by Tracy Kidder
"All right, Claude," she shouted over the din, "tell me about rivers."
And Claude, who for six months hadn't managed to complete more than a few homework assignments, delivered a lucid description, even better than during rehearsals, of the birth of rivers. "Ice melts, see. It comes down the mountain into a brook, and the brook makes a river. It flows into the ocean and the whole thing starts over again because of evaporation which makes, like, clouds." As he expounded, talking fast, his right hand flapped, as it used to when he was concocting one of his loony homework excuses. "Sometimes a waterfall gets worn away," he went on.
He seemed to know enough to talk all morning. Chris had to move along. "Okay," she said. "Thank you, Claude."
Claude's mother had arrived. Chris spotted her in the crowd and went up to her. Now at last Chris could give that likable, worried parent some good news.
"Any improvement?"
"Yes!" cried Chris. "His science project is pretty good! He's still not getting all his work in, but he wrote a pretty good story. And he did well on a social studies test."
Chris had a slightly somber thought, which she kept to herself: "Maybe all my being on Claude these last weeks has made some of the others slip."
An island of chairs had been set up for teachers in the center of the gym's blond floor. Chris retreated to one of those chairs. She needed a break. In spite of Claude, this was the worst Science Fair she could remember. Or did she think that every year? No. This really was the worst. Maybe Science Fairs worked in other schools. But this kind of event had no place at this school anymore. She'd go to Al afterward and tell him they had to rethink the whole thing.
Hazy sunlight filtered through the gym's high, frosted windows. The noise, sharp and concentrated, made her feel as if her hands were vibrating, like tuning forks. Chris looked around. Where was Robert?
Robert had come to school this morning without his science project, saying that he had left it at a convenience store. The counselor had taken him to fetch the project. Chris had told Robert that when he got back, he should come down to the gym right away. But he was nowhere in sight.
Chris sent Courtney back to the classroom to see if Robert was there. Courtney returned in a few minutes. "Robert says he's not comin'," she said.
Chris lowered her eyebrows. "Oh, he isn't, isn't he?"
Chris strode down the corridor toward her classroom. The halls were wonderfully quiet. Her skirt rustled. She quick-marched, hands swinging high. Her mind was filled with heated, exasperated thoughts about Robert. Weeks ago Robert had said he wouldn't do a project for the Science Fair. She had tried to talk him into it, and finally, he had agreed. Overall, he had improved since that day when she'd isolated him, but plenty of the old Robert remained, enough to make her think that, when it came to his science project, he just wanted to get a rise out of her. Or just wanted once again to keep failure at bay by embracing it right from the start. He'd settle for the easy distinction of being weird.
Robert was one of those children who make it hard for a teacher to like them. Not quite consciously but on purpose. She had kept telling herself that she admired his boldness and his outspoken hatred of school. But then he'd start gurgling over the idea of a baby being smothered or refuse to do a science project and shrug his shoulders when she asked why.
Chris stopped in the doorway to her classroom. Robert sat at a desk near the door, his broad back toward her.
"You! Get over here!" she said.
At the sound of Mrs. Zajac's voice, Robert ducked his head. What lay on his desk was hidden from Chris for the moment.
"Pick yourself up and get to the office," she said.
Robert stood up. His arms hung limply in front of him. His chin was pressed to his chest. His broad face was bright. He trudged, listing to one side, toward Mrs. Zajac in the doorway.
Chris looked at him. Something was wrong. He wasn't smirking. He was clearly upset. She looked at his desk, and then the tightness left her jaw. She let her shoulders sag, and her face turned as red as Robert's.
On Robert's desk she saw a weathered scrap of two-by-six with raggedly cut ends. On each of its longer edges was a flashlight battery, precariously secured to the board by a profusion of bent and twisted nails. A tangle of wires, twisted around other nails, covered the surface of the board. An attempt had been made to tape the ends of the wires to the batteries and to a small light bulb. The bulb had a broken filament. A hammer and some outsize nails lay on Robert's desk next to his project. He had tried to make an electric light. It suddenly looked like a very difficult thing to do.
Chris looked at the project and she saw all at once a Robert slightly different from the one she thought she'd known just a minute ago. All year long she had tried to get Robert to take a chance and make an effort. Now he had. He had tried, and he had sincerely failed. And she had rewarded him with humiliation. How many times had-something like this happened to him in his life already? Was this the reason Robert behaved as he did? Is self-inflicted pain better than sadness and despair? She looked at the lashed-up wires and bent nails on the dirty scrap of wood, and it was all there in front of her: the dead, undeliverable letters that Robert had written to the father he'd never met. He had no one at home to help him make an electric light. That was why he'd said he didn't want to do a project. He wasn't just being perverse. "How stupid I am!" she thought. She should have bent the rules and given him more help. She should have arranged a success for him. "How stupid I am!"
"Sit down, Robert," she said softly.
He sat down at the desk and wouldn't look at his project. He looked at his feet instead, arms dangling down between his legs. She sat next to him. "Why aren't you coming to the Fair?"
"Doesn't work." His voice was a squeak. He stared at the floor.
