'Tis

by Frank McCourt

  There are suggested activities, with insertions penciled in by a former student. Call a family meeting and discuss your family finances with Dad and Mom. Show them from your study of this book how they might improve their bookkeeping. (Insertion, Don’t be surprised if they beat you up.) Take a tour of the New York Stock Exchange with your class. (They’ll be glad to get out of school for a day.) Think of a product your community might need and start a small company to supply it. (Try Spanish fly.) Write to the Federal Reserve Board and tell them what you think of them. (Tell them leave a little for the rest of us.) Interview a number of people who remember the crash of 1929 and write a one-thousand-word report. (Ask them why they didn’t commit suicide.) Write a story in which you explain the gold standard to a ten-year-old child. (It’ll help him sleep.) Write a report on what it cost to build the Brooklyn Bridge and what it might cost now. Be specific. (Or else.)

  The ferry sails by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty and I’m so worried about Economic Citizenship I don’t even think of the millions who landed here and the ones who were sent back with the bad eyes and the weak chests. I don’t know how I’ll be able to stand before these American teenagers and talk to them about the branches of government and preach the virtues of saving when I owe money everywhere myself. And with the ferry sliding into its slip and the day that’s facing me tomorrow why shouldn’t I treat myself to a few beers at the Bean Pot bar and after those few beers why shouldn’t I take a train to the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village to chat with Paddy and Tom Clancy and listen to them sing in the back room? When I call Mike to tell her the good news about the new job she wants to know where I am and gives me a lecture on the stupidity of staying out drinking beer the night before the most important day of my life and I’d better get my ass home if I know what’s good for me. Sometimes she talks like her grandmother who always tells you what to do with your ass. Get your ass in here. Get your ass out of that bed.

  Mike is right but she graduated from high school and she’ll know what to say to her classes when she starts teaching and even though I have a college degree I don’t know what I’m going to say to Miss Mudd’s classes. Should I be Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips or Glenn Ford in The Blackboard Jungle? Should I swagger into the classroom like James Cagney or march in like an Irish schoolmaster with a stick, a strap and a roar? If a student sends a paper airplane zooming at me should I shove my face into his and tell him try that one more time, kid, and you’re in trouble? What am I to do with the ones looking out the window calling to their friends across the yard? If they’re like some of the students in The Blackboard Jungle they’ll be tough and they’ll ignore me and the rest of the class will despise me.

  Paddy Clancy leaves his singing in the back room of the White Horse and tells me he wouldn’t be in my shoes for anything. Everyone knows what the high schools in this country are like, that’s right, blackboard jungles. With my college degree why didn’t I become a lawyer or a businessman or something where I could make some money? He knows a few teachers around the Village and they’re getting out of it the first opportunity.

  He’s right, too. Everybody is right and I’m too muddled with all the beer in my body to worry anymore. I go to my apartment and fall into bed with all my clothes on and even though I’m worn out with the long day and the beer I can’t sleep. I keep getting up to read chapters of Your World and You, testing myself with questions of fact, imagining what I’m going to say about the stock market, the differences between stocks and bonds, the three branches of government, the recession of this year, the depression of that year, and I might as well get up, go out, and fill myself with coffee to keep me going the rest of the day.

  At dawn I sit in a coffee shop on Hudson Street with longshoremen, truck drivers, warehousemen, checkers. Why shouldn’t I live like them? They work their eight hours a day, read the Daily News, follow baseball, have a few beers, go home to their wives, raise their kids. They’re paid better than teachers and they don’t have to worry about Your World and You and sex-crazed teenagers who don’t want to be in your class. In twenty years workingmen can retire and sit in the Florida sun, waiting for lunch and dinner. I could call McKee Vocational and Technical High School and tell them, Forget it, I want an easier life. I could tell Mr. Sorola they’re looking for a checker at the Baker and Williams Warehouse, a job I could easily get with my college degree, and all I’d have to do the rest of my life is stand on the platform with manifests on a clipboard checking what comes and what goes.

  Then I think of what Mike Small would say if I told her, No, I didn’t go to McKee High School today. I took a job as checker with Baker and Williams. She’d have a tantrum. She’d say, All that work in college to be a goddam checker down at the docks? She might throw me out of the house and return to the arms of Bob the football player and I’d be alone in the world, forced to go to Irish dances and take home girls reserving their bodies for the wedding night.

  I’m ashamed of myself that I’m going to my first day of teaching in this condition, hung over from the White Horse Tavern, jumping out of my skin from seven cups of coffee this morning, my eyes like two piss holes in the snow, two days of black hair sprouting on my face, my tongue furry from lack of a toothbrush, my heart banging in my chest from fatigue and fear of dozens of American adolescents. I’m sorry I ever left Limerick. I could be back there with a pensionable job in the post office, postman respected by one and all, married to a nice girl named Maura, raising two children, confessing my sins every Saturday, in a state of grace every Sunday, a pillar of the community, a credit to my mother, dying in the bosom of Mother Church, mourned by a large circle of friends and relations.

