Public Enemy (7 page)

For a class on art in the early childhood curriculum, I collected a portfolio of paintings and drawings by our guys, usually accompanied by dictated commentary transcribed by me. One morning I said to Malik, “Tell me about this painting”—a colorful set of big swirls and fat lines—and he replied, “That’s me swimming with Zayd, and the river is cold.” I wrote it down and added it to the file.

And for a course on teaching reading, I kept a diary of our kids’ early language acquisition, writing about how Malik learned to read seemingly in one big gulp without much experimentation or trial and error. He grew up in a literate environment, to be sure, and he was read to all the time. But while Zayd had practiced and worked away at reading, Malik simply picked up a favorite book one day and read it through. Malik was the focus of a paper I wrote called “Perseverance and the Learning Child”—the picture of this little preschool guy self-pitching a whiffle ball hundreds of times in a row in an attempt to hit it onto the roof of the school with his plastic bat day after day is legendary—as well as a paper titled “Compassion in Young Children”—his finely tuned empathy and identification with others on display from the start.

I had to write a thesis to graduate from Bank Street, and that was hugely intimidating at first—too lofty and scholarly for me—but when my advisor suggested I write a series of brief portraits of teachers teaching, I was relieved and encouraged. I could do that, I thought, story-telling with my own people, a collective enterprise that would honor the work of preschool teachers. The first story I wrote was a portrait of BJ, and I loved it—close to the ground, engaged in practice, collaborative, and interactive. Perhaps you, dear reader—now that you know the phenomenal BJ a bit—can see why this was so much fun.

I was captivated. I liked college a lot this time, the pinheaded professors didn’t get on my nerves so much, and my big passion became my modest teacher-portrait project. I joined a committee of students working to create a doctoral program at Bank Street so that we could stay on for a few years and keep going. When that effort fell short, a group of us reluctantly applied to Teachers College, Columbia University, and soon enough we started classes right down the street. TC proved to be no less seductive for me, and I jumped in with both feet with my preschool teacher-portraits deepening and strengthening as I trudged forward. TC was much more eclectic than the consistent and sometimes insistent philosophy that undergirded every course at Bank Street—the Bank Street “developmental interactive approach to teaching.” Whew! A common joke among us was that TC
had
a chapel, where John Dewey once held forth from the pulpit, but that Bank Street
was
a chapel, with its comforting if limited dogma and Dewey as the resident saint. I loved them both.

I learned about qualitative research at TC, and I studied ethnography, alternative forms of representation, and collaborative, dialogic, and critical approaches, as well as oral history and all manner of scholarly traditions that used description, narrative, and interpretation to advance systematic inquiry. I loved foregrounding storytelling and story-listening as worthwhile endeavors—narrative suited messy me, but it also accommodated the noisy, idiosyncratic, complex, multilayered, dynamic reality of children themselves, as well as of schools and classrooms. It fit itself neatly to that reality rather than the other way round, hammering the natural disarray everywhere into a convenient if choked-off and clotted frame called research. All the while I was incubating and nourishing my portraits of preschool teachers, keeping them warm and well-fed and happy in the bulging backpack I carried with me everywhere—a teeming tropical rain forest of notes, sketches, and ideas.

I first got clued-up to the discipline of the desk by the Chicago author David Mamet, of all people, when I read an interview in which he said that he felt that he was only a writer when he completed the last line of whatever piece he was working on; every day before that he approached the desk knowing he was a failed writer. When he finally wrote that highly anticipated last line, well, then he was immediately cast out—he was now an ex-writer. You couldn’t win—failed, former, ex—and yet I aspired to write, reaching toward something mysterious and elusive, and arranging words on the page became my discipline and my assignment every day.

My writing desk was the solitary table in our tiny fifth-floor walk-up—it only served that purpose when the dishes were cleared, the food put away, and the kids asleep—and my writing time was 4:00 a.m., when the phone was quiet and the hustle-bustle was on a temporary time-out. I’d pull out my backpack and the two canvas totes stored in a corner, spread out my notes, stack up my yellow writing pads, and go to work. I wrote long-hand, the feel of the words at my fingertips, with lots of crossing-out, re-writing, and arrows connecting new sentences and whole paragraphs with older bits, rearranging to make a point or to hear the words harmonizing a bit more clearly. It was cramped quarters to be sure, more than modest, but perfectly magical for three whole hours every morning.

