"Oh, David, aren't your father's cabbages growing big! I never thought his vegetables would get anywhere in all this clay, but just look. Big, big cabbages your poppa grew."

Aunt Mae got up in the mornings now and made my lunch for school. She learned more about cooking by now and didn't do so bad. When I got off she dressed Mother and let her go outside.

In school I was almost out of Mr. Farney's, which meant I was almost out of grade school. Mr. Farney was different from the other people in the valley. I heard he was from Atlanta, but that wasn't why he was different. It was the way he acted that made him strange. He didn't walk like the other men did. He walked more like a woman who swayed her hips. You could always tell Mr. Farney by his walk, no matter what clothes he was wearing and even if his back was turned to you. He had small feet that sort of pointed in when he walked. He had thin black hair that just lay soft on his head like a baby's. The main thing about Mr. Farney that was different when you saw him was his face. I knew he was almost thirty, but his skin was smooth, and you could see thin blue veins in his forehead and his nose and on his hands. His eyes were the clearest blue you ever saw and were big and wide. Everything else about him was thin, his nose, his mouth, and his body. No matter whether it was warm or cold his ears were always red, and you could almost see through them in some places.

If he wasn't so smart the boys in our class would have laughed at him. They talked about him all the time, but they never did anything in class. He could recite anything in the line of a poem or something from a famous book, and no one else in town even read poems or many books. Sometimes he wrote poems himself. The editor of the paper would print them, but nobody knew what they meant. Oh, some people who thought they were smart said they did, but I knew they didn't. His poems didn't rhyme like everybody thought they should, so Mr. Watkins wrote a letter to the editor and asked him to stop printing that trash. The editor was from up east, though, and said the poems were very good but that only a small group could understand and appreciate them. Mr. Farney took this out of the paper and put it on the board in the room.

Mr. Farney liked plants. All over the windowsills in the room he had them in pots and jars. When one started to droop, he could just touch it with his thin fingers full of the light blue veins, and pull off the bad leaves so that the plant hardly shook at all, and the next few days he had it standing up straight again. He liked violets more than anything else because he told us they were shy and delicate. He could take violet plants and pick the violets right out from under the leaves where nobody else could ever find them.

Mr. Farney lived in a little house in town with another man who gave music lessons. It was painted blue and white and had pink curtains in the front windows. Both of them never were in the war. They were some of the few men who were left in town. The people who took music lessons from the other man said the house was pretty on the inside and had all light-colored things in it and plenty plants in pots. Mr. Farney's garden was the prettiest in town. Women used to ask him about how to grow this and that, and he always helped them because he was a very nice person. Mr. Farney called the other man "dear" once when they were in the drugstore together. Everybody heard about it sooner or later, and some laughed and some shook their heads and some wanted to see him leave the valley. But he was the best teacher our school ever had, so nothing ever came of it.

Maybe you would have thought Mr. Farney was alright if you didn't hear him talk. He sort of emphasized some words more than others, and he'd take a deep breath before he said anything. When he was talking, you always watched his hands because he used them a lot.

"Now," he would say, "I hope you all can sit still for just a little minute while I get this record on. I do wish the state would send us a phonograph worth mentioning. The one I have at home is so much better. There. This is one of my own records, and it is a Beethoven quartet, Opus Eighteen, Number One. Notice the homogeneity of interpretation. Oh, I do wish that boy in the third row would stop leering at me. It's only English that I'm speaking. Tomorrow we must have a vocabulary review. Do remind me."

Nobody laughed at Mr. Farney when he spoke. He knew too much about things like classical music that we didn't know. I did think we had a little too much music that last year, though. That and poems. The poems he read to us were better than the music because most of them were pretty, but some of the music he played for us sounded off key, or like the instruments in the band were trying to outdo each other. Mr. Farney liked it, though, so it must have been good. One poem he read to us he made the whole class learn, and we recited it at graduation. It was by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the only thing I knew he wrote was "Paul Revere's Ride," which we learned for Miss Moore because she said it was the only poem she ever heard that she liked. This one was different from "Paul Revere's Ride." It was the only beautiful thing I ever heard, especially one part:

Then read from the treasured volume

The poem of thy choice.

And lend to the rhyme of the poet

The beauty of thy voice.

And the night shall be filled with music,

And the cares, that infest the day,

Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,

And as silently steal away.

I recited it for Aunt Mae, and she said it was beautiful, just like I thought. I didn't tell anybody in school that I liked it, or they would have thought I was crazy. Everybody learned it because they had to, but they thought it was stupid and wanted to sing a song instead. Mr. Farney said we could sing a song too, so that made them feel better. The class voted to sing "Dixie."

Our graduation night was really nice. Aunt Mae went with me and got that woman she knew from the time she worked at the plant named Flora to stay with Mother. Flora was happy because her son came back and married some girl from town instead of a Chinee like she thought he might. They lived with her down in town and had two children. One of them looked like Flora herself, the little boy.

We had the graduation in the hall on Main Street they always used for graduations and wedding receptions. All the lights were on, and they had flowers on the platform and twenty chairs out for our class to sit on. After Aunt Mae got her seat out front, I went up on the platform and sat where Mr. Farney had told me to. Some of the others in my class were already up there, and we said hello. We had been in the same class ever since Mrs. Watkins' room. I had on a suit we just bought and one of Poppa's old shirts. I was the first man in my family to get through eighth grade. Aunt Mae was sitting in about the fourth row. She had on a big hat that tilted to one side and a dress with yellow flowers all over it. A few little yellow curls came down on her forehead to right above her eyebrow. I thought of how good she looked for her age. The only thing wrong was her eyes. They looked tired and sad.

I saw all the people I knew sitting out there. Mr. and Mrs. Watkins were sitting next to the preacher, who was going to give a prayer tonight, but she looked up at the ceiling when she saw me looking at her. Miss Moore was in the front row where she could hear what was going to happen. Her old mother was with her, and she was deaf too, but she had a hearing aid she got in the capital sticking out of her ear, with the cord from it hanging down the front of her dress. One of the women who testified at Bobbie Lee Taylor's the night I went was sitting in the back talking to a little boy who must have been hers. Bruce, the little boy Poppa sent me over to visit, was graduating with me. I saw his mother out front, and she saw me, and we just stared at each other. When Poppa lost his job, Bruce's father stopped being friends with him. I looked back at Aunt Mae and saw that the old man who had the band was sitting next to her and they were talking. I wondered what he was doing at my graduation. Aunt Mae smiled at him a little bit, and I knew he must have been telling jokes. He always told jokes. I never liked people who always were telling jokes, especially ones like he told that weren't even funny, and ones where they tried to imitate people like he tried to imitate Negroes that didn't even sound like Negroes. I know Aunt Mae didn't like him either. She told me so. She'd look at him and listen and smile and then turn her head away and make a face in the other direction.