The Silver Star(48)

“No one’s challenging the system,” Vanessa said.

“This discussion isn’t going the way I’d anticipated,” Miss Jarvis said. What she wanted us to do, she went on, was to put our thoughts down on paper.


When Uncle Tinsley heard about the assignment, his eyes lit up. “To Kill a Mockingbird is a fine book in its own way,” he said. “But if you really want to understand Southern race relations, you need to read the great historian C. Vann Woodward.”

Uncle Tinsley was sitting at his desk in the library. He pulled out a book from the floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind him and passed it to me. The title was The Strange Career of Jim Crow.

I started reading, but the writing was so complicated that I got bogged down on the very first page. Uncle Tinsley grabbed the book back and flipped through it, eagerly explaining the ideas and quoting sentences while I took notes.

Because blacks and whites in the South had lived together under slavery, Uncle Tinsley said, they got along better after the Civil War than blacks and whites up north, where the races hadn’t mixed nearly as much. Legal segregation started first in the North and it was hypocritical of Northerners to blame it all on the South. In fact, the Jim Crow laws began in the South only at the turn of the century. Around that time, outsiders started using what C. Vann Woodward called “negrophobia” to turn poor whites against poor blacks, when the two groups should have been natural allies.

Uncle Tinsley helped me write up the paper—basically dictating large chunks of it—and had me read it to him. A little way in, he cut me off. I needed to throw myself into the presentation, he said. He’d been in the drama club at Washington and Lee, and he showed me how to gesture for emphasis and use what he called pregnant pauses.

The next day, when it was my turn to read my essay to the class, I didn’t know if the other kids would be interested in or even understand what Uncle Tinsley had helped me write—I barely understood it myself—and that made me so nervous, the paper was shaking in my hands. It didn’t help that Uncle Tinsley had me throw in fancy words and phrases like “white man’s burden” and “negrophobia.”

I tried to use the gestures he had shown me, but I forgot the pregnant pauses. Instead, I started rushing through the essay, and my gestures got a little wild. When I finished the paper, I looked up. Some kids were whispering or doodling, and a few were smirking, but most seemed bewildered.

Tinky Brewster raised his hand. “What’s ‘negrophobia’?” he asked.

“You don’t have to know what it means to know it’s a highfalutin word for people who don’t like black folks,” Vanessa piped up from the back of the class. “Bean, you one crazy-ass white girl.”

The entire class cracked up.

“Now, Vanessa,” Miss Jarvis said, starting to get teacherly, but then, looking at the class, she changed her mind. “Well, at least you’ve finally found one thing you can all agree on.”





CHAPTER THIRTY


Liz and I were scrounging around in the attic one afternoon, opening trunks and chests to see what was inside, when we came across an old guitar. Mice had chewed at the neck, but Liz toyed with the tuning pegs and declared that the sound wasn’t half bad. When we brought it downstairs, Uncle Tinsley told us it was Mom’s first guitar, from when she was about Liz’s age and decided she wanted to become a folksinger. Liz took the guitar into the music shop in town, where the clerk put on new strings and tuned it. Liz started spending afternoons in the bird wing, strumming away on it.

Mom had tried to teach us both to play the guitar. I was hopeless. Tone-deaf, Mom said. Liz showed real potential, but she couldn’t take any sort of criticism, and Mom was always telling her what she was doing wrong and moving her fingers to the correct position. Great musicians bent the rules, Mom said, but before you could bend the rules, you had to learn them, so she was always badgering Liz to practice and Liz finally said, “I’ve had it.”

Now, since Mom wasn’t around looking over her shoulder, Liz could have fun picking out notes and chords, following songs on the radio, and figuring out what worked and what didn’t without someone getting exasperated every time she hit a wrong note.

After a while, Liz decided she needed a guitar in better working condition. The music store in Byler had a used Silvertone in the window for a good price—at $110, the clerk said it was a steal—and Liz decided to buy it with the money in her passbook savings account. Since the peach-fuzz business, I had wanted to avoid Mr. Maddox, so I hadn’t been working much, but Liz was still doing his filing and helping in his office, and she had socked away nearly two hundred dollars in her account.