The middle school had three major sections:
a central administrative area and library and cafeteria,
and two wings (composed of two long hallways)
one for sixth graders and one for fifth graders.
There was a small parking lot in front of the school for administrators or visitors
near the American flag and basketball hoops and four-square paint
and a larger parking lot behind the building for teachers and school buses.
The fifth grade wing was further south than that of the sixth grade
and both wings ran in L shapes
The grades were structured into five Teams each.
Teams 1 2 and 3 were in the north-south wing,
and teams 4 and 5 were in the wing that ran east to west.
I suppose the system made sense when they designed it
and in any case my community was always said to have Good Schools.
Only later in life did I learn that the phrase “Good Schools” was code
for not having any black or brown people
but this is not a story about racism.
The fourth team was mine I was on “5-4”
which is just what I’d say if anyone taller than me asked me what team I was on
and then they’d send me down the well-waxed tile hall to the section I belonged in.
As you walked up our hall the first door on the right was Mrs. P’s room and she was a hell of an old lady who taught us how to diagram sentences and if you ever didn’t want to do much work that day you could always just mention Bill Clinton’s name and settle back in your chair for her frothing condemnations of the man himself. We read Sounder that year and for my project I baked a cake from scratch “just like it would have been done back then” except I used electric egg beaters and the oven was electric too and my family didn’t make the flour ourselves or the butter or the baking soda but I did collect the eggs myself, big beautiful brown eggs still warm from one of the hundred birds that the 4-H Club gave my family in exchange for something weird like promising to pick the three best looking ones and show them at the county fair. I never knew how to cook and still don’t but I think the buttercream frosting was very tasty so maybe my mother made it or the cake but she might have made me make the cake.
As you walked past Mrs. P’s door you immediately found Mr. K’s door and he taught about history like it was for children but I suppose the others were children and he always had a bit of a short beard and I liked him and I think he liked me too because he would let me write essays on Thucydides instead of filling out front-and-back worksheets about why Andrew Jackson was an asshole, or maybe they were about the National Bank. I liked Mr. K a lot because he treated me like I was a person and he let me go to the Gifted and Talented room a lot when I was bored and I liked GT because they had this fun game where you simulated living on a resource scarce island and all you had to do to play the game practically all the time was to solve a bunch of easy logic puzzles and do algebra problems and or answer tests about marine biology because you had to do a certain amount of projects per hour. The thing I liked best in the game was fishing because you could build a shelter close to a source of food, water, and fuel, but it was sometimes fun to try to be a hunter instead. If you played long enough you could be rescued but if you beat the game you weren’t allowed to play it anymore... so my characters always decided life was hopeless after a certain amount of time and went off in the wilderness to starve because they never read Robinson Crusoe.
Several paces from Mr. K’s door was Mrs. Pa’s door and she taught mathematics and didn’t like when I read books in class even if they were by Descartes and she had rosy cheeks like she was sick or an alcoholic but she taught math well enough to satisfy the standards of America.
On the other side of the hall from the other three doors was Mrs. K’s door. She taught science and she was a member of the 4-H Club so I guess I kind of got the chickens from her.
In front of the school like I said there were four-square courts painted up and basketball goals and they had these long crossbars, long as a road is wide and two inches thick, one at the entrance to the asphalt recreational court and one at the exit, twenty-four-foot long beams that swung and fastened to thick black bars and they were painted yellow and they put them there so they could lock the place up and also keep us safe during recess just in case and when the bars were not locked they were difficult to move even for me and they did not sway much with the wind.
It was Sunday. February Second of 1997 was the day and I was ten years old, and I’ll never forget it, because Mrs. K was the nicest lady and I lamented once that I never got to have a birthday celebration in school because my birthday was in the summer before school started and I didn’t want to bother my mother because she had enough to worry about but Mrs. K said she would make some cupcakes on Wednesday for my half birthday. I told her that Wednesday was named for Odin and she frowned a little, in a way that she thought I would not see. She was a Baptist and didn’t like the ancient myths much or didn’t seem to but she never told me to not read The Edda in her class when I was bored. Of course I wasn’t at the school because it was a Sunday and we hadn’t had the conversation about the cupcakes on a Sunday but it was Sunday. The sun was passing through the sky as was its custom and it was in everyone’s eyes. Someone forgot to lock up the crossbar painted yellow as the long beams of the sun and she must have left church and went to school to make sure of something or get some extra work done and since the school was closed she was going into the front parking lot because it was closer to the building and she drove her car right into the crossbar and it either cut her head off or basically cut her head off and the next day at school the counselors offered us soft drinks and they kept asking if we needed to talk and they took the crossbars down for a little while so that they were not straight like sunrays and instead they made them deeper, slatted with bars as if to prefigure a prison so that no one could Not See the bar again if it wasn’t locked up and I always wondered about the man who didn’t lock the bar because she left behind three children and she was kind and it cut her head clean off or could have and how could he sleep and what about the metalworkers who made the new crossguards were they just making money or did they know she was still dead her funeral was on my halfbirthday I don’t know who cleaned up the glass but it wasn’t there on Monday and before you knew it we had a new science teacher and Mrs. H was really really pretty but what did that matter? I did not know. I did not know if Mrs. K was pretty but everyone said it about our new teacher but I think that’s just what people say about women before they have something else nice to say. She taught the other children as much as any teacher would have and she never told me that I couldn’t read in class and when they put her name over the door it did not bother me too much because the classroom was hers.
