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Coming of Age in America
Part 27 |
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It became evident to the school’s superintendent during my senior year that it would be the last year the school would be segregated. It appeared Jim Crow was dying. We already had a few black children attending in lower grades, even a few in high school, but our senior class was to be the last fully segregated class. I suppose the powers that be didn’t know what to expect in the future or they were afraid of what would happen when the county schools fully integrated, so they began to throttle back on clubs and other organizations that year. The LHS Review was among the programs that were axed. The yearbook staff was the only organization I am aware of that remained in tack. Our paper staff sponsor was livid, but there was nothing she could do. The decision had been made by folks way above her pay grade. They pulled the plug on our school paper. By then I had taken over my middle brother’s job at Jones Men’s Wear after he graduated and went off to Millsaps in the fall of 1967. I earned a whopping four dollars a day, plus one half of one percent commission on everything I sold. Most of my earnings were spent purchasing clothes the owner sold me at a discount. So I never had much money. One day I was sitting in Coach Oakley’s science class when he said it was time to clean the aquarium. There were a few goldfish and some guppies swimming around in the murky water, nothing more. At the bottom someone had placed a small coffee creamer cup that had come from a café in town. Kids would drop coins into the aquarium and watch them trickle down, hoping to land one in the creamer cup sitting on the bottom of the tank. At the time Coach Oakley was going to clean the aquarium there was a nice pile of coins lying on the bottom. Some kid asked, “Hey Coach, what are you going to do with all the money in there?” I had been eyeing all that change lying there for some time. I had estimated it was at least two Saturday’s pay just lying on the bottom. Suddenly the coach said, “I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give it to the first one of you that’ll come up here and eat one of these guppies live.” While the girls were still groaning and the guys were laughing I was on my feet and heading to the front of the classroom. I grabbed that little fish net hanging beside the tank, dipped it in and came up with a bunch of slithering guppies. Then I picked one out and threw it in my mouth and swallowed it whole before I gave it a lot of thought. If I’d taken time to think, I’m certain I couldn’t have done it. A collective, “EEEWWWWWW!” arose from the class. The coach looked at me and said, “Algood, I can’t believe you just did that.” After the aquarium was emptied I cleared just under ten bucks in pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. That was also the year I received my first and only tattoo. I was sitting in that same classroom one day when a boy got up to go sharpen his pencil. While I was sitting there, I was trying to do some homework and happened to be holding a pencil of my own, pointed end up. As he passed by me he reached out and shoved the pencil upward into my face, missing my eye by about half an inch. The pain was instant. There I sat with a pencil precociously dangling from my face near my left eye. The kid was mortified. He’d just been fooling around and hadn’t meant to cause harm. He yelled out to the coach what he’d done and I was immediately sent to the office so I could call my father to take me to a doctor. It took a good hour before Daddy arrived and took me to Crawford’s Clinic. All the while I just sat there with the pencil hanging from my face. No one wanted to touch it for fear I’d lose sight in that eye. Doctor Crawford took one look, shook his head, reached out and pulled it out of my face. “Boy, that’s gonna leave a mark. You’re lucky that kid didn’t put your eye out.” I don’t think he even charged us for the procedure. He even handed me a packet of antibiotic ointment to put on it and gave me a tetanus shot. He didn’t even bill me for the visit. He was right. It left a mark that stayed there until I was in my fifties when my dermatologist happened to notice it one day and asked how I had received that odd little tattoo. When I told him how it happened and what Doctor Crawford had done, he asked if I would like for it to be gone. I said, “Heck, yeah. What will it cost?” He said he’d charge me the same thing Doctor Crawford had because he liked the story. I think it took one stitch which I pulled out a week later by myself.
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