North Carolina Miscellany
She is the music teacher at the school where my mother walks me every morning, and I go up flights of stairs to the very top, and I have a cubby and a pad for nap time, and we fingerpaint and play with blocks. A special thing that happens, some days our teacher Sarah says, Children take off your shoes and socks and put your chairs in a circle. We are very quiet because we can’t wait until Charity arrives and we love the cool silky floor under our still-plump feet. We will sing and dance and play the tambourine and the Chinese gong and the rattles and we will feel happy the way Charity makes us feel. We will roll around on the floor like little brass wagons; in the sedate 1940s, even in Greenwich Village, this is wildly fun and naughty. We are all in love with her because she is Charity and because we are four.
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We children wear dungarees and turtlenecks because our school is a Progressive School, but Charity – her wide skirt swirls like in a storybook and she laughs and we sing. She arrives, wheeling a cart. The cart doesn’t make noise, but the effect on me, that small and timid child, is as if the auto harp were playing, and the guitar, and the red “Chinese” gongs shaped like dragons with bared teeth, and finger cymbals, and tambourines. Hear the robin singing, as he hops along the windowsill and good news he’s bringing, cheer up, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
I stand by my mother’s side next to the portable crib, peering through the slats. My sister. Never only three of us again. Her backbone a universe. Her head no larger than my dolly Elizabeth’s. My mother is oiling the baby’s back. Standing above me, she pours oil into my hand. My hand is so small its entirety rests in my mother’s palm. She places my hand palm down upon my sister’s back. My sister sends heat up my arm. I like smoothing the oil on that squirming beadwork of her spine, and down the thin flat buttocks and chicken bone legs to the feet that are smaller than my father’s thumb. I am touching a universe. My mother wraps the baby in a white receiving blanket. The baby’s head is in one of my mother’s hands and the skinny bottom in the other. “Deborah,” my mother says. The baby frowns, which makes me smile, unlike when my parents frown, which makes me go still. “Her name is Deborah,” my mother says. The baby thrusts out one arm, a twig, the fingers stiff and going in all directions. She makes a kitten noise. “Hi,” I say and reach for her hand. I want to tickle her and make her play like a kitten. “Faith, be careful,” my father says. I ignore him, because I have fallen into the enormity of her, my sister, slipped through those quivering navy blue eyes into the heart of her. I say hi silently, because I understand that my parents think Deborah is fragile, but after that swift fall into her eyes, I know my sister is the toughest person I have ever met.
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Childhood Narratives, 2016 (archival pigment print) by Dawn Surratt
cheerio. Ride her up and down in your little brass wagon, ride her up and down in your little brass wagon, ride her up and down in your little brass wagon, fare thee well, my darling. From the sky above, the leaves are falling down, slow they scatter on the lawn. . . . Schluf mein fagele. She teaches us Hebrew words, one sound at a time, like my mother feeding the kitten with an eyedropper. I don’t understand about the little bird in the song. I gave my love a cherry that had no stone. Charity strums an autoharp. I gave my love a chicken that had no bone. I gave my love a baby that had no cryin’. And Charity who opens her mouth to