Bernardine owned a first-generation Remington Electric Typewriter and yet—this is embarrassing—I couldn’t type a word. She set down every line of my dissertation, and corrections were a huge pain. “This is some sexist shit!” she proclaimed early on, smiling patiently. “This joint isn’t
Father Knows Best
, you know.” She was altogether too generous, but she let me know that I was a jerk in need of some serious rectification.

BJ encouraged overalls for all from the start, work clothes over dresses, sweatshirts not dress shirts. “We’re here to get dirty,” she told parents, “to run and tumble and climb, to explore and get into as many things as we can.” Her own outfit was built for action, and while she didn’t want a uniform exactly, she didn’t want anyone holding back for fear of wear and tear either. “Girls can do anything,” was mantra and guiding principle as well as the title of a favorite and well-worn kids’ book on the shelf.

When Lou/Bernardine had first come to visit and we all sat down on the floor to talk, she asked BJ how she chose her books for the center. BJ said that she had to rely on donations at that point and so she just took what was offered, never giving the library a second thought—books were books, and the child care was so new that she was focused on learning all she could about kids and kid development. Lou gently nudged her to think a bit about children’s books reflecting our values, our diverse society, dignity for children, antiracist activity, and supporting girls in nontraditional roles. She pointed to a pastel poster on the wall of a little boy with his hand slyly on the behind of a little girl and noted that the poster was teaching that male supremacy was cute. BJ later described that as “my a-ha moment”; the poster was gone the next day. Children’s books became her passion and her project, something she became known for in the early childhood community.

When she received a greeting card from Bernardine celebrating International Women’s Day, BJ began to construct a large collage on one wall with pictures of women doing everything: a large color photo of the astronaut Sally Ride; Zaida Gonzales, the first female firefighter in New York, posed in front of a red and glistening fire engine; Rosie the Riveter; farmers driving trucks and tractors; pilots, cops, gardeners, and nursing moms in business suits. Families soon began to bring in pictures of their moms and grandmothers and aunts and sisters, working, cooking, singing in a church choir, riding a camel, and the collage became a living thing that grew like Topsy.

We delighted in a kind of preschool patois constantly being invented and reinvented by the kids but quickly incorporated into the culture of the place, words like
africot
(half a peach, half a plum, such a fruit!). We also all spoke a fun and sometimes funny feminist argot at BJ’s:
firefighter
, of course,
flight attendant
,
cow-hand
,
waitron
! Our block area had the biggest collection of multicultural wedgies—the name we invented for these wooden wedge-shaped toys—ever assembled: a Black male nurse and a Chicana doctor, an Asian female cop and an African business person, on and on and on.

One day we went on a field trip, across the street to our local firehouse. A young recruit named Jimmie showed us around, letting kids try on the big hats, ring the bell, and sit in the front seat of the engine. It was totally awesome, until Caitlin, four years old, asked our new friend, “So, Jimmie, when are you going to get a woman firefighter here?” Jimmie exploded in mocking laughter. “A woman!” he cried. “I hope never! The neighborhood would burn to the ground! This is no place for women.”

Caitlin was crestfallen and then furious. What did he mean? Why did he say that mean thing? Back at BJ’s she dictated a letter to Mayor Koch about getting a woman firefighter up at Eighty-fourth Street: “It’s not fair,” she declared indignantly. She concluded emphatically, “Women can do anything!”

BJ wanted to make a wide and deep space for a huge range of children, an early opening for each of them to find pathways to a life lived with courage, hope, and love, a life worth doing, and so BJ’s Kids was always a work in progress. When Zayd asked if everyone who was heroic back then was dead we began to read the story of Rosa Parks each year on December 1, depicted a bus with chairs in two rows and acted out the drama, sang Freedom Songs and silk-screened T-shirts with Rosa’s image behind bars. BJ wrote to Rosa Parks and invited her to the space, and lo and behold, she wrote back and encouraged BJ’s efforts. When Rosa Parks came to New York to speak at an education conference, the organizers knew BJ’s Kids celebrated Rosa Parks Day and asked BJ to pick her up at the airport. When they met, BJ asked Rosa Parks which children’s book about her story she liked the best. Rosa Parks told her, “None of them, because they all say that I was tired from working all day and that’s why I refused to give up my seat. The truth was, I was a political activist long before that day and I had said if I am ever asked to give up my seat, I will refuse because I am tired of being treated like I am not a human being. One day, BJ, I will write an honest children’s book that you can read to your kids.”

