Chapter 8: The Ones in the Basement

8. The Ones in the Basement

The girl with the beautiful hands wasn’t in my social studies / American history class. I sat at a desk near the back with the thick textbook opened to some random page and pretended to be looking at it. Up at the front of the class Mrs. Dickinson, a thin, bespectacled old lady with faint liver spots on her hands and a faint white mustache on her upper lip, was talking, but of course I wasn’t really listening. Surprisingly more than half of the other twelve girls were.

On the podium in front of her was a class list with all of our names. Recognizing that I was a new edition to the class she decided to test the waters with a question about the Missouri Compromise.

I responded with, “I dunno,” even though Allison had softly whispered to me that she remembered a lot about the Missouri compromise. She told me it had laid out the boundaries of the slave versus non-slave states as new states were being created from the territories. I was surprised that she had reappeared so suddenly after a couple of days of just the thrum of a brain racing circles over nothing. Perhaps this going to school thing was going to be good for both of us. But the wisest course of action seemed to be to keep quiet and to acted bored. I’m not sure Ms. Dickinson noticed one way or the other.

In the next aisle I could tell that Michele, the petite black girl I had notices the day before, was doing much the same thing, feigning disinterest while listening intently. I wondered if Ms. D would ask her any questions, or be too timid about asking any of the African-American girls in the class anything that touched on slavery. I was a bit surprised that the old lady was allowed to teach us anything about slavery because we were definitely south of the famous Mason-Dixon line. But I noticed that she provided no judgment on the value of slavery one way or the other.

I picked out Erika at the front of the class, sitting at the edge of her seat, looking ready to pounce. Perhaps she was somehow intimidating frail, old Miss Dickinson, or at least trying to. I hadn’t known much time in classrooms, that I knew of, and Allison was being stubbornly absent, mentally couched back in our bed. Still, my read was there was some underlying tension in the room because of the topic. Of course, maybe it was just because I knew about Erika’s feelings on race.

My next class was English. We were reading something from Jane Eyre which was written by someone named Charlotte. Or everyone else was. I was new to the class and no one had given me a copy of the book. The English teacher, Mr. Perkins was as nerdy as they come, and probably gay. I wasn’t sure that he saw any of us through the thick glasses that rode down on his nose as he droned on about the book, and its significance to the progress of modern literature. His curly hair line was receding and he wore a white shirt and tie – another one of the public school rejects who had been recruited to teach us society rejects.

I scanned the room as I sat down in an empty seat near the door, and saw that the girl with the beautiful skin and slender hands was already present, at the far side of the room. The sight of her pulled my breath away for some reason, and I had no idea why she, of all the girls at Holshue House was having this effect on me. I wanted to take my finger and run down her broad nose, trace the chin, and then the lips and … Her skin was the color of newly ripened acorn, but soft. I could tell. And it was not anything like the ebony of Michele’s. My impression was that she was not African-American at all, but I knew that society at large would generally group her into their generic, “people of color.”

She was wearing jeans, a pale green shirt, embroidered at the edges, jeans and sandals. So as not to be noticeably staring at her I let me eyes linger on her exposed ankles where she had crossed them under desk , where my eyes could feast themselves on the skin without appearing to stare at her. My mind wanted to trace the shape of the bones, enjoying the perfection of each contour.

Erika and Michele were in the class as well, with Ericka sitting close to the front and Michele in the back in the row next to me, much like the positions they held in the American History class. Erika was watching Mr. Perkins’s every move. Michele seemed to have her eyes buried in a book, which I assumed was her copy of Jane Eyre.

At the end of class I rushed out to avoid the possibility of Erika trying to talk to me again. Strangely enough I also knew I was avoiding the girl with the beautiful skin and the long slender hands. Perhaps she had noticed me noticing her, and I didn’t know what she might say if she approached me, or what I might say.

For a moment I just hung out in the hallway, uncertain what to do with the few minutes of “free time” that we had before lunch, feeling incredibly awkward, with no one to talk to and trying to avoid the one girl that I really wanted to be closest to.

The safest thing seemed to be to go back up to my room and hide there until the afternoon classes began. But then I would be hungry, and while I had gone with little food my first few days at Holshue House, I really did want some lunch. Maybe, if I timed it right I would be able to slip into the cafeteria at the end of the meal, grab something very quick, and then rush out to class, pretending that I didn’t know the schedule, or that I had overslept or something.

