Blackned

 

                                                          Marilyn Horan

                                                    Blackened

During my thirteen years in Catholic schools I heard nothing about avoiding patent leather shoes or sprinkling baby powder in the bath water to obscure our own bodies as a way to avoid the impure thoughts that our nakedness might engender. The Sisters of Saint Joseph never claimed that the Blessed Virgin cries when a girl whistles or that tweezing eyebrows and shaving legs were signals to boys that you wanted sex. Had the good sisters said such things I could have regarded them as silly and naïve when, in fact, they were cruel taking every opportunity to demean and humiliate through public castigation followed by demerits and detention for any of many violations of petty rules, usually concerning dress code.  Not only fear that shot through me with every encounter with a sister; it was fury as well.  Who were these unfeeling harridans and crones to speak to me like that? Their regimentation and scrutiny made me feel like an incarcerated innocent or marine in bootcamp. Sister Gerard Piccata, in a wilder than usual rage, ripped earrings from a girl’s lobes so that blood ran down both sides of  her neck. One hundred and forty girls arrived at school ten minutes late because of subway delays during a blizzard and we all had got the usual detention, demerit, and dressing-down.  When graffiti, written in blue crayon eye shadow, was found on a bathroom door, the principal, Sister Leticia, screamed over the public address that all activities desist, every girl must empty her purse, schoolbag, and waistcoat pockets, and anyone having a blue crayon was to be sent to her office immediately.  No activity was to resume until the culprit was identified, even if the FBI had to be called in to do handwriting analysis. At the mention of a cherry pie during an assembly honoring George Washington, Sister Leticia barreled down the middle aisle of the auditorium, arms flailing, swishing as only a nun swathed in yards of pleated and starched black fabric could, her huge brown wooden rosary beads clacking furiously.  She shrieked repeatedly, “I will not have our national heroes debunked.”  Of course, these incidents became prime fodder for hooting derision at reunions, but we could only laugh at them from the distance of years.  Privacy, creativity, individualism, humor, and basic civil rights were denied us Bishop Kearney High School girls.

I hated these repressed women of God, these brides of Jesus, or of Frankenstein I said often. I thought myself superior to them.  They were crosses to be borne until I graduated, and developing a good defense by becoming offensive, I passed around satiric poems and caricatures of them to the class.  I learned each nun’s idiosyncrasies and imitated them to my classmates’ screaming laughter.  When we girls were being prodded up or down the stairs to or from lunch, I mooed cow-like keeping my lips sealed and my identity a secret.  My lunch mates picked up on it so that we mooed in unison and sounded like what we were treated as—a herd of cattle, prodded en masse to feed at the trough.  I rolled my eyes, sucked my teeth at the nuns, and make remarks sotto voce that cracked up the rest of the class.  The older I got the more I countered everything the sisters said.  I became contentious and supercilious, so much so, that I like to believe the Josephites became a little afraid of me.  My resentment was evident in everything I did or uttered: I spoke disrespectfully, snorted when the teachers said anything I disagreed with, and shot baleful looks at any of them who dared make extended eye contact with me.  Besides finding me amusing, my classmates admired my bravado and I achieved something of an outlaw status.

            But pride is the mother of humiliation, or at least its aunt,  and the greater the pride the deeper the potential for humiliation.  For all my swagger and seeming impenetrable haughtiness, I was humiliated one day.  A surprise chemistry quiz caught me so unprepared and panicked, that I hugged my stomach, grimaced with phantom pain, and asked if I could go to the nurse’s office.  Surprisingly, Sister Emiliana let me leave.  Once I was in the infirmary, Sister Hyacinth the nurse, barked, “What’s wrong with you, young lady?”  I told her I had horrible cramps.  She ordered me to lie down on the medical table and told me to take off my shoes.  I resisted; she insisted.  When I removed my shoes I lost my pride and dignity and reaped a ton of shame that causes me to cringe still:  the bottoms of my feet were black with dirt I had accumulated while walking barefoot around my house the previous afternoon and night.  My feet were not just a little dirty, they were shiny black with ingrained dirt—dirt that said not only was I a slovenly girl, but that I came from a shabby home and had negligent parents as well.  I lay on the table, paralyzed with meekness and misery, aware that from that moment on, all the despised nuns, who I imagined gossiped about us students, had it over me. Even as I was being carried around the gym on the shoulders of my classmates after my victory in a basketball game, even when I was publicly awarded a New York State Regents Scholarship, even during graduation when the new principal commended me for being both an athlete and a scholar in front of the whole audience of my peers and their parents and guests, I knew in my heart that all the other nuns looking on would only sniff and think to themselves, “That’s the girl with the filthy feet.”