If you were to drive by the school today the posts for tethering the metal barriers are closer to the public road than they were in my time. They are locked by the entrances far from where the children play after lunch or the visitors park their cars. They are still slatted now and not narrow to save money on metal.
She was a good woman and got her head cut off, or close enough.
She died quickly and alone on a cold day.
why was she even there on Sunday
why was she even a teacher her husband made money
why did they offer us soft drinks
why did they keep asking us to talk when there was nothing to say
I planted a white oak and I gave it her name
And it grew there for years on my family’s land
Then we didn’t have the money so we had to leave.
Three months back I drove by to show my love
The bayou and forests and place I grew up
But when we arrived I did not recognize a thing.
The strangers who live there now cut down the trees, every last one,
The three sweetgums near the road and the sassafras by the driveway
and the hundred pines that marked the edge of the goat field
They had painted the house a different color
And behind that new house you couldn’t see a thing
They had cut down it all
The giant black oak with the tire swing
The ancient elm that was half dead from lightning
The plum and all the hickory and all the sycamore and
All of it all of it all.
Many times my heart has been broken
But it can never again break as it did
There in a car sitting beside my love
Looking out at those twenty acres of desolation.
I had always daydreamed of somehow getting money
And buying the land back but now it is no longer there.
Your tree should have been twenty feet high by now
And it should have lived for two hundred years.
I am so sorry, Cindy. I will plant you another
As soon as I find a place where no one can cut it down.
a central administrative area and library and cafeteria,
and two wings (composed of two long hallways)
one for sixth graders and one for fifth graders.
There was a small parking lot in front of the school for administrators or visitors
near the American flag and basketball hoops and four-square paint
and a larger parking lot behind the building for teachers and school buses.
The fifth grade wing was further south than that of the sixth grade
and both wings ran in L shapes
The grades were structured into five Teams each.
Teams 1 2 and 3 were in the north-south wing,
and teams 4 and 5 were in the wing that ran east to west.
I suppose the system made sense when they designed it
and in any case my community was always said to have Good Schools.
Only later in life did I learn that the phrase “Good Schools” was code
for not having any black or brown people
but this is not a story about racism.
The fourth team was mine I was on “5-4”
which is just what I’d say if anyone taller than me asked me what team I was on
and then they’d send me down the well-waxed tile hall to the section I belonged in.
As you walked up our hall the first door on the right was Mrs. P’s room and she was a hell of an old lady who taught us how to diagram sentences and if you ever didn’t want to do much work that day you could always just mention Bill Clinton’s name and settle back in your chair for her frothing condemnations of the man himself. We read Sounder that year and for my project I baked a cake from scratch “just like it would have been done back then” except I used electric egg beaters and the oven was electric too and my family didn’t make the flour ourselves or the butter or the baking soda but I did collect the eggs myself, big beautiful brown eggs still warm from one of the hundred birds that the 4-H Club gave my family in exchange for something weird like promising to pick the three best looking ones and show them at the county fair. I never knew how to cook and still don’t but I think the buttercream frosting was very tasty so maybe my mother made it or the cake but she might have made me make the cake.
As you walked past Mrs. P’s door you immediately found Mr. K’s door and he taught about history like it was for children but I suppose the others were children and he always had a bit of a short beard and I liked him and I think he liked me too because he would let me write essays on Thucydides instead of filling out front-and-back worksheets about why Andrew Jackson was an asshole, or maybe they were about the National Bank. I liked Mr. K a lot because he treated me like I was a person and he let me go to the Gifted and Talented room a lot when I was bored and I liked GT because they had this fun game where you simulated living on a resource scarce island and all you had to do to play the game practically all the time was to solve a bunch of easy logic puzzles and do algebra problems and or answer tests about marine biology because you had to do a certain amount of projects per hour. The thing I liked best in the game was fishing because you could build a shelter close to a source of food, water, and fuel, but it was sometimes fun to try to be a hunter instead. If you played long enough you could be rescued but if you beat the game you weren’t allowed to play it anymore... so my characters always decided life was hopeless after a certain amount of time and went off in the wilderness to starve because they never read Robinson Crusoe.
