One speech she delivered to the children was so nasty that they started answering her back. She threw venom in their direction and they spit fire back at her.
“May I have a word with your class, Mr. Conroy?”
“Of course, Mrs. Brown.”
“It has come to my attention that some individuals have not been brushing their teeth. Now filthy teeth smell bad and when we don’t wash our hair or our bodies either, the smell would drive a preacher out of church. Smelling bad at school will not be tolerated. I’m tired of people stinkin’ in this school.”
“Better not talk so loud,” Cindy Lou said.
“What’d you say, girl?” Mrs. Brown asked menacingly.
“She say watch out,” Mary said, almost inaudibly.
“Don’t whisper under your breath. Shout it out so Mr. Conroy and I can hear what’s on your mind.”
“You don’t wanna know what’s on my mind,” someone said. They talked low and everyone kept their eyes down on their desks, so I could not tell who was talking. Nor could Mrs. Brown.
I steered Mrs. Brown toward the door, thanked her for her ingratiating speech, and promised her I would severely punish the whisperers in the class. Then I launched into a speech.
“Gang, we have been getting these talks from Mrs. Brown all year. You get too damn upset by them. Just don’t listen to what she’s saying. Think about something else. If she wants to be a big talker, let her talk, just don’t get involved with snapping back at her.”
“She ain’t talkin’ to you,” Frank said. Frank’s temper was volcanic, and he was hornet-mad at this latest sermon of Mrs. Brown.
“That’s a good point, Frank. She isn’t talking to me, but she is talking about you and it hurts me to see you get your feelings hurt. You may not believe me yet. You may not trust me yet. But you can damn well believe that it pisses me off to hear Mrs. Brown talk to you like that. There might be nothing I can do about it, but I’ll try to keep her out of this room.”
“She ain’t got no right to say things like that,” Cindy Lou said.
“Bitch woman,” Richard said.
“Yeah! Bitch woman.” The echo passed around the room.
“I bet you call me bitch man behind my back,” I said, trying to cut through the ominous, murderous atmosphere building in the room.
“No, Conrack,” Fred said.
“I call you bitches and bastards when I get mad at you sometimes.”
“God Almighty Jesus!” Lincoln exclaimed.
“Everyone gets mad, gang. But we have to learn when not to show our anger. That could get you killed.”
“Get Brown killed,” Ethel warned.
“Get Brown killed tonight,” Sidney said.
“Get Conroy killed this afternoon,” I added.
“How?” Ethel asked.
“If Brown hears you cats talking …” I began.
“She run her mout’ too loud,” Mary said.
Sure enough Mrs. Brown was ranting about something to her kids. This provided enough comic relief to enable me to change the subject, but that day I saw the seed of an enmity so profound that I did not realize the nature and magnitude of the beast until it was almost too late. This was the first day I decided to study Mrs. Brown, her relationship to the people of the island, and her relationship with the children.
That afternoon I asked Mrs. Brown to be less abrasive when addressing the kids, to be a wee more diplomatic, and to have a greater concern about their feelings. Her answer was long, rambling, antagonistic, and evasive. She ended the barrage by saying twice, “I am the principal. I am the principal.”
I answered her by saying sarcastically, “Then I am the assistant principal. I am the assistant principal.”
Despite all this Mrs. Brown possessed an unflinching sense of humor that often fractured me. It was her way of saying things more than anything else. I don’t know if she was conscious of being witty. If not, then she had her finer moments as the greatest natural comic I had met.
One day I walked into the boys’ bathroom and found Prophet hanging from the tank which held water for the boys’ urinal. The tank was eight feet above the floor. At first I just saw a single black arm suspended from this tank for no particular reason. I walked around the divider and faced Prophet. He looked at me, grinned, and remained hanging from the tank. I stared at him with my stern, ineffectual glance, not knowing what a proper response would be. Mrs. Brown passed the door, saw Prophet’s arm, and ended any necessity for me to respond at all. She roared into the bathroom and jerked Prophet down from his tank. Since she thought I lacked toughness in situations like these, I could tell she was going to make an object lesson out of Prophet to help me deal with crises in the future.
