KinkyAg's Spanking Stories

Chuck Wagon Steak

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:59:53 GMT

Chuck Wagon Steak

Lunchtime promised no treat at Salvation Baptist School. Each day we ate the same variety of cheap processed beef, purchased in bulk and stored for months in the cafeteria's huge walk-in freezer. Monday's menu advertised Chuck Wagon Steak, Tuesday's Pepper Steak, Wednesday's Western Fried Steak, Thursday's Salisbury Steak, and Friday's Chicken Fried Steak. The next week the names changed but the same slab of greasy mystery meat appeared on our molded plastic lunch trays. Nutritional balance manifested itself as canned peaches one day, canned pears the next, canned potatoes the next--served from the same kind of ten-gallon containers that provisioned prisons and army mess halls.

If you worked in the kitchen, you appreciated the size of those aluminum cans. In the frugal Protestant tradition, our cafeteria staff allowed no food wastage, to the extent of serving from a partially opened can of pears that had stood uncovered and unmolested in the refrigerator room for the entire Christmas break.   A single slice of unbuttered white Sunbeam bread completed the meal, along with that half-pint of white milk that the teachers required us to drink to the last drop. If you didn't, they wrote down your name and denied you the week's lone treat, a carton of chocolate milk served only on Fridays.

From time to time our colored cook with a third-grade education, Francis, wanted to concoct something special. Her efforts usually fell victim to a veto by our white, college-trained dietitian, Mrs. Dobson, who calculated a "daily cost to feed' as if she were a defense department contractor extracting maximum profit from a congressional appropriation. She insured the bland taste of our daily cuisine by denying us elementary school kids those little paper packets of salt and pepper. She feared we'd have salt and pepper wars.   Or, worse, the grease left by a half-eaten Chuck Wagon Steak would cause those packets to adhere to the lunch trays. That would clog the dishwasher's drainpipes, a frequent occurrence that our cafeteria manager blamed on the indolence of the high school kids on work scholarship who staffed the scullery. Mrs. Dobson was always fussing at them, either for failing to knock the residue completely from of the plastic trays or for hitting them too hard against the galvanized garbage can, shattering the trays into pieces.

One morning Francis convinced her boss to allow her to prepare a large vat of a New Orleans culinary tradition, red beans and rice. That's as far as tradition went, as Mrs. Dobson intervened, making it truly a meal to forget. In any respectable Louisiana kitchen, a sizable hunk of pickled meet, smoked sausage, or Andouille exudes its juices in the pot where red beans and rice simmers. Bay leaf, thyme, or some other seasoning complements the flavor, together with generous amounts of salt, pepper, and Tabasco. Mrs. Dobson was having none of this: "No, Francis, you can't add meat," she scolded. "That would cost too much and those kids would never appreciate the flavor. And lay off of the spices. Young, undeveloped taste buds will never favor any kind of seasoning, and we'll wind up with garbage pails full of red beans and rice."

As the bland concoction boiled in the huge industrial pot, Francis simmered on the inside. "Who ever heard of red beans 'n' rice without spicin'?," she muttered under her breath. "Even dose white babies is used to salt, pepper and hot sauce at home!" The next year, fed up with Mrs. Dobson, Francis took a job with a small Creole restaurant where she eventually became head chef.

Perhaps my reaction that day cemented her decision to quit. Admonished by my fourth-grade teacher to "clean your plate," I projectile vomited partially digested red beans and rice--mixed with white milk--all over the table, my classmates, and myself. While the teachers cleaned the smelly mess from the nostrils, earlobes, and eye sockets of the other little boys and girls, the Negro janitor answered an urgent call to mop the floor and wipe the table. The incident earned me a trip home via the school nurse's office. She didn't even examine me to see if I had been faking it.   In the judgment of our sage school administration, any kid who upchucked savory Salvation Baptist cafeteria cuisine must indeed be sick. It never occurred to them that the mess Mrs. Dobson served was damned near inedible.

