A fiction by Emily Herring Wilson '61
In memory of Linda Flowers '68, great teacher, great friend

She was hard to figure out, but some friends never stopped trying.

“I don't intend to make it easy,” she said matter-of-factly when accused of being difficult, and then her hands went up to hide her shy smile.

Her school record was superior to that of any of the other candidates in English, but when the general faculty met her for the first time at the dean's house, the reception soured. A few of the men walked away from the noisy dining room to convene on the porch to size up their new colleague. It was their opinion, reinforced by their first alcoholic drink at the dean's expense, that a single woman at mid-life had no right to think so well of herself. This was after having overheard her say to the enthusiastic dean's wife that she had grown up in North Carolina in a nearby county; initially, they had been impressed that she had a Ph.D. from a private university in the North. By the end of the first year, she had stirred up hornets' nests by challenging arcane regulations, which required that someone else had to read them. She had a quick sense of humor, and she was generous — sending gifts, usually books, unexpectedly through the mail, which always surprised and delighted her friends; but she didn't spare their feelings either when it came to truth-telling. Only when it was about her students did she want approval, and then she denied them the advantage of knowing it by piling on more assignments. She never asked for any favors for herself.

She had grown up on a hardscrabble farm in eastern North Carolina in the 1950s, long after farming had moved on, leaving behind the outhouse as a sign of the times. She was a quiet child living alone with her mother, and she followed her into the fields every summer morning, washed, combed, and loved. They slept together on a narrow bed with a tick mattress, her mother giving her the only pillow. All night they pushed it back and forth between them, and when they awoke they smiled to see who had ended up with the pillow. Their inside smiles adorned the plain house. Morning, the child was light on her feet, brushing the boards with the feather duster her daddy had brought her from Raleigh. The mother's sigh was often heavy and muffled. In the fields, the two were silent and watched one another, furtive among the other hands.

Her daddy had seen a servant using a feather duster in a house in Raleigh where he had gone to the back door to ask for work. Even the servant had turned him out, but not before he saw her flick the air, so fanciful that he had laughed, just before the door shut in his face. He left town with a feather duster concealed under his jacket, and it remained his secret as to how he came by it. Someone had told him when he passed the city limits to look back to the left at the large house sitting off the road, and if there was a handkerchief tied to the fence post it meant that there was food to be had for the taking, and you didn't have to ask. The old woman had learned from her mother during hard times to set pies in an open window, and if you got there early, there'd be one still warm. He took it and ate it all and didn't even feel watched, and nodded and walked away. Just before sundown, the dogs met him the last half-mile, and when he stepped up on the porch, the child ran to him, and stopped when she saw he was looking past her, holding out something to her mother.

“Get away!” her mother scoffed. “What kind of thing is that? Will it help the child go to school?”

Her mother and daddy quarreled endlessly over the feather duster because he couldn't explain it to her satisfaction. The child was pulled both ways about it. Later, the feather duster was the only thing she had to remember him by.

Field work was hot, and she hated it. She was to weed out the nut grass, and once someone at church had given her a little hoe of her own to make her task easier, but she flung it aside. Pride! Pride! the mockingbird sang in the mulberry tree, and it occasioned her second smile of the day. She had a hideaway in one of the branches, and the bird was a familiar, as was the old coon cat with the bobbed tail that had got caught in a trap and so always was shy but somehow managed to look fierce. The mocking bird and the disdainful cat instructed her to make her views known from deep in the unknown.

Before she went to school, she had learned to read in her mother's lap, and she had never thought to ask who was her mother's teacher, but she taught her from the only book in the house — a Bible with a broken spine and pages missing. Her mother's favorite verses taught the parable of the sower, but the child knew they lived among rocks and thorns and placed no faith in finding fertile soil. By the time she got to grade school, she was in love with words, but she rejected the foolish pictures in her primer of rainbows and happy children. In high school she had been the favorite of two women teachers, who were smart and well educated by the state's woman's college. When they found a scholarship for her to go there, she refused it at first, until her mother wept. She had never seen her mother weep, not even when they woke up to find her daddy gone.

The hard part about college was leaving home, and sometimes she failed to return on time after a scheduled break. The first time it happened her house mother had tried to get in touch with her by calling the number listed on her records, which turned out to be her high school English teacher's. The teacher explained that she had seen her former student — the best she'd ever taught, she thought to add — and she was staying at home to help her mother, who was not well. She was sure that she would be back just as soon as she could. The house mother and the high school teacher understood one another and their prized student, and they silently agreed to give her all the excuses she needed. And so she graduated, with honors, and again, a teacher who had taken an interest in this quiet, brilliant student recommended her for graduate school. By then, she had no reason not to leave home — her daddy was gone, and her mother had died. And of course, she wanted to teach, if only to prove her teachers right.