"When were you supposed to figure that out, Robert? Before now. Right, Robert?" But her voice was very gentle. Not much of the year remained, but enough for her to make a change in herself, too. No matter how infuriating he might be tomorrow or next week, she wasn't going to let herself feel truly angry at him again. He had let her see the wounded little boy inside the fat would-be comedian. She felt like crying. At last, he had let her like him.
Robert made a series of little shrugs and began picking at the wads of black electrical tape on his project.
"Can you explain what it's supposed to do?"
"No."
She knew that he could. He had explained it very well last week, after she had directed him to books about electricity. The project showed that he did know how an electric light works. He just hadn't been able to make it happen. Maybe, she thought, she could help him now.
"Robert, if you took a little longer now, it might work."
"No," he squeaked, still looking at the floor.
His jeans looked dirty. The sleeves of the heavy sweatshirt he'd begun wearing since the onset of warm weather were too long. The cuffs half covered his dirty hands.
She didn't have time now to work with him on the project. She had to get back to the gym. Anyway, the light bulb was broken, and she didn't know where to find another in a hurry. She'd take him to the office and leave him there and try to forget about him for a while. No, she couldn't do that. She'd take him to the gym and let him join his classmates and hope that the rest of this day would pass quickly.
Robert seemed to recover fast. He ambled around the gym, making snaky movements with his hands in the manner of the dancers in a then popular TV video, done to a song called "Walk Like an Egyptian." Chris's recovery took longer.
The Fair ended with a ceremony after lunch. The parents had departed. The children sat in a huge, disordered phalanx on one side of the now dusty floor, and the teachers sat on chairs facing them. It was almost over. Al roared for quiet. Chris started giggling behind her hand. "Oh, God. Our leader," she murmured to another teacher. Finally, the wave of giddiness passed and she wiped her eyes.
The team of Alice, Judith, and Margaret got first prize. Arabella got the third-
place ribbon and came bouncing up to get it. Chris felt glad that those children's parents had helped them. Claude's team got a ribbon for special effort. That was even better, because Claude had earned it all by himself.
"Oh, my God!" said Claude, receiving his ribbon.
Chris watched, and she smiled. She imagined Claude thinking, "I can't believe this! I got a prize!"
But Chris stopped smiling when she turned her eyes toward Felipe. He was scowling. Felipe's team hadn't won anything. She glanced at the faces of Jorge, Ashley, Kimberly, Courtney. The faces of the losers looked not exactly sad but distant. As more fortunate classmates took the ribbons, many of the losers watched with slightly opened mouths, like children gazing through the window of a toy store. If she could, Chris thought, she'd give them all prizes. She'd go to Al tomorrow. They couldn't let this happen again next year.
Chris once heard a veteran colleague say, "I'm not interested in impossible cases anymore. I'll teach the kids who want to learn." The strategy had an allure. "But," Chris told herself, "some kids don't know they want to learn until you put it in their heads that they do." I'll teach the ones who want to learn. She would turn those words over in her mind and answer back that her own son might not get taught if his teachers followed that strategy. And still, it was alluring. You can't fail if you don't try.
If all of life is like a rigged election, there is no point in teaching. Only the surprises prevent boredom and despair. Surprises happened every year, and Claude was one of this year's best. She'd nearly given up hope for him. On a morning a little while ago, she'd substituted him in her imagination for that rather "simple" but sweet old neighbor of her childhood, the one she saw sweeping the sidewalk in front of a store every morning. "Claude could do that," she had thought. She could see him differently now. Claude could become a game warden, a tradesman, maybe even a wildlife biologist. Whatever he did, he'd probably always be about eight weeks behind schedule, but now she knew he could do a lot more than sweep a sidewalk.
Chris spent an unhappy weekend after the Science Fair. She kept picturing Robert and his failed electric light. She kept asking herself why she hadn't realized that Robert had been asking for help. She washed windows furiously all weekend. Why hadn't she listened to Robert? Why hadn't his mother helped him? She imagined the face of Robert's mother in the glass, and that made her rub harder.
Robert was a boy for whom life certainly looked rigged. But he had let Chris see him in a new way. He had turned out to be willing, in the face of long odds, to try to do a project. That was not cause for despair. This boy was salvageable. Now more than ever, she had to get Robert to a psychiatrist.
As she scrubbed windows, Chris decided to force the issue. The paperwork to get Robert free counseling was completed. His mother had no excuse now. Imagining the woman's face in windowpanes, Chris thought, "If you don't take him, the way you promised, I'm going to file a 51 A." That official document has a longer name: "Report of Child(ren) Alleged to Be Suffering from Serious Physical or Emotional Injury by Abuse or Neglect." Anyone could file one of those, and do so anonymously. "She's not going to be allowed to sit back and do nothing," thought Chris. Ah, righteous wrath. She felt a little better.
3
Laying out her plans for what remained of this year, Chris had figured they'd get through the Civil War's aftermath, just barely. They had to get to the end of the war at least, she thought. "God forbid they don't find out who won."