I wish I had been sick on one memorable afternoon.   That was the day when one of my classmates decided that a particularly deserving offering of Chuck Wagon Steak should find a final resting place on the lunchroom floor. The kid almost got away with it, save for the sharp eye of our teacher, Mrs. Bumfuzzle, whose young husband was studying to be a minister of music at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. She had grown up in a small town in northern Mississippi, daughter of a local justice of the peace and Baptist church deacon. Her daddy, a child of the depression, enforced a strict family rule: take all you can eat but eat all you take. Mrs. Bumfuzzle wasn't quite sure whether that was found in the King James Bible, one of daddy's law books, or whether it was a holdover from his World War II army service--but she intended to pass along the wisdom to her young pupils.

Cutting short our lunchtime recess, our teacher ushered us back to the classroom, commanded total silence, and then told us to put our heads down--our noses touching the tops of our school desks. I knew somebody had committed a grave sin. Only once before had they punished us this way, the day that the principal announced President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and my classmates responded with cheers and applause. Even in the racist environment of an all-white Louisiana private school in the 1960s, that was a no-no. No matter how much our parents railed at home against the "uppity niggers who won't stay in their place" and those "damned, pointed-head liberal, white agitators from up north who are stirring them up," our teachers considered it downright unchristian and unpatriotic to cheer the assassination of a president--even if he was a civil rights advocate.

We had to keep our noses on the desk for at least fifteen minutes on that memorable Friday afternoon in late November, and on the next Monday the principal fussed at us over the P.A. system. This time, the saga of the jettisoned mystery meat would consume our whole afternoon. Mrs. Bumfuzzle was determined to extract a confession, the first step in a painful repentance process that our morally minded young teacher had in mind for the, as yet, unidentified young miscreant.

Tap, tap, tap, went the sound of the white pine paddle, its business end lightly impacting the palm of Mrs. Bumfuzzle's smartly manicured hand left. Click, click, click, sounded her high heels on the linoleum floor tiles, as she paced up and down the aisles between our rows of school desks.   As she walked past us, her back turned momentarily, a few of my braver classmates momentarily dared to lift their heads to steal a glace at the "rod of correction," as our some of our more scripturally inclined faculty put it.   In secular school parlance it was the junior paddle, measuring some twenty-one inches from handle to end. High school teachers and the coaches chastised older students with a larger and more fearsome looking implement, the senior paddle, a dastardly weapon that we elementary school kids knew of only through school legend. Each September that was the first project tackled in woodshop: manufacturing the year's quota of spanking sticks. Corporal punishment was in vogue at Salvation Baptist School, and why not? It's in the bible! Spare the rod and, well, you know . . .

Tap, tap, tap the paddle sounded; click, click, click went her jackboots, as Mrs. Bumfuzzle pontificated on the importance of fessing up to one's sins. The Apostle Paul said women shouldn't speak up in church very much, so our denomination forbad them from becoming ordained ministers. Instead, Southern Baptist women preached in other venues. Our teacher's sermon this day concerned accountability and the inevitability of consequences. She made it clear that that we'd never be allowed to raise our noses from the desk until the guilty one confessed--even if that meant keeping us in after the school bell. God knew the identity of the child who threw that delicious, nutritious hunk of manna from heaven on the floor, which Divine Providence had provided through the Salvation Baptist school cafeteria at a pittance of thirty-five cents. It was high time for the ingrate to own up and receive well-deserved comeuppance.

Tap, tap, tap.   Click click, click. The cadence droned on. In the ten-year-old mind, minutes stretched into hours. The pressure built and some of us were already cracking emotionally. A few sobs interrupted the odd rhythm of paddle taps and heel clicks. We dreaded the sound that would surely follow, the rod of correction's sharp crack on the flesh of an unfortunate derriere.   Woodshop students had drilled a series of holes in the business end and cut several v-shaped notches along the periphery. That prompted spirited debate among the boys at recess. Those bound for university studies in the physical sciences theorized that the holes mitigated aerodynamic drag, allowing the paddle to impact the upturned buttocks at a greater and consequentially more painful velocity. Others, destined to study biology or medicine, knew the tenderest area of one's bottom after a spanking was where the paddle's abrupt edge had impacted the flesh. Drilled holes and cut notches elongated the "edge space," making a whipping that much more painful and memorable. As for myself, destined for a less lucrative future in the humanities or social sciences, I thought some sadistic paddle engineer designed those features for psychological effect--making the diabolical instrument appear much more scary and intimidating. Our classmates headed for blue-collar trades just said the damn thing hurt like hell.

