No, this was not our theater. Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash The school had a small vocal ensemble, but no band or orchestra—not even flutophones. When I arrived, we had no school newspaper, though there was a yearbook, which the principal’s wife advised. Nor was there an art program, though elementary teachers had some projects and one year there was an arts and crafts club. Of course, we did have soccer (which later became football), basketball, and baseball, with cheerleaders for all sports. I’m sure that sports didn’t come cheap, but coaching the teams added a bit of income for the men involved and for the woman who coached the cheerleaders. There was no space resembling a theatre and no drama club when I arrived. Twice, later in my career, we had “drama in a box,” courtesy of Nicky Chavers and his team, who offered the makings of biblical dramas to small Christian schools like ours. The team arrived with a large trailer filled with script, costumes, makeup, props, and scenery, plus the people who knew how to fit it all together, to put on a biblical drama. Just add students and stir. Memory says we did the Joseph story once, and another year story of the spies and Rahab in Jericho. I remember these only because some of my favorite students were in them; I can see their sixteen-year-old selves on the platform of the church declaiming their lines, perhaps with a false beard added to give them the years and dignity of Judah, Joseph's brother, or in an elaborate gown and wig as Rahab. Given all the limitations, they did a great job.
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Photo by Vicko Mozara on Unsplash
Sadly, we did not have a pink flamingo to accompany us to the beach. The summer of ’76 was notable not only for the Bicentennial, but also for being the first of three summers that Alicia and I co-led the church’s day camp program. I have no idea how this happened or how we survived. Alicia is a cheerful morning person, so she took opening shift, requiring her to arrive by 7 a.m. and leave at 4 p.m. I am most surely not a morning person; I came in at 9 and stayed to close at 6. We had dozens and dozens of kids, ages 4 to sixth grade, grouped by age for handicrafts, but together a lot of the time. We hired two of high school students, a boy and a girl, who served as lifeguards and general helpers. My strength was in food prep; some of the kids paid extra for lunch, and I was the one who put together sandwiches, fruit, and chips. (I called the kitchen Johnson's Deli.) I shopped for these items and for snacks. One of my favorite memories is of buying candy bars in bulk, going into a cooler at a distributor’s place on Australian Avenue down from the church. The chilly air smelled of chocolate, one of the scents of paradise. Every day it wasn’t storming, we swam. At first we used a nearby pool, which made no sense to me, given the proximity of the ocean. We later took our church bus to several beaches that didn’t require us to pay for parking. Once, the bus broke down on the way home from Juno Beach. We waited by the roadside in a little park providentially nearby. I knew the kids needed to be kept amused before horseplay broke out, so I told stories. The stories I knew best were those I’d had to teach, so I told them (edited) stories from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. After swim and lunch, we might view a film acceptable to the church. Threading the film was another job for the student worker, though I was the one who went to the public library to check out nature films or story films. My favorite part of the day was nap time. The campers stretched out on towels on the air-conditioned classroom’s floor. One of us read to them for a while, encouraging sleep, which never arrived for some of them. No matter—everyone at least rested before it was time for crafts. Friday was field trip day, which often involved animals, usually viewed from a distance: Parrot Jungle, Monkey Jungle, Lion Country Safari, the zoo. One of the reasons for not accepting kids younger than four was personified by a staff member’s daughter. She was not quite four, but we were told to bend the rules. She was a fair-skinned redhead, a prima donna. The first time we went to Juno Beach, she decided the stairs down to the shore were too dreadful for her. Alicia and I told her she was capable of walking down the stairs, but she stood on the top step, flinging out a small white hand and crying for one of the teen counselors, “Rosby, save me!” He did not, and she eventually managed to get to the beach, since no one rescued her. And we lasted three summers. Photo by Robert Lindner on Unsplash My parents had never broached the idea of coming to visit me in Florida. For that matter, I never invited them. After all, Dad was working, with just two weeks of vacation a year. Mom worked in a candy factory known for its peanut brittle, though summers were slow, and she took those months off. And where would I have put them? Although my Dad’s mom and stepdad had lived in a trailer in Florida at some point during my teen years, we had never gone to visit them. Mom hadn’t traveled alone since Dad had returned from World War II. It had been years since Dad had done any long-distance driving; Mom didn’t drive. I don’t know if the cost of two flights was affordable for them. Now that I think of it, I’m not sure either of them had ever flown. My Dad came back from Europe on a ship; he probably shipped out, too. Mom had glued on airplane wings at Goodyear during the war, but she rode a train to see Dad in California when he was drafted. Things changed, though, after Dad died in February, 1976. Mom decided to fly down for a visit that summer. We selected the Fourth of July weekend, because the church had a major preaching/concert