TRIAL BY FIRE
Grace Lumpkin
D
UBIE SHOOK DOWN THE ASHES
in the stove very carefully
because Mister Anderson must not be waked. The ashes were
not of much consequence. They were dead and could do no
harm. He took a newspaper from the wood-box and stuffed it
into the opening of the stove. His small black hands-he was
two months less than nine years old-selected the fattest kind–
ling from under the newspapers and laid the pieces crossways
in the stove. He sat back on his heels and his black face stared
into the black opening where the fire was -laid ready for the
match.
It was this moment which paralyzed him each morning
since the Superintendent of the Detention Home had forced
him to make the fires. He felt stiff like one of the hickory logs,
with no arms and legs separate. At times he could almost feel
the rigid grain of the wood in himself as part of his own body.
The rigid grain which seemed to be part of him held him stiff
like an upright log. Recently he had begun to think of people
and wood as inseparable because they could burn together.
He sat back on his heels waiting with the match in his hand.
His eyes were closed and his sensitive thick lips were pressed
together. But closed eyes, even when he went to bed at night
in the dormitory with the other boys on cots near him, did not
bring quiet darkness. Behind his closed lids he forever saw the
flames he had seen in the school-house.
Clissy, his sister, who was ten years old, went to school in
the room above his own in the old two-story wooden school
building. Each morning they said good-byet to their mother,
who washed clothes for the white people in the part of town
where they had brick school-houses, and reached the school.
There Clissy left him in the; hall and went up the wide stairs
to her class-room.
Toward the middle of the morning when they were having
reading class and reading out loud from the primer about the
Three Goats Billy-"Where are you going?" asked the Troll.
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