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Chapter 24 Miss Tenie daily trips up the alley for visits to Miss Tenie made me her pet even before I started to school at Jefferson Davis Grammar School. She had a screened porch at the front of her simple one-story wood frame house, and on it was a two-seater porch swing, the kind that in movies provided the place of budding courtship. In her late fifties now, Miss Tenie Holmes had never been married but was anything but spinsterish. My mother said she had once been in love with a gambler, but “that wouldn’t do.” She also said, “You know, when Miss Tenie was young, she got put out of the Baptist Church one time for dancing!” She was like a grown-up playmate and seemed genuinely to enjoy and be stimulated by the presence of children. She was my first grade teacher and taught hundreds of others who preceded and followed me. Sometimes she let me help her make copies on her hectograph. Using special ink, she traced over a line drawing of a circus elephant and then laid the tracing sheet flat and smooth on a shallow tray of light gray gel. When she lifted the sheet, there the elephant was, outlined in blue on the gel itself. Then she showed me how to smooth a blank sheet of paper onto the gel and print the elephant on the paper. She saw that I wanted to stick my fingernail into the gel, the way I did in biscuit dough, but told me that was not a good idea. Often I sat in her porch swing beside her while she read to me. There was Pinocchio, the story of the wooden puppet constructed by his “father,” the carpenter Geppetto. Pinocchio yearned to be a real little boy instead of a wooden counterfeit one, but to become a real boy required him to have good character: to tell the truth, be respectful to his father, go to school or to work, and be generous and kind instead of lazy and selfish. Pinocchio failed miserably in all these expectations. He rudely snatched the wig from miss tenie 159 his father’s head and refused to go to school or to work. And with every lie he told, his nose grew longer. The wise cricket advised Pinocchio to learn a trade, but Pinocchio wanted to be a vagabond and amuse himself all day long. A selfless thought finally entered his head only when his beloved, beautiful guardian fairy fell into desperate need, and he wanted to help her. But without any means, he wondered how he could help. Suddenly a single thought transformed him: “I can work!” Miss Tenie did a school teacher’s pounce on the moral of the story: Pinocchio left his lazy ways, became helpful, and all of a sudden changed into the real boy he wanted to be! From Miss Tenie’s porch I waved at the Kogutt children, who lived directly across the street. Sarah had taught me to roller skate right there in front of Miss Tenie’s, and Samuel and Albert Kogutt were in the Boy Scouts with Adelbert. For some occasion, Miss Tenie had once gone with Samuel to the synagogue, and after that she laughed at herself for having pestered him to take off his hat. She nudged and nudged him and whispered that he ought to remove his hat in a place of worship. Well, she told me, in the Baptist church the men took their hats off, but in the “Jewish church” they were supposed to keep them on. All I knew about differences in worship was that Methodists and Baptists chatted a lot when they went into church, but that we Episcopalian children were directed to be silent, go to our knees, and say a very sincere prayer on entering God’s house. From noticing how Miss Shirley did it, I assumed that the sincerest attitude required closed eyes and the use of thumb and forefinger to keep a soft little pinch in place at the narrow bridge of the nose. Miss Tenie’s real first name, Kathleen, was known to almost no one except my father. She had been a “teeny” baby, she told me, and so was always called Tenie, somehow losing the extra e. She was born in  and as a girl had briefly assisted her mother, who taught the Hawkins children in my mother’s generation...

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