Among Schoolchildren

by Tracy Kidder

  Inside the room, during social studies, the pioneers drove out onto the Oregon Trail in a station wagon. "Put your heads down on your desks. Jimmy, keep your eyes open, because I'm not sure about you." They were pioneer children, and she was their mother. She wore a short-sleeved blouse and khaki skirt. She walked up and down among the desks of her middle people, hands in her skirt pockets, stopping now and then to bend down and make sure Jimmy's eyes were open. "You come home and your mother says, 'Okay, we're going to a place called Molasses.' And so the first thing you say to yourself is?"

  "Where's Molasses?" said Felipe, head still in the crook of his arm.

  What was Molasses like? The mother didn't know. Were they ever coming back? Nope, going there permanently. A few worried ohhhs from the children. Chris smacked her lips. "Okay. And your mother says, 'You know, on the way I can't stop at McDonald's or Burger King or 7-Eleven and get some supplies. So, because I need room for the food, we can take very little of your things.' " She sang, "Goodbye, stereo. Goodbye, TV." And her hands came out of her pockets and threw those things off the side of the trail.

  The bit about the TV brought gasps of surprise and disbelief and a few cries of protest—"No way!"—from the roomful of lowered heads, and, voice cracking on that high but gravelly laugh, Chris cried, "Goodbye, bike! Goodbye, all those things!"

  They climbed the Rockies—she had never seen them, except in photographs—and endured the hard realities of life and death on the trail. Her hands flew out to one side and threw down their Cabbage Patch dolls and all the dishes and the kitchen table by the side of the trail. "Because if you don't drop your stuff out at that point, you are stranded. One of our vocabulary words for this morning. You're stuck there, and there's nothing around for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles. Finally, you get to Molasses."

  "Thank goodness!" said Arnie. He didn't seem to be joking.

  And they had to build houses and contend with Native Americans, who didn't want these interlopers taking their land—and they wouldn't have felt any different, would they, if they'd been Native Americans?—and with exhaustion and illness and no hospitals. "I think most of us, including Mrs. Zajac, might pass out and say, 'No way!' "

  Most of the children had sat up, and most nodded their heads.

  "What you have just experienced in your minds is something not very, but a little similar to what the settlers experienced a long, long time ago. In those days they didn't use a car. What did they use?"

  "A wagon," said Dick.

  "I'd have an eight-cylinder Peterbilt," said Claude.

  "Those people," said Chris. "Why did they do it?" With feeling, she added, "They seem like nuts to me." They spent the next fifteen minutes figuring out why; the answers were in the text. In subsequent lessons, she put on a skit with them, arranged them in study groups, had them write short essays in which they imagined themselves children going west in covered wagons—a lot of the essays were pretty good, she thought—and showed them a movie in which Indians in ceremonial dress did a ceremonial dance, and Dick, the quiet boy who loved social studies, piped up, "Mrs. Zajac, is that a stereotype?"

  "It could be, but they did have rituals and dances," she called from her desk, over the sound track. "You should know, though, that not all Native Americans had the same ones." In the darkened room, Chris laid her cheek on her blotter and smiled. At least one child had remembered the academic lessons of September. " That makes you feel good," she said to herself.

  4

  Jimmy, Chris thought, has started spring vacation early. He sat at his desk with his cheek resting heavily on his hand. The skin around his eyes was stretched. He looked Chinese. It was the last day before the April break, and Jimmy was angry at Mrs. Zajac. She had caught him with homework done in his mother's handwriting again, and she had called on him several times, trying to wake him up and to get him to do some math himself. As she walked to the other side of the room to work with the top math group, Jimmy rearranged the hand supporting his cheek. He made it into a fist, but left the middle finger sticking out. Eyes closed and middle finger hanging down, pendant from his cheek, Jimmy defied her, as Roman generals once defied each other.

  Chris turned to the window until her smile faded. "Poor Jimmy," she thought. "He just hates to think."

  She advanced on the boy from behind. "Wake uh-up! Good mor-ning!" He leaned away from her but withdrew his middle finger.

