Miss Emma

Miss Emma

My friend Richard Edwards,  a Black man who grew up in southern Ohio, told me this story.

In his little town, everybody knew everybody else. In this town lived two people who form the heart of this story: a young boy with a very cruel streak, and Miss Emma, a maiden lady of great age.

The boy was mean. He delighted in kicking in people’s garden fences,  pulling flowering plants from their gardens,  laughing as he ran away. He tripped other children, twisted their arms when no grownups were looking. He took their toys and broke them. People were pretty sure that he hurt animals as well. His parents couldn’t do anything about his behavior, and people pretty much agreed that they tried their best. He was mean. Just plain mean.

Miss Emma was one of those elderly ladies who always found good things to say about everybody. She undoubtedly was brought up with the admonition, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

One day there was a terrible accident, and the boy died. I don’t know what it was, perhaps he fell from a tree, perhaps he was in the middle of some misdeed and wasn’t paying attention to his footing.  Richard never told me how he died, just that it was an accident. His parents, of course, were sad, and the townspeople were sad for them, but folks were not as sad for the boy as they thought they should be.

There was a funeral in the town church, of course, and like every funeral in that town, the casket stood at the front of the church. All the townspeople lined up to walk past the casket and to look down at the boy’s body, laid out nicely inside. Everybody waited to hear what Miss Emma had to say when it was her turn to stand by the casket—because none of them could muster a kind word about him, and they knew that she, of all of them, would try her best.

The line moved slowly, and finally it was her turn. Everybody waited. Miss Emma, wearing her best dress and a little hat with a veil, holding her pocketbook with both hands in front of her, looked in at the boy, and nodded. She pressed her lips together and nodded again. And again.

Finally she turned away and began to walk forward. She said,

“He shore could whistle good.”

© Janice Mastin-Kamps 2010