The Tiger's Child
Page 27
After getting Reuben settled with a toy at one of the tables, I turned to see a small face peering through the window of the classroom door. “Hello,” I said. “Is this your room?”
The door cracked open to reveal a small girl with thin, matchstick legs and pinched features dwarfed further by what could only be described as a Pre-Raphaelite hair style—a great wodge of dark, curly hair parted unevenly down the middle and descending over her back in a sheet. She was attractive in a pale, overwhelmed sort of way.
I knew immediately who this was—Jade Ekdahl-simply because she was the only girl in the class. What had caught my eye immediately in reading Jade’s file was the fact that she was an elective mute. Although reportedly she talked at home, at school she had never uttered a word to anyone. Indeed, not only did she not talk, she also did not laugh, cry, cough, burp, hiccup or even sniffle, which, tales had it, left snot to drip inelegantly down from her nose into her lap. She had been retained an extra year in kindergarten in hopes that time might help her overcome her speaking difficulties, but nothing had changed. She’d been promoted on to first grade, where she seemed competent enough at her schoolwork, but she was dismally isolated. Still not speaking at the end of that year and by now almost eight, she was moved down the hall to this room.
The reason that Jade’s case had caught my eye was that for the better part of the previous ten years, from college right through my work at the Sandry Clinic, my special research interest had been elective mutism. Fascinated by this disturbance, in which an individual is physically and intellectually capable of speaking normally but refuses to do so for psychological reasons, I had worked with these children extensively. Now I found it quirky that on finally deciding to end all that, who should turn up in my class but another elective mute. You’re blessed with them, Mr. Tinbergen had remarked when I pointed out this coincidence. I’d replied something along the lines of not so much being blessed with them as haunted by them.
“Good morning, Jadie,” Mr. Tinbergen said. “Come on in. This is your new teacher. Your real teacher, not just another substitute.”
Jadie—as everyone called her—glanced up at me briefly and then scuttled by to hang up her coat in the cloakroom. What I noticed immediately was her posture, quite unlike anything I’d previously encountered while treating elective mutes. Hunched over almost double, she had her arms crossed and tucked up under her, as if she were clutching an unwieldy load of books. I made a mental note to inquire about scoliosis.
The two final pupils arrived by bus and so came into the classroom together. Six-year-old Philip was a small skinny black kid with a horsey-looking face. His hair was cut very short and his two front teeth stuck out, emphasizing the equine likeness. Born in Chicago to a mother addicted to hard drugs, Philip had had a very unpromising start to life. He’d been premature, addicted himself, and had failed to thrive throughout much of his first year of life. As he passed through a series of foster homes during the times his mother felt unable to cope with him, his development had been slow, erratic, and often unreported so that when, at age three, he was finally taken permanently from his mother’s care, no one had any realistic idea what Philip was capable of. When he was five, he was placed in a long-term foster home with a local couple who had taken several other “hard-to-place” children and were raising them successfully. Without a doubt, the newfound warmth and stability were good for Philip, but he had made dishearteningly little progress. Although he grunted and gestured, he still had virtually no speech. He urinated in the toilet but would only open his bowels when wearing a special diaper, which had resulted in horrific bouts of constipation and frequently soiled pants. And he had made almost no academic progress in two years at school. A class for mildly mentally handicapped children probably would have been a more appropriate placement for his educational needs; however, Philip’s behavior made him unwelcome. Racked with fears, he was withdrawn and unwilling to approach new situations, and when frustrated, he responded with panicky violence.
The final student was Jeremiah, eight. A native American of Sioux descent, he was the oldest of five children in a family eking out a living doing God-knows-what on a five-acre tract of land littered with rusting car bodies and old stoves. Jeremiah was a fighter. His pugnacious behavior was so extreme, his mouth so foul that the parents in his previous school had banded together to keep him from returning, even with resource help. So he’d ended up here in a last-ditch attempt to save him from custodial detention. I had an irrational love for this sort of kid, for the loud, feisty, streetwise ones who never knew quite how to quit, and the moment I saw him with his black hair stuck straight up, as if it had never seen a comb, and his cocky little rooster strut, I knew I’d found another one.
