Chapter Two
April 19, 2008
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or the first few months of our marriage, I was above the clouds. Somewhere out in the cosmos, starring in a novel, living every day happily ever after. I was in love with being in love and sometimes I had to remind myself of how I felt just hours before I got married. I'd look at my ring and thank God my mother was there to prop me up. Our marriage was everything Evan had promised and as we decorated our house, hosted parties, went to church, and just settled into our life, I knew for sure I'd made the right decision. Other people were fighting and some were even breaking up, but Evan seemed to only want our lives to be perfect. And it was.
With Evan's new position in the school district, our recent nuptials, the house, and the pretty red car that seemed to get attention wherever we went, Evan and I had grown into a kind of celebrity couple in Tuscaloosa. People smiled when we walked into the grocery store, sent us expensive gifts and cards during the holidays, and we were on the invite lists of every event in town. We didn't even have to save spaces at the Alabama tailgates that season; other people held them for us.
Evan, brimming with pride at the kind of stature he'd sought since we were young, relished in the attentionâcommitted himself to memorizing the names of all the important people we'd cross paths with each day, meticulously answered each holiday card and gift with a quick thank-you note boasting a picture of us sitting beside the fireplace in our mansion, and extended his arm to lead me into rooms filled with people as we continued to make our “grand entrances.” While he was often over the top, this was just Evan. He was a true Southern gentlemanâstrong and gallant; full of honor and always wanting to exceed expectations. At times, it seemed like to him our life was a sitcom where he played the doting husband and I was the overjoyed wife. He was never angry and seldom raised his voice. One day, I pointed out that we never talked about anything that was serious, upsetting, or confrontational. I wanted to discuss what was happening in the world, who we really were, where we were going. Big stuff that I hadn't even thought of. To challenge and be challenged. To see outside of our little world into the big world in ways that would make us love where we were from that much more. Not planning my family's annual “Roll Tide” homecoming tailgate where we'd do our screaming duet of Lynyrd Skynyrd's “Sweet Home Alabama” and what red was
actually
crimson and what crimson was
actually
red. To this, Evan grinned and, after kissing me on the forehead, said I should be happy we didn't need to argue over stuff on the nightly news. He did that all day at work and didn't want to come home to it. We were happy and safe from all of that. This was a good thing.
While I was just as excited by the idea of happiness and living a carefree life, sometimes it felt so unreal that I wanted to scream and just argue about something. Anything I could bring up. It felt childish, but I wanted to prove that we were alive and not just these perfect robots. But I always failed. I'd jab about the laundry piling up and Evan would smile and call for the housekeeper. I'd complain that we needed to spend more time together and he'd clear his calendar for the day. It was wonderful. Amazing. But as we neared our one-year anniversary, I started to feel like I was suffocating. Caught in a tumbling storm of happiness and contentment with my life that made me feel like I was more dead than alive. I felt the need for
something
again, and just as they had before, both my mother and Evan seemed to have their own ideas about what that something was ...
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“When you gonna have a baby?” Opal Ivers, a student in my fourth-period chorus section asked abruptly one Friday as I waited to begin class. Opal was a petite, brown-skinned girl, who might have been pretty if she'd gotten braces when she was younger, but now her teeth were bucked and seemed to part comically with each passing week. The kids had a habit of teasing her, but that didn't stop Opal. She loved being the center of attention and took their laughs as encouragement.
Sitting at my desk behind the shaky piano I dared not ever use, as not one key was in tune, I frowned and dismissed the bold girl's question with my eyes, but she was reading my mind. In what had become a habit of late, Evan had hinted about a baby over breakfast just that morning. He'd pointed out that I was about to turn thirty-three that Sunday and that my own mother kept saying it was time. “My mama said a married woman got to have a baby,” Opal went on. “That's why you get married in the first place. Your husband rich, too!”
“Opal,” I started as the room continued to fill up with faces, “not all women want to have children ... or can. And as far as my having a baby, that's private.”