  There’s a longshoreman at a table in the diner telling his friend how his son is graduating from St. John’s University in June, how he worked his ass off all these years to send the kid to college and he’s the luckiest man in the world because his son appreciates what he’s doing for him. Graduation Day he’ll give himself a pat on the back for surviving a war and sending a son to college, a son who wants to be a teacher. His mother is so proud of him because she always wanted to be a teacher herself but never had the chance and this is the next best thing. Graduation Day they’ll be the proudest parents in the world and that’s what it’s all about, right?

  If this longshoreman and Horace down at Port Warehouses knew what I was thinking they’d have no patience with me. They’d tell me how lucky I am to have a college degree and a chance to teach.

  The school secretary tells me see Miss Seested who tells me see Mr. Sorola who tells me see the chairman of the Academic Department who says I have to check in with the school secretary to get my time card and why were they sending me to him in the first place?

  The school secretary says, Oh, back already? and shows me how to dip my time card into the time clock, how to place it in my slot on the In side and how to move it to the Out side. She says that if I have to leave the building for any reason whatsoever, even during my lunch period, I’m to sign out and back in with her because you never know when you might be needed, never know when there might be an emergency and you can’t have teachers wandering in and out, back and forth at will. She tells me see Miss Seested who looks surprised. Oh, you’re back, she says, and gives me a red Delaney book, the attendance book for my classes. She says, Of course you know how to use this, and I pretend I do for fear of being thought stupid. She sends me back to the school secretary for my homeroom attendance book and I have to lie to the secretary, too, and tell her I know how to use it. She says if I have any problems ask the kids. They know more than the teachers.

  I’m trembling from the hangover and the coffee and the fear of what lies ahead of me, five classes, a homeroom, a Building Assignment, and I wish I were on the ferry to Manhattan where I could sit at a desk in a bank and make decisions about loans.

  Students jostle me in the hallway. They push and scuffle and laugh. Don’t they know I’m a teacher? Can’t they see under my arm two atte
ndance books and Your World and You? The schoolmasters in Limerick would never tolerate this carry-on. They’d march up and down the halls with sticks and if you didn’t walk properly you’d get that stick across the backs of your legs so you would.

  And what am I supposed to do with this class, the first in my whole teaching career, students of Economic Citizenship, pelting each other with chalk, erasers, bologna sandwiches? When I walk in and place my books on the teacher’s desk they’ll surely stop throwing things. But they don’t. They ignore me and I don’t know what to do till the words come out of my mouth, the first words I ever utter as a teacher, Stop throwing sandwiches. They look at me as if to say, Who’s this guy?

  The bell signals the start of the class and the students slide into their seats. They whisper to each other, they look at me, laugh, whisper again and I’m sorry I ever set foot on Staten Island. They turn to look at the blackboard along the side of the room where someone has printed in a large scrawl, Miss Mudd Is Gone. The Old Bag Reetired, and when they see me looking at it they whisper and laugh again. I open my copy of Your World and You as if to start a lesson till a girl raises her hand.

  Yes?

  Teacher, ain’tcha gonna take the attendance?

  Oh, yes, I am.

  That’s my job, teacher.

  When she sways up the aisle to my desk the boys make woo woo sounds and, Whaddya doin’ the rest of my life, Daniela? She comes behind my desk, faces the class, and when she leans over to open the Delaney book it’s easy to see her blouse is too small and that starts the woo woo all over again.

  She smiles because she knows what the psychology books told us at NYU, that a fifteen-year-old girl is years ahead of a boy that age and if they want to shower her with woo woos it means nothing. She whispers to me she’s already going out with a senior, a football player up at Curtis High School, where all the kids are smart, not a bunch of auto mechanic grease monkeys like the ones in this class. The boys know this, too, and that’s why they pretend to clutch their hearts and faint when she calls out their names from the Delaney cards. She takes her time with the attendance book and I’m a fool standing off to the side, waiting. I know she’s teasing the boys and I wonder if she’s toying with me, too, showing her control of the class with a well-filled blouse and keeping me from whatever I might want to do with Economic Citizenship. When she calls the name of someone who was absent yesterday she demands a parent’s note and if the absentee doesn’t have it she reprimands him and writes N on the card. She reminds the class that five Ns could get you an F on your report card and turns to me, Isn’t that right, teacher?

  I don’t know what to say. I nod. I blush.

  Another girl calls out, Hey, teach, you cute, and I blush harder than ever. The boys roar and slap the desks with their open palms and the girls smile at each other. They say, You crazy, Yvonne, to the one who called me cute, and she tells them, But he is, he’s really cute, and I wonder if the redness will ever leave my face, if I’ll ever be able to stand here and talk about Economic Citizenship, if I’ll be forever at the mercy of Daniela and Yvonne.

