Ms. Hempel Chronicles

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  “A person who’s lost her memory,” Ms. Hempel said to the other Julia. “How true.”

  And she thought of the terrible blank she had drawn the very day she’d been hired to teach at this school. Upon signing her contracts and shaking everyone’s hand, she found herself sitting in the faculty lunchroom over a plate of garbanzo bean salad and across the table from Mr. Meacham, who, as it turned out, taught a course in Chinese history. He was disappointed to learn that she did not speak the language, not a word of it.

  “And your family?” he had asked. “What province are they from?"

  It was at this point that Ms. Hempel’s memory failed her. Hunan? Szechuan? Were those provinces or just restaurants? And what kind of food was she, by hereditary right, supposed to most enjoy? She knew the answer, she did! She was simply nervous.

  "Chungking?” she murmured, which didn’t sound particularly correct, but Mr. Meacham was already moving on.

  “What a shame,” he said, “that your name isn’t more indicative."

  “Yes.” She didn’t understand what he meant “It is too bad."

  “Is there a middle name, perhaps?”

  “Grace?”

  Mr. Meacham frowned, thinking. “Or a family name. Your mother’s maiden name?”

  “It’s Ho "

  “Ah!” He smiled and swallowed the last of his milk. “Have you ever thought of hyphenating?”

  He tried it out. He used the word euphonious. He said the name over to himself, three times.

  “Ms. Ho-Hempel,” she said. “That’s what they would call me?”

  Mr. Meacham nodded happily.

  “But—" How could she put this? “Won’t there be a lot of jokes?”

  He didn’t follow, g “You know, ho? As in, ‘pimps and,’ As in, ‘you blankety blank—She waved her hands at Mr. Meacham, as if guiding

  him into a very tight parking space. “Do I want a bunch seventh graders calling me ho?”

  Mr. Meacham looked at her, perplexed. "That’s precisely the idea.”

  He picked up his lunch tray. “You’ll be expanding their horizons. An awful phrase, but a sound principle”

  She had a whole summer to practice saying it. Ho-Hempel She even wrote it down on her name tag for the new faculty orientation. But when the first day of school finally arrived children came crashing into her homeroom and by the time the last of them appeared—Michael Reggiano, congenitally late—she had lost her resolve altogether.

  Ms. Hempel liked the land bridge theory, especially the part about the lumbering mammoths and the hunters in hungry pursuit. The hunters were following the game, a phrase that made her think of small boys running after ducks in the park. The two things couldn’t be at all similar; following the game was probably a lengthy and thankless process involving mammoth dung and very little real chasing or spear throw-1 ing. But still, that was how she pictured it: the band of hungry hunters pursuing a herd of lumbering mammoths. These hunters were so absorbed by the chase, they went running across a land bridge connecting their home, Asia, to an entirely unfamiliar and uninhabited continent, North America, without even noticing it. A land bridge was more difficult to imagine. The book described ice ages, glaciers, the freezing of oceans, their bottoms now exposed. Did that make sense? Did that big glacier, pinned atop the world like a yarmulke, somehow suck up the water in the Bering Strait? Apparently so. In that case, was crossing the land bridge like skirting a rampart of ice, bearing down on you from one side, or was it like trudging along a marshy strip of beach, ith the glacier a white ship floating off in the distance? The book didn’t elaborate. All that mattered was the appearance of the land bridge, so that the mammoths could lumber across, so that the Asian hunters could follow, so that the Western Hemisphere could become populated.

  "Any questions?” Ms. Hempel asked.

  “What if Ferdinand and Isabella hadn't given Columbus the money?” asked Travis, who enjoyed hypothetical situations.

  "What if the hunters hadn't crossed the Bering Strait?" he would eventually ask.

  And, “What if the Pilgrims had decided to stay in Holland?”

  Ms. Hempel wasn’t sure how to answer these questions.

  “Then I guess we wouldn’t be sitting here!” she would reply, airily.

  This seemed to be the answer Travis was looking for. He nodded and said, “I guess not."

