I worked in a hospital, briefly, when I was young. I remember the feet, gnarled, twisted, misshapen, painful, worn-out from years of standing on cement factory floors.
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Now I am a teacher. The year before last, the next-door first grade joined my first grade for a morning. Among the other frightened children, Danton was remarkable for his clothes: T-shirt too big, torn, and dirty. His high-heeled black shoes might have belonged to his grandmother. They were not laced because they had no laces; that was OK because they were too small. He was unwashed, depressed, and could not write his name, though everyone else in both classes had mastered this skill, after working assiduously at the task for the first three months of the school year.
I received a badly spelled but neatly written note from his mother thanking me and explaining that she intended to come to school to thank me herself but she had been sick. I knew she was pregnant; Danton already had several smaller brothers and sisters.
How? She banged the baby’s head repeatedly against the wall. (I imagine she could not stop the baby from crying, crying, crying.) Were Danton and his brothers and sisters cowering, looking on, or were some of them at school and did they come home to find their baby sister dead and their mother absent, or weeping, trying to revive her dead child, or in a drug-induced trance? How depressed and trapped and helpless must she have felt?
