The First Day of School
Edward P. Jones
Directions: As you’re reading,
stop and make INFERENCES.
On an otherwise unremarkable
September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes
my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of
school. I am wearing a checkered-like blue-and-green cotton dress, and
scattered about these colors are bits of yellow and white and brown. My mother
has uncharacteristically spent nearly an hour on my hair that morning, plaiting
and replaiting so that now my scalp tingles.
Whenever I turn my head
quickly, my nose fills with the faint smell of Dixie Peach hair grease. The
smell is somehow a soothing one now and I will reach for it time- and time
again before the morning ends. All the plaits, each with a blue barrette near
the tip and each twisted into an uncommon sturdiness, will last until I go to
bed that night, something that has never happened before. My stomach is full of
milk and oatmeal sweetened with brown sugar. Like everything else I have on, my
pale green slip and underwear are new, the underwear having come three to a
plastic package with a little girl on the front who appears to be dancing.
Behind my ears, my mother, to stop my whining, has dabbed the stingiest bit of her
gardenia perfume, the last present my father gave her before he disappeared
into memory.
Because I cannot smell it, I
have only her word that the perfume is there. I am also wearing yellow socks
trimmed with thin lines of black and white around the tops. My shoes are my
greatest joy, black patent-leather miracles, and when one is nicked at the toe
later that morning in class, my heart will break.
I am carrying a pencil, a
pencil sharpener, and a small ten-cent tablet with a black-and-white speckled
cover. My mother does not believe that a girl in kindergarten needs such
things, so I am taking them only because of my insistent whining and because
they are presents from our neighbors, Mary Keith and Blondelle Harris. Miss
Mary and Miss Blondelle are watching my two younger sisters until my mother
returns. The women are as precious to me as my mother and sisters. Out playing
one day, I have overheard an older child, speaking to another child, call Miss
Mary and Miss Blondelle a word that is brand new to me. This is my mother: When
I say the word in fun to one of my sisters, my mother slaps me across the mouth
and the word is lost for years and years.
All the way down New Jersey
Avenue, the sidewalks are teeming with children. In my neighborhood, I have
many friends, but I see none of them as my mother and I walk. We cross New York
Avenue, we cross Pierce Street, and we cross L and K, and still I see no one
who knows my name. At I Street, between New Jersey Avenue and Third Street, we
enter Seaton Elementary School, a timeworn, sadfaced building across the street
from my mother’s church, Mt. Carmel Baptist.
Just inside the front door,
women out of the advertisements in Ebony are greeting other parents and
children. The woman who greets us has pearls thick as jumbo marbles that come
down almost to her navel, and she acts as if she had known me all my life,
touching my shoulder, cupping her hand under my chin. She is enveloped in a
perfume that I only know is not gardenia. When, in answer to her question, my
mother tells her that we live at 1227 New Jersey Avenue, the woman first seems
to be picturing in her head where we live. Then she shakes her head and says
that we are at the wrong school, that we should be at Walker-Jones.
My mother shakes her head
vigorously. ”I want her to go here,” my mother says. ”If I’da wanted her
someplace else, I’da took her there.”
The woman continues to act as
if she has known me all my life, but she tells my mother that we live beyond
the area that Seaton serves. My mother is not convinced and for several more
minutes she questions the woman about why I cannot attend Seaton. For as many
Sundays as I can remember, perhaps even Sundays when I was in her womb, my
mother has pointed across I Street to Seaton as we come and go to Mt. Carmel.
”You gonna go there and learn about the whole world.” But one of the guardians
of that place is saying no, and no again. I am learning this about my mother:
The higher up on the scale of respectability a person is—and teachers are
rather high up in her eyes—the less she is liable to let them push her around.
But finally, I see in her eyes the closing gate, and she takes my hand and we
leave the building. On the steps, she stops as people move past us on either
side.
“Mama, I can’t go to school?”
She says nothing at first,
then takes my hand again and we are down the steps quickly and nearing New
Jersey Avenue before I can blink. This is my mother: She says,”One monkey don’t
stop no show.”
