Me and Mrs. Jones

Karen White Porter, that is me.  I am a Director of Loga Springs Academy and a Nationally Board Certified Teacher. After graduating from Rutgers University with a Masters Degree in language education, I started teaching children. I have taught at East China Normal University in Shangha, P.R. China, Hofstra University in Hempstead N.Y., Hillside Public Schools in New Jersey, Saint Andrews University in Saint Andrews Scotland, Belcher Elementary in Clearwater Florida, The University of South Florida, The State University of Florida, and Loga Springs Academy. I started my own school Loga Springs Academy in Gainesville, Florida and began to be inspired by my students who were self publishing. After working for over 25 years grading students papers, I stopped my fast paced life and began to examin my life and write. I have co-authored several books with my daughter about feelings in my ‘Emotatude’ series.  I often wonder how I got to this place.

I think the things that really matter in life are the people you meet and the love they share with you.  This is so true of the most awesome person I knew when growing up in Worthington, Ohio. She is imortalized in my heart forever.

 Mrs. Jones

It was a long day.  I was five.  I had just come home after a hard day at Kindergarten.  Everything was brand new.  I little leather jumper.  My yellow turtle neck sweater was hot.  My saddle shoes as fashionable as they were with those bobby socks made my little toe ache.  I just wanted to go home and lay down on my pink bedspread and look at the light pink purple walls and think on my own.  Cutting with scissors, using those large crayons, following directions, sneaking tastes of the peppermint flavored paste was both exhilarating and taxing.  I just wanted to think on I own.

This was the first day of Kindergarten. It was a big deal to everyone.  My mom could go to graduate school now.  My family was getting a cleaning lady.  Mrs. Santelli said she was a good cleaning lady.  Mrs. Santelli said she would only take families that had little kids.  I was proud of the fact that I was a little kid.  I was the reason they were able to get Mrs. Jones.  She was supposed to be better than Sadie the cleaning lady.  I wanted a cleaning lady so badly. The Santali’s had Mrs. Sadie the cleaning lady.  I liked the way that rhymed.  Lady and Sadie.  I even named I pet turtle Sadie the cleaning lady because we didn’t have a cleaning lady.

 But tomorrow they were going to get Mrs. Jones.  Mrs. Jones was black.  That made me nervous.  I never talked to anyone black before.  I heard people talking and making a big fuss about black people at the dinner table and on the news.  I didn’t understand any of it.  I only knew that people got nervous when they talked about black people and didn’t know what to say. My parents seemed to get nervous when people on television talked about it.  They made it a special point to have a black family over for dinner that my mom knew from school.  They were still nervous though.

They were going to get Mrs. Jones on Monday and Thursday.  I was to walk home from Kindergarten with my friends at noon and then eat lunch with Mrs. Jones.  After that Mrs. Jones would be the adult in charge until Grandma came to drive Mrs. Jones to the bus stop where all the other cleaning ladies got on the bus to go home to the south east side of town.  I did not know it or really see it with my eyes, but I knew it in my heart that love walked into our house every Monday and Thursday and would be there for the next ten years holding a light into my world that would someday shine into my heart in a very special way.  Mrs. Jones needed that love in her heart to do her job.  It made it possible to dust the crumbs away.  Scour the tubs and fixtures so shiny, mop the floors, vacuum the floors, do the laundry, fold everything meticulously and put it away so precisely.

The first Monday I came home from Kindergarten Mrs. Jones made me a tuna fish sandwich.  We shared it with some potato ships and a pickle. Instead of going up to my room to play, I watched TV until grandma came to pick her up and take her to the bus.  I didn’t want to mess anything up in the house.  Everything was spotlessly clean.  It was the first time in my life I actually had a conversation with a black person.  We sat and laughed and Mrs. Jones told stories about when she was young.  I noticed her hands and tried not to stare.  But I was so curious.  They were light pink almost with the brown in the creases on the underside, or lighter at least, and she had such long beautiful fingernails.  I wondered why god made the palms of her hands lighter.  I never found out why.