“I think we should take him up on his offer,” Liz said.
I was glad
Mr. Maddox was willing to give his side of the story. After all, he was the boss, and we were the ones who needed the
money. He didn’t owe us any explanation, and it made me feel like he cared what we thought of him.
Sometimes Mr. Maddox worked the day shift at the mill, but sometimes he worked nights and weekends, which gave him weekdays to conduct other business. This particular week, he was working
afternoons but had his mornings free, so the next day after breakfast, Liz and I pedaled our bikes into town and parked them in Mr. Maddox’s carport, next to his polished black Le Mans. As
usual, Doris had the TV on and she and the kids were on the Naugahyde couch, watching cartoons.
Mr. Maddox was in his office, sitting at his desk, feeding sheets of paper into a machine that shredded them into spaghetti-thin strips and spewed them into the wastebasket.
“Never just wad papers up and throw them out,” Mr. Maddox said. “Your enemies will go through your trash to find anything they can use against you. Even harmless stuff. They
can twist and distort it. You have to protect yourself.”
Mr. Maddox shredded the last sheet of paper. His desk was clean, and that was the way he liked it. One of Liz’s jobs was to make sure all his papers were filed away in the correct folders
in the filing cabinets, which he kept locked.
“So you want to hear what happened between me and your uncle?” he asked. “That doesn’t surprise me. Only thing that surprises me is that it took this long.”
Mr. Maddox got up and closed the door. “I’d be happy to tell you,” he said, “but you tell me something first.” He took the two folding chairs out of the closet and
had us sit down. Then he rolled his chair over until he was a few inches away from us. “Does your Uncle Tinsley know you’re working for me?”
Liz and I exchanged glances. “Not exactly,” she said.
“I was willing to bet that would be the case.”
“We wanted to tell him,” I said, “but . . .”
“But he probably wouldn’t be too happy,” Mr. Maddox said.
“We love Uncle Tinsley—” Liz began.
“But sometimes Uncle Tinsley doesn’t see things the way they really are,” Mr. Maddox said. “Sometimes Uncle Tinsley doesn’t see what needs to be done.”
“Exactly,” Liz said.
“So I think it’s a good idea that you don’t tell him,” Mr. Maddox said. He smiled that smile he got when he found a situation privately amusing. “Let’s keep
it between ourselves.”
“But other people already know,” Liz said. “You keep introducing me as Tinsley Holladay’s niece.”
“Also, I told my Aunt Al—Al Wyatt,” I said. “Joe Wyatt, too.”
“The Wyatts,” Mr. Maddox said. “Wife works the late shift. Husband’s a shirker who claims he’s got white lung. That girl of theirs used to do some babysitting for
us, but things started going missing, so we had to tell her to hit the road.” He leaned back and slapped the arms of his chair. “Anyway, just because a few people know you’re
working for me doesn’t mean your uncle will find out. He doesn’t get around much these days. And if he does find out, we’ll handle the matter when it comes up. But I think this
gives you an idea of the headaches I had dealing with him.”
Mr. Maddox explained that the Chicago company brought him in because the mill was losing money. The new owners said there were two choices: cut costs by thirty percent and try to eke out a
profit, or shut down the mill for good, disassemble the entire operation, and sell it—looms and all—to a factory in Asia.
“People at the mill hated me for firing their friends,” Mr. Maddox said. “The fact of the matter is, they should have been down on their hands and knees, kissing any part of my
body I wanted kissed, thanking me for saving some of their jobs. The slope heads in Asia are willing to work for twenty cents an hour, and they’re eating our asses alive. Meanwhile, I have
your uncle with his panties in a twist, pissing and moaning about keeping the baseball team going and how the quality of the bath towels isn’t what it used to be. As if people give a shit
about quality these days. They’re looking for something to dry their butts with, and all they care about is price.”
Mr. Maddox leaned forward, his thick arms on his knees, looking back and forth between me and Liz with his intense blue eyes. “So,” he said, “Uncle Tinsley had to go.” He
smiled again. “The news that he was getting the boot spun him around like a top,” he said. He pointed his forefinger in the air and made a circling motion. “Woo, woo, woo. Round
and round. Like a faggoty little ballerina.”
