McBean Presbyterian Part 1

Every morning I’d watch as my older sisters and brother got ready for school.  They’d dress in starched uniforms and crisp white shirts.  School was an enigma of long absences and tall white socks and satchels filled with books.  I felt left out and abandoned every weekday and I longed to go to school.  My sisters would come home with ink stains on their fingers and proceed to write in their copybooks with fountain pens filled with dark blue ink.  All day long I would sit with my mother in the hammock and swing and wait for their return.  My mother would sometimes read to me the story of a little girl going on adventures through a rabbit hole or a secret garden and I would press her to read the story over and over to me.  I loved the adventure of being out of the house.  I longed to go to school and be grown up. 

One morning just after my 5^th birthday my mother put me in my best dress and walked me to school.  I had finally arrived.  Mammy had yet to sew my school uniform so I was allowed to wear my best dress for a few days.  My dress was bright, royal blue with a white collar and tie decorated with red dots.  I entered kindergarten, or ABC as it was called in our village.  The room was filled with dark brown wooden desks, long benches and other expectant five year olds.  The room was a large open area where the ABC kids could see the older, Standard One kids supervised by another teacher behind us.  To mark their status as more advanced their seats were on a higher level that looked like a stage.  This was the path we were expected to take.  We started low in ABC then moved upstage to Standard One when we were six.  I was given a small black slate board and a piece of chalk.  On it, our teacher Miss Pearl, would write a letter or a number and my job was to trace that letter or number over and over and over for an interminable period of time. 

Miss Pearl had the most unusual distorted, twisted fingers and they fascinated me.  Her fingers were a little longer than nubs and she held the chalk, and wrote quite well on the board, with a prehensile grip of the chalk clutched in the middle of the finger nubs.  While the desks had a spot for an inkwell, much to my disappointment, we were not issued fountain pens and paper.  The little boy next to me, Kamraj, had two missing front teeth and he carried a handkerchief in his pocket.  He would spit on his handkerchief right through the opening in the front of his mouth and clean my slate for me.  He was a true ABC gentleman. 

            After a few months I had learned enough to move from the left side of ABC to the right side where the children used pencils and copybooks.  The first time I saw another student whipped for a wrong doing, my illusion of school shattered.  I became a coward afraid to go to school for fear of being whipped in front of the class.  The teachers had the power of the switch to keep everyone in line and used that power quite often.  As I feared it, I tried to be the perfect student.  One day our assignment was to make a row of “W’s” across the paper.  I agonized on how to do this, as I couldn’t remember if I was supposed to join them or not.  Asking a question was taboo, as students were not allowed to address the teacher only simply to follow directions.  When it was my turn to show the teacher my work at her desk I looked at the students around me and received some supportive glances.  I slowly walked up to the desk and showed Miss Pearl my jumble of connected “WwWwWWWwWW’s” that could easily be mistaken for V’s or N’s or a scribble-scrabble.  She looked at the page with distain and ordered me to stretch my right hand out in front of her.  She then proceeded to whip me several times with the switch for not following directions.  I tried to hold my hand out because I knew that if I followed instinct and pulled away the punishment would be doubled.  I also held back my tears and cries in my throat because I was too embarrassed to cry in front of the class. 

            Some of the teachers in our school looked down on us poor village children and took opportunities to humiliate us when they could.  One day an underwear pageant was held in our class.  The girls were told to go to the front of the room and raise their uniform skirts and show the class their underwear.  When it was my turn I walked up quickly and tried to hustle a quick flash of pink panties before I raced back to my seat.  Some of the other girls did not get away so easily.  One girl was wearing her brother’s underwear and now everyone knew it.  The other kids teased her mercilessly after that.  The village children were a range of lower socioeconomic statuses.  The ones at the top had shoes and regular meals with parents who enforced personal hygiene.  The lower status kids came to school hungry, without shoes, with ripped and dirty uniforms and occasionally their brother’s underwear because it was the only thing available in the house.  These were the students that seemed to suffer the most at the hands of the teachers and their peers. 

            One day as I sat on the right side of the ABC room diligently working in my copybook I began to have a bellyache.  The cramps persisted and I tried as hard as I could to ignore them.  Recess time was coming up and I would have the opportunity to use the latrine then as the other kids played in the schoolyard. On the first day of school the other kids had given me a tour pointing out the dark, smelly latrine and showing me how to squat on it instead of sitting down and exposing your butt to the monsters that lurked in the black hole.  I did not dare ask the teacher to go to the latrine as I was deathly afraid of a whipping and of using the latrine.  I held it in as long as I could but nature is stronger than willpower and I ended up soiling my underwear.  I sat very quietly hoping and praying that no one around me would notice.  At first no one seemed to notice my discomfort but then the students around me started commenting on the odor.  I was mortified as they followed their noses to identify the culprit and all eyes and fingers were pointed in my direction.  Finally Miss Pearl walked over with her chalk still clutched in its crooked death grip and asked me if I was the cause of all this commotion.  I slowly nodded expecting some sympathy.  Her response was, “go and stand outside.”  I walked to the back of the ABC part of the building and stood with my back against the outside wall not knowing what to do.  A few minutes later recess started and all my friends from yesterday made a semi circle around me and pointed and laughed.  No adult intervened so I simply stood paralyzed with humiliation.  I was lucky though; my older sister was still attending the same school in a higher grade on the other side of the building.  Someone must have told her what had happened because she came to my rescue.  She shooed the bullies away (she was five years older so they listened).  When we were alone at the back of the building she made me take my underwear off and she threw it under the building.  Many buildings at the time were built on stilts due to flooding so our school had a gap of about two feet between the ground and the first floor.  She then took me by the hand and ran me home.  I had never run so fast in my life.  She was terrified of getting whipped for being late back from recess and I wanted to be as far away from school as possible.  She ran so hard she almost yanked my arm out of my shoulder socket.  She deposited me with my mother with a brief explanation and then she ran back to school.  I hoped that the odor from the discarded underwear seeped back up under Miss Pearl’s desk but the incident was never mentioned again.  My underwear is probably still lodged under that school building today as an odorous tribute to all the humiliation endured by myself and other students.