The Dodos - Characters in Church School Blues

I don't think I could have written Church School Blues if I couldn't draw.  Drawing drew the old me out.  Back then, drawing was a refuge away from the scenes described in Blues and now drawing was the vehicle I used to come back to them.

I have given a lot of thought to what motivated the kids that I called the Dodos.  I have concluded that bored personalities had a lot to do with it. Though they seemed of average intelligence there was a certain dullness of mind that made them unable to create or experience wonder.  Mischief wasn't enough to break the monotony for them.  They had to go beyond mischief to cruelty in order to feel alive.

Elder Hargis's Seating Chart & The Caste System

In Church School Blues, there is a definite caste system, which the narrator secretly names and defines.  The three castes are the Dodos, the So-So's, and the Solos. Elder Hargis, the teacher, uses the caste system to his advantage with his seating chart.

From Church School Blues:

"The main requirement for a kid to be a Dodo is to be bored to meanness. This type of kid craves excitement. Obviously they have never lived in a Roach Ranch next door to Catholics, kleptomaniacs and tomato-throwing boozers. Not to mention they've not come here from the Green Swamp where they would have known all sorts of unusual things and amazing people, most of whom Mother doesn't want me to mention to anyone since it would give the impression that we came from the back woods. The Dodos have lived pretty ordinary lives in comparison, as far as I can tell. The only way they get any thrills is by bullying the Solos.

The kids in between the Solos and the Dodos are in the caste I call the So-Sos. The main requirement to be a So-So is to naturally blend in with your environment so that you don't stand out as prey. Think white rabbit in snow, think turtle among rocks, and you'll get the picture. The So-Sos are good students, and usually polite to everybody. They aren't bored to meanness because they often have talents and hobbies (which they don't flaunt so that nobody notices too much.) The only time they act mean is when they laugh along with the Dodos at the Solos. They can't really help that. It's part of their camouflage.

Then there are the Solos. I have pondered at length what makes a kid a Solo instead of a So-So. (It isn't hard to figure out why someone isn't a Dodo, but it isn't always so apparent how a person fell down so far that they became a Solo.).

There are four of us Solo kids....

...Since Elder Hargis is the principal of our school as well as the seventh and eighth grade teacher, you'd think he'd know how to handle eight students. Yes, I said eight. The other nine of us don't need handling, but the Dodos can hardly sit still in between recess breaks. Sometimes I suspect Elder Hargis is afraid of the Dodos, but that can't be the simple truth or they'd have devoured him by now like a Solo. I think that the truth is not simple in this case, and that the non-simple truth is that Elder Hargis is bored to meanness just like the Dodos. But don't take my word for it. Let me give some examples.

Here's how he has handled the problem of the Dodos talking through class. Instead of giving out some teacherly punishment—like having to stay after school or write 100 times on the board, I will not talk out of order—Elder Hargis has resorted to strategy.

His strategy is a seating chart.

He has strategically placed each Solo kid so that they form a barrier separating the Dodos so they can't put their heads together and carry on a class-long conversation with each other. But you know what that means, right? Each Solo kid is completely surrounded by Dodos, which I assure you is not a pleasant position to be in if you're a Solo.

The seating chart is an example of why I say that Elder Hargis has a mean streak. He doesn't care that the Solos are tormented in his seating arrangement, as long as it keeps the overall noise level down. Since conversations between Dodos and Solos tend to be one-sided, you can see why the noise is less."

Ever seen or experienced a seating chart like Elder Hargis's Seating Chart?

   

Full Circle

Today I have a full-circle sort of feeling.  I rode a bicycle for the first time in many years, and my father rode with me through the streets of a small Carolina town.  In Church School Blues, my younger self is a bike riding kid who uses her bike to grab a sense of freedom even as she feels herself trapped behind an invisible chain-link fence of silence, far away from the Carolina home she yearns for.

From Church School Blues:

"I feel like my life has become a Salvador Dali painting.

