Homeplace by Anne Rivers Siddons Read Free Book Online Page A

students earning at least their D’s. And even Priss’s D’s came hard. Few of the farm and bus students liked Priss, but all were afraid of her. None of them liked Shakespeare. All of them hated
Othello
. It was well into the third week of January before Mike understood why.
    “Well,” Priss said on a gray morning of cold, tired rain, “we can see how external events conspired to set Othello up for his fall. But what about the internal things? What about the forces within the man himself? What single thing about Othello can you think of that, more than anything else, brought about his downfall? Yes, Wesley?”
    Mike turned her head curiously. Wesley Cato was a lank, bull-necked giant from up around Red Oak, chiefly famed at Lytton High for the BB that had been lodged in his eyelid since he was a child and the fact that he had repeated the twelfth grade more often than any other student in the school’s history. Mike had heard that this was his fourth go-round; she did not know how old Wesley must be by now. He was old enough to have fine, webbed lines in the thin, pouched skin around his prominent white-blue eyes, but that might have been from the sun. When Wesley was not working his father’s fields, he was abroad on his Harley-Davidson. Mike had never heard him say a word in Priss’s class.
    “It’s because he was a nigger,” Wesley drawled adenoidally. “Everybody knows a nigger will screw up ever’ time he gits a chance.”
    There was absolute silence. It rang in Mike’s ears; it seemed to go on forever. She snapped her head around to look at Priss Comfort. As Priss opened her mouth to deliver doom, the class exploded in laughter, and whatever she had been going to say was drowned out. He’s talking about J.W., Mike thought incredulously. He’s talking about Rusky. She took a deep breath. She felt as if someone had struck her in the stomach and knocked the breath out of her. She felt as if she were watching them all from a distance of about fifty feet in the air. From this cold, remote blue height she watched herself rise from her seat and turn back to Wesley Cato, and she heard her voice say coldly, “That’s not true. That’sa rotten thing to say. Don’t you ever say ‘nigger’ again in this class or in this school, you … trash. Othello is one of the saddest, best men I ever heard of; he’s five hundred times a better man than you are.”
    And while she was saying it, Mike was perceiving it as a profound truth, as new and simple and world-consuming as the fact of her existence: the black people I know are fully as good as I am or anybody else, and we have been treating them dreadfully for hundreds of years. They are like me; they
are
me, and I am them. This is wrong, all of it is wrong. Why didn’t I know this before? Why didn’t somebody tell me this?
    It was a moment out of time, unlike anything she had ever felt before, and she stood alone in the enormity of it, in Priss’s stale, overheated classroom, for a long moment before Wesley Cato’s furious drawl pierced it: “Well, it looks like Miss Mike Godamighty Winship is a nigger lover, don’t it?”
    A slow cold rage started in Mike, and a profound surprise. The thought formed in her mind and hung, perfect and heavy as fruit: How dare he call me that? How dare that white trash call me that? I
am Micah Winship
. She stared at him, anger coiling in her stomach.
    “Sit down, Mike,” Priss Comfort said into the silence that had fallen with Wesley’s words. “Wesley, leave this class and take your things with you. Don’t come back. I will not have that kind of talk in this classroom, and I will not have you in it either. I don’t care if you graduate sometime in the year two thousand.”
    Wesley Cato stared at her insolently for a long moment, but he dug his books and letter jacket out of his desk and swaggered nonchalantly out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Mike sat down, her chest and forehead burning. She felt faint and