The Boy With One Leg

For a short moment, I knew his name, but it slipped away. I remember him as the boy with one leg because I had never seen that before, and I didn’t understand why this was.

This is the perspective of a first grader at a brand-new school, William Ramsey Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia. It was the Fall of 1958, and I was six, going on seven years old. Back then, at least in Alexandria, there was no public Kindergarten. First Grade really WAS first grade. Everything about this experience was new to me.

When I say this was a BRAND-NEW SCHOOL, I mean they were still finishing the construction when the school year began. There were more than 40 students in my class. My teacher was a beautiful young woman with dark brown hair (just like my mother’s), and her name was Mrs. Hay. The Baby Boom was in full blast, and they couldn’t build schools fast enough. There were four Barbara’s in my class, FOUR; Barbara Socia, Barbara Hyde, and me. I don’t remember the other one’s last name.

When Mother complained about the size of the classroom, she was told not to worry because as soon as the rooms across the hall were done, the first-grade classes would be reorganized to a smaller student/teacher ratio. And so it was that a couple of weeks into the school year, I was one of the students selected out of Mrs. Hay’s classroom and moved across the hall to a new room and a new teacher, along with the two other Barbara’s whose last names I recall.

I wasn’t happy about the change. I was just making new friends, and suddenly that process was interrupted. Also, Mrs. Hay’s room was on the east side of the building. The morning sunlight washed through it like a golden, warm, and cheerful blanket. But the new room, which stood in the morning shadows, always felt cold and dark. Our teacher was Mrs. Stone. I remember her shoulder-length light brown hair and soft sweaters pointing outward like they were stretched over wall-eyed ice-cream cones.

Very shortly after school began, a boy in my class who lived around the corner from me, a friend named Brent Gardiner, stopped going to school. I went to his house to visit him. He was in a special bed downstairs, an A-frame cast up to his chest, lying on his back. He’d had polio when he was younger and they’d noticed him developing a limp now. I don’t know what the cast was for, but they moved away and he never came back to school.

At lunchtime, we always filed into the cafeteria, class by class, grade by grade. Classes lined up against the two opposing walls of the gigantic room, sliding across the painted cinderblock in a wiggling motion as we edged forward in the food line. After we collected our trays or milk cartons, we filed to the long tables where we dutifully sat down to eat. The older students (those in grades 2-7) followed the first graders. Across the room, I saw him, a thin boy with dark hair, on crutches, making his way (in line) toward the cafeteria ladies. One leg was shockingly gone above the knee. Our teacher told us not to stare. Most days, he was in line with his classmates, someone always carrying his tray for him.

When I asked Mother what had happened to him, I discovered that parents had some magical cloud of information hovering above our heads. Even though they were not there at the school, they somehow had an incomprehensible knowledge of people and things. Mother told me he had bone cancer and they were trying to save his life by amputating his leg. That seemed like a barbaric solution to me, and I became fearful of someone finding something wrong with me that might give them an excuse to begin hacking me apart.

Meanwhile, time went on, and I found that Mrs. Stone was nice. About the time we all adjusted to the change, she suddenly wasn’t there anymore! One morning, we were greeted by a shortish grandmother named Mrs. Barnette, who told us she’d be our new teacher for a while. Another inquiry to Mother revealed that Mrs. Stone was going to have a baby and that pregnant teachers were not allowed in the classroom, so while the school looked for a new teacher, Mrs. Barnette had been called out of retirement for however long it took to find the next teacher. I think she was there for close to four months!

Through all of this musical chair teacher stuff, we were forming friendships and sweet little crushes in the classroom. How could we know this repeated disruption was unusual? I’d guess that most of us were military brats who had never known what a permanent home base was. Change was what happened every day after breakfast. We had children rotating in and out of class regularly without explanation.

