For whatever reason, drawing and painting were taught by the same woman who taught us poetry and literature, a delicate woman who reminded me of apple blossoms and the tiny, fragile flowers that grow apparently from nothing after the rains.
This teacher’s name was Emily Little. She was a widow with a very young daughter, almost a baby. While her mother gave us our lesson, the baby stayed down in the kitchen with the stereotypically fat and comfortable cook. Sometimes there would be a tapping at the classroom door and Mrs. Little would excuse herself and tell us to mind ourselves for a moment, then go hurrying down the corridor, leaving the classroom door open to assure we would behave. We would hear her footsteps tapping down the polished wood of the hallways and know that some mysterious crisis had transformed our teacher—at least temporarily—into a mother.
By the time my mother enrolled me at the seminary, I was already too old for finger paints—if anything so messy would ever have been permitted in this austere and select establishment. Even so, we were young enough that Mrs. Little did not move us to strict fine arts all at once. She had the natural wisdom of one who knows children are not little adults. She knew that if we were to love art, we must associate it with play—even as those children who are read rhyming verse long after they should have “outgrown” baby books grow to love music and poetry.
Therefore, Mrs. Little did not start us with watercolors or even those bright, garish poster paints so beloved of the classroom. She wanted us to get a feel for drawing without the worry that our medium would soak our paper, yet she wanted us to have something that would allow us to explore our potential. What she gave us was a pad of paper and a box of crayons.
These were not the fat crayons usually given to children in those days, thick, waxy, and yielding very little in the way of color unless one pressed so hard that drawing anything other than bold lines was impossible. What Mrs. Little gave us were the slim crayons about the diameter of a standard yellow pencil, solid but requiring a more delicate touch if one was to use them without snapping them.
As I mentioned before, I had never seen anything that drew in color, and I think I would have been fascinated by a box containing nothing but those most basic colors found in every color box: red, yellow, blue, green, and black. However, wonderful as these might have been to me, they would have been boring to most of my classmates. Mrs. Little knew this, and so for art class each of us was issued a box containing not five, not twelve, not twenty, but twenty-four slim waxy sticks, each wrapped in paper of a shade approximating the crayon’s own color when the crayon had been rubbed with moderate pressure across a sheet of white paper.
The other girls in the class cooed with delight when Mrs. Little handed the boxes to one of that week’s classroom monitors, then gave a stack of pristine drawing pads to the other.
“Put your names on the box of crayons,” Mrs. Little said, “and on the drawing pads. You will be using the same ones all term, so handle them carefully.”
We did this. I saw a few of the girls pull out crayons and use them to write their names on the notepad, but, uncertain how crayons worked, I printed with my ballpoint pen. My erratic stream of tutors had managed this much at least. I knew my letters and numbers, and could read and do basic figures as well as most of my classmates—even if I did not surpass my peers as Mother thought I should.
“Now, today,” Mrs. Little continued, “I want you to draw me the story of your summer vacation.”
A hand shot into the air. Hannah Rakes. A nice girl, but bossy, and full of questions.
“All of it, Teacher?”
“Pick something that you particularly liked.”
Another hand. Mary Felicity—always called by both names, never by just one, though she wrote them as two distinct words.
“Teacher, my family went on two trips. Can I draw both of them?”
“You may. You may draw several pictures if you wish.” Mrs. Little seemed to anticipate another question coming. “Keep it to, let’s say, five in all.”
All around me, girls were sliding open the tops of the little rectangular boxes. A row away, Hannah already had a crayon in hand and was making red lines on the first sheet of her drawing pad. I stared, fascinated. Then I heard the rustle of skirts and smelled the vanilla scent that always surrounded Mrs. Little.
“Mira, why aren’t you drawing?” she asked, her voice soft and friendly.
I fumbled with the box, and something in the clumsiness with which I opened it told Mrs. Little of my unfamiliarity.
“Is this your first time playing with crayons?” she said.
There was no incredulity or criticism in her voice, so I answered with easy honesty.
“Yes,” I admitted.
“They’re great,” Mrs. Little said, shaking one out and holding it almost like she would a pencil. She stroked a few diagonal lines on one corner of the paper.
Sky blue. I still remember each line. There were three of them, each no more than three inches long. Each a wonder and a revelation.
Mrs. Little took out a green crayon, then made a few vertical lines at the bottom of the page. Already I could see sky and grass, and my fingers were itching to try for myself. Mrs. Little understood my eagerness and slid the green crayon back into the box.
“Have fun,” she said, and patted me lightly on the shoulder, before moving down the aisle to talk to the girl who sat behind me.
I heard Mrs. Little say something approving, ask a question, heard the answer, but the sounds seemed very far away, drifting and dreamy, like sounds heard when one is falling asleep—only I was not falling asleep. I felt quivering and alive, desperately and inordinately happy.
Almost as if possessed of their own volition, my fingers slid out the green crayon. I noticed the slightly blunt edge on one side of the tip and immediately understood that the crayons would wear down, lose their sharpness, just as a pencil did. Carefully, as I might have tested my bathwater before getting into the tub, I drew a green line on the page, right next to Mrs. Little’s.
