The Tiger’s Child: The story of a gifted, troubled child and the teacher who refused to give up on her

“Well, I don’t read all of it. But on the cover it say Chattel of Love and so I do be curious about it, ’cause of the picture,’ cause of what the man be doing to the lady on the cover.”

“I see,” I replied uncertainly.

She shrugged. “But I couldn’t find nothing good in it, so I throw it away again.”

With an IQ we soon discovered to be in excess of 180, Sheila was electric all right. Indeed, she was more like nuclear.

Discovering Sheila was a highly gifted child intellectually did nothing to change the facts of her grinding poverty, her abusive background or her continuing and continually outrageous behavior. Uncertain where to start when there was so much that needed improving, I began with the very smallest things, those I knew were within my power to change.

Sheila’s hygiene was appalling. She literally had only one set of clothes: a faded brown-striped T-shirt and a pair of worn denim overalls, a size too small. With these went a pair of red-and-white canvas sneakers with holes in the toes. She had underwear, but no socks. If any of these were ever washed, there was little evidence of it.

Certainly Sheila wasn’t washed. The dirt was worn in on her hands and her elbows and around her ankles, so that dark lines had formed over the skin in these areas. Worse, she was a bed wetter. The smell of stale urine permeated whatever part of the classroom Sheila occupied. When I quizzed Sheila about washing facilities, I discovered they had no running water.

This seemed the best place to start. She was so unpleasant to be near that it distracted all of us from the child herself; so I came armed with towels, soap and shampoo and began to bathe Sheila in the large sink at the back of the classroom.

I was washing her when I first noticed the scars. They were small, round and numerous, especially along her upper arms and the insides of her lower arms. The scars were old and had long since healed, but I recognized them for what they were—the marks left when a lit cigarette is pressed against the skin.

“Does your dad do things that cause these?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as casual and conversational as possible.

“My pa, he wouldn’t do that! He wouldn’t hurt me bad,” she replied, her tone prickly. “He loves me.” I realized she knew what I was asking.

I nodded and lifted her out of the water to dry her. For several moments Sheila said nothing, but then she twisted around to look me in the eye. “You know what my mama done, though?”

“No, what?”

She lifted up one leg and turned it for me to see. There, on the outer side just above the ankle, was a wide white scar about two inches long. “My mama, she push me out of the car and I fall down so’s a rock cutted up my leg right here. See?”

I bent forward and examined it.

“My pa, he loves me. He don’t go leaving me on no roads. You ain’t supposed to do that with little kids.”

“No, you’re not.”

There was a moment’s silence while I finished drying her and began to comb out her newly washed hair. Sheila grew pensive. “My mama, she don’t love me so good,” she said. Her voice was thoughtful, but calm and matter-of-fact. She could have been discussing one of the other children in the class or a piece of schoolwork or, for that matter, the weather. “My mama, she take Jimmie and go to California. Jimmie, he be my brother and he be four, ’cept he only be two when my mama, she leave.” A moment or two elapsed and Sheila examined her scar again. “In the beginning, my mama taked Jimmie and me, ’cept she got sick of me. So, she open up the door and push me out and a rock cutted up my leg right here.”

Those early weeks with Sheila were a roller-coaster ride. Some days were up. Delighted awe at this new world she found herself in made Sheila a sunny little character. She was eager to be accepted into the group and in her own odd way tried desperately to please Anton and me. Other days, however, we went down, sometimes precipitously. Despite her brilliant progress right from the beginning, Sheila remained capable of truly hair-raising behavior.

The world was a vicious place in Sheila’s mind. She lived by the creed of doing unto others before they do unto you. Revenge, in particular, was trenchant. If someone wronged Sheila or even simply treated her a bit arbitrarily, Sheila exacted precise, painful retribution. On one occasion, she caused hundreds of dollars’ worth of damage in another teacher’s room in retaliation for that teacher’s having reprimanded her in the lunchroom.

What saved us was a complicated bus schedule. In the months prior to coming into my room, Sheila’s behavior had gotten her removed from two previous school buses and the only one available to her now was the high school bus. Unfortunately, this did not leave for the migrant camp until two hours after our class got out. Thus Sheila had to remain after school with Anton and me until that time.

I was horrified when I first found out, because those two hours after school were my planning and preparation time and I couldn’t imagine how I would get on with things while simultaneously having to baby-sit as unpredictable a child as Sheila. There was, however, no choice in the matter.

Initially, I let her play with the classroom toys while I sat at the table and tried to get on with my work, but after fifteen minutes or so on her own, she’d inevitably pull away and come to stand over me while I worked. She was always full of questions. What’s that? What’s this for? Why are you doing that? How come this is like this? What do you do with that thing? Constantly. Until I realized we were talking much of the time. Until I realized how much I enjoyed it.

She liked to read and she could, I think, read virtually anything I placed in her hands. What stopped her was not her ability to turn the letters on the page into words, but rather to turn them into something meaningful. Sheila’s life was so deprived that much of what she read simply made no sense to her. As a consequence, I began reading with her.

There was something compelling about sharing a book with Sheila. We would snuggle up together in the reading corner as I prepared to read aloud to her and Sheila would be so ravenous for the experiences the book held that her entire body’d grow taut with excitement. Winnie the Pooh, Long John Silver and Peter Pan proved sturdier magic than Chattel of Love. However, of all the books, it was Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince that won Sheila’s heart. She adored this bemused, perplexing little character. His otherness she understood perfectly. Mature one moment, immature the next, profound, then petty, and always, always the outsider, the little prince spoke deeply to Sheila. We read the book so many times that she could quote long passages by heart.

When not reading, we simply talked. Sheila would lean on the table and watch me work, or we would pause at some point in a book for me to explain a concept and the conversation would go from there, never quite returning to the story at hand.

