On Our Own

22.

I will continue to quote from the novel White Knight a little more. Here is another of the more subjective, second person passages:

Even as you have reached the zenith of your political career (so far), a lurking fear settles into your life like an old friend. As a leader, you fear making a mistake and opening yourself up to attack. But they could attack you anyway. They already have. They have taken your job away. You can collect unemployment for awhile, and you can tell lies about how much time your kids spend with you in order to get a large allotment of food stamps, but even surplus food won't fill that hollow in your belly where the fear lurks. It pisses you off that the system has such a hold over you, that it can mess with your mind simply by cutting off your livelihood, but that doesn't stop you from waking up in the middle of the night in a sweat surrounded by multiple images of skulls with flames flicking out of their hollow eye sockets, followed by visions of terror that lurk in the shadows between dream and memory.

One of these dream memories is of your first year teaching; you are trying to teach a roomful of black elementary children, and they are gradually getting away from you as you try to hold a discussion about a fight two of them had outside on the schoolyard, but the children refuse to take turns, and you feel them taking sides in the fight instead of looking for solutions. You want them to find their own solution, so they defy your authority in ways that have you half agreeing with them, which boxes you in so there is nothing you can do but give in to the chaos, as what had been a fight between two children threatens to escalate into a brawl between the two polarized halves of the class. Another image comes from a memory you have of your first social contact with black people when you are eleven or so and your father invites a black ophthalmologist and his family to your home on the lake, a bold move on his part in those times, and how you take the family on a ride in your family's motorboat but you have no idea what to say and neither does anyone else. The silence grates on the ears in a bone chilling, fingernails on the blackboard kind of way. In another bold move, your father takes this man into his practice but as an associate, not a full partner, and the black family never returns to the house. The shrill silence conjures another image, when you are younger still, the silent black man who clucks at the horse pulling the hansom cab, clopping along the streets of Nassau with your vacationing family, your father, your mother, your sister, [Nicki], sightseeing but the sight you are seeing is of a shantytown of unbelievable at least to your eight year old eyes squalor; the hovels are made from corrugated tin and tarpaper, babies are screaming, your eyes sting from the smoke of the outside fires, the cooking smell mixes with that of the urine, dark people in rags huddle in the darkness, the din of their crowding angry and frightful, while placid looks mask the faces of your family, and you think: This couldn't possibly be real.

The days following our center's official closing are heady indeed. There are a million things involved with running a school, and I don't know what I'm doing. After the first two days, Earldean and Tessie both go back to work, so I'm on my own with Charlene, Sue Ann, Alice, and Eddie. Between us we have to buy, cook, and serve breakfast and lunch, answer the phone -- now listed in our own name, [Geneva] Towers Children's Center, Inc. -- maintain at least a semblance of paperwork, keep the place clean, collect fees so we can buy the food. After the second day, it's pretty clear we're not going to get the school district back. The only pressure we have on them is holding their furnishings, a cost they can easily write off. So we resign ourselves to having to figure out all the steps it takes to get incorporated, independently licensed, and funded. Plus, we have to care for the children.

At first I have to do everything. There is a reason I never went in for administration. I hate telling people what to do, and I despise details. However, after two days of this, I resent even more the others not doing their share.

"Eddie. You seem to handle the children really well. Would you like to teach?"

"Sure!" he says, his eyes lighting up. He's a wiry man in his twenties with dark skin, long sideburns, and narrow features. Earldean thinks he's missing a screw, but he seems to really like the children. He plays with them. He rides tricycles with them. He molds playdough with them. He paints with them. He does naturally just what the modern practitioner of the child centered curriculum is exhorted to do by university level Early Childhood Education programs.

Alice has an obvious aversion to children, and Charlene seems indifferent, so, without my having to say anything, they settle in the office and talk to who knows who on the phone. Sue Ann volunteers to do the cooking and cleaning. So, I'm able to concentrate on handling the money such as there is, buying food, preparing sign in sheets and emergency cards, researching the ins and outs of our legal status, buying insurance, recruiting a board of directors from the community, and doing a little teaching in my spare time. My evenings I spend writing proposals, a skill I have to learn from scratch. I've never been so busy, but I have a great sense of purpose and glean a fair share of manic energy from the aura of victory that the continuing existence of the center reflects.