Beautiful Child: The story of a child trapped in silence and the teacher who refused to give up on her

“You need to stay here. Until you can get control again and not fight, you need to sit here.” Very cautiously I removed my hands, expecting her to dart up and run for the door, but she responded just the opposite to what I’d anticipated. The moment I let go, Venus immediately fell silent. She slumped forward in the chair, as if she were very tired.

“In this room we do not hurt others. We don’t hurt ourselves. That’s a class rule.”

“That’s two rules,” Billy piped up from his table.

“That’s one rule, Billy,” I said fiercely. “The rule is: we do not hurt. Anything.”

“Not even flies?” Billy asked. “We’re not allowed to hurt flies in here?”

Julie, recognizing a flashpoint situation when she saw one, quickly intervened, ushering Billy over to join the other boys, who were working with clay.

I turned back to Venus, who remained sitting in the time-out chair. She was watching me carefully, her heavy, hooded eyes so unreadable as to be virtually vacant.

“I’ll set the timer for five minutes,” I said. “When it rings, you may get up and rejoin us.”

Putting the ticking timer on the shelf in front of the chair, I backed off carefully, half expecting her to make a bolt for the door when my back was turned.

Not so. Venus didn’t move.

The timer rang. Venus still did not move.

“You may get up now,” I said from the table where I was working with Jesse.

No response.

I excused myself from Jesse and went over to her. “This is the quiet chair. It’s for when you get out of control and need a quiet moment to get yourself back together again. But once you’ve calmed down, you don’t have to sit in the quiet chair anymore. Come on. Let’s get you started on the clay. We’re making pinch pots. Have you done that before?”

Venus gazed at me. From her look of total incomprehension, I might as well have been speaking Hindi to her.

I put a hand under her elbow and encouraged her to rise from the chair, which she did. I guided her over to where we were all working with the clay. “Here. Sit here.”

She just stood.

Gently, I pressed her shoulder with one hand to get her to sit in the chair. I pulled out the adjacent chair and sat down. Picking up a ball of clay, I showed it to her.

“Look, what’s this? Clay. And see? See how Jesse’s doing it? You just push your thumbs into the ball of clay…”

Her eyes didn’t even move to the clay. They stayed on my face, as if she hadn’t even heard me.

Did she hear? It seemed hard to believe. I’d come across a lot of kids with speech and language problems in my time but none so unresponsive as this. Was this ABR test really accurate? Could there be some kind of failure between the brain and the ears that they hadn’t noticed?

I rose up. “Come here, Venus,” I said. Which, of course, she didn’t. I had to go through the whole rigamarole again of getting her up out of one chair and over to another part of the classroom. Guiding her to the housekeeping corner, I sat down on the floor and looked through the toys. My sign language was rusty and what little I did remember seemed primarily to be signs for abstract concepts like “family” or “sister,” but here was a concrete word I knew. “Doll,” I signed and held up a baby doll. “Doll.”

Venus watched me, her brow faintly furrowed, as if she thought I was doing something really odd.

I signed again. “Doll.” I made the sign very, very slowly.

Reaching over, I lifted her hand. Putting it on the doll, I made her fingers run over the plastic features of the toy. Then I endeavored to make the sign with her fingers. I held the doll up. I signed again myself. “Doll.”

The last twenty minutes of the school day passed thus. Venus never responded once.

At last the end-of-day bell rang. Julie escorted those who went by bus down to their rides while I saw out the ones who walked home. Then I retreated to the file cabinets in the main office to have a better look at the children’s files. I pulled out Venus’s and sat down.

Julie came in, carrying mugs of coffee for us both. She took out a chair on the other side of the table and sat down.

“Well, that was an experience,” she said.

“I’d like to think this is first-day jitters and everything will settle down.” I looked over. “Has that happened with Venus before, do you know? Have you seen her attack kids before?”

A pause, a hesitancy almost, and then Julie nodded. “Yes. Truth is, I think that’s more why she’s in this class than because of her speech. Last year they ended up having to keep her in during recesses because she does nothing but pick fights.”

“Oh great. Five kids, all with a mission to kill.”

“Kind of like being in the OK Corral in your room, isn’t it?” Julie said rather cheerfully.

I looked up.

“Didn’t you notice all the cowboy names? Billy – Billy the Kid. Jesse – Jesse James. And Shane. And Zane. And everything’s shoot ’em up.” She laughed.

“I don’t remember any cowboys named Venus.”

“Well, not cowboys,” Julie said. She considered a moment.

“Her name doesn’t fit,” I said.

Julie gave a slight shrug. “Neither does the kid.”

Venus’s file made depressing reading. She was the youngest of nine children fathered by three different men. The man who fathered the four eldest children, including Wanda, had been committed to the penitentiary for grievous bodily harm, had been released, had robbed a bank, had been jailed again, released again, and finally died three years later while in detention on drug-dealing charges. The second man, who fathered the next two children, had beaten Venus’s mother so severely when she was pregnant that the baby was stillborn. He was convicted of abuse toward three of the children, released, then later charged on animal cruelty for throwing a puppy onto a freeway from a bridge. The third man fathered the remaining three children, including Venus. He had a string of burglary convictions and other crimes related to drug and alcohol problems, but had also been charged with pedophile activity. He was currently out of prison and living elsewhere, as he’d been banned from having any contact with the children.

Venus’s mother had a long history of prostitution and had been in and out of detox centers for drug and alcohol abuse. She now lived with seven of her nine children, three of whom had been officially labeled as mentally defective, and all of whom had been in one form of special education or another. The eldest, a son a year older than Wanda, was now in prison. A fifteen-year-old son was in a juvenile detention center. The next eldest daughter, who was seventeen, had suffered a seizure while in police custody the previous year and was now brain damaged. Two other children, boys aged nine and twelve, were mentioned as having serious communication problems and were receiving speech therapy.

There was actually very little in the file that was specific to Venus herself. I think the general opinion was that by including her family history, Venus’s problems were self-evident. There were no notes on pregnancy or birth complications, nothing to denote whether or not her early development was normal. She had first come to the attention of the authorities when she reached age five and was registered for kindergarten. It was noted at this time that she was almost totally silent and, in general, very unresponsive. Except on the playground. Except when challenged or threatened. Then Venus seemed to call on an inner strength of almost comic book proportions. She screamed. She shouted. Some people even thought she swore. The idea would have seemed almost laughable – silent, unprepossessing seven-year-old girl metamorphoses into vicious little killing machine – if I hadn’t witnessed it for myself.

I flipped the file shut.

Chapter Four (#ulink_f465b50a-22e8-578f-9d02-eee3ec8aa3de)

When I arrived the next morning, Billy was already there, sitting in the classroom. “What’s this?” I asked in surprise.

“It’s only eight-ten.”

“I gotta come early. My god-damned bus don’t come no later.”

I put a finger to my lips.

“My god-darned bus don’t come no later.”

“How about just ‘darned.’ Darned bus doesn’t come any later?”