A free education in rural Wyoming half-a-century ago meant that
children under 16 were supposed to go to school every day. They
also were supposed to return home from school and during the interim
to cause as little disruption as possible. That many of these
children weren't particularly keen about learning to read well,
or multiply and divide, or remember who crossed the Delaware and
who wintered at Valley Forge quickly became apparent to the teachers
who were trying to educate them.
Like most of her confederates, my fourth-grade teacher dealt
with the recalcitrants by seating them at the back of the classroom,
which, for each grade, had to accommodate more than 40 students.
Her name, if I remember correctly, was Miss Ritter. She was a
stocky, energetic woman with a sharp voice and impatient way of
jerking her shoulders when she was irritated. The back-of-the-class
students (mostly boys) irritated her because they did not pay
attention to the lessons, made rude sounds and carved on their
desks with pocket knives.
Some of the front-of-the-class students (mostly girls) also
irritated her, but their irritations triggered less shoulder twitching.
I, on the other hand, drew harsher scoldings. The teacher, I once
tried to explain to my parents, wasn't as smart as she thought
she was and occasionally I had to correct her. Yes, I admitted,
sometimes that caused some of the other students to laugh. Or
secretly voice their approval.
My parents advised me to be more tactful. Like most 10-year-olds,
I didn't listen to my parents. Besides, some of my front- and
middle-of-the-class friends insisted I was a great comedian and
applauded my behind-the-teacher's-back antics. The teacher was
not as appreciative as they were when she discovered what I was
doing. Abruptly, her shoulders jerking more than usual, she sent
me to the back of the class.
I was to stay there, she said, until I proved that I could behave.
I stayed there a long time.
Exactly why I was accepted into that back-of-the-class subculture
I'm not sure. Perhaps, in part, it was because I had been about
to embarrass the teacher. Fourth-graders possess an instinctive
sense of "with me or 'gin me." My showing up the teacher certainly
was a point in my favor. And I realized, without being told, that
the longer I stayed in the back of the room, the greater would
be my victory. Even though my friends were all front-of-the-roomers,
I decided to turn what was intended as punishment into a personal
accomplishment.
The town children, a core group composed of the sons and daughters
of trades people, full-time sugar factory employees and the more
prosperous farmers, sat in the front rows. Behind them an intermediate
mix of kids from the Catholic orphanage bumped elbows with youngsters
who came by bus from the little farms that supplied the town with
pork, eggs and potatoes. Many of them were Russian immigrants
of German descent who had come to Wyoming around the time of the
Bolshevik revolution. In the very back sat the Mexican kids, some
of whom had been born in Wyoming or Colorado but who still spoke
Spanish at home.
I spoke no Spanish. Nor, I discovered, did I speak the same
language as the kids from the orphanage. The words we used, though
similar, did not describe the same things. What to me always had
been straightforward, simple concepts -- "supper," "home," "dad,"
"vacation" -- aroused different feelings for them. And I had no
way to incorporate "Mother Superior," "bed check," "delousing,"
"Hail Marys" into my frames of reference.
I listened with awe and curiosity as my new friends described
their tightly regulated dormitory life. When I asked Martin Amicich,
who sat just in front of me, if he ever was going to get to leave
and go live somewhere else, he merely shrugged.
"Where else is there?"
"Maybe somebody . . . ?" I had no way to finish the sentence.
As I heard him repeat "There's nobody who wants me," I tried to
picture what life would be like without a mother or a father,
an allowance, a room of my own. I imagined the two of us going
off together to find his parents, or find some people to become
his parents, but I had no idea how to go about it, and neither
did he. One of the things he then told me stayed with me forever.
"Some of the kids, you know, have folks somewhere. They couldn't
take care of their kids so the kids had to come to the orphanage.
Their folks write letter sometimes or visit. It's awful. When
they leave, the kids cry. Sometimes they want to kill themselves.
"I'm glad my folks don't come. If they did, I'd tell 'em to
go away. It's hard enough without making it worse."