After what seemed an eternity, I lost it. Tears streamed from my eyes. I broke the silence with an impassioned plea for our teacher to let some steam out of this pressure cooker. I couldn't take it any more, I sobbed. I didn't do it, so why did I have to suffer this inquisition?
That was a mistake. Instead of feeling sorry for me, Mrs. Bumfuzzle took my outburst as an impending admission of guilt. Just a little more persistence on her part, she reasoned, and I'd confess my sin. Then she could put the rod of correction to its proper use. Her cold green eyes projected a menacing, laser-like stare, cutting through my tears, penetrating my corneas and burning a hole in the back of my head. All of a sudden, I was the prime suspect. The other boys and girls seemed uplifted; they, too, thought I was guilty, and that got them off the hook. What had I done? Why couldn't I have been braver? In our 1960s code of boyhood chivalry, I was supposed to refrain from crying in class by the fourth grade. Most of the girls were taking this ordeal better then me. Now our teacher shortened her orbit, circling the row where my desk sat like a shark that smelled blood in the water.

Tap, tap, tap. Click, click, click.

Then God intervened.

Beverly, our class's only Catholic and our honor student, stood and proclaimed: "I did it! I threw that retched meat on the floor! I just couldn't stand it! I hate that greasy, smelly stuff! I never want to eat it again!"

Not a tear appeared in her eyes, although I could detect a slight quiver in her knees as thirty pair of eyeballs focused on her. She remained defiant nonetheless. Even Mrs. Bumfuzzle seemed taken aback. Not Beverly! Not the girl who wore a golden crucifix on a metal chain, who made perfect scores on spelling and math tests alike, and whose impeccable manners almost made up for her refusal to walk down the aisle at chapel services to make a profession of faith. Our teachers so fervently wanted Beverly to forsake her cradle Catholicism in favor of evangelical Christianity, to get saved, thereby assuring her place in heaven.

Who could have believed it? Nothing this shocking had happened during my short school career, perhaps not in the history of American elementary education since a nineteenth century Becky Thatcher fearfully admitted tearing a page of the teacher's anatomy book. No latter-day Tom Sawyer sprang to his feet that day to refute her confession and take her whipping. Standing almost a head taller than most of her classmates, her golden blonde hair braded in two symmetrical ponytails that stretched three-quarters of the way down to her waist, Beverly extended her hand to Mrs. Bumfuzzle's.

The teacher, holding the paddle in her right hand and guiding Beverly with her left, gently marched the young offender out of the classroom and down the hall to the ladies room. There she inflicted chastisement with a degree of solemnity and dignity befitting a good student who made an unfortunate choice.

We could hear the loud, rythmic pop of pine meeting flesh all the way down the hall. But Beverly fought the urge to cry out and took the whipping stoically. Silent defiance characterized her countenance. No matter how many times Mrs. Bumfuzzle applied the rod of correction to her little bottom, nothing could make Beverly penitent. Tears streamed from her eyes but not a whimper came out of her mouth.

I supposed Mrs. Bumfuzzle elected to ignore her young pupil's defiant words, so compliantly did Beverly accept her punishment. If it had been one of us, we'd have been bent over the desk, whacked in front of our peers' gawking, silver-dollar size eyeballs, and verbally chastised to boot.

Beverly's parents, both university teachers, pulled her out of Salvation Baptist the next semester and enrolled their child in a school that put more emphasis on intellectual development than dogmatic, biblical discipline. I don't know whether her new school had a better cafeteria. As for me, I took care to eat my Chuck Wagon Steak, or whatever it was called that day, down to the last fat-laden crumb. I had learned my lesson.

The Long Invitational

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 04:33:47 GMT

The Long Invitational

Here I sit, ten years old, squirming on the hardest of hardwood pews, my Sunday-go-to-meetin' clothes in shambles. My collar button ripped off during a tussle in Sunday school, where three weeks ago my only clip-on tie vanished under similar circumstances. My shirttail has been out since just before they passed the collection plate, and I've wiped my runny nose on my sleeve so often that it's drenched and sticky. Momma quit trying to make me behave an hour ago. She now acts like I'm some orphaned waif who snuck into the services. When we get home, she'll probably set my bottom on fire, but for now she pretends she doesn't know me.

