Draft 4

The Day I Stopped Hating Mrs. Bernice J. Cooper



I sat sideways in my desk, clutching my well- worn copy of The Water is Wide. As always, the aroma of old books combined with the pungency of purple mimeographed handouts permeated the room. Any second now Mrs. Bernice J. Cooper was going to walk through the door of her classroom with our guest speaker, Pat Conroy. My fellow students chatted quietly, some moving their desks slightly to the left or right to have an unobstructed view of the now empty podium. For once I was pleased with my front and center desk. I watched as Cindy Locklair expertly applied more Bonne Bell lip gloss to her already shiny lips. Strawberries-n-Cream, no doubt.

For about the one-hundredth time I glanced at my outfit. Brown pants and a matching beige and brown top. Yes, at age seventeen I was wearing a polyester pantsuit borrowed from my mother’s closet for the occasion. Well, it was 1978. The day before Mrs. Foster had emphasized the importance of our dress for today’s event. “You will be meeting an important author. It would behoove you to dress like ladies and gentlemen. Leave your dungarees at home.” Yes, she really said dungarees, and, yes, it was the 70’s, not the 50’s. Classic Mrs. Cooper. She also used the word behoove quite frequently, as in “It would behoove you to carry a dictionary and a thesaurus with you at all times.” “It would behoove you to commit Warriner’s comma rules to memory.” “It would behoove you to work on your penmanship.” The woman drove me nuts!

I had always loved my English classes in the past, and my previous teacher Mrs. Drison had been so much fun! We sat in groups, we discussed books, and we played and analyzed current music as poetry. Once she even told us about sneaking alcohol into her dorm at Winthrop by putting it in shampoo bottles. I stifled a giggle as I imagined telling Mrs. Cooper than my favorite poets were The Eagles and The Doobie Brothers. This year we sat in very straight rows, and we read books such as Great Expectations--the unabridged version, thank you very much.

Each and every full week of school we wrote a five-paragraph essay in longhand, double-spaced, following Lucille Vaughan Payne’s model in The Lively Art of Writing. Each and every full week of school Mrs. Cooper would return the essays with a content grade over a mechanics grade. We could use no contractions, no first person, no second person, and no passive voice. A fragment, a run-on, or the much-dreaded comma splice resulted in an automatic F for the mechanics grade. Each paragraph that contained any errors had to be rewritten in the lines we had skipped. My essay grades ranged from B to the occasional A-, never higher. More often than not somewhere on my paper I would find two straight lines and the word parrellism. Because I avoided talking to Mrs. Foster as much as possible, I didn’t find out until a college grammar class what that actually meant. After I somewhat dutifully corrected my essays, I put them in her file cabinet, third drawer from the top, and waited for the new topic.

I couldn’t wait to be rid of Mrs. Cooper. I was going to major in journalism in college, write about current events, and break every one of Lucille Vaughan Payne’s and Bernice J. Cooper’s rules on a regular basis. But right then I couldn’t wait for that door to open! I had read The Water is Wide three times and absolutely loved it. Pat Conroy had made me laugh out loud and cry real tears all three times. Now I may have shed a few tears over A Tale of Two Cities, but those were a very different kind of tears.

Finally, the door opened. A rather cute smiling young man with messy wiry hair and ripped dungarees (You heard me.) followed Mrs. Cooper in the room. The next forty-five minutes were magical, the author’s melodious Southern accent keeping us all completely enthralled. Pat Conroy told story and after story about his life, his friends, and his teaching experience on Daufuskie Island. He patiently signed books (“For Julie. Here’s to the good life at Summerville High,” mine read.) and posed for pictures. After dropping a few tantalizing hints about his upcoming book, he left us. It was over all too quickly, but it was truly wonderful.

Eventually, I realized that my opinion of Mrs. Bernice J. Cooper began to change that day. Although it was fun to hate her, I had turned her into a caricature of herself. By bringing in a current and somewhat controversial author who wrote on the very delicate issue of racial injustice in the South Carolina public school system—her school system--Mrs. Cooper silently told me that she didn’t view us as simple children after all. Instead, she viewed us as intelligent students capable of doing things the right way. The very fact that Mrs. Cooper had read The Water is Wide was mind boggling enough. But the fact that she no only approved of it but also went to the trouble of arranging an author visit forced me to see her as a person maybe not so different from myself.

My newly found admiration for my teacher was apparent several weeks later when Mrs. Cooper taught us how to write the proper thank you note. After purchasing the appropriate stationary, we wrote thank you notes for five of our graduation presents and turned them in for inspection. Mrs. Cooper corrected any and all errors with her red pen and the marked notes had to be rewritten. I didn’t even mind redoing a couple of mine. I wanted them to be perfect!
As it turned out, I majored in English instead of journalism, decided that Miss Havisham is one of the most interesting characters in all of literature, and refused to split an infinitive no matter what. Best of all, I have been sharing a little bit of Mrs. Bernice J. Cooper and Lucille Vaughan Payne with my own students for twenty-three years.