Sometimes, the person you least expect to change your life is the one trying hardest to change her own. Sometimes we change each others’. Aimee Armstrong changed mine. She is long gone from this world, yet I want to honor her by saying her name so that you may honor her, too. She deserves not to be forgotten.
At the time we met, Aimee had enrolled in an adult basic education class based in the high school I had graduated from 14 years earlier. Time hadn’t changed much in those creaky-floored, high-ceilinged rooms. Hundred-year-old radiators hissed on cold days. Tall windows let in a welcome breath of air on warm ones. Students spread books and notebooks on battered wooden desks, their surfaces scarred with the names of high school sweethearts now old enough to be my grandparents. After our city built a new modern high school, the school corporation had turned this building over to adult learners. Each student had a goal — to earn a high school equivalency diploma, the GED, their ticket to vocational school, community college or a job without the stigma of “high school dropout.”
It was easy to overlook Aimee in the corner she had chosen for herself. She bothered no one, stuck to her routine of attempting practice test after practice test, seldom asked a question. Only her posture gave a clue to her sorrow, the way she rested her forehead on her left hand as she took notes with her right, the weight of her thoughts too heavy for her slender neck to support. When she did look up, she’d tap her pencil and sigh before lowering her head again and turning a page. I left her alone and turned my attention to others, more demanding if only for being more disruptive. Officially, my title was substitute teacher (long-term). In reality, I felt like a glorified detention monitor.
Among Aimee’s fellow students was a girl of 19 whose boyfriend-slash-protector — or, as some said, pimp — waited for her outside on Fridays when the stipend for those enrolled in GED classes came through. Most days she’d crack jokes and exchange insults with the male students vying for my attention. Other times she’d walk to her study carrel and lay her head on the desk as if school were the only place in her life safe from turmoil. On those days, dark bruises marred her cheeks and eyes. She came home with me for lunch once. I don’t remember why I invited her or why she accepted, only that she was too nervous to sit still. While I put together a salad and an asparagus frittata, she roamed from room to room opening drawers to look inside. Soon after she passed her GED tests, she found a job selling high-end cosmetics at the mall. She was that beautiful. I lost touch with her after she left. Anyway, new and equally demanding students were taking up space in those varnish-yellow desks with the names of lovestruck adolescents scratched into their surfaces.
One of the hardest to deal with was a reputed drug dealer, a young man of 22, a flashy dresser full of bravado and cocky wit who had enrolled in adult education as a condition of parole. “School or prison,” some judge had ordered. Some choice. To him, school meant confinement. He drove me crazy with the way he sabotaged every effort to get him to settle down and stick to a task. Another teacher saw the tension rising and suggested I look at the young man this way: Without a high school diploma, he had used his initiative, creativity and willingness to take risks to manage personnel and a supply chain, analyze his market and turn a profit. If you overlooked the fact that what he had to sell was illegal, you’d have to call him a successful entrepreneur.
OK, so he wasn’t stupid. There had to be better ways for him to use all that talent. “You’re so smart,” I challenged him one day in my middle-class-white-lady-who-doesn’t-understand-anything voice. “Why didn’t you go to college or at least get a real job instead of risking your life dealing drugs?”
“Better to hustle on the streets and take your chances,” came the answer.
“What’s better about spending time in jail or getting shot?”
“Nothing. But you tell me how I’m supposed to get a job when I don’t know how to fill out an application.” In his experience, people would label him and call him stupid when they found out he couldn’t read. He pretended not to care about learning because no one had cared enough to teach him. That’s when I realized it was my job to care.
Aimee cared. She cared with every muscle on her slender frame. “Teacher, I can’t get anywhere on the English tests. I just don’t understand quotation marks.” I sat next to her and looked over her erasures. I asked if she knew anybody whose words kept getting away from them. She nodded, knowing well how we sometimes get so wound up in what we’re saying, we say far too much. I suggested she think of the quotation marks as little fences that keep people’s words from running away. She nodded again and smiled, the first time I had seen a smile on her haggard face.
