The Gold Buttons

My mom started teaching in the 1950s.  I don’t know when exactly, but it was early.  She taught until the late 1980s, and we watched many, many things change over that period of time.  I say we because I was hearing about them, but I was not on the front lines.  Mom was on the front lines through all of society’s changes.  She loved teaching, and did not think much about retiring, but was eventually mugged for a second time, by an elementary school kid, and the response was just ridiculous.  Some kid pushed her down, and took her purse.  The law, such that it was, could not do anything against a child not actually caught in the act.  Through the majority of her career, the respect given to teachers by students and parents was such that a stunt like that was almost unheard of.  By the late 80s, parents had become antagonistic, and there was less of a check on bad students.  Mom loved teaching, but the environment having changed so dramatically, she figured that it wasn’t worth it anymore, so she retired.

Mom was a petite, proud, bookish, attractive, extremely intelligent woman.  Her parents insisted that she and her siblings have an education and a trade.  Mom became a registered nurse first, which satisfied my grandfather’s trade requirement, and then got her first degree in education.  When mom left college, and started teaching in Cleveland, she was in her early 20s, and had a little money from having already worked.  As I said before, she was petite.  She was also very attractive, and well dressed.  She had a very confident bearing, for which I am eternally grateful.  

One of the early stories that she told me, for the purpose of engendering confidence and bearing, was a story from her early years as a teacher.  It may have been her first year, I don’t recall.  I also do not know what event in my life brought this story to mind for my mom, but it did come up several times in my youth.  I also do not recall all of the elements of this story, (if I ever knew them), but the story is really quite simple.  This is the story of the blue pea coat with the gold buttons.

Mom, a young, single teacher, attractive and quiet, had a beautiful pea coat, of which she was very proud.  It’s a simple thing,but it meant a great deal to her.  At that time, the teachers used to hang their coats in the hallways on a peg board…at this particular school.  One day, as Mom was leaving, she went to wear her coat was hanging, and could see from a distance that the buttons were on the floor below the coat.  She got to the coat, and removed it from the peg, and could see that the buttons had been sliced off.  It was a little act of petty vandalism, and somewhat threatening, but at least she still had the coat, right?  She went home and sewed the buttons back on. Good as new.

But, this was not just petty vandalism.  This was an act to take her down a peg, so to speak.  She was an outsider.  She was other.  She did not dare retaliate, even if she knew who had done it, which she did not.  This act hurt my mom personally, probably permanently, but she labored on in her profession, made her personal advances, and did not retire until it was the students committing the acts of intimidation, as I stated earlier.  Her career was many things, and among them was perseverance.  She was not always the “other” among her colleagues.  And I do not recall the words she used to express it, but there is a theme that echoes through our society that Black people, and many others, teach to those coming up behind them, to encourage them to persevere.  

Michelle Obama had a saying that has now become well known.  She delivered it in a speech during the 2016 Democratic convention.  Hillary Clinton was the party’s candidate that year.  In Obama’s lesson about perseverance she said, “when they go low, we go high.”  Those were not my mother’s words, but they could have been.  It is essentially the same message.  

Some 30 plus years after Mom started teaching, I was starting out as an LAPD officer.  Around that time, a couple of years before, an L.A. rapper released a song titled “Colors.”  Those of us who are roughly my age have the stories of our parents, and their teachings…and our feelings about that.  While we respected our parents views, we were convinced that we could demand a different dance in our time.  The lyrics from “Colors”, one line in particular, is emblematic of the differences.  Without looking them up, I think it went, “I don’t need your assistance…social persistence.  Any problem I got, I just put my fist in…”

It was a punchy line, if you’ll pardon the pun.  I liked it.  I couldn’t live like that.  It isn’t realistic, but it was motivating in a particular way.  We told ourselves, we are not taking that bullshit anymore.  We are defiant, not just for ourselves, but for our family members who have had to put up with your bullshit for so long.  In actuality, “when they go low, we go high”, is the best advice.  Long term, that does the most good, and preserves the most of our precious lives.  “Going high” was the speed limit, and the “fist” was the accelerator.  

Now, I wont dance around it.  This story here is to explain, at least in part, how much it makes my blood boil to read that this piece of dignified, ethical conduct instruction by Michelle Obama, is the source of someone else’s problems.  I reject that.  Every ounce of it.  It is repeated so often in American history, and probably elsewhere, that if the oppressed parties would just disappear, everything would be better.  The onus, over and over again, gets placed on the victim rather than the oppressor.

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