Walker-Jones is a larger,
newer school and I immediately like it because of that. But it is not across
the street from my mother’s church, her rock, one of her connections to God,
and I sense her doubts as she absently rubs her thumb over the back of her
hand. We find our way to the crowded auditorium where gray metal chairs are set
up in the middle of the room. Along the wall to the left are tables and other
chairs. Every chair seems occupied by a child or adult. Somewhere in the room a
child is crying, a cry that rises above the buzz-talk of so many people. Strewn
about the floor are dozens and dozens of pieces of white paper, and people are
walking over them without any thought of picking them up. And seeing this lack
of concern, I am all of a sudden afraid.
“Is this where they register
for school?” my mother asks a woman at one of the tables.
The woman looks up slowly as
if she has heard this question once too often. She nods. She is tiny, almost as
small as the girl standing beside her. The woman’s hair is set in a mass of
curlers and all of those curlers are made of paper money, here a dollar bill,
there a five-dollar bill. The girl’s hair is arrayed in curls, but some of them
are beginning to droop and this makes me happy.
On the table beside the
woman’s pocketbook is a large notebook, worthy of someone in high school, and
looking at me looking at the notebook, the girl places her hand possessively on
it. In her other hand she holds several pencils with thick crowns of additional
erasers.
“These the forms you gotta
use?” my mother asks the woman, picking up a few pieces of the paper from the
table. ”Is this what you have to fill out?”
The woman tells her yes, but
that she need fill out only one.
“I see,” my mother says,
looking about the room. Then: “Would you help me with this form? That is, if
you don’t mind.”
The woman asks my mother what
she means. “This form. Would you mind
help in me fill it out?” The woman still seems not to understand.
“I can’t read it. I don’t know
how to read or write, and I’m asking you to help me.” My mother looks at me
then looks away. I know almost all of her looks, but this one is brand new to
me.
“Would you help me, then?” The
woman says “Why sure,” and suddenly she appears happier, so much more satisfied
with everything. She finishes the form for her daughter and my mother and I
step aside to wait for her. We find two chairs nearby and sit. My mother is now
diseased, according to the girl’s eyes, and until the moment her mother takes
her and the form to the front of the auditorium, the girl never stops looking
at my mother. I stare back at her. ”Don’t stare,” my mother says to me. ”You
know better than that.”
Another woman out of the Ebony
ads takes the woman’s child away. Now, the woman says upon returning, let’s see
what we can do for you two.
My mother answers the
questions the woman reads off the form. They start with my last name, and then
on to the first and middle names. This is school, I think. This is going to
school. My mother slowly enunciates each word of my name. This is my mother: As
the questions go on, she takes from her pocketbook document after document, as
if they will support my right to attend school, as if she has been saving them
up for just this moment. Indeed, she takes out more papers than I have ever
seen her do in other places: my birth certificate, my baptismal record, a
doctor’s letter concerning my bout with chicken pox, rent receipts, records of
immunization, a letter about our public assistance payments, even her marriage
license—every single paper that has anything even remotely to do with my
five-year-old life. Few of the papers are needed here, but it does not matter
and my mother continues to pull out the documents with the purposefulness of a
magician pulling out a long string of scarves. She has learned that money is
the beginning and end of everything in this world, and when the woman finishes,
my mother offers her fifty cents, and the woman accepts it without hesitation.
My mother and I are just about the last parent and child in the room.
My mother presents the form to
a woman sitting in front of the stage, and the woman looks at it and writes
something on a white card, which she gives to my mother. Before long, the woman
who has taken the girl with the drooping curls appears from behind us, speaks
to the sitting woman, and introduces herself to my mother and me. She’s to be
my teacher, she tells my mother. My mother stares.
We
go into the hall, where my mother kneels down to me. Her lips are quivering.
”I’ll be back to pick you up at twelve o’clock. I don’t want you to go nowhere.
You just wait right here. And listen to every word she say.” I touch her lips
and press them together. It is an old, old game
between us. She puts my hand down at my side, which is not part of the game.
She stands and looks a second at the teacher, then she turns and walks away. I
see where she has darned one of her socks the night before. Her shoes make loud
sounds in the hall. She passes through the doors and I can still hear the loud
sounds of her shoes. And even when the teacher turns me toward the classrooms
and I hear what must be the singing and talking of all the children in the
world, I can still hear my mother’s footsteps above it all.
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