Freedom Rider. cin:a /993
I'd thought I would love my children so they would never doubt it and they would be safe. My children would be safe from the nightstick, the hand groping through the curtained window, because Zekiel, Lucinda, Mattie Jae, all of us, with our bodies and our lives would Overcome. Each time Mimi whimpered and I couldn't figure out what danger she faced, I would feel regret rise in my chest like the reflux. Mimi sometimes cried as if, hit just right, she would die. I allowed Joy to teach Mimi not to cry. One morning, Mimi in my lover's lap as I drove, she began to cry aoout the paddles. "Mimi," said Joy, "yoll can stop crying." Mimi floated watery brown eyes at her. "Think aoout something else. Say, The fxlddle
can't hurt me." "But it can." "Think aoout something else," Joy demanded. "} don't want to stop crying," Mimi screamed. "Let her be," I said. "You baby her." "I don't want to go to school," Mimi cried out as I parked beside Kanawha Elementary School. Out of the car, I picked her up and held her against me, her baby-soft hair in my eyes. "We'll paint this evening." I set her on the sidewalk. In the flowered jersey dress I had sewn and dark, old-fashioned tights, she waved good-bye before walking into the school building. For breakfast, the cooks prepared biscuits and bacon, or potato pancakes, or fried apples, in skillets three feet across. Mimi didn't run toward the school where she did so well and I noted it. By spring, Mimi had stopped crying and the facial tic disappeared. The disappearance makes me think of how mountain home places deteriorate into the brush after a few seasons of standing empty. Long after the abandoned houses have disappeared, their location is marked by the flamooyance of forsythia blooming in the spring. Unscreamed yellow screams. My uneasiness aoout Mimi remained, returned periodically like the forsythia, and faded. At least once a week in the country school where I first taught, the crack of the paddle was heard by teachers and students. The whistle of the flat wood blade with quarter-sized holes cut in it. Students paddled out in the corridor so we all could hear. Whack. When I started teaching, if I called parents to discuss a problem or sent for the principal, they'd ask, "Use the Board of Education?" meaning the paddle. I'd say, "No, I don't believe in it." They'd say, "What do you expect us to do?" I don't paddle, but I admit: twice I have. I liked the troublemakers, started teaching children with so-called behavior disorders. I was bitten on the fleshy inner arm, scratched Summer 2004
147