Fuck You, Felice

            1965

             When in second grade at Holy Family Catholic School, our parish sponsored a track meet. A public school was invited to participate, which meant other kids, different kids. We imagined a day of races and breathlessness and screaming and showing off. For us, this was like God versus the Devil, only we didn’t have to go to Hell if we lost. Maybe.

At the center of our playground was a huge California live oak, near the slide and swings. On the day of the track meet, classes from their school and ours gathered beneath its spreading canopy, each class guarded by a teacher and pockets of parents. The jostle of fresh bodies, the sound of so many early morning voices, had a rhythm and a pulse. The public-school kids nervously bounced on their feet, just like us. They even looked like us.

Sister Manuela was at the center of the shade, with Sister Assumpta, the principal, nearby. I was in love with Sister Manuela and transfixed in that moment by the spotted-green oak light on her forehead and under her chin. I had daydreamed of what she might look like without the mystical clothes that covered all but her radiant face. Would she look like a mom? With lots of hair on her head? Candelario Luna said nuns didn’t have ears.

Once, I even wondered what it would be like if she kissed me. An all-inclusive fear—of hell, of god, of parental authority, of kissing and even the idea of kissing, but mostly of nuns—kept that image forever secret, never confessed.

Sister Manuela had the cap gun used to start the races. Only, she didn’t. Somehow, some way, my thin-lipped spastic cousin Marty had it. A non-Catholic kid must have snuck it off to another who then passed it around in the forest of kids while Sister Manuela wasn’t looking. Because any Holy Family kid would have known the penalty for doing something so egregious would-be pain, public pain.

Surely Marty would hand over that gun immediately.

Instead, he fired it off. The blast was shocking and sharp and magnificent. Sister Assumpta gasped while Sister Manuela expanded in size. With a voice like a baseball bat, she belted a command into the now-muted crowd:

“Who shot that that gun?”

My cousin, an epic and life-long coward, quickly passed the gun to my brother, Mike. I saw this because once the gun went off, I looked for my brother, because he was my brother. Manuela pressed into Mike with military power and pronounced with the benefit of no investigation whatsoever:

“You did this.”

Mike could have pointed to Marty and said no, Marty did it. But Mike bent his head, speechless, to the ground. Sister Manuela looked to Sister Assumpta who had only to slowly close her eyes to signal “go ahead.” With that, Sister Manuela instructed Mike to stretch out his hands, and she delivered about a dozen swift apocalyptic strokes of a hard wooden ruler across his palms. Terrorized kids looked on in frozen silence. Marty was a statue of fear. I hated him in that instant. He never admitted, then or later or a half-century later, his guilt.

Mike took the strokes, there was no choice. Sister Assumpta looked out over the scene, her eyes floating with the holy weightlessness of justice. The blur of that steel-edged ruler turned over and over in my tiny mind with no resolution and no meaning: the cap gun, Marty, my brother, a day turned dark. It was too much for a little altar boy to process. Nuns could not be wrong. Could they?

Other days came, and new memories made. There were new books, and coloring, and learning how to sing. We even got a map of the world, which was flat though Sister Manuela assured us the world was really round. I trusted her with an innocence that was only just beginning to bruise. She always asked me the hardest questions and smiled wide when I knew the answers.

I still loved Sister Manuela. I just didn’t know what love was.

1968

A few years later, our dad died and lots of things changed. We couldn’t stay in our house. Mom found a rental, or it was found for her—a tiny house on the edge of our grandpa’s ranch. We moved there.

Mom was never happy and cried a lot at night. In our new old house, she and my sister slept together in the sole bedroom, and us three boys slept in small beds lined up inside a lean-to against the house. This was a year when I got into a lot of playground fights.

Holy Family Catholic School closed that same year (too poor to stay open, we were told) and we were transferred to the other Catholic grade school in town, George McCann Memorial. No one at that school wanted “Holy Family Mexicans” wrecking their school and told us so. This was when I figured out not everyone liked Mexicans, as most kids at Holy Family had been, or charity cases, which my siblings and I now were.