I felt that I understood what he was trying to express. Life
is hard. Not just sometimes -- every day. By contrast, my
life seemed pretty easy. Oh, I had my problems, but life itself
wasn't a problem; I didn't perceive it as being hard.
Once Martin told me, "Well, good things happen, you know, football
and jokes and sometimes we get candy bars," but those few bright
spots didn't change his overall perception.
He wasn't the only back-of-the-roomer who felt that way. Carol,
like Martin, lived in the orphanage. Tall, slender, otiose, she
seldom spoke to outsiders and never had spoken to me while I was
a front-of-the-roomer. With my change of status, she became somewhat
communicative. One recess, seeing her alone, I sidled over to
talk to her. At a loss for something to say, I asked her if she
would be happy when she grew up and could leave the orphanage.
She peered at me as though I'd just popped out of a hole in the
ground speaking Chinese. In a voice that could have sliced through
steel she told me, "I'm never happy. I never expect to be."
I tried to assuage her, I remember, but she only shrugged. Walking
home that afternoon, I realized how banal my cliches must have
seemed to her. Even when things weren't going well, I expected
a happy future after I left home and could travel and make money
and fall in love and marry and have children of my own. Carol
had no such aspirations, although many of the kids who lived in
the orphanage did. Some, in fact, openly said they were cared
for better there than they'd been cared for at home.
Both Carol and Martin, more than other back-of-the-roomers,
connected with the Mexican kids. Often at recess Eddie Rodrigues
and Martin wrestled, raced or played mumbly peg with each other.
Eddie was at least a year older than I, a stocky, round-faced
youth who could throw a pocket knife with amazing accuracy. Martin
made fun of him because he spoke English with a heavy accent and
pronounced such words as "teacher" and "T-shirt" the same way:
"teeshur." Because Eddie went to church at the orphanage I mistakenly
thought he lived there. He corrected me with a jovial, "I weesh
I did. To have the monjas [nuns], they take care of me!"
"You would like to live there?" I asked him -- a bit incredulously,
I think, because of the stories Martin and Carol and other orphanage
residents had told me.
Eddie laughed. "I could sleep in a bed," he told me. "Eat three
times a day."
"You don't sleep in a bed?"
"Sí, sometimes. If my sisters let me. But usually
on the floor." Seeing me struggling to comprehend, he explained,
"The house, it is very small. Not room enough for all of us. In
the orphanage," he rolled his eyes, "there is lots and lots of
room."
Eddie would have done much better in school if his attendance
hadn't been so poor. He was often absent for weeks at a time,
which threw him behind the rest of the class, especially in mathematics.
When I asked him about this, he answered, simply, "I work."
Work was the bane of fourth-graders. We all had to work. Shovel
snow. Wash dishes. Pick tomatoes. But "work" for Eddie, I was
to discover, meant something different than it did to me. Challenged
to a weekend wrestling match, he shrugged. "I lose; I will be
working."
Immediately somebody laughed and called him "chicken." He responded
with the challenge, "I not scheeken. You think I scheeken, you
come work weeth me."
Needing (I felt) to prove myself to my fellow back-of-the-roomers,
I bicycled the three-and-a-half miles to the farm at which he
and his family were thinning sugar beets that Saturday.
At first I didn't recognize Eddie. He had a hat pulled low over
his eyes, his blue chambray shirt was stained with sweat and the
old boots he was wearing were caked with mud. He introduced me
to his dad and some of the people working with him, several of
whom were only slightly older than he was. They gave me a hoe,
and I joined them, working the rows beside Eddie and some other
migrants.
Though not a farm kid, I was independent and athletic. Even
so I couldn't keep up with Eddie, especially as the day got warmer.
My back began to ache from the constant bending and rising, swinging
the short-handled hoe. I continually had to swipe at my eyes in
order to see through the sweat. Finally I had to give up. The
foreman wanted to pay me, but I told him to give the money I earned
-- maybe $2 -- to Eddie. I barely was able to bicycle home and
arrived so exhausted that I couldn't even eat.
Though I never wanted to go back to the beet fields, I'd gained
a new respect for Eddie and a new definition of the word "work."
