Alexis Krysten Morgan is a graduate student of the MLA program at the University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA. After teaching fifth and sixth graders in Camden, NJ, she spends most of her time working
on her first novel, The Road to Damascus.
Philadelphia, PA. After teaching fifth and sixth graders in Camden, NJ, she spends most of her time working
on her first novel, The Road to Damascus.
Princess Di
Not many people grow up to say they want to be a janitor, or if you want to get politically correct, a custodian. Picking up
behind people, emptying wastebaskets filled with half-eaten tuna and mayo sandwiches, scrubbing yellow rings off the seats of
toilets, is not anybody’s idea of a dream job, just ask anyone within a 20 mile radius of Camden. Even the kids who stood
behind me in the welfare line, or sat beside me on the 402 Septa headed for Cherry Hill, know that wearing a green jumper
and pushing a broom just ain’t the way to go. Part of me wants to tell them what I did wrong so that they could hitchhike in
the opposite direction. The other part of me, the part that is the Hyde to my Jekyll, walks the corridors watching the trade of
ziploc bags of white powder between the hands of Latinos and Blacks. The same Latinos and Blacks that snigger at one
another, and yell, “What up, Holmes?” are the same kids who will watch me laugh as they pass by two by two, hands cuffed,
heads bowed.
I came to Bloomsberg High the same way that every other adult passes through. Forced by a spouse who is tired of the hot-
dog and baked bean dance. I either did this or watch her backside climb into her sister’s car with my eight-year old son, Elijah
in tow. Swallowing what little manhood wasn’t locked in her Lee’s press-on nailed grip, I asked a friend of a friend to put in a
good word for me at the Board of Education. They were apparently less impressed with my background than the woman with
the onion and garlic breath at unemployment. Mr. Zero was my name, getting a job was my game. I had zero references. Zero
job experiences, if you didn’t count begging for a dollar as Mr. Squeegie Man for the corner of Westfield and Federal as
experience. But the friend of a friend was a pastor and, as they say, the prayers of a righteous man availeth much. Within
three weeks I had a swipe card, a cap, and a uniform with my name spelled in black incorrectly on the badge. Instead of Isaac
or I. Hay, the name on the badge read I. Lay. Imagine carrying that moniker in a high school.
Before she walked in, there were only five of us who can claim our ancestors didn’t come to these shores by way of the Middle
Passage. The minute details of her name aren’t worth mentioning right now. If you read the paper at all, her case is familiar,
so you won’t have a problem if I start at the beginning. She looked like Princess Di. My first impression was that she was the
real thing resurrected from the grave. Her hair was blond and coiffed. The kind of hairstyle that requires a can of hair spray
each morning just so every strand stays in place. She stood straight and regal as if she were walking in Buckingham Palace
and not the graffiti-stained halls of the East Wing. She was a real looker. Kind of girl you wouldn’t mind finding in the middle
of a magazine. Even the African-American and Latino men became a company of royal guards, saluting in her direction with
their smiles wide and their manhoods raised to attention.
She taught English. Level 2 C. That meant she taught sophomore English to the kids who were too dumb for honors and AP,
but too smart too for Dick and Jane in the trailers. She was twenty-four years old, fresh from a rural college in up-state
Maine. She had a look in her eyes that said she could save these kids. Like all these kids needed were to exchange their
sagging pants for khakis and a couple of torn copies of Shakespearean sonnets to make it out of the ghetto. Shoot, I couldn’
t even get out and I was the right color. By her second week at Bloomsberg High, I had taken the liberty of trading floors with
Ramos, the Puerto Rican for sixty dollars worth of beer. Ramos may have spoken in broken English with the suits whenever
they had a question about rooms not being up to code, but when it came to money and beer, he was more fluent in English
than I was.
“Who can tell me what is a common theme of the first seventeen sonnets?” she said aloud to the class. She might as well
have been talking to herself with all the attention the fellas were paying to it. She paused mid-stride, turning on her heel
slowly. Looking around the room, I half-expected her to repeat herself several octaves higher, like most of the other teachers
around this place. One teacher thought he had too much liberty with the students and shouted the question in the face of a
young man who looked like he already had his prison jumpsuit ironed and hung up in his closet for the right moment. It took
five security guards to pry the kid off of him, his broken nose, two broken ribs, and a missing tooth. Last time I heard, the
teacher was trying to work at the Peter Pan Early Learning Center.
“Anyone?” she said. For a moment, I felt for her. Clearing her throat, she continued her promenade to the front of the class.
“The first seventeen sonnets are written to a young man advising him to marry and have children. Does anyone know why the
author would advise him to do this?”
Finally, one student lifted his hand and gave her a reply. “So he wouldn’t have to pay child support?”
