UNCIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

I had to be in the band room because I played a cornet in the band, and the band room that particular year was Mrs. Gravitts' room. I knew Mrs. Gravitts was a terror from way back because my saintly sister didn't even like her. In fact, she and her equally saintly friends got so mad at Mrs. Gravitts one day that they "broke into" the school late one Friday (which means that they went in the unlocked doors when the janitors were still there) and turned over her wastebaskets. Julie and her bunch weren't too bright in the field of vandalism and didn't have a shining future as aspiring hoodlums because they never once considered that because of the janitors who got to Mrs. Gravitts' room late in the day, Mrs. Gravitts would never even know of the offenses against her. All they knew was that they were mad at her for whipping one of the poor kids, so they cast all caution to the wind and let their ire have its way. It was their first and last strike as far as I know. It was hard for me to understand these girls: they had worked their worst upon an offending society, wreaked uncivil disobedience upon a public school teacher's classroom on a weekend, had never gotten caught, and yet unlike most red-blooded kids in their prime, they did not seem to find their success as outlaws even the least bit titillating so as to be lured stealthily but surely into bigger and better criminality. This had been enough for them, thank you very much.

Well, I say they didn't get caught because they didn't-- by the school, that is. The only one to catch them was me, who happened to be playing on the school grounds when I spotted them and jumped on my bike and peddled home as fast as my six-year-old legs would take me to tell Mother and Daddy. Already at six I was tired of having a corner on the market on spankings from our daddy's belt. When Julie stepped out into sin's arena, I took no chances that she would make it a habit and seized the opportunity to initiate her into the fellowship of suffering. My parents didn't do much, though, except send her back up to the school to clean up her mess. On the other hand, they both lit into me and at the same time started yammering some far-out nonsense about a black pot and kettle.

Julie and her friends were right about Mrs. G. I knew first rattle out of the box that this lady was going to make for an interminably long fifth-grade year. She clacked her false teeth to scare us, yelled at us when she was in a good mood, and beat everybody with her paddle, blackened from years of carnage, when she was in any other kind of mood. She'd take kids out in the hall, bend them over, rare back, and with a loud grunt, throw her full weight behind the force of that board and smile only when the offender on the other end of the paddle cried out or lost his or her footing and went sliding across the floor and banged into the wall. You learned right off the bat to do that quick so that she would sate her sadism after one or two whacks rather than keeping you out there all day till your clothes were beaten into tatters.

Most of the time the one getting snatched out for something was a kid named Jesse Pugh, who had no business being in Mrs. Gravitts' room because he was not in the band, and he didn't have any business being in the fifth grade because he was about twenty His little brother Arnie, who was in there, too, was also not in the band, but he was at least the right age. Jesse would make his hair greasy on purpose, punch holes in the pittypat balls with his knife, and spit over the retaining wall on the second graders. But probably the reason he had failed all those years was that he wouldn't come to school more than three or four days a month. I figured the principal had assigned him to Mrs. Gravitts because she was the only teacher mean enough to control him. But Jesse wasn't the only one Mrs. Gravitts enjoyed whipping.

The very month school started, I got stupid when I was getting my whipping. It was picture day, and Mother had made me wear a dress with five ruffledy petticoats, and when Mrs. Gravitts lit into me, I couldn't feel a thing. Shoot, I wouldn't have even known she had started in on me if I hadn't heard her back there grunting and chomping her false teeth. What I did next was dumber than even something a third grader would have done: I laughed. Well, I learned, and you should too, don't ever laugh in this situation with a person like this because that was her cue to crank it up into high gear and opt for the throwing-me-against-the-wall tactic. She knew I had on prissy girl shoes without a wide base, so she had the advantage here.

On that particular day, I was having all kinds of trouble with the tenth commandment. Tina Farnsworth had just gotten a brand new blue coat with a rabbit collar, which she wore to school on this rare cool snap in September. She was a girly-girl with big baby doll eyes, long eyelashes, and curly hair. I didn't care about all that; I was a dedicated tomboy who had to be threatened or bribed every day to let my mother comb the tangles out of my hair and had never even noticed that people had eyelashes before everybody started making such a big deal over Tina's. I had absolutely no desire to look girlish.

Connie LaFevre did though. She was so jealous of the way Tina looked and upset that she didn't look anything like that at all that her mother finally had to resort to casting false aspersions on Tina by telling Connie that Tina's eyes were too close together. This wasn't really the truth at all, but this was when the whole world was nuts over Jacqueline Kennedy whose eyes were about four feet apart, so folks kept falling prey to making unfair comparisons. Then Connie lost it one day with Tina for being the teacher's pet and told her what her mother had said. Then Tina went and told her mother what Connie's mother had said. In a town the size of Azalea Heights, the grown ups really needed to get along because they had to play bridge together and go to PTA. I guess the only thing that kept all of them from killing each other was that they could always blame us kids by saying that we misunderstood what they had said. This was a lot like the excuses we used just to go ahead and do something we knew we shouldn't. On the rare occasion that I would balk at doing something I shouldn't, my best friend, Carla Nations, would shrug her shoulders and pronounce, "We're young. We don't know any better."

I don't know that I was as covetous about Tina's new coat as I was just plain fed up with her being such a perfect little lady in practically every way, so I made a plan to take a little of the shine off her silvery world the next day. I went home that night and got one of the hypodermic needles my daddy had given me from his hospital so that I could practice being a doctor on an orange and took it to school where I filled it up with ink. Me and Dixie Ruth Foster, Mary Nell Bobbitt, and Prudence Mahoney proceeded to take turns going to sharpen our pencils, and while there we would shoot ink all over Tina's rabbit collar coat. This is why I was outside on picture day getting knocked against the wall in a dress with five petticoats.

It occurs to me that religion was not working with me at that point in my life. Sunday school and church were not taking. I was easily irritated into vengeance for little reason; I was totally untamed and rebellious toward the chief authority figure of my Monday-Friday, September-May ten-year-old world; and my mind was fearfully quick and acute at devising evil. It looked for all the world that I would have gotten just as much good out of crawfishing or climbing in under the cracked foundation of the old cotton gin and braving the drunken bums on Sunday mornings as I was getting sitting there all dressed up with the First Methodists. No sirree. The church was definitely not going to be enough to scare the devil out of this kid.

From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights, by Jan Doke, © Jan Doke, 2009)