I Dwell in Possibility. Toni McNaron

artistic flair was inhibited by all the rules of public school. Teachers wanted me to sit still for hours, coloring within the lines, making trees green and cows brown and people light pink. Once in second grade I argued for the trueness of a picture. I had drawn a brown person and a pink cow because I had seen brown people out in country fields with scrawny pinkish-red cows. My teacher, driven by racism as much as a narrow view of art, threw my piece of construction paper into the waste basket, saying, “If you insist that there are brown people and pink cows, I’ll report you to the principal who will talk to your mother about your disrespectful attitude.” I got a C in conduct that semester.

      As a very little girl, I loved to make musical sounds—song snatches, whistles, simple noises that felt good. My mother sang and encouraged me to hum along with her at home and church. In grammar school, I learned there was someone called “the music teacher” who would come to our classes one hour a week. I was elated, since it meant I would learn real tunes and words. I even fancied being able to teach Mamie a song. The teacher was a tall, thin woman with fading auburn hair and big feet and hands. She would stride into our classroom, go straight to the old spinet that was wildly out of tune, and begin playing some song whose lyrics were much too advanced for us. I learned “On the Road to Mandalay” without having any idea where or what Mandalay was. But I was quite drawn to “flying fishes”; they reminded me of brown people and pink cows, and I wished I lived “in China across the bay” since maybe there they would let me color as I saw things and not worry about the lines.

      The music teacher did not like my voice because it was too low. She forced me to sing soprano notes. I squeaked and cracked and sounded awful. Everyone laughed at me for singing off key, and my record began to say I was “unmusical.” To help me retain self-respect and some interest in singing, my mother assured me, “Just keep singing out as loudly as you want at church, honey, and if it isn’t quite right, no one will mind.” She also told me that singing an octave lower than other girls was perfectly all right, that if I ever joined a choir, I would be placed with people called altos because their voices were “mellow.” That word became a lifeline to counter “unmusical” as I fought to hang on to my love of making sounds. No wonder I came to prefer cellos and French horns, contraltos and basses, the left hand on the piano, fog horns at sea.

      Too many of the people who taught me spent most of their time trying to help marginally literate students. Consequently the few teachers who did excite me remain in my mind like crystal. Much of my free time was spent in their rooms, where I helped them arrange borders above the blackboard or clean their space. I often lost potential friends because I chose to answer the questions teachers asked in class. Although it was painful not to be accepted, I did not regret my choices even when I was making them. Those women were generous to me, in class and out. They told me extra things about geography or math or sentence diagramming; they let me take heavy books or satchels full of our homework to their cars; occasionally they even asked me to read spelling quizzes or other students’ test papers when the answers just involved numbers or letters.

      The first time this happened was in second grade. My teacher was Miss Virginia Lindsay, a slight honey-blond woman in her late thirties. She was known for her long hikes even in damp Alabama winters and for her summer travels to exotic places not in America. After about three months as her pupil, I was allowed to help grade spelling papers on Wednesdays after lunch. I would bolt my food and race back to Miss Lindsay’s room where we sat together at her big desk. She gave me a red pencil like hers to put check marks beside misspelled words. Being left-handed, I made check marks that looked backwards, so I learned to reverse them. I would not give away our secret. Miss Lindsay always patted me on the arm when we were done and said, “You’ll make a fine teacher someday.”

      In fifth-grade, a tall, fleshy, not-so-smart woman named Bernice Brown taught us things I already knew, but she was warm and affectionate and liked me. One afternoon she took me aside, and put her arm around me: “Now, Toni, you know, don’t you, that you’re a special little girl who will keep going to school for a long time? And when you’ve gotten big degrees and I’m old, I’ll feel so proud that you were in my fifth-grade room. And if you aren’t popular, just wait till you’re older.” The elliptical nature of her last remark haunted me even as the rest of her speech made me feel special and proud.

      And I remember Miss Gray, a wiry woman probably only two or three years from retirement, who taught sixth-grade math with an iron fist. On rainy days after she had drilled us in fractions or simple equations or long word problems, she showed us a softer side. She would recite long poems, my favorite being one that began, “Now, William, come here sir.” Miss Gray never prepared us for her shift from math to poetry but suddenly would turn her small head capped by thinning frizzly hair and bellow out this or some other first line. I always jumped at first but then settled in for the treat that her recitation was. The lasting thing Miss Gray taught me was that math and poetry do not need to be disconnected. She primed me for my later fascination with Jacob Bronowski and Buckminster Fuller, who urged adults to stop talking about the gulf between science and the humanities.

      But most of the time I was just bored by what went on in that stuffy brick building where too many students did not know how to read or write. I began being absent often, having one form or another of a cold-flu-sore-throat ailment just bad enough to keep me home but not so bad as to keep me from reading or playing games by myself. My report cards tell it all: for the first eight years of school, I consistently ran up higher numbers in the “times absent” column than in the “times present” one, though I collected zeroes in the “times tardy” slot. One school year they went: first semester—absent 64 days, present 26; second semester—absent 57 days, present 33. In the space for accompanying remarks appears: “Toni seems quite bright, but could you encourage her to come to school more often?”

      When I did not attend school, I had to stay in bed quietly during the mornings, since I was “sick.” However, if by lunch time I had no fever, I could play quietly in the side yard during the afternoon. I quickly found ways to insure a reading of 98.5 degrees. As soon as Mamie placed the cool tube under my tongue, I maneuvered it on top. The only drawback to this practice was that sometimes the result was so low as to raise suspicion. But when it worked, I could get up as long as I promised not to run around.

      Most days I played the same solitary game. Outside our bathroom window stood a massive oak tree. Forgetting mosquitos, gnats, and other southern bugs that attack anyone who stays outside for more than a few minutes, I spent hours hunkered down on the ground.

      First I would scoop out dirt from around roots, then mold wet clay tunnels that leaned against them, and finally turn twigs and carefully sculpted leaves into road signs that meant “Right Turn Only” or “Do Not Enter” or “Danger High Voltage.” They only meant that to me, but then if I were not there, things merely looked scuffed up, as if a squirrel had scratched around for stray acorns. Once my highway was complete, I carefully smuggled tiny metal cars and trucks outside. Though for some reason unknown to me my parents bought me such toys never intended for little girls, they were to stay in the house so as not to get dirty or broken. For hours I intently moved cars and trucks along my dirt roads, twisting and turning through the system of tunnels and overpasses. Sometimes several cars stopped at once so the riders could get out to share inside information about road conditions or talk about where to go next. Occasionally a truck turned over going too fast around a sharp curve. Upset, I rushed vehicles to the scene to rescue the unlucky driver and his family who were with him on an outing. If asked the name of my game, I would have said without blinking an eye, “Running Away.” I imagined going first into town, then to places nearby whose names I knew—Bessemer, Tarrant City, Dolomite, Powderly, Ensley. If I needed to go farther away, I picked Mobile or Florida or Mandalay.

      Though I could play alone for an unusually long time without becoming distracted, this ability became a way to handle my increasing sense of difference from other children my age and the resulting isolation. Occasionally an exception emerged, some child in our neighborhood or at school with whom I formed a tight bond at least for a brief period. I have photographs of two of these friends. One is a tiny snapshot of Sue Brooks and me at my third birthday party. Binky (Sue’s nickname) and I are perched on a little stepstool placed on the sidewalk as part of some game. We are each holding a balloon chosen from the great cache