'Tis

by Frank McCourt

  My three senior classes groan with the burden of the textbook they have to carry every day, an anthology of English literature. The juniors complain over the weight of their anthology of American literature. The books are sumptuous, richly illustrated, designed to challenge, motivate, illuminate, entertain, and they’re expensive. I tell my students that carrying textbooks strengthens their upper bodies and hope the contents seep up to their minds.

  They glare at me. Who is this guy?

  There are teaching guides so detailed and comprehensive I need never think for myself. They are packed with enough quizzes, tests, examinations to keep my students in a constant state of nervous tension. There are hundreds of multiple choice questions, true or false questions, fill in the blank spaces, match column A with column B, peremptory questions ordering the student to explain why Hamlet was mean to his mother, what Keats meant by negative capability, what Melville was getting at in his chapter on the whiteness of the whale.

  I’m ready, boys and girls, to march through the chapters from Haw-thorne to Hemingway, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Tonight you are to read the pages assigned. Tomorrow we’ll discuss. There may be a quiz. Then again there may not be a quiz. Just don’t gamble on it. Only the teacher knows for sure. On Tuesday there will be a test. Three Tuesdays from now there will be an exam, a big exam, and yes, it will count. Your whole report card grade hinges on this exam. You also have tests on physics and calculus? Sorry for your troubles. This is English, the queen of the curriculum.

  And you don’t know it, boys and girls, but I am armed with my teaching guides on American and English literature. I have them safe here in my bag, all the questions that will have you scratching your little heads, gnawing your pencils, dreading report card day, and, I suppose, hating me because I’m the one who can thwart your high Ivy League ambitions. I’m the one who skulked around the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel cleaning up for your fathers and mothers.

  This is Stuyvesant and isn’t this the best high school in the city, some say the best in the country? You asked for it. You could have gone to your neighborhood high schools where you’d be kings and queens, numero uno, top of your class. Here you’re just one of the crowd, scrambling for grades to bolster the precious average that will slip you into the Ivy League. It’s your great god, isn’t it, the average? Down in the Stuyvesant basement they should construct a sanctum with an altar. They should mount on that altar a great red blinking neon 9, blink blink blink, the sacred initial digit you’re desperate for on every grade, and you should pray and worship there. Oh, God, send me As and nineties.

  Mr. McCourt, how come you only gave me a ninety-three on my report card?

  I was kind.

  But I did all the work, handed in the papers you assigned.

  You were late with two papers. Two points off for each one.

  But, Mr. McCourt, why two points?

  That’s it. That’s your grade.

  Aw, Mr. McCourt, how come you’re so mean?

  It’s all I have left.

  I followed the teacher guides. I launched the prefabricated questions at my classes. I hit them with surprise quizzes and tests and destroyed them with the ponderous detailed examinations concocted by college professors who assemble high school textbooks.

  My students resisted and cheated and disliked me and I disliked them for disliking me. I learned the cheating games. Oh, the casual glance at the papers of students around you. Oh, the discreet little Morse code cough for your girlfriend and her sweet smile when she catches the multiple choice answer. If she’s behind you splay your fingers on the back of your head, three splays of five fingers would be question fifteen, a forefinger scratching the right temple is answer A and other fingers represent other answers. The room is alive with coughs and body movements and when I catch the cheaters I hiss in their ears they’d better cut it out or their papers will be shredded into the wastebasket, their lives ruined. I am lord of the classroom, a man who would never cheat, oh no, not if they flashed the answers in green letters on the bright side of the full moon.

  Every day I teach with my guts in a knot, lurking behind my desk at the front of the room playing the teacher game with the chalk, the eraser, the red pen, the teacher guides, the power of the quiz, the test, the exam, I’ll call your father, I’ll call your mother, I’ll report you to the governor, I’ll damage your average so badly, kid, you’ll be lucky to get into a community college in Mississippi, weapons of menace and control.

  A senior, Jonathan, bangs his forehead on his desk and wails, Why? Why? Why do we have to suffer with this shit? We’ve been in school since kindergarten, thirteen years, and why do we have to know what color shoes Mrs. Dalloway was wearing at her goddam party and what are we supposed to make of Shakespeare troubling deaf heaven with his bootless cries and what the hell is a bootless cry anyway and when did heaven turn deaf?

  Around the room rumbles of rebellion and I’m paralyzed. They’re saying Yeah, yeah to Jonathan, who halts his head banging to ask, Mr. McCourt, did you have this stuff in high school? and there’s another chorus of yeah yeah and I don’t know what to say. Should I tell them the truth, that I never set foot in a high school till I began teaching in one or should I feed them a lie about a rigorous secondary school education with the Christian Brothers in Limerick?

  I’m saved, or doomed, by another student who calls out, Mr. McCourt, my cousin went to McKee on Staten Island and she said you told them you never went to high school and they said you were an okay teacher anyway because you told stories and talked and never bothered them with all these tests.

