To Sir With Love

by E. R. Braithwaite

  “I’ve been pushed around, Seales,” I said quietly, “in a way I cannot explain to you. I’ve been pushed around until I began to hate people so much that I wanted to hurt them, really hurt them. I know how it feels, believe me, and one thing I learned, Seales, is to try always to be a bit bigger than the people who hurt me. It is easy to reach for a knife or a gun; but then you become merely a tool and the knife or gun takes over, thereby creating new and bigger problems without solving a thing. So what happens when there is no weapon handy?”

  I felt suddenly annoyed, with myself for giving way to my emotion, and abruptly walked back to my desk. The class seemed to feel that something had touched me deeply and were immediately sympathetic in their manner.

  “The point I want to make, Potter,” I continued, “is whether you are really growing up and learning to stand squarely on your own feet. When you begin work at Covent Garden you might some day have cause to be very angry; what will you do then? The whole idea of this school is to teach you to discipline yourself. In this instance you lost your temper and behaved badly to your teacher. Do you think you are big enough to make an apology to him?”

  Potter fidgeted in his seat and looked uncertainly at me, then replied: “Yes, Sir.”

  “It’s always difficult to apologize, Potter, especially to someone you feel justified in disliking. But remember that you are not doing it for Mr. Bell’s sake, but your own.”

  I sat down. They were silent, but I realized that they understood what I meant. Potter stood up:

  “Is he in the staffroom, Sir?”

  “I think he should by there now, Potter.”

  Denham and Seales stood and joined Potter and together they went to find Bell. I called Buckley.

  “How are you feeling. Buckley?”

  “Okay, Sir,” he replied, as jovial as ever.

  “What will your parents say about all this, Buckley?” I was being devious, but, I thought, necessarily so.

  “I shan’t tell ’em. Sir. Must I, Sir?”

  “It’s up to you, Buckley. If you feel fine there’s no need to bother; but if in the next few days or weeks you feel any pain, it would be best to mention it so that they’d know what to do.”

  In a few minutes the boys were back, Potter looking red and embarrassed; behind them came Mr. Bell.

  “May I speak to your boys for a moment, Mr. Braithwaite?” He came in and stood beside my desk and I nodded to him.

  “I want to say to all of you,” he began, “that I’m sorry what happened in the gym a little while ago. I think that one way or another we were all a bit silly, but the sooner we forget the whole thing, the better.

  “How’re you feeling now, boy?” He addressed himself to Buckley.

  “Okay. Sir,” the boy replied.

  “Fine. Well, I suppose we’ll see each other as usual next week.” And with that he was gone, having made as friendly a gesture as his evident nervousness would allow.

  The boys seemed not unwilling to let the matter drop, so we turned our attention to the discussion of other things.

  Chapter

  Twenty

  LATER THAT WEEK THE school was invaded by a newspaper. The Headmaster had obtained the necessary L.C.C. permission for such a visit, having been persuaded that he could present his views and policy to a much wider public through this medium, and that it was an excellent opportunity to reply to his critics and detractors. The day before the reporters arrived he called a staff meeting to inform us of their visit and to ask for our cooperation. From his enthusiastic remarks it seemed undoubtedly a sound idea, and we all agreed to help. It was decided to say nothing beforehand to the children, as the plan was to photograph them at their normal pursuits.

  They arrived about ten o’clock in the morning, a reporter and two cameramen. Soon they were everywhere, their shutters snapping and bulbs flashing unexpectedly and disturbingly. The children became somewhat excited, and the members of my class were constantly craning their necks towards the door in the hope of having their pictures “took.” During the morning the Head sent for me and introduced me to the reporter and the cameramen, who were having a cup of tea with him in his room.

  “Mr. Braithwaite, these gentlemen would like to speak with you for a moment.” I sat down and the reporter began.

  “When the Headmaster told us that you were on his staff, I thought it would be a good idea to have some special photographs of you with your class; you know, as an example of the spirit of democracy and tolerance in the school.”

  I studied him for a few moments. Democracy and tolerance, how glibly these people used these words! Suddenly I didn’t like it and exclaimed involuntarily:

  “Why, what purpose would that serve?”

  “Well, at least it would show that in Britain there is no color bar.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, bored by this travesty of the truth: “Look here, I am at this school as a teacher, that and nothing more; the Council did not employ me because I am colored, and I have no wish to be used as propaganda for any idea or scheme, especially the one you just mentioned.”

  I spoke with some heat, I suppose, for they all looked at me in surprise. The Head turned to me:

  “I must confess to being the one who initiated the idea, Mr. Braithwaite, believing that any publicity given to your presence on the staff would benefit the school. I do not think there are many Negro teachers in England, and we are fortunate to have you and would like to say so publicly.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Florian,” I replied, “but I am not really concerned with the public view of my presence here, and I have no wish to be a sop to public conscience on matters of tolerance. I am merely a teacher and would prefer to remain unpublicized except in circumstances of my own choosing.”

