School Days

                                           The Past Remembered Anew:
                                      How Childhood Memories Reveal
                                                  Who We Are Now      

          

Bill

Gin wrote about her fourth and sixth grade Pittsfield classrooms in Teachers. For her those years still reverberate. I'll be reaching back further as I recall some of the moments from early grammar school in Jamaica Plain. Those grades may not have been as altering as the years Gin recounts but they include experiences I recall with fondness and with discomfort. 

My family lived in a house on Adams Circle right behind the Ellis Mendell School. My school was literally right in my back yard. School was a part of my life whether I was sitting in a classroom, playing on weekends in the schoolyard, or running along the wall out back.  The Mendell was always a glance away out my kitchen window.

My older brother spent his elementary days there. My older sister also went there except for the one year she attended sister school, also known as parochial school.  Before any of us kids existed, my mother spent a year there when her parents were unable to get her into the Catholic school. So that huge brick building didn't intimidate me; it was always in the background, sort of a benign presence even before I started going there.

I attended the Mendell from kindergarten through third grade.

Kindergarten was half a day. It's likely I spent the first four months going in the morning and the second four months going in the afternoon.  This would have been 1949.  It would not have been a difficult walk, up Adams Circle and down half a block to the school. I walked there by myself. My mother felt it was safe to do so since she could see me walking most of the way there. I'd bring papers home, drawings and early attempts at writing my name.  Looking at them years later I see crumpled wrinkled sheets of paper, probably from my scrunching them in my pocket as I walked home.  

By first grade we'd line up in the schoolyard to march into school in two lines, boys in one, girls in the other.  Unlike modern classrooms with moveable furniture, my desk was always in the same spot since all the desks, and the chairs, were attached to metal frames bolted to the floor. This rigidity made it difficult for some of the bigger kids to get their knees under the desks. 

The windows were floor to ceiling but never seemed to let in much light.  There was a blackboard up front behind the teacher's huge desk.  On a narrow ledge were bits and pieces of chalk along with several erasers. I liked chalk, white and dusty, sometimes yellow. I liked the way the erasers smeared the chalk numbers and letters into streaks and smudges.  Occasionally someone would clean the blackboards with water. Then they would become vivid shiny black rather than the dull black they usually were. The first time the teacher wrote on that just washed surface, the numbers or letters stood out like a 3-D image. 

For some reason the desks were treated like they were antiques, even though they were beat up, scratched, initialed, with holes in the upper corner where ink wells used to be.  (Teachers must have loved the introduction of ball point pens.) There were times your pencil would tear through the paper you were writing on because the desk surface was so pitted. However, when it came time to have lunch, we were required to protect these scarred and battered surfaces with tiny table clothes.

The covering was called an oilcloth. This was provided by our parents as part of our late summer, early fall school preparations. I don't remember what I ate on those cloths but I do remember the cloths themselves, especially the smell.  Yeah, they did have an oily kind of aroma.  Odd but not terribly unpleasant. They were made of linen cloth treated with boiled linseed oil. To prevent them from sticking when folded the cloth was waxed. Well, as we soon discovered, wax and liquids are natural enemies.  If you spilled your milk, and everybody did eventually, instead of being absorbed, the milk would run off onto your lap, your chair and the floor. After a while the classroom took on a distinctly sour odor.

The irony was the oil and wax coating was supposed to make cleaning the cloth after lunch easier.  Not in my classroom. Instead of cleaning them, some kids would just scrunch them up, crumbs, spilt milk and all, and stuff them back in their desks. Other kids would try to fold them into as small a square as possible. I'd just brush the crumbs off, fold it in half and then again and stash it under my arithmetic book.  

After several months of lunch time use, the cloths transformed from pristine table coverings with that like-new oily smell to crumbled, cracked, faded squares with odors of all the lunches ever eaten. Maybe we got new ones half way through the school year. It's hard to conceive of how functional they would have been by June of every year. 

A number of times throughout the school year the routine of our day-long confinement to our classroom was disrupted by the teacher calling for our attention. We were told to get out of our seats and to follow her into the corridor.  "Come with me, children. Single file. No talking. This is an air raid drill."  

