Among Schoolchildren

by Tracy Kidder

  Now, for the first extended period of the trip, Chris felt fully at ease. She had her son in tow, and a crowd of uniformed schoolchildren followed them around, staring open-mouthed at their small North American counterpart. One little girl, who kept following them, caught Chris's eye. The child had freckles and flaming red hair. Chris waylaid Efrain and asked for an explanation. He said that slaves had been clustered near the coasts and that lighter-skinned Spanish coffee growers had gone into the mountains. "So it's not uncommon to see redheads here. But," Efrain added, "we come in all shades and sizes."

  Many children asked Chris for autographs. A blond-haired girl pursued her ardently, and in just the same easy-going style she employed for Friday chats up at her desk, Chris questioned her. The girl had grown up in Miami. She told Chris that when she'd come to Comerio, she hadn't known Spanish and had been kept back a year. "I had a boy like that," Chris said to her. "I'm afraid that's going to happen to him." She lowered her head a little, to get her eyes close to the girl's. "But that doesn't mean you're not smart." The usual pep talk ensued.

  Chris ambled around, visiting classrooms. The first-grade teacher wrapped her arms around Chris's son from behind and introduced him to her class, and Chris decided right away that this teacher passed her test—Chris would feel comfortable having her son in this classroom.

  "Think they have Judy Blume?" said Chris, exploring the library. "Oh, look. Laura Ingalls Wilder. Here's David Copperfield. By Carlos Dickens." Chris chuckled to herself. Many little faces peered in through the library's louvered windows. Chris peered back at them and, smiling, said, "Hello. What are your names?"

  The fifth-grade teacher wasn't in his room. "I can tell it's a man," said Chris, looking in the door. "There isn't very much junk on the walls." She stepped inside the classroom.

  For a moment, it seemed as if Mrs. Zajac would take over and start a lesson. The children were all hooting and hollering. She eyed them with a knowing and slightly sardonic smile, then lifted her voice above the babble. She asked them what they were studying. Although they evidently didn't understand her question, they did understand her voice, and they quieted down directly.

  The Science Fair

  "You're wearin' jeans!" said Jimmy to Mrs. Zajac.

  "And Reeboks!" said Arnie.

  "Even old ladies wear Reeboks," said Chris.

  "You're wearin' jeans," said Jimmy again.

  "You're not the same," said Arnie.

  "I am the same."

  "You look about twenty," said Arnie.

  "I am about twenty," said Chris.

  Her Puerto Rican sunburn had faded. It was a morning in early May. She smiled as she led her class down the hall. But when she got near the office, Chris frowned. Robert's mother was standing there talking to Al. Chris moved on briskly, averting her eyes. She would deal with Robert again tomorrow. Robert wasn't going on the class trip to Old Sturbridge Village. Al had said he couldn't—Robert had been misbehaving again, and besides, he hadn't brought back the permission slip. Chris wasn't entirely sorry. She wasn't going to have to raise her voice once today, not even in her thoughts.

  The class, in shirtsleeves, walked out into sunshine. A couple of the girls skipped. They climbed into their bus. Chris spied and eavesdropped on the children for a while. Jimmy took a seat by himself and promptly fell asleep. She peeked around her seat at him, she smiled, and she left him alone. The boys sat in the back, of course, except for Felipe, who sat among the girls. Felipe, she thought, would not lack for girlfriends in junior high. She listened, smiling, as several of the children made the astonishing discovery that there were faces of other children from Kelly School in the windows of another bus. Someone made a crack about Claude and fishing, and Judith dealt with that. "It's America," Judith said loudly. "You're allowed to be whatever you want to be."

  Felipe spotted a McDonald's and cried out, "Take us there! It's better than the school food!"

  "Manure is better than the school's food," said Judith's voice.

  Chris heard Judith say to Arabella, "My mother gave me the tenth degree. Don't talk to any strangers and stay with the teacher and if you can prevent it, don't go in any bathrooms."