It was so faint I could hardly see it. I tried another. Too heavy. For what must have been twenty minutes, I drew blade after blade of grass until I had command of how much pressure it took to make the lines I wanted.
Then I discovered that there were other green crayons in the box, both darker and lighter. I mixed these shades in, thinking of the grass I had seen up close when I had laid on my stomach out in the shadowed shelter of our walled back garden, remembering how it was rarely all one color.
I moved on to the sky. Hatch marks had seemed right for the grass, but didn’t for the sky. Glancing around, I saw that Hannah was rubbing her crayon energetically back and forth. I tentatively tried this, experimenting until I had a blue sky creeping down the page to touch the grass.
Blue sky, green grass. Not much of a picture, but it was my very first. Also, given the flat prairie that bordered one edge of our town, it was not terribly unrealistic.
I turned the page and looked at the fresh white sheet with interest and enthusiasm. What would I draw next? The red crayons had been crying out to me ever since I saw Hannah draw what (as I saw when I snooped) proved to be a very boxy house. I didn’t want to draw a house, but I thought that I might try a rose bush. We had lots of them in the back garden, and I liked them immensely—even the gently curving thorns were interesting.
My fingers were touching the red crayon when Mrs. Little clapped her hands together in the sign to stop.
“Art period is ending,” she said. “Please put away your crayons, close your drawing pads, and pass them forward to the monitors.”
There were a few groans of disappointment, and one of them may well have been mine. However, I felt far too happy to really make a fuss. Something had come alive in me that past hour, something that remained alive even when I folded shut my drawing pad and closed the almost untouched box of crayons. I held that happiness to me, and carried it with me as we trooped off to find what the cook had concocted for our midday meal.
My name was on both my drawing pad and the box of crayons, sufficient promise that we would be doing this again.
Our lessons at the seminary focused on basic skills: learning to write a neat hand, adding and subtracting, singing, art, reading, and spelling. None of these touched on the world outside of our classroom.
Sometimes, as when I stared fascinated at a picture of a dog chasing a ball, I revealed myself—as I had on the day I first saw crayons—as having lived in relative isolation. I think Mrs. Little noticed, but I don’t think the other children did. I was already enough a stranger—a new girl among the old girls—that I did not stand out as strange for my manner.
I was not the only new girl, but I was among the quietest. The buzzing little horde of girls tried to draw me out with varying degrees of success. Hannah, in her friendly, bossy way was my chief interrogator. Through her questions and through what she did and didn’t find odd about my answers, she also became my chief source of information about the world outside of the one I had known.
Hannah liked to ask questions, but even more than listening to my answers she liked to talk. Listening to her chatter about her home, her cat, her dog, her brothers and sisters fascinated me. I had only the vaguest idea of what she was talking about—my mother kept no pets, and I had no siblings. At first, I thought Hannah must live a very exotic life. Then, as I listened to the other girls, I realized the truth.
My life was the strange one, not theirs.
For one, all of the other girls, even those whose parents were divorced, separated, or—in one very interesting case—dead, knew who their fathers were. I was the only one who had no idea who my father was. When Hannah asked me about him, I said he had been gone for as long as I could remember. Hannah decided this meant that he was dead, and being a nice girl also decided that I wouldn’t want to talk about such a sad thing. She told the other girls her version of the truth, and so I was saved from questions.
At least from other’s questions. From the questions that were now suddenly alive in my imagination I had no relief—and I knew better than to ask anything of my mother.
One of the many things I liked about the seminary was the lack of mirrors. Except for the rectangles over the lavatory sinks, there were none. Even the window glass was clear, its light glaze giving back very little in the way of reflection.
On the whole, I did not mind my lessons, but they did come most to life when color was involved. Even writing on the blackboard was more fun when the chalk was yellow rather than white. When I discovered that chalk came in pink and blue and green as well—these pastel shades as ethereal as I imagined fairy wings to be—I lived and breathed in hope that Mrs. Little would let me write in color.
She was not slow to see that this was a painless way to motivate and reward me. Before long I learned to write a neat hand and behaved myself to perfection in order to win the privilege of writing announcements on the board.
Another privilege was going to fetch something from the supply closet. There I saw pens and colored pencils stacked on the higher shelves. There were bottles of powdered pigment for paint, and stacks of construction paper. After that, I daydreamed about colored inks, and anticipated the day that we, like the bigger girls, would use paints. Already, I guessed how wet tints would blend and flow as crayons, for all their beauty, would not.
But for all that my school days were alive and livened with color, I never mentioned my art classes at home. I had never forgotten seeing my mother give herself a face. A sense that anything to do with color was forbidden knowledge stilled my tongue.
I suspect that for once Mother’s obsession with “my” and “me” aided me in my deception regarding colored art materials. She found it so difficult to perceive me as anything other than an extension of herself that she forgot to forbid my exposure to these things until it was far too late.
Her inability to comprehend my life apart from her was so complete that once out of sight I was truly and completely out of mind.
Or, maybe, something else was working in my favor, and I am being unfair to my mother. The only thing I can say is that honestly I am still too close to the matter—even now that decades have passed—to honestly judge.