passage.
This passage is adapted from Maxine Clair, October Suite.
©2001 by Maxine Clair.
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When she began occasionally calling
... [Show More] herself
October, she was only ten years old. Others said it
was ridiculous, said she was nobody trying to be
somebody. But she made convincing noises about
given names, how you could give one to yourself,
how it could be more like you than your real name.
She never dared say she hated the name that her
father had saddled on her, never said the new name
had anything to do with the memory of her mother,
who had lost her life. Instead she had mentioned all
the strange names of people they knew, like
Daybreak Honor, and a classmate’s aunt, Fourteen.
The pastor of their church had named his daughter
Dainty. Usually that fact had made people stop and
consider.
Then when she was girl-turned-grown-seventeen,
struck by her own strangeness and by the whole idea
of seasons, she had put it on like a coat and fastened
it around her. October was her name.
Midmorning, on a flaming day in that season—a
Saturday—October sat in the upstairs kitchenette at
Pemberton House, sewing on her black iron Singer.
It was 1950. She was twenty-three, and thanking her
lucky stars for a room in the best house for Negro
women teachers in Wyandotte County. Situated in
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the middle of the block on Oceola Avenue, the
two-story white clapboard set the standard for
decent, with its deep front yard and arborlike pear
trees, its clipped hedges and the painted wicker
chairs on the porch.
From her window she could look down on the
backyard and see Mrs. Pemberton’s precious
marigolds bunched along the back fence, and in front
of them, a few wilting tomato plants and short rows
of collards that waited to be tenderized by the first
frost in Mr. Pemberton’s garden.
A few months before, on the very same June day
that Cora had pushed her to take advantage of the
vacancy coming up at Pemberton House, October
Brown had knocked on the door, hoping. Word was
that you had to know somebody. For her cadetteacher
year at Stowe School, she had lived with the
Reverend Jackson and his wife. Not so bad, but
farther away and further down the scale of nice. Mr.
Pemberton, in undershirt and suspenders, had
opened the door, but his wife, Lydia Pemberton—
gold hoops sparkling, crown of silvery braids—had
invited her in.
“We don’t take nothin but schoolteachers,” Mrs.
Pemberton had said. When October explained that
indeed, she was a teacher, Mrs. Pemberton had
looked her up and down.
“Whereabouts?” [Show Less]