from Barrio Boy
Ernesto Galarza
My mother and I walked south
on
Up to this point the adventure of enrolling me in the
school had been carefully rehearsed. Mrs. Dodson had told us how to find it and
we had circled it several times on our walks. Friends in the barrio (1)
explained that the director was called a principal, and that it was a lady and
not a man. They assured us that there was always a person at the school who
could speak Spanish.
Exactly as we had been told, there was a sign on the
door in both Spanish and English: “Principal.” We crossed the hall and entered
the office of Miss Nettie Hopley.
Miss Hopley was at a roll-top desk to one side, sitting
in a swivel chair that moved on wheels. There was a sofa against the opposite
wall, flanked by two windows and a door that opened on a small balcony. Chairs
were set around a table and framed pictures hung on the walls of a man with long
white hair and another with a sad face and a black beard.
The principal half turned in the swivel chair to look at
us over the pinch glasses crossed on the ridge of her nose. To do this she had
to duck her head slightly as if she were about to step through a low doorway.
What Miss Hopley said to us we did not know but we saw
in her eyes a warm welcome and when she took off her glasses and straightened up
she smiled wholeheartedly, like Mrs. Dodson. We were, of course, saying nothing,
only catching the friendliness of her voice and the sparkle in her eyes while
she said words we did not understand. She signaled us to the table. Almost
tiptoeing across the office, I maneuvered myself to keep my mother between me
and the gringo lady. In a matter of seconds I had to decide whether she was a
possible friend or a menace. (2) We sat down.
Then Miss Hopley did a formidable thing. She stood up.
Had she been standing when we entered she would have seemed tall. But rising
from her chair she soared. And what she carried up and up with her was a buxom
superstructure, (3) firm shoulders, a straight sharp nose, full cheeks slightly
molded by a curved line along the nostrils, thin lips that moved like steel
springs, and a high forehead topped by hair gathered in a bun. Miss Hopley was
not a giant in body but when she mobilized (4) it to a standing position she
seemed a match for giants. I decided I liked her.
She strode to a door in the far corner of the office,
opened it and called a name. A boy of about ten years appeared in the doorway.
He sat down at one end of the table. He was brown like us, a plump kid with
shiny black hair combed straight back, neat, cool, and faintly obnoxious.
Miss Hopley joined us with a large book and some papers
in her hand. She, too, sat down and the questions and answers began by way of
our interpreter. My name was Ernesto. My mother’s name was Henriqueta. My birth
certificate was in San Blas. Here was my last report card from the Escuela
Municipal Numero 3 para Varones of Mazatlán, (5) and so forth. Miss Hopley put
things down in the book and my mother signed a card.
As long as the questions continued, Doña (6) Henriqueta
could stay and I was secure. Now that they were over, Miss Hopley saw her to the
door, dismissed our interpreter and without further ado took me by the hand and
strode down the hall to Miss Ryan’s first grade. Miss Ryan took me to a seat at
the front of the room, into which I shrank—the better to survey her. She was, to
skinny, somewhat runty me, of a withering height when she patrolled the class.
And when I least expected it, there she was, crouching by my desk, her blond
radiant face level with mine, her voice patiently maneuvering me over the awful
idiocies of the English language.
During the next few weeks Miss Ryan overcame my fears of
tall, energetic teachers as she bent over my desk to help me with a word in the
pre-primer. Step by step, she loosened me and my classmates from the safe
anchorage of the desks for recitations at the blackboard and consultations at
her desk. Frequently she burst into happy announcements to the whole class. “Ito
can read a sentence,” and small Japanese Ito, squint-eyed and shy, slowly read
aloud while the class listened in wonder: “Come, Skipper, come. Come and run.”
The Korean, Portuguese, Italian, and Polish first graders had similar moments of
glory, no less shining than mine the day I conquered “butterfly,” which I had
been persistently pronouncing in standard Spanish as boo-ter-flee. “Children,”
Miss Ryan called for attention. “Ernesto has learned how to pronounce
butterfly!” And I proved it with a perfect imitation of Miss Ryan. From that
celebrated success, I was soon able to match Ito’s progress as a sentence reader
with “Come, butterfly, come fly with me.”
Like Ito and several other first
graders who did not know English, I received private lessons from Miss Ryan in
the closet, a narrow hall off the classroom with a door at each end. Next to one
of these doors Miss Ryan placed a large chair for herself and a small one for
me. Keeping an eye on the class through the open door she read with me about
sheep in the meadow and a frightened chicken going to see the king, coaching me
out of my phonetic ruts in words like pasture, bow-wow-wow, hay, and pretty,
which to my Mexican ear and eye had so many unnecessary sounds and letters. She
made me watch her lips and then close my eyes as she repeated words I found hard
to read. When we came to know each other better, I tried interrupting to tell
Miss Ryan how we said it in Spanish. It didn’t work. She only said “oh” and went
on with pasture, bow-wow-wow, and pretty. It was as if in that closet we were
both discovering together the secrets of the English language and grieving
together over the tragedies of Bo-Peep. The main reason I was graduated with
honors from the first grade was that I had fallen in love with Miss Ryan. Her
radiant, no-nonsense character made us either afraid not to love her or love her
so we would not be afraid, I am not sure which. It was not only that we sensed
she was with it, but also that she was with us. Like the first grade, the rest
of the