Among School Children (34 page)

Chris spent an unhappy weekend after the Science Fair. She kept picturing Robert and his failed electric light. She kept asking herself why she hadn't realized that Robert had been asking for help. She washed windows furiously all weekend. Why hadn't she listened to Robert? Why hadn't his mother helped him? She imagined the face of Robert's mother in the glass, and that made her rub harder.

Robert was a boy for whom life certainly looked rigged. But he had let Chris see him in a new way. He had turned out to be willing, in the face of long odds, to try to do a project. That was not cause for despair. This boy was salvageable. Now more than ever, she had to get Robert to a psychiatrist.

As she scrubbed windows, Chris decided to force the issue. The paperwork to get Robert free counseling was completed. His mother had no excuse now. Imagining the woman's face in windowpanes, Chris thought, "If you don't take him, the way you promised, I'm going to file a 51 A." That official document has a longer name: "Report of Child(ren) Alleged to Be Suffering from Serious Physical or Emotional Injury by Abuse or Neglect." Anyone could file one of those, and do so anonymously. "She's not going to be allowed to sit back and do nothing," thought Chris. Ah, righteous wrath. She felt a little better.

Laying out her plans for what remained of this year, Chris had figured they'd get through the Civil War's aftermath, just barely. They had to get to the end of the war at least, she thought. "God forbid they don't find out who won."

The Civil War for Chris meant many lessons about slavery. A while back, as she had done every year since desegregation, Chris had directed the class in a slave auction down in the library. She assigned the parts. She gave some children the role of abolitionists, who would watch and afterward make reports. Some would play slave buyers, others slaves. She made Judith the auctioneer and equipped her with a gavel and a set of note cards that described the slaves. Studying those descriptions before the auction, Judith said, "God! They make it sound like these people are animals!" Before the auction, Chris explained for the others' benefit, "The point is to realize what it must've felt like to be a piece of goods. To be like a dress on a rack. Oooo, I don't like this dress. I think I'll buy that one. The slaves were human, but they weren't
thought of
as human beings."

Down in the library, Judith stood at a podium, half a dozen "slaves" lined up facing her. Claude was a slave. He was grinning when the auction started. Chris sat nearby. She called, "Claude, I thought I explained. You're
not
happy to be a slave."

Judith read from the index cards. She giggled when she read about skinny Jimmy. "What do I hear for this big strapping man?" But gradually, Judith and the others began to get into it. The slaves looked crestfallen, the buyers greedy and nasty. Judith raised her voice. She chanted like a real auctioneer.

Margaret was led to the podium.

"Okay, this is important," called Chris. "Here's a healthy young woman. She can give you lots of kids. Are her kids your slaves, too?"

Several of the children cried, "Yes!"

Julio was led, struggling as instructed, to Judith. "This is a male, age thirty," declared Judith. "Married. Can do jobs around the house. A great help. What do I hear for him?"

"Seven-fifty!" called the buyer Felipe.

"Come on. Look at him! There's lots of hard work left in him. Now what do I hear for this hard-working man?" said Judith.

The auction lasted about fifteen minutes. The buyers were cruel to their new property. Felipe wouldn't let his slave sit or talk. Judith banged her gavel down one last time and said, "Thank you for coming to the auction, and I hope they serve you well."

The class filed back to the room. Chris questioned them. What did it all mean? She got most of the answers she hoped for. She asked the class in general, "What are some of the bad things about being treated like property?"

"You can't do nothin'," said Felipe.

With feeling, Judith declared, "They're real humans, not just pieces of garbage, and they're supposed to be treated like people."

"Right," said Chris. "And if our society says there can be slaves, who's to say someone can't turn around and say, 'All people with brown hair can be slaves'? So if some people have slaves, it hurts all people. Also, some slaves could have been great inventors or artists, but almost no slaves were allowed to be those things. When you don't allow people to be themselves, they don't have the opportunity to invent things or write beautiful songs or paint beautiful pictures. That's another way slavery hurts all people."

The class lined up for lunch. Judith moved out of line and said to Chris, "I felt
terrible,
Mrs. Zajac."

The next day Chris elaborated on how slavery hurts everyone, including auctioneers.