Either she was smarter than the rest of other teachers, whom we called lifers, or else she didn’t know the five degrees of
student punishment. Every week she came in with a new lesson, a new technique to get the guys to raise their eyes from her
body to her eyes. While she tried harder, their eyes dropped lower and lower from one rung of her body to the next.
It took three weeks for her to acknowledge me. Every day I was in her corridor, sweeping crumpled test papers, incomplete
homework, notes telling one girl that her boyfriend was “doing” her best friend. She never looked up. Just continued marking
papers with her big swooping penmanship. She was cool. Real cool. Never saw the two-hundred-fifty pound freckled janitor
sweeping around her desk, emptying her trash, until she needed something.
“Do you know where I can get some more chalk?” she asked.
I looked at her for a moment before answering. In my line of work, teachers were always asking for the most mundane things.
Trash bags, toilet paper—a gun, if the students were giving them a hard time. But these were items usually stocked in our
closets. Chalk, paper, and erasers were strictly educational domain. “No ma’am,” I said. “I don’t know where you can get chalk.”
She stood, wrapping her sweater around her shoulders. “Of course not,” she said, giving a small laugh. “Oh, I don’t think we’
ve been formally introduced. My name is Miss Fisherman,” she said emphasizing the Miss. I extended my hand, clasping her
small one in mine. She even felt like a princess. Or maybe a can of beer. Soft, smooth, and cold. My mind quickly envisioned
her taste, swallowing her whole, in one swift gulp.
After that conversation, I began following her more closely. I even started reading the same books she used in class just so I
could talk with her for a little bit while I swept around her. “Yeah, we’re calling in an exterminator next week to get rid of all
these bugs. I hate to see them go. One of these little guys could be Kafka’s Gregor Samsa.” She would nod her head silently,
looking up at me as I babbled about understanding how Hamlet felt about his uncle. Mine had wanted to date my mother,
single with four kids. He hadn’t really been my uncle, just someone all the kids in the neighborhood called "Uncle" out of
respect. That and for the buck fifty each week he handed out when he was too drunk to walk a straight line home. But still, I
argued, I could identify with Hamlet’s anger.
I even started talking differently. While reading Shakespeare, I would tell Ramos to “get thee broom out of thine closet.” He
would look at me crazy, but he knew what I meant. At home, I started cracking open the GED books my wife bought for me
several years ago. She was so thrilled that I was thinking of going back to school that for once she made a meal that didn’t
require setting the microwave to two minutes. She kept asking me what had changed my mind and I kept telling her “Princess
Di.” The looks she gave me either suggested that I was crazy or back to rolling Mary Janes. But for once in my life, I didn’t
care.
A couple of times a week I tried talking to Miss Fisherman after school. By mid-October, several of the students started
staying after for extra help so I had to wait to four, five, a couple of times, even six o’clock. I kinda thought she would be
embarrassed to be seen helping the janitor break down Shakespearean sonnets so I tried to keep my distance. But she was
always willing to work with me though. I have to remember her for that.
But nothing good ever lasts long. Not in this city. One night while I was coming to see her for help on the new Shakespearean
play, All’s Well That Ends Well, I saw something I shouldn’t have. Or maybe wasn’t supposed to see. But sometimes your eye
looks right into the center of something — like looking into the sun, even after you’ve learned that by doing so you can go
blind. Well, that night I went blind. Blind, deaf, and broken. I watched as she exited the supply closet —my supply closet —
with one of her students. “Get thee broom out of thine closet!” I wanted to shout. Tall, black and a basketball player. He got a
C on the Midsummer Night’s Dream exam. He forgot that it was Oberon who ordered the revenge on his wife. I watched as
she smoothed her hair until it bounced back into its coiffed style. Pulling on her skirt until all the wrinkles were gone, she had
metamorphosed back to Princess Diana.
Even though we were all in the same corridor she just walked right past me. Princess Diana would never have done that. My
therapist told me that it was that action that caused all the pieces to fall like dominoes. Not what she did with him — that I
could understand, working in a high school. No, it was the elephant in the room, or in my case, the two-hundred fifty pound,
freckled Irishman, that everybody noticed, but no one spoke of, or to.
Dominoes is an interesting game. It consists of twenty-eight tiles that are played by laying down each tile alternatively against
your opponent’s of equal value. That is the game for intellectuals. The way I played Dominoes was to line them up vertically in
a spiral formation. When all the tiles are standing, you take the first one and you lightly press on it until it collides with the
next, which hits the next, and so on. And that’s just what I did. I told Ramos, who told his guy, who told a few students,
who told the principal.
