A PrologueIn Which I Arrive at Miss Preston’s
The first thing you should know about me, the truest most important thing, is that I ain’t never really had friends. Not back at Rose Hill Plantation, where the kids regarded me as some kind of outsider, the daughter of the plantation mistress and uppity besides; and definitely not at Miss Preston’s School of Combat for Negro Girls. Sure, Big Sue had some affection for me, and the other girls tolerated me well enough, but there was never a point I had a person that I could confide the deepest yearnings of my soul to in the manner of close acquaintances.
It was my own fool fault.
After the Negro and Native Reeducation Act enforcement officers took me from Rose Hill, the only home I’d ever known, they loaded me on a train and sent me east. It wasn’t because there weren’t any combat schools in Kentucky—there were—it was because there was a greater demand for trained Negro girls in the Eastern cities than there was anywhere else. I didn’t know it at the time, but the whole Attendant business had become big money for folks, churning out girls they could sell to the highest bidder, those fees taken by the schools as reimbursement for the training they provided us. And if the rates they charged us colored girls for our government-mandated training was higher than what families paid for tuition at the fancy Eastern colleges, well, who were we to complain? Life as an Attendant had to be better than whatever hole we’d come from.
So the boys were sent to local schools, to one day be hired out for patrols and die defending a wall somewhere, guarding some town that had no right existing in the first place. But girls like me were put on a train and delivered to fine cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore.
The trip is a blur, mostly because I cried my way through it. Adventure is only swell so long as a body is enjoying the trip. After that, it becomes an ordeal. Mine took me through Ohio and Pennsylvania, and finally to Baltimore, which stank of human misery, fish, and death. It’s a stench you get used to, although it would never smell like home.
We were unloaded from the train, hungry and tired, while the fine ladies of the combat schools haggled over us like animals at market. There was pushing, and maybe some hitting, and the next thing I knew I was on a pony—a smaller, overland version of an armored train—bound for Miss Preston’s.
I didn’t cry once I was gathered with the other girls on our way to the school. There were four of us: doe-eyed Jessamin, who would run off our second year, never to be heard from again; Bessie, who died one spring when she accidentally stepped on a shambler buried in a bramble patch; Nelly, a girl who was fond of reminding everyone how she could read, not that it kept her from dying a week into her stint as an Attendant; and me. We sat in the pony, each trapped in our own private hells as we silently considered our futures.
The pony pulled into Miss Preston’s, and for the first time since I’d left home I felt a stirring of possibility. See, Miss Preston’s looked like home to me. Oversized oaks, white split rail fence, deadlier exterior fences, a wide lawn. The school had been built in the manner of a plantation house, and while such a design caused the other girls to suck their teeth and shake their heads, it made me feel something that few places have made me feel: safe.
I do realize that there is a fine bit of irony in the architecture of oppression granting me a measure of peace, but keep in mind I was not always the woman awoken to the dynamics of power I became during my tenure at Miss Preston’s.
As we tumbled out of the pony and into the front yard of Miss Preston’s, the headmistress and school’s namesake descended the front steps to greet us. She was a large woman, and an excess of ruffles accentuated her size. She gave me the impression of a very fancy cake, all layers and joy, and the memory now makes me cringe. Had she been calculating our value to her own plans for ascension, like a villain in a Shakespearean tragedy, even as she greeted us with warmth and affection? I’d like to think not, but I know people too well to believe any differently. Folks are, at their heart, selfish, and anything they tell you is more often than not designed to meet their own goals.
I know, because I ain’t any different.
“Welcome, girls, to Miss Preston’s School of Combat for Negro Girls,” she proclaimed. “Here you will leave behind your old lives and find yourselves transformed into women of the world. It will be you who attend to and protect the finest and most elite women in this country. You will lead lives of bravery and service, and your future is now full of limitless potential.”
Silence was our only response. Because every single one of us would have done anything in that moment just to get back home.
“The upper-class girls behind me will escort you to your rooms. You’ll each start with form-one lessons. As you get settled in, the girls will explain to you the household rules. Welcome once again to Miss Preston’s, and I hope you take advantage of the miraculous opportunities afforded to you here at the school.”
With that, we were whisked away to our rooms.
The thing that stuck with me from Miss Preston’s little speech was the idea that we were embarking on a new life. But the problem about starting a new life is you bring your old self with you. Even though I was told that this was a great opportunity and I had a responsibility to grasp it and work toward greatness, I was still the same Jane McKeene that couldn’t help but run off at every opportunity to get into trouble. Back at Rose Hill, rules had been
breakable as eggshells, and just as easily disposed of. My impetuousness had, more often than not, been rewarded with indulgence, not punishment, and I suppose part of me had expected somewhat of the same at Miss Preston’s. But that wasn’t to be, and I learned right quick where I stood with the instructors at the school.