  They were disappointed but they left it at that, and soon went on with their business, photographing the children in classrooms, at meals, in the playground, and at the midday dance session. Bell put the boys through their paces before the cameras, he himself stripped down to vest and slacks. The children cooperated magnificently, stimulated by the prospect of that fleeting moment of immortality when they would see themselves in the newspaper, the pride of their parents and friends, and the envy of less fortunate youngsters.

  On the following Monday the illustrated report appeared. I call it that for want of a term better descriptive of the malicious outrage which passed for journalism. There were pictures, certainly, but the “report” was restricted to a few captions and a short paragraph, none of which were truthfully descriptive of the pictures above them. Of the three pictures which appeared one showed Mr. Florian as a small, gray, aged figure dancing with one of the girls, in ridiculous contrast to the whirling-skirted youngsters around him, who were made to look sleazy and uncouth; another picture showed some of the children with cigarettes hanging from their mouths and wearing expressions of bored depravity; the third was of the dining hall at dinner time—a thieves’ kitchen would have fared better. There was something horribly vulgar about the whole thing which sickened me, and I arrived in school to find the staff very angry at the trick played on them and the school. Mrs. Drew told us that the Head wanted to discuss the matter with us during mid-morning recess.

  The children were not upset by the publicity; they thought it grand fun, and we discovered that they had been induced to pose with the cigarettes. We all knew that some of them smoked, but the pictures inferred that they smoked openly and together. Any picture would have been acceptable to them, and that day many of them even went far afield to obtain a copy of that newspaper. I suppose the slight increase in circulation effectively soothed any twinge of conscience momentarily experienced by those responsible.

  I had never attended so voluble a staff meeting. Each one saw the “report” as a personal slight on himself or herself. The Old Man was very distressed about the whole thing.

  “When I agreed
to have the newspaper people here,” he said, “it was on the understanding that they would report, at some length, on our varied activities here, fairly and objectively. They promised that they would and I believed them. I gave the reporter a carefully prepared summary of our scheme of work to help him in making such a report. Now it seems they have gone out of their way to make us look cheap and ridiculous; they’ve given more grist to the mill of those who have maligned us without knowing anything about us; they will now be able to point at these photographs and say: ‘the camera does not lie’.” In his agitation he was pulling at his lower lip, an odd habit which appeared in moments of emotional tension. “I do not know if there is any action open to me against this sort of thing.”

  “The whole idea was certainly ill-advised,” remarked Weston pompously, quickly forgetting his own enthusiasm in favor of it.

  “I agree, Mr. Weston,” the Head said, resignedly. “It was very ill-advised, and I am entirely to blame.”

  “Shut up, Weston,” Clinty cried. “You were as keen about it as the rest of us.”

  “It is rather mean of Mr. Weston to say that now. At the time all of us were keen on the idea, except perhaps Mr. Braithwaite, and he disagreed only on a personal matter.”

  “I wonder what happened to all the other pictures they took,” Grace asked. “I wasted a lot of time getting the girls upstairs into position.”

  “Why, it’s evident they did not want anything which seemed normal and ordinary. Who wants to read of ordinary children doing ordinary things? They wanted to see spivs and morons and delinquents in their incubator before their release on an unsuspecting world.”

  “What was your objection, Mr. Braithwaite?” Miss Phillips asked me.

  “Simply that I refused to be paraded as some kind of oddity, that’s all.”

  “Well, aren’t you an oddity? How many black teachers have you met in England?” Weston was right and he knew it.

  “As far as I am concerned, Weston, I could only be an oddity to anyone fool enough to imagine or believe that my color makes me less a man than my white counterpart. I am a teacher and nothing about me is odd or unusual. The reporter gave me the impression that he was more interested in the strangeness of seeing a Negro teacher with white children, and its pictorial appeal to the curious, than in anything I was doing or could do for the children; and on that score, and that alone, I objected.”

  “Never mind, Weston,” Clinty teased, “there’s always the News of the World. Your turn will come.”

  “At least I wasn’t made to look ridiculous,” he murmured. We realized he was jabbing at the Old Man.

  “No fault of yours, chum,” Clinty replied. “It’s just that you can’t dance.” She always had the last word, this irrepressible Cockney.

  Now Gillian spoke. Never before had she made any observation during a staff meeting, and usually she treated the general staffroom chatter like the chaff it really was. Now everyone looked at her.

  “I have had some little experience with newspapers, and I would like to suggest that you are not in too great a hurry to blame this on the reporter and cameramen; they have no control over what is put into the newspaper. The editor decides what and how much of it is reproduced; and his decisions are largely determined by public taste. This school has, I gather, been often criticized in some quarters, and it must be very disconcerting to you to see this crystallization of the sort of criticisms you have heard. It might be helpful to remember that this same public will have forgotten it all by tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, Miss Blanchard,” the Head said, smiling at last.

  Soon everyone was talking at once and the heavy atmosphere of gloomy concern was breaking up.

  “Sir, what about the Christmas parties?” someone asked. Already other things were claiming our attention.

  On December 6th, Seales was not in his place and I marked him absent. Just before recess he came in and walked briskly to my table.

