Satisfying Curiosity

Yesterday's blog post elicited a question or two about my French II teacher. Although she's from Germany she was in Georgia teaching French. She also taught English. Unlike us lazy Americans, many Europeans are not only fluent in their own language, but in English, as well as one or two others. I think they start learning foreign languages at a very young age. Studies have shown that it's easier to learn and become fluent in a foreign language as a child than it is as an adolescent or an adult. Madame Teaver spoke French with a perfect French accent. She could've taught us so much more than Madame Turner did if the other students had been willing to learn from her. I heard that in one of her other classes a student asked her if her grandfather was a Nazi. Rude little bastard!

As far as her teaching English, she once told me about a student of hers (a black student) that did really well in her class until she got pregnant. When Madame Teaver approached another teacher in the English department about it, the teacher told her that it's impossible for black students to do well in English because proper English isn't spoken in their homes. Well ain't that a load of bullshit?! Depending on my surroundings I may occasionally lapse into the vernacular, but English was one of my best subjects in school, and I still do well with it as an adult, hence my certificate in copyediting. That was just one more example of the racist thinking that pervaded the institution where I received my secondary education.

Who's that Girl?

A friend and fellow blogger of mine suggested that I write a bit more about myself because she'd like to get to know me better. I've given you glimpses of what it's like presently to be Michelle Stringer, but you haven't read much about what being Michelle Stringer has been like up until this point.

"I was born a poor black child." That's the opening line from the Steve Martin movie The Jerk. He played it for laughs, but I'm dead serious. I'm the middle child and only daughter born to poor parents in rural northeast Georgia. The land where I grew up used to be pasture land and it belonged to my maternal grandfather. He gifted it to my mother upon her marriage to my father. My parents put a single-wide trailer on that land. It had three bedrooms, the smallest of which my brothers had to share. We practically froze to death in winter and burned up in summer. People assume that because winters in the southern United States aren't as harsh as those in the midwest or the northeast, that we don't get cold down there, but it's not true. In the rural south, it's a different kind of cold. Behind and all around our trailer were woods and some open space. There were no big buildings to buffer the wind or to absorb heat from the sun during the day and radiate that heat in the evenings. Add to that the fact that it was an old trailer that was poorly insulated, and you'll understand why it would be hard to stay up past 10:00pm on the weekends watching TV during the winter.

My father was and is the sole breadwinner. My mom stopped working outside the home once she started having children. My parents got married young. My mom didn't have my older brother until they had been married almost five years, and had my younger brother just before she turned 30. It was great having young parents to grow up with. If I had chosen to have children, I would like to have done it in my 20s so that I'd be finished having them by the time I was 30, too. As fate would have it, that wasn't the path my life was meant to take.

This is just a first look at the environment and the people that have shaped me. I'm actually warming up to this so I will try to include at least one entry a week in the "Who's that Girl" series. Thanks for this suggestion, Anne. By the time I'm done, you might regret your request to get to know me better ;-).

Georgia on My Mind

I spent all of last week visiting my family in Georgia. I hadn't seen them since Christmas. That Christmas was the first one without my grandmother. No matter how much time passes, it's hard to come to grips with the fact that she and my uncle are dead. Because I lived next to them when I was growing up, they were a huge part of my life. Every time I went back, they were there. Now that theyre not, I feel like a huge part of me is missing.

When I was checking in at the airport yesterday, the attendant at the counter asked if I was going home. I told him I was going to my "adult" home and that Georgia is my "childhood" home. I spent the first 19 years of my life in Georgia, which gave me the foundation to build my life on. My love, compassion, empathy, and intuition were born there. Upon moving to Massachusetts, I fine-tuned those things through life experience. It hasn't been easy, but I keep looking forward. My "childhood" home is a touchstone that helps me to regain my footing when I feel off-balance. I feel a certain peacefulness upon my return to my "adult"  home.

What are People Teaching Their Children?

There are so many people that believe that racism is a relic of the past, but if you live in the Deep South, you know better. My niece, who lives in Georgia, is in the 5th grade and has been called a "nigger" more times in this school year than I was called the whole time I was in elementary school. The election of Barack Obama was seen as a step forward, but we seem to be moving backward. My niece's class is doing a project and she was put in a group with 2 other girls. While riding the bus home, she asked 1 of the girls if she wanted to come over to her house to work on the project. The girl's response was "I don't want to come over to your house because you and your grandparents are nothing but black niggers." Now what kind of response is that to an invitation to come over and work on a school project?!