My inspiration for writing, in general, came from my third-grade teacher, Miss Herman, and her shocking response to a story I wrote called “Johnny and the Bears.â€
After returning everyone else’s homework one day, Miss Herman threw my paper back at me saying, “I thought you would at least try to write this on your own. You had way too much help!†I held my breath to keep from crying.
It didn’t work.
What she didn’t know was that I had no help at all—that my mom, a young widow with two school-age children, a full-time job, and night classes at college, had no time to even look over my homework, much less do it for me. And she didn’t know that Grandma and Grandpop, whose formal education stopped at fifth grade, were far more concerned with the rigors of Civil-Right-Era-New York than with a seven-year-old’s homework assignment.
I had sat propped up on a plastic chair in my grandparents’ kitchen facing the slightly open cellar door. Grandpop was always careful to avoid calling it a basement because that would have been too humdrum. After all, everyone had a basement. So on that one day, I sat alone at the kitchen table and made myself remember all the times he asked me, “What do you think is down there in the cellar?†Then I let my imagination go wild and wrote it all down. It was so frightening that in my mind I made “Johnny†go down there (instead of sending myself) and played with the idea of his meeting a bear . . .
I cried my heart out when my favorite teacher threw my paper at me, but I eventually understood that she thought what I had written was good. And that put the smile right back on my face. I knew I’d have to do that again one day.
