A friend’s e-mail asked if I could spell the word “murraya.” I laughed, thinking that practically every literate person could now spell the word after learning that 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde spelled it correctly, and became the first African-American winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. I have plans to meet with my friend and promised to tell him a story about CJ and the Bee.
When I was a sixth or seventh grader — I cannot remember which year — at Henry Clay Frick school in Pittsburgh, one of my teachers entered me into the annual school-wide spelling bee. I loved to write, and one of my cousins once told me that she remembers our teacher often chose my writing to read aloud to our class. (I don’t remember that, either.) But my brother, sister and I spent our free time at the Carnegie Library in the Oakland area of Pittsburgh, in what my mother once characterized as a means of escape: reading. Every Saturday morning, we would trek to Oakland and the library, where we would read books for hours. I learned the meanings of words that I read through context, and in school; we had no dictionary at home. But while a grade-schooler, I learned to spell by reading and remembering.
The teacher who enrolled me in the spelling bee must have been one who had noted my spelling ability while grading my papers. I was a shy child who did not volunteer for school activities. School was another escape from the bloody assaults by my father on his wife and children. In the relative safety of the school, I quietly went about my assigned tasks, and when told that I was entered into the spelling bee, I accepted that assignment, quietly. I was given a booklet of spelling words and took it home to study while chewing on a sandwich of government cheese and welfare bread, hoping that my father would not choose that night to come home.
I survived the initial rounds of spelling and moved into the final round. The teachers were excited and told the contestants that the winner of the final round would be going to Washington, D.C., to compete for the national title. This trip to the Capitol was news to me, and a fat white worm of worry started to feed on my enthusiasm. My father was mostly absent but when at home, was angry and abusive; my mother was poor, and while I had no specific information about our financial resources, I was certain that we could not afford a trip to Washington, D.C.
I didn’t question my teachers about the finals in the Capitol; I just out spelled all comers until I stood on the stage in the school auditorium, where each word I spelled correctly brought me closer to what I thought was the creation of an unmanageable debt for my mother. When I was one of two finalists, I thought of how little money my weekly paper route generated and imagined that a trip to another city was an expense far outside of my mother’s resources. I had not discussed the reward for winning the spelling bee with my mother; I hadn’t wanted to hear the despair in her voice as she cautioned me about the expense that we could not afford. I stood on that stage in the auditorium, and when given the next word to spell, it was a word that I knew well.
I carefully and purposely misspelled the word and sat down, satisfied that I had not created a burden for my mother.
cjon3acd@att.net