Mr. B. E. wasn’t widely known as warm, much less amiable. Fierce would be, I think, the general apprehension of children who crossed his path, which may just have been his style of school superintending.
That morning, though, he seemed positively tickled as he saw us all off on our great trip to Atlanta, to the state fair to represent the county at Dr. Collins’s Annual Spelling Bee. I was there, and my mother, and Joe, the alternate, and his mother, and his grandfather, who was driving us. And he gave us each—the competitors—a 10-dollar bill. In the fall of 1965, this was a princely sum. I expect he suggested we not spend it all in one place.
I wasn’t worried about the spelling part. I think I’d already realized what I still believe—you can spell, or you can’t, and it says next to nothing about your smarts. I knew it was just how my eyes worked, that I remembered a word if I’d ever seen it, and since I read in those days more than I breathed or ate, I had a pretty good edge in the spelling department.
The bee part itself wasn’t actually a bee. A man stood on a stage in one of the state fair’s permanent buildings, the sort that has jams and quilts down the hall, and called out a long list of words and we wrote them down. My main struggle was with penmanship; I don’t remember being stumped until the word was “casco.” I wrote “casquo,” on the “conquistador” model—we were told it was a metal helmet, part of a suit of armor. Whatever the rules behind the test, though, they didn’t allow variant spellings, and that was that for me.
I must have missed another one or two that I don’t remember, because when the man called out the winners I was the youngest third-place state ribbon winner, at 10, that he could remember. We all thanked him and met up to go get corn dogs.
Afterwards Joe and his folks had plans, and my mother and I walked along to see what we could see. We looked at the cakes and the sewing, and part of a 4-H calf parade, and headed down through the rides and the sideshows and the games of chance. People were winning enormous vulgar prizes, or more likely not winning them. They shot at the ducks and threw balls at targets and tried to get a ring around the neck of a Coke bottle. And that is where we stopped, when I saw the prize.
She was sitting forlornly off to the side, leashed to a high stool and sneezing more and more frequently. Her eyes were running. She was a rhesus monkey, and if you could ring five Coke bottles in six throws she was yours.
I was filled with a pure resolve—she had distemper and she must be rescued. I had a purseful of change from breaking my 10 for the corn dogs. My mother reminded me of what I already knew—that such games are rigged. You could spend your money till the cows come home and never beat the house. I quickly learned something else: I couldn’t throw at a target for beans. I was myopic, and I hadn’t ever thrown anything in my life. I threw and threw though, and my mother agreed past the point where she might ordinarily have called a halt. Eventually we decided that I would spend two more quarters on throws and that would be it. Which it was, interrupted only by the astonishing moment in which I got one ring around a bottle. Even the carny seemed to be rooting for me by then.
We walked gravely through the rest of the fair—cotton candy is remarkably pleasing even in grief—until it was time to catch the Greyhound home.
I don’t remember getting to the bus, but I do remember the 90 minutes home, because I was wearing my ribbon still pinned to my sweater, and the other passengers asked about it. One man in particular was persistent indeed. “Spell ‘Mississippi,’ ” he began, and he didn’t let up. I spelled, I demurred, I spelled some things for other people who got in the spirit of the occasion. I spelled until the bus pulled up. We’d gathered our things and were saying goodbye to the driver when he launched his final challenge. “Little girl! Spell ‘Constantinople!’ ” I looked at him and said loudly,
“I-S-T-A-N-B-U-L.” I talked back to a grownup, and I got off the bus.
At the end of that remarkable day, my mother wasn’t even a little bit cross. We got out at the red light in Crawford and walked on home.