Progressively, I learned more about Sheila’s life in the migrant camp, about her father and his lady friends who often came back to the house with him late at night. Sheila told me how she hid his bottles of beer behind the sofa to keep him from drinking too much, and how she got up to put out his cigarettes after he had fallen asleep. I came to hear more about her mother, her brother and the abandonment. And I heard about Sheila’s other school and her other teachers, about what she did to fill her days and her nights, when she wasn’t with us. In return, I gave her my world and the hope that it could be hers as well.

Those two hours were a godsend. All her short life Sheila had been ignored, neglected and often openly rejected. She had little experience with mature, loving adults and stable environments, and now, discovering their existence, she was greedy for them. The busy atmosphere of the classroom during the day, supportive as it was, did not allow for the amount of undivided attention Sheila required to make up for all she had lacked. It was in the gentle silence of the afternoon when we were alone, that she dared to leave behind her old behaviors and try some of mine.

Chapter 2 (#ulink_1f8df8b0-0590-5c7e-bccb-fc78bf7b9e5d)

The real issue for Sheila was what had happened between her and her mother on that dark highway two years earlier. Given her extraordinary giftedness, the matter did not remain inarticulate. With exquisite clarity, she gave a voice to her agony.

The relationship between the abandonment and Sheila’s difficult behavior became most obvious over schoolwork. Despite her brilliance, Sheila simply refused to do any written papers. I hadn’t made the connection initially. I saw the aggressive misbehavior as waywardness and only afterward realized it was a ploy to keep her from having to sit down at the table and take a pencil in hand. Coercing her to the table proved a major battle and even then she held out, refusing to work. When she did eventually start accepting paperwork, she would still crumple two or three imperfect efforts before finally finishing one.

On one occasion, she wasn’t even in class but alone after school with me. She had found a ditto master of a fifth-grade math test in the office trash can, when she had come down with me while I ran off some papers. Sheila loved math. It was her best subject and she fell upon this with great glee. It was on the multiplication and division of fractions, subjects I had never taught Sheila, but as she scanned the paper, she felt certain she could do them. Back in the classroom, she settled across the table from me and began to write the answers on the paper—a very unusual response for Sheila. When she finished, she proudly showed it to me and asked if she had done them right. The multiplication problems were done correctly, but unfortunately she had not inverted the fractions for the division, so those were all wrong. Turning the paper over, I drew a circle and divided it into parts to illustrate why it was necessary to invert. Before I had even spoken, Sheila perceived that her answers weren’t right. She whipped up the paper from under my pencil, smashed it into a tiny ball and pounded on the table before flopping down, head in her arms.

“You didn’t know, sweetheart. No one’s taught you this.”

“I wanted to show you I could do them without help.”

“Sheil, it’s nothing to get upset about. You did nicely. You tried. That’s the important part. Next time you’ll get them right.”

Nothing I said comforted her and she sat for a few moments with her hands over her face. Then slowly her hands slid away and she uncrumpled the paper, pressing it smooth on the tabletop. “I bet if I could have done math problems good, my mama, she wouldn’t leave me on no highway, like she done. If I could have done fifth-grade math problems, she’d be proud of me.”

“I don’t think math problems have anything to do with it, Sheila.”

“She left because she don’t love me no more. You don’t go leaving kids you love on the highway, like she done me. And I cut my leg, see?” For the hundredth time the small white scar was displayed. “If I’d been a gooder girl, she wouldn’t have done that.”

“Sheil, we just don’t know what happened, but I suspect your mama had her own problems to straighten out.”

“But she copeded with Jimmie. How come she copeded with Jimmie and left me?”

“I don’t know, love.”

Sheila looked across the table to me, that haunted, hurt expression in her eyes. “Why did it happen, Torey? Why did she tooked him and leaved me behind? What made me such a bad girl?” Her eyes filled with tears, but as always, they never fell.

“Oh, lovey, it wasn’t you. Believe me. It wasn’t your fault. She didn’t leave you because you were bad. She just had too many of her own problems. It wasn’t your fault.”

“My pa, he says so. He says if I be a gooder girl she’d a never done that.”

My heart sank. There was so much to fight, so little to fight with.

The issue colored everything: her work, her behavior, her attitude toward other children and toward adults. As the weeks passed and particularly as we spent so much of the after-school hours in close contact, I knew very well what was being encouraged to happen. I was the first stable, nurturing adult female Sheila had occasion to spend much time with and she grasped at the relationship with greedy desperation.

Was it right to let her? This question was never far from my mind. My training, both in education and in psychology, cautioned rigorously against getting too personally involved with children, and I strove to keep the proper balance. On the other hand, I had always rebelled against the idea of not becoming involved at all. The cornerstone of my personal philosophy was commitment. I felt it was the unequivocal commitment of one individual to another, of me to the child I was working with, that evoked positive change. How could there be genuine commitment without involvement? That was a contradiction in terms.

On a gut level I felt Sheila had to have this relationship and without it she could never go forward. She needed the esteem that comes only from knowing others care for you, others value you sufficiently to commit themselves to you. She needed to know that while her mother might not have been able to provide this kind of commitment, this did not mean that Sheila was unworthy of it. Yet on an intellectual level I knew I was treading a dangerous path.

Just how dangerous came home to me in February, after Sheila had been with us about seven weeks. I had to attend an out-of-state conference, which meant I would be gone from class for two days. Having ample warning, I endeavored to prepare my class for my absence and the anticipated substitute teacher. Sheila reacted with rage.

“I ain’t never, never gonna like you again! I ain’t never gonna do anything you ask. It ain’t fair you go leave me! You ain’t supposed to do that, don’t you know? That be what my mama done and that ain’t a good thing to do to little kids. They put you in jail for leaving little kids. My pa, he says.”