Who Do You Think You Are

it over a couple of times in her head. While she was doing this Miss Hattie asked her why she wasn’t copying.
    Rose replied that she knew the poem already, though she was not perfectly sure that this was true.
    “Do you really?” said Miss Hattie. “Stand up and face the back of the room.”
    Rose did so, trembling for her boast.
    “Now recite the poem to the class.”
    Rose’s confidence was not mistaken. She recited without a hitch.
    What did she expect to follow? Astonishment, and compliments, and unaccustomed respect?
    “Well, you may know the poem,” Miss Hattie said, “but that is no excuse for not doing what you were told. Sit down and write it in your book. I want you to write every line three times. If you don’t get finished you can stay after four.”
    Rose did have to stay after four, of course, raging and writing while Miss Hattie got out her crocheting. When Rose took the copy to her desk Miss Hattie said mildly enough but with finality, “You can’t go thinking you are better than other people just because you can learn poems. Who do you think you are?”
    This was not the first time in her life Rose had been asked who she thought she was; in fact the question had often struck her like a monotonous gong and she paid no attention to it. But she understood, afterwards, that Miss Hattie was not a sadistic teacher; she had refrained from saying what she now said in front of the class. And she was not vindictive; she was not taking revenge because she had not believed Rose and had been proved wrong. The lesson she was trying to teach here was more important to her than any poem, and one she truly believed Rose needed. It seemed that many other people believed she needed it, too.
    T HE WHOLE CLASS was invited, at the end of the senior year, to a lantern slide show at the Miltons’ house. The lantern slides were of China, where Miss Mattie, the stay-at-home twin, had been a missionary in her youth. Miss Mattie was very shy, and she stayed in the background, working the slides, while Miss Hattie commented. The lantern slides showed a yellow country; much as expected. Yellow hills and sky; yellow people, rickshaws, parasols, all dry and papery-looking, fragile, unlikely, with black zigzags where the paint had cracked, on the temples, the roads and faces. At this very time, the one and only time Rose sat in the Miltons’ parlor, Mao was in power in China and the Korean War was underway, but Miss Hattie made no concessions to history, any more than she made concessions to the fact that the members of her audience were eighteen and nineteen years old.
    “The Chinese are heathens,” Miss Hattie said. “That is why they have beggars.”
    There was a beggar, kneeling in the street, arms outstretched to a rich lady in a rickshaw, who was not paying any attention to him.
    “They do eat things we wouldn’t touch,” Miss Hattie said. Some Chinese were pictured poking sticks into bowls. “But they eat a better diet when they become Christians. The first generation of Christians is an inch and a half taller.”
    Christians of the first generation were standing in a row with their mouths open, possibly singing. They wore black and white clothes.
    After the slides, plates of sandwiches, cookies, tarts were served. All were home-made and very good. A punch of grape juice and ginger-ale was poured into paper cups. Milton sat in a corner in his thick tweed suit, a white shirt and a tie, on which punch and crumbs had already been spilled.
    “Some day it will just blow up in their faces,” Flo had said darkly, meaning Milton. Could that be the reason people came, year after year, to see the lantern slides and drink the punch that all the jokes were about? To see Milton with his jowls and stomach swollen as if with bad intentions, ready to blow? All he did was stuff himself at an unbelievable rate. It seemed as if he downed date squares, hermits, Nanaimo bars and fruit drops, butter tarts and brownies, whole, the way a snake will swallow frogs. Milton was similarly distended.
    M ETHODISTS WERE PEOPLE whose power in Hanratty was passing, but slowly. The days of the compulsory Bible Class were over. Perhaps the Miltons didn’t know that. Perhaps they knew it but put a heroic face on their decline. They behaved as if the requirements of piety hadn’t changed and as if its connection with prosperity was unaltered. Their brick house, with its overstuffed comfort, their coats with collars of snug dull fur,