  Al's voice intoned over the intercom at midmorning: "Attention, staff. It would help me out immensely if you could fill out the census forms before you leave today, so I can work on them next week."

  Chris looked up at the squawk box and smiled. That, she figured, was Al's way of telling them that he would be working over April vacation.

  Al's voice again: "Can I have your attention, staff. Please. We have a new vending machine in the office. If you have a chance, go and take a look at it."

  Chris looked up at the squawk box. This time she shook her head.

  The children gave her a surprise party in the afternoon. During the preparations, hanging crepe streamers while Mrs. Zajac was away at lunch, Judith said to Jimmy, "Do your math and she'll be happier." Jimmy did some of it.

  "Ahhh! You little sneaks! Isn't this nice!" Oh, my, didn't Mrs. Zajac look surprised! How had they managed to keep the party a secret?

  Judith eyed her from under lowered brows.

  Chris wasn't sure she wanted a vacation. Al came by the room while the class was at gym. "Did they give you a gift, Chris?"

  "Yes. They gave me a chocolate bunny and a chocolate Easter egg, and they're going right to my hips."

  The children came back shouting. She let them. She merely corrected grammar. "Mine, Felipe. Not mines. Mine."

  Saucy Henrietta from math class poked her head in the door. "Bye, Miss Ajax."

  "You're going to be a week smarter. Right, Henrietta?"

  Henrietta nodded deeply.

  "Bye, Miss Zajac."

  Whose voice was that? There was slender Juanita, her lovely frizzy hair and shapely ears, and her dimples. Was this the first time she'd heard Juanita speak out loud voluntarily?

  "Goodbye, Juanita. You have a nice vacation."

  She said goodbye to Robert and to Claude. She wished them nice vacations, and hoped that something of Robert's new attitude would survive the week off. There'd still be the last of April and all of May to work on Claude.

  The walkers had lined up at the door. She went up to Jimmy and cut him out of the line. Tapping him in the chest while he made his low, monotonic laugh, Chris backed him over to the corner where Miss Hunt used to sit.

  "Do you think school's hard, Jimmy?"

  "No."

  "Jimmy, you don't like it when I call on you in math."

  "No."

  "Why?"

  Jimmy was shy now, rolling his head from side to side and looking at his feet. "Because. It makes me feel stupid."

  "But you aren't stupid. You have the answers sometimes. Why do you think Mrs. Zajac calls on you?"

  "So I'll pay attention."

  "Do you think she cares if you learn?"

  "Yeah-uh."

  "Do you think that might be another reason why I call on you?"

  "Yeah-uh."

  "But you're right." She took him by his thin shoulders. She turned him around, pointing him toward the door. She hugged him from behind. "I do call on you partly so you won't fall asleep. Otherwise, I'm afraid you might be snoring."

  In her grasp, Jimmy smiled.

  Isla del Encanto

  Sacred Heart, a church of virtual cathedral size, dominates the once Irish neighborhood of Churchill. Driving to Mass with Billy at the wheel, through the now mostly Puerto Rican part of town, Chris huddled in the passenger seat and tried not to let her mind connect the sights of graffiti and litter with the knots of mostly dark-skinned people on the stoops and corners. She could have switched to a Catholic church in a neighborhood that didn't trouble her, but she refused to quit Sacred
Heart and her favorite priests. A church is a church wherever it is, she told herself, and besides, going to one in a Puerto Rican neighborhood did her good. She'd gotten to know some Puerto Ricans while serving on parish committees. Leaving church, she usually felt less troubled, and would tell herself that she had to work harder on correcting her own prejudice.

  Plexiglass protected Sacred Heart's huge stained-glass windows and lent the inner air the feeling of a garrisoned sanctuary. Parishioners rarely filled even half the pews. Sounds of Latin music, mostly salsa and merengue, came in from the streets outside during the quiet English Mass. Separate services were held at different hours in English and in Spanish. At the English Mass—as Chris's parish priest, Father Joyce, had observed—people stopped talking when they entered the church, they didn't bring in babies, and they spread out among the pews. Many took seats far from the altar. At the Spanish Mass, people came in talking, continuing the conversations that they'd begun outside. The Hispanic parishioners clustered together in the forward pews. The church always sat hushed after Communion at the English Mass, but voices murmured, babies cried, throughout the Spanish. "People clap their hands, and they're not afraid to sing," said Father Joyce. "There's a real noise level at the Spanish Mass that would drive most people crazy at the English Mass." He added, " Vive la différence. But it's hard to find ways to bring the two communities together."

