The story I am about to tell you is absolutely true.
One foggy, September morning a small group of six-year-olds huddled in the entry-way of a crumbling three-story building. Brown eyes stared into blue. Hands clutched large pencils and writing pads. Tears threatened. Until this morning, many of the children had never been in a group of others their own age. To them, first grade was so alien to everything they had previously encountered the parents might well have dropped them on Mars or abandoned them in the middle of a dark and frightening wood.
Original photograph by Liliane Callegari
In this particular corner of the forest, a beautiful queen held sway. She had dark hair, shiny red fingernails and glasses that gave her eyes a feline tilt. She ruled with two faces—one for parents and one for her class. One face always smiled and the other…well, the other didn’t. She was a queen well-suited to her reign. Fear was her broadsword. Humiliation was her dagger. She could sense weakness from across the room and, in the blink of an eye, would race down a row of desks to lift an offending first grader out of her chair, digging those bright red nails into the tender place behind a little ear. The children thought she knew their bad thoughts even before they thought them.
As the days passed the children became very well behaved, but they stayed patient, waiting for a chance to escape. Sometimes when the queen would lock them in the classroom while she went across town for lunch, the children would boost one of their number over the radiator and out the window. Once outside, the child would run to unlock the door and free the first graders. Into the sunshine they would dash and drink in the fresh air like it was nectar, but they were always careful to lock themselves back in the room before the queen returned. When spring came and the trees and bushes burst with leaves, the children would hide beneath the hedgerow at the edge of the playground and create worlds without rules or rulers, until the day they missed the recess bell and the queen had the hedgerow cut down.
By May, the children were wise in the ways of survival. They had learned many things, not to cry when the queen made you stand alone before the class, not to listen when one of your friends was locked in the closet, and not to tell your parents. For the parents had only seen the queen’s smile as she claimed a kiss from each child at the end of every day. The years ahead would bring new kings and queens in different realms, but the memory of kissing that powdered cheek would never go away.
On the list of names for the 1958 first grade class at my rural Missouri school, you won’t find Hansel and Gretel, but they were there. The little boy scratching at the supply closet door begging to be released and the spunky girl climbing over the window sill and racing to free her classmates might well have stepped off the pages of a Grimm brothers’ tale. Did we think in those terms at the time? I’m sure we didn’t. But I can’t help but think that on some level the insanity of our first grade year was survivable, because our parents and grandparents had told us the old tales. Joseph Campbell believed the old familiar stories provided a sense of perspective for our lives and the tale of the two children who manage to outwit the old woman seems tailor made for those times when your wits and patience are the only advantages you have.
Being Dorothy 