When she left, she carried herself out the same way she came in, with the exception of a few minor details. All the staff and
students lined up along the halls to watch her being led out of the building. Walking down the hall, her hands joined by metal,
guards on both sides, the media flashing its bulbs in succession, you could almost believe it was the real thing. The real
Princess Diana.
Not many people grow up to say they want to be a janitor, or if you want to get politically correct, a custodian. Picking up
behind people, emptying wastebaskets filled with half-eaten tuna and mayo sandwiches, scrubbing yellow rings off the seats of
toilets, is not anybody’s idea of a dream job, just ask anyone within a 20 mile radius of Camden. Even the kids who stood
behind me in the welfare line, or sat beside me on the 402 Septa headed for Cherry Hill, know that wearing a green jumper
and pushing a broom just ain’t the way to go. Part of me wants to tell them what I did wrong so that they could hitchhike in
the opposite direction. The other part of me, the part that is the Hyde to my Jekyll, walks the corridors watching the trade of
ziploc bags of white powder between the hands of Latinos and Blacks. The same Latinos and Blacks that snigger at one
another, and yell, “What up, Holmes?” are the same kids who will watch me laugh as they pass by two by two, hands cuffed,
heads bowed.
I came to Bloomsberg High the same way that every other adult passes through. Forced by a spouse who is tired of the hot-
dog and baked bean dance. I either did this or watch her backside climb into her sister’s car with my eight-year old son, Elijah
in tow. Swallowing what little manhood wasn’t locked in her Lee’s press-on nailed grip, I asked a friend of a friend to put in a
good word for me at the Board of Education. They were apparently less impressed with my background than the woman with
the onion and garlic breath at unemployment. Mr. Zero was my name, getting a job was my game. I had zero references. Zero
job experiences, if you didn’t count begging for a dollar as Mr. Squeegie Man for the corner of Westfield and Federal as
experience. But the friend of a friend was a pastor and, as they say, the prayers of a righteous man availeth much. Within
three weeks I had a swipe card, a cap, and a uniform with my name spelled in black incorrectly on the badge. Instead of Isaac
or I. Hay, the name on the badge read I. Lay. Imagine carrying that moniker in a high school.
Before she walked in, there were only five of us who can claim our ancestors didn’t come to these shores by way of the Middle
Passage. The minute details of her name aren’t worth mentioning right now. If you read the paper at all, her case is familiar,
so you won’t have a problem if I start at the beginning. She looked like Princess Di. My first impression was that she was the
real thing resurrected from the grave. Her hair was blond and coiffed. The kind of hairstyle that requires a can of hair spray
each morning just so every strand stays in place. She stood straight and regal as if she were walking in Buckingham Palace
and not the graffiti-stained halls of the East Wing. She was a real looker. Kind of girl you wouldn’t mind finding in the middle
of a magazine. Even the African-American and Latino men became a company of royal guards, saluting in her direction with
their smiles wide and their manhoods raised to attention.
She taught English. Level 2 C. That meant she taught sophomore English to the kids who were too dumb for honors and AP,
but too smart too for Dick and Jane in the trailers. She was twenty-four years old, fresh from a rural college in up-state
Maine. She had a look in her eyes that said she could save these kids. Like all these kids needed were to exchange their
sagging pants for khakis and a couple of torn copies of Shakespearean sonnets to make it out of the ghetto. Shoot, I couldn’
t even get out and I was the right color. By her second week at Bloomsberg High, I had taken the liberty of trading floors with
Ramos, the Puerto Rican for sixty dollars worth of beer. Ramos may have spoken in broken English with the suits whenever
they had a question about rooms not being up to code, but when it came to money and beer, he was more fluent in English
than I was.
“Who can tell me what is a common theme of the first seventeen sonnets?” she said aloud to the class. She might as well
have been talking to herself with all the attention the fellas were paying to it. She paused mid-stride, turning on her heel
slowly. Looking around the room, I half-expected her to repeat herself several octaves higher, like most of the other teachers
around this place. One teacher thought he had too much liberty with the students and shouted the question in the face of a
young man who looked like he already had his prison jumpsuit ironed and hung up in his closet for the right moment. It took
five security guards to pry the kid off of him, his broken nose, two broken ribs, and a missing tooth. Last time I heard, the
teacher was trying to work at the Peter Pan Early Learning Center.
“Anyone?” she said. For a moment, I felt for her. Clearing her throat, she continued her promenade to the front of the class.
“The first seventeen sonnets are written to a young man advising him to marry and have children. Does anyone know why the
author would advise him to do this?”
Finally, one student lifted his hand and gave her a reply. “So he wouldn’t have to pay child support?”
Either she was smarter than the rest of other teachers, whom we called lifers, or else she didn’t know the five degrees of
student punishment. Every week she came in with a new lesson, a new technique to get the guys to raise their eyes from her
body to her eyes. While she tried harder, their eyes dropped lower and lower from one rung of her body to the next.
