Merry just finished shouting out Roald Dahl from her bed upstairs, where she's been reading every book the man ever wrote in quick succession over the last couple weeks. When she comes to one of Dahl's cunning, rhyming ditties, she always yells the lines to establish the rhythm. It takes me back to high school, when our literature teacher had us line up and march, shouting as if we were in boot camp: My HEART leaps UP when I beHOLD a RAINbow IN the SKY. So WAS it THEN when I was YOUNG; so WILL it BE when I am OLD!
That particular literature teacher, who had been sent to Kenya by the Assemblies of God, was the most excellent of teachers. I say this despite two offenses: a memorable, hateful comment about gay people, and her failure to read or award a grade for my independent study, which was a novel I had written in the style of E.M. Forster after reading every book of his the library had, (which, ironically, excluded Maurice--I had to read that one after returning to the US). This teacher, slim, with long wavy hair, and a thin, precise looking face, was probably not all that much older than I am now, but to me then, she seemed like a career single woman. She didn't play favorites as much as some of the other teachers, like another AOG (Assemblies of God) woman who had taught me literature the year before (and terribly boring grammar) and oversaw the yearbook staff and who luckily liked me.
The AOG teachers were generally better than the Baptist teachers in our school full mostly of missionary kids, though we did enjoy some diversity from children of other, nonreligous expatriates, including kids from Eritrea, Zambia, and Ethiopia who apparently valued an American education and testing in order to make transition to US Universities easier. The Mennonite teachers were by far the most sensible and interesting--there were several Millers, including the superb music teacher who made us memorize a hymn every week and whose wall read: Can't never did anything until he took off his tail and became Can. I never really understood that saying though I carried it in my head forever after; how could a word have a tail? I was all for personification in general, but Can't becoming Can in an seemingly meaningless omission of a body part seemed absurd.
The AOG teachers were a breed unto themselves. They believed in second baptism by the holy spirit (the first was by water, of course), and encouraged speaking in tongues, though I never heard any of them bust out the tongues during school. Our chaplain was AOG and we had sat (or raised compliant hands) through numerous altar calls and heeded his warnings that the devil was a lion seeking to devour one of us.
The female AOG teachers lived on a compound together. When we visited, I was astonished that everything in their houses, from toilet paper to door handles, had been imported from the US. Visiting them was like stepping into an air conditioned Georgia suburban house. One teacher's bathroom even sported a special roll of tissue; every perforated cube bore a different FarSide cartoon. I'd only seen deep carpets with matching drapes like this in the JC Penney catalogs my grandmother would send back with my dad from America on one of his trips.
I'd had a few literature teachers before Miss Middleton. The first I remember well was a thin Baptist woman with dark patches on her face who warned us to skip the Edgar Allen Poe story in our anthology. The Telltale Heart was dark and of the devil. She leaned over her desk and said, in a quiet voice edged with sadness, "You may read it if you wish, but I don't recommend it." I think she was grieved because although she'd offered us her best advice, she knew some of us would foolishly engage in bad judgment and read it anyhow. We capped that year by rewriting the end of "Romeo and Juliet" so everything was okay; Romeo and Juliet didn't end in juvenile tragedy but lived on in love. I'm sure I rewrote it with the rest of the class, and while I breezed through and skirted around the edges of Poe, I never actually sat down and read the story. Back then I was a good kid who wanted to please her teachers, and I guess I'm still that way, though I hope I've been able to pump my moral courage with some wisdom by this point.
Fast forward some years and I'm a senior in Miss Middleton's AP Literature class. She has us read and read and read and she is a perfect stickler for passive verbs and sloppy sentences. She docks us points for every passive verb we utilize until we write so actively our figurative hair blows in the wind of our brilliance. (She would have hated that last silly metaphor, by the way). I read Wuthering Heights and fall deeply in love with all the dark drama--I end up writing my AP essay on the ending of Bronte's novel--Heathcliff and the moors fit plumb with the rather violent, shadowy phase in my own writing (barring the E.M. Forster novel). But Miss Middleton does not treat me like the genius I think I am; she discards my dramatic poetry for one clear-headed, simple piece that I write one day while staring at a painting, which portrays a Spanish man about to be executed. I can still see the strong colors of that painting in my mind, the astonished eyes of the doomed man in his white shirt, arms flung wide, as he looks at the cold, exploding line of the firing squad.**
Perhaps my best memory of Miss Middleton is when she perched on the edge of her desk and summoned us all to gather close. Then, in a breezy classroom in our school full of missionary kids and conservative teachers, she cracked Chaucer and read us The Miller's Tale, unabridged and unedited, with farts flying forth and all the splendid vulgarity old Chaucer could muster!
By the time I stumbled onto a college campus one year later in a suburb of Chicago, I was ready for three-hundred level courses. And thanks to Miss Middleton, I could write a literary analysis that was as tight as a clam. But more than this, during that last year in Kenya, my heart had leapt into a world of stories and words so magnificent that my imagination would never be the same.
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**(I have been trying to identify this painting and the painter and have not been able to--can anyone out there illuminate me? I could sketch it for you--badly--but the title I remembered was a Manet painting and not the right one at all).
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