It’s the same way she’s smiling right now, trying to remind me that they’re waiting, that all these put-together moms and orthographic judges are waiting on my next breath, for the insect in my throat to unfurl itself and fly out in the shape of the correct letters.
I pronounce the word right but I spell it
O-U-T-L-I-A-R
because wrong is the only way they let you off the stage in this game. If I spell it right, they’re going to applaud and their applause will be polite and “cold as a witch’s tit,” like Grandma would say on winter mornings when the coffee’s still brewing. They’ll send me on to the next level, and the next level will take me farther away, in dresses I don’t have, on days off Mama won’t get. Wrong is my ticket home and I’m cashing it in. And they let me off the stage, their sorry applause rings against the sorry blood in my ears as I run to Mama’s arms and they wrap around me and hold me tight.
loser
The prize for losing the Spelling Bee is that Mama takes us out to dinner. I’m thinking she’s going to make a speech but all she says is “Don’t forget your book” when we pull into the Sizzler parking lot and that is exactly all I want to hear. Reading during dinner means it’s business as usual. At least Mama pretends it is, she does give me too-long looks over the top of Pocahontas, some history-type book bought in the checkout aisle at the Save-Rite, but I drink bottomless Cokes, eat cherry tomatoes and sunflower seeds, read I Am the Cheese, and don’t look back.
We come to Sizzler sometimes on paydays, but never dressed up, and the lady whose job it is to take away our dirty plates must think our outfits mean payday for her, because she doesn’t try to get me to reuse my silverware. Mama and I read straight through dinner, only stopping for our trips to the salad bar and my two trips to the soft-serve counter, and then I read all the way home, my finger holding my place in the dark stretches between streetlights.
I’m still reading as we enter the house and don’t stop until Mama comes out of the bathroom, her clothes changed and a bottle of nail polish in her hand. Identical bottles of red nail polish line the back of the toilet for every day before work, when she paints her nails a new coat of perfect red, but tonight she’s not scheduled to work and I make a face at her going-out jeans. Mama exhales smoke through her nose and leans down to give me a kiss, but the click of the metal ball in the bottle that she has begun shaking, the clicking that signals her preparing to leave, turns my head. “You look like a dragon when you do that,” I say, bending the spine of my book backwards until it cracks, but I’m glad that she’s going. For once, I want to be alone. I smile at her and say, “Don’t kill any villagers tonight.”
partners
“We are not making turkeys this year,” Mrs. Croxton says. Because we’re moving on to Roscoe Junior High next year, and to prepare us, our Thanksgiving project will be to write our first research reports. She says this as she walks around our circle of desks and hands out the red, white, and blue cards stacked in her hands. Written on every card is one of our “glorious constitutional amendments,” and I get a blue card with letters in big red marker that reads “Fourteenth Amendment: Equal Protection of the Law.” Mrs. Croxton says that we are to take our amendments to the library where Mrs. Reddick is waiting to help us find the books we’ll need to become research experts. And then Mrs. Croxton says that, because there are only twenty-six amendments and there are thirty-two of us, she repeated some of her favorite of our many freedoms and that we can work in partners if we want, and as soon as she says this, the classroom bursts into sound and waving and running. From across the circle, I see Stephanie Harris got the Fourteenth Amendment too and I’m caught up in the rush. I walk over to her and even start to ask if she wants to work together, but she looks past me, at her best friend forever, Jena-with-one-n, and they laugh together at the very same second and their laughter crawls up my spine and turns my shoulders so fast I’m already back in my seat before Stephanie can say “No thanks, Rory D.” I sit through the burn of my blush and read over and over the words—Equal Protection of the Law—where they blur on my desk.
At the library I wait, last in line, so that I can have more time with Mrs. Reddick, and when Stephanie gets her stack of books, she turns to me and says, “Guess you’ll have to wait till I’m done.” I couldn’t care less about waiting and I hand my card to Mrs. Reddick, but for the first time I can remember, she doesn’t smile. My card bends in her grip as her eyes follow Stephanie to where she sits next to Jena-with-one-n, dumping her books on the floor. Then Mrs. Reddick looks me up and down and her eyes slow at the let-out hem of my pants, at the yarn that curls around my ponytail, and she says, “I know just what you need, Ms. Hendrix,” and, “Why don’t you sit here at my desk.” And I do. I sit behind her big wooden desk while Mrs. Reddick starts bringing me book after book from the teachers’ section of the library. Each time she brings one she pulls her glasses up from where they hang on a thick silver chain and reads through the index, then she opens it up to pages that tell stories of Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, of Roe versus Wade. I’m thinking about how I’ve heard those names on Grandma’s lips, in the same angry breath as “privacy” and mumbles about who’s “running this show,” and then I see, in the next book Mrs. Reddick sets down, a name I know myself. The name is Vivian Buck. The ones beside it are Emma and Carrie, and next to those, the word: feebleminded. Mama was right. I did find her again, and after spending all this time alone, finding my best friend right there on page 237 feels like an exclamation point in my heart. Stephanie can have her BFF with her one lousy n, I’ve got mine and I’m not letting her go this time. I take a finely sharpened pencil out of Mrs. Reddick’s pink-and-white-flowered pencil jar, turn over my blue amendment card, and start to write.
reading comprehension
Read the following passage carefully, then answer the question. (You have fifteen minutes to complete this portion of the test.)
