TheDayWeDiscoveredWeWereBlack It really wasn’t Jo^Jo’s fault. Honest it wasn’t; i f I ’m lying I ’m flying. That Francis Scott Key man started the whole thing. got gypped in fourth grade, on the very first day of school. Mrs. Loving was sus-sposed to be our teacher and we’d been waiting for years to be in her class because she was the prettiest and nicest teacher By Davida Kilgore • A r t by Seitu Jones • Design by Kim Klein in the whole school. Everybody knows when you’ re pretty you just have to be nice, so you know what ugly means. All the boys wanted to marry Mrs. Loving and all us girls wanted to look just like her, but by 8:05 tha t Monday morning, we learned that she had gone and spoiled everything by using up our- summer having an old-bald-headed baby. Our principal Mrs. Strickland, who we already didn’t like in the first place, waddled into our classroom with th is . . . th is woman and announced that she was going to be our new teacher. Mrs. Strickland could have warned us in advance, mailed one of those yellow school bulletins she was so good at making up and safety-pinning to our coats at 3:30 so we wouldn’t lose them on our way home from school. At least then we would’ve had the chance to change schools or something. We would’ve come back by fifth grade, honestly. But we got sicked; what did I tell you about ugly? Those two women stood in Mrs. Loving’s place behind the teacher’s desk at the front of the room, the American flag hanging down almost to the tops of their heads, and they frowned at us because we were rolling our eyes at them. We hadn’t learned to be prejudiced or anything like that yet. Shoot, the closest some of us had ever come in touching range of living, breathin white people was the sales clerks downtown and they didn’t count because we didn’t know them personally. It wasn’t that this Miss Fleisch- hacker was white and had a funny name that didn’t sound like nothing we’d ever heard before. And shoot, it wasn’t that she dressed so tacky, wearing all those old long dresses and shoes that curled up at the toes like a troll’s or something’s. It was just that she wasn’t Mrs. Loving and we really, truly believed that Mrs. Strickland had done this to us on purpose because she hadn’t ever liked our class. We ll...some times we didn’t mind our Ps and Qs, but even we didn’t deserve this. So after Mrs. 26 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1989-90
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