event scheduled for the nation’s 200th birthday and had rented the Palm Beach Auditorium near the mall. I remember our choir’s dresses, which we made. They were in solid red, or white, or royal blue, and probably polyester, certainly very hot and ugly. We women wore floor-length gowns in south Florida, with nylons and heels, makeup melting on our faces. I may have regretted being in choir that weekend. My new roommate, Alicia, and my mother, whose taste in music ran to anything loud, sat in the audience as we sang patriotic and religious songs. This was the biggest of big deals, but the church was forever doing events designed to draw a crowd and save souls. We even had revival meetings, sweltering in the heat in a large canvas tent on the church’s lawn, with Gospel music and many verses of “Just As I Am” as the invitation hymn. Think Neil Diamond’s “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show,” except the preacher was our own and the tent wasn’t ragged. I’m listening to it now for inspiration. Or you could listen on YouTube to the version we sang of a text taken from 2 Chronicles 7:14, “If my people…” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPY-CrPtdKw [No, this was not our trailer, but you get the idea.] Sammi, as we called her, made a great roommate. We moved into a trailer, unfortunately decorated in olive green, but with two bedrooms and two baths, one of each on either side of the kitchen and living room. She was also a wonderful addition to the music program, sometimes singing solo numbers. The song that became her signature piece was “Sweet, Sweet Spirit.” At some point in the spring, possibly as a tangent to what Sammi was trying to teach, a student asked her if she would ever marry a Black man. She said she would, if he was a Christian and loved God and her. And then all hell broke loose. Because our principal may have told me the truth—the school had not been founded to keep Blacks out—but he didn’t tell me the whole truth. Nowhere in our statement of conduct was written "Thou shalt not marry a person from another race," but clearly interracial marriage was a step too far. This was south Florida. I don’t recall now if parents got involved, but Sammi was called in to talk to the administration. She repeated her assertion and got a bus ticket back to her parent’s home. (She later met and married a wealthy man and has had a very nice life.) Incensed at the injustice of it, I wanted to resign in protest, but I had no Plan B, and I was a coward. Nobody asked my position on interracial marriage, so I stayed. This left me struggling financially, and minus a roommate. At the same time, tensions increased between the new science teacher and her roommate. I don’t know who decided it was a good idea or did the asking, but her roommate and I decided we’d live together the next year. We were both leaving for the summer to be with family, and I somehow got her to agree to take me and my cat as far as Indianapolis—not that it was really on the way to Colorado—where my parents would pick me up. As we were nearing the city, which I’d visited twice, my new roommate asked, “Where are we meeting your parents?” “At the Holiday Inn on I-465,” I told her. “Do you have any idea how many Holiday Inns there are on I-465?” she asked, not yet screaming. We pulled into the parking lot of the first Holiday Inn we saw, and there was my father, hauling a suitcase out of the trunk of his car. Photo credit: Luiza Sayfullina on Unsplash That first Florida autumn, I went back to my college for Homecoming, perhaps just to be able to say I was employed, and not the total failure I’d felt in June. When I got on my connecting flight, I saw another woman I knew also going to Homecoming. Our college circles overlapped—I worked box office and occasionally got a bit part onstage, and she did costumes for plays. But she was science and I was English, so classes didn’t often coincide. On the flight I learned she was teaching in another Christian school about 100 miles north of mine. We chatted on the flight, and I thought that was that—except later that fall, our principal went to the school where she taught, ostensibly to buy desks. His real goal was to hire that science teacher. She was a package deal; he also got her roommate, an elementary teacher who smiled at him. The two of them came to look at the school. I decided it was my task to be welcoming, and so invited them for a spaghetti dinner before we went to a high school basketball game. One of the students had given me a kitten. She was at the climb-the-curtains stage. My guests were wearing then-popular maxi dresses. They looked to the kitten just like curtains, so she scrambled up the elementary teacher’s blue dress—a great start to our relationship. To complete the list, he hired yet another woman from our college, who taught history. So, yes, he lost half of his high school teaching staff my first year. Math and English remained covered, though. The history teacher became my roommate for most of a year. We lived in a trailer; in south Florida, there were very nice trailer parks, so it didn’t feel as if we were taking a step down the economic ladder. She was bright and funny, beautiful and a singer. Getting up on time was not her priority; she sometimes risked her life putting on her makeup as she drove to school. We got along very well; the cat, by then mature, remained on the floor. Photo by Ayo Ogunseinde on Unsplash Life in south Florida provided an endless opportunity for learning. Cockroaches will come. My tiny apartment had a front entrance from a main street, but also an alley, where a storage building nestled. The first night I pulled in and saw the entire side of that building crawling with cockroaches was dreadful. As one new acquaintance told me, “Everyone