The Mighty Miss Malone

The camp, run by a woman named Donna Stewart (whom everyone calls Stew) certainly isn’t wonderful, but it is at least okay. Stew shows Mrs. Malone, Deza, and Jimmie around. Deza picks a recently vacated hut with a cheerful blue gingham curtain (like Mrs. Needham’s dress) for her family. Stew explains the camp rules—no belongings can be left outside, respect others’ property, take trash to the dump and only pee in the latrines—then bids the exhausted Malones goodnight.

When Deza wakes up in the morning, Mrs. Malone has already gone to town and Jimmie has befriended the girls who live in the next-door tent, Loretta and Kathleen Small. They both have obvious crushes on him, much to Deza’s consternation. After a while, Stew passes by and invites Deza to accompany her on her rounds of the camp. Stew keeps things running smoothly in the large community, but it requires hard work and continual vigilance. She’s a caring person, and she offers to share her collection of Reader’s Digest magazines with Deza when she learns that the girl is an avid reader.

Mrs. Malone returns without news of Mr. Malone or his mother. And Mrs. Carsdale’s friend no longer needs a housekeeper. But she does manage to secure work as a housekeeper in the Hotel Durant. Jimmie starts working odd jobs, and the family even starts saving a few pennies here and there. But they haven’t been able to move into a more stable living situation before Deza goes back to school in the fall.

Whittier is an integrated school, even though there are only about eight Black students there. And although Mrs. Needham is hundreds of miles away, Deza works hard to learn to toughen up, just like Mrs. Needham wanted her to do. At this new school, the teachers don’t praise Deza for her hard work—instead, they treat her with suspicion. When her English teacher gives her a C+ on her first essay, Deza doesn’t cry or complain, even after Loretta explains that a C+ for a Black student is like an A+ for a White one—the racist teachers at Whittier always automatically give the Black students lower marks.

As the Malones get more comfortable living in the camp, Stew tasks Deza with welcoming newly arrived children. That’s how she befriends the sad-eyed boy who walks in from Flint one day with his friend. She brings the sad-eyed boy with her to the creek to wash dishes, where she realizes that he’s shy around girls. But he’s lonely, too. As they listen to someone in the camp playing “Shenandoah” on the harmonica, he asks for a kiss. She gives him one on his forehead, then holds his hand while they listen to someone singing nearby in the darkness. No matter how hard her life is, Deza reflects, she’s still luckier than most because she still has (most of) her family with her, unlike the sad-eyed boy.