DEGENERATION: THE CASE OF BUCK V. BELL
“Feebleminded” is one of those terms, like “debutante” or “Social Security,” that is not often used in seriousness anymore. In the recent past, however, feebleminded was considered scientific and used to describe the congenital deficit of stupidity. In 1927 the phrase was given the judicial seal of approval when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the gene pool should be safeguarded from those considered feebleminded via forcible sterilization.
The Bucks are perhaps the most famous feebleminded Americans, the poster family for all the term was made to encompass: promiscuity and addiction, both encouraged by a stupidity able to withstand any effort at edification. Emma Buck was the first in that family to be officially declared mentally defective, and in 1920 she was remanded to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Emma’s daughter Carrie, along with her other children, had been sent to live with foster parents. In the foster home there was an uncle or cousin who couldn’t resist Carrie’s sad orphan eyes, and before long he took to muffling her sobs with kisses and comforting her deep into the night. Soon, Carrie became pregnant.
Carrie’s pregnancy established her promiscuity, which proved what science had already hypothesized: Carrie was loose, just like her feebleminded, alcoholic mother, and therefore feeblemindedness, promiscuity, and heredity must go hand in hand in hand. Carrie’s child, Vivian Buck, was left with Carrie’s foster parents to raise, and in 1924 Carrie was sent to the Colony to join Emma. Once there, Carrie Buck won national attention when her case, which argued that her right to bear any future children was a constitutional one, was lost before the Supreme Court by Irving Whitehead, a board member of the same institution that wished to sterilize her. Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver W. Holmes determined that in light of the traits she had obviously inherited from her mother, and certainly passed on to her daughter, forcible sterilization was a legal act in the best interest of all.
Based on Holmes’s decision, upwards of fifty thousand intellectual defectives were forcibly and legally sterilize
d before the practice was quietly brought to an end in the 1970s. Sometimes the feebleminded were not informed of what was about to be done or had been done, being told instead that an operation was needed to cure appendicitis or female trouble or was simply for their own good. Sometimes they lived the rest of their feebleminded existence without ever knowing why they failed to bear children, and sometimes they learned the truth after decades of fruitlessness and failed marriages.
Which statements are true according to the passage?
a. Science, governments, and your doctor should be trusted.
b. “Comforting her deep into the night” is a euphemism for sneaking candy.
c. The ugliest phrase used in this passage is “female.”
d. Bad things really do come in threes.
sunrise
The Government’s official opinion of Carrie Buck, as given by Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, is stated clearly in his argument’s conclusion to Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200: “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” And so Carrie was sterilized without anyone thinking she needed to be told. The thinking on Mr. Holmes’s part was that if members of the white race behaved in undesirable ways, these behaviors would creep into the upper classes like weeds, root down deep, and put the choke on the delicate hybrids growing up around them. Holmes was so concerned about the importance of good breeding even the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t give him pause. He well understood the amendment’s notion of one’s right to one’s own body and to one’s own plans, and hopes, and dreams for that body, but he just couldn’t see what that unalienable human right had to do with the obvious defective before him.
Since Mr. Justice had no problem bringing his gavel down on Carrie, if he could swing that thing so blind in her case, it’s hard for me to believe he would have had any problem hammering it home in the case of Hendrix v., had we been in her position. What with all of the begetting and begotten, the Hendrixes have proved themselves biblically fertile; but without the need to see our unions made holy or legal in the eyes of the Lord or the law, we’re just as guilty of the sins Carrie Buck was tried for as she was. The drinking and drugging haven’t helped our reputation much either, but without the drinking the unions hardly stand a chance of being consummated, and without the drugs I might’ve come into the world in the usual way; with a name that didn’t sound like a screaming sunrise and a father listed as someone other than Unknown on my birth certificate.
A pregnant Mama named me Rory Dawn because she was tripping on acid, and me with her, I guess, and I watched through her peaking skin the sun rising over the Pacific, blasting hot pink with warning through the window of her ocean-facing San Francisco hotel room, a bearded gentleman asleep on the bed behind her. Old Holmes was long dead by then, and Mama was so concerned with her own history in the making I don’t think she gave any thought to that bit of history we’ve lost, the dark marriage of genetics and class, the miscarriage of children and justice that took place less than fifty years before. If she had, she might never have seen me through to my first roar.
