Vachon Imagined

She was my teacher.

She had gorgeous, long brown hair, and she always smelled like coffee laced with a floral perfume that, to me, became her signature. Every time she hugged me, I wore that scent on my clothes like a badge of honor, proof that she had graced me with her presence, that she had graced me with her love and attention.

She was the only teacher I felt loved me.

She gave me attention, and that felt good—not just for a third grader, but for anyone.

A little boy sat behind me in that class.

I don’t remember his name. Quite frankly, I’m not sure I ever knew it.

He was a Black boy, though at that age, Blackness and color had no meaning to me. I didn’t know what any of it meant.

I just knew that he loved me.

How did I know that?

I didn’t.

Not intellectually.

I could offer a thousand reasons for it now, but I have no material evidence. No long academic explanation. No tested theory that could prove what I knew.

I knew by the way he made me feel.

He didn’t compliment me.

He played with my hair while he sat behind me.

And I remember how nice that felt.

The gentleness of the touch.

The surprise of discovering how good another human being’s touch could feel when nothing was perverting it, nothing was putting another layer over it, nothing was telling us what it meant or what it was supposed to become.

It was just me.

Him.

Two human beings who didn’t yet know anything about color, division, or what wasn’t supposed to be happening.

We simply shared moments together.

And those moments became something I looked forward to every day.

He became my salvation in a storm neither of us could stop.

Then one day, his father came to the classroom.

And that man was angry.

No.

Not angry.

Enraged.

Like a caged animal finally released from its leash, except there was no threat in front of him.

Just a child.

His child.

A little boy who had somehow threatened his father’s reputation, his sense of himself, his pride.

A child who was supposed to carry an identity that even his father could not honor that day.

And he beat him.

Relentlessly.

In front of all of us.

A classroom full of third graders.

And I remember looking at my teacher.

She seemed pleased.

Pleased that someone was beating out a behavior she couldn’t control with her nice language, her please and thank yous, or her threats of punishment.

Pleased that someone was doing what her rules couldn’t.

Everything around us was supposed to be nice sentiments.

The pledge of allegiance was plastered on the wall, waiting for all of us to recite it like little robots, being told who we were.

But children know who they are.

It’s the adults who don’t.

And there, beneath the words about allegiance and unity, a father was beating his son.

So reinforcements were called.

The government was here to help.

And he beat him.

His only son.

In front of all of us.

And we sat there and watched.

Helpless.

I remember feeling so ashamed.

I watched my only friend scream for help.

Not just from the pain, but from the man who said he loved him.

The man who told him this beating was good for him.

And somehow, when I think about the memory he carried away from that classroom, I imagine the beating had been ordained by God.

Ordained by goodness.

Because what else was a child supposed to believe when the man hurting him said he loved him, when the adults watched, when the teacher seemed pleased, when the government came in to help?

How does a child make sense of that?

How does a child separate love from violence when the people who are supposed to teach him the difference are the ones collapsing it?

And when my friend finally walked back toward me, tears streaming down his face, he sat behind me.

I didn’t turn around.

I couldn’t.

I couldn’t face my only friend.

I was filled with shame.

Horror.

Confusion.

How could adults do this?

How could they watch?

How could they call it love?

How could they call it good?

Maybe someone would say we bonded over our trauma.

But I didn’t know anything about trauma.

I knew this boy.

I knew that we connected without words.

I knew that sometimes we would sit together in silence on the playground.

I would watch him suck on rocks.

And back then, it wasn’t strange to me.

It was simply something he did.

Something that was part of him.

There was no psychoanalysis.

No diagnosis.

No meeting.

No policymakers.

No one trying to explain him to himself.

There was just us.

Two children.

Two children who already knew what it meant to suffer.

Two children who knew what it felt like to have the fantasies of adults placed upon them—to be made into something they had never asked to become.

And that is what I remember most.

We didn’t make our suffering our only identity.

We didn’t need it to explain why we loved each other.

We didn’t need a theory for the tenderness.

We didn’t need permission.

We simply found each other.

Two children sitting together in a world that had already begun teaching us about separation.

Before we knew the word for it.

Before we knew the color of it.

Before we knew that adults would spend the rest of our lives explaining to us who we were supposed to be.

We just knew what it felt like to be kind to one another.

And for a little while, that was enough.