I told a story to my physical therapist yesterday that brought back a poignant high school memory for me. In early March of 1974, I was 17, a high school senior, a member of the honor roll and with aspirations of going to college. I wanted to be the next James Baldwin or Nikki Giovanni. I had amassed enough credits by my senior year that I only needed one english course to graduate. I took that class at 9am then left school for my job from 10:30 to 3. After school and work I went home and helped my great-grandmother. My weekly evenings were homework, dinner and afterwards my friends and I played touch street football until the city lights came on and highlighted our faces.
I was working to save money for school, clothes and my girlfriend. Anyway, I knew some sort of a poetry assignment was due but it was never talked about. I thought it was just another reading requirement, given by my english teacher, I called her Mrs. Cordial because if you had a question she always responded with a, “yes-sir or yes ma’am.” She was a short full bodied white woman with shiny silver hair, except for a big splash of deep charcoal grey that would often fall over the bridge of her horned-rimmed glasses. She confided to the class she had been teaching for fifty-three years and was retiring at the end of the term. She was the last white teacher at my high school. She hung on to help in a place that needed it most, she once told me. It was not easy being white and teaching in a neighborhood that saw a considerable change of complexion following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ’68 riots.
Oh yes, the poetry assignment. She had given out the parameters, as part of what I later learned was called a syllabus, at the beginning of the school year. She wanted us prepared. I had never heard the word syllabus. I thought it was a set of school rules and threw them in my desk, never to be touched again, I was a good kid, I knew the rules. With school, work, studying, college applications and psyching myself up for SAT(s) I was readying myself for the next stop on my journey.
The day before the paper was due she mentioned it and said it would be weighted as 40 percent of my grade. Oh no, what paper could I have forgotten, panic, panic, panic! No english grade, no college! After dinner Thursday, I put aside being my favorite Washington running back, Larry Brown, running from stop sign to stop sign, crossing an imaginary goal line. I put together, what I thought was a brilliant plan. I would make up a name for a ‘relevant contemporary’ black poet, Silden Dunne, and would write his one page biography. Mrs. Cordial was a white woman, she would never know. Yeah, yeah brilliant, right? I could write the required 12 published poems by the author for review, interpret and be ready for Friday morning, it made sense to me, I was 17.
I put the poems in one of those manila office file folders packed them in the pouch flap at the back of my notebook and the next morning was off to school. “Good morning Mrs. Cordial” we all said in unison. Good morning sirs and ma'ams, she replied. Like a guilty voice from the heavens she said, “have we all completed the poetry assignment?” Shakily, I said yes with the rest of the class. Because it was s college preparatory class, she had a one on one grading session scheduled alphabetically for each student. I was in the last group, next Wednesday at 9:40 am, tick tock, tick tock.
“William sir, you are next.” Could I get away with this, my heart was pounding, my knees literally shook so much I could hear the knocking. I sat next to her desk in the witness chair, or so it felt. Time to meet the judge. She complimented me on my choice of poets, huh, am I going to get way with this? She concentrated on one line particularly, “I stare at my dinner plate, fatback, rice, carrots with no peas, is that what the white plate offers, a sparse meal is all I sees” OK, it was the seventies, I wanted to be a revolutionary and it sounded black and angry… She asked if I thought Dunne was using a metaphor. Meteor, what? She gave me a B a B! She criticized the interpretation as shallow. I wanted to scream, I wrote them how could I interpret them incorrectly! I guess I should have been satisfied, I had just gotten away with literary murder. At ten o’clock class ended, I had arranged to arrive at work about a half hour late.
I grabbed my books, Members Only jacket and tightened the laces on my black Converse Chuck Taylors. Standing in the doorway blocking my way was Mrs. Cordial all five-foot three of her.
She had a book in her left hand entitled, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, written by Langston Hughes. She put her right hand on my shoulder and said sardonically, “Mr. Dunne, my soul too, has grown deep like the rivers. Maybe not with your experiences but I am wiser than you think.” She continued, “this book is yours too keep, use your own voice next time it may be worth listening to someday.” I tucked Langston under my arm and Mrs. Cordial in my heart. I made it through school and raised a family. Thanks for encouraging my voice Mrs. Cordial?