I Felt My Soul Rise

Long before the phrase “representation matters” entered our collective consciousness, expressing, naming an essential need for some, and becoming little more than an annoying buzz phrase of an insignificant desire for others, Mr. Zimmerman landed in my world. It was the fall of 1969. I was entering the fifth grade and had been assigned to his classroom at Roosevelt Elementary, the small neighborhood school I attended in Lackawanna, NY. He was a new teacher. I had a male teacher the year before. My first one.

He was plain, wore thick glasses and was studious looking. He wore slacks and shirts, and like all the other teachers at Roosevelt, he was white. I liked him, and the other girls in the class and I would giggle because it was obvious, he had a crush on a beautiful female teacher whose room was down the hall. Even at nine, we knew crushes when we saw them because we went googly-eyed and giggled when we were near boys we liked. Boys in shades of brown. Boys with their hair shaved near bald and those who had baby afros crowning their heads like halos. Our teacher did not giggle, but his eyes did go googly.??

Before I entered kindergarten, I only wanted to have a male teacher. I made that odd request to my mother when I was five because I was that odd child. “If I don’t have a man teacher, I’m not going to school!” My mother laughed, and the rare times a neighbor would stop to visit, she would have me repeat it to her. The neighbor and my mother would both laugh. I would laugh, too. But I was serious. I don’t know why I had so firmly affixed to the idea. When I did go to kindergarten, on the first floor of the school, my teacher was Mrs. Mishka, an older woman who was kind and patient.

After I climbed the stairs to the third-floor classroom for the start of fifth grade, I was not prepared to see the man standing outside of my classroom the door. Tall and brown and lean and young, he was dressed in a navy suit and patterned tie. He looked like a fifth member of the Fabulous Four Tops, the sixth member of the Tempting Temptations. He had a thick moustache, and his hair was styled in a small afro. This was my teacher? This was my teacher! My breath left me, and I felt my soul rise. This was Mr. Zimmerman.

In a school filled with Black children. A neighborhood filled with Black children with working class and poor families. Day by day, house by house, street by street, de facto segregation was shaping our world. It made our world smaller, poorer as businesses shuttered, eventually even leading to the closure of the one grocery store, the A&P. We were the children of the First Ward, entering a desert. From the other side of the tracks, we Black children whose parents were part of the Great Migration, lived among Puerto Ricans who had come from the island, Yeminis who had recently immigrated to America, and an ever-shrinking number of white families, one or two generations removed from Europe. Most of us we part of large families. Five children. Seven. Ten. I am from a family of nine children. We all lived in the projects and small homes lining the streets near the massive Bethlehem Steel Plant. The men in our neighborhood wore rough and heavy work clothes and worked at Bethlehem, down the Turnpike at Ford, or in South Buffalo at the Buffalo Color Corps, a plant that smelled so awful, that when you passed by it riding in bus, your stomach hurt.

These men fed their families while working jobs that would eventually turn on too many of them. The dust. The dye. The chemicals. The smoke. The backbreaking work. They were carrion birds. Circling. Waiting for a chance to peck them into death. There was a time when these men shed those uniforms. They put on suits for church. For weddings. For funerals. For graduations. They knew how to show up sharp and shaved. Dapper and dashing. But on a regular day. An ordinary day when school bells rang, they had no reason to dress like Mr. Zimmerman.

From that very first day, Mr. Zimmerman set the tone. He hit the notes that would resonate in our class. He was strict, formal. He told us from the start, “I have 20/20 eyes and 20/20 ears.”?

He wore a suit every day, and he approached every subject he taught with earnestness and passion. He made no excuses for bad behavior. We were expected to behave. We were expected to learn. There was no back talk. No gum chewing. In that era, when teachers were allowed to paddle, he never paddled us.? He talked to us. Reasoned. Once, when a fight broke out in our narrow and crowded cloak room, kids fighting among wet woolen coats, rubber boots and long hooks sticking out of the wall, he jumped in to stop it.

When he was teaching from the front of the room, at the blackboard, or his desk, he could see a note being passed, and come and intercept it.? He could hear some chatter whispered from the back row, and call out the name of the student, even if his back was turned. “I have eyes in the back of my head, you know,” he said once. And I believed him.

