The Warmth of Other Suns Read Online Free PDF Page A

needed in the field. Ida Mae and other colored children in rural Mississippi didn’t start school until the cotton was picked, which meant October or November, and they stopped going to school when it was time to plant in April. Six months of school was a good year.
    She was still grieving when it was time to go back the next fall. She walked a mile of dirt road past the drying cotton and the hackberry treesto get to the one-room schoolhouse that, one way or the other, had to suffice for every colored child from first to eighth grade, the highest you could go back then if you were colored in Chickasaw County.
    The children formed a walking train to get there. It started with the child farthest away and picked up more children as it moved in the direction of the schoolhouse until just about the whole school was in a cluster at the front door.
    Ida Mae was easily distracted by the nut trees along the way and had a hard time keeping up. “I be lagging behind hollering and crying, ’cause they run off and leave me,” she said.
    When the rains came and the water got too high for the children to pass through the hog wallows in places like where Ida Mae lived, the old people cut down a tree and trimmed the limbs so the children could cross over the log to get to school.
    The school was a narrow frame cabin with wood benches and long windows, run by a teacher who was missing a leg. Amos Kirks was a source of unending curiosity and whispers among the children. He was of an age where he might have lost his leg in World War I, but none of the children knew for sure. He walked into the schoolroom, hobbling on crutches, in a suit and with a stern face. He rotated the grades as if the room were a railroad switch yard, calling the second- and third-graders to the front when it was their turn, while the other children moved to the back to do their lessons.
    He towered above them and always wore a tie. But all the children could see was the left pant leg pinned up at the knee and air where a calf and foot should have been.
    One day Mr. Kirks came in, and his pant leg wasn’t pinned at the knee. He had a new leg. But he couldn’t walk on it like a real one. “He throwed the leg, like it was tiresome to him,” Ida Mae said. “And it would swing. He kind of swing it around.”
    It was the talk of the schoolyard.
    “He finally got him a leg!” the children whispered to each other.
    When Mr. Kirks wasn’t looking, Ida Mae tried to tug at his pant cuff. “I sat side of him,” Ida Mae said years later. “I try to do all I know how to get up under there and see how that leg look. I’d sat by him, and I just rub and do. He couldn’t feel it no way. And I could see the clear foot in the shoe.”
    Ida Mae had to make sure Mr. Kirks didn’t catch on. For the slightest infraction, Mr. Kirks would send some boys out to the woods to get branches off a tree. Then the child who was talking out of turn or drawingwhen he should be listening was called up front for lashings with the switch.
    Ida Mae knew how that felt. In the fall after her father died, they were in the middle of a spelling lesson. One of the words was a city in the North called Philadelphia. Mr. Kirks called on Ida Mae to spell it. Some words, the children turned into jingles to help them remember. For geography, it was
George Eat O Gray Rat At Poor House Yesterday
. For Mississippi, it was
M eye crooked-letter crooked-letter eye crooked-letter crooked-letter eye humpback humpback eye
.
    Ida Mae had heard about the North but didn’t know Philadelphia or any ditties for it. She stumbled over the word. Mr. Kirks thought she was acting up. He told some boys to go out to the woods and get him a switch. He held the branches over the fire and told Ida Mae to come up front. He told her to bend over. He drew his arm back, and, in front of all the other children, he whipped her. And each time the switch snapped her back, he shouted a letter: P-H-I-L-A-D-E-L-P-H-I-A.
    She was hurt to be