Now in social studies, in Room 205, civil war loomed. On the bulletin board near the door, paper letters announced
DARK CLOUDS OVER OUR NATION.
Beneath the sign Chris had stapled paper clouds, which read: "John Brown," "Missouri Compromise," "States' Rights." Chris had offered rewards for children who wrote explanations to attach to those clouds. Every day after lunch Chris read to them from
To Be a Slave,
by Julius Lester.

Chris sat on her spindly-legged front table, smoothed her skirt over her shins, and read aloud this line: " 'No other country destroyed African culture as thoroughly as slavery did here.' " The casements were opened wide. Shouts and laughter of sixth graders at recess drifted in. The voices sounded distant. A soft breeze came in, too, and made the various hanging things flutter and sway—the art projects and book report projects and stories stapled to strings of yarn. Now and then Chris's voice died out in the midst of a sentence and resumed at the start of another. She was censoring the parts about rape. But plenty of horrors remained. She wondered, as she read, if maybe these children were too young for this book. She paused and looked at the class. "Can you imagine walking home from school and someone grabbing you and taking you as a slave to another country?"

Most of the children looked up and then, as she read on, went back to their penmanship or spelling or window gazing. Arnie tapped his pen on his desk, trying to hit the end of a staple, so as to get it airborne. Chris glanced at him, and he stopped. She didn't want to terrify them. Her lively voice, rising and falling, suggested that they would get safely home themselves. Imagined horrors are not horrible in such a setting. There is, after all, something comforting about history, no matter how vividly rendered. Slavery had ended long ago. In the little fluorescent-lit oasis, a person could feel indignant and also glad for having been born into a better age. It was easy to forget for a moment that in the city outside people still called each other "nigger," "spic," and "whitey," and that in the little slum nearby, real estate speculators made fortunes while children lived in squalid fire traps that were fouled by dogs and so infested with rodents that some preschoolers lapsed back to bedwetting rather than risk encounters with rats on the way to the bathroom at night.

How much of Julius Lester's book did the children understand? Did they know that Mrs. Zajac was reading to them about the ultimate rigged life? And that they lived in a rigged world, too, where it's still hard to overcome the accidents of birth? Robert seemed to have an inkling. He had asked Chris recently, apropos of nothing, "Mrs. Zajac, is it true that in the old days, what your father was you had to be?" The remark was one of those which left Chris thinking, "The boy's so bright! If only I could change the circumstances of his life..."As she read now, worried looks from Dick, Irene, Alice, Arabella, and some others suggested that they could imagine something of the lot of slaves.

In the book, a slave was getting whipped. Side by side at their desks, Judith and Alice looked at each other. Alice nibbled a fingernail. Judith went back to looking at Mrs. Zajac. With steady, solemn brown eyes, Judith watched Chris read. Judith was listening hard.

"Why do you suppose prices for slaves went up in autumn?" Chris asked.

"Because they could work harder?" suggested Irene.

"Because they had to pick crops then," said Judith softly. She looked in repose, her cheek resting on a hand, but her eyes hardly wavered from Mrs. Zajac and the book.

Judith understood the potential disadvantages of being Puerto Rican. She said that she never felt prejudice from Mrs. Zajac, but had from one or two other teachers—nothing overt, no ethnic slurs, but a pattern of favoritism that seemed to coincide with a "white" surname and the right address. Occasionally, a kid from another class—it hadn't happened in this one since Clarence, who had sometimes made remarks about Puerto Ricans—would use the term "pork" for "Puerto Rican." Sometimes kids of Puerto Rican descent would refer to children in the bilingual rooms, disparagingly, as "those Spanish kids." Judith thought that was pretty stupid. She could more than hold her own among other children. One time, down in the library, working there with Alice during spelling, she actually went looking for a little trouble. Judith and Alice were shelving books. A white sixth-grade boy stood nearby in the stacks. The boy asked the girls where they lived. What boy wouldn't try to make conversation with girls as pretty as those two? Judith put a hand on her hip and pushed the other one out. "I come from the Hispanic ghetto," she said.

The boy grinned uneasily.