I fidget restlessly as the choir begins its forty-third repetition of Just As I Am. Most are still singing, but some of their throats dried up during the thirty-ninth verse. Brother Paul begins the second half hour of his invitational, a new record for white bible-believing churches in Louisiana. For those of who don't know, we Southern Baptists focus intently on salvation. That means going to heaven, but we really stress avoiding hell.

The Sunday morning appeal comes in two stages. First, Brother Paul preaches a hellfire-and-damnation sermon, designed to scare the wits out of the unsaved. Then comes the invitational, during which those frightened into repentance receive the opportunity to walk up the aisle and whisper their profession of faith to the preacher, to which Brother Paul responds with a resounding: "Praise the Lord!" At some churches, Just As I Am lasts for only three or four verses. Our minister thinks differently, believing that sinners should receive every opportunity to wrestle with the devil. So his appeal to lost souls goes on forever, at least in the mind of a ten year old.

How can Momma expect me to sit still during this endless petition to fear? Wasn't this morning's sermon long enough? In his typical doomsday parlance, our pastor warned that the "brittle thread of life will snap," after which the unsaved will "plunge into the eternal lake of fire." He described the legions of fire-singed damned, screaming for Lazarus to dip his finger in some of heaven's cooling waters, to let a thirst quenching drop fall on their parched tongues. Of course, their screams resonate in vain. No remedy awaits the scorched soul of a condemned sinner! My childish mind wanders, conjuring up a different reason for Lazarus's inaction. He isn't unsympathetic; he's just not listening. He gallivants nonstop up there on Cloud Nine, flirting with some of the more buxom angels. As a leper back in New Testament times, Lazarus didn't have many girlfriends, and now he makes up for missed opportunities.

Next, Brother Paul foretells the Rapture, when lost souls will face the terror of pilot-less airliners, runaway eighteen-wheelers, and doctors who suddenly get sucked up into heaven while performing open-heart surgery. Poof! Boy, I'd really like to see a driverless truck run off the road and smash into a bridge abutment. Crash! That would be so cool! And how'd you like to be the lead surgical nurse when that heaven-bound doctor ascends through the roof of the operating room, penetrates the upper nineteen floors of Mercy Hospital, and then disappears into the clouds? Shaken, Nurse Wilson collects her wits, completes the operation, and stitches up the patient--just like she's seen the doctor do many times. As for me, I want to be the passenger who lands the plane. I make the smoothest landing since the days of Wilbur and Orville, and then the passengers break out in thunderous applause.

You see, I've already decided that, if indeed a second coming occurs, God will pass me by. My behavior at church is usually abominable, and I just can't swallow this "getting saved" stuff. Besides, if hell actually exists, it can't be all that bad. I've already endured three years of preaching services at Salvation Baptist Church and relentless pressure at our associated Christian school.

Oh, those young born-again elementary school teachers; they're really on fire with the gospel! Most are wives of student preachers at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. They strive to Christianize the whole student body, and lately I've become their pet project. I'm the only kid in the fourth grade who hasn't walked up that aisle and made a profession of faith. Maybe one day I'll give in and tell them I've accepted Christ as my personal savior, just so they'll leave me along.

In the meantime, I must conform to their bizarre pedagogical methods. A couple of months ago, I got all of my spelling words right, which doesn't happen very often in my case. But when my test paper came back, a big, fat, red 99 appeared next to my name in the upper right-hand corner. Since I hadn't missed one word, I asked my young teacher why I deserved less than a 100 percent. "Only Jesus was perfect," she admonished.

As the invitational draws to an end, it seems one-third of the congregation has come forward, either to make tearful professions of faith or rededicate their lives to Christ. One guy slobbers all over Brother Paul's suit coat, and cries out so loud that even the most ardent true believers exchange tortured glances. This particular pain in the ass gets saved every week, despite the fact that our Sunday school teacher says you have to do it only once. That's the beauty of Southern Baptist doctrine. No matter how much you backslide, once you get saved you always go to heaven. Of course, if you screw up too much, the old ladies in the pews--or the prissy little girls in your fourth-grade class--will whisper that you really weren't saved in the first place.