  Father Joyce had initiated bilingual services. When Chris went to one herself just before April vacation, the idea seemed to have caught on; a lot of people came, both Puerto Rican and white. Chris, the tireless volunteer, was a lector. She was standing up near the altar when the service started and the priests and acolytes paraded in. The church was very noisy. That surprised her, but not nearly as much as the music. Puerto Ricans played on an electric piano, a guitar, and Puerto Rican cuatro, and kept the rhythm on maracas and a set of bongo drums. It sounded to Chris like party music.

  All the Puerto Ricans were clapping. So were the marching Irish and French Canadian priests. She didn't know what to do. She realized that she was tapping out the rhythm against her leg with her rolled up program. The music sounded lovely. The beat infected her. Finally she, too, started clapping.

  In a former butcher shop half a dozen blocks away, on any Sunday, Judith would sit among a very small congregation, about two-thirds small children, the littlest of them gathered around Judith. One sat on her lap. They would sing a lively tune with Spanish words. Jonah being swallowed by the whale was a favorite. In translation, the song's refrain went: "Because he didn't pay attention to the word of God." Judith's brother-in-law accompanied them on an electric guitar, through a crackling speaker. Up at an old wooden lectern, Judith's father kept time on a güiro, a gourd with a serrated surface, which one scratches with a stick. A little girl sitting beside Judith, out in the several rows of folding wooden chairs, played adroitly on a tambourine. Judith, singing loudly, held her hands over the hands of the baby girl on her knees and showed her how to clap.

  The main room of Judith's father's church was windowless. The linoleum had peeled away near the door, exposing an older floor of small black and white tiles. Half of the suspended ceiling was missing. Above it was the old ceiling of pressed tin. At the front of the room, Judith's father had erected a plywood platform covered with patches of carpet. "Escapa por tu Vida," read a sign on the back wall. "Escape for your Life." An American flag hung alongside. "Gloria a Dios!" cried Judith's father.

  The church was one of several that had sprung up in the vicinity of Precious Blood Cathedral, the little storefront sanctuaries clustering around the huge, dying Catholic church. These Pentecostal churches existed back in Puerto Rico, too. Protestant missionaries, as well as North American businessmen, had followed the Marines onto Puerto Rico at the end of the nineteenth century. It had been a Catholic island, and it remained one, but Protestantism secured some ground. The Catholic Church had not provided a great deal of secular help to the island's poor. It had not cultivated a large Puerto Rican priesthood; when the Church in Puerto Rico had begun to replace the priests from Spain, it had brought in mainly North American clerics. The immigrant Poles, Irish, and French Canadians had all come to Holyoke with their own priests. They had erected their own Catholic churches, where they held services in their native languages, with their own customary music. Puerto Ricans coming to Holyoke from their island, by contrast, could not for many years find a local Mass in Spanish. In fact, for a time, a Puerto Rican couldn't even get a proper funeral locally; the white-owned mortuaries refused them.

  Father Joyce guessed that most Puerto Ricans in Holyoke remained "cultural Catholics," by which he meant that the large numbers who went to no church at all still called themselves Catholic. Only a small minority of the Puerto Rican community went to the Pentecostal churches, but this group, Father Joyce thought, had a special, internal strength. One local Latino psychologist wondered if some Pentecostals, like some Jehovah's Witnesses, did not take too strict an approach to child rearing. Maybe, he thought, they were only readying children for rebellion. But Father Joyce observed that Pentecostal families tended to remain intact and to be disciplined in their daily lives. At the very least, the little churches like Judith's father's attempted to deter early, out-of-wedlock pregnancies and addiction to alcohol and to the various drugs that frequently changed hands nearby.

