Mrs. Ashwood

When I was five years old, we moved. My parents made it sound very exciting. They bought a house near my father’s sister in New City, New York, twenty miles from Peekskill, NY where we were leaving, on the other side of the Hudson River. The day we arrived, everything in a huge moving truck, my parents were told by the bank that the builder of the house was involved in some shady deal and they would not fund our mortgage. We could not close and we became officially homeless.

We moved into the Ashley Motor Court in Nanuet for a few weeks until my parents found us a nice bungalow to rent in an apple orchard on Route 45 in Spring Valley. The Maggots, truly their name, were an old Orthodox Jewish couple renting out rooms in out buildings and in their home to people like us and also at the time, to a couple of swinging British girls in their early twenties who flirted with my brother and I. They rented in the big barn. My brother and I slept on cots in the Maggots’ kitchen. I started kindergarten at Summit Park Elementary school. Six weeks later, my parents bought a real house in Spring Valley, with nine rooms and a stream in the back yard where I finished kindergarten at Oakwood.

Before I began first grade, Bluefield Elementary School was built. It was during the period when people were fleeing New York City and moving to the suburbs so there was a need. The hallways of Bluefield were painted in bright orange, red and yellow shapes, many of them isosceles triangles. This was Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan country, and all was liberal, progressive, and who knows what else! That summer, just before the school opened, there was an article in the local newspaper about something truly exciting about to take place. Two black teachers were hired to teach in this practically all white school district. One was Mrs. Brown, the music teacher (an amazing favorite who would throw her wig on the piano when she got angry). The other one was Mrs. Ashwood (let’s call her that). I had never seen black people, really. Maybe when we drove through Yonkers to visit my grandparents or on television. But not real ones.

Mrs. Ashwood taught first grade. I was assigned to her class. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. Because the newspaper made such a fuss about it, I assumed that black people were inferior and that I was getting a really bad deal. I could not imagine what it would be like. Since teachers, at that age, are kind of like mother substitutes, I felt like I lost some sort of lottery and I would never be able to get close to this new kind of woman, an unwhite person. For God’s sake, I could barely make her face out in the poorly lit newspaper photo.

Mrs. Ashwood turned out to be exceptional, warm, a great teacher and I became her pet. She had an enormous afro. We had spelling bees called the lollipop house—if you got to the top of the stairs spelling words correctly on the blackboard, you’d get a lollipop. I still have the report cards showing her curly handwriting. She was bright and interested, pretty and lovely. When the girls in reading group were all laughing at me, and it turned out it was because of my dimples, she stood up and told those girls that my dimples were cute. Like most boys with their first grade teachers, I had a little crush on her.

There was a dark side to the whole thing. A kid in my class, let’s call him Larry Morton, had behavioral problems. He acted out. My guess is he had A.D.D. and his parents just thought he needed lots of discipline. The lore goes, they signed some sort of piece of paper that said Mrs. Ashwood could beat or hit Larry if he got unruly. And she did. At first, she did not. But as the year wore on and he wore on her nerves, she would pinch, him, pull his hair, grab him hard, and one time she even threw him into a metal garbage can. That particular day, we all just sat there, stone silent, knowing she had gone just too far but no one said anything, I don’t think, and she did not get in trouble. But after that day, she never hit him again. So I assume something went down and she was told to stop.

I didn’t think her beating up Larry was anything that strange. In fact, it was no different than what the Italian mothers up and down my street were doing to their children when they got out of hand. Seemed to me that Black people were just like any other people.

A few decades later, we are about to elect an African American president. He went to Harvard and he keeps very trim. I have known many people who have gone to Harvard who have remained thin. Again, no difference.

We’ve come a long way. Should work out well.