My Brain Woke Up

By Karen Beatty

PROMPT — What is Love?

According to Miss Henry, my older brother Billy was one of the brightest and most well-behaved boys in the county. She was, therefore, sorely disappointed when I, his younger sister and purportedly from the same gene pool, seemed to have failings in both intellect and behavior. Miss Henry assumed it was simply that my cousin Travis and I wouldn’t stop giggling and plotting mischief while she attempted to enlighten us. Travis never took much to book learning, though he was certainly smart enough and even excelled in art. I had a different problem. Whereas Billy learned to read practically on his own before he was five years old, somehow, for me, written words didn’t seem to be there. I saw marks and squiggles, but no words. Even Travis, who had no scholarly interests, readily learned to read words and to scribe letters beautifully. I was tortured by not being able to discern words or put on paper the words that flowed so freely in my head. I had been thrilled about starting school and learning to read and write, but then ended up feeling awkward and ashamed.

For a year or two, I got away with not being able to read or write, because Mama and Billy helped me along at home. Mama thought I was just not trying, and she used Miss Henry’s complaints about my distraction at school as yet another excuse to harangue against my hanging out with Travis, who had taken to cutting school with the regularity of a rooster’s crow.

Because there was such a wide range of ability and demand for attention among her students, Miss Henry divided the class into learning groups with the smarter, though not necessarily older, students assigned to helping the struggling ones. Billy, at age ten, was one of Miss Henry’s most reliable tutors. It took Miss Henry a while to catch on to my academic deficiencies, partly because I was verbally astute, and partly because there were so many troubled and troublesome youngsters in her classroom. Some children hiked miles out of the hollers and up creek beds to attend the only school in the county. Barefoot and ragged, frequently hungry and lice-infested, these children were limited in attention and intention. Most would barely make it beyond a third or fourth grade level because they were called upon to help out at home, or they got into serious trouble with the law, or they prematurely started their own families. Next to them I didn’t seem like much of a challenge, so during the early grade levels, I managed to hide my learning limitations from the over-burdened Miss Henry. Mama was more concerned about the social influences on me at school than my academic progress. She warned me to stick with my blood kin (except for Travis) at school and to keep away from children with the raising of a hog—meaning those who lacked personal hygiene as well as morals. And sure enough, when I tried to befriend a young girl from out of the holler in my slow reading group, I caught head lice. Mama truly took a snit. She prided herself on knowing better than to put kerosene, the local folk remedy, on my head, but that meant I had to sit still for days while Mama scrutinized my scalp and long hair with a fine-tooth comb to remove the individual lice and nits. If I dared move or whine, Mama yanked at my hair or rapped my head with the comb, cruelly reminding me that trusting strangers delivers one to untold sordid predicaments and suffering.

After the lice incident, as a diversion from my academic inadequacies and social restrictions, I abandoned all pretenses and threw in with the shenanigans of my cousin Travis. I cultivated an inverse adaptation to the classroom, affecting nonchalance or boredom while, in fact, listening intently—desperately—to understand the lesson. If Miss Henry called upon me to read a passage I had memorized at home, I raced through it in a panic, lest she question me specifically about individual words. If I were called upon to read an unfamiliar passage or word, I pretended to be lost or engaged in horseplay with Travis. Eventually, Miss Henry separated the two of us, and I just tried to stay invisible at school, madly memorizing pages of the text that Billy or Mama read to me at home. To me school was unrelenting mental torture.

Then, one ordinary day, around the time of my 9th birthday, the miracle that changed my life just up and happened. I was at home looking over a page in one of Billy’s tattered readers, when I SAW A WORD! Then, another word, and another. I was beside myself with elation and relief. The squiggles on the page suddenly took on form and meaning. It was the single most powerful event that changed the course of my schooling forever, and it also set me on a far different path from the one my beloved cousin Travis was treading.

This inexplicable onset of illumination enabled me to advance quickly in reading. I was astonished to find that I could learn to write letters that fit together to mean things—things that others could read and understand. Within a year I was penning thoughts I wanted to convey, ideas I wanted to express, stories I imagined in my head. Now that I could connect sounds to letters, I realized, to my embarrassment, I had been mispronouncing certain words, and that letters can teach you how to say the words correctly. My progress was swift and steady, because I truly loved words. By the time I turned twelve years old, I would come to see myself as a writer. I forever remained a slower than average reader challenged by spelling, but for the rest of my life I would love reading and writing, and cherish books like coveted jewels.

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Karen Beatty was reared in Appalachia and later settled in NYC, where she trained as a trauma-informed counselor for police officers, firefighters, and veterans for the City University of New York. Her short stories and essays have appeared in over 40 publications, including Eureka Literary Review, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Books Ireland, Non Binary Review, and Mud Season Review. Her first novel, Dodging Prayers and Bullets, was published in September 2023. She writes from NY, New York.