  “Sorry I can’t stay, Sir, but my mother died early this morning and I’m helping my Dad with things.”

  As if those words finally broke all his efforts to be strong and grown up, his face crumpled and he wept like the small boy he really felt. I got up quickly and led him unresisting to my chair, where he sat, his head in his hands, sobbing bitterly.

  I gave the news to the class; they received it in shocked silence, in that immediate sympathy and compassion which only the young seem to know and experience, and then many of them were weeping too.

  I spoke comfortingly to Seales and sent him home; then I went to see Mr. Florian to acquaint him with the circumstances.

  After recess, as I was about to begin our History lesson, Barbara Pegg stood up; she had been asked by the class to say that they had agreed to take a collection among themselves to purchase a wreath or other floral token of sympathy, to be sent to Seales’ home. I said I was agreeable, providing I was allowed to contribute also. We learned that the funeral was fixed for that Saturday. Barbara collected contributions throughout the week, and by Friday morning had nearly two pounds. I was delighted at this news, and after assembly we discussed together the type of floral token they wished to purchase and the nearest florist from whom it could be obtained. Then I remarked:

  “Which of you will take it over to his home?”

  Their reaction was like a cold douche. The pleasantly united camaraderie disappeared completely from the room, and in its place was the watchful antagonism I had encountered on my first day. It was as if I had pulled a thick transparent screen between them and myself, effectively shutting us away from each other.

  It was ugly to see; I felt excluded, even hated, but all so horribly quickly.

  “What’s the matter with you?” My voice was loud in my ears, “What’s suddenly so awful about the flowers?”

  Moira stood up. “We can’t take them, Sir.”

  “What do you mean, Miss Joseph? Why can’t you take them?”

  She looked quickly around the room as if pleading with the others to help her explain.

  “It’s what people would say if they saw us going to a colored person’s home.” She sat down.

  There it was. I felt weak and useless, an alien among them. All the weeks and months of delightful association were washed out by those few words.

  Nothing had really mattered, the teaching, the talking, the example, the patience, the worry. It was all as nothing. They, like the strangers on buses and trains, saw only the skins, never the people in those skins. Seales was born among them, grew up among them, played with them; his mother was white, British, of their stock and background and beginnings.

  All the hackneyed clichés hammered in my head. A colored boy with a white mother, a West Indian boy with an English mother. Always the same. Never an English boy with a Negro or West Indian father. No, that would be placing the emphasis on his Englishness, his identification with them.

  It was like a disease, and these children whom I loved without caring about their skins or their backgrounds, they were tainted with the hateful virus which attacked their vision, distorting everything that was not white or English.

  I remembered a remark of Weston’s: “They’re morons, cold as stone, nothing matters to them, nothing.”

  I turned and walked out of the classroom, sick at heart. I wanted to talk to someone about it, but to whom? They were all white, all of them, even Gillian, so what could they say that was different. Maybe they were, by education and breeding, better able to hide it, to gloss it over with fine words.

  I walked into the Head’s office. He listened, his face mirroring the deep humanity and sympathy which were so truly a part of him.

  “I’m glad this has happened, Braithwaite, for your sake, especially.”

  “Why, Sir?”

  “Because I think you were setting too much store by quick results. After all, we are not concerned here merely wit
h academic effort; our idea is to teach them to live with one another, sharing, caring, helping. It’s not easy for them.”

  Here we go again, I thought. Everything those little bastards do is right, even this. Was he never prepared to see any point of view except that which supported their case?

  “Whether it is easy or not, Mr. Florian, Seales is one of them, he has grown up with them, he’s no stranger like myself.”

  “This is a community with many strong racial and religious tensions and prejudices, most of them of long standing.”

  “That may be so, Sir, but Mrs. Seales was a white woman of this area, and she worked at the local laundry with many other parents of these children; they knew her as well as they know her son.”

  I was feeling angry with him for his attempt to excuse their conduct.

  “You have been taking too much for granted, because of your success in the classroom. I am sure that they all like Seales very much, but once outside the school things are different, and I think Seales would be the first to appreciate that.”

  “But Mr. Florian … ”

  “You must be patient, Mr. Braithwaite,” he continued, rising. “You’ve been here, how long? From May to now, nearly seven months, and you’ve done a great deal with them. Be patient. Maybe next year, the year after—who knows? Go back to them and show them some of the same tolerance and patient good will you hope to get from them.”

  This little man always seemed to grow larger as he spoke; as if to compensate for his twisted frame he had been given a saintliness; a deep patient wisdom which quite dwarfed bigger, more imposing men.

  After leaving the Headmaster I stood for a time in the corridor outside my classroom, my mind in a whirl. The way these children and their parents felt about Seales and his parents was a personal lesson to me. This was the sort of ostracism Gillian and I would have to face and the thought of it filled me with worry. What, I wondered, would it do to her? Would we be able to cope with it? Or would we escape it, at least in its cruder form, if we lived in different surroundings, among people who could claim better social and educational advantages? I went in.