While I did want children, I just wasn't sure if it was time for me to take that step in my life. Yes, like Opal and her mother had pointed out, I was married and had a wonderful husband and home, but I still had other things to figure out. That, and not to mention, there was a school full of other babies that needed my attention.
The bell rang and a few stragglers came rushing in without apologizingâas I would never have done when I was in high school. But a lot had changed since then.
Last to arrive as usual was Zenobia Hamilton, a mother and second-year sophomore whose child's fatherâa second-year seniorâwas expecting another baby this summer with Patrice, another one of my students (luckily, she was in first period). Zenobia walked into the room with an air of marked carelessness; her feet were angled at a lazy ninety degrees and her lips were turned under into a nasty frown. Her short hair was undone and standing all over her head as if she'd just rolled out of the bed and onto the school bus.
“Ms. Hamilton,” I said, signaling for her to come to my desk. I unbuttoned my suit jacket and slid it onto the chair behind me.
“Ummm-hum?” She was trying her best to communicate attitude in her voice. She rolled her eyes and balanced her weight on one of her ducked feet. This kind of unnecessary and unwarranted anger so early in the day used to perplex me eight years ago when I started teaching at Black Warrior, but now I'd figured out that mistreating me and mistreating their education, which for most of the students in the poorest school in the county pretty much made up the only structure they had in their day, was simply how they dealt with the emotional minefields that had been titled their life. Zenobia knew she was wrong for most of the things she did, but being bad and stepping out of line was the only thing she thought she could control. If I was fifteen, poor, and had a child with a high school student who was now expecting another baby with my classmate, I might be duck-walking and rolling my eyes, too.
“First, it's, âYes, Mrs. DeLongâ' ”
“
Yes, Mrs. DeLong
,” she said under her breath, repeating my words with no trace of sincerity.
“And second, what's wrong with your hair?”
“I ain't felt like combing it today.”
“But you knew you had to come to school, didn't you?”
“Yeah, but my mama took my braids out last night and then my auntie ain't come over to braid it.”
“Personal situation asideâwhat's the rule about hair grooming at the school?” I asked. The classroom grew quieter with each exchange. I didn't want to embarrass her, but the hair was really standing up high and now that she'd mentioned that she'd just taken out braids, I noticed that it hadn't been combed out and drifts of dandruff cradled her balding edges.
“I know the rule. We can't come to school without our hair combed.”
“You know I have to send you to the office.”
“It ain't my fault,” she said. “I told my mama my auntie wasn't coming. She took my mama's money and went to smoke it.”
It seemed every student knew what she was talking aboutâsome had drug addictions of their ownâand it was no longer a hidden Southern secret, not something these children felt they should be ashamed of. Zenobia hadn't lowered her voice.
“Ms. Hamilton,” I whispered, leading her to the door. “I can't allow you to sit in my classroom with your hair like that.”
“I know.” She crossed her arms and shifted her weight again.
“Then, if you know, why would youâ” I stopped myself. I could hear my voice becoming frustrated. “Just go to the bathroom and comb it. Put it in a ponytail or something andâ”
“My hair don't fit in no ponytail. I ain't got no gel ... no weave.”
“Well, just comb it down and come back.”
She sucked her teeth and flicked a red, widetoothed comb out of her back pocket. One she could've used hours ago.
“Fine,” she snarled. “I'll be back.” She turned and waddled through the doorway and as she exited, I saw the promise of a firm belly imprinting the edges of her oversized T-shirt. I closed my eyes for three short seconds to say a little prayer of “no” and “God, please, no” over the pudge before turning back to the students.
“Let's do a quick warm up and then we'll pick back up where we left off on Thursday with âSwing Low'âwe have only five more weeks to get this perfect for graduation,” I said, looking up at the other students in front of me. Some were other Zenobias, others were coming close, and fewer, Opal included, were fighting their best to escape it. The rest simply hadn't come to school.