What struck me is how quickly the kids from all the other rooms were gathered in the main corridor by the front entrance. This was a very precise, well-planned operation, less chaotic than the fire drills during which you would have to go outside.  It was dark in that front corridor, a kind of dim, flickery light in which the other kids were more silhouettes than real. A great setting for the end of the world. Thinking about it now, maybe they turned out the lights on purpose. Could it be for some yet unrevealed reason the Ellis Mendell School was in reality a strategic target by the Russians?  

The corridor where we walked so freely coming to and leaving school was now filled with four or five rows of sitting children. It was quiet too. Way too quiet.  Maybe we understood the seriousness of this more than we realized. This wasn't quite the same situation kids endured in the London underground.  Even though families spent entire nights cooped up by the subway tracks in an effort to avoid exploding bombs just above, they were safer than we were trying to survive atom bombs. We were in the corridors to avoid flying glass but certainly after a direct hit on Boston flying glass would be the least of our problems. 

While we might not have been aware of all the ramifications, most of us realized it would be a very different world after an atomic attack.  Maybe that's why everyone sat there so quietly.  Maybe it was just the obvious absurdity of bunches of kids sitting in the dark waiting for a flash that never came.  Either way, it was unsettling.

We seemed to spend much time in that front corridor. The cold war never turned hot but the belligerence between the US and Russia, allies not long before, was palpable. The end of the Second World War did not bring the kind of lasting peace to the world everyone had hoped for. So many people killed. So much damage. There may have been joy and relief when the hostilities ended but there remained residual bad feeling as well. Russia had pushed the Germans out of eastern Europe, but remained in those countries as an occupying force. America had developed the A bomb and then had used it, some historians contending its detonation was more a warning to Russia than to subdue an already defeated Japan, There was anger, fear and distrust on both sides, and many people willing to fan the flames.  I'm not sure I knew what a Communist was but I knew it wasn't a good thing to be one or even to be accused of being one.  Even sympathizing with what the Russians had been through during the war could get you in trouble. Senator McCarthy saw to that. 

Reinforcing all this anxiety were these incessant air raid drills. Often I was right up against the corridor wall. No talking was allowed, no whispering, no coughing, no breathing I guess. My mind wandered. I would look at the series of photographs hanging above me. Portraits of former mayors of Boston? Past principals of the school? I don't know.  Each of them, however, stared down at me, reinforcing the gravity of the situation in which I found myself.

  

Then the "all clear" came, or at least the teacher said, "Back to class."  Suddenly movement. We all seemed to get up on our feet at once to walk back to the normality of our classrooms.  Now there was noise.  Shoes on the floor, murmuring, sort of a restless excitement of this being over.  It's difficult for little kids to be so quiet for so long for a little-discussed situation adults seemed to take very seriously.  No smoke or flames or destruction outside our classroom windows.  The Russians had spared my neighborhood once again.

Besides dealing with oil cloths and living through air raid drills, what did we do all day in those classrooms?  Nowadays kids sit in groups, work creatively at art tables, move their desks and chairs around, have corners for quiet reading, have lunchrooms for eating.  Few of these things were possible in the Mendell world unless you took screwdrivers to free up the desks and chairs.  We were stuck in our assigned seats for the duration. In most classrooms there were six rows with eight desks in each row. If all those seats were filled, that's a lot of kids per classroom.  Many more than the current average of thirty-two.

Some years I'd be right next to the windows and other years furthest away from the windows depending on which row the teacher would use as a starting point when she seated us alphabetically.  My last name began with a 'B' so most likely I'd be in the first row or the last row as you walked into the class. Never in the anonymous middle.  The people I would get to know best were often determined by the first letters of their last name. I moved to Hyde Park before starting fourth grade.  By the time I was at Hyde Park High, my classmates were many of the same kids who were in my fourth grade class with me. I got to know particularly well the kids whose last names began with A, B, C and D in part through proximity; year after year we sat near each other.  Who knows if I missed out on a great friendship or a great relationship with an S or a V because for years they sat on the opposite side of the room.  I exaggerate but propinquity is often a main factor in developing intimacy.

