*from the archive and oh maybe the early 2000s? who knows at this point, but, in increments I will share and, knock wood, you will enjoy, this old-ish story. Mildred Jensen was an actual math teacher I had in middle school, she was tall and leggy, but everything else is entirely fictional here. I really liked her, a lot, even if – at the end of her career when I had her as an instructor – she was showing not only her age but the age of some of her ideas (boys are better at measuring things, for one).
Thanks for reading, and subscribing!!
She had always loved math, even as a child attending a rural one room school in the valley five miles walk from her parent’s farmhouse. She was, very early on in that single room, a help to their instructor Mr. Fiske, teaching the younger children all about sums, subtraction, fractions, and long division, among other subjects, for she was a bright one all around.
At home, if her father or mother was stuck, figuring out quarts and gallons against dollars and cents, feed prices and profit versus loss, Mildred would work it out, sitting at their well-worn kitchen table with her pencil flying across the page. Sometimes she knew the answers to math problems just by looking at them, by merely being told the sums, one less another or times another or even when divided by a third, but she knew that being able to show how she got there, that also counted.
Her mother and father encouraged her in this, her schoolwork, her special abilities in math, for as they well knew, farming was a hard life; her older brother wanted the farm, if he chose, as seemed likely. And, happily, Mildred wanted to teach, wanted a life that was intellectual and fine, more like the town girls in the central school she shifted to for the seventh grade, girls who looked down on her in her homespun skirts, made from her mother’s old clothes cut down to size. It was the nineteen thirties, and even if things were getting better, there was no wasting anything on the farm.
Mildred was also not a pretty girl; she said so herself and said it bluntly, ‘I’m not the kind to catch the eye of a boy, a Future Farmer of America, perhaps, or even a fellow teacher, later on’. This was not just because she was smarter than most of the boys she knew, she was also taller, just under five foot nine at thirteen years old, with endless seeming, narrowly calved legs and long skinny arms to match, coarse hair she could not control making her head, she felt, resemble the bulky end of her dad’s anvil. The trunk of her body was round and thick in contrast to her limbs, and she tilted forward, always, as if perennially walking into or against a strong wind. No, Mildred freely acknowledged, she was not pretty.
And so, she worked hard at her studies, bringing home every prize in academics she could, including a full scholarship to a local college where she would learn all she needed to be a teacher, the kind of teacher she herself loved and benefitted from at the central school: sharp-eyed spinster ladies dedicated to the craft, to the art, of bringing out the best in their pupils. She would make herself in their image, finding her true calling in educating others as she had back in elementary school, helping out – of this she was sure. It seemed not being one of the pretty, popular girls, yet knowing where one belonged and finding joy in inspiring others, might have its compensations.
The history teacher, a man, said as much to Mildred one day in her final weeks of high school, when her plans were set and shared with the rest of her classmates, ‘You’ll make fine teacher one day, Millie, a girl like you. The classroom’s where you belong.’ Mildred felt his eyes run up and down her, taking in her coarse hair, her large capable barn-chapped hands, ‘Yes, I think you’ve made a smart choice. Good luck to you.’ She saw him once that summer before college, in the town, with a woman she assumed was his wife, a pretty little thing whose head barely met his shoulder.
And why have we not heard of her, along with so many other women of note throughout our history? Well, c’mon, y’all know why*.
Anna Julia Cooper was a scholar, educator, author, sociologist, speaker, and civil and women’s rights leader. Born in 1858 to Hannah Stanley, an enslaved woman held captive in North Carolina in the household of Doctor Fabius J. Haywood. Many scholars conclude that the ‘good doctor’ Heywood was Cooper’s biological father. Not much is known known of her years enslaved in Raleigh. While a student at St. Augustine’s Normal School, however, she was a standout student, including her earning money tutoring her classmates. She also first encountered gender discrimination – being required to take ‘The Ladies Course’, a diminished curriculum by anyone’s measure – at the school, and decided to fight for racial and gender equality equally.
Cooper graduated high school in 1877, enrolled at Oberlin College in 1881, and was only the fourth female to attend. She received a B.A. in mathematics in 1884 and completed a doctorate degree at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1925, only the 4th African American woman to earn her PhD. Cooper was an influential educator, writer, activist and feminist; she was also member of the influential and historic black women’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, an organization of which our current V.P. Kamala Harris is also a member.
