Beautiful Child: The story of a child trapped in silence and the teacher who refused to give up on her. Torey Hayden
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let out a long, heavy sigh. “Okay, yeah. You’re the one who’s trained in all this. You’ve got the experience. I’m nobody really. Just an aide…” Another sigh. “But I still feel really uncomfortable with this ‘means justifying the ends’ kind of approach. Know what I mean?” She looked up at me. “I’m not kidding, Torey. This girl comes out of a nightmare home situation. I know, because I’ve been at this school for a while and I’ve seen what she and her siblings live like. I can’t believe it’s right for us to be horrible to her too. Ever.”
“I don’t think it did fall under being ‘horrible to her,’” I said, “but I take your point.” There was a pause. “I guess the only thing left to say is that in the future, it’d probably be better if you told me ahead of time when you don’t want to do something rather than give up halfway through it. That way I’d cope better.”
“Yeah, I’m just really sorry, Torey. It’s a principles issue. I hope you understand.”
The awful thing was that I did understand. And in my heart of hearts I agreed with Julie. In an ideal world people in my position should never have to force their will on children like Venus. But then in an ideal world there would be no children like Venus. In this pathetic, ignoble, real world we were stuck in, however, I could see no other way to bring order out of chaos. Before anything could be done to help Venus – or the boys either, for that matter – limits had to be set to achieve the secure environment necessary for growth. These were unhappy, out-of-control children, which was why they’d been placed in this room to begin with. They had to be certain I was more powerful than any of their worst urges or most horrible feelings, that I would not cave in, give up, or in any other way abandon them to those things in themselves they could not control. Only with that security could they then risk change.
The academic necessity of doing this, however, and the gritty reality of putting it into action were quite different things. Moreover, there was always the agonizingly fine line between the right amount of force and too much. And the fact that each child was different. And each circumstance. There was never a formula.
In my heart of hearts I dearly wanted to be the kind of person Julie believed in, the kind who could change the world simply by being loving enough. I felt it was crucial to keep such ideals alive, to keep believing that good would triumph over evil, that love could conquer anything, that no one was hopeless, because while the world might, in reality, not be that way, its only chance of changing was if we believed it could.
Consequently, I ended the day on a low note, going home more bothered by my encounter with Julie than by my encounter with Venus. This was such a hard position for me to defend. The truth was, I was on Julie’s side, not mine.
The next morning Venus did not come to school.
At recess time I went down to the main office to phone her house.
“Hullo?” answered a thick, sleepy sounding voice.
I said who I was and why I was phoning. Was Venus there?
“Huh? What? Dunno,” the voice at the other end replied. Then the line went dead.
I dialed again. Again, the same sluggish, sleepy voice. I couldn’t actually tell if it was male or female. Female, I guessed, but not Wanda.
Once more I explained I was Venus’s teacher and I was concerned because Venus was not at school. I said we’d had a disagreement the previous day and I was worried that Venus might still be upset. “Is this Venus’s mother?” I asked.
The person at the other end was incoherent. Drunk possibly. Whatever, I couldn’t make sense of the call.
As a consequence, I decided to visit Venus’s house after school. Normally I didn’t do this without giving the parents ample warning, but I was more than a little concerned about having allowed her to leave the school premises the day before in the state she was, and I wanted to see for myself that Venus was all right. Moreover, I wanted to make it perfectly plain to whomever was in charge at her house that unless she was ill, Venus had to attend school. This wasn’t a choice Venus or Wanda could make. It was the law.
Julie came with me. Venus and her family lived about five blocks from the school down one of the seedy side streets between the railroad and the meat-packing plant. Although it was now known as an area of crime and drugs, a century earlier when the town had been founded, it had been laid out with broad sidewalks and boulevards planted with elm and cottonwood trees. The elms had long since succumbed to disease and been cut down, but the cottonwoods had thrived, heaving up the decaying sidewalks and casting the whole area into dense shade. Most of the houses had been built between the two world wars. None of them were large houses, but most had porches and broad lawns. Now, however, the porches were broken-down and unpainted. Many houses had boarded-up windows, and the lawns, unwatered and too shaded by the big trees, were worn largely to dirt.
Venus’s home was not a house but a trailer set back on an empty lot. It was old and fitted permanently to a concrete foundation. The screen door was hanging open, and a man sat on the doorstep. I parked the car and got out.
He was a skinny, small-built man, probably two or three inches shorter than I was. His hair was that nondescript color somewhere between dark blond and light brown and it was rather wavy, rumpled almost, as if he hadn’t bothered to brush it when he got up. He had a thick growth of stubble and a very hairy chest showing through his unbuttoned shirt. He sat, smoking a cigarette and watching us come up the path to the front door.
“Hello, I’m Venus’s teacher from school.”
“Well, hi,” he said in a distinctly lascivious manner that made me very grateful for having Julie along.
“Is Venus here?”
He considered this a moment, as if it were a difficult question, then smiled. “Could be. You want a seat?”
“Is she?”
A slow, rather insolent shrug. “I reckon.”
“Venus didn’t come to school today. I’m concerned about her. It’s very important that Venus come every day, unless she’s ill. So, is she here?”
“Why? You want to see her?” he asked, but before I could respond, he leaned back and called over his shoulder, “Teri? Someone here about Venus. Teri?”
There was no response.
The man smiled at me in a casual way.
“Are you Venus’s father?”
“You think all these black bastards are mine?”
A woman, perhaps in her late thirties, appeared in the doorway behind him. She had shoulder-length hair, corn rowed neatly into small braids, and looked as if she just woke up, despite it’s being three-thirty in the afternoon. She blinked against the late summer sunlight. “Who are you?”
I explained again who I was and why I was there.
“Oh fuck,” the woman said wearily. “Wanda?” she shouted over her shoulder. “Wanda, what the fuck you done? Didn’t you take Venus to school again?”
Wanda stumbled to the doorway.
The woman turned. “What you done, you lamebrain. Why didn’t you take her to school today?”
“Beautiful child,” Wanda said and smiled gently.
“Yeah, I’ll ‘beautiful child’ you one of these days. Why didn’t you take her to school?”
“Her no go school,” Wanda replied plaintively.
“Yes, her do go school, you big fucking idiot. How many times you got to be told? You’re good for nothing.” The woman raised her arm as if to hit Wanda, but she didn’t. Wanda scurried off. The woman turned back