Sunday School, 1948

Note: this photograph has haunted me for a very long time, and I wrote this piece to imagine what her life might have been like...and to guess at what she may have been staring at... I suspect that some of you may be able to fill in the blank at the centre of the story. For those of you who might be confused, please watch the video at the end of this piece, and dig a little deeper.

-K.D.

*

Ms. Pearson is a nice woman. I really do like to hear her sing when we have our time out in the choir and she leads us through “Amazing Grace” and many of the other hymns. I really want her to like me, too. But I don’t think that she sees me as a real person.

That sounds really strange, so I better explain.

We had a class about the resurrection and how Jesus came back from the dead after three days and appeared to the women first. She told us that Jesus did not see the apostles until much later and that the women were the ones he wanted to appear to after his miracle against death.

“We can face death if we know what life is worth.”

Those were not her words. Those were the words of the sermon Reverend Hemsworth shared with us earlier. We had all nodded and closed our eyes out of respect when we heard it. It was a sentence that stuck in my head, just like anything from our reader or the Bible. That was why I was very confused when Ms. Pearson chastised me for repeating it.

“Clarissa! You don’t know what that means!”

“But the Reverend said…”

Now, she did not slap me. She hit the table with the ruler that seemed to be attached to her hand and the whole room grew quiet. I think that it is strange now to think about how we were all girls in that class (the boys never went to the classes when the mass was on and my brothers all had chores to do). I wondered if we were going to continue with our lesson.

“You don’t know… You really do not know what that means. You always think that you are ready for life because of your smartness, but death is something else. It is really something else.”

Was that a bad joke? We knew what death was. Our fathers, uncles and brothers had just been through the war and then came back to deal with all of the things we could not ignore. In the eyes of the police, our white neighbours, store clerks, bus drivers and crowds filled with hate, we knew how things could work.

We knew about the body.

Well, I knew. Like I said, there were crowds when these things happened, and the results were all there for us. Especially for us.

They wanted us to see what they could do to us.

They wanted us to be afraid.

Strange when the lesson was over to think about how unafraid I was when I saw it. I was wearing my best clothes and had to look up to see that face and understand that there was something different this time.

I knew the boy. I knew what he had been accused of (ridiculous; he could not even look a girl in the eye).

I was ready for death if this was our life.

*

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You can find more poems, stories, and articles by Kendall Defoe on my Vocal profile. I complain, argue, provoke and create...just like everybody else.

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