Mr. Maddox stood up, raised his arms above his head, and did a mincing pirouette. Then he sat back down. “Don’t get me wrong, I think your uncle’s a great guy, but you have to
admit his judgment sometimes sucks.” He looked at the two of us. “Well, don’t you?”
I shifted in my seat. Liz studied her fingernails. There wasn’t a whole lot to say.
Mom called once
a week and talked first to Liz, then to me. Life in New York was exciting, she said, but also more challenging than
she’d expected. It was expensive, for one thing. The only affordable apartment she could find had a bathtub in the kitchen and was in a rough neighborhood with a crummy school. Lots of kids
in New York went to private schools, but they were way beyond our budget. Liz and I rightly belonged in one of those special public schools for gifted students, she explained, but it was too late
to apply this year, so what we needed to do was start the school year in Byler—Uncle Tinsley had said he’d be happy to have us stay on at Mayfield—then, once she’d found a
cheap apartment in a neighborhood with a good school, she’d bring us up to New York, and the Tribe of Three would be together again.
That was fine by me. Frankly, Mom had begun to get on my nerves. By now, it was early August, and whenever I felt like talking to a grown-up, I’d go see Aunt Al. We’d sit with Earl
at the kitchen table while she nursed a glass of the iced tea she made by the potful and talked about things like the time when she was a girl on the family farm and the corn didn’t sprout
because of a drought, so her pa made the kids dig up the kernels to plant the next year. She also told me stories about my dad, like the time he built an entire car out of junkyard parts, the time
he held Ruth upside down over a bridge so she wouldn’t have a fear of heights, and the time he gave Aunt Al a ride on his motorcycle and she accidentally stuck her foot in the spokes, ripping
her shoe to pieces.
Uncle Clarence was a certifiable curmudgeon, and I suppose Aunt Al was right that it was on account of his hard life. But it seemed to me that Aunt Al also had it really tough—working the
late shift at what Mom would call a dead-end job, coming home to make her family breakfast, grabbing a few hours’ sleep, and getting up to make them dinner. Her grouchy husband was disabled,
one son was off at war, her youngest wasn’t quite right, but she never complained. Instead, she was always talking about how blessed she was and how many wonderful things Jesus had brought
into her life, what with people like me showing up out of the blue. But her greatest blessings were her kids, and most of Aunt Al’s conversations came around to them—Truman, the proud
serviceman; Joe, who could do anything he set his mind to; Ruthie, who had spent the summer nursing Aunt Al’s sister and was going to get herself a good office job; and her little special
Earl. She loved them all, and they loved her back. “I swear, they think I hung the moon and scattered the stars,” she told me more than once.
One day shortly after Mom told me we should start school in Byler, I biked over to the Wyatts’. When I walked into the kitchen, Aunt Al was sitting at the table reading a letter. It was
from Ruth, she said. Aunt Al’s sister had recovered from meningitis, Ruth hoped to be home in a few days, and she was looking forward to meeting Liz and me. Then Aunt Al opened a shoe box on
the kitchen counter and pulled out a bundle of thin blue aerograms wrapped with a rubber band. “Truman’s letters,” she said. “He writes me every week, without
fail.”
In Truman’s most recent letter, he’d told her that he’d become sweet on a nice Vietnamese girl. He was thinking of asking her to marry him and bringing her back to Virginia,
and he wanted Aunt Al to write back with her thoughts on it all. “If you’d asked me a couple of years ago, I might have said I don’t rightly know if Byler is ready for that, but a
lot’s been changing around here these days, so I told him to pray on it, and if that’s what the Lord tells him to do, I’ll welcome that girl with open arms.”
Aunt Al carefully replaced the bundle of aerograms in the shoe box, along with Ruth’s letter.
“I’ve got news, too,” I said. “It looks like Liz and I are going to Byler High this fall.”
“Honey!” Aunt Al gave me one of her big hugs. “I’m so glad you’re staying with us instead of going off to the big city.”
“Mom said life in New York was more challenging than she’d expected.”
“That’s one word for it.” Aunt Al laughed. “Speaking of challenges, you’re in for quite a time. This is the year that, like it or not, we’re
integrating.”