“Not the boys less, but the girls more,” Cooper wrote in “A Voice from the South,” published in 1892. Cooper’s topics included education, segregation, women’s suffrage, and the portrayal of African Americans in literature and poverty. The title is considered the ‘first book-length feminist analysis of the condition of African Americans.’ Cooper wrote, ‘Women in stepping from the pedestal of statue-like inactivity in the domestic shrine, and daring to think and move and speak – to undertake to help shape, mold, and direct the thought of her age, are merely completing the circle of the world’s vision.”
Clannad was and is a Celtic folk band, around since the late 1970s; it exists in the present day with new personnel. I first heard their music in the early ‘90s when Sophie, a twenty-something like me, but from Germany, was listening to shit I had never heard of; she played it for me one slow afternoon at our part-time job. She and I worked together on the one day per week I put in at a store on Columbus and seventy-third that featured handmade shoes; I did this in part because I got a steep discount on shoes (an obsession of my earlier years), but also because at the time I needed extra money (when did I not?). Eddie, the store’s co-owner, master shoe-maker, and certifiable sweetheart, paid cash.
Clannad. What else was I listening to at the time? I had a lot of disco and dance music, post-Studio 54 work phase, which infamous club had slumped into a pale parody of its glory years, but that music, and the power of dance, continued to move me (still does). I owned multiple albums by Madonna, as well as by Springsteen, The Moody Blues, U2, and other bands, as well as single tracks and albums by Sade, Tears for Fears, Men At Work, Dire Straits; maybe even Wham, I guess? George Michael, yes, Whitney, maybe? Anita Baker. Tracey Chapman, yes and wasn’t she folk? Yes. But still, I mostly listened to pop and dance music.
Tracey aside, a Celtic folk sound was very different, perking up my ears, becoming a central part of the soundtrack of my late twenties and early thirties. Enya was an early member Clannad, going solo to break big, and her album Watermark was one I owned in almost every format in years of major transition in music technology, and in my life. I finally left the cheap walk-up two-bedroom apartment I’d come to know was a trap, made my family go into therapy (more on that another time), and started asking for what I needed from the people in my life. Yay.
Clannad’s music was not only beautiful, it was political, in part because it helped resuscitated the genre of Celtic music. That means we can thank them for the national tours of Celtic Woman and Celtic Thunder, I guess? Why aren’t Irish dudes singing together just called Celtic Men? And must they strut and stomp around in that odd way (I cannot watch, it’s just too odd, altho that one blond guy is compellingly hot)? But I insist that no responsibility (or blame) rests withClannad for The Lord of the Dance and Flatley’s many feet flailing, arms clamped, fellow dancers, which I always found both weird yet perfectly reflective of a culture oppressed for centuries by the church of St. Pat, and the Brits, like ducks who’ve been trapped, surrounded in a puddle by a ravening, rabid pack of wolves. All that motion under water, under a smooth surface, behind the closed doors of churches and political board rooms.
Clannad– and later Enya – were political because they started a revival of Celtic music, and language, a language suppressed by the British; anything or anyone elevating, celebrating, and being successful in the realms of Irish culture, language, music, and history was considered political because of the continuing lousy policies in the north of that country by the British. Clannad also was known as a political band because they first came to wider acclaim as a result of Harry’s Game, the theme song to a British TV show covering the Irish Troubles, forever after therefore to be associated with that long-time struggle.
I remember flying to San Francisco and Montana with my Walkman, listening to Enya’s Watermark the entire trip, my stomach churning because my life was changing, I was changing, because I had to, to survive. Maybe there’s something to the language, and the music, that called to my Irish DNA. Funny thing that, because on my mother’s side, I am equally German, but – two world wars involving Germany while the twelve original Byrnes kids were growing up meant that side was ignored, regardless of the inconvenient truth that many in Ireland during both wars cheered for the Germans because their hatred of the colonizing, cruel Brits triumphed over all other considerations. Ah, the world is complex.
