One Mississippi Read Online Free

they sat in the back.
    Nobody tried to teach us anything. The teachers took roll, handed out textbooks, then spent the hour gossiping in the doorway with other teachers while the students fired spitballs and caught up on their summers.
    Fourth-period English was Mrs. Thomas, a big black lady who got our attention by smacking the blackboard with her open hand. “Listen up! Y’all gonna learn one thing in my class, and that is the writings of Mister William Shatespeare. He just about the best writer they ever was.” She wrote his name on the board,
Shakespeare.
We would be reading a “whole mess” of his plays, she said, including “Julius Seizure,” “Hamblit,” and “Henry V-8.”
    I looked around to see if anyone else found this amusing. I saw a smirk lighting up the face of a pale, lanky kid with a shock of black hair falling into his eyes. He was struggling to keep from laughing out loud.
    After Mrs. Thomas went to chat in the hallway he swung into the desk beside mine, darkly muttering, “Henry V-8!”
    That cracked me up.
    He said he was Tim. I told him I was Daniel. We shook hands on it. I was pleased to find they used the same cool-guy handshake down here as in Indiana — hook thumbs, then wrap your hands together to make a mutual fist.
    “What if I told you Mrs. Thomas is one of the best teachers?” he said. “Wait till you see her act out the parts. She does an incredible Romeo.”
    “I thought there weren’t any black teachers last year,” I said.
    “Hey, what are you saying?” Tim looked shocked. “You mean — Miz Thomas is black?”
    It took me a second to be sure he was kidding.
    He winked to confirm it. “Minor’s always had a few Negro teachers,” he said, “to show we’re not prejudiced.”
    “But no black students, right?”
    “Not till today.”
    I followed him up the hall. “So I guess the whole integration thing turns out to be not such a big deal after all, huh?”
    “Oh, it’s a big deal, all right. Everybody’s killing themselves trying to act like it’s not, but it is. Don’t worry, you’ll catch on to how things work down here. The one thing you’re never supposed to do is talk about it.”
    “Oh. Sorry.”
    Tim smiled. “I mean to other people. You can talk to me about anything. I can translate for you. I have been trained to speak and understand most forms of Yankee.”
    All you need is one friend who makes you laugh, who laughs at the same things you do. Almost at once I knew Tim Cousins would be my friend. We had three classes together. He enjoyed making fun of everything as much as I did. Right there on the first day of school, we formed a team, just the two of us.
    Tim said Minor High was perhaps the best school in the greater Minor metropolitan area. I said my lousy first impression probably stemmed from the fact that I was a Yankee snob from Yankeeland. The teachers seemed to be fresh out of junior college, or else they were cranky old women teaching out their time until retirement. In retrospect my teachers in Indiana seemed witty, dynamic.
    “You should have stayed up there,” Tim said. “If I’d known you were coming, I could have warned you.”
    “It wasn’t my choice,” I told him. “My parents kidnapped me and brought me here by force.”
    I explained how we had lost all our worldly goods on the trip south, so we were having to furnish our new home one garage sale at a time.
    “Your family sounds almost as weird as mine,” Tim said. “How long are you in for?”
    “Twenty to life.”
    He grinned, and clapped me on the back. “Me too! We can be lifers together!”
    After lunch the day slowed to a crawl. I made elaborate doodles in my notebook with my new felt-tip pen. It seemed forever until the three o’clock bell.
    Bud plopped beside me on the bus. “How’d it go?”
    “Okay, I guess. I met one guy that’s cool.”
    “That’s one more than me,” he said. “Are all your teachers complete morons?”
    “Seems like it.”
    “Mine