  Smiles around the room. Teacher unmasked. Teacher never even went to high school and look what he’s doing to us, driving us crazy with tests and quizzes. I’m branded forever with the label, teacher who never went to high school.

  So, Mr. McCourt, I thought you had to get a license to teach in the city.

  You do.

  Don’t you have to get a college degree?

  You do.

  Don’t you have to graduate high school?

  You mean graduate from high school, from high school, from from from.

  Yeah, yeah. Okay. Don’t you have to graduate from high school to get into college?

  I suppose you do.

  Tyro lawyer grills teacher, carries the day, and word spreads to my other classes. Wow, Mr. McCourt, you never went to high school and you’re teaching at Stuyvesant? Cool, man.

  And into the trash basket I drop my teaching guides, my quizzes, tests, examinations, my teacher-knows-all mask.

  I’m naked and starting over and I hardly know where to begin.

  * * *

  In the nineteen sixties and early seventies students wore buttons and headbands demanding equal rights for women, blacks, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities, an end to the war in Vietnam, the salvation of the rain forests and the planet in general. Blacks and curly-haired whites sprouted Afros, and the dashiki and the tie-dye shirt became the garb of the day. College students boycotted class, taught in, rioted everywhere, dodged the draft, fled to Canada or Scandinavia. High school students came to school fresh from images of war on television news, men blown to bits in rice paddies, helicopters hovering, tentative soldiers of the Viet Cong blasted out of their tunnels, their hands behind their heads, lucky for the moment they weren’t blasted back in again, images of anger back home, marches, demonstrations, hell no we won’t go, sit-ins, teach-ins, students falling before the guns of the National Guard, blacks recoiling from Bull Connor’s dogs, burn baby burn, black is beautiful, trust no one over thirty, I have a dream and, at the end of it all, your President is not a crook.

  On streets and in subways I’d meet former students from McKee High School who would tell me of the boys who went to Vietnam, heroes when they left and now home in body bags. Bob Bogard called to tell me about the funeral of a boy who had been in both our classes but I didn’t go because I knew that on Staten Island there would be pride in this blood sacrifice. The
boys from Staten Island would fill more body bags than Stuyvesant could ever imagine. Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.

  In my classroom I wore no buttons, took no sides. There was enough ranting all around us and, for me, picking my way through five classes was minefield enough.

  Mr. McCourt, why can’t our classes be relevant?

  Relevant to what?

  Well, you know, look at the state of the world. Look at what’s happening.

  There’s always something happening and we could sit in this classroom for four years clucking over headlines and going out of our minds.

  Mr. McCourt, don’t you care about the babies burned with napalm in Vietnam?

  I do, and I care about the babies in Korea and China, in Auschwitz and Armenia, and the babies impaled on the lances of Cromwell’s soldiers in Ireland. I told them what I’d learned from my part-time teaching at New York Technical College in Brooklyn, from my class of twenty-three women, most from the Islands, and from my five men. There was a fifty-five-year-old working for a college degree so that he could return to Puerto Rico and spend the rest of his life helping children. There was a young Greek studying English so that he could work toward a Ph.D. in the literature of Renaissance England. There were three young African-American men in the class and when one, Ray, complained he’d been bothered by the police on a subway platform because he was black the women from the Islands had no patience with him. They told him if he stayed home and studied he wouldn’t be getting into trouble and no kid of theirs would come home with a story like that. They’d break his head. Ray was quiet. You don’t talk back to women from the Islands.

  Denise, now in her late twenties, was often late to class and I threatened her with failure till she wrote an autobiographical essay which I asked her to read to the class.

  Oh no, she couldn’t do that. She’d be ashamed to let people know she had two children whose father had left her to return to Montserrat and never sends her a penny. No, she wouldn’t mind if I read the essay to the class if I didn’t tell who wrote it.

  She had described a day in her life. She’d wake early to do her Jane Fonda video exercises while thanking Jesus for the gift of another day. She’d take a shower, get her children up, her eight-year-old, her six-year-old, and take them to school and after that she’d rush to her college classes. In the afternoon she’d go straight to her job at a bank in downtown Brooklyn and from there to her mother’s house. Her mother had already picked up the children from school and without her Denise didn’t know what she’d do especially when her mother had that terrible disease that makes your fingers curl up in knots and Denise didn’t know how to spell. After taking the children home, putting them to bed and getting their clothes ready for the next morning, Denise would pray by the side of her bed, look up at the cross, thank Jesus once more for another wonderful day and try to fall asleep with His suffering image in her dreams.

  The women from the Islands thought that was a wonderful story and looked at each other wondering who wrote it and when Ray said he didn’t believe in Jesus they told him shut up, what did he know hanging around subway platforms? They worked, took care of their families, went to school and this was a wonderful country where you could do what you liked even if you were black like the night and if he didn’t like it he could go back to Africa if he could ever find it without getting hassled by the police.

