Mrs Parker taught Grade 5 at Quilchena. I had Miss Arms for Grade 1, Miss Gray for Grade 2, Mrs Switzer for Grade 3, and then in 1971, as I was going into Grade 4, the school implemented the "Alternative Program", an attempt to break from the stratification of grades and have three deskless classes of students aged 9-12 converging en masse for certain projects (remaking scaled-down versions of world famous rivers in the sands of Kitsilano Beach, for example), while returning to our own age cohort for more rudimentary classes like Arithmetic. The three teachers who led the Alternate Program were Mrs Harrison, who normally taught Grade 4, Mrs Parker (Grade 5) and Mr Hamel (Grade 7). No one had to tell us that Mrs Thompson, who taught Grade 6, was too old -- and too square -- to be participating in something as "hippie" as the Alternate Program.
By the time I was in Grade 4, I had in my child's mind a sense of Quilchena's teachers and staff, and this sense was based largely on who was "easy" and who was "strict". From what I had gathered, everyone was easy -- compared to Mrs Parker.
Mrs Parker was an imposing figure. She was tall and lean and muscular, with eyes that saw to the end of our playing fields and, if necessary, a voice that could reach you there. If you pretended not to hear her, she could get to you just as quick by foot, and you better believe that her voice would be even louder once she got there. Before she was my teacher I saw her and a group of runners practicing at the oval track outside of the high school below us. In her aerodynamic shorts and t-shirt she looked like an athlete you might see on ABC's Wide World of Sports, her long bare legs tapered perfectly into shoes that looked like slippers -- if they didn't have spikes coming out of them. I relayed the story to my Mom, and she said, "Oh yes, Mrs Parker was in the Olympics. She's one of the fastest women in Canada." I was impressed but not surprised.
Shortly after that, while eating my lunch on a ledge beside the school parking lot, Mrs Parker breezed past then stopped to talk to another teacher. She was wearing a skirt that ended just above the knee, and I stared at the profile of her well-defined calves, when suddenly she flexed one, and I jumped. I looked at her face and, though she was listening to the person talking to her, I felt the kindness from an eye that made me feel like that eye was directed at me, and I wanted to cry.
The teacher assigned to teach Arithmetic to the Grade 4 Alternate students was Mrs Parker. Arithmetic, as much as soccer and softball, was a competitive subject for those of us who excelled in it, and we were always taking shortcuts to make us faster. Once, in an effort to finish First, I turned in a test where I got 3/50, and was singled out by Mrs Parker as both a jerk and, oddly enough, a victim of our reckless game. I will never forget the look on her face when she handed me back my test. I was terrified, not because I had failed her test so miserably, but because I felt she knew my terror was something I was unfamiliar with, and that the real lesson here was how I might sit with it, a question that had me wondering the same about her when she was my age.
Something happened at school one day, a Friday I think, though the day doesn't matter, only that it began in the morning and it was in 1972. Because both my parents worked jobs that started early, I would arrive at school shortly after 8 a.m., a half-hour before the janitor, Mr McIntosh, unlocked the doors. There was a group of us, all boys, all ages, and we would huddle in the sheltered "Boys" entrance, except this time when I arrived, no one was waiting; everyone was down by the gym. I followed, and as I walked I noticed all sorts of black felt pen graffiti on the exterior walls of our mint green school. Standard Rat Fink and Big Daddy Roth stuff, but then one drawing was of our principal, because his name was below it, and then oh my god as I turned the corner and saw on the gym wall a drawing that had no name below it, only a human shape, thin, with a head of kinky Bride of Frankenstein hair and a pronounced and rounded belly with an arrow pointing to it that said WHO DID IT? The drawing was of Mrs Parker.
The terror I felt after getting back my test was nothing compared to the terror I felt after seeing this drawing. And I wasn't the only one who felt this way. Jamie Emerson came running up to me with tears in his eyes, "We're all going to die!" Yes, I thought, we are all going to die, but I had no sense of how Mrs Parker would kill us, only that she could, in the way Medusa could, or that Indigenous spirit we learned about recently, Dzunukwa. Emerson continued running, and I followed him to the end of the field, but something made me stop, and as I did, I looked over my shoulder and saw Mrs Parker taking in the drawing of our principal.
By the time I got back, Mrs Parker was standing before "her" own drawing. She seemed neither angry nor sad, and I wondered what else she could be feeling. But after my wonder expired, she was still there, still looking. Only then did it occur to me that what I was looking at was not simply an attempt to injure, but a response to that attempt; a staring down of that drawing; indeed, a demonstration of the incredible strength of a woman who, with her brother Harry Jerome, represented our country at the 1960 Rome Olympics, both of whom, I would later learn, experienced horrific acts of racism, a racism that Mrs Parker, whom I know today as Valerie Jerome, continues to experience.
