by Audre Lorde
The school was right across the avenue from the catholic school where my two older sisters went, and this public school had been used as a threat against them for as long as I could remember. If they didn’t behave and get good marks in schoolwork and deportment, they could be ‘transferred’. A ‘transfer’ carried the same dire implications as ‘deportation’ came to imply decades later.
Of course everybody knew that public school kids did nothing but ‘fight’, and you could get ‘beaten up’ every day after school, instead of being marched out of the schoolhouse door in two neat rows like little robots, silent but safe and unattacked, to the corner where the mothers waited.
But the catholic school had no kindergarten, and certainly not one for blind children.
Despite my nearsightedness, or maybe because of it, I learned to read at the same time I learned to talk, which was only about a year or so before I started school. Perhaps learn isn’t the right word to use for my beginning to talk, because to this day I don’t know if I didn’t talk earlier because I didn’t know how, or if I didn’t talk because I had nothing to say that I would be allowed to say without punishment. Self-preservation starts very early in West Indian families.
I learned how to read from Mrs Augusta Baker, the children’s librarian at the old 135th Street branch library, which has just recently been torn down to make way for a new library building to house the Schomburg Collection on African-American History and Culture. If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read, and that that could get me through.
My mother was pinching my ear off one bright afternoon, while I lay spreadeagled on the floor of the Children’s Room like a furious little brown toad, screaming bloody murder and embarrassing my mother to death. I know it must have been spring or early fall, because without the protection of a heavy coat, I can still feel the stinging soreness in the flesh of my upper arm. There, where my mother’s sharp fingers had already tried to pinch me into silence. To escape those inexorable fingers I had hurled myself to the floor, roaring with pain as I could see them advancing toward my ears again. We were waiting to pick up my two older sisters from story hour, held upstairs on another floor of the dry-smelling quiet library. My shrieks pierced the reverential stillness.
Suddenly, I looked up, and there was a library lady standing over me. My mother’s hands had dropped to her sides. From the floor where I was lying, Mrs Baker seemed like yet another mile-high woman about to do me in. She had immense, light, hooded eyes and a very quiet voice that said, not damnation for my noise, but ‘Would you like to hear a story, little girl?’
Part of my fury was because I had not been allowed to go to that secret feast called story hour since I was too young, and now here was this strange lady offering me my own story.
I didn’t dare to look at my mother, half-afraid she might say no, I was too bad for stories. Still bewildered by this sudden change of events, I climbed up upon the stool which Mrs Baker pulled over for me, and gave her my full attention. This was a new experience for me and I was insatiably curious.
Mrs Baker read me Madeline, and Horton Hatches the Egg, both of which rhymed and had huge lovely pictures which I could see from behind my newly acquired eyeglasses, fastened around the back of my rambunctious head by a black elastic band running from earpiece to earpiece. She also read me another storybook about a bear named Herbert who ate up an entire family, one by one, starting with the parents. By the time she had finished that one, I was sold on reading for the rest of my life.
I took the books from Mrs Baker’s hands after she was finished reading, and traced the large black letters with my fingers, while I peered again at the beautiful bright colors of the pictures. Right then I decided I was going to find out how to do that myself. I pointed to the black marks which I could now distinguish as separate letters, different from my sisters’ more grown-up books, whose smaller print made the pages only one grey blur for me. I said, quite loudly, for whoever was listening to hear, ‘I want to read.’
My mother’s surprised relief outweighed whatever annoyance she was still feeling at what she called my whelpish carryings-on. From the background where she had been hovering while Mrs Baker read, my mother moved forward quickly, mollified and impressed. I had spoken. She scooped me up from the low stool, and to my surprise, kissed me, right in front of everybody in the library, including Mrs Baker.
This was an unprecedented and unusual display of affection in public, the cause of which I did not comprehend. But it was a warm and happy feeling. For once, obviously, I had done something right.
My mother set me back upon the stool and turned to Mrs Baker, smiling.
‘Will wonders never cease to perform!’ Her excitement startled me back into cautious silence.
Not only had I been sitting still for longer than my mother would have thought possible, and sitting quietly. I had also spoken rather than screamed, something that my mother, after four years and a lot of worry, had despaired that I would ever do. Even one intelligible word was a very rare event for me. And although the doctors at the clinic had clipped the little membrane under my tongue so I was no longer tongue-tied, and had assured my mother that I was not retarded, she still had her terrors and her doubts. She was genuinely happy for any possible alternative to what she was afraid might be a dumb child. The ear-pinching was forgotten. My mother accepted the alphabet and picture books Mrs Baker gave her for me, and I was on my way.
I sat at the kitchen table with my mother, tracing letters and calling their names. Soon she taught me how to say the alphabet forwards and backwards as it was done in Grenada. Although she had never gone beyond the seventh grade, she had been put in charge of teaching the first grade children their letters during her last year at Mr Taylor’s School in Grenville. She told me stories about his strictness as she taught me how to print my name.