  Daniela says she’s finished with the attendance and now she needs the pass to go to the bathroom. She takes a piece of wood from a drawer and wiggles her way out the door to another woo woo chorus and one boy calling to another, Joey, stand up, Joey, let’s see how much you love her, let’s see you stand, Joey, and Joey blushes so hard there’s a wave of laughter and giggling across the room.

  We’re halfway through the period and I haven’t said a word about Economic Citizenship. I try to be a teacher, a schoolmaster. I pick up Your World and You and tell them, Okay, open your book to chapter, ah, what chapter were you up to?

  We weren’t up to no chapter.

  You mean you weren’t up to any chapter? Any chapter.

  No, I mean we weren’t up to no chapter. Miss Mudd didn’t teach us nothing.

  Miss Mudd didn’t teach you anything. Anything.

  Hey, teacher, why you repeating everything I’m sayin’? Nothing, anything. Miss Mudd never bothered us like that. Miss Mudd was nice.

  They nod and murmur, Yeah, Miss Mudd was nice, and I feel I have to compete with her even if they drove her into retirement.

  A hand is up.

  Yes?

  Teacher, you Scotch or somethin’?

  No. Irish.

  Oh, yeah? Irish like to drink, eh? All that whiskey, eh? You gonna be here Paddy’s Day?

  I’ll be here on St. Patrick’s Day.

  You not gonna be drunk an’ throwin’ up at the parade like all the Irish?

  I said I’ll be here. All right, open your books.

  A hand.

  What books, teacher?

  This book, Your World and You.

  We ain’t got that book, teacher.

  We don’t have that book.

  There you go again repeatin’ everything we say.

  We have to speak proper English.

  Teacher, this ain’t no English class. This is Ecanawmic Cizzenship. We supposed to be learnin’ about money an’ all an’ you ain’t teachin’ us about money.

  Daniela returns just as another hand is raised. Teacher, what’s your name? Daniela returns the pass to the desk and tells the class. His name is McCoy. I just found out in the bathroom an’ he ain’t married.

  I print my name on the blackboard, Mr. McCourt.

  A girl in the back of the room calls out, Mister, you got a girlfriend?

  They laugh again. I blush again. They nudge each other. The girls say, Isn’t he cute? and I take refuge in Your World and You.

  Open your books. Chapter One. We’ll start at the beginning. “A Brief History of the United States of America.”

  Mr. McCoy.

  McCourt. McCourt.

  Okay, yeah, we know all that about Columbus an’ everything. We get that in history class with Mr. Bogard. He’ll be mad if you teach history an’ he’s gettin’ paid to teach it an’ that’s not your job.

  I have to teach what’s in the book.

  Miss Mudd didn’t teach what’s in the book. She didn’t give a shit, excuse me, Mr. McCoy.

  McCourt.

  Yeah.

  And when the bell rings and they rush from the room Daniela comes to my desk and tells me not to worry, don’t lissena to these kids, they’re all so stoopid, she’s taking the commercial course to be a legal secretary, and who knows she might be a lawyer herself some day, she’ll take care of the attendance and everything. She tells me, Don’t take no shit from nobody, Mr. McCoy, excuse the language.

  There are thirty-five girls in the next class, all dressed in white with buttons down the front from neck to hem. Most have the same hairstyle, the beehive. They ignore me. They set up little boxes on their desks and peer into mirrors. They pluck their eyebrows, they dab at their cheeks with powder puffs, they apply lipstick and pull their lips back between their teeth, they file their nails and blow at the nail dust. I open the Delaney book to call their names and they look surprised. Oh, you the substitute? Where’s Miss Mudd?

  She has retired.

  Oh, you gonna be our regular teacher?

  Yes.

  I ask them what shop they’re in, what they’re studying.

  Cosmetology.

  What’s that?

  Beauty Culture. And what’s your name, teacher?

  I point to my name on the board. Mr. McCourt.

  Oh, yeah. Yvonne said you was cute.

  I let this pass. If I attempt to correct every grammatical error in these classes I’ll never get to Economic Citizenship and, worse, if I’m asked to explain the rules of grammar I’m bound to show my ignorance. I will put up with no distractions. I will begin with Chapter One from Your World and You, “A Brief History of the United States.” I flip the pages from Columbus to the Pilgrims to the War of Independence, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and there’s a hand and a voice in the back of the room.

  Yes?

  Mr. McCourt, why you telling us this stuff?r />
  I’m telling you this because you can’t understand Economic Citizenship unless you have a grasp of the history of your country.

  Mr. McCourt, this is an English class. I mean you’re the teacher an’ you don’t even know what class you’re teaching.

  They pluck their eyebrows, they file their nails, they shake their beehives, they pity me. They tell me my hair is a mess and it’s easy to see I never had a manicure in my life.

  Why don’tcha come up to Beauty Culture Shop an’ we’ll do you?

  They smile and nudge each other and my face is on fire again and they say that’s cute, too. Aw, gee, lookit him. He’s shy.