No One Ever Asked Page 9

  Camille blinked.

  “What’s going on with you?”

  “Sorry,” she said, giving her head a little shake. “I have a terrible headache.”

  It was true. She did. The kind of splitting headache she got whenever she tried quitting coffee. But she’d had her two cups this morning, so maybe she was the one with the brain tumor. Maybe she would die and Neil would be free to marry his gal-pal from CrossFit. Some woman called Jas would take Camille’s place. She and Neil would move the gun safe into the house, and then she would teach all Camille’s children how to hunt.

  “Well, take some Advil and snap out of it. This is too important for headaches.”

  Kathleen was right.

  This was vitally important.

  Her children didn’t know it yet, but their father had ripped their entire world out from under them. She couldn’t let their education be ripped out from under them too.

  Not if she could help it.

  Fourteen

  They were running late. Mama had to stay past the end of her shift because two of her coworkers didn’t show. By the time she rushed home, she had no time to shower. Now she was self-consciously patting her hair, positive it smelled like hospital cafeteria food, as the two of them made their way down the hall, toward the distinct sound of booing.

  Anaya’s skin prickled.

  A stack of pamphlets was scattered across a table outside the gymnasium. She snagged one and slid past two different cameramen, and all their gear, clogging the doorway.

  The gymnasium was packed. Every seat was taken. Fifteen minutes past six, and the atmosphere was heated—like a teakettle about to whistle.

  “Just to be clear,” a large man sitting at a long table with several others said into his microphone. The placard in front of him read Keith Staley. “This will not happen at the expense of our tax dollars. The South Fork district must pay tuition for every student who chooses to transfer. We will receive that tuition on a monthly basis.”

  “What happens if South Fork doesn’t pay?” someone shouted.

  “We have been assured that if that were to happen, their government aid would come to us.”

  Several cries came from the crowd—too indecipherable to address. Anaya and her mother stood off to the side, squeezing next to the overflow of attendees.

  “Next speaker, please,” Keith said.

  A woman in a purple Crystal Ridge Wildcats Wrestling T-shirt standing at the front of a long, single-file line moved up to the microphone. “My name is Diane Greer, and I’m head of the high school booster club. I’m wondering if South Fork students will be playing on our sports teams.”

  “South Fork students will become Crystal Ridge students, and as such, they will have all the same opportunities every other student has.”

  Several objections bubbled up from the crowd. Then someone commented that maybe the football team would finally win some games this year, and the objections turned into laughter.

  It made Anaya want to take Mama’s hand and walk away. But Mama had planted her feet and stared intently at the line of people waiting to speak. Instead of becoming shorter, it grew in size as one after another stepped up to the microphone. They had questions about class sizes and additional support staff and special education. Test scores and whether or not the incoming students would put Crystal Ridge’s accreditation at risk.

  When Keith Staley explained that class size would be set at the recommended desirable levels—and once capacity was reached, Crystal Ridge would not be required to take any more transfers—someone from the crowd yelled, “Then lower the capacity!”

  Mr. Staley either didn’t hear or pretended not to.

  Anaya removed the small bottle of hand sanitizer from her purse and rubbed the gel into her hands. She imagined her skin thick, impenetrable. She imagined the angry words bouncing off her. She told herself they weren’t about Darius. Because if these people knew Darius, they would want him to be a part of their school. And not just because he was good at football, but because he was funny and smart and kind.

  An auburn-haired waif of a lady introduced herself as Rebecca Yates. She had two children at Truman Elementary and, as she put it, an unexpected surprise on the way. She smoothed her hand over her shirt, revealing a small round bump where a flat stomach should have been. “In August, I’m going to send two of my children to you, and I have to say, I’m very concerned about their safety. My husband is a police officer. He’s well acquainted with the crime rate in South Fork. Only two weeks ago there was a fatal stabbing. And if that were the only thing, then okay. But that isn’t the only thing. We aren’t talking about a bunch of kids with poor grades. We are talking about a pattern of violence, and as parents we’d be foolish not to be concerned about that.”

  The crowd began to cheer.

  It seemed to embolden Rebecca Yates. “I want to know what the safety plan is going to be when school starts in August. I want to know if there’re going to be metal detectors installed. I want to know if the behavioral records of each South Fork student are coming with them, just like their medical records are coming with them.”

  The cheering grew louder.

  Anaya and Mama exchanged a look.

  What would they say about Darius’s behavioral record? Would anyone see past it? Would they understand that a record was just a record? It came without context, without explanation. It didn’t say anything about the fact that Darius had recently lost his father. That he’d been hurting and upset and impulsively young. A record wasn’t a person. Darius’s record was not Darius.

  Anaya closed her eyes.

  Her skin was thick. Her skin was impenetrable. These people could not hurt her. These people did not know her. These people were going to send their children to her.

  “We ought to be able to send our children to school without worrying that they will be shot or stabbed or offered drugs!” Rebecca shouted over the roaring approval, her face red and impassioned. “I’d like to know what your plans are to protect them from that!”

  Anaya felt sick to her stomach.

