“That’s where she got that bracelet, I guess,” Jamie said, pointing to the string of brightly colored wooden beads that circled Miss Channing’s wrist, the very one Mr. Parsons would later find at the edge of Black Pond, broken by then, the beads scattered across the muddy ground.
As usual on the first day of classes, my father stood at the entrance of the school, the teachers and administrative staff to his left, the boys to his right, all of them dressed in what amounted to the uniform of Chatham School, white shirts, black trousers, gray ties, and black suspenders. Dark gray jackets would be added later in the fall.
“All right, let me have your attention, please,” my father began. “I want to welcome all of you back to Chatham School. Most of us are very familiar with the routine, as well as each other, but we have a new teacher this year, and I want to introduce her to you.”
He motioned for Miss Channing to join him on the stairs, which she did, moving gracefully beside him, glancing first at her fellow teachers, then at the boys.
“This is Miss Channing,” my father said. “She has come all the way from Africa to join us here at Chatham School, and she’ll be teaching art.”
There was polite applause, then Miss Channing stepped back into the cluster of teachers and listened quietly while my father continued his introductory remarks, going over the necessary administrative details, reminding the boys of various school rules, that there was to be no cheating, no plagiarism, no profanity, no smoking, nor any drinking of alcoholic beverages, as he put it, “anywhere, anytime, for any reason, ever.”
I have often wondered what came into Miss Channing’s mind as she listened to my father recite the rules by which we were all to conduct ourselves at Chatham School, rules that stressed humility, simple honesty, and mutual faith, and which stood four-square against every form of recklessness and betrayal and self-indulgence. How different they must have seemed to the visionary teachings her father had laid down, how deeply rooted in the very kind of humble, uninspired, and profoundly predictable village life he had taught her to revile.
Once my father had finished, the boys already shifting restlessly and muttering impatiently to each other, he clapped his hands together once, then uttered a final remark whose tragic irony he could not have guessed. “Welcome to another splendid year in the history of Chatham School,” he said.
I entered Miss Channing’s class about an hour later.
It was a small room, formerly used to store school furniture and various supplies, but now converted to other purposes. It was not physically connected to the school, but stood apart from it in a little courtyard to the rear. Still, it seemed adequate enough, with three long tables lined up one behind the other in front of the much smaller one that served as Miss Channing’s desk. On the far wall, half a dozen gray aprons hung from wooden pegs beside a metal cabinet upon which someone had painted the words art supplies in large white letters. In the far corner a few wooden sculpting pedestals had been stacked base to base, the legs of the upper pedestals stretching almost to the room’s tin ceiling.
As for art, there were portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, along with a framed photograph of the current president, Calvin Coolidge.
There were only five of us in the class, but we scattered ourselves widely throughout the room. Ralph Sherman and Miles Clayton took possession of the rear table, Biff Conners and Jack Slaughter the middle one, leaving the front table to me.
Miss Channing didn’t smile at us or say a word of welcome as we entered the room. She’d already placed one of the sculpting pedestals in front of her, and as we filed in, she began to knead the clay gently, hardly glancing up from it as we took our seats. Then, once we’d taken our places, she drew her hands from the clay and looked at us, her eyes moving from one boy to another. She did not acknowledge me in any way.
“I’ve never taught art,” she said. “Or been taught it by anyone else.”
Her fingers moved over the clay’s wet surface, shaping it with slow, graceful strokes as she searched for her next remark.
“When my father died, I went to live with my uncle and his family in Africa,” she said finally. “He had a mission near a village where the natives lived in wooden huts. It was just a clearing in the plain. The people who lived in the village did all their cooking in their huts, and there was no way for the smoke to get out except through a small hole in the roof. When they came out of their huts in the morning, a sheet of smoke trailed behind them.” Her eyes lifted toward us, and I saw them take on a certain wonder and delight. It was as if in telling stories, she could find a voice to teach in, a way of reaching us. “Like wings that dissolved in the light,” she said.
“That’s where I learned to paint.” She was kneading the clay more quickly now, in short, quick thrusts. “In Africa.” She stopped suddenly and settled her eyes upon us. I could tell that a thought had just occurred to her, that in the very course of talking to us she’d discovered something. “That’s where I learned that to be a painter or a sculptor, you have to change your senses,” she said. “Switch them around, so that you see with your fingertips and feel with your eyes.”
I didn’t see Miss Channing again until much later that same day. The last class had been dismissed for nearly an hour, and I was busily doing my assigned tasks around the school.
Under my father’s leadership, it was the policy of Chatham School to combine academics with physical labor, and so from the time of his arrival, each boy was assigned various chores. Some of the boys swept the classrooms and the dormitory, some washed the sheets and blankets, some worked on the grounds, pruning shrubbery or mowing grass or maintaining the playing fields. In the winter everyone shoveled snow or took turns unloading coal.
On that particular afternoon it was my job to return any books that lay on the library tables to their proper shelves, carefully keeping them in order according to the Dewey decimal system Mrs. Cartwright, the school librarian, had established. After that I was to dust the bookshelves with the old feather duster my mother had donated to the school after buying a new one at Mayflower’s a month before.
It was nearly four by the time I’d finished. Mrs. Cartwright surveyed the now-empty tables and ran a finger over the top of one of the bookshelves. “Very good, Henry,” she said when she found it clear of dust. With that statement of satisfaction I was released for the remainder of the afternoon.
I remember the feeling of relief that swept over me each time I ran down the stairs, bolted through the broad double doors of Chatham School, and raced out into the open air. I don’t know why I felt the weight of Chatham School so heavily, or so yearned to be rid of it, for it was by no means a prison, my father by no means a tyrant. And yet, in my raw youth, the days seemed to drag along behind me like a ball and chain. Every stricture burned like a lash, and sometimes, at night, I would feel as if my whole life lay smothered beneath a thick blanket of petty obligations and worn-out rules.
Miss Channing’s class had offered a certain relief from that musty atmosphere, so that even on that first afternoon I found that I looked forward to the next one in a way that I’d never looked forward to Mr. Crawford’s Latin lectures or the interminable recitations of Mrs. Dillard’s history class. There’d been a freshness to her approach, a sense of something less hindered by the ancient forms of instruction, something young, as I was young, already free in a way I one day hoped to be.
As I came out of the school, already vaguely considering a quick stroll into the village, perhaps even a secret cigarette behind the bowling alley, I saw Miss Channing sitting on one of the wooden benches that rested near the edge of the coastal bluff. Normally it would not have occurred to me to approach a teacher outside of class, but she already seemed less a teacher to me than a comrade of some sort, both of us momentarily stranded at Chatham School, but equally destined to go beyond it someday.