Shem Creek by Dorothea Benton Frank Read Free Book Online Page A

school in Montclair!”
    “There are over two thousand kids at Wando here.”
    “There are?”
    She nodded her head, thinking she had me, but it cut no ice.
    “Yeah, two thousand bubbas! Look, I have kids in my bio lab with gunshot wounds and they didn’t come from deer hunting, okay?”
    “Gracious! Honey . . .”
    “I know thugs with four-point-three GPAs that pack heat in their lockers!”
    “Heat?”
    “Handguns.”
    “What’s the matter with these children? And, more importantly, why would you want to know them? Aren’t you afraid you’ll get tangled up with them and get hurt?”
    “Not at all. Look, we’ve got the Bloods and the Crips for sure, but we’ve got every kind of nationality you can name. We think and talk about different things than the kids down here. . . .”
    “Bloods and Crips? What in the world?”
    “Gangs, Aunt Mimi. Like the Bloods and the Crips are totally famous all over the country. There’s this initiation you have to go—”
    “I’ve never heard of such a thing in all my life. . . .”
    “And that’s the point. Neither has anybody else down here. I mean, my term paper for world history last year was on female genital mutilation!”
    “Dear heavenly mother!”
    “See? People here are all the same. White kids hang out with only white kids. Black kids hang with blacks. In Montclair, we don’t care about that stuff. I mean, the black kids and the white kids in my school sort of go their own ways after school and even in school but the difference is we don’t look down on each other. You know what I mean? We live in the whole world! Not just one tiny pocket like this?”
    “Well, sort of, I guess. I mean, everybody thinks that the north, in general, is more tolerant of cultural differences.”
    “Aunt Mimi! Listen! It’s not about being tolerant! Cultural differences are how the whole world is! I think it’s interesting! Listen, you should see the black girls in my class—it’s all about hair and nails. And, shoes! They got some long nails and hair weaves that you wouldn’t believe! And, they are hilarious! They love me because they know I think they are very, very cool. I don’t want to be them; I just want to understand their world and how they think. Even the fat girls wear tight clothes and they aren’t all hung up on being skinny, you know what I mean?”
    “I think you’d find the same thing here, Gracie.”
    “Well, I don’t.”
    “You’ll never know until you take a look at it. I mean, we could sign you up for driver’s ed at Wando this summer, even today, and you could see who shows up, right?”
    “That’s nice, but here’s the problem. I don’t fit in here and I never will.”
    Aunt Mimi turned on the dishwasher and rinsed her hands for the hundredth time. Then she sighed and turned to me. “Baby? I have to tell you something. I think I have spent my entire forty-three years just trying to figure out where I fit in. And, you might be right, but only to a point. You’ve got the old ‘How’re You Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree’ Syndrome!”
    “ What? In English, please?”
    “Our grandmother had this problem with Granddaddy. He went off to World War Two, but actually spent four years in Paris, going to the Moulin Rouge and the Lido and God knows, French whorehouses, for all she knew.”
    We both snickered at that, because who ever thinks about their great grandparents having a sex life?
    “Ew!” I said.
    “Precisely. Anyway, after the war so many men didn’t want to go back to rural America that they wrote a song about it. My grandmother used to sing it whenever Granddaddy pulled her chain about attending covered-dish dinners at church or bingo or who knows? So, that’s what you’ve got! Lindsey was right. You know a whole lot more about how the world ticks than a lot of kids around here. But, not all of them. At least one kid a year pulls a sixteen hundred on their SATs and we do have cable TV, you