Teacher’s First Day

I made my first visit to Grand Caillou School on a cold, rainy January afternoon in 1980. In spite of the winter weather, I parked my oil dripping red and primer gray VW Beetle across the street, as far back as possible in the shell-covered parking lot to avoid being connected to the wreck. From the front, or bayou side as the kids called it, the school looked fairly presentable: two brick structures for classes and another serving as a combination cafeteria/auditorium. I wasn’t assigned to any of these, though, and was directed to what was called “the back building.”

Grand Caillou itself seemed totally alien, a small fishing community just “up to bayou” as the Cajuns say above Dulac, the last outpost in Louisiana salt marshes before opening up to the Gulf of Mexico. The bayou in front of the school would have been attractive had its banks not been profusely littered by discarded junk. Broken refrigerators, half-sunken boats, old tires and even wrecked cars mingled with egrets, floating vegetation and more than an occasional alligator. In many ways I felt as if I’d just landed on Mars.   

The hall was cold, damp, dark, and eerily quiet when I first walked down it, progressively disturbing with each subsequent footstep. Nothing about the wooden building, a long single story structure over fifty years old, awakened my previous recollection of my own schooling in upstate New York. Faded beige paint peeled from the building’s dingy wood siding and further travels inside revealed plastic buckets strategically placed about the corridor to catch trickles of water dropping down from a stained, crudely patched ceiling.

The school served a predominantly Native American population that itself had been pushed down Grand Caillou Bayou as far as possible by white men who stole the higher, safer ground. Surrounded on three sides by swamp and open water and connected to Houma by a 13-mile strip of badly paved highway cutting north-south through sugarcane fields, Grand Caillou School was the at the end of the education line in Terrebonne Parish.

The entire back building was once even further south, originally part of the old Dulac Indian School previously operated by the Methodist Church, and the only earlier chance the Houmas Indians, as they called themselves, originally had to get any kind of formal education. Prior to desegregation, public schools were divided along white/black lines with the Houmas being denied entrance to both black and white schools.

After federal intervention and subsequent desegregation, the “Dulac Indian School” was partially dismantled and sectioned, placed on barges, and then towed by tugboat up the bayou for reconstruction behind the existing school previously open only to white children.

Both long and narrow inside, my new place of employment often reminded me of an oversized box car with doors and classrooms positioned along the side, a library serving as caboose at the far end of its poorly illuminated, frequently wet and muddy hallways that were neither heated nor air conditioned. Consequently, hall climate varied from a meat locker chill to London Broil, depending on season. Outside, the whole structure bore a striking resemblance to a WW II prison camp barracks. Little did I know I’d soon be cast as a popular TV character appropriate to the setting, Sergeant Schultz. “I know nothing…nothing…,” would gain deeper meaning that contrary to prior exposure wouldn’t be a damn bit funny, at least not to me at the time.

Still unaware of my impending debut as a poorly paid buffoon, I sought counsel from the teacher I was to replace, my real reason for the tour.  I stopped my building observations to notice a gawky kid I guessed was about 14 walking slowly down the hall in my general direction.
“Hi, can you tell me where I can find Mr. Pitre’s room?” I asked. The boy smiled, nodded and gestured to a nearby door. I knocked, and out came teacher.

Mr. Pitre smiled briefly until he glanced over to the boy and broke into a hard stare. “Oh, I see you’ve met the worst kid in school,” he said flatly. It didn’t seem to bother the kid who kept the same blank grin he had when I first saw him.

“Are you going to be the new teacher?” asked the boy, whose name I now knew to be Wilson. “That’s right,” I answered.

Our conversation was dramatically interrupted by a loud crash coming from the classroom. “You stupid asshole,” a very big girl screamed. “I ought to fuckin’ kill you!” She drew back and swung at a plump, dark brown boy who began imitating her high pitched voice. “Sit down and shut the hell up,” Mr. Pitre contributed to the tableau.

After school, we talked about my new job, which I already gathered was going to be far from the picture of educational excellence I’d been given by the personnel director, and more like the relief column for Robert E Lee’s final campaign.

“Don’t ever argue with them,” teacher said wearily of my new pupils. “If you do that, you bring yourself down to their level.” To this I replied, “Just exactly what is their level?”