I do wonder what all us A's and B's and J's and K's and, well, probably no X's, and maybe a Z or two, learned as we sat in those rooms year after year. Just because I don't remember those history, geography and English lessons doesn't mean they didn't influence how I interpret the world. I certainly knew about atomic bombs.  Did I learn about them from school, listening to my parents talk, other kids, how?  Was I reading the Boston Globe every night? In my war games with friends we used to casually toss atom bombs at each other so I certainly had some idea what they were. I certainly had no idea how they were deployed.

When I was six or seven I was very Boston-centric. I admit I had no idea there was even a place called Pittsfield where concurrently

Gin was sitting at her bolted down chair and desk learning her own version of facts.  At the Mendell I wonder how much detail was revealed to us about what the rest of the world was like? How much of it was accurate and not tinged by the patriotic culture of the country in which I lived? Certainly, at the time, Russia was not promoted as a place to vacation. Moscow was not Miami Beach. 

I did learn about oceans and continents even if simplistically. I knew there were five oceans, although I always forgot about the Antarctic Ocean. (Now it's considered a part of the Southern Ocean.) There was the Arctic Ocean too. I thought it odd an ocean would be covered by ice. Then the Indian Ocean. Confusing again. The only reference I had to Indians were the ones who lived out west. The Atlantic was most familiar.  I swam in it.  The Pacific was where Hawaii was. That was it for that.

I was taught about the seven continents. Again not much sophistication here. There was Asia and Europe, on the map all one giant place. I wondered how a traveler walking from one to the other would know when he crossed the dividing line. Africa was called the Dark Continent. It had nothing to do with race or lack of sunshine, I realized later; it was a nineteenth century reference to its mystery, inaccessibility. I loved how North and South America were joined by this tiny strip of land between them. I envisioned giant hands coming down twisting this bit of land apart leaving both continents adrift. Australia had kangaroos. Antarctica, really the darkest continent if you're referencing inaccessibility, was where the south pole was. Penguins, too, maybe.  Or was that up by the north pole? Limited concepts surely but it was a start.

I can't put the entire blame for my ignorance on school as my friends were also a source of misinformation. I knew about Russia. They wanted to bomb us. That fact from school. I knew about China. If you dug deep enough you would reach it. That "fact" from my friends. I knew there was an "out west" but I thought most of that was in a place called Texas. I loved the name Rocky Mountains envisioning enormous heaps of boulders. 

My family could also be a source of confusion.  Sometimes if we didn't eat all our food at dinner, my father would try to shame us by talking about starving kids in other parts of the world. I remember him at the head of the dinner table referencing the phrase "Famine in India."  I sort of knew about India.  Tigers.  People riding elephants. What I didn't know was how the partition of India to create Pakistan resulted in a shortage of food, a famine which impacted many people including kids. I remembering thinking as my father spoke if I could somehow get my plate of uneaten food to some kid in India it would make everything all right.

Stereotypes abounded in my perceived world. Much of what I knew wasn't quite right. I knew there were cold places in the world where people lived in igloos. I knew Indians lived in teepees. Africans lived in the jungle. The English drank tea. Australians hunted with boomerangs. The list went on and on. Occasionally though the real world intruded.

I knew about a place called Korea from a memory of my father and me standing outside on Adams Circle one evening early in the summer of 1953.  Sirens had been sounding, some near and quite loud, others off in the distance. I must have heard them inside my house.  We then must have walked outside where he told me, "The sirens are announcing a cease fire in the Korean War."  I remember standing beside him, just listening, as the siren celebration came to an end. It was quiet again, here and in Korea. An armistice would be signed a few weeks later.

There was another time when real history made its presence felt. President Eisenhower's first inaugural. The day would have been Tuesday, January 20, 1953.  It was memorable because we were dismissed from school early to see it. 