Whatever decisions Mama weighed, whatever history she lost, never learned, or plain ignored, that morning she trained her eyes to the promise of the sun rising over the Pacific and gave me a glimpse of the potential that Holmes, via willful ignorance or a simple lack of psychotropic drugs, could never see to believe: how short the distance is between the haves and the have-nots, the cans and cannots, how where you’re born is sometimes all that separates a sure thing from a long shot. These possibilities tangled in my umbilical cord, warmed to the pink hint of dawn and the thrum of Mama’s voice as it echoed right into my newly forming bones, Mama promising a threat I inherited, words as familiar as my own skin, “Pink sky at morning, sailor, take warning.” The Fourteenth Amendment’s flag flies in triumph for Roe and Brown but it still hangs at half-mast in the case of Buck v. and I can’t let that stand. I may not have been born captain of this boat, but I was born to rock it.
a bartender’s guide
The American Dream
This classic cocktail has gone through a few changes since its first manifestation. The original recipe called for equal parts ambition and sweat with apple-peel spiral for garnish. The signature characteristic of the modern American Dream creatively substitutes a nearly perilous belief in oneself in the place of the historical apple peel.
Equal parts sweat and heedless disregard
Dash of bitters
Lucky twist
Stir. Strain. Garnish.
VARIATION: For an ultra-dry American Dream, substitute an actual fortune for the twist of good fortune usually required.
average
When I get my report back, Mrs. Croxton’s red pen has pushed too hard into the paper to tell me that I should have “stayed focused on the big picture of the Fourteenth Amendment” and not let myself “get sidetracked.” Mrs. Croxton “expected more from me.” Where usually I hide my papers so no one can see the plusses and stars and A’s, I have a new reason to turn my paper over today. I fold it into tiny squares and wait forever for the bell to ring.
When I get home I wait until after Mama’s asleep to take my paper out and read it again, the details of Holmes’s decision, of Vivian Buck’s life, how he couldn’t see that the equal protection the Fourteenth Amendment promises applied to Viv and Carrie’s lives, to their futures, that it applied to their bodies too, and how this probably means the Fourteenth Amendment just isn’t going to be enough to count on for the rest of us either. And then I read Mrs. Croxton’s notes again, about how the “unfortunate mistakes” made in the case of the Bucks aren’t important enough to overshadow “the victories that have been won for the underprivileged.” Mrs. Croxton wanted pretty pages about how far we’ve come since slavery, not ratty truths about what work awaits us with other groups still deemed less than human, and her final comment, “This Report Is Not On Target,” hangs right over the angry, empty claw of my very first C. Average.
I’ve been waiting for this since the Spelling Bee, waiting to fade into the background, to end the challenge I didn’t mean to present to the Roscoe teachers and their empty expectations of the Calle kids. I finally got the grade I thought would make me feel right at home, only now it feels like there’s nowhere worth belonging to anyway. I ball the report up but I’m afraid of Mama finding it if I throw it in the trash, so I open the stove door quietly and toss it onto the ash and embers. It smolders there, the facts of Viv’s life lost in the smoke.
family ties
Roscoe Junior High has always been on the brink of Nevada’s Great Basin and now it is officially on the brink of something else: at risk. This isn’t new, but the term is, borrowed from the medical field when the vocabulary usually used to describe populations notorious for their stupidity and stubborn will exhausted itself. So now there’s a special term to describe us, but we’re just as invisible as before, maybe more so. The only real risk that concerns the teachers and administrators at Roscoe is the risk of having to do their jobs. They aren’t worried about us slipping through the cracks. They are the cracks. Fading into the background after losing Roscoe’s chance at the Spelling Bee was easy. The idea that Calle kids might have some potential hiding in our dirty creases gave them a scare. It’s not like they work on commission. So when I lost at State and then proved myself hopeless with my report on the Bucks, we all breathed a sigh of relief and returned to the regularly scheduled failure. Now I toss my homework in the ditch on my way home from school like everyone else, and after late nights, I tiptoe past Mama’s still-sleeping body but bang the kitchen cupboards to beat the band when the milk carton’s empty and the Wheaties are gone. There’s no making college plans when you can’t make breakfast plans. Wake up Mama with Alka-Seltzer, plop, plop, fizz, fizz, it don’t matter who the president is. It’s morning again in America.
the great chains of being
If I drew pictures of the Calle families, this is what they would look like. Not family trees, more like weeds really, just a
s simple, stubborn, and unwanted:
Buck Hendrix
Emmad Shirley Rose
Carried Johanna Ruth
Viviand Rory Dawn
The little d’s that bud on some folks’ trees are round and ripe as daughters but here they all hang withered to let us know who’s died. Some folks, like Viv, have long been dead but make appearances for the living, and some, like Mama, can’t seem to get that little d added fast enough, deaf to those they’ll leave behind.
The Bucks live in history books written far from the Calle, and their lives were spent in the wet Old South, not the dry Old West, and in the Roaring ’20s not the boring ’80s, but I count them as neighbors. As family, because Viv came through for me when no one else could and because our families’ patterns are so alike we might’ve been run off on the very same Singer. This way: Vivian belonged to Carrie, Carrie belonged to Emma, and all three of them belonged to the State. The Bucks, like the Hendrixes, were passed from the arms of one social service agency to another their whole lives. By virtue of being a Buck, Vivian’s fate was predetermined, and by virtue of that, the fate that comes with a name, Viv was just like me. Except that her story’s told and mine isn’t. The Bucks’ history lies flat and fading between the pages of my Academic American Encyclopedia, only paper and ink now, but the Hendrix story isn’t finished yet.
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