Teaching nine hours a week at New York Technical College in Brooklyn was easier than twenty-five hours a week at McKee Vocational and Technical High School. Classes were smaller, students older, and there were none of the problems a high school teacher has to deal with, the lavatory pass, the moaning over assignments, the mass of paperwork created by bureaucrats who have nothing to do but create new forms. I could supplement my reduced salary by teaching at Washington Irving Evening High School or substituting at Seward Park High School and Stuyvesant High School.
The chairman of the English Department at the community college asked me if I’d like to teach a class of paraprofessionals. I said yes though I had no notion of what a paraprofessional was.
That first class I found out. Here were thirty-six women, African-American with a sprinkling of Hispanics, ranging in age from early twenties to late fifties, teacher aides in elementary schools and in college now with government help. They’d get two-year associate degrees and, perhaps, continue their education so that someday they might become fully qualified teachers.
That night there was little time for teaching. After I had asked the women to write a short autobiographical essay for the next class they gathered up their books and filed out, apprehensive, still unsure of themselves, of each other, of me. I had the whitest skin in the room.
When we met again the mood was the same except for one woman who sat with her head on the desk, sobbing. I asked what was the matter. She raised her head, tears on her cheeks.
I lost my books.
Oh, well, I said, you’ll get another set of books. Just go to the English Department and tell them what happened.
You mean I won’t get throwed out of college?
No, you won’t be throwed, thrown out of college.
I felt like patting her head but I didn’t know how to pat the head of a middle-aged woman who has lost her books. She smiled, we all smiled. Now we could begin. I asked for their compositions and told them I’d read some aloud though I wouldn’t use their real names.
The essays were stiff, self-conscious. As I read I wrote some of the more common misspelled words on the chalkboard, suggested changes in structure, pointed out grammatical errors. It was all dry and tedious till I suggested the ladies write simply and clearly. For their next assignment they could write on anything they liked. They looked surprised. Anything? But we don’t have anything to write about. We don’t have no adventures.
They had nothing to write about, nothing but the tensions of their lives, summer riots erupting around them, assassinations, husbands who so often disappeared, children destroyed by drugs, their own daily grind of housework, jobs, school, raising children.
They loved the strange ways of words. During a discussion on juvenile delinquency Mrs. Williams sang out, No kid o’ mine gonna be no yoot.
Yoot?
Yeah, you know. Yoot. She held up a newspaper where the headline howled, Youth Slays Mom.
Oh, I said, and Mrs. Williams went on, These yoots, y’know, runnin’ around slayin’ people. Killin’ ’em, too. Any kid o’ mine come home actin’ like a yoot an’ out he go on his you-know-what.
The youngest woman in the class, Nicole, turned the tables on me. She sat in the back in a corner and never spoke till I asked the class if they’d like to write about their mothers. Then she raised her hand. How about your mother, Mr. McCourt?
Questions came like bullets. Is she alive? How many children did she have? Where’s your father? Did she have all those children with one man? Where is she living? Who’s she living with? She’s living alone? Your mother’s living alone and she has four sons? How come?
They frowned. They disapproved. Poor lady with four sons shouldn’t be living alone. People should take care of their mothers but what do men know? You can never tell a man what it’s like to be a mother and if it wasn’t for the mothers America would fall apart.
In April Martin Luther King was killed and classes were suspended for a week. When we met again I wanted to beg forgiveness for my race. Instead I asked for the essays I had already assigned. Mrs. Williams was indignant. Look, Mr. McCourt, when they tryin’ to burn your house down you ain’t sittin’ around writin’ no cawm-po-zishuns.
In June Bobby Kennedy was killed. My thirty-six ladies wondered what was happening to the world but they agreed you have to carry on, that education was the only road to sanity. When they talked about their children their faces brightened and I became irrelevant to their talk. I sat on my desk while they told each other that now they were in college themselves they stood over their kids to make sure the homework was done.
On the last night of classes in June there was a final examination. I watched those dark heads bent over papers, the mothers of two hundred and twelve children, and I knew, that no matter what they wrote or didn’t write on those papers, no one would fail.
They finished. The last paper had been handed in but no one was leaving. I asked if they had another class here. Mrs. Williams stood and coughed. Ah, Mr. McCourt, I must say, I mean we must say, it was a wonderful thing to come to college and learn so much about English and everything and we got you this little something hopin’ you’ll like it an’ all.
She sat down, sobbing, and I thought, This class begins and ends in tears.
The gift was passed up, a bottle of shaving lotion in a fancy red and black box. When I sniffed it I was nearly knocked over but I sniffed again with gusto and told the ladies I’d keep the bottle forever in memory of them, this class, their yoots.
Instead of going home after that class I took the subway to West Ninety-sixth Street in Manhattan and called my mother from a street telephone.
Would you like to have a snack?
I don’t know. Where are you?
I’m a few blocks away.
Why?
I just happened to be in the neighborhood.
Visiting Malachy?
No. Visiting you.
Me? Why should you be visiting me?
For Christ’s sake, you’re my mother and all I wanted to do was invite you out for a snack. What would you like to eat?
She sounded doubtful. Well, I love them jumbo shrimps they have in the Chinese restaurants.
All right. We’ll have jumbo shrimps.
But I don’t know if I’m able for them this minute. I think I’d prefer to go to the Greeks for a salad.
All right. I’ll see you there.
She came into the restaurant gasping for breath and when I kissed her cheek I could taste the salt of her sweat. She said she’d have to sit a minute before she could even think of food, that if she hadn’t given up the cigarettes she’d be dead now.
She ordered the feta salad and when I asked her if she liked it she said she loved it, she could live on it.
Do you like that cheese?
What cheese?
The goat cheese.
What goat cheese?
The white stuff. The feta. That’s goat cheese.
’Tis not.
’Tis.
Well, if I knew that was goat cheese I’d never touch it because I was attacked by a goat once out the country in Limerick and I’d never eat a thing that attacked me.
It’s a good thing, I told her, you were never attacked by a jumbo shrimp.