There Are No Children Here (11 page)

Ms. Daigre, though, is not universally loved. Some mothers complain that she is too quick to judge their children, that she often plays favorites. Some have even transferred their children to other neighborhood schools, where, they hope, their children won’t be written off as “bad students.” On occasion, teachers have protected children from Ms. Daigre. At least one teacher thinks twice before sending a particular student to the principal’s office for fear that Ms. Daigre’s punishment will far exceed the crime.

There are also elements beyond Ms. Daigre’s control. Like other big-city schools, Suder has experienced financial constraints. Its art and music classes were cut in 1980. Its one counselor must administer the Iowa Tests, maintain the students’ medical records, and set up career day for the eighth-graders, leaving little time for counseling the school’s seven hundred students. Also, Suder must share a nurse and psychologist with three other schools and a social worker with four others.

Suder has another problem common to most urban elementary schools. Of its thirty-eight teachers, only a handful are men. In a community where positive male role models are scarce, school is one of the few places where children could come into regular contact with an employed man who is not a police officer. (An estimated 85 percent of the households at Horner are headed by women.) The lack of male teachers was felt so acutely at Suder that when the school was awarded extra funds by the city, teachers suggested they be used to hire more male teachers.

It was the first day back from school after the strike, and Diana F. Barone, forty, strode into her fourth-grade classroom. Her students fluttered around her like baby robins angling for a worm.

“Where you been?”

“D’you get your money?”

“Sure happy you back.”

The questions and comments came at her fast and furious. They made her feel good. Everyone, students and teachers alike, were glad the strike was finally over.

Ms. Barone, who had recently gotten married and was still known to her students by her maiden name, Ms. Fecarotta (some students combined the two and called her Ms. Fecarone), had begun teaching at Suder sixteen years earlier, and, while she hadn’t lost her enthusiasm for teaching, she had become a bit leery of investing as much energy and time as she once did. In her early years, it wasn’t unusual for her to spend $500 of her own money to buy books and supplies for her students. She had since become more frugal. Each year, she decorated her four bulletin boards with posters on reading and with
essays
written by students. One board, she devoted to phonics and displayed large punctuation marks. She dressed them in sneakers and hats. To conserve money, though, she had the characters laminated so that she could use them year after year. She also retained various other bulletin board material, some of which dated back sixteen years.

Ms. Barone tired of the large classes, which at one point swelled to as many as thirty-four students—they now numbered around twenty-five—and of the funding cutbacks. And she worried so much about her children, many of whom came in tired or sad or distracted, that she eventually developed an ulcerated colon.

The relentless violence of the neighborhood also wore her down. The parking lot behind the school had been the site of numerous gang battles. When the powerful sounds of .357 Magnums and sawed-off shotguns echoed off the school walls, the streetwise students slid off their chairs and huddled under their desks. The children had had no “duck and cover” drills, as in the early 1960s, when the prospect of a nuclear war with Cuba and the Soviet Union threatened the nation. This was merely their sensible reaction to the possibility of bullets flying through the window. Ms. Barone, along with other teachers, placed the back of her chair against a pillar so that there would be a solid object between herself and the window.

She dreaded the walk each morning and afternoon from and to her car. She no longer wore jewelry or carried her leather purse. Instead, she used a cheap plastic handbag. She regularly slipped her paycheck into her bra before making the short trek to her car.

But none of this had depleted Ms. Barone’s tremendous energy. A short, spunky woman, she spoke so rapidly that it sometimes sounded as if someone had turned up the rpm. She was always in motion. In the previous year’s school talent show, she and three other teachers had dressed up as the California Raisins, in costumes of black garbage bags, black pants, white gloves, and enormous sunglasses. They entered the auditorium boogying to the tune “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Ms. Barone always looked as if she were boogying.

As if to compensate for her free-spirited personality, Ms. Barone turned to her military training—two years in the Marines and three years in the Air Force reserve—to help maintain order in the classroom. And on this first day of school, she explained to her students that they had to follow a set procedure for getting to their desks. They must, she informed them, march single file to the back of the room and then down the appropriate aisle. If a student took home a book, the next morning he or she had to place it on the upper right-hand corner of the desk. Children could go to the bathroom no more than twice a day, and then only as an entire class; they could dispose of garbage only on the way out of the classroom.

“The kids want this orderliness,” Ms. Barone reasoned. “They appreciate it. They like it. It gives them a sense of being in an environment that is safe and comfortable.”

On the first day of school, Ms. Barone had the students introduce themselves. When it was Pharoah’s turn, she noticed his stammering. “M-m-mymy name … m-m-my name is Pharoah Rivers,” he told the class. She was struck by his determination. The words came hard sometimes, but that didn’t stop him. Ms. Barone urged Pharoah to slow down, to take his time talking. But Pharoah’s stutter that year, as his family ran into a series of problems, would only worsen.

Ms. Barone had an unusually talented fourth-grade class this year. Her top student was Clarise Gates, one of seven sisters
attending Suder. The girls were well known at the school for their collective smarts; the seven of them had already won over a hundred awards. Clarise was the third oldest. Ms. Barone was taken with Clarise’s maturity; she seemed much older than the others. Ms. Barone had her tutor other students.

