Letter to a Teacher, 1930s

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Recently, Kentucky Monthly Magazine reprinted a letter from a parent to a teacher in the 1930s. I wondered what would happen if I took the end of that letter and just kept going with the voices of everyone else involved.

Miss Schnider —

take you a stick and

give Laren a good beating and

he will mind you.

That’s all it takes to make him mind.

Mama I don’t

know why you ain’t never seen

I am not Edward, won’t never be him.

Something in the vapors from his sick room

got all caught up in your eyes —

they only look at him.

My father’s hand on my elbow was gentle,

but I hated it.

Callused and creased as it was,

rubbed black in the lines from coal dust,

never to be clean.

He promised me my hands would stay as white and soft

as the rabbits he kept in cages back of the house.

Now my hands

rubbed white in the lines form chalk dust,

and the rabbits —

long ago killed, long ago eaten with greens from Mama’s front garden.