It’s true. Mrs. Vincent will never know what it means to live in the space between black people and white people. The spitting boy will keep her up tonight. And while she struggles with the challenge of spreading God’s love, Lottie will lie awake and remember her dead father and her broken mother.

And I will lie awake and imagine my own father in his house far away, surrounded by children that I will never meet.

14

The Lord Giveth

Saturday is set aside for “healthy body, healthy mind” activities: soccer for the boys, calisthenics for the girls, and track-and-field training for all students who’ve shown athletic talent. After lunch, we get a choice of activities. I work in the gardens while Lottie goes on an organized walk to the Matula Gorge. The gorge is to hell and gone, so I stay on school grounds, and when the gardening is done, I join the Saturday Scripture club to learn more Bible verses.

Sunday is our day off. On Sundays we get to sleep in for an extra hour, and after breakfast and church, we do whatever we want. Girls iron their hair straight with hollow-bellied irons filled with hot coals while others knit, do puzzles or laundry, and walk hand in hand to splash in the river . . . so long as a senior girl is there to supervise them.

I wash my school clothes first thing and hang them over an out-of-the-way bush to dry. Then I find a shady indoni tree to sit under and read Jane Eyre. I was right about Lowood. Jane has gone from being a virtual prisoner in her aunt’s house to being the prisoner of a boarding school that is similar to Keziah but far, far worse. We get Sundays off. We eat roasted sweet potatoes and curried beef and bread-and-butter pudding with raisins. It’s plain food made from cheap ingredients but warm and spiced. Jane eats cold or burned porridge, toast, cold meats, and brown bread, with a single mug of coffee. All the food is served in small portions, “scarcely sufficient to keep alive a delicate invalid.”

Keziah students do die. Mostly, they die at home in farm accidents and car accidents and by drowning in rivers. Lorraine Anderson and Billy Bernard are exceptions. A mystery fever took Lorraine in the night, and Billy dropped dead, just like that, on the sports field.

Billy died before my time, and I have only a vague memory of Lorraine, an older girl with brown hair and brown eyes. The death of Helen Burns, Jane Eyre’s best friend, affects me more than the deaths of real students who walked where I walk and might have sat under this exact same tree. I wipe away tears to think of Helen and Jane shivering together in the cold stone hall of Lowood Institution.