It was odd leaving my third grade class in the middle of the morning.  We just got there. I would walk home along School Street and then down to Adams Circle, but always in the afternoon. The mid-morning light didn't seem quite right. I hadn't had lunch yet. Regardless, here I was, walking home from school. As for Ike, I vaguely remember watching the inaugural parade. He good-naturally had let a cowboy marching in the parade lasso him. 

Geography and history were one thing. Exotic places. Interesting people. Arithmetic, not so much. In particular, those incessant multiplication table drills. The teacher told us the secret to multiplication was to memorize the multiplication tables.  It was as simple as that.  Not to me.  There were just so many!  And we had to know them through the twelve table. Diabolical! I realized in order to deal with the daily recitation of these satanic numbers I had to come up with strategies other than rote memorization.

The one table was easy.  You just repeated whatever number the one was being multiplied by. 1 times 11 is 11. Equally simple, the ten table.  Just put a zero after the number you started with.  5 times 10 is 50. The two table I could figure out in my head.  Just double whatever the number was. 2 times 6. Double the 6. 12.  I used the same technique to triple that number in the three table.  The four through nine tables were more problematic. Well, except for the five's. They were easy. You could recite the fives singsong style in about ten seconds. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25... That still left an awful lot to commit to memory.  It didn't occur to me to notice half the facts were the same, just reversed. 9 times 4 is the same as 4 times 9. 36. Eleven's were easy. Just say the number twice. 8 times 11 was 88.  Twelve's were the most difficult for me. I knew no tricks for the twelves. For some reason I had no problem remembering the product when the two numbers were the same. 6 times 6 was 36, 8 times 8 was 64.  Even the twelve's. 12 times 12 was 144. Still is. 

I realize now if I had been given the chance to analyze my strategies, I might have noticed there were techniques, tricks, to coming up with answers in my head without the need to memorize.  Take 9 times 12. I knew 10 times 12 was 120. So 9 times 12 had to be twelve less. In my head I could subtract the twelve.  Answer, 108.  On paper I had time to think about such strategies.  The problem arose when the teacher would drill us orally. 

During the oral drill the teacher would start in a front row and then go one kid to the next asking each the answer to one of the multiplication facts. I preferred it if she started with the kid at the front in my row; my misery would be soon over. If she started with a kid on the other side of the room, my anxiety would mount until she finally called on me.  It could be a long wait to see which problem I'd get, one I had an answer for, or one I didn't.

Best was when she would begin the exercise in order of the tables, starting with the ones. By the time my turn came I would have had time to start my calculations. If the third kid in front of me got, "What is 4 times 6?", the second kid in front would get, "What is 5 times 6?" By the time the kid in front of me was supplying the answer to 6 times 6, (An easy one by the way.), I had calculated what the answer would be to 7 times 6. It felt good to give the teacher the correct answer when she called on me. What the teacher wouldn't have liked is the way I came up with that answer. I'd often figure it out by doing the single thing the teacher spoke against more than any other. "I don't want to see anyone counting on their fingers!" she'd demand.  Well, fingers were my personal calculator.  Besides didn't the teacher know the reason we have the numbers one through ten is because we have ten fingers? 

What I dreaded most was when she went around the room in a random fashion, jumping from row to row, desk to desk, kid to kid. There was no pattern.  No time for me to calculate.   All I could hope for was one of the easy ones.  5 times 5.  4 times 10.  3 times 6.  It was agony waiting this out.

Sometimes luck would be with me. "William, what is 7 times 7, or 2 times 9, or even 11 times 11?"  I knew those. Sometimes I'd have no luck at all.  "What is 7 times 12?" I was doomed. My nemesis numbers.  I hated the twelve table. The worst. Silence. I'd consider venturing a guess. "Quickly," she'd say.  Just what I needed, more pressure.  Luckily the teacher wanted to keep some machine-like momentum going. After a few seconds of silence she'd skip over me and the kid behind me would get my question. I have to say if that kid were a girl, the answer would be forthcoming. "84, Miss Touhy."  If a boy the chances of a right answer would drop. I concluded that girls were better in math than boys. Certainly better than I was.

