laughter stopped and faces and feet grew heavy again. All but Esther’s. Hers had never been light. I sighed and turned to the papers. Here was Abie’s little book. I thumbed through it and drew a deep breath and went back through it slowly again.
A second grader drawing this? Six pages-six finished adult-looking pages. Crayolas achieving effects I’d never seen before-pictures that told a story loudly and clearly.
Stars blazing in a black sky, with the slender needle of a ship, like a mote in the darkness.
The vasty green cloud-shrouded arc of earth against the blackness. A pink tinge of beginning friction along the ship’s belly. I put my finger to the glow. I could almost feel the heat.
Inside the ship, suffering and pain, heroic striving, crumpled bodies and seared faces. A baby dead in its mother’s arms. Then a swarm of tinier needles erupting from the womb of the ship. And the last shriek of incandescence as the ship volatilized against the thickening drag of the air. I leaned my head on my hands and closed my eyes. All this, all this in the memory of an eight-year-old? All. this in the feelings of an eight-year-old? Because Abie knew-he knew how this felt. He knew the heat and strivings and the dying and fleeing. No wonder Abie whispered and leaned. Racial memory was truly a two-sided coin.
I felt a pang of misgivings. Maybe I was wrong to let him remember so vividly. Maybe I shouldn’t have let him …
I turned to Martha’s papers. They were delicate, almost spidery drawings of some fuzzy little animal (toolas?) that apparently built a hanging hammocky nest and gathered fruit in a huge leaf basket and had a bird for a friend. A truly out-of-this-world bird. Much of her story escaped me because first graders-if anyone at all-produce symbolic art and, since her frame of reference and mine were so different, there was much that I couldn’t interpret. But her whole booklet was joyous and light.
And now, the stories…
I lifted my head and blinked into the twilight. I had finished all the papers except Esther’s. It was her cramped writing, swimming in darkness, that made me realize that the day was gone and that I was shivering in a shadowy room with the fire in the old-fashioned heater gone out.
Slowly I shuffled the papers into my desk drawer, hesitated and took out Esther’s. I would finish at home. I shrugged into my coat and wandered home, my thoughts intent on the papers I had read. And suddenly I wanted to cry-to cry for the wonders that had been and were no more. For the heritage of attainment and achievement these children had but couldn’t use. For the dream-come-true of what they were capable of doing but weren’t permitted to do. For the homesick yearning that filled every line they had written-these unhappy exiles, three generations removed from any physical knowledge of the Home.
I stopped on the bridge and leaned against the railing in the half dark. Suddenly I felt a welling homesickness. That was what the world should be like-what it could be like if only-if only…
But my tears for the Home were as hidden as the emotions of Mrs. Diemus when she looked up uncuriously as I came through the kitchen door.
“Good evening,” she said. “I’ve kept your supper warm.”
“Thank you.” I shivered convulsively. “It is getting cold.”
I sat on the edge of my bed that night, letting the memory of the kids’ papers wash over me, trying to fill in around the bits and snippets that they had told of the Home. And then I began to wonder. All of them who wrote about the actual Home had been so happy with their memories. From Timmy and his “Shinny ship as high as a montin and faster than two jets,” and Dorcas’ wandering tenses as though yesterday and today were one: “The flowers were like lights. At night it isn’t dark becas they shine so bright and when the moon came up the breeos sing and the music was so you can see it like rain falling around only happyer”; up to Miriam’s wistful “On Gathering Day there was a big party. Everybody came dressed in beautiful clothes with flahmen in the girls’ hair. Flahmen are flowers but they’re good to eat. And if a girl felt her heart sing for a boy they ate a flahmen together and started two-ing.”
Then, if all these memories were so happy, why the rigid suppression of them by grownups? Why the pall of unhappiness over everyone? You can’t mourn forever for a wrecked ship. Why a hidey hole for disobedient children? Why the misery and frustration when, if they could do half of what I didn’t fully understand from Joel and Matt’s highly technical papers, they could make Bendo an Eden?
I reached for Esther’s paper. I had put it on the bottom on purpose. I dreaded reading it. She had sat with her head buried on her arms on her desk most of the time the others were writing busily. At widely separated intervals she bad scribbled a line or two as though she were doing something shameful. She, of all the children, had seemed to find no relief in her remembering.
I smoothed the paper on my lap.
“I remember,” she had written. “We were thursty. There was water in the creek we were hiding in the grass. We could not drink. They would shoot us. Three days the sun was hot. She screamed for water and ran to the creek. They shot. The water got red.”
Blistered spots marked the tears on the paper.
“They found a baby under a bush. The man hit it with the wood part of his gun. He hit it and hit it and hit it. I hit scorpins like that.
“They caught us and put us in a pen. They built a fire all around us. Fly ‘they said’ fly and save yourselfs. We flew because it hurt. They shot us.
“Monster ‘they yelled’ evil monsters. People can’t fly. People can’t move things. People are the same. You aren’t people. Die die die.”
Then blackly, traced and retraced until the paper split:
“If anyone finds out we are not of earth we will die.
“Keep your feet on the ground.”
Bleakly I laid the paper aside. So there was the answer, putting Karen’s bits and snippets together with these. The shipwrecked ones finding savages on the desert island. A remnant surviving by learning caution, suppression and denial Another generation that pinned the evil label on the Home to insure continued immunity for their children, and now, a generation that questioned and wondered-and rebelled.
I turned off the light and slowly got into bed. I lay there staring into the darkness, holding the picture Esther had evoked. Finally I relaxed. “God help her,” I sighed. “God help us all.”
Another week was nearly over. We cleaned the room up quickly, for once anticipating the fun time instead of dreading it. I smiled to hear the happy racket all around me, and felt my own spirits surge upward in response to the lightheartedness of