At McCann, Sister Margaret was the principal. She was mean and powerful. Margaret despised all of us Holy Family kids straight away, and barely hid the fact. As brother Mike would recall it, Sister Margaret had a shit list and at the top were Irish, then Mexicans, then Portuguese, which is what we were. A shit list was among many new revelations, along with how you could get on such a list just for being you.

Sister Margaret marched up to me once at lunchtime and said, in front of benches full of boys, that there had been a vote and she wanted me to know the vote was against me. Then, she walked away. It didn’t occur to me to ask someone what kind of vote that might have been. I only knew it was against me, whatever “it” was, and so did my new classmates.

When Holy Family closed, Sister Assumpta moved over to George McCann Memorial, too. The nuns were losing their habits and changing their names: Sister Assumpta was now Sister Felice, the word for happiness. I still saw her as Assumpta, and my brother liked her even less without her layers of black drapery. In them, she had seemed otherworldly and wholly inaccessible, a dark spirit. Dressed in simple, no-nonsense civilian clothes, she looked like any random person might look. And that ordinariness made her all the more concretely hateable.

Mike made two fast friends straight away at George McCann: Larry McKendrick and Louis Bajarano. Larry was straight from Ireland; he had four siblings, a sickly mother, and no father. He came to live at our house most of the time. Louis was a good kid, quiet and friendly, devoted to Larry and Mike. On a fall morning before classes began, the three of them produced a fateful, short note:

“Fuck you, Felice.”

I don’t know that I had ever used that mighty word. I got a thrill out of cussing and often said hell and damn but not goddamn, which was walking a moral tightrope. “Fuck,” however, was distant, adult, and uncomfortable. When Mike, Larry and Louis come up with this note, it was a feat of realization: they made the word tangible and shared in its power by writing it down. When the school bell rang, the note was “somehow dropped” as the three ran to class. The note floated to the ground as if detached from the wings of Icarus.

Maybe the boys figured a student would pick up the note and take it straight to Sister Felice who would be grandly mortified and secretly tuck the note into her new gray skirt from Sears. But the God of Unfairness had other plans. The note was in fact picked up by a student, who took it straight to Sister Margaret.

Margaret interrupted one class after another, her pasty grocery-bag head entering first, followed by her tightly armored body. When she charged in, everyone stood at attention. When she got to the seventh grade, Mike, Larry, and Louis knew instinctively and simultaneously from her steaming face that the inconceivable had happened: Margaret had been given this note, read it, and now her fury would have a stage, a script, and a fantastic denouement.

She held up the note, a mere shoe-stained scrap, for all to see. She knew the guilty would recognize it, no need to read it. She choked it in her clenched, arthritic fist, and barked the question again. Still, no one answered. Yet three students in the class knew well who wrote it, and all three were focused on not peeing their pants, the floor, and the schoolyard until finally drowning in yellow humiliation.

“Who wrote this note?” She growled, she spat.

Eyes darted uncontrollably. Perspiration’s odor. Like animals in the wild, Catholic kids had evolved to run from predators. Unless like in the wild, that predator was in disguise.

“Who…wrote…this…note?” The words came slowly now, with mean breath blowing through clenched worn-down teeth. Devoid of patience and compassion in equal measure, it was time for intimidation.

Sister Margaret walked toward Louis, the only Mexican in the class. Mike made a turn, instinctively wishing to protect his friend. A mistake. Sister Margaret spun toward him and knifed him with her eyes: “You!” You Pordagee. “I knew as much.”

She stepped toward him like a gun. Louis was near gasping for breath, and Larry was vibrating. Mike would get a Biblical beating in front of the class. If he didn’t shoot pee like an arrow, it would be yet another miracle.

Before she could begin, while still flexing and posturing and summoning the wrath of her feckless thug of a God, Larry stood up:

“I did it,” he whispered.

Sister Margaret spun yet again, somehow not at all disappointed. Really, it was Larry she wanted to beat. The little Irishman. The Prize. And she did beat him.

