Dahlia

By the second grade my parents had lost the farm through a fire and lots of bad luck.??We moved to Kingsville down on the Gulf Coast, where Dad worked as a printer and proofreader for The Kingsville Record, an ‘open shop,’ meaning non-union, which he did not like, but with easy proximity to the fishing in the lagunas and lots of Mexican Americans,?whom both my parents liked and even preferred to Anglos, Dad having been the only Anglo kid in his one-room school house out in Fort Davis, in the foothills of the Rockies, Mom having grown up in San Antonio, which still prides itself on being the northernmost city in Latin America, her best friend at the Thomas School for Girls and forever after having been from an old and prominent family in Nueva Laredo, just south of the border.?They both had some fluency in the Spanish language, and considered that a mark of intelligence as opposed to ignorance, a word that carries a little more weight in Texas and throughout the South than it may elsewhere.??

Mrs. Brown was my Second Grade teacher at Flato Elementary School in Kingsville, and we formed the same estimate of each other.?She was no Mrs. Crunk and did not remind me of Nonnie in the least, and I was just another problem and apparently thought, as she told my mother at a parent-teacher conference, that I was obliged to entertain the class.?Also, the blackboards weren’t black, as they were supposed to be, and the chalk was yellow and not white in her classroom at Flato Elementary School.?The only thing good about Mrs. Brown’s class was my friend, Johnny Martinez, who taught me some Spanish on our very first day together which consisted of a couple of bad words and a challenge to fight which Johnny said to tell those taller boys over there on the playground. The State of Texas had carefully observed events in Arkansas in 1957 and had initiated a plan of integration of Anglos and Hispanics the very next year, my first year at Flato, also for Johnny Martinez.

Happily, I found that Mrs. Brown’s class was not all there was to Flato Elementary in Kingsville, former commissary of the King Ranch in Kleeburg County, very South Texas.?There were older, more interesting parts of the school, and wonderful teachers you did not see everyday.??In those classes, long before junior high, one met other pupils from other classrooms, some of them very ?interesting.?There was the Art Class, hung with pictures by Dali and Picasso, for example, and the Music Class, where we listened to LPs of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.??It was 1958, and our music teacher, who I gathered was also the piano teacher for some of us who took piano, not I, taught us to sing folk songs and also played reel-to-reel tape recordings of Leonard Bernstein conducting and announcing the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts.?I did not know it at the time, but a pupil not from Mrs. Brown’s class but from another 2nd grade class and in both my Art and Music classes was taking my measure.?Sharon Smart, of the Boston Smarts, but late of Saudi Arabia, where her father, now a professor at Texas A&I College had worked for ARAMCO, a worldly woman of 8, whom I would meet again in the wonderful Miss Morgan’s Third Grade Class in 1959.?There and then, as we were paired up in the same class, the now nine-year-old Miss Smart of the Boston Smarts said to me quite directly, “Well, Carter, at least there’s one other intellectual here.”?I had to ask my Mother what that meant when I got home and Tag greeted me by trying to bolt straight through the front screen door.?“It was a compliment,” Mom said.?“It means she thinks you’re smart.” Sharon was my first encounter with the Bay State, it occurs to me only now.?She used to always quiz me on what grade I had received on every test, and would comment?on my vocabulary, which, she said, was "relatively large, but only relatively."?Checking to see if I was Harvard material, no doubt.?She knew she could forget about me and MIT after the mess I made of Ben Franklin very, very wet-cell battery, my failed entry in the school science fair.

But this was the Lone Star State. Here was also Folk Dance class, and there, too, they mixed the pupils up, so that, pretty soon, you had a chance to meet every single second-grader in that school.?That is how I met the most wonderful second-grader and third-grader the following year, my folk dance partner, Dahlia.

Dahlia’s mother must have loved her very, very much.?She came to school, at least on dance class days, immaculately dressed and coiffed, her shining black hair braided and then looped, with pretty ribbons, her starched, white blouse embroidered with tiny flowers and her pleated, swirling skirt with brilliant Mexican folkloric patterns, right down to her little white socks with lace inside black Mary Janes. ?The only thing prettier than all this was her smile, almost breaking out in laughter, and her dancing black eyes.?We square-danced, danced the Israeli Hora and the Mexican Hat Dance, I with only an imaginary hat.?But, there was nothing imaginary about Dahlia, and when it was time for her to curtsey, spreading out her skirt on the floor and time for me to bow, it was the only time I had ever felt graceful up until that point.?All I remember is us smiling together, but I don’t remember anything that we said.?Perhaps I was, also for the first time, speechless.

?Oh Dahlia, mi amor se ha levantado mi corazón, que todos tus días desde entonces y en el futuro se llenen de alegría con el recuerdo de tu caballerito de nuestra inocente infancia!

--gcc

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?Guy Christopher Carter, 05/04/2023