Free Eden Burning by Belva Plain

schoolmistress, bringing the class to attention, became in those first years a summons to a new kind of pleasure. On the long bench under the trees he plowed obediently through arithmetic so as to get it over with quickly, waiting for the big books with their stories of knights who fought with swords and rode their horses in places with strange names. All those things happened a long time ago, he wasn’t sure when, probably before he had been born.
    Sometimes the teacher held up pictures. There was a stone church much bigger than the one in Covetown.
    “An abbey,” she said. “Westminster Abbey.”
    “What is an abbey?” Patrick asked, but she didn’t answer.
    Then there was a long car called a railroad and this, too, was in England. There was a picture of a man with a pointed long face and large, pale, bulging eyes; he was the king,George the Sixth, and you were his subject, you belonged to him.
    “That means you are English,” said Mistress Ogilvie.
    “We are English, did you know?” he asked his mother.
    “Why, who told you that?”
    “The mistress.”
    “Ah, well. We were slaves of the English. Did she tell you that too?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You didn’t know we were slaves?”
    “I think somebody told me. But there aren’t any more now, are there?”
    “No slaves?
They
make the laws,
they’ve
got the jails! And so, what are
we
? I ask you, what are
we
?”
    He stood there, feeling the knotted frown on his forehead, uncomfortable in the face of her strange anger.
    “Ah,” she said abruptly. “I shouldn’t talk like that! There’s nothing I can do about it, and it only gives me a headache, anyway.”
    She could say such odd things, things to make you think she hated the people who owned the estates; then, at other times, she would admire some white lady they might see on a trip to Covetown.
    “Ah, but there’s quality! So well dressed, such fine manners!”
    It was confusing. So much, it seemed, depended upon skin: what people thought of you and said about you. He knew, for instance, that people whispered in the village about his mother and about their house. She never told him, and he understood that she never would, yet here and there he overheard enough to bring him some vague understanding that her little money had come from a white man, the man who had fathered him.
    Over the dresser in his mother’s room there was a mirror. Standing on a chair, he could see how light he was comparedwith the people he knew, excepting, of course, people like the Kimbroughs. None of the children in school was as light.
    So he wondered about color and faces, Ah Sing’s, for instance, with his peculiar, narrow eyes.
    “That’s because he’s Chinese,” Maman said, which was no explanation at all. It was confusing.
       One evening she told him a story. He had been lying, for hours, it seemed, too hot to sleep. Lightning flared; the air was heavy and he felt the melancholy of oncoming storm. At the window where his bed stood he could see the yellow, flashing sky. Yellow is always angry, he thought. It was not the sort of thought he would express aloud; it would seem a stupid thing to say. Still, he always thought that colors were saying something: orange, for instance, looked surprised, as though something nice had happened unexpectedly. It was amazing what you could do with words.
    Thunder rolled and cracked; rain pounded the tin roof; a terrible crash shook the house. Maman came over and sat on Patrick’s bed. He moved nearer to her, ashamed of being scared.
    “You think a storm like this is anything? I remember when Mount Pelée blew up. That was in 1902, the eighth of May, and that boom was bigger than any thunder you’ll ever hear! People thought it was Judgment Day. They even felt the ground shake here on St. Felice, can you imagine that? No, you can’t, nobody could imagine what it was like. A cloud came out of the mountain; first it looked like smoke from a burning house, but it kept on