My respect increased even more after he dealt with the bullies
who'd begun molesting me. That spring a pair of older boys (sixth-graders
I believe) had started to threaten me. I evaded them by detouring
around the block on which they lived, but a few days after my
beet-thinning experience I ran into them on my detour. They pushed
me against the side of a garage and took my pocket knife. They
told me I was lucky they didn't beat me to a pulp. I didn't tell
my parents about it, but I did tell Eddie's sister.
Eddie's sister obviously conveyed the information to Eddie.
The next day he led me to a corner of the playground where one
of the bullies was waiting for me. Something seemed to have happened
to the bully's mouth, for it was all swollen, and to his conscience,
for he returned the pocket knife. When I asked Eddie if he'd done
something to the bully he laughed.
"Somebody more bigger did," he said with a wink, and I remembered
the older boys who'd been working with him in the beet field.
"Never try to do stuff like that," he advised. "Always there is
somebody more bigger than you to make you pay for it."
Although most of the kids from the sand hills outside Torrington
did not have to leave school to work in the fields like Eddie
did, many of them (including the girls) worked every day for their
farmer fathers. There were hogs to slop, chickens to pluck, onions
to plant, barns to clean, fences to repair. School for them was
always secondary, even if their parents insisted that they attend
classes and bring home their report cards.
Most of these farm kids came to school in one of the district's
few buses, each of which made two trips each morning and each
afternoon, taking those who lived closest to town on the first
circuit and those who lived farther away last. As a result, those
who lived farthest away had to hang out in the school yard for
nearly an hour before and after school. As I got to know some
of them better I began to hang out with them, especially as the
weather warmed.
The farm kids displayed a worldliness about animal life that
the town youngsters didn't possess. The farm kids could talk about
shoveling manure or slaughtering pigs or a cow's afterbirth with
as little emotion as they discussed their clothes or the contents
of their lunch boxes. Yet some of them, like Donna Hansen, had
little or no concept of a world beyond their farms, the town and
the North Platte River.
Donna was at least two years older than I was and had older
brothers and married sisters. Like Eddie Rodrigues, she somehow
had missed a year of schooling and been forced to repeat the second
or third grade. Her parents were Danish immigrants and very strict.
For some reason they wouldn't let Donna have jewelry, even the
cheap dime-store kind. I often shared gum or candy with her, and
when she had a dime or quarter that one of her sisters or brothers
had given her she would buy a bead necklace or little ring and
give it to me to keep for her so she could wear it in class.
Despite her intellectual shortcomings, Donna was honest and
good-hearted. She wanted to know why I wanted to stay in the back
of the room ("If it was me and I could sit up front I would.")
and what my home life was like. She was the only girl in the class
to befriend Diane, a farm girl like her. Diane suffered a speech
deficit, a form of bradylogia, that made her seem retarded because
she spoke so slowly.
Once when I asked Donna if she didn't find Diane difficult to
listen to, Donna shrugged. "Each one of us's got something wrong
with us," she told me. "It ain't her fault. Nobody's perfect.
Just what's wrong with some people's back inside them, where you
can't see it so easy. But it's there. God put it there."
Donna was the first of my new companions to ask for help with
her lessons. Eddie's sister was next. By Easter I'd become the
informal tutor for most of Miss Ritter's back-of-the-room recalcitrants.
Deciding, I guess, that my will power wasn't going to cave in,
Miss Ritter began suggesting that other front-of-the-roomers help
those who "are having trouble with their lessons." I might have
taken this as a further sign of victory had she not told my parents
that my move to the back of the class had been good for me, and
that thanks to her, instead of continuing to be a clown and a
behavior problem, I had "grown into being able to accept responsibility."
Robert Joe Stout
is a freelance journalist, fiction writer and poet. He currently
lives in Mexico after a career as a magazine editor, newspaper
reporter, editor and columnist and government property tax accountant.
Algora Press brought out his The Blood of the Serpent: Mexican
Lives, a mosaic of Mexican faces, places and experiences,
in 2003.
(October 2004)
