Before I Let You Go
One year, my class, known as problematic for being easily distracted and causing disruptions that made us very hard to teach, wasn’t assigned a homeroom teacher hired to break us. Mr. Lovette, that teacher, lacked bulk and a bulldog face. Our first day, first morning back, attendance began with a trill made by the binding springs of his attendance register run against his open desk drawer, not a harsh slap of that blue book on the desktop. That slightest difference caught our attention, until our circling roulette eyes locked upon Lovette’s index fingers, until not a word from us was spoken, just thoughts like You monsters or You freaks — what we were accustomed to hearing from teachers, but not in Lovette’s case. He, with his index fingers, took our place. They reached two inches past the tip of the middle fingers, made each hand— pinky to index— a crescendo. These made me think of the ascending gold organ pipes behind the church pulpit, their range of pitches, where I disappeared every Sunday. I didn’t feel empathy, sad to say, for Lovette, but given that our class was more apt to deliver pranks, thought that’s what his fingers were, a clever attempt to soften us. Any second, Lovette would remove the fake fingers and turn our usual tactic against us, get poking and grinding. That didn’t happen. And with a longer pointer Lovette didn’t stoop to pin the attendance register to his desk, didn’t vulnerably begin attendance head down like teachers before him, inviting trouble for himself or into the room. Lovette stood upright and held us in his eyes, until we realized he actually looked past us, out the high windows to our sagging tenement and factory roofs, the blackened steeples, which we turned around to view. “Now,” he said, his first word, “when I call your name, forget raising your hand, answering here or present or whatever you’re taught to do before filing out.” We turned to face forward again. If what had already unfolded wasn’t disorienting enough, Lovette began using one of those freak fingers to loop name-to-name down the page in the register as he called attendance, but kept looking out the window, not at the page, as if he’d already committed our names to memory. I’m not sure about the others, but somewhere in there, for me, his calling became more like singing, and my church organ bled in to accompany, so that I couldn’t really say how many names Lovette called or for how long he’d been calling when he closed the register as if he’d just finished a book. When he did, it sounded huge. “All present, then,” he said. “Everyone. Everyone here.” It was the loudest and most excited he got. But then, very hushed, he said, “Now, before I let you go to your classes, here’s the question: since your ancestors are really you, do you think that you’re really where they want to be?” Quite a way to begin a year, but the next day we were told Lovette was not coming back. Another goon, Mr. Terry, had replaced him. “Remain,” he snapped, “silent and in your seat until your name is called, and when you’re called, the simple response, here, will do.” Post-Lovette, we expected more than silent and here, and soon enough came the shout from one of us that really made the room go crazier than ever: “What did Lovette do or say that was so threatening it made you get rid of him that quick?” I’ve never forgotten.