When
I was a little kid, I was a student at St. Peter's Lutheran School on the South
side of
Chicago.
It was me and 200 other little black boys and girls in Navy-blue slacks and
ties, or
Navy-blue
tartan dresses. The school was built onto the Church building, as is the way of
the
Lutherans.
A honeycombed warren of dark stairways, dark wood floors, and plaster walls.
As
children, we were about average. Not too bad nor too good. We did our dirt, but
it was the
horrific
communal dirt of children in general. But because black people used to openly
admit
their
social conservatism, these dirty deeds would only go so far before they were
met with a
show
of overwhelming force. In the case of St. Peter's Lutheran School, the force
was in "Ugly
Charlie".
Ugly
Charlie was the agreed upon form of punishment from on high [being the
concerted
efforts
of our parents, teachers and pastors to not raise us like those heathen-niglets
that tore
through
the South and West sides like disrespectful earth-toned tornadoes.]
Ugly
Charlie was a belt. Let me rephrase that; Ugly Charlie was a BELT. Someone had
chosen a
wide
brown belt to be the instrument of disciplinary administration.
Someone
had chosen to take a wide brown belt, fold it in half (so that it was creased
on one
end)
so you had double the leather to spank.
Someone
had chosen to take a wide brown belt, fold it in half [(so that it was creased
on one
end)
so you had double the leather to spank the palm of a child's hand].
Someone
had chosen to take a wide brown belt, fold it in half {[(so that it was creased
on one
end)
so you had double the leather to spank the palm of a child's hand] as many
times as that
particular
teacher felt was necessary}.
And
"someone" named that brown belt, "Ugly Charlie".
Who
the person was, I don't know. I do know that Ugly Charlie had been in existence
when my
Father
was attending St. Peter's Lutheran School, as a little kid. So this belt had
the force of at
least
20 years of legend behind it.
I
was a conscientious child. I tried to avoid evil, but my mind wandered. So when
the black
teacher-ladies
(if they had been Catholic they would have been Nuns) would say, "Idle
hands
are
the Devil's Workshop" my little kid mind had no problem inventing a flesh
and blood
boogeyman
called "Satan" to torment me for the next 30 years.
It
was on one of these wanderings of mind that I didn't do my homework properly
one day. I
seem
to remember it as a sort of meta-situation in which I discovered a loophole to
the
teachers
homework algorithm, which I thereby, proudly, exploited. And seeing as how
little
black
children that are smarter than their black teacher-ladies are indicative of the
Village of
the
Damned, or at the very least are "acting smart", the indicated
intellect intervention was, of
course,
Ugly Charlie.
So,
to BE the child that you had seen so, so many times before, as the eponymous,
"Dead Man
Walking"
is a reality-fractalizing proposition. I walked the runway of glaring white
light,
between
kids' desks, towards the hulking Miss Knott. She was nearing 30 and unmarried,
so
back
then you knew she was either evil or ugly or both. She was both.
1She
sat impatiently at her desk, tight red and white floral-printed dress
attempting to hold in
the
gargantuan coffee-colored waves of fat-layered muscles. Her eyes were hooded
and
unsmiling.
She wore a medium-sized afro and seemed to me to be some horrible cannibal
woman.
I don't know what I expected, but not this- *WHOP!*
She'd
somehow grabbed my hand, holding my little fingers crushed together in her
angry fist,
while
her other hand sent white hot light into my soul via the palm of my hand. And
again-
*WHOP!*
she did it with a popping sound that seemed indecently loud. All of the other
little
snot-nosed
boys and girls staring at me. It was as though I were naked. And again she-
*WHOP!*
slapped/whipped/beat the palm of my nine year-old hand, and she continued for
another
27 beats. And though I realized that the punishment was supposed to be the belt
on
my
palm, I knew that the real punishment was the passive-aggressive grinding
together of my
finger
bones, that rhymed too perfectly with her angry grin. But I had learned my
lesson that
day, at least for a
while, and didn't mention to her, or anyone else that I knew.
