Schooled

by Mona Shaw

I don’t see teachers as saints. As a child who lived on the wrong side of the tracks, teachers, for the most part, were among those I had to overcome.

I grew up in the poor section of the poorest neighborhood in Burlington, Iowa. It was named Flint Hills Manor, but locals called it “The Manor” with no small amount of derision toward its residents.

I started noticing I was treated differently in first grade, but I couldn’t figure out why.  By, second grade, the reason became clear.  When I would raise my hand, my teacher would tell me to put my hand down.

“You live in The Manor,” she said, “You don’t know the answer. You’re slow.”

There were teachers who were exceptions, but exceptions they were. Mrs. Chant, my fifth-grade was one. She called on me even though I no longer bothered to raise my hand.

“You’re bright. You’re very bright,” she said with authority, “Don’t you let anyone tell you that you’re not.”

She saved me. My entire world opened after that. I drank in learning like someone who’d been crawling in the desert. I won spelling bee after spelling bee and every essay contest. I wrote poems, and Mrs. Chant would read them to the class and tell others she had friends in college without the skill to write such a poem. I was happy and at the top of my game. I naively believed I’d proven the teachers who didn’t believe in me wrong--until that day.

That day I had won another contest. My reward was to hang student art work in the hall, and I was doing that.  Two teachers began to discuss my brother and I as if I weren’t there. Mark and I had scored extremely high on a Basic Skills test. They were bothered by this.

“Those minds in those children,” one said to the other, “What a waste!”

They went on to berate my father.

“They are so hopeless. We called the parents, and the father just said, ‘I know my kids are smart. I’m glad you all finally figured it out,’ and then he hung up on us!”

Something snapped in me that day, and it defined me for the rest of my life. I had come to accept by then that there were many things of which I was not worthy. I was not worthy of nice clothes or to live in a nice house and ride in a nice car or even to be friends of children who did not live in The Manor. I certainly wasn’t worthy to expect teachers to assume I wasn’t “slow.”  I had to prove myself in ways others didn’t.

“But,” I thought in defiance, “But, I am certainly worthy of my very own mind.”

I glared at them. They didn’t notice.

“I’ll show you,” I thought, “I’ll show you my mind is not wasted in me!”

Now, I can’t say that I’ve done that, but my life isn’t over yet.  Still, I’m grateful that ten-year-old little girl had that thought instead of the endless self-destructive thoughts she might have had.

I’m certain without Mrs. Chant I wouldn’t have had such a thought.  The soaking in self-worth she had given me had freed me more than likely either of us knew. Mrs. Chant gave me something else, something subversive and dangerous. She told me how to get a library card at the Burlington Public Library.

Teachers aren’t saints. Librarians are. No librarian ever told me I was “too slow” to check out or read any book there. They helped me find books on things I wanted to read about. They never questioned why I questioned.  Once one even let me climb onto to the glass floor in the stacks.

“I think you’ve earned that,” she said.

The library wasn’t just magical. It was the place where magic was made. I was passionately in love with everything about it. The smell, the feel of books in my hands. The difference in that feeling whether a book was old or new. The way newspapers hung on their poles. The busts of famous writers perched here and there. I was there as much as my parents would allow. I would do extra chores late into a Friday night to spend all day Saturday there.

I traveled the world in that library. I went to the Louvre in Paris and to the pyramids in Egypt. I boated down the Amazon and walked the paths in Jamestown. Before too long, I became obsessed with oppressors or people who hurt people.  I read everything I could find about Hitler and the Holocaust.  The more stories shook me, the more I read.  Even though many of the horrors I read were far worse than anything I had experienced, these stories gave me an odd sense of solidarity.  I clung to that like a life raft. 

I studied rich people and monarchies. I not only read of their historic atrocities to others like myself, I studied how they lived, their customs, their beliefs, their sense of entitlement. I read everything written by Emily Post twice.

I read about slavery. I read things slaves had said about being slaves, how they lived, how they felt when a child was sold, about the contrast between palatial mansions and dirt floors.  I read about how slavery began, where it began, and who began it. It was rich people wanting to get richer I learned. I began to see a constant connection between wealth and power and the nascence of human cruelty.

Maybe that’s why I believed Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn’t just standing up for race equality, but that he was standing up for poor people too.  I fell in love with him quickly when I began to read his words. For me, they easily translated to my own situation. He gave me hope we could overcome.  I had ongoing imaginary conversations with him when I walked the halls at school. We became close. By, ninth grade I was hanging his photo in my room and in my locker.  In 1966, this was strange to everyone, but me.

I had had also noticed something else.  As I grew older, the Mrs. Chants were fewer. There had been Mr. Rowell in Junior High and Miss Byers and Miss Bauercamper in high school, but that was about it.  Not all, the teachers mistreated me, most simply ignored me.  I was invisible. 

However, I began to consistently see that those teachers who did see me in a positive light were also the ones who did the same with African American students.  I wasn’t sure why, but I decided this probably wasn’t an accident.

This synchronicity became even clearer to me the day Miss Bauercamper told me to read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 before my 11^th grade English class.  Unbeknownst to Miss Bauercamper, I had been taken with this sonnet already to the extent that I’d memorized it. So, without using our text book, I just stood and recited.

“SONNET 116

By William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

When I finished, Miss Bauercamper was strangely silent for the longest time. I quickly took my seat fearing I’d done something wrong. Maybe I should have read it from the book. She finally stood and faced the class.

“In 20 years,” she said, “Mona is the first of my students who understands this poem. You may want to consider this class, the next time you make fun of her.”

I was over the moon, of course. Boy, had she told them!  They won’t make fun of me now!  I was wrong, as I’d quickly learn right after class.