I haven't always been this skeptical. At age seven, I shook when the preacher described the horrors of hell. By eight and a half, I started having my doubts. Now, at the wise old age of ten, I regard the whole notion as horse feathers. Will God condemn some fifty billion ancient Chinese to the scorching torture of eternal perdition because they never accepted Jesus, when not one of them ever heard of the bible? Will he let the thief on the cross, who admittedly led a rather riotous life, into heaven because of his last-second conversion, while condemning Ghandi to hell because he never accepted Jesus? For that matter, will Mother Theresa roast in flames because she subscribed to the Catholic idea of Christianity, rather than brother Paul's evangelical Protestant admonition to accept Christ as one's "personal savior?"

If so, I'm not sure I want to go to that God's heaven.

When, I mentioned the Chinese problem to my Sunday school teacher, he uncomfortably mumbled something about the Holy Spirit manifesting itself to the unchurched. But Mr. Dial A. Bible-Verse uttered no scriptural reference to back it up. Usually he's pretty handy with a passage from one of the Gospels or from the Apostle Paul. On this subject, he's probably as uncomfortable as I am, but we both know that professing skeptics don't stay in good graces around here. His wife would make his life miserable, as would Momma with me if I ever expressed a contrarian's attitude. So we keep our doubts to ourselves.

That doesn't stop me from rebelling inwardly. I still laugh when I remember the pained look on Miss Willingham's face in Vacation Bible School, when my little guest from the federally subsidized housing project matter-of-factly responded to a question about her father: "My grandma says that my daddy wasn't worth the bullet that sent him to hell." Red-faced, our teacher tried to shush our giggles by changing the subject. That marked the end of my family's gospel outreach program to the lower social class.

It's a good thing Mrs. Willingham hasn't heard Uncle Leo talk at family reunions. Grandpa's brother says life won't be so bad in hell, because most of our friends and relatives will be there--especially both of his ex-wives. Leo wouldn't mind getting a little warm himself, just to see those bitches roast at the end of the devil's pitchfork. Momma doesn't approve of that kind of talk, and usually makes me go out and play when the adults get liquored up, profane, and irreverent.

Well, the invitational finally finishes, and the choir quits singing just before its members come down with a terminal case of laryngitis. Perspiration-soaked Brother Paul, the shoulders of his suit coat wet with the tears and nasal mucus of the newly saved, revels in the joy of a couple dozen souls who are now destined for eternal paradise. However, he reminds them that, until their bodies rest on the other side of the grass, they need to tithe their ten percent. In case Jesus came into their hearts after the offering, there will be a collection box available as they head out of the door.

Now church is finally over. Mark Twain once described church lettin' out as the weekly event that liberates a kid's soul. Well, we already know where my soul is going, but with regard to my ten-year-old body, there's nothing more refreshing than having that invisible seatbelt unbuckled, and then bolting off of that hardwood pew. I play grab-ass with other kids in the foyer; they're just as happy to be free. Of course, after momma gets finished with me at home I may be sleeping on my tummy for the next couple of days, and if she ever reads these words she'll wash my mouth out with soap. But my whippin's at least an hour in the future, and of little immediate concern in my childish mind.

She could blister my bottom every day for the next week, and the pain wouldn't nearly match the ordeal I'll face next Sunday. Then I'll have to endure another longwinded preaching service and everlasting invitational. I wonder how many previously hell-bound sinners will get saved next week, and how much money this week's converted will drop in the collection box. After all, that's the purpose of this sanctimonious horse flogging, isn't it?

Shotgun Houses, Stolen Childhood, part 1

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 05:04:10 GMT

Louisiana Shotgun House, circa 1950

Shotgun Houses, Stolen Childhood
Part 1

I grew up in a blue-collar suburb of New Orleans, farmland that had been subdivided in my grandparents’ youth and subsequently dotted with nondescript, shotgun-style houses. These narrow, single-story homes without halls took shape as Depression-era residents added one room at a time, as they could afford to build them without the luxury of a bank loan. As the name implies, if somebody discharged a shotgun at one end, the pellets would take out everybody in the house.

In the late 1950s and early 60s, the era of my childhood and adolescence, air conditioning was just appearing in the American South. Every once in a while, somebody would install a window unit. But the builders of these houses knew nothing about insulation, making those noisy, inefficient, electricity-sucking cooling machines an expensive and wasteful luxury. For the most part, we relied on high ceilings, big wood-frame windows, and powerful whole-house fans to keep us as comfortable as possible during the muggy, suffocating, ten-month southern summers.