I liked it when he moved away from the front of the room and walked among us.? At any minute, he looked like he could break out and do the Temptation Walk, Tighten Up, Camel Calk, or Bugaloo down Broadway. Mr. Zimmerman would stop to praise good work, to help a student who needed help, or pull out a tissue for someone who was chewing gum to place it in his hand.

I loved it when he walked past my desk because he wore aromatic cologne that smelled like musk with a hint of wood smoke. When he praised my work, I would smile, and so would he. Mr. Zimmerman taught the three Rs, but he went beyond that. My favorite days would be special afternoons when he would turn off the lights and play jazz records for us.

While the steel plant raised steady columns of acrid smoke, the men went in and out, and the mothers were home cooking, our classroom was transformed. The sounds of the bass, horns, of drums and piano pulled us into moods we had not known. Blue notes dropped us. Syncopation lifted us. Carried us into concert halls. Into a world of music. Past what we played on 45’s at home or heard on American Band Stand or The Ed Sullivan Show.?

My favorite memory of Mr. Zimmerman was one I did not witness. Parents’ night. My father never went to any. My mother always went. On a chilly evening in late fall, my mother dressed like she was going to church. Her hair freshly pressed and curled. She wore a dress, stockings, and pumps. She lightly powered her face and applied a little red lipstick. She slipped into a simple wool coat with a fur collar and off into the darkness she went to walk to school.

When she came back, I asked what she thought. Did she like him? What did he say about me? My mother laughed, showing her big gap-toothed smile. “He is nice,” she said. “And he told me that you are one of the best students in class.” Then she laughed again. “He told me, I like the way you dress Connie. You take such care of her. Is she your only child?” My mother and I looked at each other. We laughed together.

“Mr. Zimmerman thinks I’m an only child?! Me?”

With him being new, he did not know of the seven older siblings who had preceded me. My oldest two, brothers, had already left home and joined the navy. For years I had heard some teacher say, “Oh, you’re another Porter. I know you will do well.” I didn’t know if I would always be able to live up to up with my siblings. They were all brilliant, ambitious, curious, and well-behaved.??

My mother said, “I told him I have nine children, and have cared for all of you this way.”

I hugged my mother, and in that moment felt that I belonged in the line with my brothers and sisters, but that I also stood out on my own.

I wanted to hug Mr. Zimmerman that next day at school. I did not. I said my usual good morning. Smiling, he said, “It was nice meeting your mother last night.”??

Looking back, I feel that Mr. Zimmerman cared for all of his students “this way.” He saw all of us. He saw each of us. He saw me.???

When it came time to write a dedication for Addy Learns a Lesson: A School Story, I immediately thought of him. He was at Roosevelt for only one year. This phoenix, fiery like the glow of orange, red that shone from the steel plant at night. Perhaps he had risen from the ashes of riots of ‘68. Having only coming briefly to lift our souls when we did not even know they needed to be lifted. He was the rebirth of hope.

None of us knew where Mr. Zimmerman went. Walking up those steps to the third floor to my sixth-grade classroom the next year, I thought I would at least see him standing there welcoming his new class. He would be just down the hall, and I could greet him every morning. But he was definitely gone.

Today, it may be hard to understand that a “Mr. Zimmerman,” a Black man with a sharp mind, in a sharp suit could have such an impact.

For me, he was the embodiment of “representation matters.” African American educators, especially those who teach children who are living like I was as a child—in poverty, in the projects, unaware that they may even be in a desert--you matter. You make a difference. For generations you have risen from the ashes, and upon your wings, lifted souls.

Footnote: I wanted to leave Mr. Zimmerman's memory alive in this article. I did have a phone conversation with him three decades ago, and I was able to express my gratitude to him and let him know the impact he had on my life. He remembered me, which made me smile! Mr. Zimmerman went onto have a 40 year legacy of teaching in Buffalo and Chicago, and I can only imagine the number of children whose lives he lifted. While writing this article, I found the obituary of Mr. Zimmerman. Representation matters. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/buffalonews/name/harold-zimmerman-obituary?id=33417442