memory

Age Nine: Penmanship and Shame

/ Gerry Wilson / 11 Comments

Fourth grade was the year of Miss Annie Nesbit, a spinster teacher who had also taught my mother (as had my first grade teacher, the one who spanked hands with a ruler). Miss Annie was a legend. We’d all heard of her since the time we entered school, and now it was our turn to endure her for an entire year.

Miss Annie was tall and thin and ramrod straight with a set of classroom rules to match. I don’t remember her ever cracking a smile. She terrified me. She prided herself on her penmanship and was determined to pass that art on to all fourth graders. She lived for cursive. We must have spent hours each day practicing our strokes and curves to make perfect letters. I tried very hard.

Handwriting
Image courtesy of office.microsoft.com

That year was also the year of the kiss.

On cold mornings when we were allowed inside the school before the bell rang, the game of choice was for the boys and girls to take turns chasing each other up and down the halls. Those wood floors were slick and smelled of oil, but we didn’t care. We ran with abandon, and we girls kept the boys at bay by hitting them with our book satchels. No lie. How we got away with such behavior, I don’t know.

There was one second grade boy–the younger brother of a boy in my class–who started chasing me. He was cute. He was just little. Having a boy your own age chase you was okay, but this little guy? And then one day he caught me and planted a kiss right on my mouth.

Everybody was laughing. Everybody had seen.

I went and hid in Miss Annie’s cloakroom. Every classroom had one. It was a big closet where we hung our coats and took off our galoshes on rainy or snowy days. It was dark and close and smelled of wet wool and rubber and sweat. I hid among the coats. Miss Annie called my name. Someone must have told her where I was because I heard footsteps, and then she was standing beside me.

“Come out now,” she said.

I was sobbing. She asked me what had happened, but I couldn’t tell. I was too ashamed. I already knew what a reputation was. Mine was ruined. Ruined.

I don’t remember what she said to calm me or how she coaxed me out. I do remember that she put her arms around me and told me it was all right, that _______ was just a silly little boy and I shouldn’t worry. But maybe I shouldn’t chase boys in the halls anymore. I went back to class, which as best I can recall had stayed quiet the whole time. If Miss Annie had told them to be quiet, they would have done just that. I went to my seat with my face still burning, and the lessons began.

I survived that first unlikely kiss. And I would never see Miss Annie in quite the same way. I’d discovered a softer side of her that not many people knew. I even imagined that sometime in her life, sour and old as she was, surely, sometime, she must have been kissed.

This is the eighth post in the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge launched by Jane Ann McLachlan. For previous posts, see Recent Posts in the right column.

Age Eight: Snow, or Sand?

/ Gerry Wilson / 9 Comments

First trip to the beach: visions of sand and water and warm sun, although I had never seen sand and water. Or at least not that kind of water.

Daddy believed in getting an early start. He got up very early anyway, so leaving at four in the morning seemed like a good idea. We would have half the trip behind us by breakfast time. I remember being feverish the night before, certain that I was coming down with something that would spoil the trip. I couldn’t get to sleep, but then, all too soon, my mother was shaking me awake. We packed ourselves in the car and headed out into the darkness.

We broke our eight-hour trip by stopping for breakfast in Meridian, Mississippi. (The restaurant, Weidmann’s, still exists.) Another four hours in the car, and we finally reached what I now know were the pine barrens of the Florida panhandle, and then, looming on the right side of the car, were these low hills so white they hurt my eyes, and at first I thought there must be some mistake. Was it snow? “That’s it,” my daddy must have said. “That’s the beach.” And then the water came into view, all blues and greens and white foam, and all that sky . . .

The beach and water were wonders to me. But my parents had made one slight miscalculation. We went in March. Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to them that the weather could be nippy in Florida, too.

Chilly Florida beach

Here I am playing on the beach, wearing my fine navy “spring” coat with the big pearl buttons over my red two-piece bathing suit! I seem to be wearing sandals with socks. (There’s a photo of me without the coat, but that one stays private. I was a chunk.)

In spite of the cool weather, I loved the beach, and I still do. There’s something about the power and the vastness of the ocean that humbles and soothes me. Or makes me feel playful and free, like the little girl in this photo.

 
 

Age Seven: An Awakening

/ Gerry Wilson / 27 Comments

Along about this time, an incident took place that nagged at me for years. It has become a short story, but I won’t print it here. I think the memory suffices.

I may have been younger than seven; I can’t swear to how old I was. I was old enough for what happened to make an impression but not old enough to understand the implications.

From my earliest memories, we always had a maid. Some people had cooks, too, or a woman who could both cook and clean. Our maid was mainly a housekeeper. She came every day, I think, although I can’t imagine why. The incident I’m remembering happened in the summer. The maid–I’ll call her Rose–came to work with her two or maybe three children, all close to my age, in tow. When Rose showed up at the back door, my mother was miffed. Rose explained that she didn’t have anybody to keep the children, and rather than miss work, she had brought them with her. I can hear her voice in my head: “They won’t be no trouble, Miss Carra. They play outside, they be fine.”

Mother had some project underway–making jelly, maybe–so she needed Rose to stay. She told the children to go play in the yard, and Rose came inside and went to work. The trouble was, I wanted to play with them. I nagged at my mother until she gave in, but she lectured me to “keep my distance” and to come in when she called. I wondered aloud why those kids couldn’t come inside to play. I got no answer.

So I went out to play with the black children, and we wound up under the walnut tree where the swing was. I don’t remember if any of us played on the swing. I had a package of balloons in my pocket, precious treasure from a trip to the dime store a day or two before. I brought them out, and we children sat in the dirt and began to blow up balloons. The fun got out of hand when I showed them how to blow them up and let them go so they went buzzing and flying all around us. Hysterical with laughter, we began to swap balloons, blow them up, let them go.

Balloons
Image by jdurham/www.morguefile.com

And then my mother showed up. Red-faced with fury, she demanded to know what we were doing, but I didn’t have to tell her. She had been watching us. She yanked me up by the arm and dragged me into the house. All my balloons were left behind.

I don’t recall what happened after that. I suppose the black children stayed on and played in the yard. In my fictional version, their mother takes her dignity and her children and walks away from that job. I’d like to think that was true, but I doubt it. Whatever happened, I was left with the feeling that something wasn’t right.

In fairness to my mother, she had reason to be concerned about me and “germs.” I was sick a lot in those days. She would not have considered herself a racist. It was all she knew. It was what I learned, too: a cultural context of racism that I wouldn’t unlearn for many years. That day, though, for a little while, we children saw only those brightly colored balloons. The color of our skin didn’t matter.

I wonder how those children felt, having their playmate taken away from them, or if the left-behind balloons were enough. I wonder if they sensed the discrimination at the heart of it and if the story stayed with them the way it has stayed with me.