Come a Stranger (24 page)

Mina sat at the kitchen table, with the dark empty house
around her. The assignment was to write about a real person having a real conflict. She had decided right away to write about herself, and she wrote it pretending she was writing about someone else, so no one would know until the end who it was. She picked out examples of conflicts anybody could have, because when it came to the point, she didn't want to write the real truth. She really wanted to write about dance camp, to say how bad it was the way those white people acted. More than that, she wanted to write about Tamer Shipp and wrap her memories around with words. But she didn't want to write out her real feelings for anybody else to know.

The essay sounded as if she wasn't hiding anything, but she was hiding everything. Mina liked that. She knew, if they had to read them aloud, everybody would like it too, because they'd know it was Mina making her own form of mischief. It was a good essay. It made her laugh as she wrote.

Everything was rolling along right for Mina that fall, except Dicey Tillerman. The intermediate tennis class was fun, classes were pretty easy, and wherever she went people liked her. She was even getting to know some of the upperclassmen. One of the ones she wanted to meet was that guitar-playing boy Dicey talked to, because she'd heard him playing out by the bike rack a couple of times and she liked the sound of his music. Besides, she said to Kat, who also wanted to meet him, he was pretty good looking, even if he was white. “Good looking?” Kat said, staring back at him, hoping he'd notice her. “He's beautiful.”

Mina was having a fine time in her life. Dicey Tillerman was no worse than a little splinter of discontent, the kind of little splinter that you can't quite get out, although you are aware of its sharp and irritating presence. Mina would have liked to show Dicey, but that wasn't anything to do with Dicey or anything Dicey actually did. Dicey didn't pay any attention to Mina. To
try to get her would be like letting the splinter work its way in closer to your bloodstream, deeper into your flesh.

Mina got all A's on her report card, and she asked her parents if they'd get her a tennis racquet for her Christmas present. “I don't know if it's too expensive,” she said. “The school has some, so it's okay if it's too expensive. But I'd like it.”

“Why?” her mother wondered.

“I'm good at it,” Mina said. “I'm not uncoordinated.”

“I know you're not uncoordinated,” her mother said, “but—”

Mina's mood got out of her control at that “but.” She didn't know why, except that she'd felt sad all day, maybe because she'd dreamed about Tamer Shipp, dreamed that she was looking for him and couldn't find him. Maybe some of it was the strain of convincing herself that she was more interested in the many friends she did have than in the one she didn't, or pretending to herself that she didn't care if Dicey was the kind of person who rejected someone because she was black. Maybe she was just tired of waiting around for her English essay to come back, tired of Mr. Chappelle's weak excuses. Whatever the reason, she heard her voice get high and say, “You don't understand, you just think everything has to do with being black, or female, you just don't know anything about me and you act like you do. I'll save up and buy the racquet for myself since you feel that way.” She burst out of the room and up the stairs to her own room. Up there, she slammed the drawers for a while until she felt a little better.

*   *   *

The day Mr. Chappelle finally returned their essays, he said he wanted to read a couple aloud. Mina's was the first one he chose. She wasn't surprised. She listened to it, to how it sounded, and listened to the response it got. It was the response she expected. She kept her eyes down, enjoying herself. Then she started listening to what she'd written, and she stopped enjoying it, because
she hadn't told the really important things. She'd talked about laughing and crying and seeming confident, but being insecure. She'd made it sound like she was being perfectly frank and open. But she hadn't had the courage to tell the real truth.

Mina wasn't any too pleased with herself, even though at the same time she was really pleased with herself. She wondered if black people just never did talk about what was true, the way she hadn't. And if that was the case, how could they expect whites to understand? Maybe they really wanted to stay back angry, maybe she did—so she wouldn't have to face up to things. Really face up to them. Mina sat there, enjoying how smart she was and wondering, but hiding the wondering. It was nobody else's business, was it?

