Kizzy Ann Stamps Read Online Free Page A

first-name basis with something I might have to eat later on. And of course, the rooster is ornery, so I avoid him all the time.
    Phew! Is that enough describing?
    Did you like football when you went to high school? I don’t care, particularly, but my brother, James, plays football at the high school. Well, that isn’t really the truth. He’s still practicing at the black school field. Football doesn’t seem to have gotten integrated like the school. The coach said there isn’t room at the high-school field for everybody, and he says none of the black boys are ready for the varsity squad because they haven’t faced the right kind of competition. So all the black players are on the junior varsity team, and it practices over at the old school. James says it is fine by him, ’cause it feels like normal. But I think he must be angry about it, because he’s a senior, and his dream since he was very little was to be the star of the homecoming game, and even though the coach says JV will have a homecoming game too, it isn’t
the
game.
    Talking about this makes me feel right nervous about starting at your school, Miss. Plus, to be honest, I just don’t know if I’ll be able to work with all those white kids around. My mama says this is a chance for me to prove to Frank Charles and others that I’m just as good as they are.
    I’ll tell you a secret: I sure hope they’ll see that I am.

    I’m anxious to see your school building, Miss Anderson. Our building is squat and square, slatted on the sides with planed boards the newly freed slaves slapped together in their excitement for a school the first time it was legal for my people to learn. While it is true that they put it together in a flurry, they tried to do it with some care because the school was an important place. It was important to my family, for sure, because some of my ancestors had already had some learning. Like Granny Bits told me about Rainser. He is one of my ancestors who’d had to learn in secret. He worked in the fields during the day, but at night, all secret like, he learned to spell and write his name. I don’t think he learned much else, but he learned that. I don’t know who taught him either, but it was dangerous for both of them, that’s for sure. There were others in the family — Granny Bits has a list of them, and I had to memorize them for her back when I was seven, to prove I appreciated my heritage and had respect for schooling. It was interesting to me anyway, I’ll tell you, but I do like choosing what I do outside of school, so it did rankle me, I admit, when she
made
me do it. Of course, I know better than to question Granny Bits — last time I did that, I couldn’t sit down comfortably for three days, so I kept that rankle to myself!
    Anyway, you can see why the school was and is so important to my people. Granny Bits says this building was put up before some folks had their own homes. We’ve used the same building ever since. It doesn’t have a floor to speak of, just swept dirt. Mr. Felix, our custodian, who I swear is two hundred years old, is supposed to keep the place clean and tidy. He comes in every day. He’s bald-headed and shrinking away as he ages, his eyes getting more and more stuck out with every year, and he looks around the room like it has gotten bigger every day. His head sticks out of his shirt like an old turtle — you know, those old tortoises that are hundreds of years old? He pokes his head into this corner and that corner and says, “Looks pert clean to me, no cobbsywebs here, no cobbsywebs there.”
    What he knows is that Mrs. Warren cannot abide dirt of any kind, and she will get so fed up with the dirt and the cobwebs that she will get out that broom and clean it herself every day and then he won’t have to do it! Then off he goes, to wherever he hides, to smoke or whatever, his old eyes smiling because he has tricked her again. That old dirt floor gets cold come winter, but we all bring wood for