Kizzy Ann Stamps by Jeri Watts

thought you were just joking around. Then I could see you were crying and Mr. Glenn was crying, and I could feel a blanket of sad covering our school and our state and our nation. I hope no black man did this. I’m running home to my barn to hide, just in case.

    My mama cannot stop crying. She made pancakes this morning, which she only does for funerals and birthdays. Today is nobody’s birthday.
    We ate our pancakes in silence, as silent as the syrup when it pours slow and smooth across the fist-size pancakes my mama stacks high. Daddy usually complains about those pancakes — he calls them two-bite pancakes — but he just swallowed one after another, barely chewing. His hand went from plate to mouth like the automatic pie machine I saw at the bus station. Pie gone, pie there, pie gone, pie there. The sad seeps over us all. It never occurred to me to walk today. I went to the bus stop automatically. When I called Shag to walk with me to the bus stop, she kept her head down the whole way. Of course I only know because I kept mine down too.
    Mr. Fielder didn’t say a word when he swooshed open the bus door. He usually mutters, “Watch out, darky,” or something like that, but today he kept his eyes straight ahead and his mouth shut.
    None of the kids moved as I walked down the aisle. Tommy Street didn’t stick his foot out. Laura Westover didn’t flounce her hair at me.
    I eased into my usual spot right next to the big tear on the backseat and felt the silence settle around me.
    You’ve given us extra time to write, now, as if even you can’t stand to break the quiet. I can see Laura crying, but she’s not sniffling out loud. And it seems the clock isn’t ticking as loud as it did just Friday.
    How can one man dying make the whole world hush?

    After school I sat with Shag at the kitchen table. I couldn’t study my spelling-bee words. I know we’re supposed to keep studying on them and working for that big bee at the end of the year, but it seems pointless in light of all that is happening in the world. Shag was lying at my feet, and I was kind of tranced, smelling the hot iron from Mama in the other room and feeling weighed down by the silence. And then the quiet cracked.
    James slammed into the house like a wind flying down from the Peaks of Otter — always a bad sign.
    “Show of respect, my foot,” he said. “They ain’t canceling the varsity homecoming football game.”
    Mama came around the corner. She was holding a pillow cover, and her eyes were pooled up with tears. “What are you riled up about?” she said, her voice shaking as those pooled-up tears flowed over and tracked down her cheeks.
    “They’re canceling the JV game and the junior-varsity hop. Because of the assassination.”
    Mama folded the pillow cover she’d been ironing, then snapped it open and folded it again. “Sounds like a respectful thing to do, James. President Kennedy was a fine man.”
    Shag scrambled up and away as James clomped over to the sink. Her toenails skittered across the wood floor, and I was reminded again of how quiet it had been. But that silence was shattered now — by Shag’s toenails, by the words and footsteps, by anger and resentment leaking loud in my home.
    “But they ain’t canceling the varsity game, just our game. Life will go on if you’re a white football player, a white cheerleader, a white high-school student. It’s just if you’re black that things will stop.”
    “Hush, James,” Mama snapped, her voice soft and hard all at the same time. “You don’t know who’s listening — I swear even the walls have ears, this kind of thing happening and all.”
    My mama is flitty right now. She figures the white world was set on edge by the Medgar Evers assassination, and he was a black man — there is no telling how tender the relations between races will be now that a white man has died. No matter that he died at the hands of another white man, a Communist to boot. We had all better tread