Lost. Shortly after that she began what Jefferson called meddling with the Negroes. Apparently she went without invitation or warning, into the different classrooms of the Negro grammar and high school, who couldn’t hear thunder, mind you, and so all she could do was watch — the faces, expressions, gestures of the pupils and teachers both who were already spooked, perhaps alarmed, anyway startled and alerted to cover, by the sudden presence of the unexplained white woman who was presently talking to the teacher in the quacking duck’s voice of the deaf and then holding out a tablet and pencil for the teacher to answer.
Until presently, as quick as the alarmed messenger could find him I suppose, the principal was there — a college-bred man, Uncle Gavin said, of intelligence and devotion too — and then she and the principal and the senior woman teacher were in the principal’s office, where it probably was not so much that she, the white woman, was trying to explain, as that they, the two Negroes, had already divined and maybe understood even if they did not agree with her.
Because they, Negroes, when the problems are not from the passions of want and ignorance and fear — gambling, drink — but are of simple humanity, are a gentle and tender people, a little more so than white people because they have had to be; a little wiser in their dealings with white people than white people are with them, because they have had to survive in a minority. As if they already knew that the ignorance and superstition she would have to combat — the ignorance and superstition which would counteract, cancel her dream and, if she remained bullheaded enough in perseverance, would destroy her — would not be in the black race she proposed to raise but in the white one she represented.
So finally the expected happened, anticipated by everyone except her apparently, maybe because of the deafness, the isolation, the solitude of living not enclosed with sound but merely surrounded by gestures. Or maybe she did anticipate it but, having been through a war, she just didn’t give a damn. Anyway, she bulled right ahead with her idea.
Which was to establish a kind of competitive weekly test, the winners, who would be the top students for that week in each class, to spend the following week in a kind of academy she would establish, with white teachers, details to be settled later but for temporary they would use her sitting-room in her father’s house for a sort of general precept, the winners of each week to be replaced by next week’s winners; these to embrace the whole school from kindergarden to seniors, her theory being that if you were old enough to be taught at eighteen you were old enough at eight too when learning something new would be even easier.
Because she couldn’t hear, you see, not just the words but the tones, over- and under-tones of alarm, fright, terror in which the black voice would have to say Thank you. So it was the principal himself who finally came to see Uncle Gavin at the office — the intelligent dedicated man with his composed and tragic face.
“I’ve been expecting you,” Uncle Gavin said. “I know what you want to say.”
“Thank you,” the principal said. “Then you know yourself it won’t work. That you are not ready for it yet and neither are we.”
“Not many of your race will agree with you,” Uncle Gavin said.
“None of them will,” the principal said. “Just as none of them agreed when Mr Washington said it.”
“Mr Washington?”
“Booker T.,” the principal said. “Mr Carver too.”
“Oh,” Uncle Gavin said. “Yes?”
“That we have got to make the white people need us first. In the old days your people did need us, in your economy if not your culture, to make your cotton and tobacco and indigo. But that was the wrong need, bad and evil in itself. So it couldn’t last. It had to go. So now you don’t need us.
There is no place for us now in your culture or economy either. We both buy the same instalment-plan automobiles to burn up the same gasoline in, and the same radios to listen to the same music and the same iceboxes to keep the same beer in, but that’s all. So we have got to make a place of our own in your culture and economy too.
Not you to make a place for us just to get us out from under your feet, as in the South here, or to get our votes for the aggrandisement of your political perquisites, as in the North, but us to make a place for ourselves by compelling you to need us, you cannot do without us because nobody else but us can fill that place in your economy and culture which only we can fill and so that place will have to be ours.
So that you will not just say Please to us, you will need to say Please to us, you will want to say Please to us. Will you tell her that? Say we thank her and we won’t forget this. But to leave us alone. Let us have your friendship all the time, and your help when we need it. But keep your patronage until we ask for it.”
“This is not patronage,” Uncle Gavin said. “You know that too.”
“Yes,” the principal said. “I know that too. I’m sorry. I am ashamed that I . . .” Then he said: “Just say we thank her and will remember her, but to let us alone.”
“How can you say that to someone who will face that much risk, just for justice, just to abolish ignorance?”
“I know,” the principal said. “It’s difficult. Maybe we can’t get along without your help for a while yet, since I am already asking for it. — Good-day, sir,” he said, and was gone. So how could Uncle Gavin tell her either. Or anybody else tell her, everybody else tell her, white and black both.
Since it wasn’t that she couldn’t hear: she wouldn’t listen, not even to the unified solidarity of No in the Negro school itself — that massive, not resistance but immobility, like the instinct of the animal to lie perfectly still, not even breathing, not even thinking. Or maybe she did hear that because she reversed without even stopping, from the school to the board of education itself: if she could not abolish the ignorance by degrees of individual cases, she would attempt it wholesale by putting properly educated white teachers in the Negro school, asking no help, not even from Gavin, hunting down the school board then, they retreating into simple evaporation, the county board of supervisors in their own sacred lair, armed with no petty ivory tablet and gold stylus this time but with a vast pad of yellow foolscap and enough pencils for everybody. Evidently they committed the initial error of letting her in.
Then Gavin said it went something like this:
The president, writing: Assuming for the moment just for argument you understand that we substitute white teachers in the negro school what will become of the negro teachers or perhaps you plan to retire them on pensions yourself
The duck’s voice: “Not exactly. I will send them North to white schools where they will be accepted and trained as white teachers are.”
The pencil: Still assuming for the sake of argument we have got the negro teachers out where will you find white teachers to fill vacancies left by negroes in Mississippi and how long do you think they will be permitted to fill negro vacancies in Mississippi
The duck’s voice: “I will find them if you will protect them.”
The pencil: Protect them from who Mrs Kohl Only she didn’t need to answer that. Because it had already started: the words Nigger Lover scrawled huge in chalk on the sidewalk in front of the mansion the next morning for her father to walk steadily through them in his black banker’s hat and his little snap-on bow tie, chewing his steady chunk of Frenchman’s Bend air. Sure he saw it.
Gavin said nobody could have helped seeing it, that by noon a good deal of the rest of Jefferson had managed to happen to pass by to look at it. But what else — a banker, THE banker — could he do? spit on his handkerchief and get down on his knees and rub it out? And later Linda came out on her way back to the courthouse to badger the rest of the county authorities back behind their locked doors. And maybe, very likely, she really didn’t see it.
Anyway, it wasn’t either of them nor the cook nor the yardman either. It was a neighbour, a woman, who came with a broom and at least obscured it, viciously, angrily, neither to defend Linda’s impossible dream nor even in instinctive female confederation with another female, but because she lived on this street. The words could have been the quick short primer-bald words of sex or excrement, as happened now and then even on sidewalks in this part of town, and she would have walked through them too since to pause would have been public admission that a lady knew what they meant.
But nobody was going to write Nigger Lover nor -Hater either, delineate