We took the kids to the UN and sang “Give Peace a Chance,” and then we gathered the whole day-care community to march to Central Park with kids in red or yellow wagons for the million-person no-nukes rally; Pete Seeger read one of our kid’s letters from the stage, and we all went a little giddy. BJ wanted the kids to feel that they and their families could stand up in acts of repair and hope, and that something could always be done.

One morning when Susan was dropping three-year-old Jemmie off at day care, she told us that she’d just learned that she would be laid off from her job as a nurse in a public hospital in Harlem in less than a week. Sydenham Hospital was slated to be shuttered by Mayor Ed Koch for budgetary reasons, and for Susan—as well as for many others in Harlem—it seemed that she and her neighbors were once again being treated, as Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, like “the leastwise in the land.” Her spirits were down, but she was planning to attend a community rally later that evening.

Next day her spark had returned and she was on a freedom high: “The whole community is up in arms,” she told us. “They rely on the hospital, and they care about us.” The rally had been huge, filled with spirit and singing and determination.

Sydenham was a vital space—seven hundred beds in the middle of what was, without it, an effective health care desert. More than that, Sydenham had a storied history woven into the essence of Harlem: founded in a brownstone in 1892 to serve African Americans, Sydenham was the first US private hospital with both white and Black doctors on staff. Susan was trained in Jamaica and was one of thirty-two Black nurses whose jobs would disappear with a stroke of Mayor Koch’s pen.

Each day Susan brought news from the hospital, and her accounts became a wildly anticipated and vivid “chapter book” shared at morning circle. She animated her stories with a colorful cast of characters, nurses and friends, community activists and ordinary folks, in a Dickensian slog through the empire city, life in excruciating detail, world without end. But the core of each installment was a clash of two titans: on one side, the Reverend Timothy P. Mitchell, leading critic and charismatic leader, beautiful, brilliant, and brave, rallying the community in heated demonstrations; on the other side, rankling all the good people, the scary and gnarly Mayor Koch, a lonely, barren soul whose foul deed had set the drama in motion. The Mayor Koch of Susan’s story hated ordinary people—and Black people in particular—and was the embodiment of evil: the Wicked Witch of the West to the kids, Mistah Kurtz or Iago to the rest of us. Susan was in the thick of it, eyewitness reporter, participant observer, hero, sage, mom, and friend. She never mentioned the hardship of a no-pay payday—it was a children’s story, a magnificent fairy tale.

When the ministers and their allies occupied Sydenham to keep it open, the kids were excited because, like Rosa Parks, they would not be moved. And when they escalated by announcing a hunger strike, the kids were electrified: “When will they eat?” “Are they sad?” “I’m hungry!”

“Let’s bring them something to eat,” Z said at snack time that day. Good idea! We baked for the ministers two big carrot cakes, decorating each with hearts and stars. And next morning, right after circle, Susan led the staff, kids, and a couple of other mothers on a field trip to bring carrot cake to the hunger-strikers at Sydenham Hospital—missing the concept a bit, perhaps, but wholly aligned with the spirit of the struggle. We wanted the ministers to be strong and successful in their righteous effort, we wanted Susan to keep her job, and we wanted to stand up for justice and against health care denied.

The bus dropped us a block from the hospital and we immediately heard the chanting and singing from down the street. We moved excitedly on, and when we got close Susan began greeting folks. She seemed to know everyone. The picketers cleared a path for us, smiled at the kids, and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” as we passed by. We were in the middle of the crowd when we spotted the famous Reverend Mitchell beaming at us. “Here you are!” he exclaimed, delighted. “Susan, come on up here.”