Even without all the details, her insides bubbled over with excitement. She was so tickled with possibility that on more than one occasion she found herself skipping down the road, twirling, and laughing herself silly. She had done it. Sophia was the best student at W. S. Brooks High School and had been admitted to one of the most elite schools in the state of Maryland.
As she slipped off the main road onto the grassy path that led to the farm, Sophia’s thoughts wandered to the pages of the school’s brochure. The campus was sprawling, and the library was a buildingunto itself, unlike Mrs. Brown’s closet-size room with two shelves of tattered books. The dormitories had real beds, not a mattress in a storage room. No rooster to wake her before the sun or laying hens ready to peck her hand to bleeding. No more hauling hay, making soap, or feeding animals.
Sweaty and out of breath, she finally glimpsed the house. The slates of plywood that Walter had used to patch the shingles were cracked and curled from the weather. He must have run out of either wood or time, because there were two big bald spots with no shingles at all. The exterior of the house was mostly a dull, chipped yellow, except for the siding along the backside of the kitchen. That was half gray. Last summer the Old Man had gotten it in his head that the house needed a coat of paint, but he’d brought home only one can, and that one wall was as far as he’d gotten. The windowpane in the front door had a hole in it as wide as her foot and had been covered with plastic and reinforced with tape. No one used the front door, anyway. It jammed all the time, and if a person pulled too hard, the whole house seemed to rattle. If Sophia didn’t live in the farmhouse, she would suspect that it was abandoned. As much as she wished she had received the news from West Oak Forest Academy sooner, she was suddenly glad that Mrs. Brown had not stopped by to deliver it after all.
Ma Deary’s Rambler was parked in the dirt patch just to the left of the house. When Sophia saw it, she reminded herself to slow down.You can’t cross a bridge before you reach the river.When she opened the door to the kitchen, she saw that Ma Deary was still asleep. She worked the four-to-midnight shift at Freedman’s Hospital as a nurse, and the hours she spent at home were mostly in her bed.
Sophia listened for snoring and then removed her shoes, tiptoeing over to the short cabinet that doubled as the stand for the black-and-white television set. It had a catchall drawer for loose buttons, small tools, safety pins, pencils, scratch paper, and mail. The drawerwas stuffed to the gills, and Sophia had to rattle it a bit to pry it open. At the top of the pile were stacks of bills, a few with the words “Final Notice” blazed in red, two postcard advertisements, and then she saw it: an envelope crested with “West Oak Forest Academy” in navy blue. The letter had been opened, and when Sophia held up the document, she spotted a coffee stain in the top-right corner. She heard the mattress springs creak as Ma Deary sat up in bed.
“Rusty?” she called out to Sophia, her voice hoarse with sleep. Ma Deary had given her the nickname Rusty on account of her hair; Sophia despised the name. She was the only redhead in their family. In second grade, two boys had yelled, “Get away from her. She’s Satan’s daughter. Run!” Sophia hadn’t known who Satan was, and when she came home crying to Ma Deary, asking why she looked so different from everybody, Ma Deary just barked, “Stop asking dumb questions. Just be grateful for what you’ve got.” And that was the end of that.
Sophia held the letter between her fingers as she watched Ma Deary push up from the bed. She pulled on a pin-striped duster robe. Her big breasts flopped from side to side as she stuffed her feet into teal slippers. Her hair was in pin curls, covered over by a silk headscarf.
“Why aren’t you in school? It can’t be three o’clock yet. Feels like I just put my head on the pillow,” she said, and then leaned her torso forward and let out a “pfft.” Sophia could smell the sour cottage-cheese odor of the flatulence instantly, and she waved her hand in front of her face.
“?’Scuse me,” Ma said, shuffling toward her closet.
“Mrs. Brown sent me home.”
“What for?”
Sophia held up the letter. Ma glanced at her, tsked her teeth, and then went back to thumbing through her wardrobe.
“Ma, have you read this? Mrs. Brown said that West Oak Forest Academy is one of the best schools in the state, and I got in.”
“Who said you could apply?” she snapped. “Ain’t nobody notify me, ’cause I would have told them not to waste their time.” She inspected her uniform and, when satisfied, hung it on the closet door.
Sophia exhaled and made her voice softer. “Ma Deary, I’m the only one in the whole school who was selected to go. It would be foolish to pass this up.”
“Rusty, we’re barely making ends meet ’round here. Y’all eating us outta house and home as it is.”
And you inhale anything that’s not nailed to the table,Sophia thought, but she didn’t want to get popped for being smart-mouthed.
“Says right here that my tuition is fully covered by the Prosser Foundation. All you need to do is get me there. They’ll put me up, give me a uniform, and I’ll receive a top-notch education.”
Ma Deary walked into the living room, scratching the pit of her right arm. Then she looked down at her fingernails and flicked something white in the air. “The school you go to is fine, and we need you working this here land.”
“But Unc told Walter that he’d have two or three new hires by tomorrow. They could take my place.” Sophia’s voice cracked. She could feel her dream of going to West Oak Forest Academy slipping away from her.
Ma Deary sucked her teeth. “Umph, he’s been saying that all summer long. I’ll believe it when I see it.” She walked to the kitchen, opened the cabinet, and reached for her tin of Maxwell House coffee.
“But if he does, can I go?”
Ma Deary spun around so fast, it caused Sophia to jump two steps back. “Rusty. That fancy school ain’t nothing but a pie-in-the-sky dream. They don’t want no ragamuffin like you. You’ve got as much in common with them fancy white folks as I have with Lady Bird Johnson. Now, please.”
“But—”
Ma Deary picked up a spoon and slapped it in her hand and thenpointed it at Sophia. “Not another word. Now, since you want to be home, go on down there and harvest some corn so you can feed your brothers tonight and forget all this foolishness.”
Sophia’s eyes burned as she pushed past Ma Deary and stomped her feet out the back door. She ran barefoot up the hill, past the chicken coop, to the back half of the farm where they planted all their crops. A few weeks ago, Sophia had put in rows of collard greens, broccoli, spinach, and romaine. The cornfield had a slight slope, and the path between the two fields was wide enough for a tractor to pass through without harming the crop.
Sophia grabbed an ear of corn as if it were Ma Deary’s head, bent it straight down until it snapped, and then ripped it from the stalk with all her might. That woman didn’t have an ounce of love for her children. Why had she become a mother, anyway? To make them work until their fingers bled? Sophia grabbed another stalk. Bend, snap, rip, bend, snap, rip. She was holding seven ears in her arms before she realized that she had forgotten the wheelbarrow back at the house. She threw the corn to the ground, bent over at the waist, and screamed, “Ahhhh,” so loudly that she startled a flock of mourning doves, who took off into the sky.
“Whoa.”
Sophia turned to see Walter coming through the field on his old Schwinn bicycle.
“Rusty, what’s the matter?”
