For decades the only childhood report card that survived my nomadic wanderings was the one from fifth grade, a testament to shame and sorrow. This uninspiring collection of marks at least allowed me to tell a good story as a successful writer, since I used it often as a visual aid in my lectures to younger audiences, many of them fifth graders themselves with dull report cards. Other school evaluations would float up from the wreckage of my mother’s shoe-box archives and attest to academic improvement later. But at the time I wrote the following, my terrible fifth-grade report card was all I had to remind me of my childhood panic of school. I remember I’d wake up sick with fear, often bleating, “Ma, I don’t want to go to school today.” “So don’t go,” she’d say without a “How come?” or “You better.” God knows why she was lenient with me. Maybe she intuited my unhappiness. I felt susto, terror, from third grade through sixth. This memory is so strong, it overwhelms me every time I visit an elementary school to speak even now. Thankfully, it wears off once I start talking.
This lecture was first delivered at the downtown San Antonio Public Library in October 2007 to an auditorium of middle and high school students. The occasion was the second San Antonio reunion of los MacArturos, the Latino MacArthur fellows. Our first MacArturo event had happened a decade earlier. I shared the program this time with the president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, Baldemar Velásquez, a great oral storyteller, and that P. T. Barnum of booksellers, Reubén Martínez, who made our jaws drop when he gave away a crisp hundred-dollar bill to the student who could remember the name of the library director. I learned a lot from Reubén about making an unforgettable impression.
When I was in fifth grade, my teacher, Sister Mary Regina Immaculata of the Holy Ghost Most High, asked to see my mother. This was a big deal. It meant I had done something awful. But I couldn’t remember what awful thing I’d done.
“Now what?” Mother said, disgusted. Dinner would be late. She would have to walk over to my school and walk back, and I’d have to go with her. My two older brothers would be ordered to take care of the four younger; the last time they’d done that, the twins had wound up at the police station, and they were only five years old. Father would come home from work tired, hungry, and with his feet throbbing. Mother, in a terrible mood, would hurl words at anyone who got in her way. Thanks to me, the world was thrown into chaos.
The complaint from Sister Mary Regina Immaculata of the Holy Ghost Most High was this: “Your daughter is a daydreamer.”
What could I say? It was true. When my teacher called on me, I seldom knew where we were. But it was also true that the class was a mix of forty-seven noisy kids from a mix of grade levels, too much for one tired teacher to deal with. Often in a day there were moments when you could drift away on a daydream, and often I took that route, staring out the window at a cloud, a coral geranium petal, or at Salvador, the boy who sat in front of me, whose wrinkled shirt and dirty collar made me wonder why his mama didn’t take better care of him.
I thought and thought about Salvador a lot back then and imagined he lived with a family of little brothers, and maybe these little brothers made his mama too busy to send Salvador to school in a clean, pressed shirt. I imagined Salvador getting up early to help with the babies. I was sure I knew where Salvador lived, over on Western Avenue near Flournoy Street, in a Chicago neighborhood worse than ours, near my aunt Timo, who, like the woman who lived in a shoe, had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
And just when I could imagine Salvador tumbling out of bed and dressing himself in his wrinkled shirt, helping his mama feed the babies cornflakes from a tin cup, combing his hair with water, rushing to get to school, this was exactly when the teacher would call on me. I don’t remember much else about that fifth-grade year except things I wish I could forget. “Daydreamer.” A word worse than a stick or a stone. It broke more than bones.
I felt ashamed to raise my hand for the rest of the school year, until, by Divine Providence, our pipes froze the following winter and we had to move to another neighborhood, another school, one with kind, compassionate lay teachers and nuns who discovered I was an artist and writer. But before that bright eureka, I hid inside myself and drew and wrote in secret, never volunteering an answer in class because I assumed if I thought of it, it must be wrong.
My fifth-grade report card
It’s funny, with all of the moves in my life, that horrible report card from fifth grade survived to remind me who I used to be. I have only to look at the constellations of Cs and Ds to remember how others saw me, and how I once saw myself. Too bad there was no grade for art, or I would’ve gotten an A. Too bad there was no credit for the seven or eight books I borrowed every week from the public library. Who knew this was important to bring to the attention of someone like Sister Mary Regina Immaculata of the Holy Ghost Most High?
In the fortieth year of my life, I received a MacArthur fellowship, the so-called genius grant, which is like an Academy Award for the story of your life. (That’s how I explained it to my mother, who didn’t understand at first.) What it finally made me realize was this: I have always been a daydreamer, and that’s a lucky thing for a writer. Because what is a daydreamer if not another word for thinker, visionary, intuitive—all wonderful words synonymous with “girl.”