here has bugs. No shame. Hire Nozzle Nolen to come once a month.” The company advertised with a large, white plastic elephant (hence the nozzle in the name) affixed to the top of the vans that carried poison to spray. Another unavoidable drain on my small salary. It can get cold even in the semi-tropics. We had a rare cold snap that first fall. I had no idea that space heaters existed, even if I’d had money for one. I tried to power through, teaching with the mother of all head colds. This was not entirely due to my devotion. At the beginning of the year, we were told in a teachers’ meeting that each of us had $500.00 reserved in an escrow account. If we had perfect attendance, it was ours in June. For each day we missed, $100.00 would be deducted (maybe to pay a sub?). The prevailing slogan was Don’t call in, crawl in. Never mind the spread of disease to others or the disregard to your own well-being. One day I did crawl in with my cold. I asked my eighth-grade class to pray for me, telling them I didn’t care if they prayed I’d get well or that I’d be too sick to get out of bed the next day. The following morning, I couldn’t get out of bed. One of the boys took credit for his prayer’s effect. Procrastination and fear will become your besetting sins. I hated grading papers and was jealous of the math and science teachers, whose grading was simple. I had multiple subjects to cover—grammar, spelling, vocabulary, writing, and literature—in each grade. Each had homework and each needed to be tested. And there were essays and research papers, always a battle with myself over how seriously to regard spelling and punctuation errors. I was always late getting work back to the students, sometimes pulling all-nighters to grade at the end of the six-week grading periods. One night when I was at the kitchen table working—the chairs were hard, and thus preferable to the sofa, where I might fall asleep—I was sure I heard a baby crying in the alley. I was too frightened to investigate. I’d felt safe living alone, with the fire station nearby, but that night, my mind full of plots of novels in which nothing good happened to bold young women, I had no courage. I called the fire department, and soon I heard men in the alley, swinging flashlights and looking for a distressed infant who wasn’t there. I suspect they figured out before I did, a long time later, that what I’d heard was a cat in heat. [photo from Church of Bethesda-by-the-sea website] I was often overwhelmed during the seven years I worked in Forida . It was so far from everyone and everything I loved, and the teaching took a lot out of me. I’m an introvert who can project like an extrovert, then go home and collapse. I loved many of the students I taught—in ways I now think were probably not healthy—but their adolescent energy and dramas were exhausting. Two places of refuge existed for me. The ocean, only a bridge away to another world, was big enough to absorb my grief when my father died. Many nights after I returned from his funeral, my roommate would drive us to the ocean and I would sit on the seawall and cry. The ocean also cast up daily delights of shells and stones I collected in Mason jars. The second place, also across the bridge, was (of all the foreshadowing places!) the historic Episcopal Church on that island, Bethesda-by-the-Sea, a Spanish Gothic structure built in 1925. To enter its sanctuary, which was open during the day, was to enter a blue darkness. The magnificent stained glass depicted scenes from the Bible featuring water—the flood, Jonah and the whale, Jesus walking on water—all in glorious shades of blue. It was cool within the stone walls, the day’s almost inevitable sunny glare absent. A short walk outside the sanctuary through the courtyard led to a garden with a reflecting pool, complete with large orange koi and water lilies. In the lower part of the garden hung a della Robbia image of the Virgin. At the far end were two wooden gazebos, their tops conical like a dunce cap to offer shade; a lantern hung in the ceiling of each, festooned with spider webs. The stone walls enclosing the garden were lined with bougainvillea, crown of thorns and ixoria bushes. A demure fountain fed water to the pool; I could hear it splashing as I sat in one of the gazebos with my journal. Writing is the only way I can begin to make sense of the world; this has been true since at least sixth grade. During those seven years of teaching, I did write, though just short pieces, sometimes doing the assignments I gave the English classes I taught. I kept a journal, though, and puzzled over people who confused me and issues that disturbed me. The garden offered me a much-needed sanctuary from the hot, extroverted world and the hurts and difficulties I fled. My first year of teaching, I had five classes to prepare for, five homework assignments, tests, and essays to grade. I was to teach using five textbooks I’d never read, though I had a fondness for them—they were the Harcourt series that I remembered from my own seventh-grade English class. Adventures for Readers, Book 1 was the first time I knew I was falling in love with language and poetry. One of the deficiencies in my teacher training program was a unit on classroom management. How was I supposed to control 43 seventh graders? The class size meant that we teachers changed rooms, because only one room was large enough to hold 43 desks. Thus, we teachers grabbed our books and raced down the open halls; in my case, I just hoped for enough time for a bathroom break if I needed one. Nothing prepared me for the energy and the mischief seventh graders could get into. Sitting in the back of the room, Lonny and Daisy had marker fights, making colorful dashes on each other’s forearms. God alone knew what their parents thought. But