He was glad he wasn’t married with children. How would he handle it if some white woman teacher sprained his own child’s arm?
He mopped more vigorously, until the floor shined in the dark.
5
Sister Sixtus had a face like a middle-aged man, even though she was supposed to be this side of thirty. That’s what all the girls said. And when she was angry, she never changed expression. She only got red in the face.
I tried to look contrite, with my eyes lowered. But the truth of it was, if I looked at her, I’d crack up. And then she would be even madder.
She caught me smoking and was yelling at me about it. “You need to pray about this, young lady! At your flouting the rules at every turn!”
“The nuns smoke.”
“What’s that you said to me?”
I raised my face then. I didn’t feel like laughing anymore. “I said, the nuns smoke.”
A sting and then my head rang. She’d slapped me... oh good and hard. I was like a doll with a spring for a neck because my head just knocked back.
I stared at her. My hand went to my cheek and it was hot. “You bitch.” It came out of my mouth before I could stop it. The hand came again and slapped me a second time.
“You will pray ten Hail Marys for that outrage, young lady.”
“I’m not Catholic!” I shouted back at her. “I’m not gonna say your witchy spells!”
Another slap.
“Sister Sixtus!”
My face burned. I turned toward the doorway where Sister Conception and two other nuns stood in horror. Like they never slapped anyone.
Sister Sixtus brought herself up, adjusted her habit and the rosary hanging from her belt, and walked away from me.
The nuns in the doorway parted for her, but all they did was stare at me. I sneered at them for just standing there, for doing nothing, for not even stopping her, for not defending me.
I stomped out of the room, pushing them aside because they weren’t moving for me like they’d done for Sister Sixtus.
6
Tonight’s expedition meant spying on Mr. Washington. He didn’t live on the premises, but he often stayed late. There were always spicy rumors about him, and we wanted to be front and center to see it.
I was not an instigator, but I liked to participate. We mostly got along with each other, though we also found pleasure at being cruel to one another. I seldom understood their cruelty, vaguely owing it to their indifference to the images of saints being tortured with arrows, being cooked on hot grills like a barbecue, or getting chopped up... all with those vacant expressions on their faces. The sisters liked to have those images around as teaching tools. As if this was the sort of thing the students could expect in the modern world. I often wondered if the nuns thought this was a real possibility. Or were they trying to be subtle? No, not possible from those stern faces that seldom cracked smiles. I was sure they fully expected that I would turn on a spit if I got out of line, dating the wrong boy or doing a little petting. I wasn’t sure if I believed in Hell, just the Hell of sitting in class and listening to the nuns babble on. That was surely Hell on earth. Say ten Hail Marys and get it over with.
We waited ten minutes as usual after lights out before we slipped on our regulation flannel bathrobes and set out.
The corridor outside the dorm was dark. Shadows were always moving from the roving headlights of traffic along Crenshaw. Light kept sweeping over our faces, and I caught a secret glance between Josie and Maggie with smiles meant only for the dark, and didn’t attribute it to anything other than our mutual eagerness.
I liked roving the empty corridors at night, seeing the closed doors on the sleeping classrooms. The quiet. I imagined the nuns settling down in little nests, like black-and-white-feathered chickens, clucking softly to one another, plotting their evil for the day to come.
First place we headed was the basement, because that was where Mr. Washington had all his tools, his shelves filled with cans of paint beside stiff brushes, coils of wire, buckets, electrical tape, coffee cans of nuts, bolts, screws, nails.
He wasn’t there so we poked about, looking into the cans of oily-smelling nails, brown with grease. We pried opened paint cans and sniffed their pungent fumes.
It was Josie who got the idea.
She took a bucket and filled it with the smelliest white paint. We got a rickety old stepping stool, and placed it on the landing so we could position the bucket over the door, pulling it ajar. We had to figure out how to get out of the room and set it up, and we finally did. Then we scrambled around the corner in the dark to watch what happened.
It took a long time. We were getting bored waiting, and had to keep reminding each other it would only be really good if we saw it happen. But it seemed like hours. It might have been.
Finally Mr. Washington came around the corner, the squeaky wheel of his dented metal mop bucket echoing down the corridor. He pushed it forward, leaning heavily on it, like he had the whole world on his shoulders. He looked tired. For a second, a short one, I thought of stopping him... but then the idea of white paint all over that black face was starting to make me laugh, and I threw my hand over my mouth, stifling the sound.
He scuffed to the basement door and stopped. His eyes traveled up and down that doorway. I guess he wondered why it was ajar, but he didn’t think long about it before he pushed it open. The bucket came down on him, dumping a sheet of white on his head. It looked like a cloak, covering the roundness of his head and then his shoulders, before the bucket hit the floor with a loud clatter, and then bumped down each step. He swore some bad words that I wasn’t quite sure the meaning of, and slipped down a few of the stairs, yelling some more. He fell on his back and just lay there, swearing and crying.
We jumped up from our hiding place and tore through the corridors back to our dorm, slippered feet slapping the linoleum. When we got back inside the dorm, with whispered warnings to be quiet that only made more of a ruckus, one of the girls sat up in bed and scolded us, saying that they’d all get in trouble because of our shenanigans.
And all night I sort of regretted doing it. Though it had been funny at first, he was crying real tears because it had hurt when he fell, and maybe it wasn’t all that funny, and then I got mad at Josie and Maggie. And I knew we’d get in trouble bad in the morning.
But nothing was ever said about it. And when our guilt faded away, we plotted again.
7
Mr. Washington had a shed where he kept the lawn mower and other garden tools and bags of manure. He did a lot of work in there, sharpening shears and clippers. I hung around, eating peanuts in the shell that he always had.
And he’d always tell me, “You shouldn’t be in here, miss. You’re gonna get dirty with all them tools and grease.”
I hung out there sometimes because I wanted to get away from my friends. One day I asked him, “Where do you live, Mr. Washington? Do you live here at the school?”
“No, little miss. I live not too far from here in a house.”
“You work late. Why don’t you live here?”
“It ain’t right for me to live here. And I got a house.”
I wanted to ask more personal questions, but I didn’t know how to.
I don’t know why we played pranks on him. I liked him. But I liked doing things with my friends. Even though... even though they played them on me sometimes.