You pulled it back and forth with a rope. They didn’t have any screens back then. Just sometimes you’d put cloth on the windows, but that was mostly in cabins like where the slaves lived. Those used to be right out back of the barn and the wagon shed. There was, like, a couple dozen. But folks moved the cabins away on big rollers, so they could sharecrop different patches of land on their own.”
I stand openmouthed, amazed, not only that she knows so much history, but that she recites it in such a matter-of-fact fashion. “Where did you learn all those things?”
She shrugs. “Aunt Dicey. And also the judge told me tales. Miss Robin did, too, after she moved in here. She was studying up on stuff about the place. I think she was writing a book or something before she died. She’d have Aunt Dicey, Miss Retta, other folks come out here, tell her what they remembered about Goswood. What tales their relatives passed down. Stuff the old people knew.”
“I asked Granny T to come to class and share those stories with us. Maybe you can talk her into it?” From the corner of my eye, I catch what looks like a spark, so I add, “Since Animal Farm really isn’t all that interesting.”
“I was just telling the truth. Somebody’s got to help you out.” Tucking her hands into her pockets, she takes a long breath and surveys the library. “Or else you’ll just leave like everybody does.”
A warm feeling settles into my chest. I do my best to hide it.
“Anyhow,” she goes on, crossing the room, “if you’re from around Augustine, and your last name is Loach, or Gossett, no matter what color you are, your way-back history goes to this place, some time or other. Your people didn’t get too far from where they started. Probably won’t, either.”
“There’s a whole big world outside Augustine,” I point out. “College and all kinds of things.”
“Right. Who’s got the money for that?”
“There are scholarships. Financial aid.”
“Augustine School’s for poor folks. The kind that stay put. What’re you gonna do with a college degree here anyhow? Aunt Sarge’s been to the army and got a college degree, too. You see what she’s doing.”
I don’t have a smooth answer, so I revert to library talk instead. “So, let’s stack classroom books over there. But…nothing that’s going to give us trouble with the parents. No steamy romances or hot-blooded Westerns. If there’s a high skin-to-clothes ratio on the cover, set it on the pool table for now.” One thing I learned in my student teaching is that trouble with the parents is the bane of a teacher’s existence. It is to be avoided at all costs.
“Miss Silva, you don’t gotta worry about parents. Around here, they got bigger things to care about than what their kids are doin’ in school.”
“I doubt that’s true.”
“You’re stubborn, you know that?” She flicks a bemused glance my way, studies me for a minute.
“I’m an optimist.”
“I guess.” Hooking a toe on a bottom shelf, she starts climbing upward the way tree frogs scale my windows on their suction-cup toes.
“What are you doing?” I move into position to catch her if she falls. “There’s a ladder over here. Let’s move it.”
“That ladder can’t reach all the way around here. Look at it. Its little slider track stops at the door. The track’s broke on this side of the room.”
“Then let’s work with the bottom shelves today.”
“In a minute.” She keeps right on going. “But you oughta see what’s up here, first.”
CHAPTER 13
HANNIE GOSSETT—LOUISIANA, 1875
It’s deep in the night when I start to say the Our Father over and over and over. Scaredest night I’ve had since Jep Loach dragged me from the trader’s yard and left Mama behind. I whisper the Our Father now, just like I did that night all alone under the wagon, trying to call down the saints.
They came when I was a child, them saints. Took the form of a old pasty-skinned widow woman that bought me at a courthouse steps