The Civil War for Chris meant many lessons about slavery. A while back, as she had done every year since desegregation, Chris had directed the class in a slave auction down in the library. She assigned the parts. She gave some children the role of abolitionists, who would watch and afterward make reports. Some would play slave buyers, others slaves. She made Judith the auctioneer and equipped her with a gavel and a set of note cards that described the slaves. Studying those descriptions before the auction, Judith said, "God! They make it sound like these people are animals!" Before the auction, Chris explained for the others' benefit, "The point is to realize what it must've felt like to be a piece of goods. To be like a dress on a rack. Oooo, I don't like this dress. I think I'll buy that one. The slaves were human, but they weren't thought of as human beings."
Down in the library, Judith stood at a podium, half a dozen "slaves" lined up facing her. Claude was a slave. He was grinning when the auction started. Chris sat nearby. She called, "Claude, I thought I explained. You're not happy to be a slave."
Judith read from the index cards. She giggled when she read about skinny Jimmy. "What do I hear for this big strapping man?" But gradually, Judith and the others began to get into it. The slaves looked crestfallen, the buyers greedy and nasty. Judith raised her voice. She chanted like a real auctioneer.
Margaret was led to the podium.
"Okay, this is important," called Chris. "Here's a healthy young woman. She can give you lots of kids. Are her kids your slaves, too?"
Several of the children cried, "Yes!"
Julio was led, struggling as instructed, to Judith. "This is a male, age thirty," declared Judith. "Married. Can do jobs around the house. A great help. What do I hear for him?"
"Seven-fifty!" called the buyer Felipe.
"Come on. Look at him! There's lots of hard work left in him. Now what do I hear for this hard-working man?" said Judith.
The auction lasted about fifteen minutes. The buyers were cruel to their new property. Felipe wouldn't let his slave sit or talk. Judith banged her gavel down one last time and said, "Thank you for coming to the auction, and I hope they serve you well."
The class filed back to the room. Chris questioned them. What did it all mean? She got most of the answers she hoped for. She asked the class in general, "What are some of the bad things about being treated like property?"
"You can't do nothin'," said Felipe.
With feeling, Judith declared, "They're real humans, not just pieces of garbage, and they're supposed to be treated like people."
"Right," said Chris. "And if our society says there can be slaves, who's to say someone can't turn around and say, 'All people with brown hair can be slaves'? So if some people have slaves, it hurts all people. Also, some slaves could have been great inventors or artists, but almost no slaves were allowed to be those things. When you don't allow people to be themselves, they don't have the opportunity to invent things or write beautiful songs or paint beautiful pictures. That's another way slavery hurts all people."
The class lined up for lunch. Judith moved out of line and said to Chris, "I felt terrible, Mrs. Zajac."
The next day Chris elaborated on how slavery hurts everyone, including auctioneers.
Now in social studies, in Room 205, civil war loomed. On the bulletin board near the door, paper letters announced DARK CLOUDS OVER OUR NATION. Beneath the sign Chris had stapled paper clouds, which read: "John Brown," "Missouri Compromise," "States' Rights." Chris had offered rewards for children who wrote explanations to attach to those clouds. Every day after lunch Chris read to them from To Be a Slave, by Julius Lester.
Chris sat on her spindly-legged front table, smoothed her skirt over her shins, and read aloud this line: " 'No other country destroyed African culture as thoroughly as slavery did here.' " The casements were opened wide. Shouts and laughter of sixth graders at recess drifted in. The voices sounded distant. A soft breeze came in, too, and made the various hanging things flutter and sway—the art projects and book report projects and stories stapled to strings of yarn. Now and then Chris's voice died out in the midst of a sentence and resumed at the start of another. She was censoring the parts about rape. But plenty of horrors remained. She wondered, as she read, if maybe these children were too young for this book. She paused and looked at the class. "Can you imagine walking home from school and someone grabbing you and taking you as a slave to another country?"
Most of the children looked up and then, as she read on, went back to their penmanship or spelling or window gazing. Arnie tapped
his pen on his desk, trying to hit the end of a staple, so as to get it airborne. Chris glanced at him, and he stopped. She didn't want to terrify them. Her lively voice, rising and falling, suggested that they would get safely home themselves. Imagined horrors are not horrible in such a setting. There is, after all, something comforting about history, no matter how vividly rendered. Slavery had ended long ago. In the little fluorescent-lit oasis, a person could feel indignant and also glad for having been born into a better age. It was easy to forget for a moment that in the city outside people still called each other "nigger," "spic," and "whitey," and that in the little slum nearby, real estate speculators made fortunes while children lived in squalid fire traps that were fouled by dogs and so infested with rodents that some preschoolers lapsed back to bedwetting rather than risk encounters with rats on the way to the bathroom at night.
How much of Julius Lester's book did the children understand? Did they know that Mrs. Zajac was reading to them about the ultimate rigged life? And that they lived in a rigged world, too, where it's still hard to overcome the accidents of birth? Robert seemed to have an inkling. He had asked Chris recently, apropos of nothing, "Mrs. Zajac, is it true that in the old days, what your father was you had to be?" The remark was one of those which left Chris thinking, "The boy's so bright! If only I could change the circumstances of his life..."As she read now, worried looks from Dick, Irene, Alice, Arabella, and some others suggested that they could imagine something of the lot of slaves.