“Boy, what you doin’ hangin’ from the urinal up there? You think we got candy hidden up there?”
“No, ma’am,” Prophet answered. He was terrified.
“Boy, you think we put Christmas packages in that there tank for some monkey like you to find?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, boy, there must be some reason for you holding on to the pot every time you tinkle, son. What’s the matter, boy? Is your pinky so big that you have to hold the bowl ’cause you are afraid you might fall in?”
For a moment I thought she had asked Prophet if his pinky was so big that he had to hold the bowl for fear of falling in. Then she repeated her question.
“Prophet. You answer me, boy. Is your pinky that big? Are you top-heavy because of that big ol’ pinky between your legs? I haven’t noticed you stumbling around the schoolyard when you walk. And I ain’t heard none of the boys talking about Prophet using his pinky as a baseball bat.”
By this time, I was on the verge of hysteria. My face had reddened like a blood clot trying to keep from laughing. For her part, Mrs. Brown remained as serious and stoical as a cigar-store Indian. This was no laughing matter to her.
“That urinal is state property, boy. If it gets broke, Mr. Conroy and I are required by state law to pay for it.”
By this time Prophet was crying, great tears rolling out of his eyes and down his face. Mrs. Brown continued, “Mr. Conroy, I am going to leave this room. I want you to check Prophet’s pinky to see if it is so big that he needs to lean on the pot to piddle.”
She left the room. Prophet unzipped his pants to give me a shot of his pinky. I grabbed him, told him to go no further, and waited a few salient moments. As I walked out of the latrine, I informed Mrs. Brown that according to my calculations the young lad, Prophet, did not possess a gargantuan pinky but a pinky of normal proportions. This is the most ludicrous scene I’ve ever been involved in, I was telling myself. After I delivered this factual information, Mrs. Brown grabbed Professor Medicine, her favorite strap, stormed into the bathroom, and beat the hell out of Prophet. I never did find out why Prophet hung from the urinal tank. Probably, like Everest, because it was there.
I believe Mrs. Brown sincerely believed that a child needed a beating every once in a while if he was to respect authority, do his lessons, and grow up to make a contribution to his community. She whipped children out of a sense of duty. We probably would never have crossed swords if she had let me work out my own system in the classroom and left my kids alone. For six months we worked together in an uneasy truce. Then total war raged through the two-room schoolhouse on the island.
Several events early in the school year told me that something was wrong between Mrs. Brown and the other black people on the island. One night I had left my set of school keys in Beaufort. I was still living in the schoolhouse and I needed the keys to get into the kitchen where I kept my food. It was already dark when I drove over to the “white school-house” where Mrs. Brown lived. The lights on the car swung into her yard. I parked under a tree and walked up the steps and knocked on her door.
A voice roared out defiantly, “Who are you? I got a gun pointed at your head.”
A little bit startled, I shouted, “It’s me, Mrs. Brown, Pat. Goddam i
t, don’t shoot me.”
She opened the door a crack, looked me over with one, great eye, then told me, “Son, a man could get killed comin’ up to somebody’s house at night.”
“It will not happen again, I promise you. I just came up to get the keys to the kitchen. I need to eat, Mrs. Brown.”
“What happened to your keys?”
“I left them in Beaufort.”
“That’s no place for your keys. That’s state property.”
“I know, I am sorry. But I’ve got to eat.”
“Yes, sir. A man’s got to eat.” She still had let me glimpse no more than her one eye peering out into the shadows at me.
“There are some people on this island, Mr. Conroy, who will shoot you deader than a door nail for coming up to their house.”
“White people?”
“No, colored people. There are some of the meanest, dirtiest people in the world on this island. That’s why I carry fire in my pocketbook all the time. These people know that ‘Mr. Thirty-Eight’ is always right near in case I need him. If you are smart, you’ll get some fire too.”