When they got to the last line of the essay, where she identified herself as both writer and subject, everybody thought it was terrific. Mr. Chappelle got her to stand up. He was pleased with her, because reading her essay made him look good to the class. Dicey was impressed and didn't try to hide it. Mina was pleased and didn't try to hide it from herself. But even as she sat down again, smiling broadly, she knew what she hadn't had the courage to do.

Mina settled back to listen to the other essay. This was about someone called Mrs. Liza, and about one sentence into it, Mina realized that somebody was talking right to her heart, right from whoever's heart it was that wrote it. The essay wasn't about feelings, but it touched Mina's feelings about this poor lady who lived with her kids and no husband, who walked “like a song sung without accompaniment.” Mina could see that, even while her memory supplied a better word,
a cappella.
This person told the real truth. Whoever wrote it had the courage for that. When it ended, with Mrs. Liza somewhere absolutely alone, worse than where she'd started out, Mina thought it was about anybody who'd ever been beaten down, by one other person or a bunch of other people or society. She didn't know who Mrs.
Liza was, but she'd met her before, a hundred times she'd bet. Miz Hunter's great-grandaddy was Mrs. Liza, and so was Miz Hunter too, and Mina sometimes, and Mr. Shipps' bassoon voice because there was something helpless in it, something lost, something good just thrown away.

Mina felt as if she could have cried for how true the essay was. Instead, she broke the silence by making a joke. “That surely
is
a horse of another color. I guess it beat me around the track before I even got out of the starting gate.” She looked around, to see who had written it, because she meant what she said. She didn't mind being beaten out by something that good. She'd only mind not getting a chance to say how much she liked being beaten out by something that good.

Even, she realized, watching how hard Dicey was fighting to keep her face expressionless, if it was Dicey Tillerman. She wondered, for a minute, who the lady was, maybe the grandmother who was supposed to be crazy anyway. Mina let the class talk on around her, her heart still reverberating from what she'd heard. She wished, she really wished—she thought, her eye on Dicey's profile with its straight nose and large mouth—she thought, angrily, that Dicey should know that Mina was a friend worth having. Except Dicey didn't seem to think that.

After some questions back and forth, Mr. Chappelle told Dicey to stand up, because she had written the essay. Mina made herself smile across the room—because it was good, whatever else Mina was thinking—but Dicey just stood there, her eyes fixed on Mr. Chappelle's face, as if she knew something nobody else did.

“Do you have something to say?” Mr. Chappelle asked Dicey. Mina heard it in his voice: He thought she hadn't written the essay herself.

Dicey didn't move a muscle and Mr. Chappelle talked on. He was edging up on the accusation. Everybody else caught on,
and the whole air of the classroom got that excited silence, like people gathering together around the scene of an accident, people watching somebody else's trouble and pain.

Mina looked at Dicey, who wasn't giving Mr. Chappelle an inch, not a word. She was so disappointed. She really wished Dicey
had
written the thing herself. Mr. Chappelle paced his sentences out slow, talking about plagiarism. He knew Dicey was helpless. He knew anything she said or did wouldn't do any good. So he kept on slow, making it as hard on her as possible. Everybody was enjoying it too. Nobody liked Dicey, nobody cared about her because she didn't pay any attention to anybody, so they were almost glad she was the one chosen to be humiliated like this.

Served her right too, Mina started to think to herself; and then she realized that if Dicey had cheated on the essay, then Mina was entirely wrong about everything she'd thought about the girl. Mina didn't think she could be so entirely wrong about something, not entirely like this, and she started to think that the kind of person who would cheat wouldn't just stand there like that, not giving an inch.

“What I primarily resent is the deceitfulness of it,” Mr. Chappelle said, dragging each word out, “the cheap trickery, the lies.”

Nobody in that room could begin to think that Dicey cared enough about them to go to so much trouble. Mina was on her feet before she thought any further. Whatever Dicey Tillerman might think of her personally, she thought more of herself than to stay quiet. Mina figured if she had to choose, she would choose to be among the people who were willing to stand up for the truth. One of the minority who stood up against. . . whatever was trying to press people down by lies. She was already stuck in a couple of other minorities, she thought to herself, she might as well join this one. “That's not true,” she heard herself say.

