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rare that anyone referred to it so openly.
    “He can’t do anything, really,” Miss Anderson said after a pause. “He’s been talking and talking about how we need a long-term sub, and then this teacher comes along out of the blue. He’s qualified— over -qualified even—he has a master’s degree besides his credential. There’s no way Steven could deny him without it looking like discrimination. I mean, if worse came to worst, there could even be a lawsuit.”
    Mr. Sealer scoffed. “That degree’s probably not worth the paper it’s printed on, anyway. The female’s either. The schools are just giving diplomas away now, whether or not those people deserve it. I mean, who would ever trust a black nurse?”
    “Exactly,” said Mrs. Hood, her voice more squeaky than usual. “And anyhow, it’s not discrimination to want to protect our way of life. We should be able to have some say about who our children are exposed to. Besides—what if more of them come? What if they have children? Before you know it, it could get as bad here as Milwaukee or Chicago.”
    “You’re right, Gracie,” Miss Anderson said. “It’s about our way of life. We’re just thinking about what’s best for our children.”
    I walked home from school that day without anyone bothering me, maybe because they were so distracted by the news of the teacher. As always, I felt a sense of ease and relief when I turned the corner and saw my grandparents’ house. Like all the other houses on Dryden Road, their place had two stories, with a basement and an attic and a long yard stretched out behind it. There was a covered porch in front with a dozen shaded windows, a row of sleepy eyelids half-covering rectangular glass eyes. Between the garage and the back door stretched a small covered walkway, and that’s where I headed now. After I ran up the back stairs and into the kitchen, letting the screen door slam shut behind me, I gave Brett a quick rub on the head and went straight to my grandmother’s side.
    “Grandma, Miss Anderson told us a Negro teacher is coming.”
    She was cutting the ends off the string beans that Charlie had picked from the garden, and listening to Paul Harvey on the radio. Every day she spent hours on some such task—cutting, picking, canning, cooking—almost never leaving the house except for errands. She was an introverted woman, married to an outgoing and popular man—in pictures I have of my grandparents from the early years of their marriage, he is handsome and loose-limbed; she is tense and too severe to be pretty. They were an odd match in ways beyond their disparity in looks, and now I wonder if this fundamental difference in temperament—his ease with the world, and her discomfort with it—ever caused a rift in their marriage. Now she stopped cutting, knife edge flush against the wooden board. “That’s right, Michelle,” she said. “A Negro teacher.”
    “And his wife is going to work at the clinic?”
    “I think she’s already there.”
    She returned to her task, taking single green beans out of a white plastic bowl, snipping off one end, flipping them, then cutting the other. I stared at this procedure as if I had never seen it before. And although I knew what the answer would be, I asked, “Why is everyone so upset?”
    She sighed and put down her knife. “It’s hard to explain. But people don’t like to feel like they have no say over who lives amongst them. There’s no place here for people so different from us.”
    I didn’t point out the obvious, that she and Grandpa had someone different from them living right there in their house. But she picked up her knife and set her shoulders in a way that made it clear the conversation was over. I left the kitchen and went into the living room to drop off my backpack. My grandfather wasn’t there—twice a day, in the morning and then again after lunch, he walked uptown to Jimmy’s Coffee Shop. Earl’s Gun Store was right across from the coffee