Prince Alarming by Rhonda Denise Johnson

Author:Rhonda Denise Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fairy tales, fairy tale, snow white, sleeping beauty, cinderella, prince charming, seven dwarves, 7 dwarves

Rhode Island Avenue

She came for me. She came and we were going away. The beautiful woman whose smile I had seen in light bulbs. In my winter white coat, opaque white stockings and fire engine red shoes I didn't even mind that my mittens kept me from sucking my thumb. I was with my mother! I looked out the car window as the neat, narrow and cozy streets of Northwest D.C. disappeared behind us and we entered the wide vista of Rhode Island Avenue. The building was so big and the glass doors so thick. But she pulled them open with her great adult strength and we entered a new world. In that world, I found Gumby and Pokey, baby swings, Pinocchio and joy.

There was a nursery school on the ground floor of the building. I sat on the floor with the other kids watching the television that hung from the ceiling. I watched Tom Jones wiggling his hips and jerking his head back. I don't know where at that age I had learned to interpret this behavior as arrogance--don't know where I had learned to dislike arrogance, but something about the way he jerked his head back made me dislike him more and more each time he did it.

The other children did not speak to me. I did not speak to them. They were not real to me, and it never crossed my mind that I was supposed to do something to make myself real to them. They were a part of this world in which I found myself. I was here to observe this world, not affect it.

Later, when my hearing impairment had progressed to profound deafness, my mother remembered that the teacher in the nursery had asked her if I was hard of hearing. But in the late sixties conventional wisdom did not understand the many degrees of hearing impairment. You could either hear or you couldn't. We did not understand the ways a person could be hearing impaired. Consonants give words their meaning but vowels make words pronounceable. Because consonants are higher pitched than vowels, a person with a hearing impairment might hear but not understand speech. For a child, what was missed or not understood could be ignored and forgotten because "wasn't nobody talking to you anyway. Mind your business. Go play." So it was decided there was nothing wrong with my hearing. I was just a daydreamer who liked to go off into another world. And of course, I could hear what I wanted to hear. All these things were decided and certified as common sense--as what everybody knew about me and the way I am. Unlike hearing being impaired, it was decided that what was wrong with me was something I would outgrow or have beaten and ridiculed out of me. As I went from daydreamer to problem child, hardheaded and hateful, the fact that I did not know what thing this hatred was based on was taken as proof of that thing.

Still

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