"I
do,
" said Judith. She turned to Alice. "He doesn't believe me." Judith went on, moving down the stacks, "I've come a long way. At least I'm not flunking, like kids from good neighborhoods."

The boy started to pretend that he was busy.

Judith went on airily, laughing now and then. "Hispanic kids are smart. We had to overcome obstacles. Our ancestors were slaves. That doesn't bother me. I don't care. I wasn't there. I'm one of the lucky ones. When I grow up, I'm going to live in the Spanish ghetto."

Having said all that, Judith turned her attention to the boy again. "When you were born, did they take you out the wrong way, or just throw away the wrong thing?" She grinned.

The boy muttered under his breath.

"They shot him in the head," said Alice. She and Judith giggled.

The boy, who hadn't deserved such harsh treatment, but apparently was wise beyond his years, didn't try to fight back. He moved away out of earshot.

Judith and Alice had tried eating lunch together, first Alice at Judith's table of Puerto Rican girls, and on another day Judith at Alice's table of blond girls from the Highlands. But each had missed her other friends, and they'd agreed to eat lunch separately. Judith had gone home with Alice to the Highlands several times, much to Chris's delight. But Judith had never asked Alice over to her apartment in the Flats.

One time, at Alice's house, Judith asked Alice, "Do you like my neighborhood? You want to live down there?"

Alice looked at Judith and said softly, "Not really."

"I live down there," said Judith. She laughed. "I know the streets and the situation and the people. It's not a gold mine." She laughed again, that laugh she offered Mrs. Zajac to say she was just joking. "Maybe copper," Judith added.

Alice said, "My mother used to drive kids down there who didn't have a ride, and—"

"Don't say any of them looked like me!" Judith interrupted, laughing. "Don't say anybody down there looks like me!"

Judith thought Alice's house was pretty. She didn't think that she felt envious. "I have everything I need, and I'm satisfied with what I have. I think I got a great ... a great future, and I don't really care about material things." Judith remembered fondly her early years in Pennsylvania. Her family had lived in a quiet neighborhood in a small, neat house. There were many children on their street. Judith thought Alice's neighborhood suffered by comparison. The Highlands was too quiet, Judith thought. She often spoke mordantly about the Flats. "Where I live is exciting. You can look out the window and see people coming down the street, fighting and shooting each other." In a more serious mood, she would say that at least the Flats was lively. If there was defensiveness in Judith, it took an extremely intelligent form, and was infinitely preferable to the pathetic shame of the Puerto Rican boy at Holyoke High—the story was well known and true—who had told everyone that he was Samoan, and had begged his teacher not to reveal his true nationality when she'd found him out.

In about two hours, two hours after Mrs. Zajac finished reading aloud, Judith would return to a barren, littered street where she played Double Dutch by the hour; to a housing project where insecurity took the manifest form of front doors without locks; to her family's cramped apartment where summer had already arrived. Judith had an older sister who took her on car trips, but she didn't regularly go farther than the K Mart and Ingleside malls. She shopped there with her parents and interpreted for them at the cash registers. At home, when she got tired of TV and reading, Judith amused herself by making scrapbooks of clippings about movie and rock stars. Volunteers from other parts of town showed movies for the children of the project down in a basement room. Judith said, sardonically, that the end of the movies was exciting, when the lights came on and the rats and mice scurried for cover.

Occasionally in her neighborhood Judith saw sights that troubled her much more than rodents and roaches. One morning this spring, she had come out of her apartment in the project, heading off for school, and found a family on the stairway—a mother, a father, and several small children. The family had been evicted from their apartment and had spent the night on the landing, without blankets. They had managed to save some bowls and spoons, a box of cereal, and some milk, and when Judith came past them, the family was gathered on the filthy staircase eating breakfast.

That sight had inspired Judith's latest essay, which was about the homeless. It began, "I live in the Hispanic ghetto, and I've seen people sleeping on the stairs." In it, she scolded Ronald Reagan. The other day Judith had read the rough draft aloud to a couple of classmates over near the social studies bulletin board. This was what, in Room 205, was called an "editing conference." Claude served as one of Judith's editors, and Claude seemed to understand the irony of his situation.