A Morality Question

At times I go looking through old journals and on occasions I find some entry I wrote (and maybe all of them are this way) after I thought I had reached some special sort of understanding about myself or my situation in the world. In looking back on these entries I know this is foolish, however understanding is a tricky thing. What is the thing I am talking about and is it really that particular thing I think I have come to understand. Here is an example:

{no date...this is unusual because I usually date everything}
"? re: Voice. I feel I am gaining an understanding of good vocal technique but losing my sense of music somehow. i am also gaining insights into my own psychology which seem to have nothing to do with vocal technique per se, e.g., "nigger lips". I had not even thought of that for twenty years. Is this a kind of hidden handicap? I was talking to N... yesterday (10 July 2005) and it occured (sic) to me what Balachine {(sic) this is a reference to the great choreographer George Balanchine} meant when he told a woman in response to a question about whether her daughter would dance; "C'est une quéstion morale." A morality question? That means that her daughter could not become a dancer unless she (the daughter) committed herself to the morality of the dance. Is not morality a commitment of faith to the rule of an order? One then marries oneself to one's order, like a priest to his church, or a monarch to his country."

There is a "back story" to this. I take voice lessons. I took voice lessons for a very long time and then I stopped for a number of years, then took them up again. I take voice lessons because I like to sing. I am not sure I am a very good singer, but I have received compliments and I enjoy it. More importantly, and no one seems to believe me when I tell them this, it is a form of discipline to me, self-discipline, which I think I need. I have also taken and taught dance. Dance is another form of self-discipline for me, including teaching. I like the 'morality' of the disciplines. In July of 2005, exactly one year ago, I was having a voice lesson and my teacher told me to do something and I tried to do it but didn't succeed because, and he noticed this, that I seemed to have a lot of muscle tension in my lips.

I have had a lot of voice teachers but this is the only teacher I have ever had who can tell what I am doing without being able to see my face. I tested this one day by turning my back on him and doing whatever exercise he was asking me to do and he told me exactly what I was doing wrong. He knew without seeing my face where the tension was, how my tongue was placed, whether I was relaxed in the way that he requires, etc. When I asked him how he could do this, he said, "I can feel it." Needless to say, I was very impressed.

On the particular day in question, I seemed to have a lot of muscle tension in my lips, and he noticed. He said, "you seem to be trying to pull your lips in, or hide them or something." Oh dear!

What came flooding back into my mind almost made me cry, so I tried to laugh instead, jumped around for a few moments in what must have looked like a bit of a seizure or what we used to call a "spaz dance". My voice teacher is used to seeing such things, so he just waited until I came to rest and asked me what had just happened. I was embarrassed and had a very hard time telling him what had come creeping back into my mind.

It is even difficult to write about it now. So this is like a confession but I do not know to whom the sin belongs. Here is the history.

When I first went to school, I knew how to read. No one else in my class seemed to know how to read, and I thought it may have upset my kindergarten teacher. I now think a lot of things about me upset my kindergarten teacher. On one January day shortly after Christmas break, I brought some of my Christmas presents to school; one present was a book and the book was a rather complicated story with rabbits as the main characters. Just a book with a story about rabbits. It wasn't a Beatrix Potter book, nor was it a book about the Easter Bunny. It was just a story that had rabbits instead of humans as the heros and villians. And it was something I could bring for show and tell and, I thought, maybe have the teacher read, or allow me to read, to the class.

So when I came to class with my book, I asked the teacher if she would read it to the class. I told her I had already read it at home and that I thought it was quite good. She looked at it rather absent-mindedly and told me to bring it back and maybe we could read it at Easter. But, I protested, it wasn't an Easter book, it was just a book about rabbits. No, she was very firm, bring it back at Easter. But she didn't give it back to me to bring it back at Easter. She took it and put it on a shelf which no kindergartner could reach and started the regular class. This last action really puzzled me as you might imagine because she had told me to bring it back at Easter and then she didn't give it back so I could bring it back.

As a back-up share and tell item, I had also brought some toy cars to school. There were about twenty of them and they were all made in the same scale and underneath were labeled with whatever sort of automobile they were supposed to represent, and they were very accurate representations. During one of our recesses I took the cars out to the play area with a girl named Paula with blond braids who always seemed to wear plaid dresses with white collars. Sometimes a red plaid and sometimes a green or blue plaid, but always with a white collar. She and I were very good friends; she seemed to get into more trouble than any of the other girls for some reason. Maybe the teacher didn't like her either. Maybe the teacher didn't like Paula because Paula and I were friends. I do not know.