It took three weeks for her to acknowledge me. Every day I was in her corridor, sweeping crumpled test papers, incomplete
homework, notes telling one girl that her boyfriend was “doing” her best friend. She never looked up. Just continued marking
papers with her big swooping penmanship. She was cool. Real cool. Never saw the two-hundred-fifty pound freckled janitor
sweeping around her desk, emptying her trash, until she needed something.
“Do you know where I can get some more chalk?” she asked.
I looked at her for a moment before answering. In my line of work, teachers were always asking for the most mundane things.
Trash bags, toilet paper—a gun, if the students were giving them a hard time. But these were items usually stocked in our
closets. Chalk, paper, and erasers were strictly educational domain. “No ma’am,” I said. “I don’t know where you can get chalk.”
She stood, wrapping her sweater around her shoulders. “Of course not,” she said, giving a small laugh. “Oh, I don’t think we’
ve been formally introduced. My name is Miss Fisherman,” she said emphasizing the Miss. I extended my hand, clasping her
small one in mine. She even felt like a princess. Or maybe a can of beer. Soft, smooth, and cold. My mind quickly envisioned
her taste, swallowing her whole, in one swift gulp.
After that conversation, I began following her more closely. I even started reading the same books she used in class just so I
could talk with her for a little bit while I swept around her. “Yeah, we’re calling in an exterminator next week to get rid of all
these bugs. I hate to see them go. One of these little guys could be Kafka’s Gregor Samsa.” She would nod her head silently,
looking up at me as I babbled about understanding how Hamlet felt about his uncle. Mine had wanted to date my mother,
single with four kids. He hadn’t really been my uncle, just someone all the kids in the neighborhood called "Uncle" out of
respect. That and for the buck fifty each week he handed out when he was too drunk to walk a straight line home. But still, I
argued, I could identify with Hamlet’s anger.
I even started talking differently. While reading Shakespeare, I would tell Ramos to “get thee broom out of thine closet.” He
would look at me crazy, but he knew what I meant. At home, I started cracking open the GED books my wife bought for me
several years ago. She was so thrilled that I was thinking of going back to school that for once she made a meal that didn’t
require setting the microwave to two minutes. She kept asking me what had changed my mind and I kept telling her “Princess
Di.” The looks she gave me either suggested that I was crazy or back to rolling Mary Janes. But for once in my life, I didn’t
care.
A couple of times a week I tried talking to Miss Fisherman after school. By mid-October, several of the students started
staying after for extra help so I had to wait to four, five, a couple of times, even six o’clock. I kinda thought she would be
embarrassed to be seen helping the janitor break down Shakespearean sonnets so I tried to keep my distance. But she was
always willing to work with me though. I have to remember her for that.
But nothing good ever lasts long. Not in this city. One night while I was coming to see her for help on the new Shakespearean
play, All’s Well That Ends Well, I saw something I shouldn’t have. Or maybe wasn’t supposed to see. But sometimes your eye
looks right into the center of something — like looking into the sun, even after you’ve learned that by doing so you can go
blind. Well, that night I went blind. Blind, deaf, and broken. I watched as she exited the supply closet —my supply closet —
with one of her students. “Get thee broom out of thine closet!” I wanted to shout. Tall, black and a basketball player. He got a
C on the Midsummer Night’s Dream exam. He forgot that it was Oberon who ordered the revenge on his wife. I watched as
she smoothed her hair until it bounced back into its coiffed style. Pulling on her skirt until all the wrinkles were gone, she had
metamorphosed back to Princess Diana.
Even though we were all in the same corridor she just walked right past me. Princess Diana would never have done that. My
therapist told me that it was that action that caused all the pieces to fall like dominoes. Not what she did with him — that I
could understand, working in a high school. No, it was the elephant in the room, or in my case, the two-hundred fifty pound,
freckled Irishman, that everybody noticed, but no one spoke of, or to.
Dominoes is an interesting game. It consists of twenty-eight tiles that are played by laying down each tile alternatively against
your opponent’s of equal value. That is the game for intellectuals. The way I played Dominoes was to line them up vertically in
a spiral formation. When all the tiles are standing, you take the first one and you lightly press on it until it collides with the
next, which hits the next, and so on. And that’s just what I did. I told Ramos, who told his guy, who told a few students,
who told the principal.
When she left, she carried herself out the same way she came in, with the exception of a few minor details. All the staff and
students lined up along the halls to watch her being led out of the building. Walking down the hall, her hands joined by metal,
guards on both sides, the media flashing its bulbs in succession, you could almost believe it was the real thing. The real
Princess Diana.
Alexis K. Morgan