“I would just like the keys, Mrs. Brown, if you please, ma’am.”
The door shut again, and Mrs. Brown disappeared from view. The door opened again and a large brown arm with keys dangling from two fingers was pushed under my nose.
“I would not advise sneaking up on someone in the middle of the night like that again, Mr. Conroy.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Brown.”
I never saw Mr. .38 but the idea of a loaded gun being pointed at my head by a woman who thought the Yamacraw people were out to get her made my stomach do handstands and somersaults. And I could not figure out why Mrs. Brown seemed to hate the people of the island, at least the black people. She thought Ted Stone was hot porridge, and that Ezra Bennington was conceived without original sin. There was something very wrong in the fact that a black woman in 1969 cast her lot with white men whose thoughts and actions dated back to 1869. Mrs. Brown, the principal, was showing signs that a blow-up between us was imminent. Small signal fires broke out for a long while, but the war would begin much later.
I left school early one day in November, for the supreme commanders in the educational hierarchy were clamoring for some form or document from Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown, unbelievably, was more inefficient than I was in compiling the drivel and trivia demanded by the higher administrators. Whenever they saw me in the county office building, they would curse Mrs. Brown with red faces and swear to the forces that ruled the underworld that she was personally responsible for sabotaging a hundred different sets of statistics in her tenure on Yamacraw Island. And it was strange. For Mrs. Brown studied every document which she received from the top cats with religious zeal, as if she had just received the Ten Commandments from the burning bush. She would work all of a school day fiddling with figures and shuffling names, crying out that she was overworked and that the burden of teaching was too heavy a load. She was very cranky on these days and I kept my distance. Yet I could not help but wonder how she could botch them up when she spent so much time compiling them.
Anyway, she called me into her room one day, gave me an official-looking envelope, and commissioned me to take it across turbulent waters to the powers in Beaufort. Meek servant that I was, I consented to go. I left the gang an assignment on the board that I thought they would enjoy. We had talked about making a collage on the bulletin board. After going over with them what a collage was, and how you went about making one, and all the other rot, I brought out a stack of magazines. I told them to find pictures or portions of pictures that appealed to ’ them or meant something to them. Art for art’s sake. The joy of living. I wanted to return the next day to find a collage of such surpassing brilliance and shocking significance that it would knock my eyes out. O.K.? O.K., they murmured, each kid with a pair of those crummy elementary-school scissors that couldn’t cut a fly wing. As I scooted out the door, each one of my scholars was thumbing seriously through the old editions of magazines I had brought to the island. The twin with the wart on his nose was meticulously excising a picture of a large, green Cadillac. He saw me watching him and said, “I’m going to get me a big car.” Mary was snipping away at a model in a wedding gown.
The next day Mrs. Brown met me at the door. She was wearing one of those do-I-have-something-to-tell-you looks and her arms were folded beefily across her chest. Since Mrs. Brown took every action of my class as a sign of imminent conspiracy or revolution, I strongly suspected, and was correct in believing, that the kids had somehow blown it, in Mrs. Brown’s eyes, the day before. As I walked in the door, I looked to the bulletin board to see how the collage turned out. The bulletin board was blank. Mrs. Brown had retreated to the hall by then and was beckoning me with a seven-pound index finger. Like a well-trained spaniel, I trotted to the door.
“Mr. Conroy,” she intoned heavily, “do you know what your babies did yesterday?” “No, ma’am.”
“Well, I am about to tell you what they did.” Here she sighed loudly as if what she had to tell me was too painful to be divulged. “They tacked up pictures of naked wimmin all over the room. Naked wimmin, Mr. Conroy, naked wimmin. They tacked up pictures of white wimmin naked as jaybirds.”
“I don’t understand, Mrs. Brown. I didn’t give them any girlie magazines in the stack,” I said, fearing for my life that a stray Playboy might have found its evil way into my stockpile.
