I showed [a friend] the scars on my right hand where I was branded "one of the boys" by Elijah. The scratch became infected, and it is a visible reminder that we were joined as childhood "blood brothers." I knew from then on that teaching Elijah and inner city children like him would be my work.
I took Elijah to his grandmother's house after school that day to show her what her grandson had done to me. But she was visually impaired.
She told me that Elijah's father, who died two years earlier, had loved Elijah the most. I had made the mistake that day of reading a story to the class about a father and his son. Elijah took the book and threw it across the room and then did the same with a chair he had been sitting on.
As we moved out of the room and into a safer place in the office, the "branding" took place. It didn't hurt me physically, but it touched my heart, and I knew it was a ritual that mattered to both of us.
He had torn my flesh, and I was no longer that white teacher come to do her good work among the black children. I was picked out and touched more than skin deep. He went inside of me with his rage, and I became angry for him as well. And I became his spokesman [sic]. I became his instrument for change. He had torn away at my complacency.
9/8/92
Penny Flenniken, in the Sunday Oregonian July 5, 1992:
