Reverence(Barry) Darcy Rainey, an older black woman who taught advanced math classes and coached the girls’ track and field team at Riverton High School, poked her head in the doorway. “Got a minute, Alex?” Darcy stepped into the English teacher’s cramped office, easing the door shut behind her. In her late sixties the matronly woman, who was retiring in the spring, already boasted two grandchildren with a third on the way.

Alex Fulton glanced up from a cluttered desk just as the bell clamored shrilly signaling end of the period, and a torrent of teenage students flooded the corridors on their way to the next class.“What can I do for you?”

“It’s not a matter of what you can do for me,” she said cryptically before slumping into a straight-backed chair. “Did a third-year student, Julio Sanchez, meet with you earlier this week?”

“That insufferable fool?” Alex replied. “He came by with a contingent of disgruntled Hispanic students, insisting that I stop teaching classics like Gabriel García Márquez or Cervantes in favor of Pedro Hernandez.”

“An author who I know nothing about,” Darcy returned.

The commotion in the hallway died away as the students disappeared into their assigned classes. “A shitty contemporary writer of Dominican heritage, who glorifies kids bunking school, shoplifting and perverted sex.”

“Apparently Alex didn’t appreciate your response because he’s registered a formal complaint with the DEI representative.”

“Melba Jackson?” Darcy nodded. “Which still doesn’t explain how a woman who teaches algebra and trigonometry would know much of anything about my dealings with Pedro Hernandez.”

“I was correcting tests in the teachers’ lounge earlier today, when I overheard Melba chatting with one of the other minority staff about the incident. Apparently she’s already sided with the disaffected Hispanics and plans to confront you.” When there was no immediate response, Darcey reached across the desk and patted Alex playfully on the wrist. “Melba Jackson is a nitwit… a dark-skinned buffoon.” “She’s a nitwit not because of the color of her skin,” Darcy qualified, “but because the day she was born God was in a hurry doling out brains and skipped right over the unfortunate creature.”

Alex cracked a complicit grin. “Probably hasn’t read a solitary book since leaving elementary school.”
”And yet, all the black girls at Riverton admire her swagger and brash assurance even though she’s no role model, just the opposite.” Darcy scowled before her features eventually settled into a sober expression. “So what are you going to do?”

“Wait until she confronts me and stand my ground. The third-rate Dominican author, Pedro Hernandez, will never see the light of day in my classroom.”

*****

Three days later Melba stopped by Alex’s classroom at the end of classes. Alex glanced briefly at the woman. She was wearing a turquoise print dress in dashiki style with platform shoes that lifted her tall, lithe frame an additional three inches. Her clothes were all haute couture, purchased off the rack at chic fashion boutiques in downtown Boston. “Next Monday starts Afro-American Cultural Heritage Week. What were you planning?”

“I’ll be reading from Zorah Hurston and some of Nikki Giovanni’s poetry.” When there was no reply, Alex added, “Giovanni dates back to the psychedelic sixties and the ‘black-is-beautiful’ trend that was sweeping the country at the time.” “With Hurston we’ll focus mostly on her unique approach to language and phonetics.”

Melba blinked and her eyes clouded over. Totally out of her element the women hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. “Julio Sanchez stopped by to see you earlier this week?”

“He wants to revamp the curriculum.”

“He only asked that you add a Dominican writer to your reading list,” Melba countered.

“The writer, Pedro Hernandez, favors foul language and graphic sex. His plots are paper thin – no pun intended, and I wouldn’t teach such literary crap if he was the last Hispanic writer on the planet.” “Julio Sanchez is a C-student, who misses as many days in the classroom as he shows up for.” Alex could picture the wiry youth with his wispy goatee, mop of unruly brown hair and habitual indignation. “He spends most of the time in the classroom either staring out the window or surfing the internet on his cell phone which he hides under his vest. Julio doesn’t give a rat’s ass for Hispanic literature; he’s just a radical troublemaker.”

“As a member of a disadvantaged minority, his opinion counts for nothing?”

“Now you’re playing the race card.”

Melba Jackson glowered at him in mute rage. “We will put Julio’s reasonable request aside for the moment.” Melba stepped closer and, with her knuckles resting on the desk, positioned her face within inches of the English teacher. “As chairperson for the DEI committee, I’ve set up curriculum guidelines for the Afro-American Cultural Heritage Week that everyone without exception must follow.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Every instructor is mandated under the new guidelines to include at least one example of critical race theory and an additional reading on diversity, equity and inclusion.” Melba fixed Alex with a menacing stare. “Any questions?”

“Not at this time, but as you can see I have some educational business of my own to attend to.” A Hispanic girl clutching a loose-leaf binder stood waiting just outside the door.

“The DEI coursework is mandatory,” Melba lowered her voice, “so there’s no way of weaseling out.”

“Succinct choice of words,” he replied as the woman swept from the room without giving the bewildered student even a cursory glance. Alex took a deep breath to calm his bristling nerves. “Come in Adelina and take a seat.”

*****

Adelina Sanchez had emigrated with her parents five years earlier from a small Mexican village south of Guadalajara. Several months earlier the girl sought Alex out after classes let out. “I want to be a writer.”

“What type of writing?”

“Short fiction, essays… I don’t know.” The girl fidgeted with her thin fingers. She was short and willowy with a solemn expression and dark-frame glasses. The wide, flat cheeks and fleshy nose reminded Alex of her Mayan ancesters. In class she was clever enough and always had the correct answer on the tip of her tongue but seldom if ever volunteered here thoughts. “With English as a second language, it’s difficult to say what’s in my heart.”

“You’re grammar is better than three-quarters of the students in the class,” Alex chuckled, “and they have no reasonable excuses being born here.”

“I wrote a short story,” the girl shifted gears.

“And you’d like me to look at it.”

She shook her head vigorously. Reaching into a backpack, she withdrew a handful of typed pages and handed them to the teacher. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

“It’s no trouble at all,” he returned. “How’s your mother.”

Adelina pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “Still embarrassed about what happened last week.”

Alex smiled faintly and shook his head. “No one was to blame.”

*****

The previous Wednesday was parent-teachers day. At four o’clock when Alex gazed out into the hallway a line of parents stretched twenty feet almost to the teacher’s lounge. At the front of the line, Adelina Sanchez stood next to a squat, brown-skinned woman with a careworn expression and a rather large gold cross dangling from her neck.

“My father wanted to come,” Adelina explained in a hushed tone, “but the cleaning service he works for sent him to an office building late this afternoon. My mother’s English isn’t very good so I -”

“Come right in.” Alex made a sweeping gestured with an outstretched arm.

“Your daughter, Adelina, is a fine student with a solid ‘A’ average,” Alex began once they were settled. “I wish she would participate more in the group discussions, but that’s just a minor concern.” Glancing up, Alex noticed that Mrs. Morales was thumping her daughter on the forearm and whispering in her own language.

“No hay problema,” Adelina spoke distinctly. “There is no problem in class.”

Turning to her teacher, she added, “My mother’s English is somewhat limited.”

Somewhat limited. Alex didn’t think the woman understood much of anything he had said in the past five minutes, but still she smiled graciously and put up a good front. He displayed some paperwork, standard fare, indicating that Adelina placed near the top in the class standing then spoke about her participation in an extracurricular program for would-be writers.

Since the line outside his door had snaked well past the teacher’s lounge, Alex had to bring closure, wrap things up. “Your daughter may speak English as a second language, but she has a better grasp of both grammar and spelling than many of the kids who were born here, which is quite an accomplishment.”

“Qué dijo?” Mrs. Morales asked. She was exultant, beaming with gratitude, but when her daughter interpreted the teacher’s remarks, she suddenly burst into tears.

“No llores! No llores!” Adelina grabbed a handful of tissues from a carton on the desk and wiped embarrassedly at her mother’s tears. Once calm, she kissed the woman’s cheek and rubbed the residual dampness away with the heel of a hand. “Hearing about my success only makes her feel all the more inadequate for not learning to speak the new language.”

*****

Alex had Adelina’s story a week already and was planning on speaking to her when she dropped by unannounced. He gestured for her to take a seat at the side of the desk and pulled a handful of pages from a folder. “The writing is quite good and you certainly have an original style.” He tapped his finger over several words circled in red pencil. “There are some minor grammatical mistakes like the compound adjective that you didn’t hyphenate.” “Three-inch… the two words taken together modify the noun that comes directly after so you need to join them with a dash, but that’s no big deal.”

“Yes, I see.” Adelina hunched over the paper. “Same here.” She pointed at another set of words that Alex had cobbled together. “Blue-eyed refers to the baby’s eyes. The words have to be taken as a whole.”

Alex shifted over to the second page. “Here you wrote ‘fowl smell’. The proper spelling is foul with a ‘u’. The other implies a bird… a chicken, hen or rooster.”

Adelina nodded. “It won’t happen again.” Shuffling through the pages, Adelina thumped her finger on a paragraph midway down the third page. “I did what you said in class… the method that the South African writer used when she wrote descriptive passages.”

Alex’s features brightened noticeably. He had mentioned in class that Nadine Gordimer, one of South Africa’s most prominent writers, tended to engage all five of the reader’s senses when writing expository prose. The example he gave centered on an elderly man peeling and eating an orange. Gordimer, he mused, who was writing by the age of nine, and published her first story in a magazine when she was fifteen, had a bit of a head start on the Mexican immigrant but he opted not to share that consideration. “The scene where the girl’s mother is preparing the enchiladas for their evening meal… yes, that was well done. The reader can smell the meaty aroma, hear the sizzling meat then taste the finished food.

“More importantly,” Alex rushed on, “the story itself is quite poignant, especially the part where the Hispanic girl is trying to convince her mother that she should speak English in the home now that they have moved north.”

“My poor mother has been here years and still only speaks Spanish,” Adelina confided. The girl lowered her eyes and her shoulders slumped precipitously. “She misses her own mother back in Mexico and during the day has no one else to talk to in her own language.” “I worried that particular scene might seem too… ” Her voice died off.

“Maudlin,” Alex offered.

“I’m not familiar with the word.”

“Overly sentimental or self-pitying,” he added. “Something that is tearfully emotional, often in a foolish or annoying way.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly!”

Alex shook his head vehemently. “You got the sentiment as it should be. The writing was fine.”

Sitting with her hands folded on her lap, the girl finally mumbled a handful of words too soft to be heard. “Excuse me?”

“Language is sacred,” Adelina said. “We need a reverence for words.”

“A reverence for words,” Alex repeated. “Well you captured the pathos perfectly,” he assured her. “I want you to review all the corrections you make and we’ll sit down in a week or so and go over the rest of the material.”

*****

Alex watched as Adelina tucked the revised pages into a manila folder and pushed the chair back, “Thank you, Mr. Fulton.”

“Adelina,” he called out as the girl cracked the door open and was heading out into the corridor. “Do you know a student named Julio Sanchez?”

Adelina frowned. “That snot-nosed jerk?” She came back to where Alex was sitting. “He was arrested two weeks ago for shoplifting at the Briarcliff Mall. The judge at juvenile court warned him that if he’s seen at the mall again they’ll revoke parole and send him to trial.”

“How do you know this?”

“The idiot was bragging about it to all his hoodlum buddies.”

*****

Alex waited until the final bell rang before picking his way to the DEI office on the second floor of the building. “Fiction mirroring reality… are you familiar with the term?” When there was no response, he added, “On rare occasion, fiction is the stark truth inside the boldfaced lie.”

Melba Jackson who was dressed in yet another elaborate dashiki with her elegantly coiffured hair wrapped in an ornate silk scarf stared at him uncertainly. “Don’t waste my time. If you got something to say, spit it out.”

“The Hispanic author, who Julio Sanchez wanted me to teach, jokes in one of his short stories about teens bunking school and shoplifting at the local mall.” He paused briefly in no great hurry to bring closure. “Mr. Sanchez, who would like to revise the school’s reading curriculum, was picked up by the police for shoplifting earlier this month.”

Before she even opened her mouth Mabel’s hazel eyes were flitting about the room in muddled confusion. The woman, who had a knack for blustering her way through every half truth, falsehood and devious nonsense was at a loss for words. Finally, her features congealed in an irascible sneer “I don’t believe you.”

“My wife’s brother is an undercover detective with the Riverton police. I called him before coming to see you and verified the details.” Melba’s eyes narrowed and her creamy skin convulsed in a myriad of jagged lines. Alex waited patiently but there was no response. “Go to the school board with complaints against me and you will be selling pencils on the street corner before the semester ends.” Alex gently closed the door as he left the room.

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