Verbena by Nanci Kincaid

Author:Nanci Kincaid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workman Publishing
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

Thanksgiving was Bena’s favorite holiday. It was the one meal every year that she threw her heart and soul into preparing. She started getting in the mood weeks ahead, beginning with her class. They reenacted the original Thanksgiving dinner, Indians and settlers eating corn and pumpkins and sliced turkey from Kroger. Most of her students were black but it didn’t seem to deter their enthusiasm for the event. Half of them dressed up like Indians and the other half like Puritans. They made feather headdresses and Puritan hats and collars. Bena let the Indians paint their faces with red tempera paint and the settlers with white tempera. That seemed to her an African sort of compromise. Her students ran with it too, imitating the peculiar habits they attributed to Indians and white people. It was clear they considered both groups strange, and the exercise made them more than glad to be of African descent. Bena’d been in the classroom for years and was required to teach a yearly American history unit revolving around Thanksgiving. She figured she wasn’t tampering with history any more than most textbooks were.

This was her year to teach the slow learners—kids who usually had so much life on their minds that school seemed frivolous in comparison. But the notion of a big outdoor cookout where a bunch of people who didn’t really like one another sat down together to eat a bunch of odd food fascinated them. The concept fascinated Bena too. Those had been the sort of family Thanksgivings she’d known as a child.

Mayfred had the classroom across the hall. She’d started going out with a white man from church. It had her three kids in a stir. “We keeping it a secret best we can,” Mayfred said. “Long as Jesus knows, then I figure it’s nobody else’s business.”

Joe was planning to bring Lisa Rayfield home for Thanksgiving dinner—to meet the family, as he put it. “Y’all are going to love Lisa,” he kept saying, “especially you, Mama. Wait and see.” He offered these comments as instructions, not predictions. Bena sensed the panic in him. Another of the Rayfield girls, Bena thought. Who were these people anyway? Where did they come from? How many more would be sneaking their way into her life? Was this God’s idea of a test? Maybe if there were enough people at Thanksgiving dinner Lisa Rayfield would just blend in and sort of go unnoticed. That’s what Bena was hoping.

Without asking anybody, Leslie invited Corby and Sue Cox for Thanksgiving too. Sue Cox startled Bena when she called to accept, saying, “Sure, we’d love to come.”

Corby had spent the fall sending Leslie band tapes, so she’d gotten interested in the music scene and had started going to concerts over in Atlanta and Birmingham and even out at Larry’s with some kids from school. Sometimes Ellie went with her.

Eddie surprised everybody and invited Anna Kaye to dinner too. Ordinarily he liked to keep Anna Kaye out of the fray of his mother and sisters.

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