Letters to Missy Violet Read Online Free Page A

Miss Battle, she can talk loud too. She dressed Mister Waters down good fashioned in front of the class. Told him that colored folks were doing fine things every day now. Becoming doctors and lawyers and teachers and inventors because they were able to get education.
    â€œLet these children get their lessons out, man! And stop being a stumbling block!” she shouted at him. She said we might not all get educated, but some of us would, and I think her words must have scorched Mister Waters like hot coals because he stopped fussing and left. He even let Cleveland stay in class that day. Hooray for Miss Battle!
    When Mister Waters left Miss Battle talked to us for a while about sharecroppers. She said she didn’t want us to get the wrong idea about men like Mister Waters. She said he was a good man but he just couldn’t believe that things were going to get better for colored people. She said he just didn’t understand how important education was. “There are lots of people like that, children,” Miss Battle told us. “But that doesn’t mean that things won’t change.”
    Miss Battle said that men like Mister Waters were smart men with their own brand of education. Instead of getting their knowledge from school and books they got their knowledge from life, which means that they know a lot of things. Miss Battle said that the share­cropper is a mechanic because he has to know how to fix farm machinery if he has any and if he doesn’t he still has to know how to repair harnesses and shoes for his horses and mules.
    She said he is part blacksmith, carpenter, animal trainer, and breeder. He has to know about all kinds of trees and the crops that grow on his land. He has to know something about insects and plant diseases and sprays to control insects. He even has to be a midwife and a doctor to the animals on the farm. And then she told us how a sharecropper farmer saved her neighbor’s cow.
    She said one day her neighbor’s cow was eating some apples and she was gobbling them up so fast without chewing them and an apple got stuck in her throat. A sharecropper farmer was passing by in his wagon and saw the cow choking. The farmer took a piece of rubber hose, put a stick through it, and pushed it down the cow’s throat but it didn’t move the apple. So the farmer pushed his hand down the cow’s throat and got hold of the apple and pulled it out. The cow didn’t like it at all and stepped on the farmer’s foot. But if the farmer had not done that the cow would have died.
    â€œSharecroppers and farmers are very special people, and I don’t want you children to forget it,” Miss Battle said. It sure was a surprise to hear Miss Battle put in a good word for Mister Waters and the sharecroppers. Miss Battle is beginning to sound a bit like Miss Glover . . .

Always Go Straight Home from School
    I don’t know why, but I keep getting into trouble lately. Right after I got into hot water with Mama about writing that letter to Missy Violet about Miss Olette’s daughter, I got into trouble again following behind Charles. This time I really did get a whupping—the worst I ever had. The trouble started one day while some of us kids were passing by the church on our way home from school. Charles said he knew a big secret about something that was inside the church. But before anybody could ask what it was, Charles blurted out, “It’s a dead body!”
    â€œWhy don’t you quit fibbin’,” Arma Jean said, because she knows how Charles likes to make up stories. Nobody ever believes him except maybe Jeff Brown. He thinks Charles is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
    â€œWhy don’t you tell the truth sometimes and shame the devil,” I said to Charles, and his face started getting all red.
    â€œIf you don’t believe me, why don’t you go inside and see for yourself!” he told me.
    â€œY’all wanna