  She wasn’t naive. She’d known there would be concerns and pushback. But this? She and her mother had come expecting an angry house cat and instead found themselves inside a cage with a hungry tiger. The crowd turned into a living creature—one that grew an extra hissing head every time Keith Staley attempted to cut the other one off.

  They demanded a special session be called with the governor.

  They refused to be the Band-Aid for South Fork’s problem.

  Over and over again the message was overwhelmingly and painfully clear. They were not welcome. They needed to stay where they belonged.

  Anaya’s ankle throbbed, and her heart too. As thick and impenetrable as she imagined her skin to be, at the end of the day, it was still flesh. And flesh had this terrible way of bleeding.

  A woman with long blond hair and sun-kissed skin stepped up to the microphone. She wore the kind of outfit that looked expensive and fashionably casual. “Hello, everyone,” she said. “I’m Camille Gray. I have three children in the district. A student athlete who’s going to be a junior, a son going into sixth grade at the middle school, and my youngest will be in second at O’Hare.”

  Anaya could feel Mama’s glance.

  Second grade at O’Hare.

  “I’m part of the PTA, as well as president of the Crystal Ridge Memorial Day 5K committee. I love this community, and as someone who loves this community, I’d like to address the mother who spoke in the beginning—the one who brought up race. I think I speak for everyone here when I say that if these students were all white with the exact same records and challenges, we’d be every bit as concerned.”

  The crowd began to clap. A few people whistled.

  “I don’t care about skin color. I don’t even see skin color. This isn’t about race.”

&nb
sp; “It’s about trash!”

  The anonymous male shout from the crowd came like the slice of a knife. The sharp sting made her wince.

  Camille Gray lifted her chin and kept on going. “This is about commitment to education and a drastic difference in values. Just look at the statistics. Sixty-three percent of their seniors didn’t graduate last year. Very few parents volunteer in their schools. I’m sorry for the condition of the South Fork District. I truly am. But I think we’d be foolish to think that mentality won’t make an impact here.”

  The clapping escalated.

  Anaya wanted to plug her ears.

  She wanted to shield her mother from all of it—her strong, resilient mother, who worked two jobs and came home bone weary but still made time to fight for her children. Who refused to let Anaya drop out of college last year when she lost her track scholarship. She didn’t have the luxury to shop around for a district, and she couldn’t come into the class to volunteer. She was too busy making sure her children had a roof over their heads and food on the table.

  How could anyone look at her life and dare accuse her of not valuing education? She loved her children—wanted what was best for her children—as much as, if not more than, every other mother in this gymnasium.

  And the students who were going to get on a bus at six in the morning for the sake of a better opportunity were absolutely committed to their education. They weren’t part of the small percentage that gave South Fork a bad name. Crystal Ridge was going to get many of South Fork’s top students—another reason Auntie Trill hated the transfer.

  “I know this has been an emotional evening,” Camille Gray continued. “Many of us are upset. But that’s only because we didn’t have a say in this decision. No one ever asked how we felt about this. Don’t we live in a democracy? We should get to vote. We voted for all of you.” She motioned to the row of legislators dressed in suits. “Why didn’t we get a chance to vote for this?

  “A lot of people are talking about doing the right thing, which is easy to say. But what about all the decisions and choices that led up to South Fork losing their accreditation?” She turned to the approving crowd and the cameramen standing inside the doors. “This isn’t our mess to clean.”

  Fifteen

  Anaya and her mother drove home in a silence heavier than the moon. The meeting scheduled for an hour and a half had gone way past, but Mama and Anaya couldn’t find a way to leave. It was as if they were incapable of moving. Paralyzed. So they just stood there and listened. Afterward, a woman from Crystal Ridge had come up to them and apologized. She was shaking and appalled. But by then Anaya had gone numb. She couldn’t even remember the woman’s name now.

  When they stepped inside the living room at half past nine, they found Granny asleep on the couch and the local news playing on the television. A sound bite from the Crystal Ridge gymnasium played inside their living room.

  “Turn it off,” Mama said, her voice quivering. “I don’t want Darius to hear any of it.”

  Anaya jabbed the power button.

  The house went quiet. There was nothing but the heavy breathing of her great-grandmother.

  “I’ll get her to bed,” Anaya said. “You go on to sleep, Mama.”

  Mama didn’t object. Maybe because she had to be up in four short hours. Or maybe because tonight had zapped all her energy. She squeezed Anaya’s elbow and walked away like a soldier weary from battle, like the things said in that gym had sunk deep into her bones, making her whole body sag.

  Anaya lifted Granny to her feet. She wound the old woman’s arm around her shoulder, wrapped her own arm around Granny’s thin waist, and walked her to her room. She was light and frail, yet even as Anaya bore her weight, her grandmother had an unmistakable strength.

  The kind carved from a life of adversity.

  Granny was six months old when the stock market crashed in 1929. She was raised in the Great Depression, a daughter of a hardworking sharecropper. As a little girl, she sat at the feet of her great-grandmama Hettie Horton—a freed slave from Jackson, Mississippi—absorbing stories she would one day pass on to Anaya.