Eventually, because we seemed to do this drill thousands of times, I did learn all the times tables. Except for the twelve table.  Through innate stubbornness, maybe a sense of enough is enough, even the rote drill didn't push the twelves into my head.  To this day I still have trouble with them. 

A note from Gin.  She is saying when the teacher asked me the answer to a twelve table fact, there was another way to get the answer without knowing the twelve table.  "Think of 12 as 10 plus 2.  You already knew the 10s.  7 times 10 is 70.  7 times 2 is 14.  You knew that too.  Now just add in your head. Simple."  Yeah, if you're one of those little genius grammar school math whizzes.  Gin then tells me, "In Pittsfield the public school kids only had to learn the one through ten tables; the parochial school kids had to memorize the tables up to and including twelve.  It was a bit of a joke that you knew a kid was Catholic if they knew the answer to 8 times12." 

Gin also has her own multiplication table story.  "I also spent third grade practicing those multiplication facts.  However, I knew my older brother was multiplying things like 38 times 18. The summer before fourth grade I spent worrying, wondering how we were ever going to learn the 12, 13, 14, all those tables up to the 38 times table!   What I didn't know as a third grader was that in fourth we'd learn about the multiplication algorithm which allowed us to calculate any multiplication problem just by referring to the times tables we had learned.  My brother never disabused me of this notion or shared his way of doing these problems.  I think he found my needless concern over fourth grade math quite amusing."

Thanks Gin.  There are reasons you are a math educator.

The desk and chair I was assigned became my domain. It's where I was every day, where I sat to read or write, from where I attempted to answer questions. It's where I had my lunch. It was also my place to nap.

Nap time may have been over by third grade but in kindergarten and first grade I do have vague memories of trying to get comfortable at my desk during nap time.  I can't imagine anyone sleeping but we went through the motions.  It was a matter of folding your arms across your desk and then somehow placing your head down in a position that was the least uncomfortable.  There was no comfortable way to do this.  How could there be? You're hunched forward, arms slipping off the sides of the desk, moving them around trying to block out the light, moving your head side to side trying to find a position you could maintain for more than a minute.  It was supposed to be quiet in the room but it wasn't. There'd be breathing sounds, coughing, chairs and desks creaking as kids tried to find a good position, noise from outside.  The teachers may have enjoyed those minutes of repose but for us kids nap time was the antithesis of anything to do with relaxation.

One consequence of being cooped up together in those classrooms was the opportunity to bully other kids.  I both bullied and was bullied during my years in elementary school.  Maybe bullied is too strong a word; teased some of the other kids.  Nothing violent, but taunting certainly takes it toll as well. 

In second or third grade, there was a kid who sat in the last row nearest the window.  He was a big kid, fat was the word used then, and, well, he had body odor. Likely, I realize now, the result of a medical condition.  Some of the other boys would tease him, name-call; others would punch him in the arm, try to twist his fingers. I mostly ignored him, perhaps taking a secret pleasure in the fact the abuse he suffered was abuse deflected from me.

He just took it, whatever the bullies did.  He sat there stoic, almost accepting.  Not responding inspired some of the kids to keep at it, to get him to acknowledge in some way the torment they delivered. He didn't. The teacher must have stepped in at some point, or simply ignored it, the "boys will be boys" excuse. Ideally, the kid would have finally snapped, picked up the most vociferous of his oppressors, lifted him squealing in terror over his head before hurling his tormentor through one of the high windows, glass and window frame crashing all around as the bully fell to the ground. Well, in a cartoon maybe; in my classroom, he endured silently.  As with most things then, one day he was gone from my life.

There were a couple of kids from those years who had a much more lasting effect on me. Dick and Jane.  I think they had an impact on most kids.  I personally found Dick and Jane to be rather dull. I was drawn more to Sally, the little sister.  She seemed the most real. Like a kid. She was always getting into trouble, more like mischief, and, as I'll describe in a minute, she could also be irresponsible.. 