“Don’t know about any magazines. Just know that I walked in that room and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. There was a woman’s bare va-gyna on that board. Bare va-gyna. I had to do some beatin’ in there yesterday. I found out who done it and I set some fanny on fire.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have done that, Mrs. Brown. I gave the kids the assignment and it was my fault if they screwed it up·”
“They knew it was sinful. They knew it was against the Lord’s will.”
“They’re just kids, Mrs. Brown, I said.
“Man, you are lucky the preacher didn’t walk in this room. He would have thought it was Jezebel teaching in this school.”
“Hell, Mrs. Brown, he’d probably have gone out and bought the magazine.”
“Oh, I would be ashamed to talk about the preacher like that. The preacher is so good to come bring us the word of Jesus.”
“Yeah, he is a swell guy.”
“And what if some administrator had surprised us with a visit? I am the principal and in charge of this school.”
“None of those guys are going to come over here, I assure you, Mrs. Brown. It is getting cold on the river and I assure you we will see no one until the weather is pluperfect.”
“But wimmin butt-naked. Naked women. Naked women,” she repeated over and over. She paused, looked furtively around to see if any administrators were hiding in trees, then fished several pages from a hidden compartment in her pocketbook. She lifted the pages as if she were handling a tray of radioactive material. I looked at the pictures, then threw my head back and laughed like hell. Some esthetic student had discovered an article on Pablo Picasso in Life magazine. Indeed there were pictures of naked women.
“This is Picasso, Mrs. Brown.”
“It’s naked women, Mr. Conroy.”
“If these were the originals, we’d be rich.”
“What would the preacher say. But the babies won’t be playing with dirty pictures again. They got the belt yesterday.”
I left Mrs. Brown to her fulminations and returned to class. The kids were not amused. The singing belt of Mrs. Brown had found a sizable number of fannies the previous day. When I asked them about it, they would not talk. Somehow they felt I had set them up for the slaughter.
“How many of you guys like to look at naked women?” I asked.
No one raised his hand, nor did anyone speak a word.
“I bet I have a few guys in here that just love to look at naked women.”
“No,” a few of the boys answered.
“Well
, you guys know what? I’d rather look at naked women than do anything. I love looking at naked women.”
“Conrack likes to look at naked wimmin,” Richard said.
“You know why I like to look at them?”
“No.”
“ ’Cause they’re naked.”
“Yeah,” the boys said.
“No,” the girls said.
Then the boys told me it was the girls who had hung the pictures on the board.
My own disciplinary philosophy, a frail and skeletal animal to begin with, never acquired the health or bulk I wanted during the year. The year became a search for what was right for the Yamacraw children: a magic formula to rescue minds stunted through disuse, a formula that would raise reading levels to Appalachian heights. The search was a failure because I did not and could not know how irrevocably my ideas about education, those sacred and pontifical utterances, would be battered, bullied, disproven, and changed. Like my bleeding-heart theory of discipline. Although I still maintain my right to claim bleeding heartship for myself, I had to modify my theory that a teacher does not have the right to lay a single digit on the body of a child. That notion worked fine at Beaufort High School, where my students had more or less reached the age of reason and could be dealt with and reached by words. Not so at Yamacraw. These children had known the leather strap too long to be controlled by the threatening modulation of the vocal chords. So when Lincoln would lean over his desk and slap the hell out of Fred, and Fred would turn around, blame Saul for the unseen blow, and hit Saul across the side of the head, and Saul, wailing pitifully, would pick up his ruler and flog Fred with it while Jasper was throwing a pencil at Cindy Lou, I would feel compelled to take some type of action.
“All right, gang. Now enough of this,” the bleeding heart would begin. “Now, Fred, it’s not right for you to pick on Saul. He’s smaller than you.” This would cause Saul to cry more vehemently since he was more sensitive about his height than about Fred slapping his head. “Come on, Saul. Relax. Take it easy. Head for the bathroom, wash your face, forget your troubles.”