  Grandpa’s Chest. The year is 1691, and the settlers at Jamestown are packing up and moving the colony inland. Imagine that you are helping your grandfather sort through his belongings. Each item, that he puts into his chest reminds him of some significant event or person in Jamestown’s history. For instance, an old tobacco pouch might remind him of the crop that saved the colony from total ruin (“Ah, I remember it well—if Pocahontas hadn’t taught John Smith how to plant tobacco, we never would have survived. But rich folk back home loved chewing the stuff. Soon everybody was growing it—even in the streets!"). Write a scene in which you describe this conversation with your grandfather as he reminisces' over the contents of his chest. Note: Tou will need to include ati eight items!

  “Before I read my scene," Audrey said, “can I tell a joke?"

  Ms. Hempel said yes.

  “My father told it to me. It’s a dumb joke, but I wanted to tell it. First he said, ‘Why is it important to learn about American history?' Remember? The assignment we did? And then he said, ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat’”—Audrey paused, sheepishly-—‘“the seventh grade!’”

  The class laughed. So did Ms. Hempel.

  “The best reason yet!” Ms. Hempel declared. “Who wants to repeat the seventh grade?”

  And then it occurred to her: She was repeating the seventh grade, in fact for the fourth time, and she would still be repeating the seventh grade when Audrey and Kirsten and Travis were out in the world, doing things. Over and over again, the Jamestown settlers would complain of the mosquitoes, the tea chests would tumble into the harbor, the Loyalists would be tarred and feathered and paraded through the crooked streets. Every November, the war would be won; every October, the colonies would rebel; every September, Ms. Hempel would turn to the board, pick up the chalk, and write: First Assignment.

  Out of all the days in the month, Affinity Day was perhaps the most difficult. Ms. Hempel questioned the choice of Affinity, which she normally used to describe how she felt about Thomas Hardy, but the word was already a fixture, Umoja's gentle way of saying No White People Allowed. The organization s founders had decided, in the interests of unity, that once

  a month of its nonwhite members should congregate without its white members. Or, to put it a preferable way, its members of color should gather without its members of noncolor.

  INow Ms- Hempel was left with a classroom half full of

  , nervously rattling their lunch trays. Where to begin? The white members probably suspected that as soon the door swung shut, the Korean kids would start speak-f Korean, and the Puerto Rican kids would start speaking S anish, and the black kids would start speaking in some new nd alluring way that no one else had caught up to yet. From inside the room would come the sounds of profound relief: laughter, slapping of hands, little moans of commiseration. Delicious food would be shared. Maybe some hilarious imitations of the other, absent members would be performed.

  "So," Ms. Hempel began. “Is there anything that’s on your mind? Anything you'd like to talk about?”

  Everyone concentrated on their lunches. No one wanted to talk. The wall clock suffered one of its attacks; the minute hand shot forward, and then jumped back again. Balancing their trays, they had come, docile and curious and considerate of Ms. Hempel, but they didn’t know what to do next. She didn't know how to show them. She exhaled noisily to signal that it was now safe to let go, but no one seemed to take her cue. Perhaps they weren’t holding in their breaths.

  Perhaps they moved through this school with ease and ownership; perhaps it was unfair to expect that they should feel discomfort.
But that’s what Ms. Hempel half hoped would come spilling forth: tales of woe, a collection of slights and insults and misunderstandings. Wonderment at the nature of one’s hair; clumsy impressions of the deli man’s accent. Expectations of brilliant athleticism, or of preternatural skill with calculations. A belittling of one’s dearest accomplishments:

  We all know why she got in early to Yale. They could gan together here, with their lunch trays, and share these fenses. Theirs would be a kinship based on grievance.

  Ms. Hempel could feel as if she were providing something. a community; a sense of—affinity.

  But no one was talking. Either they felt no outrage no struggle or unease, or else they felt all these things and were not comfortable enough around Ms. Hempel, or each other to

  describe it. Ms. Hempel feared that the latter was true_f0r

  she was aware of the struggle, she had been witness to it—she had seen Alex and Shanell and Andrea walking toward the bus stop, their heads bent together in solace and ConsoilpM she had seen Nestor smiling, widely, entreatingly, altogether too readily; she had seen Clive rambling down the hallway? looking as if he had lost something. It could not be easy, being at this school. She had no way of fortifying them. In fact she was making it worse—making them trail up here to her classroom, making them parade out of the lunchroom, carrying their trays.