  Chris had a cozy feeling about Judith's future these days. Obviously, Judith's parents had done well by her. Chris thought of how hot the Flats would be in another month or so. She wished she had it in her power to move Judith's family out of there. Anyway, Chris was moving her class out of there for today. The bus was peaceful, the children in a holiday mood. Back in the room, the boys rarely gave her a chance to spend much time with her girls. She got up and sat down across the aisle from Judith and Arabella. Mariposa and Judith sang jump rope songs for Chris most of the rest of the way.

  At the orientation, the guide explained to all of the fifth-grade classes that in a moment they would walk out into Sturbridge Village and travel back to the year 1830. "We're English," the guide said, to get them in the spirit. Chris remembered vividly her own fifth-grade trip here, and how transported she'd felt. The guide released them. Chris gathered her class around her outside, at the edge of the bridge into the village, and reminded them that they had already studied this era. Now they would see it come to life. They should stick close to her, she added.

  Claude looked up at Chris and declared, "I'm with you ninety-five percent of the way!"

  Claude looked earnest. Had he just misspoken, or did he mean that? Chris looked down at him. Then she took him by the hand. For most of the expedition, Claude ambled happily along holding hands with Mrs. Zajac.

  Woods surrounded them, inviting groves with orangey, pine-needled, fragrant forest floor. They strolled down neatly bordered paths in the shade of tall white pines and soon found themselves beside a lovely village green, all set about with maple trees. Sturbridge Village is a village that never was. Buildings of the 1830s were reconstructed here in a forest in central Massachusetts. How lovely the buildings looked now, reconstituted straight and square, in coats of white paint that would never grow old and peel. The Towne house, a white federalist mansion that once belonged to a successful New England merchant of Charlton, Massachusetts, sits at one end of the green. At the other, on a little rise, the tall, porticoed Center Meetinghouse, a Baptist church in its former life, presides over the town common.

  The village gleamed in spring sunshine. The hardwoods were in leaf, the flowers blooming in the gardens behind white picket fences. People in period costume, the living mannequins of the village, passed by Mrs. Zajac's class. A young man in a straw hat and breeches with suspenders walked along an edge of the common beside a pair of perfect oxen, groomed as if they were racehorses. Young women walked by in long dresses and white bonnets. Judith gazed after them. She looked down at the wool tights she wore under her skirt—the nearest thing to pants she was allowed to wear, being a proper Pentecostal daughter—and, laughing, Judith said, "I got these at K Mart." All the children were smiling, chattering happily. Mrs. Zajac was smiling. At the tinsmith's shop, Felipe just had to touch some of the authentic items on display, in order to make them real. Alice told him, in a whisper, that he wasn't supposed to touch. Felipe yelled out, "She's always yellin' at me!" And Chris turned back, still holding Claude's hand, and said, "Okay. No grouches."

  They stopped in at the handsome little Greek Revival Thompson Bank, and the elderly guide in his banker's frock coat talked to them about old currency and commerce. Dick asked hopefully, "Did they have bank robbers?" Chris took them on a short detour to the bakehouse, where they got tollhouse cookies, the treat that she remembered best from her own schooldays. A few of the children had no money. Chris got out her purse so that everyone could have a chocolate chip cookie. She gave in to their request that they stop at the souvenir and candy store, and she regretted it a little. Ashley bought a bag of candy that must have weighed a pound. Chris told the chubby girl please not to eat it now, but the next time Chris looked, Ashley had devoured it.

  Chris kept an eye on Ashley during a lot of that sp
ringtime ramble through the model village. The girl troubled her. Ashley hung back when the others crowded up to the edge of an exhibit. She wore a pair of dowdy brown double-knit stretch pants, clothes that had long since fallen out of fashion among her peers, who preferred blue jeans. In her mind, Chris fumed at Ashley's mother: "What does it cost to buy her a pair of jeans?" (Chris had not quite realized her special objective of the fall. She had now managed to meet every child's parent, except Ashley's. She had tried. She'd asked Ashley to tell her mother it was very important that she come to the last parent conference. The next day, Ashley had sidled up to Chris's desk and said, "My mother may not be able to come. She says it depends on what kind of day it is, or whether she has something else to do.")

