The Teacher Who Changed My Life
An ode to Ms. Snow and the gift of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS
I’ve missed writing this newsletter! I got COVID the week after my book tour for We Were Illegal ended, capping off one of the busiest summers of my life with several weeks of exhaustion and fatigue. I let myself drift into this school year and it’s been really wonderful (if you know me in real life, you know I rarely *drift*), but I’ll be back more regularly from now on! Sorry to vague-post until it can be official, but I have some FANTASTIC news I’m desperate to share with you (it’s not a movie deal), so make sure to subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!
I’d forgotten where I got my copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou when I pulled it off the shelves; I’ve had it so long, I almost don’t see it anymore. It’s been all over the world with me, the teal and coral cover faded along the spine, its pages yellowed and a little torn. When I cracked open the cover, I was FaceTiming with Christine as we planned out season 2 of “The Beautiful and Banned.” (Yes, we talk as often as you think we do!) We decided we’d read it for episode 1, and I opened my book while we talked.
Inside the front cover, a handwritten note reads:
“Jessica,
This is my favorite author and poet from America. She is a terrific woman. Hope you enjoy this and are inspired by her as I was.
I’ve enjoyed getting to know you this year.
P. Snow
May ‘94”
Growing up a bookish girl in Abilene, Texas, where the cool kids were athletes and cheerleaders and I was neither, I was miserable. In my latest book, I wrote a line that made my editor laugh, about how the other girls were reading magazines and curling their hair at an age when I was tromping around the backyard in the Renaissance cape I had my mother sew for me. By the time I got to my sophomore year in high school, my reputation for deep nerdiness had been in place for years.
It wasn’t just that I was nerdy. I was also a really good girl, the kind of goody-two-shoes who got good grades and went to Bible studies and evangelized to others. I was earnest and chirpy and confident about my views.
I wasn’t alone. In those days, we called Abilene the “Buckle of the Bible Belt” because you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a church. Everyone I knew at my public high school went to church; our deepest conversations were about doctrinal differences between the Baptists, Methodists, and Churches of Christ. One of my friends on the Speech team was (gasp) an atheist, and we spent hours on bus rides back from speech tournaments trying to “win him back” to faith.
We knew from other students before we started that year in Advanced World History that Ms. Snow was not an avowed Christian, and she was quietly queer—not in the closet, but subtle in a small-minded town. For the first several weeks of class, one of my Presbyterian friends brought her Bible to Ms. Snow’s class every day. She left it perched on the table, hoping to inspire Ms. Snow to change her ways.
I was even less subtle about it. All year, we talked about world religions and contexts. Ms. Snow’s entire goal was to expose kids from a tiny corner of Texas to the idea that there was a world bigger than ours; my goal was to convince her that my closest-held opinions at the ripe age of fifteen were correct. Over the year I had her, she endured multiple conversations with me. She listened so thoughtfully, her eyes kind, her head tilted slightly. She let me get it all out, like she hadn’t heard it all before.
One time, over lunch in her room, after I spun my argument, she said, “If you’d been born in another place or another time, you’d be vehemently arguing with me that I should become Muslim or Hindu or Baháʼí. You’re a product of where you grew up and your family and all that came before you. You’re not going to change my mind, but I receive your passion with so much love. Thank you for being concerned about me.”
I’ve forgotten everything about the arguments I made to her; looking back, I was truly insufferable. But I will never forget her graciousness and her patience in response to me.
Of course I did not change her mind. However, she fundamentally changed me. While I argued and schemed, Ms. Snow just lived out her values of tolerance, kindness, and love for others.
Once Ms. Snow heard some kids were making fun of a student who wore the same clothes for several days; that week, she wore the same outfit every day. She didn’t say anything, just quietly donned the same vest and trousers all week. Word spread through the school. I cannot remember a single outfit I owned that year; I’ve never forgotten about her wearing the same clothes in solidarity with a student in need. Ms. Snow created the kind of space where everyone mattered.
In her classroom, we felt heard but also learned to listen. She stretched our minds, and she was also enthusiastic and hospitable and goofy and smart. She talked about books and ideas with fascination and joy. She treated us like adults whose thoughts had value and merit; she wanted to know what we had to say. She exposed us to a whole new way of thinking.
She gave me a roadmap to a future version of myself I might never have found otherwise.
In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou talks about a woman named Mrs. Flowers who literally helped Angelou find her voice; after enduring horrible trauma, she stopped speaking for a time. Mrs. Flowers was refined and well-read and well-spoken. Angelou wanted to be like her, so she read widely and finally spoke to Mrs. Flowers. It was her admiration, her desire to both be like Mrs. Flowers and to make her proud, that drove Angelou in the narrative to find her voice.
When I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings again for the podcast recently, I thought of Ms. Snow when I read about Mrs. Flowers. My admiration for Ms. Snow made me want to be like her; there is some core part of me that will probably always hope she’s proud of me. I already loved reading, but she pointed my mind toward a way of thinking that expanded and expanded and expanded over the years. My situation was less traumatic than Angelou’s, but Ms. Snow was to me what Mrs. Flowers was to a young Maya.
The future possibility she showed me is now my daily life: I’m comfortable in my nerdy skin. While not queer myself, I am close friends with all kinds of people, including many who are LGBTQIA. My classroom and my home are safe places for all people. Every day, I get to live out my own core values of love and tolerance and inclusion.
Maybe I would have found myself here eventually without Ms. Snow anyway; I’m so glad I had her help getting here.
When I opened the front cover of that book and saw her note that day talking to Christine, I smiled. Of course it was from her.
I now know that what Ms. Snow did was very, very difficult. To create a classroom in West Texas that challenged the minds of Christian kids, that gave a safe space for queer kids and poor kids and kids of color and anyone who was different in a place where homogeneity was prized—it was a radical, courageous act. I can never know what it was like for Ms. Snow to leave that classroom and go out into a community that did not appreciate her: to shop for groceries or take a walk or make a life in a place that did not welcome her like she welcomed others.
I can trace back the roots of much of my work—my podcast about banned books, my PhD about underrepresented writers, my journalism about historical racial injustice, my teaching methodologies, my always widening worldview—to a second-floor history classroom at a small town high school, and a teacher who had the courage to show me a different world.
This country feels so awful right now for teachers and librarians and professors and administrators and others who work with students. There was another mass shooting at a high school yesterday; my heart is in my throat every day when my kids leave for school, and I cannot imagine how hard it is to work at a school in a time like this. You can get fired for having the wrong books on your classroom shelves in some districts. In others, police are investigating librarians for distributing “pornography” because they have books about queer and trans kids. School board members face death threats for saying that teachers should be able to teach.
It was not easier in the 1990s for a teacher to hand a nerdy bookworm a new book about racial injustice and to write inside the cover, “I hope you enjoy this and are inspired by her as I was.” I did; I still am.
I’m also inspired by Ms. Snow, who rooted me and changed my life, and the lives of so many others. If you’re a teacher or a librarian or a professor, you don’t hear it enough, but the work you are doing matters. It matters for years. It matters for decades. It might even matter for generations.
On behalf of all of us whose lives you’ve changed: thank you.
"I receive your passion with so much love." What a beautiful way to put it!
What a beautiful essay, just as thousands of teachers and school personnel are returning to legions of students, wondering how/if/when they'll impact them. Thank you for bringing a tear to this [retired] school nurse's eye today.