A group circled me in the hall and began to taunt me.

“You know,” they said, among other cruel things,” that any teacher who thinks white trash and ‘niggers’ know more than us doesn’t know what she’s talking about? She should be fired for saying that to us!”

No matter how much we may believe that cruel words are a lie, there is a tiny wicked voice inside that can still pipe up and whisper, “Maybe they’re right.”

This wicked little voice refused to shut up for the rest of the day. Maybe they were right. Maybe there was something intrinsic to poverty that simply made you inferior in thought and being.  Maybe I just wasn’t smart enough to get it.

The notion was breaking me when they circled me again late in the school day. They didn’t hurl any racial epithets then and were content to just make fun of everything about me. I did nothing but stand there while hot tears squeezed themselves out of my tightly closed eyes on to my cheeks. They made fun of my tears too.

Then something happened that had never happened before in many years of being taunted in school. Not once.  Two students come over and intervened. They had not been in Miss Bauercamper’s class or witnessed the scene after class.  Still, these two brave girls broke into the circle and said.

“Knock it off! Leave her alone! We don’t care what you think!  You’re idiots!”

By some miracle, my tormenters stopped and left. The courage of these girls blew defeat away. Just like that.  Just like that.  They were slight of frame and pretty and very smug with themselves. They were Black.

I fell into an easy sleep that night feeling more comforted than I have ever felt by someone my own age in the face of such things. My last thought was this.

“Does being picked on make you more compassionate?”

People were more honest about their racism then.  Many openly took pride in it.  And, teacher after teacher who claimed to not be prejudiced would tell us we had to respect the opinion of those who were.

“This is America. People are free to believe ever they choose, and we need to respect that.”

I never had a teacher tell me they had a problem with Jim Crow laws.

I wondered about this and said as much to Grandma Shaw.

She simply replied, “You can believe shit doesn’t stink too, but it does.”

The following spring, everything changed. In April, King was assassinated. I was inconsolable and essentially wallowed in my own private grief. “Who would help me overcome now?”

Most of the people I knew couldn’t stand Dr. King. Even the most generous, said he may mean well, but that he was going about it wrong. “He’d rather make trouble and get attention than do things that could make things better for his people. He makes them all look bad.”

But, now that King was dead, everyone loved him.  There were special assemblies and church services to sing his praises.  It was all very confusing to me, but I was still glad about the change.

The star students in school all suddenly wanted to be friends with the white trash and Black kids.  I was quite happy about this and accepted their friendships gratefully.  They invited me into their homes and to their parties.  Their parents gushed over me.

My working-class father wasn’t buying it.

“You’re a do-gooder project,” he said, “Can’t you see that?  They don’t care about you. They care about making themselves feel good.”

He was wrong, and I knew it, and I told him so.

“Okay,” he said, “Give a party in our home.  I bet no more than two or three will show up.”

“Okay,” I said, “I will. You’ll see!”

Only one student came. I had to listen to my proud father try to convince parents on the phone that their children wouldn’t be in danger in our home. 

“We just can’t risk exposing our children to that kind of environment,” they explained.

Tim McCormally, whose father was the editor and publisher of the Burlington Hawkeye played checkers with my father all evening.  I just stared at them and managed to choke back tears.

My father was not smug. He was sad.

“I’m sorry, Kid,” he said, “I really am. I don’t care if you still want to hang out with them but stop trusting those bastards.”

A teacher I confided in would tell me I was foolish and selfish to not be fine with this.

“People need to do what they believe is best for their families,” she said, “You need to respect that.”

Still, my heart cooled to them. I made excuses to not go to their parties unless they were at the McCormally house.  They didn’t mind I didn’t come.

It is now my inclination to not trust affluent people. A few have proven me wrong in this. Too few to allow me to let down my guard.

I chose to retire in Burlington nine years ago. I live ten blocks from where I was literally born. I expect to die here. Nothing has changed. Class bigotry is as blunt as it ever was. Racism has become more insidious.  The greater sin than being a bigot has become being called a bigot.  People aren’t terribly concerned that their beliefs are racist. They are unabashedly furious at being asked to consider they might be. Without a moment of reflection, they believe they can prove their innocence on a technicality.

“I’m not racist. I don’t hate Black people. I just know they commit more crimes.” (Fact: they don’t.)

Somehow--though I’ve never met them myself--they know a lot of purple and polka-dotted people.

“I don’t care if you’re Black, white or polka-dotted, I think you’re a thug.”

This is only said when they think what they think about a person of color.

However, in my decades of travels I’ve yet to find a place better on these issues than Burlington. I didn’t find it in Iowa City or New York. Burlington is certainly better for oppressed people than the South or Indiana.  There are kind people here, who will give you the shirt off their back.  When someone stole my recycling bin and trashed my yard, folks came with a new bin and cleaned up the mess.

Sure, too many people here believe Black people are more apt to be arrested because they commit more crimes, but so does the sheriff of Johnson County, Iowa. Yet those self-described liberals keep voting for him. (No, the facts haven’t changed in four paragraphs. Black people are less likely to commit crimes than white people.)

Teachers are pretty much the same. From conversations with my grandchildren, I think there may be fewer bigots now, but the ignorant still wield too much influence. It’s still true that a teacher is as apt as not to be among those an oppressed child must overcome.

Working class, working poor, and people of color need to join forces. We could turn the ship of injustice around if we would. White oppressed people will never be free until we end racism, and people of color will never be free until we end classism. Against overwhelming evidence, I still believe that can happen.

There is no safe place on the entire planet against oppression of any kind.  None. I’ve learned that now. If the revolution can’t happen in Burlington, it can’t happen any other place either.

So, I’ll struggle from here. Who will join me?