Lonny’s chief partner in crime was Johnny. Together they racked up multiple detentions and extra work, none of which deterred them. Finally, I sent them to the principal’s office. Grif called me in on the conference he’d already begun. Seated in front of his desk were two frightened boys, their faces tear-stained, their blue eyes wide and wary. “Miss Johnson, these boys have been a source of trouble for you from the beginning. They deserve to be expelled from this school. But I am leaving the decision up to you. What shall we do with these boys?” No syllabus had ever covered this sort of thing. I looked at the boys. I looked at Grif, who sat pokerfaced, giving me no clue. “No,” I said finally. “No, I think they will do better. Don’t expel them.” The boys shed a few more tears, in relief this time, and went back to class. Later I confronted Grif. “Don’t ever do anything like that to me again! How was I supposed to know what to do?” He just smiled. “I knew what you’d say. You now sit at the right hand of the Father. Those boys won’t disrupt class anymore.” And they never did. Here’s an illustration of where [selective] biblical literalism can take one. In Deuteronomy 22:5, the writer states in plain King James English, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.” This text has been interpreted to mean that women cannot wear pants, even though men wore robes, not trousers, when this text was written. Thus, at my Christian school and the church that sponsored it, women wore dresses, skirts, even culottes, but not pants and certainly not shorts. We wore them with nylons and heels in the relentless heat of south Florida. I could perhaps have borne it better—after all, my Christian college let us wear pants only after five p.m., another bizarre rule—if all of Deuteronomy were evenly applied. For example, one chapter earlier, provisions were made for stoning a rebellious son. Any number of such sons sat in my classes, and no one was throwing rocks at them, least of all their frustrated or doting parents. The saga of women and pants at our church and school took place over several years and stages. First, wearing pants was clearly forbidden. Then it was decided that pants with an elastic waistband could be worn; they didn't pertain to a man. Next, pants with side zippers were acceptable; no man would wear those. One teacher, an excellent seamstress, moved all the zippers in the pants she still owned. Color was the next determiner of true manliness—no man would wear pastels, so sherbet-colored pants, even with a zipper in front, were acceptable for women. Never mind that Florida was and is littered with men playing golf in pink or mint green or yellow trousers. A manly man would always wear black, navy, brown, or gray. By the time that final ruling came down, the women in my circle were weary and cynical. We suspected that these changes had nothing to do with biblical interpretation but may have owed their origin to the fashion desires of the pastor’s wife. She was petite and cute; she looked darling in pants. [The photo is from an ad for Lilly Pulitzer, noted for the brilliant tropical colors of her fabric.] A three-fold cord, proclaims Ecclesiastes, is not quickly broken. During the week of teacher orientation, sitting in a stuffy upstairs room, I started to see exactly what I’d signed on to do, including expectations I’m not sure the principal and I covered in our two phone conversations. One was our absolute allegiance to the church that sponsored the school, which he expressed crudely as “No visitee other churchee.” We were expected to be at all services and to take part in the Thursday evening visitation program, but with a twist. We were to visit not prospective members, but the homes of students in our classrooms or home rooms. We always went two by two, which was how Jesus sent out seventy of his followers to preach and heal. The fact that I had six sophomores in my home room did not excuse me from going with someone else after I’d visited those six families. The rationale was based on a simple idea: “If you know the parent, you know the child.” The school also believed in a “three-fold cord,” which Scripture said was not quickly broken. If parents, teachers, and the church were all working together for the same goal, it was more likely to happen. At least we weren’t making cold calls; we were to phone the family of the week and set up a convenient time (always on a Thursday evening, though). All teachers know that Thursday is one of the worst evenings to go back out; we’d almost survived the week, had only one more day to slog through—but had to be charming and intelligent for parents, say something encouraging about their adolescent. Occasionally, we got lucky and were invited to dinner, saving the cost of a meal at home. Visitation was agony for an introvert like me, but I did this for the seven years I worked at the school. At one point our principal, who wanted to ensure our compliance and possibly had a sadistic streak, passed out our paper paychecks on Thursday evenings when we met at the church. That was before he started passing them out Friday afternoons at staff meetings. Either way, it meant a frantic run to the bank on Friday after school, hoping to avoid bounced checks. |
Baptist GirlI was a conservative Baptist girl who grew up to become a career Christian, working first in a Baptist school and then in a Baptist college. For about three decades, it was very good until it wasn’t, and I had to leave. But the Baptists formed me. This is my homage to the good times and good people of the world I left, finally, at forty-three, when I became an Episcopalian. These are my memories; others might disagree with my recollections. So be it. Archives
January 2024
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