Public Enemy (6 page)

Z and I jumped down the steps one by one to the garden apartment entrance—New York real estate folks had rechristened basement spaces “garden apartments” years before, probably figuring that
basements
are cousins to cellars and crypts and caves, while “gardens” are a bit of Eden, all green and sunny with vegetables and flowers—and rang the bell. We were buzzed into a small, delicious-smelling kitchen and made our way to the big room beyond, which to my delight was way more cabbage patch than crypt, a child’s garden of color and light, streaming with early childhood energy.

BJ looked comfortable on a sprawling green beanbag chair, swaddled in a tangle of toddlers. She smiled and waved to us and kept on reading a big book about a mouse and a whale, best friends for life. Z hurried off and began stacking blocks while I settled into a tiny chair to watch the action.

She was about my age, maybe early thirties, her jet-black hair cut into a pageboy that framed her perfectly round and pale face. She was dressed for action—high-tops, rough-stitched fatigue pants, oversized corduroy shirt sporting two big pockets—with no fear of tearing, wrinkling, staining, or mussing. She resembled a grown-up Buster Brown, the pretty cross-dressing comic book hero from the turn of the century whose charming demeanor hid a mischievous heart and a critical consciousness. Buster Brown’s constant companion was his dog, Tige; BJ’s roommate was a giant cuddly English sheepdog called Daisy. Like Buster, BJ was a living lovable contradiction.

The space was a perfect reflection of her personality—an enchanting jumble. There were books and book shelves everywhere, easels and paint supplies in one corner, wooden blocks in another, a large round table with eight little blue chairs in the middle, and a row of colorful cubby holes against one wall in the kitchen, each with a name, a few family photos, a change of clothes, and a favorite stuffy or snack or blanket. All the kids were part-time, so while there were only six kids in the space now, there were at least a dozen cubbies.

The toddlers were busy, busy, busy—someone scribbling wildly with big colorful chalk on the linoleum floor, someone else pushing cars up a ramp, others listening to the story—their natural narcissism on full display, and BJ, unruffled and at ease, finished the book, gently swooshed the kids from her lap to the table, and greeted me again on her way to get the apples and bananas she arranged at the table. The place hummed with the good anarchistic energy of toddlers at work, and BJ’s Kids had the feel of a sweet if slightly screwball family with a surplus of very young children getting into everything in every corner. When we visited again with Lou/Bernardine later in the week, we all felt right at home and vowed never to leave.

BJ had no formal training, no college degrees, but she was an inspired early childhood educator right from the start with a burgeoning library about teaching toddlers, and anyone who watched her for a minute recognized something special. Perhaps it was her ability to communicate so easily with tiny people without a hint of patronization or manipulation, or perhaps it was the obvious delight she exuded, or her laser-like perceptions of what it felt like to be Lynnette or Little Jack or Z in full fury or crushing sadness or bursting bliss. She was one of a kind, and everyone knew it.

BJ’s Kids was seat-of-the-pants as an organized enterprise, but Z felt safe and solid and fully recognized there, lighting up whenever we made the turn onto Eighty-fourth Street, and it quickly became his, and our, second home. Play-dates and picnics and outings followed, and little by little an entire community swung into view. I was parked there already when BJ hired me as an assistant.

Besides the hard work of taking good care of the swelling gaggle of kids, BJ was trying to manage her embryonic small business, juggling a blizzard of part-time schedules and the cash that flowed in and out daily. Tuition was based on an evolving, dynamic, and idiosyncratic hourly rate—unwritten, uneven, and unclear—that seemed to spring spontaneously and fully-formed from the head of BJ. My first payday was a marvel: BJ pulled her large shoulder bag from the top of the fridge as I was getting ready to leave and rummaged through the bills, emerging with a handful of crumpled up twenties that she handed over to me. “See if that’s right,” she said. I couldn’t remember what we’d agreed on, but it felt OK, so I said sure.

