Riddance. Shelley Jackson
dress with a big white man-faced woman in it, and a line of children, some of them colored like me, with black bands around their sleeves. I had been told that “someone with your gifts, girl”—gifts!—would be admitted on scholarship, room and board included. It scarcely mattered. For inducements little greater than these I would have gone to Mongolia, or the moon.
It seems incredible, but I am going, really going, I told myself. My stammer, the cause of so much misery, had set me free.
I was only seven and just come from quarantine to my aunt and uncle’s big Boston house when I first heard the Voice (for so I thought of it). It growled and spat in my throat, and I was beaten with a strop, for my new guardians had no better notion than to try to scare it out of me. The sum of their ambition for me was that I should disappear into the nondescript throng of their own children, of whom there were six seven six or seven. Unfortunately I could not do so. If nothing else, my dark complexion would have set me apart—for though my mother was white Irish like my aunt, my father had been black—although my aunt feigned not to notice it, while pressing upon me, as my only luxuries, whitening creams and parasols. But no one scrupled to editorialize on my stammer. Even little Annabel, still in diapers, knew that to imitate me was to earn shouts of laughter from her older siblings, and smiles even from the adults.
I can see her now, in receding view: fat feet drumming the parquetry, Hygienic Wood Wool diapers dangling from a single pin.
(“My hat!”—Miss Exiguous, outraged, as a lurch crushed its cheap feathers against the car ceiling. She unfastened it and, having inspected it for damages, laid it on the seat between us, holding it there with one sinewy little hand.)
Still, I thought well of myself, though I had little enough reason to do so, and had I suspected that a stammer betokened “exceptional natural aptitude for spirit communications” (as Miss Exiguous would subsequently inform me), I would have prided myself upon it, no matter how my cousins derided me. But I did not, and I fought the Voice. The Voice won. I had periods of fluency, but much of the time I could barely speak at all and was in a pretty pickle when it came to asking directions of a policeman or naming the capital of Lithuania. I did not go hungry—to point and grunt was not beyond me. Still, if what distinguishes us from the beasts is the capacity to speak, as I was often told, I was not quite human.
At the school there would be others like me, or even worse. It would be interesting to meet the worse. Drooling perhaps. Jerking and hissing like geese.
At home, I mean at the large Boston house of my aunt and uncle, a picture hung on the wall. It had once decorated a Slavic beehive, I had been told; I do not know how it came into their possession, or why they kept it. It looked barbaric amid their twinkling crystal, fringed lampshades, dark soft-glinting mahogany furniture. In it a crudely rendered, gape-mouthed lady was having her horribly long red tongue drawn out by a naked devil wielding a pair of oversized tongues, I mean tongs. Tongue-tongs: it was as if the near-homophone had itself brought them together—as if language held a barely concealed grudge against its chiefest organ. It, the tongue, was frayed at one end into what I took for roots, in the botanical sense. I had red, I mean read, of a tongue being pulled out “by the roots” and had drawn from this the lesson that a tongue was a sort of vegetable, not of a piece with the body in which it was fixed. My own experience had supported this view: Within my mouth, warmly fuming with self, something foreign had grown. So I had half-believed the picture and even entertained, in drowsy reveries, certain fearful corollaries: that if my tongue was not pulled out like a carrot, it would branch, flower, go to seed. Of course it was not my tongue but my Voice that had taken root in my mouth like a weed. I could not imagine the tongs that could pluck it out. But I thought that the devil wielding them might resemble a man-faced woman in black.
I slumped, jamming my chin against my chest through the stiff, coarse cloth of a new pinafore, a parting gift from my aunt. A more loving, better-loved child might have been hurt to be thus packed away, but I was glad. Glad! Hateful Aunt Margaret. Hateful cousins. Hateful house. And hateful myself, there. I had been bad, very bad, so bad that remembering, I swallowed hard, frightened and even awed at myself; but I would put wickedness behind me now. I would be so good, no one would ever send me away again.
The hat crouched on the seat beside me, jet-tipped hatpins glinting like eyes among the feathers. It was watching me, knowing what I was thinking, that it would be so easy to reach over, and with just two fingers . . .
I took hold of the seat with both hands. The car jerked, staggered, jerked. Miss Exiguous was breathing through her nose in indignant little puffs. We had come to the worst stretch yet; at some point the overflow from a drainage ditch had evidently run a good way down the road, washing away the dirt between the boulders; it would be interesting to see what became of the road if the storm fell upon us here, but I was no longer thinking about it.
A peculiar tugging and plucking was taking place somewhere in my midriff. There was an almost palpable snap as of stitches parting, and then a slackening and a sliding; my past life was slipping away, like a loose signature from an old book. Already, those tribulations that had seemed so real were disintegrating into dust. Cousins, aunts, salt pork and boiled cabbage, grief and the slow, terrible deadening of grief—had I ever really believed any of it? Willingly, I yielded to a will stronger than my own, and let myself be carried into a new story.
Readings
My Childhood
The following document, ostensibly by Sybil Joines, has been much discussed in the critical literature. It was sent to me as a .pdf file by a representative of the school, rather late in my researches, when I had already begun compiling this book. I subsequently offered it up to the larger community, with my own commentary and modest fanfare. It made a great stir, of course, as contributing a new and more intimate perspective on the early life of the Headmistress, and my reputation as a scholar was such that few questioned its provenance, but after its swift elevation to canonical status, questions began to arise about certain subtle anachronisms in the text, and it was finally condemned as a forgery by several major scholars in concert, in a rather hurtful public demonstration on the occasion of my presentation with an honorary degree from the University of Göttingen.
Flushed, still holding my parchment scroll with its little tassel (which had somehow got caught in my reading glasses), and somewhat the worse for champagne, I was forced to hastily defend the document’s authenticity and, implicitly, my scholarly integrity, while at the same time aware of a highly unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach, not entirely attributable to Schnitzel mit Spaetzle, as I awoke to inchoate but long-standing doubts of my own.
Finally, a Dutch research team took the obvious step of asking to see the handwritten original—as I should have done at the start—and resolved the debate at a stroke, for they found that it was written with a ballpoint pen. (As we know, Laszlo Biro did not file his patent until June 1938, well after Joines’s death.) I quickly issued a handsome retraction, making no reference to hurt feelings. Yet questions remained. If I had been the victim of a hoax, what on earth was its objective? Was the SJVS less enthusiastic about my project than it seemed? If so, why had they gone to such lengths to appear accommodating? Why was the fraud so cunning in one respect (whoever wrote it knew his SJVSeana) and so careless in another (how difficult would it have been to procure an inkwell and quill)? Finally, should we not accept as plausible
hypotheses, if not facts, the explanations the counterfeit supplied for the many hitherto inexplicable references in the legitimate texts? I found myself unable to “roll back” the changes in my understanding of the Headmistress’s story; the fiction had folded in the facts and made them its own.
I took these issues to the community at large, and after much consternation and internal debate we penned a collective e-mail to the Vocational School that was a masterpiece of tactful circumspection, requesting more information on the provenance of the contested document, and offering the dubious “out” that they had themselves been victims of a trickster among their own ranks. The response was quick and disconcerting in its honesty.
Of course the