Today's Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul

[Guest guest]

Old Deadeye Bean

By Wilkins

My favorite teacher was Dorothy " Deadeye " Bean. She was in her forties and

taught American history to eighth-graders in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The year

was 1944. Allied troops were battling their way across France, lin D.

Roosevelt was president, the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott was more than a

decade away, and I was a twelve-year-old black newcomer to an all-white school.

My mother, a widow from Harlem, had married a Grand Rapids physician, and he had

bought the best house he could afford for his new family. We were not welcome in

our new neighborhood, however, and there was a lot of angry talk among the

adults.

Some of the kids, too, were quite nasty. They threw stones at me, chased me home

and spat on my bike seat when I was in class. I was lonely, friendless,

sometimes frightened, and ashamed for being different.

But things began to change when I walked into Dorothy Bean's classroom. Whereas

my other teachers were easing in their new black pupil by ignoring him for the

first few weeks, Miss Bean went right at me. After our first assignment, she

asked me the opening question.

I gulped and answered. It wasn't a brilliant answer, but it did show that I had

read the assignment and that I could speak English. Later in the hour, when a

classmate bungled an answer, Miss Bean asked me to correct it, and that

established me as a smart person.

Thus, she began to give me human dimensions, though not perfect ones for an

eighth-grader. Nevertheless, it was better to be an incipient teacher's pet than

merely a dark, silent presence in the back of the room.

A few days later, Miss Bean asked my opinion about something Jefferson

had done. I stared at her for a second. In those days, all my opinions were

derivative. I was for Roosevelt because my parents were, and for the Yankees

because my buddy from Harlem was a Yankee fan. Besides, I didn't have opinions

about historical figures such as Jefferson. Like my high-school building, he

just was.

" Well, should he have bought Louisiana or not? " Miss Bean persisted.

" I guess so, " I replied tentatively.

" Why? " she shot back.

Why! What kind of question was that, I groused silently. But I ventured an

answer. Day after day, Miss Bean kept doing that to me, and my answers became

stronger and more confident. She was the first teacher to give me a sense that

thinking was part of education and that I could form opinions that had some

value.

Her greatest service to me came one day when my mind was wandering and I was

idly playing with my pencil. She impulsively threw a gum eraser at me. It hit my

hand and sent the pencil flying. She gasped, the class roared and I crept,

mortified, after my pencil.

That was the icebreaker. Kids came up to me to laugh about " Old Deadeye Bean. "

The incident became a legend, and I, a part of it, became a person to talk to.

So that's how Dorothy Bean became Old Deadeye - and how I became just another

kid in school.