Mostly the Dick and Jane primers are bland.  Very little of any consequence happens to anyone in them. There is a lot of looking, a lot of seeing, a lot of going. Mother and Father are there as well but mostly in the background.  The emphasis is on the kids, the two pets, Spot and Puff, and Sally's much abused teddy bear, Tim.  Did I mention jumping?  These kids jumped a lot, always encouraging others to jump as well.  Even Spot and Puff got into the act, usually jumping over obstacles the kids put in their way.  Now that I think of it, they weren't jumping as much as escaping.

The books were designed to teach us how to read.  Mostly through rote and memory. The multiplication tables all over.  Did I talk like that when I was with my friends?  "Roger, see Johnny jump. Jump, Johnny, jump!"  "Johnny, look. See that bicycle on the street.  Look, Johnny, look!  It is red and blue and yellow.  Jump, Johnny, jump over that bicycle!"  I don't think so.

As far as grammar was concerned, it apparently was not part of the overall intent of the books to have anything to do with that part of learning the language.  Subject, verb, object, over and over.  Mostly verbs.  The jumping and seeing and going.  No participles, no gerunds, no tenses.  Very short sentences.  To the point.  Again, not the way I spoke even as a six year-old.  The books weren't about speaking but more about learning to say what other people spoke. Reading.  Sometimes reading out loud.

Listening to other kids read was the first time I realized some people did not have the skills I did.  For whatever reason, I read well.  "Sally jumped."  "Mother jumped."  "Tim jumped." My reading flowed along.  For some of the other kids in my class it was an obvious struggle.  Long pauses.  Trying to sound out the word.  Stammering.  Mispronunciation.  It would be nice to say I had sympathy for them, patience to wait for them to get through a sentence.  No.  I wanted the teacher to tell someone else to take over, mid-word if they had to.  Some girl.  Every girl seemed to be able to read perfectly.

The saving grace of the Dick and Jane books was the humor, intentional or not. Funny at first and then, upon reflection, more thoughtless than funny, even more mean than funny. Consider the way Sally dealt with Tim, very rarely cradling him in her arms, mostly dragging him by one paw, down stairways, along sidewalks, behind her tricycle. Once in a row boat she allowed him to fall into the water.  Maybe she tossed him in. Spot saved him.  Soggy Tim given back to an indifferent Sally. 

She wasn't much better with her pets.  She'd climb the stairs and then hurl poor Tim along the bannister where he would fly off landing on top of a bewildered Spot.  Another memory of the behavior considered laugh out loud in the books was of Sally pulling her wagon in which Tim, Spot and Puff were riding. How she coerced them all in there I don't know. Tim got tossed out first.  Fearing the worst, Spot and Puff jumped out. Required jumping in this case. When Sally looks back she finds she is pulling an empty wagon.  "Dammit, Spot, Dammit, Puff!"  Well, not quite.

A couple of story lines I remember more vividly, not only the story but the reaction of the class to what we were reading.  In one, Puff gets into some flour and tracks it all over the floors. Someone comes in, Jane maybe, sees the prints, thinks it's some sort of ghost.  I don't know if the word ghost was used but there was confusion and bewilderment as to how the tracks got there. The kids followed the tracks up to a bedroom discovering Puff licking her paws under the bed.  Kids in the class were laughing.  I felt differently.  Some anxiety actually  The episode made me wonder how my mother would feel if I tracked let's say mud on our kitchen floor.  Would she be mad?  Would she yell at me?  I'm thinking I'd have to hide under my bed.

Another incident involving Sally should have been one that provoked the most anxiety but even today I recall it as one of the funniest things I've ever read.  Keep in mind I was only six or seven. Sally is lost.  Now I don't think she was completely lost but may have been on the sidewalk a house or two from where she lived.  She felt lost.  I could identify with that and should have been apprehensive wondering what was going to happen.  Instead Sally has the good fortune to run into a policeman apparently sent to the neighborhood to investigate ghostly footprints.  He asks her name. "Sally," she says.  So far, so good.  "Sally what?" the cop asks.  "Sally Sally." That struck me as particularly funny. Most of other kids in the class too. Many of us were laughing out loud. I like absurdist humor, now and apparently then.  I still smile when I think back to it.

