"Does Miss Belle Flowers teach here?"
She did, and two minutes later I was in her class room, our
conversation being listened to with much interest by the twenty-odd
little boys and girls in the room. It seemed that she was expecting me,
and that I could make the examination in twenty minutes after school
was closed. So I decided to wait outside.
It was a modern eight room consolidated country school, which seemed
to be built miles from everywhere. On one side, an old Ford car, three
buggies, and at least fifteen saddle-horses were parked. A few shabby
shrubs shivered silently in the sallow sunshine of spring. Here and
there remnants of building material told the story of the building's
recent construction.
Walking along, I turned the corner of the building and looked toward
the west. What I saw made me walk away from the schoolhouse to a
white-haired darkey sitting on the ground propped against a wire fence.
He seemed asleep, but when I came near him, he turned to me a weasened
face with two eyes circled with the arcus senilis of the aged.
I asked him to have a cigarette, and lit it for him; then sat down by
his side.
"Queer place for a schoolhouse, Uncle," I said.
"Worsen queer. Poor and hard on us."
"How come?"
"Quality folks put it heayr, whar land was cheap. Peers like they
didn't know about Massa."
"Your Master?"
"None but."
I looked over at the tombstone. Just one stone, and at the back of it a
cypress tree. Four fence posts around the tree and the stone, and then
were connected by a wire fence. The posts were newly placed, the wire
made up of odds and ends tied together and nailed in place with every
kind of nail imaginable.