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WE’RE ALL DOING THE BEST WE CAN: REFLECTIONS ON THE VIRTUES OF BEING DIFFERENT BY MARGARET JOHNSON
They didn’t like reading. They didn’t go to church. They didn’t like to learn. But they were impressive and bold and funny in their own ways, and they had a good time. I made some really good friends, and I started to understand that their difference from me didn’t make them inferior to me. They were people, and we were all just doing the best we could to make it through the school day.
WE’RE ALL DOING THE BEST WE CAN: REFLECTIONS ON THE VIRTUES OF BEING DIFFERENT
BY MARGARET JOHNSON
One summer in Phoenix my dad left me and my sisters in the car for a few minutes to grab some groceries. Having just moved from the slightly less-hot Houston, he hadn’t thought a car with the windows open could be dangerous. A police officer noticed us and came striding quickly across the asphalt parking lot with the wavering heat waves rising from it, and baffled us with his horror at our situation.
Because of that incident, a social worker paid us a visit. She looked around and talked to each of us alone. I stared into her protruding eyes and took the meeting seriously. She asked if my parents ever argued, and I said, “Yeah, about philosophy!” She must have been taken aback by our house. It was big and messy, filled with boxes and boxes of books that we still hadn’t unpacked after moving in. We sat on some of them, letting Plato and Tolkien and Hopkins double as our chairs. At the time I had four younger sisters and one baby brother, and we ran around the house, generally causing chaos, drawing on the many bookshelves, and acting out scenes from the Narnia books.
My sisters and I had so many prejudices against “normal people” that the social worker must have picked up on. My parents instilled in us the idea it was great to be a Johnson, to be Catholic, and to like to read, and that made me feel that everyone who wasn’t a Johnson was to be looked down upon: all those people with their conspicuously healthy food and their pop music and their multiple cars and their very few books. Apparently, the social worker must have found it a safe, if strange, environment, because she left without any trouble.
We had moved to Arizona so that my dad could help form a school and become its headmaster. It was called Teleos Preparatory Academy. I remember him lying on his back on our living room floor, trying to decide on uniform colors, and my white mother telling him that he should probably avoid navy blue and choose something that looked nicer with dark skin, since the point of Teleos was to bring classical education to inner-city kids, and most of them were black. My black father must have agreed, because the uniforms were burgundy. I had to tuck a white button down shirt into a creased burgundy skirt and cross a short tie around my neck with a pretty, pearly snap. I liked the uniforms.
The other kids hated them. I found myself sitting in classrooms next to kids who swore every other word, who flipped each other off, and who definitely weren’t at school because they wanted to be there, which confused me. I had enthusiastically attended private Catholic schools and gone through a year of homeschooling, so Teleos was a big change. I had always been the only black kid, feeling oddly embarrassed when we learned about slavery in history class. At Teleos, I could count the white kids I knew on one hand.
At Teleos, I didn’t stick out because of how I looked. I stuck out because my dad was the headmaster and because I’m a weirdo and a know-it-all. I didn’t talk like the other kids. I didn’t know who Michael Jackson or Taylor Swift were. I staunchly avoided words like “awesome” and “lame.” But I found that I liked and wanted to imitate many of the kids I met.
They didn’t like reading. They didn’t go to church. They didn’t like to learn. But they were impressive and bold and funny in their own ways, and they had a good time. I made some really good friends, and I started to understand that their difference from me didn’t make them inferior to me. They were people, and we were all just doing the best we could to make it through the school day.