A small victory, that smile, on a field where each student waged a battle so personal that loss of focus meant relinquishing hope that life could change. Most of the older women, the mothers and grandmothers, understood best how high the stakes were. Some bore the grief of a child sentenced to prison; a son murdered in a drive-by shooting; a pregnant daughter abandoned by her boyfriend. In words I was then too inexperienced to fully comprehend, these women refused to despair. They would just “keep on keeping on.”
Aimee and I began to work together every day. With time, she pulled back, ever so slightly, the curtain that hid her struggles. First small tug: a disabled daughter. Another: an eviction from her apartment. Then another: a 4-year-old son from an abusive relationship.
And another: the sweet-talking alcoholic who swore he would take care of her if she’d give him one more chance. “But that’s nothing but a lie. No way I’m going to live like that again.”
She mastered math, scraped by the English composition pretests, did well enough in science and moved on to history, where she gave the curtain a final tug. She admitted she had hated white people for what they had done to her people. Then she realized they were only doing what their parents had taught them. “That’s why I have to get an education,” she said.
And I thought how wrong we were, we who called ourselves teachers, trying to motivate our students with visions of steady income and an easier life, assuming we knew what they should aspire to. Aimee set me straight with her simple hope to be able to teach her own kids something better.
St. Francis of Assisi supposedly admonished his handful of followers: Preach all the time. Use words if you have to. Without realizing, the welfare moms and drug dealers, the felons and dropouts, had been preaching to me by the simple act of showing up and not giving up.
None of them knew that I, too, hid a secret. They called me “teacher,” but I had never finished college. For me, substitute teaching had started out as a hobby with a paycheck. For the students, passing their high school equivalency was dead serious. Pocket money for me; a way out for them. While they had every excuse to give up, I had no excuse not to better myself, except for laziness. I thought of Aimee struggling to make life better for her children and felt ashamed. At 32, the mother of three school-age children, I applied to Saint Mary’s College. When the acceptance letter came, the whole class celebrated with me.
Three years later, a few days after my graduation, I called Aimee to thank her for inspiring me to go back to school. She didn’t remember me, had no clue who I was or what she might have done. She couldn’t understand why I claimed she had changed my life.
I don’t know what became of most of those students, whether the young drug dealer ever learned to read well enough to make it in a legitimate job, or those grieving mothers found solace in education. I can tell you, though, something that happened a dozen or so years later when, around 10 one summer night, a stranger rang our doorbell. A heavyset Black woman in white shorts and flowered top asked, “Margaret?” (I’m Barbara.) “Do you remember me? You taught me a long time ago. Do you remember? In adult ed? Can I come in?”
Seated in our kitchen, she told me how she got her GED and how the program helped her get a job at the makeup counter at Marshall Field’s at the mall. “But,” she said, “I got myself fired because I’d sleep late and show up any old time like I didn’t care.” She ended up working in a factory, where she ruined her legs by standing all day. “But I didn’t have a choice. Then just this month I won a dollar house in the city lottery. They gave away five houses for a dollar each. You read about it? I got one of them.”
“I do remember you,” I said, although no trace remained in her face of the lovely teen who had found refuge in her study space. “That’s wonderful. Congratulations.”
“Now I have to figure out how to budget and get loans for repairs and stuff, and nobody I know can tell me how to get started. I thought you might be able to give me some ideas about where to go for advice.”
We talked for hours before I asked, “How is it that you came here?”
“Because I remembered this house.” The house, yes, but not my name. “You had me over for lunch one time. I came because you were kind to me.”
In some ways, I was her Aimee, unaware that anything I said or did would make a difference.
And isn’t this exactly right? That the way we live, imperfect in many ways, influences others without our knowing? And isn’t it right that, no matter how poor or anonymous, no matter how few or how many years we live, we can preach a sermon without words by our example?
My Aimee died in a traffic accident. The local paper said the driver of the car she was riding in was drunk. She didn’t have time to make that better life for herself, but I have to believe that she died trying. And that she finally knows how she changed mine.
Barbara Mangione has dedicated her life to teaching. From English as a New Language to adult basic education to high school Spanish to Italian in the Department of Romance Languages at Notre Dame, she has always learned far more from her students than she ever taught. She lives in South Bend, Indiana.