Pearl of Great Price

FICTION Pearl of Great Price Tina Rae Collins BACK WHEN I WAS A KID people didn't talk about equality like they do today. The rich stuck with the rich and the poor stuck with the poor. If you had money you got all the breaks. And I was poor. But I had another handicap that the rest of the poor kids didn't have. I was half black. Funny how people never say half white. Like white is the color people are supposed to be and anything else is a mutation. I don't guess nobody even wants to hear about this stuff, but I like to talk about it. My mama always said that was one thing I wasn't lacking in was words. I never seemed to be able to put them together right for the teachers though. They wanted it just so, and I figured if I could get my point across I was doing fine. My teachers always tried to get me to make everything match—the verbs and nouns and stuff. But I talked like my mama taught me. "They's just two more months till your fourteenth birthday," she said. My teacher would have said that was wrong, I know. Two more months till I was fourteen and I could quit school. That was what I was longing for. Mama had quit when she was fourteen and she said that was enough education for anybody. I wasn't learning nothing noways. They didn't teach what I wanted to know. Even the history classes—and I love history—didn't teach me nothing. All they wanted to talk about was what happened and when it happened and who done it. I wanted to know why. Anyways, I figured if that much education was good enough for my mama if was good enough for me. Besides, it was hard being a mulatto. The other girls didn't want to be around me. It was like they thought my blackness might rub off on them if they got too close. One day I was standing in line in front of two of them to go to the lunchroom and I heard one say, "Do you reckon her blood is black too?" She said it out loud. Like I wasn't even there or was deaf or didn't have enough sense to know what she was talking about. Or maybe she just didn't care. I wanted to ask her if her blood was white. But you don't say nothing. It wasn't just the kids. The teachers treated me different too. I was sitting in class that day when I wasjust two months shy ofmy fourteenth 58 birthday and mybelly started cramping. I went to thebathroom and saw thatI was gonna have to go home. Ijust lived across the swingingbridge. I could have gone home and been back in ten minutes. I walked back into the classroom and up to the teacher's desk. "I need to go home 'cause I started," I said. She didn't look up from her papers. "Started what?" she asked. I didn't know what else to say so I repeated myself. She sighed and looked up at me and in a real loud voice said, "You started what, Ginny?" The whole class stopped working and looked at me. Then some of the girls in the back started giggling and it finally dawned on the teacher what I was talking about. She stood up and motioned for me to follow her out the door. When we got out in the hall she walked toward the girls' bathroom and I followed her. She opened the door and said, "Go on in." I thought maybe she was gonna give me something so I wouldn't have to go home, but she told me to go on back to the back stall. The back stall didn't have no door to it, so Ijust stood there waiting for her to do whatever it was she had in her mind to do. "Okay, pull them down," she said. I said, "Ma'am?" "I can't just trust you to tell me...