack, you fixin’ to lose your job? Things is tight enough as they is.” I could hear fear in Mama’s voice.
“No, no, nothing of the sort. That’s why I didn’t mention it. I didn’t want you to worry. This will blow over.”
“You mention purity of white womanhood and de black man in de same breath, and you got big trouble. That editor be swinging afore it’s over,” Boo Nanny said.
“Shhh,” Mama said.
“He’s gone,” Daddy said.
There was a moment of silence at the table, then Mama said, “Moses? You there?”
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