Nine
I had other classes in seventh
grade—not just science with Mr. Gisborne, the Crazy One. Some of the other
classes and teachers I actually liked. I’ve always enjoyed English classes.
Getting to read and write all the time—what could be better? There were parts of English I always hated,
though. I’d done so much reading in my life that sometimes I thought the books
and stories the teachers gave us were pretty juvenile. And the vocabulary and
spelling lessons? Again—all the reading I’d done made all of our classwork seem
pretty … elementary. I’m not bragging—just telling the truth.
In seventh grade I had a very good
English teacher, Ms. Medwin,[i]
a very young woman (just in her first year, I found out later) who made
mistakes every day but who was so smart and funny that no one really cared that
she goofed up now and then. You know what I mean? Forgetting that she’d already
told our class something. Or asking for us to turn in an assignment she hadn’t
given us—or forgetting to ask for one that she had assigned. Mixing up our names. Mispronouncing names.
But no one really cared too much,
mostly because we could tell that she liked
us—not always the case with a teacher. And in the boys’ case, it didn’t hurt
that she was very attractive, too. They—the boys—couldn’t turn their eyes away
from her. An advantage for a teacher, I guess.
She had a very unusual first
name—Thomasina. I saw it once on a piece of paper on her desk. And then another
time I heard another teacher in the hall call her “Tommy” (rhyming with show me). Very odd. But I liked Ms.
Medwin—liked her a lot as the year rolled along and things … happened.
The first of those “things” was not
long after Gil and I had our weird early-morning detention. In English class later
that very day, Ms. Medwin had us look in our literature books at some poems by
Edgar Lee Masters. I have to say that most kids in my class didn’t like poems—except
the ones by Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss that they remembered from early
childhood. And out at lunch I’d heard the boys shout out some verses with dirty
words in them.
But Ms. Medwin liked to read poems
aloud—with lots of energy and enthusiasm—and she encouraged us to do the same when we read them aloud—which we had to do in
her class, all the time. Gradually, I could see the other kids coming to like
poetry more and more. To look forward to the days when Ms. Medwin would say,
“Take out your literature books. Let’s read some poems.”
Well, Masters, she told us, wrote a
famous collection of poems called Spoon
River Anthology, poems that are voices from the cemetery in Spoon River,
Illinois. (There actually is a Spoon
River that flows through the southeastern part of the state—but no town with
that name: I looked it up.) That’s right: All the speakers in the poem are
dead. They are talking from beyond the grave, commenting about their lives in
all sorts of ways. They were happy, sad, angry, depressed, frustrated, and on
and on—expressing just about every emotion that a human being is capable of
expressing.[ii]
Here’s one that Ms. Medwin read
aloud in class that day. Before she read it to us, though, she wrote the word haggard on the board and asked if anyone
knew what it meant. No one did (except me, but I’d learned to keep my mouth
shut at such moments). She told us that haggard
has had all sorts of meanings—from a wild female hawk to a witch. (That got everyone’s attention.) And as
an adjective, it can mean wild- or crazy-looking. Starved-looking. That sort of
thing. (I knew what was going to happen later on—and I was right: Kids calling
one another haggard out in the halls!)
Anyway, then she read Masters’ poem
“Ollie McGee” to us …
Have
you seen walking through the village
A
man with downcast eyes and haggard face?
That
is my husband who, by secret cruelty
Never
to be told, robbed me of my youth and my beauty;
Till
at last, wrinkled and with yellow teeth,
And
with broken pride and shameful humility,
I
sank into the grave.
But
what think you gnaws at my husband’s heart?
The
face of what I was, the face of what he made me!
These
are driving him to the place where I lie.
In
death, therefore, I am avenged.
We must have talked for half an
hour about that poem—kids saying all kinds of things about what cruelty does to
other people. Some even told stories about cruelties done to them at home, at school, other places. And
how those acts made them feel—about school, about other people, about
themselves. It was an amazing conversation, one of the most unusual—and honest—of
my entire school career.
Then we read a few more of Masters’
poems but didn’t talk too much. And then Ms. Medwin asked, “How would you like to write something from beyond
the grave?”
There was actual cheering in that class that period. We
were excited about the idea. But not as excited as when Ms. Medwin said, “Good,
good. We’re going to go to the old cemetery next Tuesday.”
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