Hidden and Safe

“Human beings have an infinite capacity to ignore things that are inconvenient.” — Jan Karski

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I unlocked the door of my classroom, entered the generous space, and put on my glasses. Over my shoulders I wore a dark-blue sweater with fat buttons. As I remember that long-ago day, golden light shone from windows along the east wall, and an Audubon bird print, captioned with a phrase from Whitman, “I sing myself,” greeted me from the bulletin board.

Outside, California’s sunny skies seemed a utopian vision, perfection designed by a happy god. The chaos of the Seventies was muffled by birdsong, and spring breezes scattered the particulates in the Los Angeles basin. Birds entered my consciousness a lot that week, and for some reason bird images crowd my memories now. I write about the past with sounds of birdcalls and whispers of flight in my ear.

Cheerful students crowded in the door behind me, oblivious to the uproar in the  streets, where other young people marched for civil rights and in protest of the Vietnam War. My students were not part of that impassioned cohort. Here, safely indoors, the girls wore bright red lipstick and the boys sported buzz cuts. They carried their literature books and sat in assigned seats.

These young teens of prosperous white America were a special group. They’d been segregated from less advantaged students — even though new equality legislation had been passed — and they exuded a sense of entitlement. They seemed incapable of protesting injustice or war, let alone incubating such thoughts themselves.

I walked to my desk and pointed to a picture on the bulletin board of an armored medieval knight. “Can you turn your thoughts to the Middle Ages this morning? Just look at this knight for inspiration.” I tried to sound like my mentor, Mrs. Miller, a wise and tough teacher, a hawk, scrutinizing and confident.

“If you ask me,” Claudia said softly, regarding the knight, “he was awfully short.”

I turned to the record player beside the lectern and we listened to Alexander Scourby reciting lines from The Canterbury Tales, stories told by a motley procession of pilgrims progressing through medieval England. Those scrappy pilgrims were not like the tidy group of white Americans in front of me. My students looked alike, as if they’d been hatched from the same clutch.

Some weeks later I sat in a café with Maxine, another teacher, enjoying an afternoon away from end-of-year tempests at the high school. Like my oblivious students, we’d sequestered ourselves in a bookstore, a place we thought had a British pub look — dim lights, lots of wood, quiet. Max and I sat apart from noisy reality that day, distancing from a world of racial turmoil and the horrors of war. We could have been two aristocrats oblivious to the armies at the gates while songbirds twittered.

My slender, fashionably dressed companion never took a false step in those high heels of hers. I gathered teaching ideas from her like a hungry sparrow pecking at the crumbs she dropped on my plate.

“I overheard Brad call me Bird Legs!” I said. “I think he meant me to hear. He said it just as he was leaving the classroom. I should have ….”

“Bird Legs? I’d have the twerp drawn and quartered.” Max blew on her black coffee and smiled. “Bet he didn’t like the grade you gave him. We can’t pamper those athletes.”

“Too late for executions,” I sighed, fingering the copy of Sophie’s Choice I’d purchased. “Brad’s probably at UCLA now, signing football contracts. Besides, he’s right. I do have bird legs.”

“No you don’t. Birds don’t have knees.”

Looking back at classroom and bookstore, I wish I’d been more courageous and taught America’s bitter history along with tales of medieval wanderers. I wish I’d combined an approach to literature with accounts of present battles for justice and lynchings I knew to be real, and, inspired by Whitman, been more true to myself. Hiding behind my well-dressed colleague is not a memory I’m proud of.

What would have happened if I’d chosen to teach the truth about antiwar movements and struggles for civil rights? What would I do in education today, where critics confront school boards, advocating for sanitizing the curriculum? They hope to expunge material about racial injustice and accounts of the American story, which is complex and violent. Despite my timid response in the past, my hope is that I’d have the courage to confront those critics who must not succeed in censoring material that is truthful and vibrant.