THE WALL

When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers who would
Hurt the children in any way they could
By pouring their derision
Upon anything we did
And exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kids


My sister and i were born within a year of one another, and, as her birthday falls in December, she and i started school in the same year. We were always put in separate classes, and this gave me a window in to the other classroom, so to speak. I loved my first grade teacher with the whole-hearted, uncritical love which only a child can produce--the charming Miss Whitfield. My sister's first grade teacher was The Harpy from Hell. On occassion, Miss Whitfield would be absent, and we would all be ushered into The Harpy's domain. She would commonly leave the room, telling us that she had a secret device, an "eye," in the room which would detect the least infraction of rules, or lapse of decorum. She would then leave the room, "going to the office." (As an adult, i rather suspect she just hung out in the hall, or went to the teachers' lounge for a cup of coffee.) Upon her return, one horrified little rabbit or the other would blurt out a tale of any misdeed seen, which would be instantly punished. Then The Harpy would turn from the Miscreant to the Informer, and putting her (relatively) large head immediately on a level with theirs, would chant, in the high, nasal sing-song common to the society of her diminutive charges: "Tattle-tale, tattle-tale, hanging from a cow's tail." You might well imagine the horror, along with the physical terror, of he or she who had been foolish enough to have ratted out their companion. By my sister's account, experienced inmates of her asylum sat in terrified silence, nearly as though petrified, awaiting her return in such circumstances.

The PTA considered her a very good teacher, and were especially taken with her legendary, seemingly casual, enforcement of a strict discipline (different times, a different world). Not like that Miss Whitfield--she let her children get too attached . . .

Myriad small cruelties and injustices made up the life of a school child then, but not inflicted simply by one's peers. Passing over much, i will alight on an incident in my eighth year in the tender mercies of these women (men were by far too uncommon in the profession then--i'd seen exactly one in my few years). There was in our class a girl, unfortunate offspring of The Lowest of the Low. Alma often wore the same shift to school for seven or eight days hand running. Her face and person were usually besmirched with the soil one expects to see on the three- or four-year old newly returned from "the back of the lot." Her look was one of constant melancholy, of a hebitude untutored at home and allowed to fester in a school system which promoted her with the class--a nuisance to be passed on to the next teacher obliged to deal with her whom everyone seemed would rather just to have gone away.

One day, Alma cut her hand--not badly, but it was in this incident that i first truly realized the horrifying solitude of the unloved, the neglected, and the disproportionate magnitude of any minor calamity which futhered burdened an already blighted existence. I was sitting in the classroom, copying an essay into a good hand, so as to have free time in the afternoon, when our teacher returned to her desk (it was the lunch hour). Shortly thereafter, Alma entered in a wild passion of surprisingly muted misery, her eyes welling so that i wondered she could see enough to walk uninjured. She showed her wound and silently plead for sympathy. The teacher never changed her posture, nor her glance (except to raise it to me), and did not in any way physically acknowledge Alma's presence. She then began to ridicule the girl to me for a child, little more than a monstrously huge infant, lacking all perspective of the insigificance of her being . . . and then paused to look at Alma dramatically before turning again to me (we hated one another cordially, she simply exploited my presence for her little ritual), to say: "You know, i think she actually knows we're talking about her." I hadn't spoken a word--i was experiencing a profound horror the like of which i had only known once before, at the consequences of a thoughtless act of my own. Stumbling, and dropping my personal effects, i scooped up all i possessed as hurriedly as the "law" of the school allowed from the classroom, having never uttered a sound. To this day, i cannot stomach the contemplation of what Alma's life must have become.

These will sound like horror stories, and i would not dispute that we live in a more "enlightened" era now than then . . . and yet . . . cruelty is a constant, a given among children when their society is unfettered by surveillance, both physical and psychological cruelty. How assured can we be that there are never such casual cruelties occassionally practiced by adults, at almost all other times "perfectly reasonable," which remain hidden from all but perhaps another child or two? Whether or not such "crimes of the spirit" are perpetrated by the grown-ups, what do you think about the place and effect of fear, cruelty, of sorrow, in the lives of the Least Among Us? If it is pertinent to your family, how do you deal with that sorrow, and the specter of cruelty?