“Well, children,” Mr. Tinbergen said cheerfully, when everyone had arrived, “guess what? This is your new teacher. Your new teacher. Not just another substitute, but your own teacher. Miss Hayden. Miss Torey Hayden. And she says you may call her Torey. That’s what her other boys and girls have called her. So let’s say hello to Torey.”
All four children stared at me. No one spoke.
“Well, come on, now. Let’s make Torey feel welcome. Reuben? Can you say good morning?”
“Good morning,” Reuben echoed in a singsong falsetto.
“Philip?”
Philip grunted and hid his head in his arms.
“Jeremiah?”
His grunt was not much more intelligible than Philip’s.
“And Jadie says hello, too, don’t you, Jadie?” Then Mr. Tinbergen turned to me. “Welcome to P.S. 168. Welcome to our school.”
I smiled self-consciously.
“And now, I’ll let you go. I’m sure you’re anxious to get on with things.” With that, Mr. Tinbergen finally went out the door.
Pressing it gently shut behind him, I turned back to the class, to the four of them sitting around the table. “Well,” I said, “good morning. Good morning to you, Philip. And to you, Reuben. And to you, Jeremiah. And good morning to you. Jade—Jadie? Is that what you like people to call you?”
“She don’t talk, so you might as well not make a point of it,” Jeremiah said.
“I can still talk to her,” I replied.
“Oh Jesus,” Jeremiah replied and rolled his eyes. “You’re not going to be one of them teachers, are you? Not one of them always wanting her own way.”
“Is that what you’re worried about?” I asked.
“Is that what you’re worried about?” he mimicked perfectly. “Oh Jesus, you guys, listen to her. Listen to that boogy old broad.”
I grinned. Back in the saddle again.
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About the Author
TOREY HAYDEN is an educational psychologist and a special-education teacher who, since 1979, has chronicled her struggles in the classroom in a succession of bestselling books. She currently lives and writes in North Wales.
Praise for
TOREY HAYDEN
and
THE TIGER’S CHILD
“Hayden pulls readers in … Chapters that fly with ease … Filled with descriptive, lively anecdotes, The Tiger’s Child illustrates the trials of teachers who work with emotionally disturbed children.”
Orlando Sentinel
“Hayden probably would have become a fine writer under any circumstances but it is our good fortune that she also decided to become a teacher of children with severe mental handicaps and emotional disorders.
When you read a Torey Hayden book, however, all such descriptions of children become academic nonsense. What we are guided to discover is that human beings rarely fit into conventional categories and diagnoses … Hayden has a gift for demonstrating the ways in which, despite their unique qualities, these human beings are ou
rselves. Here are universal fears, feelings of not being lovable enough, the universal inability to express the sources of pain.”
Washington Post Book World
“What kind of book will hook a teen on reading? … Any book by Torey Hayden.”
Florida Times-Union
“Hayden’s compassionate writing underscores the power of love.”
Topeka Capital-Journal
Other Works
Also by Torey Hayden
One Child
She was a wild, violent six-year-old lost in a world of anger and torment – until a brilliant young teacher reached out.
Six-year-old Sheila was abandoned by her mother on a highway when she was four. A survivor of horrific abuse, she never spoke and never cried. She was placed in a class for severely retarded children after committing an atrocious act of violence against another child. Everyone thought Sheila was beyond salvation – except her teacher, Torey Hayden. With patience, skill and abiding love, she fought long and hard to release a haunted little girl from her secret nightmare, and nurture the spark of genius she recognized trapped within Sheila’s silence.
‘Page after page proves again the power of love and the resiliency of life.’
Los Angeles Times
‘Torey Hayden deserves the kind of respect I can’t give many people. She isn’t just valuable, she’s incredible. The world needs more like Torey Hayden.’
Boston Globe
Copyright
Excerpts from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, copyright 1943 and renewed 1971 by Harcourt Brace & Company, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Lines from “The Stolen Child” by W. B. Yeats are from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Editing, edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983).
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First published in the US by Avon Books 1995
This edition published by HarperElement 2005
© Torey Hayden 1995
Torey Hayden asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007206971
Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN 9780007373956
Version 2
This book is based on the author’s experiences. In order to protect privacy, names and some identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed or reconstructed. Some characters are not based on any one person but are composite characters.
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