I did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey, and would always forget to put it on, which used to disturb my mother greatly. I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE at four years of age, but I remembered to put on the Y because it pleased my mother, and because, as she always insisted to me, that was the way it had to be because that was the way it was. No deviation was allowed from her interpretations of correct.
So by the time I arrived at the sight-conservation kindergarten, braided, scrubbed, and bespectacled, I was able to read large-print books and write my name with a regular pencil. Then came my first rude awakening about school. Ability had nothing to do with expectation.
There were only seven or eight of us little Black children in a big classroom, all with various serious deficiencies of sight. Some of us were cross-eyed, some of us were nearsighted, and one little girl had a patch over one of her eyes.
We were given special short wide notebooks to write in, with very widely spaced lines on yellow paper. They looked like my sister’s music notebooks. We were also given thick black crayons to write with. Now you don’t grow up fat, Black, nearly blind, and ambidextrous in a West Indian household, particularly my parents’ household, and survive without being or becoming fairly rigid fairly fast. And having been roundly spanked on several occasions for having made that mistake at home, I knew quite well that crayons were not what you wrote with, and music books were definitely not what you wrote in.
I raised my hand. When the teacher asked me what I wanted, I asked for some regular paper to write on and a pencil. That was my undoing. ‘We don’t have any pencils here,’ I was told.
Our first task was to copy down the first letter of our names in those notebooks with our black crayons. Our teacher went around the room and wrote the required letter into each one of our notebooks. When she came around to me, she printed a large A in the upper left corner of the first page of my notebook, and handed me the crayon.
‘I can’t,’ I said, knowing
full well that what you do with black crayons is scribble on the wall and get your backass beaten, or color around the edges of pictures, but not write. To write, you needed a pencil. ‘I can’t!’ I said, terrified, and started to cry.
‘Imagine that, a big girl like you. Such a shame, I’ll have to tell your mother that you won’t even try. And such a big girl like you!’
And it was true. Although young, I was the biggest child by far in the whole class, a fact that had not escaped the attention of the little boy who sat behind me, and who was already whispering ‘fatty, fatty!’ whenever the teacher’s back was turned.
‘Now just try, dear. I’m sure you can try to print your A. Mother will be so pleased to see that at least you tried.’ She patted my stiff braids and turned to the next desk.
Well, of course, she had said the magic words, because I would have walked over rice on my knees to please Mother. I took her nasty old soft smudgy crayon and pretended that it was a nice neat pencil with a fine point, elegantly sharpened that morning outside the bathroom door by my father, with the little penknife that he always carried around in his bathrobe pocket.
I bent my head down close to the desk that smelled like old spittle and rubber erasers, and on that ridiculous yellow paper with those laughably wide spaces I printed my best AUDRE. I had never been too good at keeping between straight lines no matter what their width, so it slanted down across the page something like this:
A
U
D
R
E
The notebooks were short and there was no more room for anything else on that page. So I turned the page over, and wrote again, earnestly and laboriously, biting my lip,
L
O
R
D
E
half-showing off, half-eager to please.
By this time, Miss Teacher had returned to the front of the room.
‘Now when you’re finished drawing your letter children,’ she said, ‘just raise your hand high.’ And her voice smiled a big smile. It is surprising to me that I can still hear her voice but I can’t see her face, and I don’t know whether she was Black or white. I can remember the way she smelled, but not the color of her hand upon my desk.
Well, when I heard that, my hand flew up in the air, wagging frantically. There was one thing my sisters had warned me about school in great detail: you must never talk in school unless you raised your hand. So I raised my hand, anxious to be recognized. I could imagine what teacher would say to my mother when she came to fetch me home at noon. My mother would know that her warning to me to ‘be good’ had in truth been heeded.
Miss Teacher came down the aisle and stood beside my desk, looking down at my book. All of a sudden the air around her hand beside my notebook grew very still and frightening.
‘Well I never!’ Her voice was sharp. ‘I thought I told you to draw this letter? You don’t even want to try and do as you are told. Now I want you to turn that page over and draw your letter like everyone …’ and turning to the next page, she saw my second name sprawled down across the page.
There was a moment of icy silence, and I knew I had done something terribly wrong. But this time, I had no idea what it could be that would get her so angry, certainly not being proud of writing my name.
She broke the silence with a wicked edge to her voice. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘I see we have a young lady who does not want to do as she is told. We will have to tell her mother about that.’ And the rest of the class snickered, as the teacher tore the page out of my notebook.
‘Now I am going to give you one more chance,’ she said, as she printed another fierce A at the head of the new page. ‘Now you copy that letter exactly the way it is, and the rest of the class will have to wait for you.’ She placed the crayon squarely back into my fingers.