She met Dicey's eyes across the classroom. Mina's mind stayed cool as she talked, but she didn't feel cool in any of the rest of her. She was angry at everybody, at the teacher for doing this to a kid, at the rest of them for allowing it, and at herself for not having the courage to write out the truth. The bell rang before Mina was through, but she told everybody, including Mr. Chappelle, to stay there.

As Mina said that, she felt herself spreading out her whole personality, like limbs from some big tree, over everybody in the room. They stayed put, and she had known they would. The only one in that room she couldn't keep in place by the force of her personality alone was Dicey, and Dicey's eyes looked like the eyes of somebody walking home after a war, someone whose side had lost and was going to have to rebuild a whole life.

Mina didn't let her sympathy get in her way, and she didn't try to stop herself from enjoying herself. It took about five questions to show everybody that Dicey would never have cheated. Mina asked those questions. Dicey answered them. Then Mina nodded her head and left the classroom without a backward glance.

People caught up with her in the hall, to tell her how terrific she was and to laugh about the teacher's embarrassment. Mina heard them, but didn't count them for much, because these people had been just as ready to let Dicey stand alone there and be lied about. She didn't expect Dicey to do anything so commonplace as say thank you, so she guessed she wasn't disappointed to be ignored in Home Ec. Besides, Mina admitted to herself, she hadn't done it for Dicey Tillerman, or for Tamer Shipp either. She'd done it for herself, Mina Smiths. She hadn't done it for pity, but for her own self-respect.

W
hen the phone rang, late that evening, Mina was drilling Belle on a list of vocabulary words for Math. This was Business Math, and there was a lot of accounting in the course, Belle said, which made it harder. You had to know the vocabulary to understand the way the problems were stated. “Invoice,” Mina asked. Belle started to spell the word, and Mina watched her sister's face as she concentrated. Belle was proud of being practical; her standards for herself in this course were as high as her standards for personal appearance. The phone rang, and her father called out from the living room that he'd get it. Mina watched Belle and decided that she'd probably make a really good secretary.

“Do you know what time it is?” their father's voice asked.

Belle smiled at Mina, sharing the joke. It was probably one of the boys who often called Belle up. Their father was pretty strict about phone calls, and he wasn't too wild about Belle being so popular. All of their friends had been grilled by him for calling up at what he considered the wrong time.

They heard him say, “I'll get Mina,” which surprised them both. He came into the kitchen with an odd expression on his face to tell her a Dicey Tillerman was on the phone. “Don't talk long,” he told her, following her back to the living room.

“I won't, Dad,” she told him, and she didn't. Dicey had just called to say thank you. Mina made conversation, from the front
of her head, but most of her mind was thinking how weird it was: What kind of a person wouldn't realize for hours that she wanted to say thank you? It didn't sound like someone was forcing Dicey to call, so how come—having put it off for so long—Dicey didn't wait until school.

Mina's father was watching her, and she knew he was going to have something to say. She knew he remembered the name.

“What was that about?”

“Oh,” Mina said, still standing by the phone table. “It was just . . . the teacher accused her of cheating today, and I . . . kind of defended her.”

“Mina?” Belle called from the kitchen.

“She'll be a few minutes,” their father answered. “Sit down,” he told Mina. She sat across from him on the sofa. “Why did you defend her? Is she a particular friend of yours?”

Mina watched the way her father reserved judgment. He wasn't ever hasty. He waited until he had the information that he thought he needed. His eyes looked at her, waiting to understand.

“I guess I like her. I'm not sure how she feels about me. But—I knew she wouldn't cheat.”

“Do you know her that well?”

Mina shook her head. “She's new this year. It wasn't just rooting for the underdog, Dad, I know that's what you're thinking.”