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| Toy Horse (detail) |
Following Mrs. Brown’s instructions, we reached into
our school bags and got out our new Big Chief blue-lined manila paper tablets,
along with our giant First Grade pencils - the fat ones intended to fit snugly
into clumsy First Grade fists - each fitted with a bubble-gum pink eraser the
size of a gumdrop, anticipating an abundance of First Grade mistakes. These we
placed in front of us, the pencils laid to rest in smooth grooves cut neatly
into the tops of our desks. We would need them later, Mrs. Brown said.
For now,
we would use our colors, big cigar-sized crayons in the standard
eight-pack of primary and secondary hues, plus brown and black. Take out the
red one, and do as I do.
Open your tablets, she said, her taught straight back
turned to us, her hand raised to the blackboard, her voice as crisp as her
starched plaid cotton dress. We were going to learn to write today. We were
going to learn to pay attention. I did so, or tried to, distracted as I
was by the surprising display unfolding before me.
Mrs. Brown was writing in red. And she wasn’t
writing words, either. I knew that much right away. She was drawing a picture.
In colored chalk!
Crayons I understood. Chalk, too. We’d seen it in
kindergarten, and at home in the sewing room. Sometimes Grandma let us use it
to make hop-scotch squares on the sidewalk. Chalk was white, sometimes light
yellow in grown-up grades, but never in colors so rich and vivid. And now Mrs.
Brown was writing with it, drawing a long red box in the center of the board, bleeding
deep, shiny lines as bold and tangy as strawberry Kool-Aid.
Do as I do, she said again, and I did, mimicking her
bright chalk shapes on my page with poor waxy imitations in red Crayola. Mrs.
Brown was drawing a wagon! Red rectangle. Black circles for wheels. Brown
shaft. Green handle. I was drawing a wagon, too. My picture looked like
hers.
Mrs. Brown wrote a large red S at the top of my
paper. Satisfactory, she said. That meant Good, she said. It didn’t look
as good to me, though, not any more, now that she had written right on the
front of my nice drawing. I looked back up at the board. Nobody put a big S
on her picture. Now they didn’t look the same at all.
Lisa, the girl who sat in the space next to me, had
drawn a glorious picture, far better in my estimation than my own. Hers was a
dark black rectangle filled with circles and triangles and spirals of yellow
and green, with a zig-zag red fringe border, blue-purple wheels and a bright
orange pull. Lisa was very pleased with her work. Her wagon was different from
everyone else’s. It was very different from the one in the middle of the
blackboard.
Mrs. Brown did not think it was Good. She marked
Lisa’s paper with a broad, cursive U, looping like a deep red cut across
the middle of Lisa’s wagon. Unsatisfactory, Mrs. Brown said, making a
big frown. Lisa explained that her picture was prettier than the plain red
wagon on the chalkboard. Mrs. Brown said that Lisa would have to learn to follow
directions. That’s what First Grade is for.
Lisa took her paper back to her desk, buried her face
in her arms, and cried for the rest of the school day. She earned many more U’s
that year.
I liked Lisa. I liked her very much.
* Originally published in the
Birmingham Arts Journal, Volume 4, Issue 3, © 2007, Birmingham Arts
Association. Jim Reed, Editor
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