most memorable aspects of elementary school were my music, my friend Mildred, and my books.
What’s so Junior About Junior High?
During the summer of 1952 I turned twelve. I still read the L A Times with Aunt Lizzie every day. The headlines were about Queen Elizabeth being crowned and I thought she looked so young when we saw her picture in the paper. The sports section reported on the tragic loss of the Brooklyn Dodgers to the New York Yankees. I thought for sure the Dodgers could do it this time, but again they didn’t, and I lost the bulk of my baby-sitting money to pay a bet to my friend Rochester, our back fence neighbor.
America was invaded by television in the 1950’s, and we were the last family on our block to get a TV. We were not allowed to watch except Fridays and Saturdays because my mother felt after school and evenings were for homework. However, an exception was made so we could the watch major sporting events, as my mother was a big fan of both the Dodgers and championship boxing, particularly Joe Louis. I remember a few other special TV shows that were the exception, like The Jack Benny Show and Amos and Andy.
Our most loved movie that year was High Noon. My favorite screen personalities were the strong, silent cowboys like Roy Rogers, Gary Cooper and Alan Ladd. Cowboys led both exciting and quiet lives, fighting and shooting to root out injustice when necessary, but doing their real jobs of taking care of cattle, sitting around the campfire, while singing to the cows.
The three of us were going to the movies alone on the bus by now, on Sundays after church. We were not allowed to go to a movie unless we went to church, so we took the short-cut by attending Sunday School. The cost to ride the bus was 10 cents and 9 cents to get into the cheap movie theater. One dollar did the trick for the three of us. If we wanted to see more recent movies, like High Noon or The Greatest Show on Earth we had to pay 25 cents at the Manchester Theater. Sometimes we had a dollar each, but our movie allowance was usually one dollar between us, given to me, the oldest, to cover bus fare and admission. The dollar was tied into the end of my handkerchief for safe keeping. Because it was such an accomplishment for a Negro woman to be nominated for an Academy Award, we were given the full amount to go to the Manchester Theater to see Gone with the Wind, in which Hattie McDaniel played Mammy. It was a long and wonderful movie, especially when we heard Clark Gable say “damn.” There was a lot of talk in our community when Hattie McDaniel won the Academy Award and gave such an articulate acceptance speech. We knew white people were surprised, thinking she spoke as she did in Gone with the Wind.
Although I was not to turn twelve until later that summer, I was excited and ready for Junior High School. I was looking forward to wearing saddle shoes and skirt and sweater outfits of instead of my brown oxfords and plaid dresses with sashes in the back.
Enterprise Junior High had the same structure as many schools in California at that time in which ninth grade was included with Junior High. This meant that I was in school with high school freshmen when I was in seventh grade. It was a little scary since some of the ninth-grade boys had deep voices and hair on their faces and most of the girls had breasts.
The fact that some girls had breasts didn’t bother me. It bothered me that I had breasts! The year before, I had little buds in that area, but this summer I was still only eleven and they had grown to a pretty good size. I had thought they would grow slowly, like height, and would look like Mom’s when I was close to her age. I had no idea this meant other things would happen. I saw a little bit of hair in places that had been smooth, but didn’t worry about it.
I couldn’t understand why I had a stomach ache and stains in my panties for a few days. Just when I began to worry about this, it went away. It was probably something I ate. After four weeks it happened again, and a deep red residue was a little more than stains in my panties. I did my best to keep it under control with toilet tissue, but soiled my skirts a couple of times. I still didn’t know what this was all about and worried that I was injured ‘down there.’ On about the third afternoon of this second time around, I got in bed with my mom, a day sleeper whom we never disturbed, crying, “My stomach hurts and my panties keep getting dirty!” She seemed only a little surprised, but went to her lingerie drawer and pulled out a book. We read the book together, she showed me how to use a complicated uncomfortable belt/hook/pad contraption, and went back to sleep. I was not yet twelve years old and was totally perplexed about what was happening to my body. From the book we read, it would happen every month forever! What was this all about?
Later that afternoon, after Mom awakened we had a chat. It wasn’t the kind of detailed and informative chat mothers and daughters have today with questions answered and the sex angle added in. It wasn’t even as informative as the film they show girls in school these days. Instead, using her nursing text, she explained how the menstrual period occurred every month, told me not to get wet during this time, and not to play with boys any more. That was it! In talking with my friends, most of them did not get as much information as my mom gave me. We filled in the blanks with misinformation about pregnancy, birth control, and what actually happened during sex.
I was embarrassed that this inconvenience came every month and tried to keep it a secret outside my little circle of best friends, since most of my contemporaries had not yet entered this phase.
I was embarrassed, too, that my breasts moved around. When I jumped rope, I crossed my arms over my chest. I asked my mom if I could have a bra, but she said I was too young to have one. I didn’t understand what this had to do with age; it seemed that volume was more important. The next year, after suffering embarrassment with bouncing breasts, I was thirteen years old, and had a big piano recital. We selected a dress from the women’s section that was a little more grown up than previous recital dresses. Mom decided this dress required a bra, for which I was fitted at the Missy Shop. Since this first bra was a size 32B, I think she waited too long.
The walk to junior high was a little longer. We walked the same route we had taken for the past six years, but now we passed both the cow pasture and our former elementary school, crossing another big street. It was about a three-mile walk.
In junior high, students were grouped by ability in the academic classes, although the staff assumed they had disguised this fact. Our groups were numbered, indicated by the written number after our grade level, 7-1, 7-2, 7-3 and so on. It didn’t take us long to figure out that the scale went from 1 to about 10, with 1 being the highest achieving and 10 being the lowest. Most of my friends were 7-2 or 7-3. The bulk of the higher numbers were filled with the growing population of the Negro children who had moved into the school district.
English and History classes were a breeze, but Math was harder at the 7-1 level. This was a time when some teachers used a method of teaching by telling and showing, which didn’t work for me. After a whole class period of being told how to do three-digit long division, with several kids coming to the board to do a problem, we were assigned homework with an entire page of this kind of problem. I worked hard that evening, but I couldn’t estimate well enough to complete a problem reasonably. Being the verbal kid I was, I wrote a note to my teacher on my paper, “I don’t understand.” and didn’t complete the assignment. The next day she went over the instruction again, using the same procedure as the day before, after which she made the comment that someone had written on their paper I don’t understand. She went on to say that same person obviously didn’t pay attention. I think it was my dad who later taught me this type of division after he answered all my questions about “why?” This incident stayed with me and as a result, years later as a teacher, I never used demonstration as a sole technique for learning. I always taught using methods that required interaction and questioning. Throughout my schooling, I hated doing a page of arithmetic problems and avoided it whenever possible. In Algebra and particularly Geometry, I excelled. I don’t understand this phenomenon, except that