On cue, they groaned and rolled their brown eyes as if they'd thought there was some chance I wouldn't require them to singâin chorus. Send them all home for not having combed their hair. Zippers unzipped and song sheets rustled as they were taken out to be held in front of the faces of the few kids who still had their copies or needed the words.
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was the traditional spiritual the choir had sung at every graduation since Black Warrior was founded for Negro students in the early 1900s.
“Let's go.” I walked to the organ I'd placed in front of the old piano.
Hum.
Hum.
Hum.
Hummmm.
I keyed and sang each note for all of the sections to warm them up and just as they did whenever I sang in class, the students relaxed in their seats and looked on like babies being soothed to sleep by a lullaby. They requested the notes again and again and finally, I laughed and said it was time for them to sing.
“But we want you to sing,” Opal whined, and I shook my head no. But I was used to this. I'd grown up being a soloist in the choir at my father's church and my mother always bragged that I had the voice of an angel. I wasn't that confident, but when I was just a little girl, I realized that my singing could do things. My father would push me to the microphone and I'd sing nervously, watching as people fell to their knees and got saved right in front of me. Grown men and women would crawl on the floor and sing along with me, crying and praying, some speaking in tongues.
Hum.
Hum.
Hum.
Hummmm.
The sopranos. The tenors. The baritones. The altos. They sent waves of vibrating sounds through the oval-shaped room as I keyed the notes through the short warm up. Suddenly, the room went from dull and tired to a soothing rainbow of sound. The echoes from each group bounced around the room in a tide of confidence and calm.
Zenobia had come back, and we went on, charging at “Swing Low” so hard that it seemed as if the spirits of our ancestors, who rested on the very plantation that the school was built upon, were singing along. The children could feel this energy. All of them. And it came through in their voices. They were forgetting the past with song and living just in the moment in the wonder that we could sound as one. Right now, who they were and where they were from really didn't matter. When class ended, they would walk out and return to the world; but for now, singing and “Swing Low” held their spirits captive. In that moment, I was winning.
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“Wow,” Billie exclaimed, her face appearing and reappearing in the waves of a sea of students rushing out of the room when the bell rang. My best friend since she stopped Angie Martin from beating me up on the school yard in second grade, Billie taught language arts at Black Warrior. “They sounded really good. I heard them all the way down the hall.”
“Thank you.” I sat down at my desk and sighed. “Let's hope they sound that way at graduation.”
“Oh, they will. They always do. Anyway, let's go get some lunch. I need to get out of here.”
“You know I can't do that,” I said, reaching for the running sneakers beneath my desk.
“You're working out today ... again? This is five days in a row. This is getting out of control.”
“Don't be mad at me because I'm actually
keeping
my grown lady New Year's resolution,” I said, and Billie rolled her eyes at my reminder of our New Year's pact. At my parents' annual New Year's Day breakfast that year, Billie and I sat stuffed and sleepy in my parents' den, talking about how fast time was flying by. It seemed that only days ago, we were twenty-one and just graduating from collegeâmaking plans neither of us would keep and feeling like the rest of our lives were in front of us. And then, just in a quick snap of time, we'd awoken and found ourselves grown up and feeling like the rest of our lives had already happened. The maps had been laid out and we were just biding our time at work and in the mall. We groaned and complained that we were too young to be so old. We weren't in our forties, fifties, or sixties. We were in our thirties! And that was supposed to be the new twenties! So, why did we feel so ... over? Not young enough to hang out in the new nightclubs downtown, but not old enough to play bingo in the basement of the VFW either. Then Billie came up with an ideaâwe had to make “grown lady” resolutions. We had to set up three goals for ourselves for the new year and not let another year pass us by without moving on them. Billie's grown lady resolutions came quickâletting go of her tumultuous relationship with Clyde and finally dating other men, going back to school to get her master's, and getting a new carâshe'd been driving the same red Eclipse since college. My resolutions took a little longer. I just didn't know what I wanted. But finally, I decided that I wanted to start to travelâto see the world beyond the South, to start writing songs again, and to lose all of the extra weight I was carrying around.