BJ’s Kids had a row of easels against one wall, a cozy reading corner with lots of books and pillows, a dress-up area stocked with hats and flowing scarves, colorful clothes and costumes, brief cases, hand-bags, cow-poke boots, capes, hats of all kinds, and milk cartons filled with specific items to create a make-believe hospital, pizza restaurant, shoe store, bakery, fire house, and more. It was home-like, hidden and impenetrable—a place to explore and experiment. And beyond this, there was clay, water, sand, and art materials set up and available in a corner near the sinks, a large collage table on wheels with a series of bins containing bits of cloth, shells, buttons, bottle caps, and corks. For Zayd, BJ’s Kids was an infinite treasure-trove of discovery and surprise, and it was also the honey pot, a place to feast and fatten. The joy began each morning in the biggest collection of wooden unit blocks ever assembled—Build! Build! Build!—where Zayd moved in a matter of months from horizontal runways to vertical towers to bridges to archways to entire fantastical worlds complete with characters and action.

We earned some early childhood notoriety through what seemed to us a harmless enough innovation: we had a large juice and snack table near the sink that we kept stocked and available from the moment children arrived in the morning until the last one left in the afternoon. The table had little cups surrounding pitchers of juice that kids could pour for themselves whenever they liked—with all the attendant spills and stickiness—and paper plates and napkins for the taking, as well as larger plastic serving dishes with sliced apples, celery and carrot sticks, oranges and bananas, cheese and crackers constantly replenished by staff throughout the day. “Disgusting,” said the director of a sister preschool. “You will have roaches and mice everywhere!” “This is bad practice,” advised another. “The kids will eat all day and never learn the importance of meal time.” None of this had occurred to us, and none of it made immediate sense, but we were a bit off-balance and unsure at the start. When a neighbor and friend—a therapist and a feminist whose practice focused on eating disorders—encouraged us to persevere, arguing that the main thing everyone needed to learn in relation to food was self-regulation, and that the operating question should always be, “Are you hungry?” the snack-on-demand table became a quirky signature we embraced.

This fit with a larger idea that guided BJ’s Kids from top to bottom, beginning to end: kids need to be free to develop from the inside out, not the other way around.

We created a dazzling collection of good, solid children’s literature by African American, Native American, Latino and Hispanic, Asian and European American authors; books that mirrored for children, culturally and personally; books that stretched them and opened them to different or unfamiliar cultures and situations as well.

My favorite books were the ones the kids made themselves, stories they dictated to an adult and then illustrated and bound. We had a vast collection about families, pets, monsters, baby sisters, grandparents, trips to the zoo or the museum, space travel and hospitals. One of my most beloved homemade jobs was an ABC book that BJ had developed by gathering the invented toddler-talk all around us into a compilation that arguably improved on the original words in several instances: N is for Nosey, a noun—those hardened bits of dirt and mucous one picks from the nose; B is for Blurries, a noun—sudden bursts of wind-driven blinding snow; R is for Repulsicans, a noun—it’s the party of Ronald Reagan!

Over time BJ and I developed our own working early childhood education philosophy; we hatched as well a little set of grounded theories about kids, conclusions about how they grew and what they needed, coalescing in the middle of the muddle of our mish-mash classroom. We hadn’t read or heard about any of this, and our observations were not confirmed for us by any research or authoritative sources whatsoever—but we thought putting a toddler in a walker was a form of abuse, asking a little kid to tell what a painting depicted a kind of censorship, and telling a child not to be angry a pathway to neurosis. As BJ would say, “If it’s not true, I’ll eat my shirt.”

One mid-morning the front bell rang unexpectedly, and in swept Eva Wolfson from the New York City Department of Health—someone had ratted out BJ for running an unlicensed child-care center, and suddenly there was the distinct whiff of danger at the door. Eva was short and tough with BJ, reading her the riot act in her crisply accented voice, and the conclusion was both quick and apparently foregone: the place was substandard, second-rate, out of compliance, and would be “closed by order of the New York City Department of Health.” The phrase evoked images of filthy kitchens and infestations of vermin—I wouldn’t want to eat at any joint that had been “closed by order of the New York City Department of Health”—and the words themselves were tragically definitive and carried the chilling ring of irrevocability.

