19. Women in Charge

“You can’t do this to us. You can’t shut Women in Action down.” Claraberta rose and lunged forward. Marina stepped back and left her the teacher spot in the center of the classroom. Ginny stood and joined her. “You know if we are not enrolled we lose our assistance benefits.” Marina looked around. The other women had been struck dumb. For now. Claraberta’s screaming would surely get them all going. Marina felt a tremor crawl up her spine. She hated being the bad guy.
Through the window she saw snow flurries. A freak spring snow. Just right.
She began to speak but was afraid of her own words, afraid to inflame their anger.
“It’s also my loss. I’m going to file for unemployment as soon as we’re done here today. Centro Libre will take over the program so it’s only a furlough, a temporary shut down.”
Ginny broke in. “Temporary’s too long for us. If we’re not active for even one week our public assistance money gets stopped.”
Asia spoke from where she sat. “Listen everyone, Marina’s not the one we have to be angry at.”
Alta screamed, “Well then who? Tell me where I have to go march. Do we go to Amanuel Cole’s office? I thought he was supposed to help us and it turns out he just wants us to help him.”
Lula, Alta, Asia all rose and stood together, facing Marina. Lula sobbed and shook. “This has been our home. These are my friends, my family. What will I do all day?”
Claraberta opened her arms. “We have to talk by ourselves. You need to go out and leave us alone. We’ve run the program before, when you go to meetings. We’ve run breakout classes in the afternoons when we were over enrolled before the Centro started sending women to the Department of Education. We are scribes. We write for each other. What one of us knows the other ones are soon going to learn. That’s why you call us peer teachers. There’s got to be something we can do.”
Marina was relieved to get out of the room. She stood alone in the hallway and breathed. What could they possibly do? Ginny was right. Their livelihood was at stake. If they were not enrolled they would not be in compliance with the Personal Accountability law and would be penalized. She walked up the stairs looking for Jimmy. She found him in the hall sitting outside the open door to the day care room, reading the paper while the children lay on their cots, staring at the ceiling or napping. She knelt beside him and began to cry. He let her cry for a few minutes and put his hand on her shoulder. She felt his warm rough palms. Her skin remembered his. “I heard what’s going on at All Read. No surprise there. The man doesn’t want us to read.” Marina kept sobbing. She thought for just a minute that she should correct Jimmy. That it had been Mrs. Asher’s inability to rein in her fancy namesake executive director Vivian Long. This time it hadn’t been the man, it had been the women, Asher raised too rich and Long too poor, to think well about money. But Jimmy wouldn’t get it. Or he did. If she traced it back far enough it was the man, always the man.
Asia called to her from the top of the stairs. “We want to talk to you.” She was smiling. It looked to Marina as she entered the room that the force field of hostility was gone.
Claraberta waved her to a chair, one of the student chairs. “We’ve got an idea.”
Ginny interrupted. “If you’re on unemployment you’re getting paid anyway. You're not going to find another job right away.”
Lula laughed. “She probably doesn’t want to get a job right away. She’d rather be off writing her plays.” Everybody laughed and talked at once. Claraberta spoke loud. “This is what we think.” She looked at each person in the room one by one. “This is serious. We’re not joking now.” She waited until the laughing died down.
“We want you to work for us. We’ll be the boss now, not that Mrs. Asher or that nice Miss Soli. Us. We take care of everything we can take care of, the attendance sheets, and the reports to old Amanuel Cole’s Central Board.”
Clara waved down the groups “that’s rights” and “yeahs”.
“We’ll thank unemployment for paying your salary and since it’s less than half what you make, we’ll do what you did for us when you took us to that conference up north.”
Ginny cut in. “Stipend…You hear. We’ll pay you a stipend.”
The laughter hit another crescendo.
“Hear, hear.” Claraberta calmed them down again.
“What Ginny means is we’ll take up a collection to pay your transportation and your lunch so it won’t cost you anything but your time. Just part of the time.”
Asia came over and put her arm around Marina.
“You’ll still have time to write.” She lifted Marina off the chair and swung her around. “And besides, you’ll have all this to write about.” Asia pushed her out the door. “Go outside and think about it. We’ve got to do some math in here.”
Marina ran up the stairs but Jimmy’s children had already woken up and he was inside giving out fruit punch and graham crackers. She stood by the door watching him work. He loved the children and the children loved him. Jimmy had the gift of loving full out without holding back, loving cleanly. He still loved her even after she left him. Even after the things she said to him when she left. If she had been the drinker and he had been the sober one, yet still Jimmy, he would have been able to love her. He would have known what was true about her and what was the lie. She was sorry he couldn’t help her think, decide. She could hear Asia calling to her from the stairs. Just watching Jimmy had given her the answer.
As soon as she got to the door Claraberta handed her several sheets of notebook paper. “We scribed for you what we just told you. Are you going to let us be your new boss?”
She walked into the room and for that moment felt imbued with Jimmy’s gift for full out loving, her heart opened. “My answer of course is yes. I am so proud of you. I love you. We will not close the program until Centro Libre is able to take it over. Until then, I’m honored to work for you."