Fortunate Son

Elton had enrolled Thomas in Carson Elementary, only a block and a half away from the house. On Monday morning he would walk there with Elton, and then he’d finish the first grade.

Thomas liked school. There were so many people with so many different kinds of voices. And there were books and sometimes pictures of animals, and teachers who wore nice clothes and smelled good.

Thomas wasn’t afraid of the new place. He had not often felt fear. He couldn’t fight and he couldn’t run very well, but he’d learned to skirt around pain and bullies and anger.

So he looked forward to the new school.

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Wa l t e r M o s l e y

*

*

*

I t was a big salmon-pink building with red and dirty green unglazed tiles for a roof. When he was led into Mr. Meyers’s first-grade class, the children were all laughing at something, and the bald-headed teacher was trying to make them quiet down.

“Everyone be quiet. Back to your seat, Maryanne,” the teacher was saying when Miss Andrews from the Registrar’s Office brought Thomas through the back door of the classroom.

The children got louder.

Miss Andrews waved at Meyers. He pointed at an empty chair, and she said, “Sit here, Tommy. Mr. Meyers will introduce you later.”

And so he entered the first-grade class with no one noticing, no one but the boy who sat in the other chair at the two-student table.

“I’m Bruno,” the husky boy said. He stuck out a chubby hand, and Thomas shook it.

“I’m Tommy. I just moved here last week. Why’s everybody laughing?”

“You talk funny,” Bruno said.

At first Tommy thought Bruno was saying that the class was laughing at him, but, he thought, they couldn’t be because they were laughing before he got there.

“Mr. Meyers farted,” Bruno said then.

He giggled.

Thomas giggled.

Then they were friends.

Thomas gazed around the room filled with laughing black children. One girl jumped up out of her chair and ran from 8 4

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one desk to another while waving her arms in the air, all the time laughing. A boy made a farting sound with his mouth, and the whole class broke down. Several kids rolled out of their chairs and laughed on the floor.

There was a chalkboard with the letters A, B, C, and D

written upon it. There was a carpeted corner filled with toys and books.

The children were laughing and the sun was shining in, and for some reason Thomas began to weep. He put his head down into his arms, and the tears flowed onto his hands and then the desk.

If someone had asked him at that moment why he was crying, Thomas wouldn’t have known, not exactly. It had something to do with one new room too many and the sun shining in and all the children laughing at a joke he hadn’t heard.

“Shut up!” Mr. Meyers shouted in a deep, masculine voice.

The children all stopped in an instant. Now that the rest of the class was silent, Thomas’s soft weeping was the only sound.

“Yo, man,” Bruno whispered. “They could hear you.”

“Who’s that?” a girl asked.

“Why he cryin’?” another girl added.

Thomas wanted to stop but he couldn’t.

A shadow fell over Thomas, and the deep voice said, “Stop that.”

Didn’t he know that you can stop laughing but not crying?

“You, boy,” the voice said.

A hand pulled his shoulder, and the sun lanced Thomas’s eyes. The tears ran down, and he cried out from the attempt to stop crying.

“Who are you?” short, pudgy Mr. Meyers asked.

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“Thomas Beerman,” the boy said, but nobody understood him because of his sobbing.

“Do you know this boy?” Meyers asked Bruno.

“That’s Tommy, Mr. Meyers,” Bruno said proudly.

“Take him down to the nurse’s office, Mr. Forman.”

Thomas felt Bruno’s hands on his shoulders. He got to his feet and, blinded by tears, allowed his new friend to guide him into the darker hallway.

Thomas breathed in the darkness, and the sadness in his chest subsided.

“I’m okay now,” he told his burly friend.

“Yeh,” Bruno said, “but now we got the hall pass.”

He held up a wooden board that was about a foot long and half that in width. It was painted bright orange, with the number 12 written on it in iridescent blue.

“That means we don’t have to go back to class,” Bruno said. “We could go to the nurse’s office an’ hang out.”

Thomas didn’t want to go back to the room of sunlight and laughter.

“Do we have to go outside?” he asked.

“Naw,” Bruno replied, and then he ran up the hall.

Thomas ran after him. Even though Bruno was big and slow, he got to the end of the hall before Thomas.

“Why you breathin’ so hard?” Bruno asked his new friend.

“I was in a glass bubble when I was a baby. ’Cause of a hole in my chest. Ever since then I get tired easy.”

“ A nd what ’s w rong with you?” Mrs. Turner, the school nurse, asked Thomas.

The boy just looked up at her thinking that she had the same skin color as his mother but her voice and face were different.

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“Well?” the nurse asked.

“He was cryin’,” Bruno, who stood beside the seated Thomas, said.