Several paces from Mr. K’s door was Mrs. Pa’s door and she taught mathematics and didn’t like when I read books in class even if they were by Descartes and she had rosy cheeks like she was sick or an alcoholic but she taught math well enough to satisfy the standards of America.
On the other side of the hall from the other three doors was Mrs. K’s door. She taught science and she was a member of the 4-H Club so I guess I kind of got the chickens from her.
In front of the school like I said there were four-square courts painted up and basketball goals and they had these long crossbars, long as a road is wide and two inches thick, one at the entrance to the asphalt recreational court and one at the exit, twenty-four-foot long beams that swung and fastened to thick black bars and they were painted yellow and they put them there so they could lock the place up and also keep us safe during recess just in case and when the bars were not locked they were difficult to move even for me and they did not sway much with the wind.
It was Sunday. February Second of 1997 was the day and I was ten years old, and I’ll never forget it, because Mrs. K was the nicest lady and I lamented once that I never got to have a birthday celebration in school because my birthday was in the summer before school started and I didn’t want to bother my mother because she had enough to worry about but Mrs. K said she would make some cupcakes on Wednesday for my half birthday. I told her that Wednesday was named for Odin and she frowned a little, in a way that she thought I would not see. She was a Baptist and didn’t like the ancient myths much or didn’t seem to but she never told me to not read The Edda in her class when I was bored. Of course I wasn’t at the school because it was a Sunday and we hadn’t had the conversation about the cupcakes on a Sunday but it was Sunday. The sun was passing through the sky as was its custom and it was in everyone’s eyes. Someone forgot to lock up the crossbar painted yellow as the long beams of the sun and she must have left church and went to school to make sure of something or get some extra work done and since the school was closed she was going into the front parking lot because it was closer to the building and she drove her car right into the crossbar and it either cut her head off or basically cut her head off and the next day at school the counselors offered us soft drinks and they kept asking if we needed to talk and they took the crossbars down for a little while so that they were not straight like sunrays and instead they made them deeper, slatted with bars as if to prefigure a prison so that no one could Not See the bar again if it wasn’t locked up and I always wondered about the man who didn’t lock the bar because she left behind three children and she was kind and it cut her head clean off or could have and how could he sleep and what about the metalworkers who made the new crossguards were they just making money or did they know she was still dead her funeral was on my halfbirthday I don’t know who cleaned up the glass but it wasn’t there on Monday and before you knew it we had a new science teacher and Mrs. H was really really pretty but what did that matter? I did not know. I did not know if Mrs. K was pretty but everyone said it about our new teacher but I think that’s just what people say about women before they have something else nice to say. She taught the other children as much as any teacher would have and she never told me that I couldn’t read in class and when they put her name over the door it did not bother me too much because the classroom was hers.
If you were to drive by the school today the posts for tethering the metal barriers are closer to the public road than they were in my time. They are locked by the entrances far from where the children play after lunch or the visitors park their cars. They are still slatted now and not narrow to save money on metal.
She was a good woman and got her head cut off, or close enough.
She died quickly and alone on a cold day.
why was she even there on Sunday
why was she even a teacher her husband made money
why did they offer us soft drinks
why did they keep asking us to talk when there was nothing to say
I planted a white oak and I gave it her name
And it grew there for years on my family’s land
Then we didn’t have the money so we had to leave.
Three months back I drove by to show my love
The bayou and forests and place I grew up
But when we arrived I did not recognize a thing.
The strangers who live there now cut down the trees, every last one,
The three sweetgums near the road and the sassafras by the driveway
and the hundred pines that marked the edge of the goat field
They had painted the house a different color
And behind that new house you couldn’t see a thing
They had cut down it all
The giant black oak with the tire swing
The ancient elm that was half dead from lightning
The plum and all the hickory and all the sycamore and
All of it all of it all.
Many times my heart has been broken
But it can never again break as it did
There in a car sitting beside my love
Looking out at those twenty acres of desolation.
I had always daydreamed of somehow getting money
And buying the land back but now it is no longer there.
Your tree should have been twenty feet high by now
And it should have lived for two hundred years.
I am so sorry, Cindy. I will plant you another
As soon as I find a place where no one can cut it down.
