Educational Experience

Chapter Six

“That’s puttin’ it mildly,” Delores muttered.

“He has Asperger’s,” Caldwell said.

“Yeah, and you all were s’posed to be trainin’ them kids how to handle it!” Big Mama bellowed.

 “Kids aren’t counselors,” Delores snapped. “And they shouldn’t have to be. Wyatt shouldn’t have to be, either—none of us should have to be!”

“So if you got a illness or a disability or somethin’ you shouldn’t bring your little sorry ass up in here—izzat what you’re sayin’?”

Now, she’d made a valid point, for sure. But right about then I was becoming aware of something I’d been too unnerved to notice at first—this wave of reek coming off of Big Mama that actually started to make my eyes water. I could see everybody else starting to get a whiff, too—they started squirming and leaning ‘way back against their chairs trying to get away from the wall of stink rushing toward them.

I mean, I hate to say this, but she smelled like ass to infinity, as Aisha would say. I’m talking super funk, like unwashed gym socks, all the fried food she’d cooked in the past year and a lot of other kinda personal stuff I’d rather not mention. And some of that smell had to be coming from beneath her toenails—bear claws, she had. Thick, fungus’d up nails so long they curved downward almost over the flip flops she had on. I have never seen that before in my life, toe nails like that—I saw them because she’d pulled over a chair and put one leg on it that was bandaged around the ankle. I figured just the strain of carrying all that weight had sprained or broken it or something.

I don’t know how Price managed to offer up a very patient, “Alva, we are here to give our accounts of the incidents that occurred today.”

But Big Mama wasn’t having it. She turned to me and started huffing and puffing like The Little Engine That Could, and pointed one of her bratwurst fingers my way.

“And you had no business puttin’ your hands on ‘im!” she bellowed.

LeeAnn gave her this little glare and said, “He assaulted a teacher, Alva—hasn’t even been to court for that last one yet’n’ here we are again.”

“She come up behind ‘im!” Big Mama yelled. “He got a right to defend himself!”

“He was never in any physical danger,” Price said.

“These kids is always in physical danger—you got every kinda gang there is up in here! It’s like prison already, ‘way these thugs run this place!  White kid ain’t got a chance in hell in here!”

“He pulled a gun on me!” I said. It just blurted out—I knew better, but I couldn’t help it.

“That wun no real gun--see that right there’s the problem! You let ‘em sass you like that all the damned time—and that one there? That…assistant or whatever you call ‘im? They laugh at ‘im. Laugh at ‘im!”

The black cop went, “Lady—“

But she cut him off with, “Y’all do, too! When y’all come to my house you sing a total different tune—don’t even try to deny it. Firs’ thing you tell me’s how if there was some real discipline at this school you wouldn’ have to be doin’ his job for ‘im!”

 Caldwell was “having a stroke” red by then. And gripping this pen with the school’s logo and name on it so tight I thought it might break in two. But she’d found the weak link—we also like to take at least one prisoner down with us, my people. Some poor, clueless bystander. Caldwell wasn’t clueless, he just sorta believed in truth, justice and the American way and all that in a world where that shit just doesn’t fly anymore. I felt for him.