The Black Rose by Tananarive Due

needed canes to walk, and they were all crammed on their benches with their eyes on her. Some of the students in the back, who’d arrived late, had to sit on the floor, and they shifted uncomfortably as they fanned themselves. Sarah couldn’t remember a time when so many people had been watching her.
    And expecting her to read! She couldn’t read. That was the whole reason Sarah had asked Louvenia if she could take time off from her washing in the mornings to come to the school held every weekday in the basement of the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Washington Street. She told Louvenia she’d promised Mama, and Louvenia had asked their colored employer, Miss Brown, who said it was fine with her, so long as Sarah made up for the lost time in the evenings. Louvenia had told Sarah not to expect any fancy school clothes, so Sarah wore the same simple clothes she wore when she did washing and wrapped herself up a sandwich for lunch, which she kept in her lap. In this way, she’d been going to school each day, trying to pay close attention to every word Miss Dunn said.
    Sarah loved school, much more than she had the few months she attended the Negro school in the woods not far from the fields when she was very little. Miss Dunn was a better teacher; her old teacher, Sarah remembered, could barely read herself, and she’d been painfully slow at her figures. But not Miss Dunn. Miss Dunn had been to a college , and she read without any pauses or having to sound out her words one letter at a time.
    And Miss Dunn knew a wealth of information Sarah was sure her other teacher had not. She taught them about the battle in the Civil War that had taken place in Vicksburg before Sarah was born, and how people had hidden in the caves. If they looked carefully, Miss Dunn told them, they could still see the caves, trees that had been split by cannonballs, and even a few exploded bombshells. She taught them about the president of the United States, the leader of the country voted on in the election, whose name was Rutherford B. Hayes. He lived in Washington, D.C., which Miss Dunn had told them was a thousand miles away. And President Hayes was a Re-pub-li-can , she’d told them, which meant he was from the party that had fought to end slavery, just like the last president, Ulysses Grant, who had been the general of the Union Army that had come to invade Vicksburg.
    In fact, every day it seemed Miss Dunn had a fascinating new piece of information to share that made Sarah realize how little she really knew about anything except cropping and washing. And Miss Brown, their employer, was always telling her and Louvenia they barely knew anything about washing, either. “Washing clothes in water straight from the river!” Miss Brown had exclaimed when they told her about their experiences in Delta. “That water wasn’t proper. Didn’t y’all see how gray and brown the clothes got? Might as well have been using bathwater!”
    Sarah didn’t want to disappoint Miss Dunn, so her hands were shaking when Miss Dunn gave her a small square chalkboard and told her to read the first word written in white chalk. Although Sarah didn’t dare disobey, in that instant she felt she would rather run off and never come to school again than shame herself in front of Miss Dunn and the class.
    With unblinking eyes, Sarah stared at the letters Miss Dunn had written on the board in neat block letters. S-K-Y. F-L-Y. M-O-R-N-I-N-G. She sighed and started to sound them out the way Miss Dunn was teaching them, beginning with the first letter, then blending the first letter to the second and third.
    “Ssssss … kyyy?” she said at last, faintly.
    “Louder, Sarah,” Miss Dunn prompted. “And don’t say it like a question.”
    Sarah took a deep breath. Her fingers were so sweaty she was afraid she would drop Miss Dunn’s board and break it in two on the floor. “Sssss … kyyy.”
    “Next word.”
    “Ffffffff … lllyyy,” Sarah