  The mattress creaked as she tucked that strong-as-steel woman into bed and kissed her forehead.

  According to Hettie, when her father got free at the end of the Civil War, he was promised forty acres of land and a mule—restitution for centuries of abuse. But President Andrew Johnson didn’t follow through on his promise. He returned all the land under federal control to its previous owners—the very enslavers who scarred the back of Hettie’s father.

  And what did the government do?

  With the southern economy in shards, state governments enacted strict codes to ensure free labor would continue. They arrested newly freed slaves by the droves for things like vagrancy and loitering—Hettie’s father included. But where was he supposed to go—a displaced man with a daughter and nothing to his name? He was labeled a criminal, and as such the thirteenth amendment no longer applied. Convict leasing became the new order of the day, and the powers that be did what they could to criminalize the formerly enslaved. They put them in jail. They put them back in chains. All the while propagating the same mentality Camille Gray spoke tonight.

  This isn’t our mess to clean.

  In one fell swoop, they washed their hands of all culpability. They acquired amnesia, as though the past never happened. Meanwhile, their willful blindness ensured the problems would continue into perpetuity.

  It’s about trash!

  Anaya’s arms trembled.

  Nobody booed the man who shouted it. Nobody objected at all. She was trash. Latrell and Darnell next door were trash. Little Abeo. All the kids who came to the youth center. Her brother, Darius.

  Trash.

  This was what the world told them. Maybe not with words as bold as that man’s, but the message was the same. In every media outlet. In all that was missing from the history books. Every time another school district like South Fork failed, with run-down facilities and too-crowded classrooms, brimming with students the same color as Anaya. The same color Camille Gray insisted she did not see.

  All of it sent the same message.

  This is what you are worth.

  Too many believed it.

  And Anaya hated them. In that moment, as she stood inside Granny’s room, she hated every person in that gym with a hatred so visceral it made her body quake. She should ask for forgiveness. Get down on her knees and repent. Add her hatred to the list of things she’d already repented of, the list of things she continued to repent of.

  But all of it stuck in her throat like bile.

  There was a picture frame on Granny’s dresser—a photograph of her daddy’s father. Granny’s only son. Marching in a line, holding a sign that said I Am a Man, with his head held high as a crowd of angry onlookers jeered, livid that he had the audacity to say he was human.

  As Anaya shut off Granny’s light, she couldn’t help but wonder about those jeering people. She knew what happened to her grandfather and Granny. Many of the men in that line—her grandfather’s friends—were still alive today. So what about the angry onlookers? Where did they go?

  Across the hall, Mama kneeled on the floor with her hands clasped on her bed and her head bowed in prayer.

  The bile in Anaya’s throat turned into a hard lump.

  It’s about trash!

  She wondered if the refrain was echoing through her mother’s prayers like it was echoing through Anaya.

  * * *

  Jen’s phone buzzed with a message from Nick: That was unbelievable.

  Uh-oh, Jen typed back.

  When it came to Nick, unbelievable was never a good thing. He only ever used that word when something was unbelievably bad.

  On my way home now, came his response.

  Jubilee was already in bed. Jen had to lie with her for forty-five minutes
before she fell asleep. When her breathing finally turned deep and rhythmic, Jen tiptoed away, wincing every time a floorboard creaked. The first month home, Jubilee would startle at the slightest sound. She refused to stay in her bedroom alone. So Jen and Nick took turns sleeping on the trundle they would pull out from under Jubilee’s daybed. Thankfully, Jubilee hadn’t woken up tonight.

  Jen came downstairs to tackle the massive pile of laundry that kept expanding on their basement floor. She sat cross-legged with the news on, her phone beside her, trying to find matching socks, when the word transfer caught her ear. She picked up the remote and pointed it at the television, upping the volume.

  A female reporter with Channel 6 News stood outside in the dark while people filed out of the high school gymnasium behind her. “It was a packed house tonight here at Crystal Ridge High, at a meeting that went an hour longer than planned. And one thing was very clear. Emotions were running high.”

  Several clips played on the screen—making a montage that was indeed unbelievable—before cutting back to the newsroom. “Citizens aren’t the only ones in disagreement about the transfer law,” the news anchor said. “Here’s a closer look at what some of our decision makers have to say.”

  The same reporter stood outside again, this time in the daylight, speaking with a man who bore a resemblance to Barack Obama. According to the bar stretching across the bottom of the screen, his name was Dan Green, and he was the vice president of Missouri’s Board of Education.

  “Do you think the concern is over a flood of students coming in, or do you think it’s more about the fact that these are low-income, black kids coming into a mostly white district?” the reporter asked.

  Green arched a brow. “Melissa…I don’t think you need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this out. All the pieces create a telling picture.”

  The screen panned to a quick shot of a run-down school building. Several cars whooshed past while students—almost all of them black—got on and off a cluster of yellow buses. Then it cut to a different man, also in a business suit. Apparently, he was Jen’s state representative. He stood with his hands in his pockets, squinting against the sun. “Anybody who makes this about race is intellectually lazy.”