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By Root 327 0

The trailer they used was not air-conditioned, and there were flies. Sometimes classes were crowded, and composed of people who—from years of being passive spectators in church, required only to respond in shouts or “amens”—found it difficult to take an active part in their own instruction. They doubted their own personal histories and their own experience. The food—donated by the local college whose backyard they were in—was bad. Bologna and pork and beans and yellow, wilted slices of lettuce. Oversweetened lemonade that attracted mosquitoes. And there was the smell of clean poverty, an odor Irene wished would disappear from the world, a sharp, bitter odor, almost acrid, as if the women washed themselves in chemicals.

Teaching was exciting only sporadically, when student or teacher learned something. Often no one seemed to learn anything. In desperation Irene would sometimes show films, because whatever the films were about, they seemed to threaten her students less than Irene’s constant insistence that they acknowledge their own oppression, as blacks and as women. From films like “Birth of a Nation” there would be an immediate rise; from a film like “Anna Lucasta” a stunned and bewildered silence. At first, anyway.

“It’s not going well,” Irene said, as Anastasia put a filter into the Chemex, spooned in coffee, and poured on boiling water. Through the low-slung kitchen window Irene saw the fog sliding into the garden, a cat napping on a rock, and a round terra-cotta urn of herbs on the back steps. There was a peace and unreality about the house.

“You wrote me about your school,” Anastasia said as noncommittally as possible, as they sipped mellow black coffee and munched on homemade carrot cake.

There was a side of Irene that Anastasia did not like. It was the side that seemed unnecessarily obsessed with the dark, seedy side of life. They’d once discussed Anastasia’s inability to get involved in projects that interested Irene, and Anastasia had shrugged and said, “You’re into pain!” They had laughed, but Anastasia realized Irene thought her incapable of deep emotion, and so, in a way, talked (or wrote) down to her. Since this spared her a lot of Sturm und Drang, she thought this was okay, and didn’t complain. She accepted the shallowness this attitude assured.

It didn’t occur to Irene that Anastasia could empathize with her commitments, and their college friendship had been based largely on a shared love of movies and jazz. Though she feigned a good-humored acceptance of Anastasia’s easygoing life style, and her reliance on personal fashion to indicate the state of her mind, on a deeper level, she felt contempt for her, as a person who chose to be of limited use.

“It ended for lack of funds,” Irene said.

“Who funded it?” asked Anastasia, politely.

Irene sighed, and began in a rush. “In the beginning, there was no funding.” The two women could not help grinning in recognition of the somehow familiar sound of this: they had both been brought up in the church. “In the beginning, there was no funding,” repeated Irene. “The women wanted to learn before they ‘got too old’ and they simply talked—and in some cases shamed—younger women into teaching them. Then there was a grant from the government that paid those like me who came from outside. The trouble with government funding, of course, is that it is so fucking fickle.… With the war going on in Vietnam, and bombs to be bought, government could hardly be expected to care that a few dozen old black women still believe in education.”

“I thought you said in your letters that some of the women are white,” said Anastasia, resting her chin on the back of her hand, and gazing steadily at Irene. She liked to look at Irene, liked her sometimes fierce brown eyes, liked very much the dark richness of her skin—but she could never say so.

“Oh yes,” said Irene, “some of them are. Three, in fact.” When white people reached a certain level of poverty (assuming they were not members of the Klan, or worse, which they very often were), they ceased to be “white” to her. Like many of her