A Teacher

A Teacher   by Diane Hanley  9/21/2022

It was September of 1961, my sophomore year in high school.  For other schools around our country, desegregation was being enforced, but not at our school.  We were already integrated and always had been.  Our small county only had a few, even smaller, K-8 elementary schools feeding it.  Students came from the two island schools (one of which I attended—a four room school building with a newer auditorium for all sorts of town events).  There were the farm kids who all went to the main county elementary school.  New Jersey, after all, is called the Garden State.  Our county seat was surrounded by farms.  Finally, students came from the Whitesboro School, in a town by the same name, a predominantly Black community.  So, our high school was all mixed-up, integrated and always had been.  A good place to learn tolerance and gain understanding of each other, except for one different sort of minority, just barely represented in our approximately 300 plus student body and teaching staff.

I first met Mrs. Creed in my Sophomore biology class.  She was one of those teachers who loved her subject and made it both fun and challenging for her students.  I had done lots of hands on assignments in elementary school, since teaching two to three grades at a time demanded innovations.  Mrs. Creed took hands on to a whole new level — dissections!  Who couldn’t enjoy taking a frog apart, learning that its body systems were incredibly similar to our own, in spite of its green, brown or speckled skin.  Who cared about the color!  As our little team of two was dissecting our frog, we were giggling a bit, I admit, which drew Mrs. Creed’s attention.  “What is so funny, you two?”  

“We just can’t believe how all our frogs legs look exactly the same when we carefully peeled off their different colored skins.  See that group’s frog, Polka Dot, that group’s green Slimy and our brown Freddy —  their leg muscles all look the same!” 

Mrs. Creed smiled, “The same with humans.  We are all alike beneath our skins.”  Then she sighed and her face got a far away look.  She added, “I guess there maybe some differences, hiding, however.”  I wondered about that remark.

Mrs. Creed’s comment about us all being alike was validated as I was getting to know my new friends or, “people of color” (a term some black leaders were using in the 60’s).  I was accepting the whole Black/White thing when I became aware, sometime late in my sophomore year, that there was yet another discrimination issue within our walls.  I heard some derogatory comments about Mrs. Creed.  I had heard some of the same ones directed at one of our classmates:  “Butch, Dyke, Lesbian.”  I understood that my classmate wished she was a boy and had cut her hair very short to make that statement.  A very brave thing for her to do back then.  She came from a wealthy family who owned some very popular well-known businesses in our area, ones we all knew.  Our classmate did her best to keep to herself, but at times, for reasons I never quite understood, she would give some of us passes to use at her family’s businesses.  I did not really understand her or her proclivities, but I tried to be nice to her.

And so I respected Mrs. Creed as a teacher and didn’t care what I heard.  It wasn’t important to me in my teenage world then anyway.  My junior year of high school arrived.  I had been chosen, somehow, to be on the yearbook staff.  I was pleased and excited to be part of such an important committee for the next two years.  We worked hard on our book during some study halls, some nights and even some Saturdays, whenever a deadline was close.

One night, I was in the yearbook room busy doing copy or layout, my two favorite tasks, when one of the handsomest senior boys came in looking for me.  “Say, Mrs. Creed sent me down here to ask you to try out for one of the parts in our Fall play.” 

He really did his best to convince me to come, but I was seriously not inclined to get on any stage anytime, anywhere.  You see I was still battling an issue that had plagued me since I began to talk.  I was a stutterer!  At one time a very bad and sad stutterer.  Over time I had learned to carefully enunciate most words and avoid a whole lot of others, but it was still an obvious impediment and challenge for me, and to anyone who ever listened to or watched me struggle.  How could I ever be on a stage in front of hundreds of people?

“Well,” the handsome senior finally added, “She told me if I couldn’t convince you with my charm, that I was to tell you to come see her at once!”  I finally agreed to walk with him to the auditorium.  Mrs. Creed took me aside and described the character she wanted me to play, Althea, a languid model, demur and unassuming.  Wow, I thought, “Mrs. Creed sees something in me I sure don’t see in myself!”  She went on, “I understand that you would rather hide what you think is a significant flaw, but it IS something you can overcome.  If you take on the persona of another person, you are not you. You can become that character and you will not stutter. “

I made a few objections; to all of which, she had answers.  You won’t see all the people, maybe only the first row.  The play is a “whodunit” and you get killed in the first act and become a prompter for the second act.  But the statement I will always remember, which harked back to that biology lab a year before, “Look at me,” she whispered,  “I am MRS Creed, pretending to be someone else most of the time. ”  She paused.  “I need you to try this, Diane, will you do it for me?”

I did, of course, and it was truly an illuminating discovery, that the act of pretending to be someone else could both help me with my stuttering, and be so much fun at the same time.  Mrs. Creed helped me to see myself differently.  Throughout those weeks of practice and in the pep talk before the show she gave us all encouragement and confidence to be the best we could be.

I learned some things from Mrs. Creed, those last two years of high school, maybe more than she may have intended.  I did become more competent at speaking slowly and correctly.  I did get bitten by the acting bug and did have fun becoming different characters in those next three plays, my junior and senior years.   AND I did learn to accept and care for people different from myself, partly because of my integrated school, my different, yet kindly classmate and my understanding and inspiring teacher with her related issue.  These all taught me that I shouldn’t be judgmental or content with surface-level assumptions, but that I should try to understand all characters, all people on a deeper level.  That appreciation, I have found, works in both the theater and in life.

I came to realize that Mrs. Creed may have enjoyed her persona of being a MRS.  I wonder if she ever acted on the feelings she kept hidden inside her.  It is possible she may have always lived her life suppressing her authentic self, or maybe she did gain some freedom over the years.  I’ll never know.  An internet search showed that she was only seven years older than we were, she never married and either died at 62 in 2001, or I like to think, could be 83 now, and still living near our still integrated school.  I paid for that online search, which turned out to be very empty of information.  She never left an obvious trail, but she did leave an impression on me — being an amazing, encouraging and life-changing teacher!