After the recess I packed up all my cars and put them into the special box they had come in and took them into the classroom and put them carefully under my table. Because Paula sat next to me she could tell me how much she really enjoyed playing with the cars during recess. The kindergarten teacher heard her telling me this and told her she had to stand in the corner until she was sorry she had spoken during class. Then the girl who sat across from me said something to me about Paula standing in the corner and the teacher heard her too but for some reason did not make her stand in the corner. The teacher then told me that I had to put my cars in a different place than under my table and showed me where they had to go which wasn't in the same place as my book. In fact, the book couldn't be reached or seen by any of the kindergarteners, but the cars I was told to put on a shelf where all the educational toys, puzzles, blocks and regular kindergarten books were, as if they were to be put there so the entire class could share them. Honestly, I didn't mind putting them there, I brought them for sharing. But then, after class was over, a strange thing happened.

After the bell rang and all the students were gathering their share and tell things and their coats and bags, a student named Douggy picked up all my tiny cars except for one miniature Ford pick-up truck which he took out of the special box, and started out the door with them. I immediately intercepted him and angrily asked him what he thought he was doing with my cars. He told me he "wanted them" and that was all there was to it. I wasn't going to allow him to proceed so I yelled for the teacher and told her that "Douggy was taking my cars!" And then another odd thing happened. The teacher came over and told me to let Douggy have the cars. Why? I asked angrily, should I let Douggy have my favorite Christmas present?

I honestly cannot remember what the teacher told me except something about Douggy not having anything to share and tell about. And she restrained me until Douggy had left the school. I alternated crying and screaming all the way home, but the closer I got to my house the angrier I got and when I reached the safety of our living room, I was probably red in the face with anger and my mother asked me what was wrong. When I told her what had happened and could she do anything, she just seemed to get very calm and perhaps a little sadly said, never mind, just don't take anything else you like to school.

I was astounded, to say the least. My mother was tough. And I am not talking about a kindergartner's point of view. She was tough and quite capable of battle. When my older sister had gotten in trouble for calling one of the other girls in her class a bitch, my sister had been sent home in tears and my mother got a call from the principal telling her exactly what had transpired. "Did you know your daughter called (let's call her Jane) a bitch?!" "Yes," my mother replied reasonably, "my daughter told me what happened." "Well," demanded the principal, "don't you think she should apologize to (Jane)?" Without a pause, my mother replied, "I don't know. Is she a bitch?" I know my sister returned to school without any further incident other than she and the other girl were kept well apart. My mother was tough.

There was something I did not know about the world.

My parents made no effort to recover my little cars and it was clear from the moment it happened that the teacher was not going to make any effort to recover them either. What had actually transpired here? I even asked my brother if he understood what was going on but he also could shed no light on the situation. But I did have the one little toy to remind me of the incident. Whenever I looked at that little truck, I recalled with full force, the complete injustice of the situation and even today I am not sure what exactly transpired. But here is my guess.

My family is mixed ethnically and over the years, I have heard comments at different times from different people that alluded to that facet of my heritage. Because my appearance and the appearance of my family is in no way unusual, there is no way to tell from the surface that we are anything but anglo-saxon. But if the subject comes up, and I am surprised how often it does come up, the mention of the latin side has sometimes brought out a side of people I am not sure I would have believed existed if I had not had the experience.

There are actually several examples; my favorite story about this sort of thing happened to me at a friend's house. I had spent many hours over time enjoying these people's company. One afternoon my friend's mother started talking about people belonging to my ethnic group sometimes rather disparagingly and she got more disparaging as she warmed up. My friend made several attempts to slow her down and only succeeded in stopping her when he finally shouted at her that I was indeed a member of that group. There was a rather long silence which was finally broken by his grandmother who said rather dryly, "you are not." When I replied in the affirmative she said, not without humor, "well!.....I let one in my house!" She also told me that being part anglo "saved me". The disturbing part of this to me, happened when I asked his mother what kind of bad experiences she had had with members of "those people". She told me she had never had any bad experiences because she never knew any. That is true prejudice. No direct knowledge, only rumor and some kind of strange floating reputation inform a person's attitude. Another like incident happened one day while members of my college world religions class were waiting for the professor to arrive.

It was a beautiful spring morning and many people had arrived early to read or drink coffee or just chat. Somehow the subject of ethnic backgrounds came up and while I was a member of the conversation, it seemed to me that when people were describing their backgrounds there was a kind of sameness about them. One older woman, who had told us about her desire to change her life by re-entering college and the work world after her divorce, told everyone her anglo-teutonic background all the while smiling and saying "how cool", "how neat" when people said they came from Northern European backgrounds. She seemed genuinely intrigued by mixtures of English/French or German/French or Dutch/German/Czech. I was really just listening when she asked me in a kind of breathlessly happy voice, "and what are you?" When I told her, the smile faded and she literally took a step backward away from me saying, "did you know they married black people?" She didn't say being part anglo saved me.

Was my Oklahoma-born kindergarten teacher (oh yes, I remember) a bigot? A racist? I do not know. This only occurred to me much later as a possibility. Was this the reason my mother had been cowed so easily? I do not know. And that is the nature of this strange beast. The recipient is almost never sure. What I do know is this: after that day, I hated "poor little Douggy", and he was the first person I heard call me "nigger lips".

I am glad I had read my book before that day in kindergarten because that was also never returned.