By this time I had no idea at all what this lady wanted from me, and so I cried and cried for the rest of the morning until my mother came to fetch me home at noon. I cried on the street while we stopped to pick up my sisters, and for most of the way home, until my mother threatened to box my ears for me if I didn’t stop embarrassing her on the street.
That afternoon, after Phyllis and Helen were back in school, and I was helping her dust, I told my mother how they had given me crayons to write with and how the teacher didn’t want me to write my name. When my father came home that evening, the two of them went into counsel. It was decided that my mother would speak to the teacher the next morning when she brought me to school, in order to find out what I had done wrong. This decision was passed on to me, ominously, because of course I must have done something wrong to have made Miss Teacher so angry with me.
The next morning at school, the teacher told my mother that she did not think that I was ready yet for kindergarten, because I couldn’t follow directions, and I wouldn’t do as I was told.
My mother knew very well I could follow directions, because she herself had spent a good deal of effort and arm-power making it very painful for me whenever I did not follow directions. And she also believed that a large part of the function of school was to make me learn how to do what I was told to do. In her private opinion, if this school could not do that, then it was not much of a school and she was going to find a school that could. In other words, my mother had made up her mind that school was where I belonged.
That same morning, she took me off across the street to the catholic school, where she persuaded the nuns to put me into the first grade, since I could read already, and write my name on regular paper with a real pencil. If I sat in the first row I could see the blackboard. My mother also told the nuns that unlike my two sisters, who were models of deportment, I was very unruly, and that they should spank me whenever I needed it. Mother Josepha, the principal, agreed, and I started school.
My first grade teacher was named Sister Mary of Perpetual Help, and she was a disciplinarian of the first order, right after my mother’s own heart. A week after I started school she sent a note home to my mother asking her not to dress me in so many layers of clothing because then I couldn’t feel the strap on my behind when I was punished.
Sister Mary of Perpetual Help ran the first grade with an iron hand in the shape of a cross. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. She was big, and blond, I think, since we never got to see the nuns’ hair in those days. But her eyebrows were blonde, and she was supposed to be totally dedicated, like all the other Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, to caring for the Colored and Indian children of america. Caring for was not always caring about. And it always felt like Sister MPH hated either teaching or little children.
She had divided up the class into two groups, the Fairies and the Brownies. In this day of heightened sensitivity to racism and color usage, I don’t have to tell you which were the good students and which were the baddies. I always wound up in the Brownies, because either I talked too much, or I broke my glasses, or I perpetrated some other awful infraction of the endless rules of good behavior.
But for two glorious times that year, I made it into the Fairies for brief periods of time. One was put into the Brownies if one misbehaved, or couldn’t learn to read. I had learned to read already, but I couldn’t tell my numbers. Whenever Sister MPH would call a few of us up to the front of the room for our reading lesson, she would say, ‘All right, children, now turn to page six in your readers,’ or, ‘Turn to page nineteen, please, and begin at the top of the page.’
Well, I didn’t know what page to turn to, and I was ashamed of not being able to read my numbers, so when my turn came to read I couldn’t, because I didn’t have the right place. After the prompting of a few words, she would go on to the next reader, and soon I wound up in the Brownies.
This was around the second month of school, in October. My new seatmate was Alvin, and he was the worst boy in the whole class. His clothes were dirty and he smelled unwashed, and rumor had it he had once called Sister MPH a bad name, but that couldn’t have been possible
because he would have been suspended permanently from school.
Alvin used to browbeat me into lending him my pencil to draw endless pictures of airplanes dropping huge penile bombs. He would always promise to give me the pictures when he was finished. But of course, whenever he was finished, he would decide that the picture was too good for a girl, so he would have to keep it, and make me another. Yet I never stopped hoping for one of them, because he drew airplanes very well.
He also would scratch his head and shake out the dandruff onto our joint spelling book or reader, and then tell me the flakes of dandruff were dead lice. I believed him in this, also, and was constantly terrified of catching cooties. But Alvin and I worked out our own system together for reading. He couldn’t read, but he knew all his numbers, and I could read words, but I couldn’t find the right page.
The Brownies were never called up to the front of the room; we had to read in anonymity from our double seats, where we scrunched over at the edges, ordinarily, to leave room in the middle for our two guardian angels to sit. But whenever we had to share a book our guardian angels had to jump around us and sit on the outside edge of our seats. Therefore, Alvin would show me the right pages to turn to when Sister called them out, and I would whisper the right words to him whenever it came his turn to read. Inside of a week after we devised this scheme of things, we had gotten out of the Brownies together. Since we shared a reader, we always went up together to read with the Fairies, so we had a really good thing going there for a while.
But Alvin began to get sick around Thanksgiving, and was absent a lot, and he didn’t come back to school at all after Christmas. I used to miss his dive-bomber pictures, but most of all I missed his page numbers. After a few times of being called up by myself and not being able to read, I landed back in the Brownies again.