  The class filed into the reconstructed one-room District Schoolhouse, where a young and rather nervous-looking woman was playing teacher. The school had wooden desks with inkwells but otherwise looked familiar. The class sat down. Felipe, wondering just how much the past resembled the present, shouted a question at the young play-teacher: "Do you put anybody outside if they're bad?"

  "I might," said the scowling young woman. "Or I might try to embarrass you. Or I might bring you up here and make you hold logs for a while."

  Victor had arrived at the schoolhouse with his class at the same time. "I'll have to try that," he whispered to Chris.

  "And I might use this," said the teacher, holding up a short rod, an authentic ferrule, "on your hand or your bottom."

  "Where can I get one?" whispered Victor to Chris.

  "Anybody ever take you to court for hitting a kid?" called Felipe to the teacher.

  The class crowded up to the edge of the visitors gallery inside the potter's shop. Their eyes grew wide, their mouths hung open, as they watched a pot emerge from a spinning lump of clay under the hands of the neatly costumed potter. "That's fresh!" said many voices.

  The academic objective of this expedition was, of course, to have the class glimpse a time that seemed primitive compared to their own. But no nineteenth-century village could ever have looked so thoroughly kempt, serene, and civilized as this one. The mud and blood of everyday life were not displayed. In Sturbridge Village on that sunny day, the past looked like a vast improvement on the present that most of the class came from. Then again, even a more accurately harsh version of this village might have looked like an improvement.

  Judith and Arabella, the class's two most religious girls, stuck close to each other. They held hands now and then. They walked together down the tidy paths, across the covered bridge, which was fragrant with the smell of old wood, past the wonderfully costumed guides. They stopped to listen to the birds singing in the trees. The village inspired the two girls. Arabella, who lived in the mostly rebuilt section of the Flats, remarked, "I'd like to leave Holyoke. People walk around with big radios, and they're always yelling."

  "I'd like to leave, too," said Judith. Both girls' voices were happy. "But the radios don't bother me."

  The class circled back, walking beside the mill pond. Claude stopped to gaze into the waters, wishing he had brought his fishing gear. Chris took him by the hand again. Their last stop was the Freeman Farm, a little farmhouse painted brick-red, with a gambrel roof of cedar shakes. They poked around inside awhile, then came to rest outside, a band of now weary travelers on a dreamy springtime afternoon. They clustered around Chris beside a split rail fence, Mrs. Zajac and her class gazing out on a patch of plowed ground. All around they saw neatly fenced-in pastures, cultivated fields and hayfields, and beyond, horizons of tall trees. Sounds of traffic from the Massachusetts Turnpike drifted through the woods. A rooster crowed from the barnyard.

  "Where the horses are?" Pedro asked Chris.

  Judith stood beside Chris at the fence. Judith, from a family of Puerto Rican farmers who had lost their land, gestured at the field before them, its new corn crop sprouting. "My father would love this," she said to Chris.

  Time to go back, and Chris calling loudly from the front of the bus, "I want to congratulate my class. You behaved very well." Chris ambled down the aisle and sat on an armrest among the girls. They sang while the boys snickered and listened intently. The girls broke into "Miss Suzie":

  "...And broke her little—

  Ask me no more questions..."

  Hysterical laughter.

  "...The boys are in the bathroom

  Zipping up their—

  Flies are in the meadow..."

  "Let's sing it again!" said Kimberly.

  Chris rolled her eyes and tapped her own breastbone. "I know that one. That's as old as I am. Wait a minute. Wait a minute." She sang, on key and sweetly, to the tune of "Molly Malone":

  "In Holyoke's fair city,

  Where girls are so pretty..."

  Other girls gathered. "Want to sing, Ashley? Want to sing, Courtney?" asked Chris. She said, "When I was in grade school, my friends and I used to have a song we'd sing and kick our legs out." Looking at Judith, Chris added, "I grew up in a part of Holyoke called the Highlands." Then Chris sang:

  "We are the Highlands girls.

  We wear our hair in curls.

  We smoke our sisters' butts.

  We drive our mothers nuts."