“They belong under the building, not in it,” he responded. The following Monday I wished I’d been buried under the building myself. Instead, I was burned at the stake of public education, my feet ignited by flaming curriculum manuals and uncompleted lunch reports.

When injected alone into the dysfunctional classroom shortly after the Christmas break, I thought the madhouse patients were loose. I moved through the chaos as an over-matched prizefighter, literally and figuratively ducking and weaving, not having the slightest clue how to stop the insurrection or at least counter punch, much less teach reading as my contract stipulated. I was also quite frightened.

Three boys in the back of a littered, dirty classroom constructed spitballs faster than a pulp processing plant and fired volleys at me with the practiced marksmanship of a veteran artillery regiment. Even when directly facing the execution squad with my back pressed up against the dusty chalkboard for protection, the noise around me rose and fell in waves of screams, yells, and bilingual curses, a wonderfully instructive introduction to teaching. The kids, however, didn’t learn anything.

A 200-pound bowling ball of a girl with “LUV” crudely tattooed on her left hand led the charge from her front row seat. She swung her big body almost gracefully, announcing with total accuracy to all able to hear above the screams and shouts, “Dis man here ain’t got no sense!” She then inspired and directed a group chant, everyone pounding battered old desks and yelling: “We want Mr. Pitre! We want Mr. Pitre!”

“Hey, Mr. Pitre isn’t here, and he won’t be coming back. You’ll have to learn to live with me,” I answered, wishing my predecessor had been present so I could hand back the keys to the asylum and run for my life.

“Who says we gotta live with you?” the insurrection leader responded, thumping her desk with both fists to add emphasis.

“I says!” I answered.

My tormenter paused briefly, cracked open a thin sneer and shot back, “So what?”

After crawling out from under the building on my second day impersonating a teacher, one member of the artillery regiment decided to go for an early lunch by imitating the daily call to the cafeteria. While I was actively engaged in resolving a dispute over a broken digital watch, the counterfeit announcer leaned down, stuck his head up close to his desk opening for books and called, “Mr. Brown, time for lunch.” Acoustically, the voice reverberating from inside a metal desk enclosure sure sounded like the commanding intercom that summoned us the day before. Teacher was completely fooled.

My students piled up in a tumultuous blob that forced the smaller kids up against the straining door, until one of the pushed and crushed managed to turn the doorknob to allow the entire screaming mass to explode into the hall. From there they raced riotously down to the cafeteria, the horde much like drunken outlaw bikers told a million dollar prize went to the first person reaching the bar.

When I finally caught up with my adolescent biker gang in the cafeteria, I found it odd that my eighth graders were scheduled to eat lunch with the kindergarten through third graders, and promptly discovered I’d been had. The assistant principal did too, and I soon received my first chewing out as a teacher. This I was accustomed to after years of working for bad newspapers. It was, however, the only extended lunch break I ever took in my first six years of teaching.

I hung my head and walked back to the empty classroom to look out through dirt-caked windows at a two-acre athletic field. Behind the field was marshland adjoining Lake Boudreaux. A relatively shallow body of water, Lake Boudreaux was a formidably large lake. One could not, in many places, see the opposite shore, making it quite easy to become lost when out on a boat if not very familiar with the few geographical reference points.

With regard to reference points as a teacher, I had fewer still. The pandemonium in my room continued daily until the final bell.

Somewhere into my second week, two reading curriculum specialists knocked unannounced at my door, asking if I could use any assistance. Simultaneously, two of my better pupils tumbled out of their chairs and began wrestling on the floor. I equated the specialists’ solicitation on par to making a casual inquiry of a drowning man going under for the third time. I lunged appropriately. “Anything you can do to help would be greatly appreciated,” I pleaded, a walking dead man on the 12^th step of a scaffold in the shadow of a student-constructed noose. Making assurances that the cavalry would soon be on its way, the women promptly withdrew to safety as 20 Houmas Indians, assisted by about ten other black and white adopted tribe members, circled the new General Custer.

“Hey, Brown, who dem people?” one student asked after the specialists departed for safer surroundings.

“They’re curriculum specialists who are going to help me teach you,” I answered.

“You need it, man,” someone most wise called from the back row. I didn’t see either curriculum specialist until the following year, but had a lifeline thrown to me by two very kind saviors who also, most fortunately, were excellent teachers.