Tale of the Tea Set
This year my spring cleaning unearthed a little boxed set of pint-sized china. The kind a young girl would use for a tea party with her dolls. The cardboard box is intact—orange, with pictures of little girls who are variously ice fishing, playing the xylophone, or dressed as nurses.
Two of the delicate cups have broken, but the rest of the set is intact: two more cups, four saucers, teapot with lid, sugar bowl with lid, and a cream pitcher. All pearly beige with blue flowers painted on them.
What makes this find spectacular is that I received this tea set when I was in third grade—a present from a boy in my class. Armando. He was a Latino flamenco dancer. Really! He could dance—percussive fancy footwork with arms in the air. And he wanted me to be his girl.
This happened in 1962. At Westminster Elementary School in Venice, California. My year at Westminster set me back, academically. My formal education thus far had been at a Chicago public school where in second grade math, we’d been calculating simple division problems. But in Venice, the third graders were just learning to add single and double digit numbers. And they were reading at a much lower level than I had been—even though my reading skills were lackluster for my Chicago class.
Lunchtime was as depressing as the academics. Students sat on outdoor benches with no backs and no tables—shaded from the sun only by the time of day, as the building behind us cast a much-needed shadow. We silently ate sack lunches we’d brought from home (I envied my friend her oleo and sugar sandwiches, having no idea they were a symptom of poverty) while teachers patrolled the courtyard looking for talkers. Those who violated the “no-talking” rule were forced to sit in the sun.
I got in trouble, once, for merely smiling at my friend—and was forced to endure sunburn with the disobedient kids. I remember a cockroach crawling across my lap. My seat mates on the punishment benches seemed to think I was brave because I endured the big bug silently—but it wasn’t bravery. It was fear of what the prison guards would do if I made a peep.
The student body at my old school in Chicago was all white and middle class. Westminster’s student population was composed primarily of poor kids, a high percentage of whom were people of color. It was my first experience with non-white classmates.
It would take me decades to figure out that the reason for the lag in academics, and likely the lack of freedom during lunch, was because impoverished communities are not provided the same educational resources as middle class schools. Some folks in power look down on certain neighborhoods much as our former president regards “sh#t-hole countries.”
But I did absorb an important lesson at Westminster. It was not mandated by a school board or incorporated into a lesson plan. It’s what I intuited, even as a youngster: Humanity has nothing to do with skin tone, hair texture, nationality, first language, or what kind of sandwiches one’s parents can afford.
But here we are, more than sixty years later, with a presidential candidate ranting about his inability to determine his opponent’s race. I wish he’d had the benefit of a Westminster Elementary education circa 1962.
My little tea set has traveled from California to Illinois to Michigan to Mississippi to Louisiana to New Mexico and finally to Arkansas. Perhaps I’ve kept it all these years as a gentle reminder that people are people, no matter what the man-who-would-be-king would have us think.