A Sister, A Wayfaring Stranger
an excerpt

My first memories of Birmingham have little to do with what I saw. No, I remember what I smelled on the way to school. My nose always tingled with the smell of burning. I didn't know what was burning at the time, but God help me if it didn't remind me of that strong scent you get when you first step into a room full of sick people. You can smell their waste and their sweat, and maybe the kicker is that you smell the fear seeping out of them. The smell on the way to my elementary school kicked me awake many mornings. It followed us for most of our two-mile walk from the neighborhood, past the white folks' apartments, around the paper mill, and just past the mill yard. At least it stayed behind us when we got inside the school auditorium. Inside, there was just the scent of eggs and grits and the sound of about a thousand classmates assembling in line.
Bell Elementary was the only choice for kids like us in the whole county, and maybe even in the next. Some of my classmates came from little towns I had never heard of and never thought I would see. Some kids didn't like the size of our school; at recess time, they would brag to me about how they would keep making good grades, skip three or four levels, and go to Hayes with the other smart kids in a few years. But I was content where I was. Every kid I knew was here, plus several hundred who I might get to know eventually. My teacher led choir at church, so I never worried about forgetting which song we would sing on Sunday or not memorizing a verse. And who wouldn't want to be in the place where her aunt worked in the hall across the courtyard? Even on days when I wasn't so excited about school, she was there to give me a hug and share a slice of cornbread. So I guess I was pretty happy where I was.
Mom and Dad moved to the city when I was a baby. Daddy worked in one of those mills, but he always changed clothes so he wouldn't bring the smell home. And mom was a teacher. Not at my school, or any other school really. She stayed home and let the students come to her. I guess any given day, there would be thirty teenagers gathered in our living room reading to each other and multiplying numbers with letters. I never heard them unless I stayed home sick. And on those days, their lessons didn't interest me anyway. But I remember how they would recite things over and over – it sounded kind of like Bible verses with a lot more romance talk. By the tenth time, the students seemed to fall in rhythm with the sound of my mom shaking the wrinkles out of shirts. Sometimes, she would do laundry while the students were there. I never did understand how she managed to teach and fold and iron and wring sopping clothes at the same time. Still, with her, everything seemed to come out perfect. She would end class just before I got home from school and give the white folks back their clothes just after we ate dinner. Sometimes, she told me she even got a tip.