it so naturally, I’m dumbfounded. To cover that up, I change the subject. “Listen, LaJuna, I’ll make a deal with you. If you promise me you won’t sneak in here anymore, you can come and help me in the afternoons…with sorting the library books, I mean. I know you like books. I saw you with a copy of Animal Farm in your back pocket.”
“It ain’t the worst book.” She scratches a sneaker along the floor. “Not the best book, either.”
“But…only if you’re in school when you’re supposed to be. I don’t want this to interfere.” She’s noticeably unimpressed, and so I try to sweeten the deal. “I need to get a good gauge on what’s in that library as quickly as I can before…” I swallow the rest of before there’s trouble with the rest of the Gossetts.
A sly look comes my way. She knows. “Now, I might help you. Because of the judge. He would probably like it. But I got some conditions, too.”
“Fire away. We’ll see what we can settle on.”
“I can’t always come here. I’ll try. And I’ll try better about school, but lots of times, I need to keep the little kids for Mama. They sure can’t go stay with their daddies. Losers. It was Donnie that got Mama in trouble for the drugs. All she did wrong was be in the car. Next thing, there’s police dragging us off to the emergency children’s shelter, and Mama’s got three years in the pen. I’m just lucky I had a great-auntie on my daddy’s side who could keep me. The little kids don’t got that. Can’t let them go back in foster care again. So, if you’re out to get in our business, make trouble about my school and all, then I ain’t part of this book project.”
Or you, her expression adds. “I need to know up front, though. Yes, or no.”
How can I make that promise?
How can I not?
“Okay…all right. Deal. But you have to keep up your end.” I offer a handshake, which she avoids by staying out of reach.
Instead, she adds a late-coming codicil to our agreement, “And you can’t tell nobody at school that I’m helping you.” She grimaces at the thought. “In the school, we ain’t friends.”
I take heart in the fact that this could mean that outside of school we are friends. “Deal,” I say, and reluctantly she steps closer, and we shake on it. “You’d probably be bad for my reputation anyway.”
“Pppfff. Miss Silva, I hate to break it to you, but your reputation can’t go anyplace but up from where it is.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Miss Silva, you stand there and read to us from that book and then ask us what we think about it and then give us a quiz. Every. Single. Day. It’s boring.”
“What do you think we should be doing?”
Lifting her palms, she turns and starts toward the library. “I dunno. You’re the teacher.”
I follow along as she moves confidently through the house, and we switch into project mode. Safer territory. “So, my thought about the books is to start a stack for ones we might use in a classroom library,” I tell her as we enter the room. “Anything from third or fourth grade level through high school.” The reality is that I’ve got kids who are years behind in their reading skills. “Newer books only, though. Nothing antique. Maybe we can clear off the desktop and start putting the antique ones there. Carefully. Old books are fragile. Let’s stack the classroom books over by those doors to the porch.”
“That’s the gallery. The judge liked to sit out there and read, when the flies and the skeeters weren’t bad,” LaJuna informs me. I watch as she steps over to peer out the doors as if she expects to find him there.
She studies the yard for a moment before she continues, “Back in the old-old days, little kid slaves had to stand there with feather fans and chase flies from the rich folks. And in the house, too, but in the dining room they had this old-timey ceiling fan called a punkah.