Because of her age, Miss Magill would leave the room for a few minutes from time to time. When she did, she brought in one of her former students, now in the upper grades, to serve as monitors. (This was before they opened Joan of Arc Junior High; P.S. 166 still went up to eighth grade.) The monitors--always girls--were taller and older, intimidating not just through residual fear of Miss Magill, but through their size and age. Any sign of disorder and a glance from them stopped us cold.
One day Miss Magill had to leave for fifteen minutes and she brought in a short, plump Chinese girl from third grade as monitor. We had several refugee kids from China. The Sino-Japanese War had just restarted, and everyone in America loved everyone in China. But this girl was smaller and younger than any monitor we’d ever had before. She had dark eyes, a small flat nose and a round expressionless face that was absolutely symmetrical. Her hair was black and straight and it hung down to her jaw-line at the sides and was into cut into bangs across the center of her forehead. She didn’t introduce herself or say a single word. She didn’t even look at us. She just stood behind Miss Magill’s desk, gazing straight ahead.
For the first five minutes we all sat still and studied our readers; residual fear of Miss Magill preserved order. But this round-faced little girl with her blank gaze had none of the intimidating power of the older, taller monitors Miss Magill had chosen during previous absences. This little girl appeared timid--even afraid of us.
After five minutes of watching her gaze silently and simple-mindedly straight ahead, Miss Magill’s residual powers began to wear off, especially among the students seated in row five, at the far left-hand side of the room. The boy in the last seat of that last row made a noise. Our stone-faced little monitor did not glance his way. Two other boys in that row giggled disruptively and set off the three disreputable permanent female inhabitants of that disreputable row. Still, no reaction from our monitor; it was as if there were no king in Israel on that day and everyone could do that which was right in his own eyes.
The disorder spread gradually rightward across the room. Two boys in the fourth row put down their readers and whispered together. A girl in the third row passed one pink and one white Necco wafer, both forbidden, to a girl in the second row in exchange for six forbidden Raisinets. A third-row boy said something rude to the monitor. She did not respond. Two others called out to her. Still no response. The boy in the last seat third row stood up, walked forward and exchanged “A Girl Scout Carrying Flag To Doomed Men” Horrors of War card for a “Shanghai Shoppers Blown Up By Bombs” card with a boy in the first seat, second row.
As the minutes passed and Miss Magill did not return, the disorder fed upon itself and lured even two students in the elite first row to take a part in it. I was not one of them. Nor were the three Japanese students in our class. One, James Taka’s parents had cut the last three syllables off the family name to Americanize it. One of the girls, Emeretta, had lived in London. The other’s name was Dolly. I think that was an Americanization too. All three disappeared in 1942.
The noise inside the room might have been audible through the door and into the hallway outside, but there was no reaction from our expressionless, evidently toothless monitor. Then the door opened and Miss Magill returned. Instantly, the room went dead silent.
She sat down at her desk with a wooden pen, opened a bottle of ink and scratched careful notes onto a writing tablet as our deadpan monitor stood beside her and seat by seat, row by row, in perfect English, gave a detailed accounting of exactly which rules her passive silence had lured each rule-breaker into breaking—an unforgettable performance. No one in Miss Magill’s class was at all surprised when that same plump little Chinese girl recited, by heart, all eighteen stanzas of Poe’s “The Raven” in School Assembly the following Thursday morning.
Allow me to jump to an early November morning exactly twelve years after that day. One of the boys who’d been sitting in the first row, and who’d remained silent while Miss Magill was absent from the room, was marching north along the road to Unsan, hoping to urinate in the Yalu River and be home in time for Christmas. The temperature had been dropping every day, his company’s promised winter clothing had not arrived, and the hills either side of the road were eerily quiet. Their scouts had not seen a single peasant in the last two days and there were persistent rumors of a huge army of Chinese hiding in the hills to their right, trying to lure them into marching still farther north, get around behind them and cut them off. Eighth Army Intelligence had denied the rumors, but their skeptical company commander ordered them to climb hill 407, to the left of the road, and to dig in.
As that boy of twelve years earlier, now a young man, tried to hack his way into the frozen ground with his entrenching tool, he kept seeing the dark eyes of Miss Magill’s passive-seeming little monitor gazing straight ahead, looking at none of them, but silently watching and registering every mischievous thing her seeming passivity had emboldened them to do.
Herb L
oldtimewriter.com
