They looked like birds, but in rows. Six tables in three neat rows, an aisle down the middle, two birds per table. The tables hid wings and feathers, revealed necks, beaks, and beady eyes barely above books and pencils and three-ring binders. The ones who sat alone were the only girl in the eighth grade and a boy who looked at the wall. At St. Tim’s they called eighth grade Second Form, ninth grade Third Form. There is no First Form. Something like the British schools. Something else prescribed, like what to wear and what brand. The boy who looked at the wall wore a wool tweed coat with elbow patches and a tie bumpy in its knot. His hair like electric shocks, he could have been Einstein if he weren’t a baby bird stuck behind a table.
You would have known what to do. You had already been teaching a year in Philadelphia before I ended up in this birds’ nest, the faces turned to me, their throats exposed.
“Miss Alta?” the small blond boy in the front row said. He was more tree frog than bird, bright green.
“Yes.” His name was sure to be on a list, but I was all gills and scales, no hands.
“How many tests will we have?” the frog said. “How much are they worth?”
If we had been swimming, little frog and fish, if we had faced each other suddenly in a slow pool, I would have unlocked my wide mouth and swallowed him.
“Well, now,” I said, “your name?”
“Jimmy O’Brien,” the frog said.
“Jimmy,” I said, and evolution caught up with me. I was a fish with legs and walked to his table. My hands sprang from gills, and I reached a hand to him. “Pleased to meet you,” I said and shook the clammy hand he extended.
I went around the room, taking each eighth-grader’s hand, Second Former’s hand, and wrapping mine around theirs. I stood, and they sat. I found my bag and lists, my three-page hand-written notes for an hour-long class. I found my spine and hands and voice.
“We’re starting this term with South Africa,” I said. “Does anyone know where that is?”
And David in the second row, on the left, his glasses making his face a dragonfly head, raised his hand straight up.
“In southern Africa,” he said, and he looked to his left at Tommy Underwood, and they giggled.
“Right,” I said. “So, what’s going on in South Africa right now?” Ask open questions, said the articles I read on teaching, the only teacher training I had. My undergraduate English major didn’t include Education classes, and learning to propel my body over water and lifting weights were more my world than witty conversation about Mr. Darcy. Perhaps Jane Austen would have served me better.
From the back row, the desk with one bird, the tweed coat and wild hair, a voice fired words like a typewriter.
“A-par-theid, the in-sti-tu-tional se-gre-ga-tion of the black ma-jor-i-ty by the white mi-nor-i-ty,” he said each syllable, and he moved his head like the platen of a typewriter, jerky, quick, turning one direction, until his head reached his shoulder, and he said, “Zip. Ping.” And he spun back to the other shoulder, and started the typing-speech again.
“Kyle, is it?” I said. His name checked on my list. He nodded machine-style, precise, up and down. “How did you know that?” The other birds turned toward the back row, and all I saw were heads of hair, blond, brown, tight-curled black.
“Don’t know,” Kyle said. His metallic voice flat, keys striking. He looked down, his chin almost tucked into the knot of his tie.
You wouldn’t meet my eyes at our graduation. Your last name in the middle of the alphabet, you marched in line before me, the As at the end, and stood while the rest filed in. In the black cap and gown, the white of shirts and the white skin of most of us, our line cut the lawn into green halves. Two classmates handed out pink, green, blue balloons, and you didn’t take one. I did. The balloons said, “Apartheid kills,” in big black letters. Our college had not divested. When I passed by your row, I tried to turn your head my way, but you were looking at the bleachers for Mark and your family.
When my family saw my balloon, they shook their heads. My family believed communists were at work everywhere, especially in South Africa. Workers organizing and rising up were a sure sign. They feared Martin Luther King Jr., feared Gandhi. They couldn’t say “Soviet Union” without whispering it as if the devil’s name might draw the devil out. Your parents pointed at you, snapped pictures, waved. Mark beamed at you, and you waved at him.
Kyle didn’t move. His arms slack at his sides, his head almost to his notebook, he was no longer typewriter, dictionary definition, words. Two boys leaned into each other at one desk and whispered.
“South Africa,” I said, “is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and one of the poorest nations.” Two days I had spent researching and rehearsing great paradoxes and twists of language. I heard none of the oohs and aahs I had expected. The entire class was pond-bottom sludge. Lecture was what I knew. College. This school the Du Ponts built, stone by stone, had teachers from the finest colleges in the country. What we knew from our training in those fine colleges was analysis, how to take a Geography class and break it into countries. How to take a country and break it into statistics. What I didn’t know was eighth grade. Second Form.
The bell at the end of the period was spring.
Birds became bodies, and Second Formers scraped chairs on wood floors, slammed notebooks, stuffed books into bags. They slung bookbags on shoulders and ducked by my desk at the front of the room. Almost in the hall, they spoke loud and bumped shoulders and elbows. They had five minutes to find their next class, and I had an hour before Fifth Form English.
As they left, I heard, “Did you hear him?”
I heard, “What is wrong with that kid?”
“Weird” was the thing I heard that could have meant me.