a nigger, ainât a niggerâ¦,â sung in a robot voiceâcame to mind.
Without looking up from the page, I said I was fine with it. She said she could gloss over it somehow, but I told her again that I was okay.
âAre you sure?â Mrs. Paul was somewhere between the ages of like forty-one and maybe seventy-three.
âUmm-hmmm.â I made an about-face and walked back to my table, no. 12.
âWhud she wan?â asked Bo, whose desk faced mine and whose face I dreamed of at night.
âNothing.â
Polly was my revenge. Not against Mrs. Paul. She was a fantastic. She got breast cancer twice and still smoked in secret when we were at recess. There was a test she gave every yearâthe âpay attentionâ quiz. All you had to do to pass was ignore her. It had maybe ten questions, each one more random than the last:
No. 2â: Lick your thumb and then smudge it next to the space provided.
No. 4â: Switch chairs with the person to your left, wait four and one half seconds, then switch back.
No. 7â: Stand on your chair and recite the 5 times table from 2 to 10, skipping every answer ending in 0.
No. 10â: Shout out âIâm finishedâ after playing the piano on your desk. Choose any song you like.
During all this, Mrs. Paul was clucking like a chicken while tap-dancing on top of randomly selected desks, and rule No. 1 said not to laugh, keep your eyes on your paper. What most of us didnât bother to do was read the instructions at the top of the page, which said to write your initials on the back and sit quietly until she called time. Paying attention was worthless if you didnât start out right to begin with.
Polly would be a new beginning for me. The day I brought the tape in, I felt powerful, like when you know a secret that other people donât realize that they should know. I had a G14-classified VHS in my JanSport and was waiting for the perfect moment to slam it down on someoneâs desk. Oh, you thought you knew what a black girl was? Well, take. A Look. At this! Minds would be blown. After two hours, everyone would know what me was: well, me if I was a singing orphan in 1950s Alabama. Whatever. It was a start.
Someone from the AV club rolled in a two-hundred-pound twenty-inch. Mrs. Paul called my name, and I got to walk all the way from table no. 12 to the front of the room to pop in the tape and press play. The whole way back, I couldnât stop smiling. Once we got rolling, even Johnny Leonardi laughed, and I was pretty sure he was plotting to kill me one day, or at least trip me en route to sharpening a pencil. Everybody liked it. They ooooohed when the old white doctor who looked like the Kentucky Colonel calls Polly a âpickaninny,â having the faint intuition that it meant something bad (Frances had to explain it to me). We all cheered at the end when Polly cuts the ribbon, christening the newly built bridge that joins the white part of town to the black part.
I thought my life might change after that. I thought I might be invited to more sleepovers with Barbies and less Bible studies. I thought someone might pick me first for something. Anything.
Not so much. But I did score points for getting us out of reading hour, which Iâd personally hated since Mrs. Paul read the word âniggerâ out loud. Sure, I told her it was fine, but I didnât think sheâd actually do it:
Little Man bit his lower lip, and I knew that he was not going to pick up the book. Rapidly, I turned to the inside cover of my own book and saw immediately what had made Little Man so furious. Stamped on the inside cover was a chart which read:
CHRONOLOGICAL ISSUANCE: [â¦] 12
DATE OF ISSUANCE: September 1933
CONDITION OF BOOK: Very Poor
RACE OF STUDENT: nigra
Then the main character goes, âS-see what they called us.â Then Mrs. Paul with all her ancient oratory skills goes, ( evil redneck old teacher voice )
Without looking up from the page, I said I was fine with it. She said she could gloss over it somehow, but I told her again that I was okay.
âAre you sure?â Mrs. Paul was somewhere between the ages of like forty-one and maybe seventy-three.
âUmm-hmmm.â I made an about-face and walked back to my table, no. 12.
âWhud she wan?â asked Bo, whose desk faced mine and whose face I dreamed of at night.
âNothing.â
Polly was my revenge. Not against Mrs. Paul. She was a fantastic. She got breast cancer twice and still smoked in secret when we were at recess. There was a test she gave every yearâthe âpay attentionâ quiz. All you had to do to pass was ignore her. It had maybe ten questions, each one more random than the last:
No. 2â: Lick your thumb and then smudge it next to the space provided.
No. 4â: Switch chairs with the person to your left, wait four and one half seconds, then switch back.
No. 7â: Stand on your chair and recite the 5 times table from 2 to 10, skipping every answer ending in 0.
No. 10â: Shout out âIâm finishedâ after playing the piano on your desk. Choose any song you like.
During all this, Mrs. Paul was clucking like a chicken while tap-dancing on top of randomly selected desks, and rule No. 1 said not to laugh, keep your eyes on your paper. What most of us didnât bother to do was read the instructions at the top of the page, which said to write your initials on the back and sit quietly until she called time. Paying attention was worthless if you didnât start out right to begin with.
Polly would be a new beginning for me. The day I brought the tape in, I felt powerful, like when you know a secret that other people donât realize that they should know. I had a G14-classified VHS in my JanSport and was waiting for the perfect moment to slam it down on someoneâs desk. Oh, you thought you knew what a black girl was? Well, take. A Look. At this! Minds would be blown. After two hours, everyone would know what me was: well, me if I was a singing orphan in 1950s Alabama. Whatever. It was a start.
Someone from the AV club rolled in a two-hundred-pound twenty-inch. Mrs. Paul called my name, and I got to walk all the way from table no. 12 to the front of the room to pop in the tape and press play. The whole way back, I couldnât stop smiling. Once we got rolling, even Johnny Leonardi laughed, and I was pretty sure he was plotting to kill me one day, or at least trip me en route to sharpening a pencil. Everybody liked it. They ooooohed when the old white doctor who looked like the Kentucky Colonel calls Polly a âpickaninny,â having the faint intuition that it meant something bad (Frances had to explain it to me). We all cheered at the end when Polly cuts the ribbon, christening the newly built bridge that joins the white part of town to the black part.
I thought my life might change after that. I thought I might be invited to more sleepovers with Barbies and less Bible studies. I thought someone might pick me first for something. Anything.
Not so much. But I did score points for getting us out of reading hour, which Iâd personally hated since Mrs. Paul read the word âniggerâ out loud. Sure, I told her it was fine, but I didnât think sheâd actually do it:
Little Man bit his lower lip, and I knew that he was not going to pick up the book. Rapidly, I turned to the inside cover of my own book and saw immediately what had made Little Man so furious. Stamped on the inside cover was a chart which read:
CHRONOLOGICAL ISSUANCE: [â¦] 12
DATE OF ISSUANCE: September 1933
CONDITION OF BOOK: Very Poor
RACE OF STUDENT: nigra
Then the main character goes, âS-see what they called us.â Then Mrs. Paul with all her ancient oratory skills goes, ( evil redneck old teacher voice )
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