This has been true for some time, but – to see and hear former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr say he would vote for Donald Dump – Governor Chris Sununu of N.H. as well – has been mind-blowing. Biden, according to Barr, and the progressive left with their dangerous agenda pose a greater threat to America than a wanna-be-dictator cum sociopathic narcissist. That means that (because neither man mentioned specifics of ‘the leftist agenda’ they find so scary) forgiving student loans, expanding voting rights, universal healthcare, family leave, child tax credits, among others – these policy choices are so dangerous to our constitutional republic they want to bring back the purest agent of chaos and crazy to ever sit behind the resolute desk? Which desk, by the by, their candidate says he will pulverize because Biden has so badly tainted it? Sununu was so pale and so clearly in a cold sweat (that’s what lying and being a total coward’ll do to you) I almost felt sorry for him, taking it up the ass for Orange Menace, but – no.
The crazies on the right accuse those of us opposing Dumpster Fire a.k.a. Orange Nero a.k.a. Don the Con of suffering from TDS: Trump Derangement Syndrome. Au contraire, mes amies. Those who suffer from TDS are y’all. The sickos are you – bowing and scraping and making excuses for inexcusable acts, statements, and positions because – political expediency? Fear? Cowardice? Craven ambition? All of the above and more.
Sam Alito is another one, positing that an unborn child is more of a person with protected rights – in the EMTALA case before SCOTUS last week – than the host body (a.k.a. woman) who is carrying said fetal person. Nothing that asshole says or takes a position on surprises me, and there are women (a few) who would and do choose to save the life of their unborn child rather than their own, but – essentially – that is their choice, a decision not meant to be mandated by SCOTUS, the legislature in Idaho, or Louisiana, or anywhere else. Alito basically posited that losing an organ – a female organ, it is worth noting – is not such a big sacrifice, and if that organ is a uterus, as happened in Idaho after a woman there was denied necessary abortion care, well, that’s pro-life, right!?! Huh?!!
Speaking of insane, and saying the quiet part out loud (almost), the Louisiana Supreme Court has decided that the city of Baton Rouge can be ‘broken up’, with – essentially – the wealthy white parts of the city becoming another municipality entirely. Will it be called Baton Blanc? It should be. And, will the city fight this all the way up to the activist conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court, which will undoubtedly side with the pale males fighting for separation. You see, after a century plus of under-investment, red-lining, and deliberate fucking over of the black population, the good people of Baton Rouge keep electing black Mayors, Democrats, and that has meant that the wealthier areas of B.R. are being challenged to make good on the promise of equal treatment under the law, including local funds to all local infrastructure, and more. Ouch. Making more crazy-ass Republicans fly to the hills, or – wherever. Swamps? Sewers? There are parts of NYS that want to secede, the acts of spoilt bullies who are no longer getting their way in a changing world.
And then there’s Kristi Noem. Shooting and killing her 14-month-old puppy because she needs to demonstrate that she is that tough, and you softie (but somehow still incredibly dangerous) libtards don’t understand how it’s done on the farm a.k.a. real ‘Merica. You know what real America is, Noem? A place where our pets are pretty much adored. We are also – thanks to the GOP and their partners at the NRA – a country with too many guns and in many cases too few brain cells, a dangerous combination. And, too few mental health support systems or public health support, period, because – again – GOP policies. This week, yet another mass shooting, this time in North Carolina, where four officers (to date) have died, after attempting to serve a warrant for unlawful possession of a firearm. Thanks, GOP, and NRA, for making America safer. Not.
What’s that saying? The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over, expecting a different result? Donald Dump and the gun lobby are both alligators, and if you think they won’t take your arm off because, like Barr or Sununu, you’ve placated them time and again in public forums, well, you’re dead wrong, and soon to be without at least one of your limbs. As you deserve. I may have no use for Mike Pence, but – he has at least rejected his old boss, and his ways, taking the (somewhat) higher road of opposing Dump. Let’s be grateful for that, at least, I guess? Maybe the current GOP needs to remember and revive Nancy Reagan’s old saying re: illegal drugs for the modern era re: Orange Crazy: Just Say No. That’s right, GOPers, just say no to the drug that is Dumpster Fire and his crazy-ass base. You can do it!