For a while, there was the little girl who showed up, often in Sunday dresses of lace and voile, but who always had bruises, scratches, and the occasional black or swollen eyes. She never smiled and needed oh so much coaxing to join our activities. She was frequently absent. We never knew when she would turn up, again. And then one day, she just never came back to school.

These things were perplexing, but our questions were shut down immediately. Then one afternoon, Mrs. Barnette announced that the next day we’d get a new student in our class. She told us it was very important that we make him feel welcome, that if he were dressed a little differently, or seemed a little shy, he needed to feel just like the rest of us. She reminded us how it is always a little scary to be the new person in the room. I thought this was nice, but wondered why we were suddenly getting this lecture when, as I said, students were rotating in and out of our classroom all the time.

The next day, we were introduced to Gerald. There was nothing unusual about the way he was dressed or spoke. What was the big deal? I had never noticed before that there were no “colored” children in the class, or the entire school, for that matter. I’d never noticed that anything or anyone was missing. And when I went home that evening, Mother showed us the newspaper. Gerald’s picture was in it, along with six other older children. President Eisenhower had ordered the school to be integrated, and it was accomplished by bringing in one “colored” child to each grade (not each classroom) in our elementary school. These children had been carefully selected to blend well and open the door for more complete integration. We were small children. We had no problem including Gerald, although I didn’t spend a lot of time wondering how HE felt about it.

Not too long after that, we got another new first-grade teacher, Mrs. Anderson. As it happened, her husband was a Marine officer under my dad’s command. Small world.

I stayed at that school for another year, and with only one teacher (not four) in the second grade, Mrs. Abbot, an old gray lady who scared the bejesus out of me and even made me stay after school one day for making my classmates giggle during rest period (shame of shames)! And then, I was at Lynden Elementary in Middletown, Rhode Island for third grade and there were plenty of “negro” children in that school. Nobody ever made a big deal about it, I guess because those schools hadn’t been segregated in the first place.

Sixty-seven years after starting school, I remember when I noticed that I hadn’t seen the boy with one leg at school for some time. It took a while to notice. Mother said the cancer had taken him. Removing his leg did not save his life. I just couldn’t believe that a CHILD (like me) could die!

I don’t know what happened to the bruised and beaten little girl, and I don’t know what ever became of Brent, Gerald, or Mrs. Stone and her baby. I couldn’t tell you what became of ANY of my classmates from William Ramsey Elementary School because I was gone, never to rejoin them. Every one of them was a real person, not just a prop in my life, not just a picture on a classroom photograph. Obviously, any of them who are still alive are old now. Where are they? Have I unknowingly run into any of them since then?

As I moved around in my youth, I strove to remember as many of my friends and classmates as I could, bits and snatches of so many people in different places. I have stayed in touch or reconnected with several over the decades. Whether or not they remember me or even survived childhood, they will forever be the very molecules of my being. It is important to honor them, to know they felt washed in the same sunshine of that classroom, boastfully shared the misadventures hidden under their Band-Aids, and squeezed my hand as we walked in the Buddy System around the schoolyard.

Note: In the 1950s and early 1960s, whether or not it was right, I was taught the polite term for non-white people was either “colored” or “negro.” The preference for “black” had not yet been established. I remember Mother talking about “colored people” when I was very young, and I told her I’d never seen any “colored people.” She tried to correct me by later pointing out some when we were driving downtown. I remember telling her those people were not “colored;” they were “brown.” In my mind, brown was the absence of color. It was the color of the ground before the grass and flowers grew in. Balloons, flowers, ribbons, and sashes were things of color. I had never seen a brown flower, balloon, or ribbon, so I was expectantly searching for purple, green, pink, and blue people. I also told her that I was not “white.” Clearly, I was sort of peachy-pinkish with blue and purple squiggly lines running under my skin. She was talking to me like I was some kind of idiot! This is the same woman who told me I could not wear blue and green together because they “clashed.” I asked her if the green trees clashed with the blue sky. Mother had a very confused sense of color theory.