Wide open windows and doors, and pier-and-beam foundations that raised these houses several feet off of the ground in order to escape frequent flooding, made every family’s life an open book. When a husband and wife got into an argument, everybody in the neighborhood heard the details. If a young couple’s marital passion floated on the magnolia-scented late evening breezes, the gossipy neighbor women speculated about the stork’s scheduled arrival in nine months. Likewise, when a dad’s belt landed on our juvenile posteriors, its smacks and our cries could be heard at the other end of the block. The evening’s spankings became our first item of discussion as we kids gathered at the school bus stop the next morning.

It wasn’t always this way. The original Irish, Italian, and German immigrants lived far enough apart so as to retain a sense of privacy. As the South industrialized in the booming, postwar era, and its children turned away from farming and subdivided their inheritance, new shotgun houses sprang up almost overnight.

With all of these long, narrow houses situated close to each other, the stay-at-home mothers of the late 1950s maintained an efficient neighborhood surveillance system. Multiple sets of maternal eyeballs tracked every move we kids made, sight lines unblocked by even a single fence on the entire block.

There were few secrets to be kept in Old Metairie, where everybody knew everyone else’s business, and no incidence of juvenile mischief—or family discord—went unobserved or escaped neighborly comment.

* * *

Then one spring a contractor began building a different kind of house on the vacant lot behind ours. Its cement slab foundation, brick veneer siding, and composite shingled roof not only threatened the architectural monotony of our neighborhood, but its social structure as well. With double-pane windows, fiberglass insulation, and doors that sealed firmly into aluminum frames, what transpired inside became nobody’s business. A couple could argue vociferously, make passionate love, or firmly discipline a recalcitrant child, and what happened in the family stayed in the family.

This marked the beginning of the anonymous middle-class American neighborhood, studied by sociologists and rued by journalistic commentators in the decades that followed. Neighbors in their cookie-cutter tract homes lived next to each other for years, drove off to their city jobs during the week, and to diverse, distant churches on Sunday--and never introduced themselves to each other. But the appearance of the first such bunker house in our neighborhood really didn’t change much—at least, not at the beginning.

Any curiosity we kids had about parental discipline in the Laningham family quickly disappeared when the voluptuous, red-headed mom, Wanda, poked her head out of the door to threaten her six- and eight-year old cherubs, in her Georgia-accented voice that carried across the neighborhood, with a “panties-down whoopin.” No, we never heard the subsequent smacks; that happened inside that soundproof, window-shaded vault that passed for a home.

Wanda Laningham was a dish, even in my ten-year-old mind. Her auburn hair, arranged in a high-stacked bouffant, signaled her temperament. She and each of her daughters bore copious freckles on their faces and forearms. We boys wondered whether the Laningham girls sported freckles on their butts—and whether they’d change color when mom applied the wooden spoon that she often held in her hand when she shouted those spanking threats across the neighborhood.

Wanda’s large, perky breasts didn’t sag an inch. Sometimes, in the deepest recess of my forbidden thoughts, I wondered if those boobs bounced up and down when Wanda wielded the wooden spoon, a redheaded munchkin positioned, bare-bottom, over her knees.

We kids found another problem with their house. Because the Laninghams had strung a chain-link, hurricane fence around a large portion of what had once become the de facto neighborhood football field, we as the youngest residents of the neighborhood felt dispossessed of our traditional stomping grounds. Finally, it was decided that one of us should ask permission to use that large enclosed back yard for its original purpose. As I was the oldest member of the neighborhood rat pack, guess who received the assignment?

* * *

One fall afternoon after school, just a couple months after the Laninghams moved into the first brick house in the neighborhood, I hesitantly shuffled up the concrete walkway. Clad in my sweat-soaked t-shirt, short pants and black U.S. Keds with white socks, I felt like an unwelcome interloper as I approached their front door. Reaching up to push the newfangled electric doorbell button, I wondered if this redheaded Amazon would answer the door with her wooden spoon in hand.