Larry took the blows, while all went silent. Others were baffled at such fury and prayed it would never befall them. None could believe what they saw—Larry didn’t cry.

Mike was pale with a worse kind of pain, one for which he had no word.

None of the three great friends would ever say who among them had actually physically written that note, but I knew it was Mike. From deep inside, for years, he had wished to curse Felice with the strongest curse he could summon. When dad died, the unfairness of his death had been unbearable. For Mike, the shape of unfairness belonged to the withered, anemic face of Sister Assumpta, aka Felice.

Curse her he did—in print, no less: “Fuck you, Felice.”

And justice again proved itself illusory. The curse had been stupidly “lost,” then found as any scrap of interest would be, and fate demanded that a best friend take the blame, the beating, and the humiliation.

2021

            Live, and boxes of junk stack up around you. At first, they’re in a room, maybe under your bed. Then in the closets of your own house, or in the garage. They wind up forgotten in an attic.

            It was finally time to get serious about ridding myself of stuff. My research library could go to a university, and off it went; my personal archive, with pages and photos already yellowing, could be scanned. Done. Anything still useful could be donated—dusty furniture from houses that never seemed to fit the next house in the next state. Gone to charity.

            In among the dust and molding boxes of my own attic was a slim blue file, one carried across country and across a lifetime, as if saving its biographical contents had some ultimate purpose. I had to smile—no memoir for me. Things had not turned out that way, though over the years I once in a while thought they might.

            Picking up that old, time-rubbed clutch of papers, I could only think that I had mostly done my best. That I had loved my friends and family, worked hard, and even if mine were not a life I cared to write about, not anymore, anyway, it at least had been one of ideas and poetry, books and talking. It had been a privilege, really, to serve so many over so many years. That was something to be proud of—a selfish feeling quickly tamped down. After, all, I had received as much or more as I ever gave.

            Almost on cue, a small brown envelope fell from the blue file. In it were report cards, somehow not musty, not brittle. On top was my report card from the Diocese of Monterey-Fresno, Holy Family School, for the year 1964–1965.

            Opened up, there were handwritten grades, including for penmanship, now a lost art. To the right of the list of graded subjects was a note. It was written to my mom, from Sister Manuela:

            It has been a pleasure to teach William and a joy to have in my class. My only  recommendations are that you encourage him to pursue books like treasures, to share his talents with his classmates, and above all to accept and use the talents God has given him with humility based on love of God and neighbor.

                                                                                                            SM

            Then, something creaked in the attic. Perhaps it was the sound of old wood beneath me.

Perhaps it was my heart.

Will South received his doctorate in art history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1994, specializing in early modern American art. He has published widely in the field of American impressionism, including In Nature’s Temple: The Life and Art of William Wendt for the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, California, 2008; California Impressionism for Abbeville Press, 1998; and Guy Rose: American Impressionist, for the Oakland Museum of California Art, 1995. Another area of interest is African American art. In 2010, he published Marking the Past/Shaping the Present: The Art of Willis Bing Davis, an exhibition catalogue on this internationally recognized painter, sculptor, community activist and educator.

In Columbia, SC, South served as the Chief Curator for the Columbia Museum of Art. His last show for the CMA was the large-scale project, Van Gogh and His Inspirations, an exhibition, with a catalogue, that opened in October 2019. While officially a part of the museum world, he lectured regularly from coast to coast on various aspects of American art, gave regular television and radio interviews, and was a popular tour guide for the museum’s permanent collection as well as for traveling shows. Now, as an unofficial part of the art world, South works from home where he continues to organize exhibitions. His most current project is on the draftsman, Charles White, for the Lowe Art Museum in Miami.

Throughout his museum career, South led an alternate life as a visual artist. His latest exhibition, at the Rob Shaw Gallery in West Columbia in 2021, featured figures and faces inspired by the isolation incurred during the pandemic. South continues to write, including a script that is scheduled to be filmed in 2022, as well as short fiction. Quarantining inside his home resulted not only in stacks of paintings and drawings, but in a couple dozen shorts, and two novels.