Revisionists condemn the Dick and Jane books as being woefully out of touch with the real situations of many of the kids who read them. No minorities, Dad always with the suit, Mother always at home, a world of white middle class affluence, the stereotypical family unit. My mother was at home too but I rarely saw her dressed up while doing laundry or dealing with us kids. My father did not own a briefcase; he worked as an electrician at the South Boston Navy Yard.  We didn't own any pets.  My friends were rough and tumble.  I was scared a lot, anxious. Yet I took chances, some of them foolish. Still, in spite of the differences, the world of Dick and Jane was familiar to me in many ways. I knew kids with younger sisters. I was curious about things. I liked to run and jump. I too was abusive of my toys.

Dick and Jane did lack a certain realism, in particular about class and race. In contrast we were presented an alternative in the story of Little Black Sambo.  I was familiar with black people as a kid and had I been left alone to form my own opinions, I believe I would have accepted them as equal individuals with the same good/bad dichotomy as all people.  Unfortunately racist views prevailed when I was young negatively influencing my ability to reach my own conclusions.  Black people are different, I was told.  Not as good as we are. Don't think any more about it.  End of story.  These admonitions came not just from adults and other kids but also from magazines and advertising and, yes, books. These beliefs were pervasive when I was a kid. It took a while as I grew up to realize my original conception was the correct one. People are the same the world over. I'm one of them. 

In a story involving tigers racing around turning into butter I'm not sure I even noticed Sambo was black. (In the original book the kid was from India, not Africa. Tigers are also from India, not Africa.)  Maybe in the version I read Sambo was portrayed more benignly than he often was. In some of the more racist versions he was a pickaninny, an unkempt, primitive, ignorant black child whose hair stood out in all directions, was ill-clothed, loved watermelon and chicken and whose eyes were always big and wide. Brutal. I don't recall these attributes in the Sambo character I read about in school. If I had, I probably would have been repulsed, even frightened at the grotesquery involved.  Maybe my Sambo came from the pens of more progressive illustrators. Then again I was fairly naive.

I did like the Sambo story.  It was fantastical. Exotic. The jungle setting. The absurdist images that fed my imagination including one of a tiger with it's tail coiled around a huge red or green umbrella, the one he stole from Sambo to make himself "look grand."  I liked the fact that with not a drop of rain in sight Sambo walked around with this huge umbrella.  The tigers eventually become irrational like all the rest of us; they turn on each other. The image of them whirling around and around some sort of tropical tree until they lose all semblance of looking like tigers was the highlight of the story.  Those flat two-dimensional illustrations came to life in my mind.  I loved the energy and motion, the qualities I rarely got from the much more subdued pictures in Dick and Jane.  I was mystified at how running tigers became butter, still am, but it added much to the surreal quality of the whole tale. 

Not all the stories I enjoyed in those early grades became controversial. There was the one involving three billy goats attempting to cross a bridge to get to the "sweet" grass on the other side.  Once my friend Johnny and I thought it would be interesting to munch on some grass.  We made an effort to find some we thought would be clean, "None that nobody has stepped on, or peed on," he'd admonish.  Well, the grass wasn't sweet. It was coarse and, well, grassy-tasting.  We spit it out quickly. 

One reason I liked the billy goat story was it had my name in it, Billy.  I don't know if the goats were related, son, dad, grandfather, or friends, but regardless each showed no remorse in putting the others in danger.  The bridge they crossed had a troll under it.  I'm not sure if I knew what a troll was; one illustration showed sort of a small grizzled old man.  Why he would be interested in eating a billy goat for breakfast I couldn't fathom. Each time he stopped a goat on the bridge the goat would plead for his life by convincing the troll the next goat to pass would be bigger and much more delicious.  The troll let the first one pass and then the second until the third, the largest one, head-butted him into the river. 

Things under the bed, under bridges, these were scary, so there was that element.  Also the story had a strangeness to it, trolls, talking goats, threats and violence.  I remember in particular the noise the goats made click-clacking across the bridge.  I liked reading those words, hearing that sound in my head, sharp, rhythmic. Finally the story had a happy ending, well, maybe not for the troll.

