“Why are you here?”
It was Rosie who’d said it, not from
impertinence, but because she had a knack for sensing a problem and boldly
speaking its name – in this case me. . .
I had sent out invitations to all the sixth-grade girls to come to my
classroom for a series of lunchtime gatherings where we’d talk about
courageous women. It was ten
minutes into
noon
recess and I was beginning to wonder if any were going to show up – it was
their lunch period after all – when my classroom door inched open and a mop
of chestnut hair poked in, two intense brown eyes peering out from under it.
“Is this where the girls are going to be meeting?”
“Sure is.” I didn’t know Rosie by name. I had seen her once or
twice on the playground and had been struck by a clarity you don't usually see
in the eyes of an eleven-year-old. “Have a chair,” I added, sweeping my
hand towards the empty table in the middle of the room.
“The other girls are getting their lunches,” she said, scuttling
across the carpet. “They'll be here in a minute." Then she stopped,
suddenly, cafeteria tray locked in her hands, fixed her ocelot eyes on me, and
popped the fateful question: What was I
doing there? She’d expected a girls-only gathering.
I’m not sure how I answered, but Rosie’s question set me thinking.
(What was I doing there? Why all
this work on girls’ behalf during the past few years?) Had I the time, and
Rosie the interest, I might have given any number of reasons – historical,
cultural, social, even economic – why I thought it a good idea to help
empower Rosie and her friends. But in fact, my deepest motivation lay
elsewhere – comes from an image, really, a precious bit of cargo that got
stowed in my subconscious one rainy afternoon in my GATE classroom more than a
decade ago. Chance had left me with a class of sixth-grade girls that year,
and I'd made the most of it, slipping in a little opera along with the earth
science unit I was teaching in my mixed-gender classes.
The image is of girls dancing. It is our lunch period, downtime. We are
eating together and listening to the final aria of Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci, “The Clowns.”
The mournful clown, “Pagliaccio,” is bewailing his fate, having just
killed his faithless wife and her lover in a fit of jealous passion.
Someone has turned off the lights as we listen. A dreamy half-light has
settled upon the classroom, heavy rain is falling on the roof, and
Pagliaccio's anguished voice fills the room. Partway through the aria, one of
the girls, a ballet student, stands up, takes a couple of short steps, then
sets out across the carpet, moving to the music in brief, simple turns. The
girls watch her. Then two of them put down their sandwiches, rise without
speaking, and join her. Before I'm quite aware of what has happened, all the
girls have gotten up and are wheeling wordlessly through the classroom, their
silhouettes backlit from the low afternoon light that comes in through the one
window.
I watch suspended, hardly breathing. The girls have forgotten my
presence, glissading in small loops and circles over the carpet, around the
tables. They turn, circle each other, legs taut, then bowed, in an unplanned
choreography. The music rises to a crescendo as the clown's heart breaks and
the opera ends on a single, lingering note – the sudden silence stopping the
young dancers where they stand.
No one stirs. There is only the sound of the rain and some faintly
labored breathing. Then, the explosion: “Let's
do it again!” It is not a demand, but an expression of unassailable
need. Without saying a word, I rewind the tape, press Play. Pagliaccio begins
his slow lament, mourns his tragic love, cries out in agony once more, as the
girls circle my classroom in the twilight. Circle and glide.
And
a third time, by command – Pagliaccio reprising the desolate aria, the
classroom swelling with his grief, thundering rain beating above us, the girls
drifting with the music.
Then the lunch period’s over. We swing back to reality, get down to
earth science again.
It is difficult to name just what I saw that day, but it was an
unforgettable display of grace and power that seemed effortless, natural even,
once the girls were given a chance to be themselves. And it formed in my mind
a notion of fresh possibilities in
a world visited routinely by such beauty, when all girls can develop
themselves fully and become, simply, everything that they can be.
All of them – girls I’ve
taught or come to know over the years, and girls I've never known, never will,
black or white or brown, girls in faded blue jeans or bright cotton saris,
and, of course, Rosie herself – girls everywhere, unconstrained by bias or
custom or someone else's notions of what they should be, unbounded altogether,
fully themselves, moving to their own secret melodies in ever-widening arcs
and loops and perhaps the occasional, bedazzling arabesque.
What a world it would be.
Surely, it would be one of new prospects. Perhaps a world graced with a
wonder comparable to that which visited my classroom that rainy afternoon.
Fanciful? Perhaps. Wishful thinking? I don't know, really.
I want to find out.
That’s why, Rosie.
*********************
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