  Ms. Hempel felt the tenuousness of her claim. She wished she wasn't only half.

  “Well, I have something on my mind,” said Amara, Um-oja's newly elected president. “I had an encounter with Mr. Meacham.*'

  It concerned the list of research topics that he had presented to his Intellectual History class. “According to Mr. Meacham, Montaigne and Hobbes and Ralph Waldo Emerson were the only ones around doing any thinking."

  Amara spoke of the great Nubian civilization, its delicate art and extensive trade and ingenious devices for irrigating the land. And the kingdom of Aksum—their alphabet and their gods, the grandeur of their obelisks! The stone thrones and colossal statues. She then leapt over thousands of years, arriving at Wole Soyinka and Leopold Senghor and Chinua Achebe. Glorious thinkers, all of them.

  Amara remembered Ms. Hempel. "Look at the Chinese!" she added. “They had poetry, and philosophy, gunpowder and noodles and silk, when all those Europeans were running about waving clubs at each other. Wearing animal pelts!”

  This was a way of thinking that Ms. Hempel couldn’t quite rid herself of. As she accompanied her class through the Reformation, and the growth of European empires, and the race to explore, and the discovery of the new continent, and the settlement of the first English colonies, she often found herself wondering, What was going on in the rest of the world? Her thoughts would begin, Meanwhile, back in China... but she wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.

  All that she could say for certain was that the English colonists seemed an unhygienic, scrabbling bunch. They died off at an alarming rate.

  “Does that mean that we re going to see people dying?” asked Jonah.

  “Possibly,” Ms. Hempel said. “But if anyone dies, remember that it's a re-creation.”

  “It will look real, though,” Jonah said. “Won’t it?”

  It should, if Plimoth Plantation recreated death with the same devotion with which it clothed its inhabitants, bred their livestock, built their dark and smoky homes. Ms. Hempel had studied the brochure. Upon any day of the week, one could step back into the year 1627. Scores of thrifty colonists would mill about you, busy with their chores: cleaning muskets, plucking chickens. And when you asked them a question—Why did you come to America? Or, What is that there you’re growing?—

  the colonists would look up mildly from their labor, and offer you an off-the-cuff and fascinating answer. They might then introduce themselves: Captain Standish, Goody Billings Governor Bradford. Each colonist’s accent was true to the English county from which he or she hailed. Even the swine were recreated: modern pigs, being too dainty, had been crossbred with a warthog; thus the hairy, truculent animals that now rooted about at the edges of the settlement. Ms. Hempel was very excited to see it all for herself) even though it did mean spending a long time on a bus.

  “Ask lots of questions!” she yelled, trying to secure the seventh grade’s attention. The bus was luxurious, its seats high-backed and plush. Probably every kind of mischief was occurring, unseen. “You will get the most out of the experience that way!"

  Ms. Hempel worried that her students might be overawed by the colonists, might spend the whole day staring at the strange pigs. So she had assembled a list of suggested questions, of the type that curious seventh graders might ask an English colonist. These she distributed as the kids came careening down the aisle of the bus, tangled up in their backpacks and clipboards and sweaters. Ms. Burnes waited outside to make sure they didn’t go anywhere.

  Ms. Hempel stepped off the bus last. The air! It delighted her, it was brisk and wood-smoky; it smelled the way early music sounded: thin, feverish, slightly out of tune. Ms. Hempel hurried to the top of the path, flapping her hands to encourage the seventh graders, who tended to clot and clump and meander off into the distance; she touched their arms, she called to them, “Just a bit farther! Just over the crest of that hill!” And there it was: the settlement, the colonists, the sea. The blue sky, and the white smoke rising up in wispy

  streams. The roofs, gray and matted; the gardens, brown and stumpy; the roosters, red-crowned and wandering, The fort, with its cannons peeking out from under its eaves. The high, ragged fence, running along the perimeter of the settlement.