  After the song and prayers, the congregation split up for a while. Judith taught Sunday School, usually to six and sometimes to eight small children, in another windowless and smaller room equipped with a scrap of carpet, some metal folding chairs, a rickety table, and an old automobile seat propped against one wall. Judith looked very grown up in black high heels and a gray and white striped dress. She told Bible stories, David and Goliath one week, Cain and Abel another. She had a little blackboard on which, just like Mrs. Zajac, she wrote down the facts she wanted her pupils to remember. She walked back and forth in front of them as she told the stories in Spanish, stopping to interrogate them and laughing over childish replies, also interjecting now and then commands to pay attention. She had one difficult pupil, a skinny little boy with mischievous eyes. "My Clarence," she called him. When he acted up, she'd make him stand and, standing behind him herself, would envelop him in her arms. He would grin and stop chattering. She looked like a snake charmer then, arms around the rascal from behind, swaying from side to side, and as she talked, reaching around to inscribe an imaginary mark on the boy's forehead to show the rest what God had done to Cain's.

  Judith kept her lessons to about ten minutes. Then they'd sing a song or two, and Judith Would get out some scissors and a shoe box of crayon remnants. She'd show them how to make bunnies out of the paper shells designed to hold cupcakes, which she'd bought for pennies at a bakery nearby. She watched as her Clarence fashioned an imitation cigarette—or possibly a joint—instead, and made as if to puff on it. Judith put on a sour face. The young teacher reasoned: "A child's behavior in school comes from what he learns at home. And look what he learns at home."

  After the midday service, Judith's family would go home. The outer doors at the project had lost their locks and knobs. Anyone who wanted to get in could crook a finger through the hole and pull open the door. This was still arson country, and there were drug addicts around. Judith's parents almost never left her alone in their apartment.

  They had a Puerto Rican Sunday dinner: roast pork and beans, yams and plantains, spicy chicken stew, pastelillos. The apartment, though small, was tidily kept. Brightly painted plaster fruits and vegetables, which Judith's father had made, hung on the kitchen cupboard doors. Many colorful knickknacks covered the coffee table in the tiny living room, among them a güiro, like the one Judith's father played in church, except that this one had been cut in half and its handle had been removed. It was now doing service as a vase.

  On a spring Sunday afternoon, done with preaching until evening, when he always held another family service, Judith's father sat in an easy chair, holding the güir
o-vase while the Red Sox played, unwatched, on TV. The güiro is one of the traditional instruments of Puerto Rico, made from the gourds of the calabash tree. Turning it over in his hands, Judith's father gazed fondly at it and chuckled.

  There was a gentle, easygoing, old-world quality about him. He had first come to the mainland thirty years ago to work on farms. When he had left Puerto Rico, almost everyone in his village had lived in humble wooden houses—some in houses made of hay, he said. Without rancor he blamed the island's famous first governor, Munoz Marin, for abandoning agriculture, in order, Judith's father said in Spanish, "to put the island on the road to being rich." His grandfather had a farm of thirty acres back then, much of it in sugar cane, and also many animals. But Judith's father couldn't earn much working there. He could make $50 on the mainland for work that paid only $13 or $14 on the island. So he had come to North America. He had worked on farms in Florida, Pennsylvania, and New England. A recent car accident had disabled him for heavy work, and he had been forced to live partly on public assistance. He believed that Puerto Rico ought to become a state, which explained the American flag at his altar, but he had never really gotten comfortable with life on the mainland. He could understand English fairly well but spoke little. His older children sometimes teased him, saying, "Puerto Rico me encanta, y welfare me aguanta"—"Puerto Rico enchants me, and welfare supports me." The saying was popular locally. It implied that going back to Puerto Rico was not a realistic option for a poor islander.

  Judith had been to Puerto Rico once, as a baby, and since then only vicariously, via a Spanish-language newspaper called El Vocero, for sale at Papote's bodega in the Flats. The tabloid's front page often carried a photograph of a bullet-riddled corpse lying somewhere in Puerto Rico. Imagining red blood from the evidence of black and white news photos, Judith had the inaccurate impression that Puerto Rico was a very violent place. She didn't want to move there. But her father, who knew better, had not given up the idea of going home someday.