And another thing I've recently learned—I can stand persecution. I've mentioned already about how we Adventists have to be ready for the Great Persecution when The World will turn on us for being a Peculiar People. Well, I am being persecuted for being a Peculiar Person, so I am getting plenty practice in bearing up.

As soon as I'm away from that school, back on my bike in the afternoons, I start fitting back into my skin. I merge with the wind and let it take all that awful hairspray right out of my hair and lift me up so I feel like I am flying. I can really ride that bike. I cross my arms and steer with no hands, making the turns and everything just by shifting my weight a tiny bit. As long as I'm on my bike, I am still keen."  

Mother's Ingenious Compromise

One of the underlying themes of Church School Blues is the conflict between Jade and her mother.  Her mother is very concerned with external appearances and rising socially, while Jade prefers the rustic ways she learned from her grandfather.  "I see crumbling elegance where Mother sees shabbiness, I hear music where she hears noise."

Sometimes, Mother comes through in the narrative with an "Ingenious Compromise" that allows her to keep things picture perfect while allowing Jade some of the rustic things she craves.  In chapter one, as they prepare to leave the swamp country for a new life in the city, Jade is allowed to take with her a piece of driftwood she had found on the wild shores of Lake Waccamaw:

"I get to bring a few treasures with me to Chattanooga. My bicycle is of practical use as it will be my ride to school there just as it is here. More frivolous is the inclusion of a large piece of driftwood that I triumphantly dragged home from the shore of Lake Waccamaw a year ago. Mother thought it was a horrid rustic piece, but rather than make me get rid of it, she came up with one of her Ingenious Compromises. You never know with her. Her way almost always rules because she is the adult and has all the votes while I am supposed to grow up before I have the right to vote. But sometimes she comes up with an Ingenious Compromise that blows me plum off my feet.

While I was at school, she varnished and shellacked my driftwood until the wood grains shone with as much luxury and depth as the mahogany woodwork of her stereo cabinet, which is also loaded into the U-Haul. I was appalled to see my driftwood thus transformed, but I have come to see that she has created a conversation piece. I have yet to see another one like it."

I still have the driftwood, still with some of the shine that Mother added to it.  Trying to decide if it needs a new coat...

Church School Blues will be available on Amazon.com this week!

A Sense of Place

This post comes to you from Columbus County, North Carolina, land of Rhoda Bell in Fireflies, the winter's haven of the travel-weary family in Precious Jewels, and the lost home of a bullied child in Church School Blues.  It is official.  I have come home.  As I listened to the voice of my younger self narrate to me how she would never ever give up her Green Swamp no matter what, I was finally able to call to her across time, "I finally made it home."

Church School Blues will be released in a few weeks, perhaps less.  We are still in the process of all the activities related to moving, which is one of my excuses for the long break in posting.  The other excuse is that once I convinced my younger self to tell what happened in church school, she couldn't shut up.

Church School Blues

My current project has had me off my blog, digging through the old photographs, old stories, old poems and writings of a kid who served six years time in church school -- at least that's how it felt.  This is the hardest book I've written because it takes me to a time I have wanted to forget.  Through the years I wrote some of it as short stories, which were published in Insight/Out Magazine at various times.  My aunt kept urging me to compile these stories as a single work, but that would mean writing more.  I tried several times, but I just didn't want to be "her" again.

And that was the thing.  I didn't blame the bad teachers or the bullies.  I blamed me and rejected me. Eventually I became someone I like and respect, but I still could not embrace my younger self because she thought she was a failure and I could not forgive failure.  Gradually, I have become aware that I had become my own worst bully.  As an adult, I would never judge and condemn another kid the way I have judged and condemned myself for more years than I want to count.

Yet, I still could not revisit her, the younger me.

This year I had a breakthrough in communication with my younger self.  Maybe I have finally acquired enough years distance that I can begin to listen to her.  I let her have her voice, and once she started speaking, she held me mesmerized.  As she told her story, I remembered  what a colorful character she was -- even as the world around her tried to fade "all the colors out of who I really am."

We (my younger self and I) have completed the first draft.  We hope to have it available online by summer's end.

How Do You Do?