The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton

blasted the audience to pieces. Miss Finch wouldn’t have been able to tolerate such a thing. The students usually sang songs by dead composers. Then, after they were finished, Aunt Sid had to turn around and bow to the parents. The entire auditorium rose up clapping and stomping their feet. I asked Aunt Sid to write and tell me every little thing in her life, because I wanted to breathe with her, and Miss Finch did too. She described the time she went to Chicago and heard a singer named Leontyne Price. She said she had dreams that she herself was a black opera star, and when she woke up she was awfully disappointed. I was shocked; I couldn’t stand to think of Aunt Sid as a Negro.
    I read the letters to Miss Finch and she’d say, “Ask Aunt Sid what her house looks like.” So I had to write to Aunt Sid, “Don’t send a picture because remember Miss Finch is stone blind. She can’t see her own nose.” I confessed that I stuck my tongue out at her, just to make sure.
    When I got Aunt Sid’s letters I ran over and ripped them open, and then I read the news to Miss Finch. There was the one summer Aunt Sid took a group to Europe. They sang songs and people threw flowers at them. Before they left the U.S. they sold thousands of grapefruits to raise money, and it had to make me wonder if the grapefruits were those Elmer picked way down in Texas. It had to make me think that somehow, in a strange way, there are a few binding strands between us. Picture it—Aunt Sid selling Elmer’s grapefruits to go to Europe, to sing songs to the communists so she can write me, so I can read the letters to Miss Finch, and add something new to her brain. It’s all a big old chain. There isn’t one unconnected link.
     
    There were parts of the letters I didn’t read to Miss Finch. I’d skip sections like this:
     
I know how hard it is to be a teenager. There is so much going on inside a person’s head and heart. It is sometimes difficult for me to watch my students struggling through adolescence; I think it’s much harder for your generation than it was for mine. You sound as if you have a good friend in Miss Finch, and I’m so glad you can share all the lovely books. I don’t think I could have survived if I hadn’t discovered the library in Stillwater, and Miss Ogelsvee, the choir director, who told me repeatedly that I had a good voice. Still, it is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can’t do anything else, read all that you can.
     
    I didn’t have much luck reading to myself because my eyes weren’t extra-strong. I needed glasses but May said she didn’t have the money for the optician. I wrote to Aunt Sid and said how adolescence, that’s what she called it, wasn’t so bad. I told her that every minute I could, I was out of the house, at Miss Finch’s, and that when May talked to me I pretended I was far away, and then her voice came to me like it was a thin column of smoke from way over on the other side of the mountain. That’s what I said, although we don’t have mountains in Illinois, except Starved Rock—where some people didn’t have food and they died. I wrote Aunt Sid about how I walked out into the night, back through the cow pasture and up into the woods, to the plateau where there are a few cedar trees and long wild grasses. I lay on the ground looking up to the sky and sometimes I got the queerest feeling. I could sense the earth spinning around, and I felt small, probably how a midget feels in a room with regular people. For a split second I had the sensation all through my body that there wasn’t a reason for our being on the planet. We were hurtling through space and there wasn’t any logic to it. It was all for nothing. Such a thought made me feel so lonesome I had to turn over on my stomach and cry for all the world. I cried for the little lamb we had once that lost its hind leg in a dog attack. It had to hobble around the yard bleating, waiting for someone to feed it corn. I