Two days after I arrived, I got my first lashing.
That initial night at Miss Preston’s, I had lain in the dark and listened to the crying and sleep sounds of twenty or so other girls. I would have been the oldest girl in my class, if it hadn’t been for a pretty blond-haired girl named Katherine Deveraux. I couldn’t say why I hated Katherine so much on first sight. Maybe it was her bossiness. Maybe it was the way all the other girls gravitated to her, as though her friendship and approval could change their lives. Or maybe it was because she smiled all the time, always smoothing things over when a mistake was made—but there to witness the mistake, every time, without fail.
And so when I committed the crime of taking an extra piece of corn bread at dinner without permission and Miss Anderson dragged me into the yard before the whole school for my first-ever whipping, Katherine was right up front, hands folded in her skirts, looking like an angel sent down to witness my punishment.
I’ll spare you the details of the ordeal. There were ten lashes, and it was more pain than I’d ever endured in my life. After it was done, Miss Anderson made some grand pronouncement, as despots are prone to do, and I knelt there in the dirt without a single regret, because that corn bread was delicious.
But when Miss Anderson left, it was Katherine who came over to me, who helped me to my feet.
“Jane,” she said, her voice high and clear, loud enough for all the girls to hear, “it will be okay. There is no need to cry. This is a trial of your own making, one many of us will surely endure, sooner or later. We are, so often, our own worst enemies.” She smiled that smile of hers. “But the rest of us, we are here for you.”
See, this is the kind of nonsense Katherine would spout, like she just couldn’t help herself. A barb wrapped in cotton, some sort of admonishment tucked into platitudes.
And I was not one to stand for it.
I looked at Katherine, my tears drying cold on my cheeks. “A trial of my own making.”
She blinked, as if surprised at how her own words sounded coming out of someone else’s mouth. “Well, yes. We all wanted an extra piece of corn bread, but only you were fool enough to go into the kitchens and snatch one.”
“There was plenty of corn bread. Why shouldn’t we all have an extra piece?” I crossed my arms even though it made my back scream in pain. A few of the other girls murmured in agreement, and I could feel the questions sprouting beneath them, taking root in that moment. Why did we have to be sent halfway across the country to care for some fancy white ladies that wouldn’t even let us have an extra piece of corn bread? Where was the justice in that?
But Katherine didn’t understand the change in landscape, and she muddled along on her high horse just as best as she could. “Because there are rules. You cannot just go around
breaking them. And if you do, there must be consequences. Otherwise everyone would just do as they like.”
“That don’t sound half bad to me,” a girl said, and there were more murmurs of agreement.
Katherine huffed a little in frustration. “You all are missing the point. I was trying to tell Jane we understand how she feels, that we are here for her after her punishment.”
Maybe it was the way Katherine said punishment, like it was something I deserved. Or maybe it was the way she kept saying that she understood how I felt, even though I was sure that fair skin had never borne the brunt of the lash. Either way, something in me gave way, and my black temper rose up, blotting out all reason.
I drew my hand back and slapped Katherine with all the force I could muster in that broken moment.
It was a good slap. The sound carried throughout the yard, silencing conversations and eliciting a few gasps. Katherine’s eyes widened, impossibly large, and tears filled them, though none fell. A thin tendril of horror uncurled in my middle, and in the back of my mind Aunt Aggie chided me for being too quick to resort to violence to express my feelings, but mostly it felt good to take all the ugliness of the past week and direct it at one person, to give it to them, a gift of pain.
“Maybe,” I said, my voice low, and a few girls took a step back lest the slap become a real dustup, “maybe now you understand a little bit of how I feel.”
Katherine blinked, and her tears finally fell. I was ready for her to hit me back, and I’d have a chance to work out the rest of my homesickness and heartache in a bit of fisticuffs. But instead, she turned on her heel and fled, back toward the main building of Miss Preston’s.
And that is the story of how Katherine and I became sworn enemies.
Sometimes, when sharp-edged personalities like ours rub against each other, it generates nothing but sparks and heat. But after a while, well, they can wear each other down until the pieces fit together. If it hadn’t been for what happened at Summerland, Katherine and I facing the worst ordeal of our lives and each of us only surviving for the companionship of the other, I suspect we would still be adversaries. We’re too different to be anything else. Which begs the question: What comes next?
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