I slipped through the steel door and into the stair well. As I started up the stairs towards my room on the second floor I heard voices whispered. They were coming up from somewhere down below, and it hadn’t occurred to me until then that I could follow the stairs down, that there was an area of the mansion that I had left totally unexplored. I went down.

This stairwell had been built of concrete block at some time long after the house it had been constructed, probably when it had been converted into a reform facility for young ladies, whose parents had enough clout to keep them out of real prison. The landings on the first and second floor were kept brightly lit with recessed lighting in the ceiling, but the stairs going down from there led into darkness, either because there were no lights there, or because they had burnt out, or perhaps someone had intentionally turned them off.

My quiet spider-self emerged as I moved on down into that darkness. Whispers, seditious, conspiratorial. The steel door at the bottom of the steps stood open a foot or so, just enough to allow me to slide in sideways without moving it. While the staircase had been built as a concrete shaft at the side of the original house, I had now slipped into something that must have been the basement of the original house, built nearly two centuries before. I put my back against a wall and could feel that it was stone, old stone, cold and a little damp.

As my eyes adjusted I could see that storage shelves had been built in this part of the basement, rows of them, much like the stacks of a library. I slipped around the end of one of them so that I was hidden between two shelves, one holding food supplies in cans and jars, the other big packages of toilet paper.

Through an opening between jars I could make out the shapes of two faces, close together. Each had a hand on the face of the other and then they were kissing, long and deep. It was a girl and a boy. In the dimness I was pretty sure the girl was Erika, the girl I had been avoiding. The boy I didn’t recognize – all the residents and most of the staff at Holshue House were female, but there was something vaguely familiar in his voice, like something remembered from another life.

He was saying, in a accented rough whisper, “They don’t belong heere. Thees place was created for those who deserve the best.”

Erika answered, “That’s right. They should have no rights here, in this house built for us, for the superior race.”

“It’s not a question of rights, but of who shall rule.”

“Whom?” she asked, tentatively proposing a grammar correction.

“Who. Subjective case,” he answered.

Perhaps not recognizing the grammatical term, she answered, “They, they will be subjects, our subjects, and we, we will be the rulers. That is the way it was always intended to be. This house is a testament to that.”

“Yes, and soon we will find a way to do something about it,” the handsome young man answered.

“It’s nearly lunch. I had better get back up there before someone notices that I’m not at my usual table. Yesterday that one darkie had the nerve to nearly sit at our table, but then I … I just looked at her and she got the message. I gotta go.”

The boy pulled her in for one more forceful kiss, his hand caressing her hips. “Tomorrow. The same time, my love.”

She didn’t say anything more, but pulled away and then returned for one more peck before rushing out the steel door and up the stairs. She pulled the door most of the way shut, deepening the darkness, but I could still make out that the boy had slipped away deeper into the cellar. There must have been another way out.

Moving back towards the door I pushed myself against the old stone wall, and then I heard them. The deep moans of a ghost, definitely male and crying in pain, so quiet and yet gently vibrating the wall itself. Then there was more, the sobbing of a woman and of a child, probably a little girl. These voices were nothing like the darkness that had tried to attack the Formula on that night and James in his bed the night before. These murmurs were not trying or frighten me, or threaten me. They simply were expressing a pain that ran deep and ghostly old.

But I was frightened and so I pushed myself away from the wall, and slipped back up the stairs to the cafeteria and the noisy clatter of lunch.

When I got there Erika was sitting with her tray with two of her friends. She gestured that I should come sit with them, but I pretended to not see it as I quickly grabbed a sandwich and a dish of soupy mashed potatoes, jumping out of the line without getting a drink for myself. At the last minute I remembered that I needed to keep from turning my back towards Erika, because undoubtedly I had mortar fragments and dust up the back of my blouse.

The girl with the beautiful skin was eating with Michele and one of the other black girls. I didn’t want to face her either, so I took my tray to sit alone in the common room. For a moment I worried what those people thought of me, what they might be saying about me, Erika and her friend, and the girl with the beautiful skin and Michele. But I quickly gave up on that path – it was just too much work.

I would find a way to keep my eyes on the floor and my interactions with everyone to a minimum for the rest of the day, through math and science and dinner. I simply wanted to be left alone to live within my own pain without having to worry about what was in the basement, or Erika’s little race war.