by Rosalyn Butt
I was born in October 1952. I weighed two pounds, twelve ounces, and I'm totally blind. My story takes place in the winter of 1963, in Phoenix, where I've lived most of my life. I was in the second group of children to be integrated into public school. We went to regular class, and had a special teacher one period per day.
One winter afternoon Miss Fry, my fifth-grade teacher, was teaching us a unit on poetry. Now the poems in this unit were very visually oriented, filled with sunsets, daffodils, clouds; we were reading lots of Emily Dickinson and William Wordsworth. Miss Fry said that if we understood the poems, we would be able to explain to the class how and what we felt when we read them. We should be able, Miss Fry explained, to have images in our minds and these would come from our reading the word pictures in the poems.
The trouble was, I was feeling nothing from this class exercise. I had nothing to say. I wanted to do well in school. I didn't want to be sent to the "blind school," a hundred miles away in Tucson. Things were not looking good -- I was already starting to have lots of trouble with math. When class was over, I got out of there as fast as possible. For the first time I could remember, I hated being blind, and knew I was a failure.
That night, I wasn't myself. I was too quiet. Mother asked me if everything was OK at school. I lied and said things were fine. I don't advocate this practice, but even at that age I had learned it wasn't cool to complain about things. If you did, all you would get would be a lecture about how you shouldn't feel that way. Besides, I had done what I was told to do; if I had a problem in class, I was supposed to tell the resource teacher, the special teacher for blind children. I loved Mrs. Griswald like a grandmother, and thought she would solve things as Mom had said she should.
When I told her what had happened, she said, "Because you've never seen anything with your eyes, there are certain things you will never understand. You will just have to accept that." When I asked her what "that" was and how I should do that, she couldn't explain to me what acceptance was. So, I figured it would do no good to talk about my problems to those dumb grown-ups anymore, since they wouldn't be any help anyway.
I was in a funk; I didn't even stay up to catch "Sing Along with Mitch," which I watched without fail every Friday night. However, a little after 9 p.m. I woke up. Dad was doing what Dad always did -- keeping the TV on and falling asleep in front of it. Jack Parr was on, and from a half sleep, I heard him introducing Giselle McKenzie, a singer from Canada who was often on that show. "She's going to perform a song from a new musical that's just come from London to Broadway, 'Stop the World, I Want to Get Off,'" Parr was saying. He said that the song was called "Gonna Build a Mountain."
"Grown-ups have gotten really strange. I'll listen if I can stay awake," I thought. Well, not only did I stay awake, I sat bolt upright in bed, and that was when something happened as McKenzie performed the catchy song, which reminded me of one of those gospel songs I knew African-American Christians sang at church.
I was getting all sorts of images, just as Miss Fry had said I should from reading the poetry. I was receiving those word pictures, thick and fast. There were these little people, short and wide, with tools in their hands, working on a project of some sort, and the foreman in charge was directing them as he sang along with the television.
As the song concluded, I heard an inner voice saying, "That woman isn't the grown-up responsible for this song. She's only sending it to you. If you learn about the place from which this song comes, you'll be all right, and you'll stay at school and not be sent away." Mother walked by, and saw me jumping up and down while sitting on the bed.
"Are you OK?" she asked.
"I'm fine now, Mom," I said, not a trace of lying to be found anywhere.
There was one problem, though. I couldn't tell Miss Fry what had happened. She would think I had totally lost my mind if I tried to explain how I saw word pictures while listening to a song about some guy who wants to build a mountain.
I kept my secret hidden from grown-ups for a long time, but a year later, when we had to do geography papers, I told my teacher I had to learn about this place called London. "You should write about the British Isles," she said, and I did. I've been interested in that part of the world ever since. I never was sent away to "blind school," but stayed in public school all the way through Arizona State University.
I heard Jack Parr's show of that night again in a summer re-run, so I knew I hadn't imagined the song, and besides, Sammy Davis Jr. had a hit with "Gonna Build A Mountain," so I heard it on the radio many times. It was years later, while watching Ed Sullivan on a Sunday night, that I found out about the person who was responsible for writing that song. It was a performer whose work I've come to love. Antony Newley, who, sadly, is no longer with us, had a voice that could tell stories. You never had to see anything in order to know what was on his mind; he sang with such feeling. It's true this guy had the thickest British accent I had ever encountered in my young life before learning about him, but I figured deciphering the accents of the British Isles must be part of the assignment that had been handed to me the first time I heard Newley's song. Meeting Miss Fry Again
After college, I began giving talks at schools, talking with children about the usual stuff, e.g., guide dogs, blindness, Braille and an assortment of other related topics. I still give talks like these whenever I'm invited to do so.
One of my dad's patients, Miss Murphy, taught at one of the schools in my old school district, and I was asked to come and give a talk. An interesting thing happened when I was invited to have lunch in the faculty lounge with the teachers. It's not exactly posh, but it's a step or two up in the world. This woman sat across from me at the table and announced, "You don't remember me. I'm Miss Fry, your fifth-grade teacher."
I said I remembered now that she had introduced herself, and added that I had something I wanted to tell her about. Then I told my story. This was followed by silence, and then she said, "I remember that day. I knew from the expression on your face that I was in big trouble, but I didn't know what to do or what to say. I went home and prayed a lot, but never knew what happened until now. Yes, I know the song. Sammy Davis does it, right?"
We had a good time together, and we ended with hugs all around. Miss Fry said she was making an effort to include a wider variety of poems in the curriculum. I'm not surprised. Writing to Antony Newley
Expressing gratitude, as clergy will tell you, is a wonderful thing. I had thought about doing this on and off for about 30 years. Finally, while I was meditating, I heard again from one of those little short guys from back in 1963: "Have you thanked your human benefactor?"
I answered aloud, "I couldn't get backstage at his concert to thank him ... I'd be willing, but we have a few difficulties ... My typing isn't that wonderful, I have problems with addressing envelopes, and famous people aren't exactly in the phone book."
I told a close friend and fellow practitioner of religious science about this. She was a retired English teacher, and she agreed to help me and supervise my writing. I had a friend who interviewed famous people for a living, and she gave me a couple of possible addresses. These didn't work. Finally, reasoning that song writers love being paid for their work, I ended up calling ASCAP in New York, and they knew how to reach Antony Newley.
I wrote to him and told the story, though leaving out the details about the creatures I saw in my head. I told him what his work had meant to me through the years, and assured him he was significant, even though he might not realize it because his kind of music wasn't the most popular anymore.
Much to my surprise, I got a fine letter in reply two months later. He thanked me for writing, saying he had been touched. I have both letters in a special file here at home.
Final Thoughts
I think this whole business could have been avoided if Miss Fry had known her limits. One can teach about poetic techniques, history, language, and content, but feelings about a particular poem can't be legislated or graded. Any system that relied so strictly on knowledge of the visual was bound to fail. As for what other adults could have done, I'll leave that for you all to contemplate. Thanks for reading, and thank you, Antony Newley, for helping a blind child to learn to see the pictures in her mind.