  And Judith and Mariposa sang more jump rope songs for Mrs. Zajac, including some in Spanish:

  "Tu madre, tu padre

  Viven en la calle

  De San Valentine..."

  The girls sang:

  "Shake it, shake it, shake it,

  Shake it all you can,

  So all the boys around the block

  Can see your underwear."

  Courtney did the shimmy in the aisle to this tune, her blue eyes looking old and sad. Chris watched her and felt a little sad, and worried, too. They sang for Mrs. Zajac, who shook her head, a satire of a TV ad that was going around Holyoke:

  "Come back to Jamaica,

  We'll hijack your plane,

  We'll steal all your money,

  And feed you cocaine."

  The class re-entered Holyoke; on the Willimansett Bridge. By the time they got there, the bus had quieted. Chris and most of the children gazed out the windows. The old bridge, made of steel and painted green, looks as if it were constructed from a grown-up version of an Erector set. To the right is a dark railroad bridge and the tail of a rapids below. Down to the left the brown river grows lazier. It flows south beside brick mills, between muddy banks. A couple of discarded fuel tanks, half rotted now, sat in the shallows. On the far river bank, on the Holyoke side, garbage decorated the few trees.

  Up ahead loomed the vast complex of brick mill buildings where Chris's father spent most of his working life. Chris used to pick him up here, when she was in high school and her father had lent her the car. The sooty bricks of industrial Holyoke seemed to stain the air on that sunny afternoon. There was litter on the river banks, litter in the weeds entwined in the metal fences along the roadway, litter down side streets and in vacant lots.

  The bus crossed the bridge and carried the class back through the lower wards. They had left a village that tried to re-create the mid-nineteenth century. They came back to a city that had in fact been founded then, and might still serve as a model of a nineteenth-century industrial town. The bus passed some new stores and a couple of apartment houses with the soot removed and solid-looking front doors, buildings renovated by a nonprofit organization called Nueva Esperanza—"New Hope." But all around those few examples of real human progress stood buildings with windows boarded up in plywood and covered with graffiti. The bus passed lots made vacant by old and recent fires. If one looked closely down side streets, one would have seen, here and there, pairs of sneakers hanging from the wires.

  Heading back to Kelly, they went down Cabot Street, then past streets named Franklin and Sergeant, names that honor some of the city's founders and their invested capital, long since returned many times over and withdrawn. For the most part, people with Spanish surnames now live on streets named for New England Ya
nkees. But in this part of town street and surnames have never coincided. Some people say that the lower wards were beautiful back when O'Malleys and Fleurys lived on Cabot Street. This was a fine part of town, some people say, before the Puerto Ricans came. The delicate brickwork around the windows and along the eaves of many grimy tenements suggests that once the lower wards looked comelier. But probably the lower wards have always looked better just a while ago. They did not look like model neighborhoods one hundred years back, when the city was still growing. In 1875, a report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics described the worker housing of Holyoke as follows:

  Holyoke has more and worse large tenement houses than any manufacturing town of textile fabrics in the state, and built in such a manner that there is very little means of escape in case of fire. The sanitary arrangements are very imperfect, and in many cases, there is no provision made for carrying the slops from the sinks, but they are allowed to run wherever they can make their way. Portions of the yards are covered with filth and green slime, and within 20 feet, people are living in basements of houses three feet below the level of the yard.... There are also quite a number of six and eight tenement houses, with only one door at front and none at back, over-crowded, dirty and necessarily unhealthy....It is no wonder that the death rate, in 1872, was greater in Holyoke than in any large town in Massachusetts, excepting Fall River, and if an epidemic should visit them now, its ravages would be great.

  Citing this report in 1939, the author of the only full history of Holyoke wrote without irony: "The squalor and filth in which Irish and French Canadian immigrants lived in these years is partly attributable to their lack of any knowledge of the most elementary rules of sanitation."

  The tired children smiled out the windows of the bus. They passed by Judith's father's church. Judith spotted her sister in a window in the apartment above and waved. It was a warm day in the lower wards, and many women sat by their windows, looking out.