  Its purpose was to protect the colonists at night—to keep out the Spanish, or unfriendly Indians, or wild, hungry creatures of the forest.

  “But you don’t sleep here, do you?” Jonah wanted to know. “After this place closes, you go home.”

  The colonist scratched at his delicate beard. “Aye, I go home and sleep in my own bed. You can see it yonder," he said, pointing at a grey roof. “And if you happen upon my wife, you tell her that I will be back for the midday meal ”

  About ten or so seventh graders had another colonist surrounded. He was leaning jauntily upon an axe.

  “What was the voyage over like?”

  “What was your profession in England before you came here?”

  “Did you come here for religious freedom or economic opportunity?”

  “How do you feel about King Charles marrying a Catholic?”

  “What is the literacy rate in the colony?”

  They looked up from their sheets and stood braced for his answers, their clipboards jutting forward. Soon they would be free to climb on things and poke long, tough blades of grass into the animals’ pens. But the colonist, suddenly, had turned gruff. “I was a planter there, in England, and I am a planter here,” he said, before wielding his axe and letting it fall decisively into an upended log. The seventh graders moved away, in search of a more obliging colonist, and Ms. Hempel followed, whispering, “Have conversations with them.”

  But some children needed no prompting. Peering into the dim interiors of the houses, Ms. Hempel saw Annie explaining, with many violent shakes of her pencil, why Indians ought not to be called savages; Daniel squatting beside the fireplace examining the contents of a big, tarnished pot; Maria reaching out and stroking a woman’s dress, asking, Is it scratchy? Does it itch?

  Jonah was looking around for the dying. He couldn’t even find a colonist who was feeling sick. He ran up to Ms. Hempel and told her this, rather pointedly.

  “It isn’t winter yet," Ms. Hempel said. “Come back a few months from now, and they’ll be dropping like flies.”

  She drifted about the settlement blissfully. She ran her fingertips along the fence; she pressed her nose into the marigolds that hung drying from the ceilings. She asked, in every house she entered, what was cooking for supper. The seventh graders darted about her but they seemed, to her enchanted eye, nearly invisible: a school of silver minnows, and she, a great, stately carp. All sh
e saw were the marigolds drying, and the bread rising in the wooden trestles, and the colonists calling to each other from their chores. Ms. Hempel surrendered, without protest.

  “So where are all the kids?” Jonah was asking Governor Bradford. “Why aren’t there any kids around?”

  “Why, the lambing season does not come until spring!” said Governor Bradford. “You will not find any kids before April.”

  "Children,” Jonah said. “You know what I mean. There aren't any children here. Because they’re all at school”

  "Nay, we have neither school nor schoolmaster here, but we hope for a schoolmaster soon to come from England.”

  “Their real school, Jonah said. "They can’t skip it. That's why they aren’t here.”

  “Have you not seen our children?” Governor Bradford asked. “Mine own son was here not a moment ago. He went to fetch wood for the fire. And Winslow s two girls wished me a good afternoon, but a minute afore you spake to me. They Lere on their way to gather crab apples, it being the season to harvest them."

  “Very convenient," said Jonah.

  “If you do not see our youngfolk, it is because they must work. No one rests here,” said Governor Bradford, with finality.

  How magnificent! Ms. Hempel rejoiced. How unperturbed he was, how convinced. Governor Bradford was unmistakably himself. Ms. Hempel aspired to such a performance. If only she, too, were a colonist. But why not? She could learn to do these things: to sew a jerkin, render fat into soap, and muck out a barn. She could say aye, and betwixt, and if the Lord wills it so. As she herded the seventh grade back onto the bus, and frowned at the little wooden muskets they had purchased at the gift shop, and reminded them to put their notes in a very safe place, she entertained the possibility. When she returned home, she would write a letter to the Plantation. Of course, she could not ask a colonist how she might join them; they would rebuff her, good-naturedly, just as Governor Bradford had done with Jonah. She must address her letter to the administration, who were probably tucked away somewhere behind the bluffs. Perhaps a whole network of cubicles and fluorescent lights stretched out beneath the settlement, hidden and labyrinthine. Her letter would be opened by one of these underground workers; a response would be posted; by