The tale of Dark Pony was another story I could get inside of, imagine with clarity what was happening.  Just after dark a pony would come "galloping, galloping, galloping" down the road picking up children to take them off to sleepy town.  Yeah, that sounds creepy now.  First a little boy, then a little girl, jumping on the pony as it hurtled along the dark road.  Next a little dog.  Faster and faster the dark pony would gallop.  Nearing sleepy town he would slow down, everyone becoming very sleepy.  Slow, slow, stop.  Presumably everyone asleep by now.

I slept every night, eight, ten hours, and lots more during naps as a younger kid. It was such a daily routine, regular, natural, expected, that I don't recall what ritual I might have needed to get to sleep. That's why I liked the story.  Here is an explanation of something I did every night.  Clear and literal, and, well, odd too.

Art in those grades at the Mendell was simply the teacher handing out sheets of paper, we kids pulling crayons out from the debris of our desks and then drawing what we wanted. There was rarely any instruction, even from special teachers, art teachers, who would come to our class presumably to show me how to make something other than the primitive houses I would obsessively draw. They all looked the same: a large square with a triangle balanced on top for a roof embellished with square windows broken up into smaller square window panes with a rectangle for a door, and another rectangle on a side of the triangle roof with a squiggle of smoke coming out of it. My house didn't even have a chimney but nonetheless all my drawn houses always included one.

Sometimes I'd put irregular green lines in front for grass, and splotches of red and blue for flowers. Occasionally I'd attempt a walkway, always black, always dead straight to the doorway.  A blue sky would press against the triangle roof with white clouds floating about, the only time I'd use the white crayons.  

Once, during Christmas, the class attempted something much more ambitious, an art project that involved not just coloring but also cutting and then joining all the parts. All this effort centered on a Santa Claus with arms and legs and a bag full of toys, all of which swiveled.  We started with the various parts outlined on a sheet of paper. Then we got to work with our crayons. The Santa suit, body and legs and arms colored red with white trim, the broad belt colored black, the bag of toys brown, the eyes blue along with bright red cheeks. We had to add the toys popping out from the top of the bag. I worked on what sort of looked like packages and even attempted the head of a doll which looked more like the head of some scrawny bird.  Everything then had to be carefully cut with scissors.  It's not often scissors were passed out to us making this project even more unusual. 

We worked on this for a number of days, the one more exciting than the last as each unique Santa took shape.  One day we used bits of cotton to trim the edges of Santa's suit.  Cotton and glue.  Everyone had cotton hands for a while after that.  The big day finally came when we attached all our finished pieces.  We had little brass fasteners that you poked through the ends of the pieces; once attached you would spread the two tines apart and press them against the back of the various parts which not only kept them together but also allowed the arms and legs, even the toy bag, to move.  

I was not the most careful fabricator.  Some of the holes I made to insert the brads would tear. I'd have to make another in not quite the right spot. Holding two pieces together, a leg and the torso, while trying to get the fastener in, required more hands than I had.  When it was finished it looked a bit clumsy, one of Santa's legs shorter than the other. I was still happy and proud. I made this. I cut it and drew it and cottoned it and put it all together.  For years it perched on an outer branch of our family Christmas tree.

There may have been a music teacher, maybe not, but we did sing as a group. The song I most remember was All Through the Night. It was lyrical, poignant, evocative. I couldn't have described it that way when I was 7seven. I would have just called it pretty. My unspoken thoughts were more complex.  

Sitting at my desk in the afternoon, the song words in front of me, quietly singing about the "soft and drowsy hours, hill and dale in slumber sleeping, all through the night," I'd go into a sort of reverie. The voices of the class would merge, those of my friends, the kid in the back row, the bullies, even the teacher. The tender couplets a restorative, a kind of catharsis, all the kids becoming one, animosities set aside, the song linking us for a few moments. 

I was quietly enchanted.  No air raid drills, no times tables.  Just a few minutes of repose, of quietly drifting to my own safe place. Sleep my child and peace attend thee.  And it did.