Our downtown restaurants have more blacks waiting on tables than sitting at tables to be waited on, and more blacks than that in the kitchen with their hands in the dishwater.
What black teenagers there are in La Belle go mostly to Commercial High, to learn trades or business skills. Of the few that go to La Belle High, one is always elected to some office, unanimously. But that high honor rarely gets one of them a seat saved at noon in the cafeteria among the whites, or even a particularly warm hello.
Calpurnia Dove is the treasurer of our senior class, the only senior in the whole school who’s black.
That Friday afternoon on my big birthday weekend, the assignment for Miss Grossman’s class had been to write a short story.
I’d written one called “The Wistful Wheel,” about a wheel who longed to travel alone, but always had to be attached to something to move.
When I read it to Cowboy, she said, “This isn’t about a wheel. It’s about you, Little Little. You always hated traveling with the family.”
I hadn’t intended it to be about me, but maybe Cowboy was right. Maybe Miss Grossman was right, too, about what a fantasy was. She said when you wrote a fantasy you were like a spider spinning a web from your own insides.
Whenever our family went anywhere, we were always stared at because of me. There were always what Cowboy and I called “peepers” in the hotel dining room, or the motel lobbies. Wherever we went, we’d see them looking over the tops of their newspapers or menus, stealing glances when they thought we weren’t watching, sometimes just plain staring at us as though we’d just piled out of a flying saucer direct from Mars.
“Jeepers creepers, look at all the peepers,” Cowboy would remark.
She’d try her best to laugh it off, but she’d get red and start cracking her knuckles, and I’d wish I’d just eaten in my room, or not gone on the trip at all.
My mother’d purr, “You have to expect to be admired when you’re such an extraordinary little beauty, darling.”
But she’d knock back a double martini to get past it, and my father’s face would be fixed in a scowl, his angry eyes trying to meet with the peepers’ eyes to stare them down.
Except when we were all tooling along together in the car, I never really saw the sights when we went places. I saw the sightseers see me.
That afternoon in English class, I got my paper handed back along with all the others except for Calpurnia Dove’s. I saw her sitting at the front of the class empty-handed, biting her lips to keep from smiling, looking down at her desk so no one could see her eyes shining.
Miss Grossman had marked my paper A–. She wrote across the top of the first page: Watch your spelling. But this is excellent. You know, going away to college is a way of traveling. You see a lot and you’re getting your first taste of independence, and you’re on your own. Did you ever think of that, Little Little?
Miss Grossman was the only person I knew who’d figured out a way of going to heaven without dying. You just went from high school to college.
If you were accepted by a college, Miss Grossman put your name up on her bulletin board with a gold star pasted next to it. You got a silver star for even sending in an application.
My father always told me, “It isn’t wrong to want to skip college. Just be sure you’re not passing it up for the wrong reason.”
“Just be sure,” my mother’d chime in, “you’re not trying to avoid the real world.”
“Of course I’m trying to avoid it,” I told her. “It’s real to you, but not to me.”
“There’s no way to avoid the real world,” my father could be counted on to point out in these conversations. “Not going to college is not going to stop the real world from being right outside the front door.”
“Then I’ll stay in the house,” I’d murmur back.
On and on.
Cowboy always said our mother faced the real world the same way someone handled a headache: she took something for it, from a bottle.
After we got our stories back and all read Miss Grossman’s comments, she said, “And now I’d like to read something for you that Calpurnia Dove wrote.”
It began:
The first time I was ever called nigger I was four years old and went home crying. Didn’t even know why I was, didn’t even know what “nigger” meant. Only knew it was bad. So my mother say oh they got around to saying that to you, did they, well get in the boat here along with the rest of us, you got a lot of company on the stormy sea, honey, ain’t one of us not been called that, ain’t one of us heard “nigger” for the last time, either.
I used to daydream that I was from an all-dwarf family. I would imagine my mother, father, grandparents, and Cowboy all shrunk to my size, living in a little house locked in against a larger world, laughing at them and cursing them, sharing their tyranny with other La Belles.
Although in various ways and straight out I was told by my mother I would not grow to be as tall as other people, it did not sink in until my little sister grew bigger than I was.
In every room of our house, there is a chair my size.
When Cowboy was very young, she would always try to sit in my chairs. For a time, my father added other small chairs to appease Cowboy, until she was too big to be comfortable in them.
When she stopped sitting in the little chairs around the house, I grabbed at them ecstatically, as though they