  I told the women they were heroes. I told the Puerto Rican man he was a hero and I told Ray if he ever grew up he could be a hero, too. They looked at me, puzzled. They didn’t believe me and you could guess what was running through their minds, that they were doing only what they were supposed to do, getting an education, and why was this teacher calling them heroes?

  My Stuyvesant students were not satisfied. Why was I telling them stories of women from the Islands and Puerto Ricans and Greeks when the world was going to hell?

  Because the women from the Islands believe in education. You can demonstrate and shake your fists, burn your draft cards and block the traffic with your bodies, but what do you know in the end? For the ladies from the Islands there is one relevance, education. That is all they know. That is all I know. That is all I need to know.

  Still, there was a confusion and a darkness in my head and I had to understand what I was doing in this classroom or get out. If I had to stand before those five classes I couldn’t let days dribble by in the routine of high school grammar, spelling, vocabulary, digging for the deeper meaning in poetry, bits of literature doled out for the multiple choice tests that would follow so that universities can be supplied with the best and the brightest. I had to begin enjoying the act of teaching and the only way I could do that was to start over, teach what I loved and to hell with the curriculum.

  The year Maggie was born I told Alberta something my mother used to say, that a child gains her vision at six weeks and if that was true we should take her to Ireland so that her first image would be of moody Irish skies, a passing shower with the sun shining through.

  Paddy and Mary Clancy invited us to stay on their farm in Carrick-on-Suir but newspapers were saying Belfast was in flames, a nightmare city, and I was anxious to see my father. I traveled north with Paddy Clancy and Kevin Sullivan and the night we arrived we walked the streets of Catholic Belfast. The women were out banging on the pavements with the lids of garbage cans, warning their men of approaching army patrols. They were suspicious of us till they recognized Paddy of the famous Clancy Brothers and we passed on without trouble.

  Next day Paddy and Kevin stayed in the hotel while I went to my Uncle Gerard’s house so that he could take me to my father in Andersonstown. When my father opened his door he nodded at Uncle Gerard and looked through me. Uncle said, This is your son.

  My father said, Is it little Malachy?

  No. I’m your son Frank.

  Uncle Gerard said, It’s a sad thing when your own father doesn’t know you.

  My own father said, Come in. Sit down. Will you have a cup of tea?

  He offered the tea but showed no signs of making it in his little kitchen till a woman came from next door and did it. Uncle Gerard whispered, See that. He never lifts a finger. He doesn’t have to with the way the ladies of Andersonstown wait on him hand and foot. They tempt him daily with soup and dainty things.

  My father smoked his pipe but never touched his mug of tea. He was busy asking about my mother and three brothers. Och, your brother Alphie came to see me. Quiet lad your brother Alphie. Och, aye. Quiet lad. And you’re all well in America? Attending to your religious duties? Och, you have to be good to your mother and attend to your religious duties.

  I wanted to laugh. Jesus, is this man preaching? I wanted to say, Dad, have you no memory?

  No, what’s the use. I’d be better off leaving my father to his demons though you could see from the peaceful way he had with his pipe and his mug of tea that the demons wouldn’t cross his threshold. Uncle Gerard said we ought to leave before darkness fell on Belfast and I wondered how I should say good-bye to my father. Shake his hand? Embrace him?

  I shook his hand because that’s all we ever did except for one time when I was in hospital with typhoid and he kissed my forehead. Now he drops my hand, reminds me once more to be a good boy, to obey my mother and remember the power of the daily rosary.

  When we returned to his house I told my uncle I’d like to walk through the Protestant area, the Shankill Road. He shook his head. Quiet man. I said, Why not?

  Because they’ll know.

  What will they know?

  They’ll know you’re a Catholic.

  How will they know?

  Och, they’ll know.

  His wife agreed. She said, They have ways.

  Do you mean to say you could spot a Protestant if he walked down this street?

  We could.

  How?

  And my uncle smiled. Och, years of practice.

 
; While we had another cup of tea there was shooting down Leeson Street. A woman screamed and when I went to the window Uncle Gerard said, Och, get your head away from the window. One little movement and the soldiers are so nervous they’ll spray it.

  The woman screamed again and I had to open the door. She had a child in her arms and another one clinging to her skirt and she was being forced back by a soldier pushing his slanted rifle. She begged him to let her cross Leeson Street to her other children. I thought I’d help by carrying the child clinging to her but when I went to pick her up the woman dashed around the soldier and across the street. The soldier swung on me and put his rifle barrel against my forehead. Get inside, Paddy, or I’ll blow your fawking head off.

  My uncle and his wife, Lottie, told me that was a foolish thing I did and it helped no one. They said that whether you were Catholic or Protestant there was a way of handling things in Belfast that outsiders would never understand.