BJ’s Kids was spontaneously, naturally homemade, and, of course, an uneasy fit with rules, straight lines, orderly regulations, or city codes. On that first visit Eva checked off the contradictions: improper files and inadequate record-keeping, sloppy documentation of attendance, unacceptable kitchen and bathroom sinks, no approved governors on the hot water faucets, insufficient square footage, inappropriate staffing, and no fully certified teacher. After she left and the kids went down for their naps, BJ cried for two hours, flattened momentarily. She didn’t stay down for long.

By that evening BJ, who looked so mild and unassuming hours before, had organized a campaign to save the center that would have made Patton proud. Parents were mobilized, politicians contacted, and an elaborate media strategy launched. Ken Auletta visited BJ’s Kids a few days later and wrote a column for the
Daily News
entitled “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” and both BJ and Eva were suddenly famous.

Thus began a complicated association. Eva was smart and capable and even, once she dropped that brusque bureaucratic pose, a good mentor for BJ; for her part, BJ was willing to learn and to search for the common ground between dream and reality. The swords were sheathed.

And within it all was an odd unintended consequence for me as well. I returned to school seeking certification as an early childhood teacher after fifteen years away from the classroom, to the Bank Street College of Education—a perfect fit, it turned out—where I would earn a master’s degree.

I’d left college with a vengeance and vowed to never look back. School had felt increasingly irrelevant and superficial to me in 1964, and I was straining to escape, burning to dive head first into the real world to end a war and upend the system (this was a time before I’d discovered that all worlds can be real if you’ll let them be, even the world of your imagination). Revolutionaries want to change the world, of course, and teachers, it turns out, want to change the world too—typically one child at a time. It wasn’t as much of a reach as you might imagine: day to day, I had more adrenaline pumping through my veins as a teacher than at any other time in my life.

In any case, Bank Street quickly won me over and affirmed my basic instincts as a teacher: the learning child is an unruly spark of meaning-making energy on a journey of discovery and surprise, not a passive receptacle waiting for instructions; every kid is a whole human being with a mind and a heart, a body and a spirit, experiences and aspirations that must somehow be accounted for by an engaged teacher. But from this base my professors at Bank Street went deeper, showing me again and again that the work of teaching is infinitely complex and excruciatingly difficult—becoming a good-enough teacher (like becoming a good-enough parent) was a life project and not some easy fix or formula.

I learned to practice observing and recording, kid-watching, as a central activity—thick description and time-sampling, artifact analysis and tone-monitoring, and so on. I read Jean Piaget’s stage theory and Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s philosophy.

Doing some errands one Saturday morning, I said casually to five-year-old Zayd, “There’s a guy named Piaget who says that kids like you think that people think with their mouths.”

“What?” he said indignantly. “That’s so stupid.”

“Well, what do people think with?” I asked.

“People think with their brains, and people talk with their mouths,” he said definitively.

I decided to interview Zayd for my class project, imitating the format that Piaget used with his own kids.

Piaget’s insight was that young children are concrete operational thinkers, lacking the capacity for abstraction and inference, relying instead on the visible, the tangible, and the material. I was impressed that Zayd was as clear and confident as he was, and I figured as a modern kid his sophistication was way beyond what Piaget’s kids had access to or knew.

“So,” I said when we sat down a few days later, “you think with your brain?”

“Right,” he said.

“And right now what are you thinking about?

“A TV,” he replied.

“And where is the TV you’re thinking about?”

“There’s a tiny TV inside my brain,” he explained.

Holy shit, I thought, concrete operational, as Piaget predicted. But onward: “Have you ever forgotten anything?”

“Sure, like when I forgot to tell Mom the joke from school.”

“OK, where did that joke go?”

Without missing a beat Zayd said, “It went right out my mouth.”

Wow! Piaget rocks!

From then on any assignment that came my way—child development, literacy, curriculum, teaching—drove me to my own little hands-on laboratory at home: snapshots of toddlers in motion, sketches of family life, representations of young children reaching deep within themselves and clamoring to learn and to grow.