Back in the fifties, she went on, the Supreme Court had ruled that black kids were allowed to attend white schools. In almost all Southern towns, however, black kids kept going to the black
school, and white kids kept going to the white school.
As Aunt Al was talking, Uncle Clarence came in from the garden. Pulling off his straw hat and wiping his forehead, he filled a water glass at the sink and took a gulp. “Everyone was free
to attend whatever school they wanted, and people chose to go to school with their own kind,” he said. “That’s natural. White ducks flock with white ducks, and mallards flock with
mallards. It’s called freedom of choice. What’s more American than that?”
“The Supreme Court disagreed,” Aunt Al said. Last year the court ordered the forced integration of all Southern schools. So the Byler superintendent was closing down Nelson High,
which had been the black school for fifty years, and turning it into the vocational school. Beginning this year, the kids from Nelson would be going to Byler High.
“It’s the doing of those damned Harvards,” Uncle Clarence said. “They started this war and told our boys to fight it, then they changed their minds about the war and went
around spitting on our boys for serving their country. And now the Harvards want to come down here and tell us how to run our schools.” He coughed and tossed the rest of his water in the
sink. “Now I’m all riled up, so I best get the hell back to my tomatoes.” He picked up his straw hat and muttered on his way out, “Ducks got more sense than that Supreme
my-ass Court.”
Later that week,
on a morning when Mr. Maddox didn’t have any work for either of us, Liz and I rode over to the mill hill.
While we were parking our bikes in the Wyatts’ front yard, a tall young woman around Liz’s age came running out the door. She had a wide smile just like Aunt Al’s and long dark
hair held back by barrettes, and she wore those plastic cat’s-eye glasses that you saw on old ladies.
“You must be Liz and Bean,” she cried out, wiping her hands on her apron and giving us both a bone-crushing Wyatt hug. “I’m Ruth, and I been just dying to meet you all
for the longest time.”
Ruth led us into the house, explaining that the harvest season was under way and she and her mom were in the middle of canning. The kitchen table was piled with red, green, orange, and yellow
tomatoes. Earl was lining up rows of mason jars on the counter while Aunt Al stirred a big steaming pot.
“Uncle Clarence grew all these tomatoes?” I asked.
“Everything Daddy grows, we eat fresh,” Ruth said.
“With all these mouths to feed, it don’t go far,” Aunt Al said. “Joe brings me my canning tomatoes.” She started spooning stewed tomatoes into the jars. “I
know some people may wag their finger at what my boy does,” she said, “but the food he brings home helps keep this family fed, and those darned farmers are always growing more than they
can sell anyway.”
“Ma told me you all will be going to Byler High this fall,” Ruth said. “A lot of the white folks, including Daddy, are making a heck of a fuss about integration.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s the big deal? There were always Mexican kids in the schools in California, and they were just like everyone else, except they had
darker skin and ate spicier food.”
“It’s a little more complicated in these parts,” Aunt Al said.
“A few people in Byler are saying this integration thing could actually be good,” Ruth went on. The Byler High football team would get all those big, strong, fast black boys from
Nelson, she explained, and they might take us to state. At the same time, she said, white players would have to be cut from the team to make room for the blacks. The Byler High cheerleaders, who
all had boyfriends on the team, were saying that they’d quit the squad if their boyfriends were cut because they didn’t want to be cheering for a bunch of coloreds who stole their
boyfriends’ positions.
The cheerleaders all came from well-to-do families, Ruth said. They were the daughters of the doctors, the lawyers, the car dealer, the man who owned the country club. Mill hill boys sometimes
made it onto the football team, but no girl from the hill had ever become a cheerleader. It simply didn’t happen. A cheerleader had to be a certain type, and that type just wasn’t found
on the hill. All the girls on the hill knew this, so they never even tried out.
“Until now,” Ruth said. “Because if some of the cheerleaders who are the right type quit, saying they aren’t cheering for any niggers—pardon my French, that’s
the word the girls use, I know you’re not supposed to call them that—other girls will have a chance to make the squad.” She started screwing lids on the jars Aunt Al had filled.
“And that there’s the silver lining in the whole integration thing. So I’m planning to try out for the cheerleading squad. I don’t have any problem cheering for the colored
boys.”