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they reached the edge of the school grounds. There, smiles died and laughter
stopped and faces and feet grew heavy again. All but
Esther's. Hers had never been light. I sighed and turned to the papers. Here
was Abie's little book. I
thumbed through it and drew a deep breath and went back through it slowly
again.
A second grader drawing this? Six pages-six finished adult-looking pages.
Crayolas achieving effects I'd never seen before-pictures that told a story
loudly and clearly.
Stars blazing in a black sky, with the slender needle of a ship, like a mote
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in the darkness.
The vasty green cloud-shrouded arc of earth against the blackness. A pink
tinge of beginning friction along the ship's belly. I put my finger to the
glow. I could almost feel the heat.
Inside the ship, suffering and pain, heroic striving, crumpled bodies and
seared faces. A baby dead in its mother's arms. Then a swarm of tinier needles
erupting from the womb of the ship. And the last shriek of incandescence as
the ship volatilized against the thickening drag of the air. I leaned my head
on my hands and closed my eyes. All this, all this in the memory of an
eight-year-old? All. this in the feelings of an eight-year-old? Because Abie
knew-he knew how this felt. He knew the heat and strivings and the dying
and fleeing. No wonder Abie whispered and leaned. Racial memory was truly a
two-sided coin.
I felt a pang of misgivings. Maybe I was wrong to let him remember so vividly.
Maybe I shouldn't have let him . . .
I turned to Martha's papers. They were delicate, almost spidery drawings of
some fuzzy little animal
(toolas?) that apparently built a hanging hammocky nest and gathered fruit
in a huge leaf basket and had a bird for a friend. A truly out-of-this-world
bird. Much of her story escaped me because first graders-if anyone at
all-produce symbolic art and, since her frame of reference and mine were so
different, there was much that I couldn't interpret. But her whole booklet was
joyous and light.
And now, the stories...
I lifted my head and blinked into the twilight. I had finished all the papers
except Esther's. It was her cramped writing, swimming in darkness, that made
me realize that the day was gone and that I was shivering in a shadowy room
with the fire in the old-fashioned heater gone out.
Slowly I shuffled the papers into my desk drawer, hesitated and took out
Esther's. I would finish at home. I shrugged into my coat and wandered home,
my thoughts intent on the papers I had read. And suddenly I wanted to cry-to
cry for the wonders that had been and were no more. For the heritage of
attainment and achievement these children had but couldn't use. For the
dream-come-true of what they were capable of doing but weren't permitted to
do. For the homesick yearning that filled every line they had written-these
unhappy exiles, three generations removed from any physical knowledge of the
Home.
I stopped on the bridge and leaned against the railing in the half dark.
Suddenly I felt a welling homesickness. That was what the world should be
like-what it could be like if only-if only...
But my tears for the Home were as hidden as the emotions of Mrs. Diemus when
she looked up uncuriously as I came through the kitchen door.
"Good evening," she said. "I've kept your supper warm."
"Thank you." I shivered convulsively. "It is getting cold."
I sat on the edge of my bed that night, letting the memory of the kids' papers
wash over me, trying to fill in around the bits and snippets that they had
told of the Home. And then I began to wonder. All of them who wrote about the
actual Home had been so happy with their memories. From Timmy and his "Shinny
ship as high as a montin and faster than two jets," and Dorcas' wandering
tenses as though yesterday and today were one: "The flowers were like lights.
At night it isn't dark becas they shine so bright and when the moon came up
the breeos sing and the music was so you can see it like rain falling around
only happyer"; up to Miriam's wistful "On Gathering Day there was a big
party. Everybody came dressed in beautiful clothes with flahmen in the girls'
hair. Flahmen are flowers but they're good to eat. And if a girl felt her
heart sing for a boy they ate a flahmen together and started two-ing."
Then, if all these memories were so happy, why the rigid suppression of them
by grownups? Why the pall of unhappiness over everyone? You can't mourn
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forever for a wrecked ship. Why a hidey hole for disobedient children? Why the
misery and frustration when, if they could do half of what I didn't fully
understand from Joel and Matt's highly technical papers, they could make
Bendo an Eden?
I reached for Esther's paper. I had put it on the bottom on purpose. I dreaded
reading it. She had sat with her head buried on her arms on her desk most of
the time the others were writing busily. At widely separated intervals she bad
scribbled a line or two as though she were doing something shameful. She, of
all the children, had seemed to find no relief in her remembering.
I smoothed the paper on my lap.
"I remember," she had written. "We were thursty. There was water in the creek
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