Todays 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.