And then there was Pharoah. He flourished under Ms. Barone’s rigid discipline and high energy—and Ms. Barone, despite promises to herself to treat all students alike, quickly came to treasure Pharoah. “You try to treat everyone the same, no matter how partial you feel,” Ms. Barone would say in explaining her philosophy about teaching. “But Pharoah’s special. I’ll always have a little soft spot for Pharoah.”

Ms. Barone quickly learned that Pharoah, despite his stuttering, liked to talk in class. Sometimes he would answer questions out of turn; at other times he would simply start up conversation with his neighbor, often smack in the middle of a lesson. In all likelihood, Pharoah talked and moved freely at school because he felt protected there. With a sense of security comes comfort, and Pharoah, who in the streets often seemed withdrawn and flighty, livened up at school. There he gossiped and played with a freeness he rarely exhibited outside. Later in the year, his classroom chatter got so out of hand that Ms. Barone had to call in LaJoe to talk with her about it.

Ms. Barone insisted that Pharoah sit in the front row next to her desk so that she could keep an eye on him. Pharoah relished the idea. He would be sitting at the head of the class, next to the teacher and the blackboard.

Because of his size, Pharoah was often picked on by the other children. Once, in the middle of a test, a girl sitting next to him hit him on the neck with a spitball. Pharoah screeched, and then, to the delight of his classmates, hollered, “Old girl be hitting me! Old girl stop it.” Everyone in the class broke out in laughter. Pharoah was always referring to others as “old girl” and “old boy,” even the adults, and it never failed, though he couldn’t fathom why, to tickle everyone who heard him.

Pharoah often asked Ms. Barone to let him help collect papers in the class or to run errands to the principal’s office, anything that might give him some responsibility. He was earnest about everything, from talking to his neighbors to finishing his schoolwork.

But Pharoah most endeared himself to his teacher and his classmates by his imagination and writing. He loved words. He’d remember names of places like Ontonagon River and Agate Falls because he liked the way they sounded. When he could, he’d play Scrabble with friends, spelling out words like
motel
and
quake
. He was so proficient at spelling that later in the year, Ms. Barone would choose him to compete in the annual spelling bee, one of the school’s biggest honors.

The class was once asked to write an essay entitled “My Pet Monster,” and Pharoah’s composition won him classroom raves. He wrote about a monster who, like himself, had an uncontrollable sweet tooth. Pharoah knew that candy and cakes and soda pop were bad for him, but he couldn’t help himself. Sometimes his face would break out. If he couldn’t stop, at least he could laugh at himself—and that’s what he did in his essay. Ms. Barone asked Pharoah to read it to the class. He stuttered only occasionally, racing through parts of it, thinking that if he did so he wouldn’t trip over any words. It also helped that he was reading and didn’t have to think about what he was going to say.

Once I had a pet and his name was “My Pet Monster” and he loved sugar milk more than any other thing. He always was getting into trouble, and every time he get into trouble I’ll lock him up with some hand cups and then he’ll try to con me to let him out but I wouldn’t until a certain time.

One day the stores had closed down for a week. Then “My Pet Monster” found out the stores were closed down and started thinking, he started thinking about his sugar milk. He started running around everywhere to find out if a store was open in the town. He found out there was no store open in the town. “My Pet Monster” was unhappy and he didn’t talk to nobody. That’s how unhappy he was.

The week passed and the stores were now open and “My Pet Monster” was the first to enter the store. He got two gallons of milk and two quarts of sugar, and “My Pet Monster” said “the only reason I got two of each so if the stores closed I will have an extra gallon and wouldn’t have to worry.”

The kids laughed uproariously at the tale, and Ms. Barone brought it home that evening to read to her husband. She then
tacked it to one of the bulletin boards, where all the students and passing teachers could see it. It was a treasured moment for Pharoah, who had often been teased about his studiousness. Some students called him a nerd; others made fun of his buck teeth. The taunting upset Pharoah—and he knew he wouldn’t always be able to deflect it with humorous stories. Early that school year, though, he found a friend who helped keep his tormentors at bay.

Eight

   
PHAROAH FIRST MET RICKEY at school, where they were classmates. Rickey asked Pharoah for a favor. Rickey had developed a crush on Pharoah’s cousin Dede. “Pharoah,” he said one day at school, “ask Dede if she’d go out with me.” Pharoah giggled, delighted to be entrusted with such a task. When he delivered the message to Dede, she told him, “No way.”

“Ask her again,” Rickey implored. Pharoah did, and this time Dede said she would date Rickey, at least give it a try. Before
too long, graffiti began appearing in Pharoah’s building:
RICKEY LS DEDE
. Rickey and Pharoah became friends after that.

Rickey, whom the adults called Richard, lived in Henry Horner with his mother, Gloria, and a younger brother and two older sisters. His father had left when Rickey was three, and the boy last saw him two years ago.

Rickey lived just two buildings west of Pharoah, but his house seemed much farther away, because it was on the other side of Damen Avenue. Damen acts as the dividing line between the Vice Lords’ and the Disciples’ turfs. It also divides the housing complex in half. Although younger children freely cross the four-lane street, teenagers and even adults take considerable care in crossing the gang boundary. Most children living west of Damen, in what is called the “new projects” because the buildings were a second stage of Horner, don’t hang out at the Boys Club, which is in Vice Lords’ territory. Rickey lived one building west of Damen; Pharoah, two buildings east of the line.