Free Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis Page A

steps of the school so antsy and twitch-ity that he looked like he’s sitting on a hot stove. Something had him awful riled up and happy.
    I said, “Morning, Cooter.”
    â€œMorning, Eli!”
    He jumped off the steps and pulled me over to the side of the schoolhouse so’s no one else could hear us.
    Cooter said, “Guess what! I seen Mr. Travis at the sawmill on Saturday!”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œAnd he was acting more peculiar than he normal do!”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œAnd we gets to talking and I seen he’s mighty upset ’bout something.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œSo the more he talk to me, the more and more upsetter he’s getting for no cause atall. So when he finally leave, I’m standing there scratching my head wondering what’s plaguing him.”
    â€œWhat you figure it was?”
    â€œI couldn’t make heads nor tails of it till a minute ago when I seen him going at the blackboard like a demon had ahold of him! Then I finally knowed what it was!”
    â€œCooter, quit playing. What was it?”
    â€œHe was acting so peculiar ’cause of what he was planning on doing here at school today!”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œElijah, you ain’t gonna believe what Mr. Travis is fixing to teach us ’bout this morning!”
    I waren’t gonna get myself worked up ’bout
none
of Mr. Travis’s lessons. I ain’t trying to say I’m smarter than Cooter, but I notice things a little better and carefuller than him, and Mr. Travis ain’t showed no signs atall that he could come up with any lesson that was worth getting this excited over.
    But if there was someone who waren’t enthusiastic ’bout his studies more than me it was Cooter Bixby, so for him to be this riled up maybe it was gonna be something after all!
    I said, “What’s he gonna teach us?”
    Cooter looked over both our shoulders then whispered, “Take a peek in that window and look what he’s writ on the blackboard. You ain’t gonna believe it!”
    I stood on my tiptoes and looked into our classroom. Mr. Travis didn’t usually write nothing on the board till we’d been studying for a while and children had started getting drowsy and droopy, but today he’d writ ’cross the blackboard in letters big enough that you could’ve read ’em from Lake Erie in the fog: FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT !
    You could tell Mr. Travis was feeling real strong ’bout this lesson, the words were underlined three times and you could even see that he’d been mashing on the chalk so hard that it had busted clean in two in a couple of places and he had to commence his underlining all over again! It waren’t nothing to imagine Mr. Travis standing at the blackboard after he’d finished doing this writing, huffing and puffing with his eyes spitting fire!
    Doggone-it-all, maybe Cooter was right!
    I waren’t too confident that he was gonna know but I asked him anyway, “So what do those words mean?”
    Cooter said, “You don’t know? I was kind of hoping you could tell
me
. But I done some thinking the way Mr. Travis’s been telling us to. I matched up the two of them words I don’t know with two words that I do know.”
    â€œWhat you come up with?”
    â€œLike I said, I ain’t got too much a notion what the first word and last word mean, I figure they ain’t nothing but some fancy mumbo jumbo. But we
both
know what that word in the middle means, right?”
    I must’ve been looking puzzled.
    Cooter said, “Eli! You work in the stable, you
gotta
know what …” He checked over our shoulders again, leaned in real close, and whispered in my ear, “You just gotta know what
BREEDING
is, right?”
    You didn’t need to work in no stable to know what breeding is!
    I said, “Yeah!”
    Cooter said, “And look at that first word,
famili-arity
.