Linda Joy Myers Memoir Vignette Prize

Not Your Average Butler

As a child at Southwest Elementary School, I had the profound good fortune of having Ms. Leila Butler as my music teacher. I do apologize if this is offensive, but I will admit to my bias that every child in America deserves to have a big, pillowy, terrifying black woman for a music teacher.  If you want to be all glass-half-full about it, I think that one good thing slavery did for African Americans was to give us enough transgenerational, spiritual wounds to create good music. Passionate undulating heart-songs seem to launch from chocolaty throats, scurrying through the air and piercing the listener’s soul with an acuity that allows him to experience, if only for a moment, the pain and the pleasure of the warrior-warbler crying out. That’s why it is hard to find a person who doesn’t enjoy a black gospel concert—my WASPy friends, my atheist friends, my friends from other countries, they all seem to agree that there is something about this genre of music that we so aptly call soul.

Ms. Butler had soul and sass and class and if looks could kill—well, class size at Southwest Elementary may have become exceedingly more manageable thanks to her expressive interactions with disrespectful little boys and girls.  I think most of my Black History Education happened in that little, out of the way, music portable under Ms. Butler’s queen-like reign. She would have us re-enact Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat for a white traveler in Alabama. For what seemed like weeks, we would walk into her classroom and set up two long rows of chairs to approximate a greyhound bus and then vie for acting roles. Three or four of us would be the White passengers in the front, another 3 or 4 kids would be the black passengers in the back and 3 others would fulfill the roles of bus-driver, entitled-seat-demanding white person and tired, old Rosa herself. I don’t know if Ms. Butler turned in these lessons plans to the administration or whether or not they would have been approved if she had, but I am so thankful that I was there participating in the Butlerian congregation. Reenacting this scene over and over again-- using our own  little toothless mouths and voices to make someone give up their seat and then using those same little bodies to  rise up against this evil was a sort of Eucharistic experience—holy in the way education really ought to be.

Ms. Butler also taught us about Dr. Martin Luther King Junior and his peaceful protests. It was she who told me, for the first time, that in the not-so distant history, black people and white people had to use different facilities, water fountains, entrances and all manner of resources. But it was when she said that people who were different races could not be friends and absolutely could not marry, that I experienced one of those life changing moments in which the new knowledge that you have acquired cannot be unknown and must therefore be addressed or ignored.  Ignoring is not a strength of mine.

I started telling everyone I knew, (mostly mixed-race family members) about this crazy injustice from years past. When speaking the words was no longer therapeutic enough I wrote a paper about Dr. King and how,were it not for his efforts, I would not just be oppressed but in all likelihood, as a biracial child of a black mother and white father, I would not even exist. In an unfortunate string of events, my older siblings found my literary reflections on MLK and I entered our living room just in time to see them laughing at and presumably making fun of my hard work. This presumption filled me with equal portions of debilitating pain and homicidal rage. I screamed at them and ran out of the room crying. One of them, I think it was my oldest brother Shawn, came after me and explained that they were not laughing at my ability or sentiments, but instead were chuckling at their own ignorance—the fact that their baby sister knew more about Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights than they did.  This, of course, appealed to the narcissistic and tyrannical tendencies that characterized my early years and calmed me down enough to be useful again. To me, Dr. King and Rosa Parks were not just interesting pieces of classroom trivia. These stories were fiercely personal, emotional, meaningful and sobering.

Each day in music class during this Black History Unit we would sing a rendition of Martin Luther King’s  I have a dream speech that went like this:

I have a dream, that we could all love one another,

I have a dream that we could be sisters and brothers,

I have a dream that when the sun shines down on the world

That there’d be peace on earth in every place, for every one of every race.

And every time we sang this song, tears poured from my dark brown eyes. I cried as though my tears might somehow make those dreams of his come true. They were amen tears.

Amen to love.

Amen to family.

Amen to light covering and warming us.

Amen and amen and amen to systems that promote peace for each of us.

Those were the prayers of my fresh, young, soul in that little portable in my little town in the south. Music opens us up and brings us into agreement with the truth. We sing it out to one another and hear it sung back to us, and that is why Ms. Butler did more than teach Hot Cross Buns on the flute-a-phone (although she did that too.)  With her fold out chairs, homemade scripts and songs of justice, Ms. B might have been one of the first influences that led me into Social Work. Sometimes when I am worried about the world, I put myself in someone else’s shoes like we did on that imaginary bus. Sometimes, I write and op-ed like I was inspired to do when I first learned about segregation. More often than not, though, I sing that song that we sang back then and I am thankful for the woman who taught it to me.