Whiter Than Snow by Sandra Dallas

condemned man had a final word, but just a sloppy lynching where the teacher mumbled the words of the Lord’s Prayer before he flopped around at the end of the rope like a catfish out of water. It took a while before he stopped moving, because the fall didn’t break his neck, and he’d had to strangle himself to death. Then the body turned round and round because of a twist in the rope. Joe put his hand in front of his mouth, hoping he wouldn’t throw up. He looked down and saw that Little Willie had wet his pants. A girl was sniveling, another shaking so hard that Joe thought she might tip over. He could smell the fear among the children.
    When the teacher at last was still, his head over to one side, the men, silent now, the bravado gone, got on their horses. “Now, don’t you little negras never forget this,” one of them said to the children. As if we ever would, Joe thought.
    The students were afraid to cut down the teacher, afraid to touch him, and they ran home and told their parents what had happened, although they didn’t tell the names of the lynch mob. And when dark came, the fathers took down the dead man and buried him deep in the woods. They knew better than to mark the grave. They searched the teacher’s room and found an address, and a woman who could write penned a note to his family: “Your son don get cilled, and we bureed him. Hes a good man. We sory.” She took the letter to the post office and purchased a stamp. But the postmaster must have wondered why a colored woman was sending a letter to Boston, because he opened it, read it, then threw it away. The mothers said weren’t they lucky that the schoolhouse hadn’t been burned down.
    The school board didn’t shut down the Negro school, as many expected. Instead, the school board found another teacher, a local girl who hadn’t gone further than the third grade and who understood what was expected of her. She resumed classes in the tobacco barn, a drafty building with no stove and cracks between the boards big enough to let a cat through. But Joe never went back, because there was nothing the young girl could teach him.
     
    What Joe learned that terrible day the teacher was murdered was not hatred as much as sadness and a knowing of the world, and, of course, that was exactly what the white men had intended. Joe was a smart boy, and when he first met the teacher, he’d decided he wanted to learn everything he could so that he, too, could be a Negro who stood tall with white men. He was embarrassed at the way his father, Riley Cobb, bowed to the whites, docile, obedient, laughing when they made fun of him, never protesting when he was shortchanged at the mercantile. Joe could count, and once he’d spoken up when the change came back two pennies short. His father had smacked him and said, “Shut your mouth, you little fool.”
    “But Pappy—” the boy said after they left.
    “Don’t you never tell a white man he’s wrong, boy, if you want to live. That’s the way of it.”
    School had been different. The teacher told them they were as good as anybody, and that they could own stores and farms just like white men. All they needed was an education. So Joe sat up straight and listened.
    The lynching was the end of Joe’s boyhood. He no longer walked along the dusty roads, barefoot as a duck, with his fishing pole over his shoulder. Nor did he play baseball with a broomstick and the ball his mother had made from rags. With no school to attend, Joe was sent to the fields to help his father, who was a share-tenant on Hogpen Lane. “He’s old enough to work,” said the landowner, who claimed part of the crop Riley made and wanted all the field hands his black families could produce. So now the boy rose before daylight and worked until dark.
    It was not an altogether unhappy time. Joe loved the smell of the earth, freshly turned, and the touch of the dew on his feet. There was pleasure in seeing the tips of the corn poke up from the