My arm, still firmly in the grip of authority, became a pointer stick. The entire student body scrambled to their feet – we understood better than to address elders while seated – and in unity replied, “No, Miss.” The teacher said, “I did not hear this brazen person ask permission to leave her seat. She demanded to know what exactly I thought I was doing. My intention was to drop a pencil near her to avoid any chance of contracting pus-eye, but as I stretched my arm forward, the teacher grabbed it and squeezed. Sally’s eyes – the good and the oozing – opened wide in dismay and without thinking I stood. The teacher announced a surprise math test that was to count for a disproportionately high percentage of the term’s grade. When Sally forgot her pencil she became the subject of a lesson on the value of preparedness. Every school day was the same it had been like that all her life. She seemed unaware of the freckles of dried mucus stuck to her cheek. Us girls inflated cheeks and waved hands until someone delivered the inevitable punch line, “Something smell stink like Sally Burry.” It was a pet prank for one of the boys to sneak up and crouch at the edge of the circle, pass gas and fan his bottom. Walk in gypsy, walk in/Walk inside I say/Walk into my parlour and hear the banjo play/I don’t love nobody and nobody love me… Tra la lalala… But none of us would clasp hands with Sally, so she swayed and sang along from outside the ring. When someone had a new welt or bump, we would point it out and ask, “What happen?” The answer was always ‘Burry-sitis’.Īt recess, when we had to play indoors, the girls formed a circle for a choral game with clapping and dancing called, Gypsy in the Moonlight. I watched as she was tripped and shoved to the ground, as she wiped mineral-red earth from scraped knees and the wetness around her eye, as she hurried to smooth her dress and stand – but never in time to stop us seeing the strap marks on the backs of her legs. The bat or ball, or both, inevitably walloped Sally. When the rain let up, children played rounders barefoot on the flat above the school. The only way in or out of the Pen was by boat which meant most of us weren’t going anywhere.

On the third of that month, Russia sent a dog into space and the government of Perseverance had yet to build a bridge over a river that swelled to such proportions during raining season, that our village became cut off from the rest of the island. Sally and I were twelve years old and half way through our second to last year in our one-room schoolhouse. I plugged my nose and hissed, “You don’t have no radio.” “Please? I would give it back after school. Her proximity and my belief in her unremitting infectiousness caused me to tread on the heels of the girl ahead.Īs we settled at our desks, she approached and whispered, “Borrow me a black lead, please?” One morning, as the bell rang and we formed two lines – one for boys and one for girls, Sally filed into place behind me. One pink-ringed eye cried nonstop globs of pus that left her with a faint, but persistent pong of sour milk. Each of us had hair the color of overcooked pumpkin and neither of us had a father at home. Households numbering ten or twelve weighed in on the small to normal side of things in our village and this made Sally and me unique because we were from one-child families.

We were Poor White – the inbred aftermath of a long-forgotten British penal colony. We were at school together, Sally and I, in Heart’s Pen, the coastal hamlet where we were born, on the Caribbean island of Perseverance. I wish I had amnesia so I could forget Sally Burry.

Pale moon gypsy