Flossie Pendergast struggled, her arms full, to reach the doorknob and
open the door to the old building. She hooked the knob with her fingers
and twisted, pushing against the door with her shoulder and knocking off
a few more paint chips. The door stuck, and she had to put everything
down and then pull, twist and push in just the right order before the
door creaked open. It was the same every day as she entered the decrepit
schoolhouse where she was the teacher, teacher's aide, and janitor, all
combined into one. In private, she called herself the Principal of the
school, but she couldn't say it out loud. That would bring the kind of
scorn and derision she was so used to, but which ate at her guts like a
rat inside a dead possum.
She surveyed her kingdom, such as it was, her eyes falling on the
scarred and tilting desks, with their built-in chairs that required a
student to slide into the seat from the left side. There were fifteen of
those desks, neathly lined up, facing the wall with the blackboard on
it. One forlorn wooden, straight-backed chair, two slats missing out of
the back, sat by the board. Other than that there was no furniture in
the one room that made up the structure. There was no desk for the
teacher. What few materials she had scraped together were in cubby holes
that had been nailed to the wall, patched together from odds and ends
of lumber that had been scrounged from the surrounding area. A former
student had done the work.
The school was in a region of the United States that was south of the
Mason Dixon line, and East of Texas - exactly where isn't all that
important - and most of the reason that the school was in such poor
repair was because the building had once been used to house thirty
people who, in these modern days, would gently be called 'migrant
workers'. In the old days, though, the workers didn't have the luxury of
moving from place to place to pick the cotton, or tend the tobacco. If
they felt compelled to move from one place to another, shackles took
care of that.
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