“The problem, or one of them, was that I was not an enormously adaptable person and I did not fit into new situations well.” – Tom, The Midnight Fox, by Betsy Bryers, The Viking Press, 1968
As an adult, I couldn’t recall the storyline of The Midnight Fox, even though my eyes swept over its pages ten times when I was in the fourth grade. Not in a single, concentrated period, but over the course of my year at Strother Elementary School, on the west side of Louisville. That’s because when my teacher sent me to get a book from the library, I always checked out the same one.
“Do you like animals?” the librarian asked me during my first visit in September. She’d noticed me wandering aimlessly among the stacks. “This is a good one, you’ll like it,” she said, tipping a spine free from the shelf. In subsequent visits, I retrieved the book myself, like a drinker pulling a bottle from a familiar hideout. The librarian pursed her lips when she stamped the “Date Due” form for me yet again. Wasn’t it time I read something else? I showed up in the fall of 1977, bussed in from the east side of town, and gave The Midnight Fox a nine-month twirl.
The thing was, I never got past the third chapter. Around the time that Tom—the story’s eleven-year old protagonist—catches sight of the fox, the book would come due. So I’d check it out again and start over. I’d re-read about Tom going to live with his aunt on a farm while his parents cycle across Europe. How he misses his friends, loses his appetite, and feels bored. And how his alienation breaks unexpectedly when he catches a glimpse of a mysterious black fox.
I did not believe it for a minute. It was like my eyes were playing a trick or something, because I was just sort of staring across this field…and then in the distance, where the grass was very green, I saw a fox leaping over the crest of the field…It was so great that I wanted it to start over again, like you can turn a movie film back and see yourself repeat some fine thing you have done, and I wanted to see the fox leaping over the grass again.
My teacher, Ms. Turner, saw I was lost at my new school. Halloween came and went, and I hadn’t made any friends. My classmates consisted of African-American children from the neighborhood, and white kids who arrived en masse from a school I’d never heard of. I was too shy to wriggle my way into either group of established friends. We crept through our lessons, reading aloud, word by word, desk by desk.
“Get your SRA folder and sit with me,” Ms. Turner said to me one day. It was the start of my new routine. At 9:30, she’d pat her hand on her desk and gesture me to come forward. The tap of her fingers started out quiet, but by November it grew to the knock of gold against oak. She’d become engaged. Ms. Turner returned from Thanksgiving with a new name, and during Christmas vacation departed Kentucky for a new state.
Her replacement, Ms. Hacker, said to sit at my own desk. In the classroom that Spring, I learned the difference between a “comment” and a “compliment.” On the playground, I won a three-legged race in a cloud of fumes from the nearby Heaven Hill bourbon distillery. At the cafeteria table, I discovered that if you peel back the breading on your free-lunch corndog, the meat is spotted with mold. But mostly what I learned at nine years old, is that if you keep watching the clock, the hands will eventually land on the three and the twelve.
On the hour-long bus ride home, I sat in the back seat with a fifth grader named Phoebe. She protected me from bullies, but she was no saint. The cherry-flavored discs she offered me every day and promised were candy, turned out to be 3,000 MG of Vitamin C stolen from her mother’s dresser. Somewhere between the Dizzy Whiz Drive-In on West St. Catherine St. and O.K. Storage on Broadway, Phoebe proved that a friend can look you square in the eye and lie.
But like Tom from the book, I learned that life spins magic to spell you from your misery. For me, the mystery came in the form of my bus driver, Mr. Black. I can’t explain why he changed my seat assignment to the plastic hump between his seat and the driver’s side window, but he did. While chaos erupted in the rows behind us, Mr. Black and I floated above the world, eye-to-eye with neon signs and fascia boards along our route. Mr. Black was 6’-4” and stick-thin. When the bus wheels dipped into a pothole, his afro bounced and his Menthol Mores sprang out of his shirt pocket. We talked about everything—Corvettes, Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors, and his great-grandchildren. The only time he ever chided me was when I used the word impossible. “They said it was impossible to put a man on the moon,” he said. “Never say impossible. Shouldn’t even be a word.” I studied his profile as he spun the wheel.
Curiosity about my fourth grade year still visits me every few years, an open loop that longs for closure. At points during the last twenty years I’ve unsuccessfully searched for Mr. Black and his descendants. The Jefferson County Public School system denies having records dating back that far about its drivers. I tried finding Mrs. Turner in Chicago to no avail.
Buildings, luckily, are easier to locate. When I was in Louisville in 2002, my Dad and I and drove out Dixie Highway and easily found Strother at the intersection of Wilson Avenue. The school closed shortly after I left in 1978, and was later converted to apartments. I never got a good look at Strother back in the day because the bus pulled right up to the entrance, and we quickly ducked inside. So I crossed the street and took it all in.
It took me until this year, though, to remember The Midnight Fox. My children have graduated to chapter books now, and we get a stack of them from the library every few weeks. Reading Black Beauty and The Trumpet of the Swan kicked up the memory of Tom and the black fox. With one quick title search online, I found them living on a library shelf just a mile from my house, inside the same 1968 edition I read at Strother.
I sat alone and read for an hour in the library parking lot, the book propped up on my briefcase. I hoped for some deep insight into my childhood in the desegregated South. Instead, the words planted a stake in my current life as a mother.
“Check this out,” I said that night to my daughter. “This is a book I loved when I was your age.” I read aloud:
The rest of the way I just sat in the back seat with my eyes closed. I started thinking about a movie I saw once where some farm people send to the orphanage for a boy, because they wanted someone to help with the hard work on the farm. Instead of a boy, the orphanage sent them a puny girl, and there was tremendous disappointment.
“Anne of Green Gables!” my daughter said. We had just started reading L.M. Montgomery’s book several nights before, both of us for the first time.
“Isn’t that weird?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, reaching towards her nightstand. “And speaking of Anne, let’s get to it. “
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