A blast of central air conditioning struck me in the face. As I looked into the open door to see Wanda Laningham looking down at me, I wondered how people could live in such polar conditions. It was as cold as a meat locker in there. We Louisiana kids were accustomed to 90-degree days soaked in 90-percent humidity. If we were lucky, it got down into the 80s on sweltering summer nights. We usually felt air conditioning only when our moms took us to the downtown New Orleans department stores.

“Well, hello young man,” she said in a slow, pleasant southern drawl. “What can I do for you?”

No, she wasn’t carrying the wooden spoon. Nevertheless, I found myself mesmerized by this tall, buxom redhead. She stood barefooted, her fingernails and toenails painted in the same orange-red hue. A tight-fitting red tank top clung to her, leaving nothing to be imagined about her cleavage. The shortest of white shorts extended only one-third of he way down from her waist to her knees. Her forelegs, both above and below the knee, sported a huge crop of reddish, orange freckles. There was not doubt she was her daughters’ mother.

Only half her size, I stood there looking straight into her belly button. I let my eyes drop and wondered how it would feel to be taken across those long, shapely, freckled legs, firmly positioned for an over-the-knee spanking. I fantasized looking down through my tears at her brightly polished toenails, my short pants and undies down around my ankles, one of her large hands pinned to the small of my back while those long fingers on her other hand wrapped themselves tightly around a wooden spoon that delivered lick after painful lick to my sore, flaming bare flesh.

I could hardly find the words as I looked up into her effervescent smile, as she patiently waited for me to compose my request.

“Uh, good afternoon, ma’am, uh, my name is David,” I finally stammered, “and I live in the house across your back fence.”

“Well, hello little David,” Wanda spoke pleasantly. “Have you been a good boy today?”

Wow! I had only spoken one sentence and already Wonder Woman was inquiring about my behavior.

“Yes, ma’am. Me and the boys were wondering, you know, since we used to play football in the field that you fenced off—well, would you mind if we still played back there after school and on weekends?”

She paused a bit, her hazel eyes seeming to inspect me from top to bottom, as if she could do a character evaluation with a cursory examination.

“Well,” I suppose, David. “Of course, y’all are gonna have to be real good, understand? No fightin’, no cussin’, and the first time somebody breaks a window, there’s gonna be a peck of trouble. Do you understand me, David?”

“Yyyes, ma’am.

I got the words out, but my mind was still stuck on that business about the consequences of breaking a window. Luckily, we southern children always had a fallback when we felt lost for words. Since we were old enough to talk, our parents insisted we reply with “ma’am” and “sir” to every adult inquiry, just to show the proper respect. When I moved up north as an older child, the teachers discouraged such perfunctory courtesy, preferring instead to judge our deportment by the way we acted. I understood. Too often we southern kids hoped to escape or at least mitigate our transgressions by appending all of the trappings of deferential courtesy to a weak alibi.

“Now before you and your friends start playing, you make sure to knock on my back door. You can come in the back gate without permission, but you made sure I know you’re here. Hear?”

“Yes ma’am.” Then she said something that got my belly quivering.

“And I’m real serious about you boys not misbehaving. I’m holding you responsible, David. I give good spankings, understand?”

Wow. I don’t recall how the rest of the conversation went. After a remark like that, how could I remember any of the mundane details?

Continued

Shotgun Houses, Stolen Childhood, part 2

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 05:02:05 GMT

Modern Electroshock Therapy uses sedatives and low voltage. In the 1950s, it was brutal.

Shotgun Houses, Stolen Childhood
Part 2

Although I lived in a typical southern working class neighborhood, I wasn’t a typical neighborhood kid. Several incidents in my early childhood marked me as distinct from my peers.

The Italians, Germans, and Irish who settled our city hundreds of years ago differed in their customs, but they endured a common economic and religious environment. The hardscrabble existence that preceded Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society mandated survival before comfort. The welfare state was much less providential in those days, and if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. These were no-nonsense, hardworking people. They had no alternative.

Also, the Roman Catholic Church still cast its vast influence over simple, poorly educated American parishioners. People still genuinely feared going to hell. Remarriage after divorce was a mortal sin in Catholic theology, forever prohibiting you from receiving the Eucharist. Unlike today, the Church didn’t hand out annulments like candy.

A modestly educated woman had no way to support herself if she left an abusive spouse, and she faced societal condemnation if she remarried. Thus, many tortured couples simply endured bad marriages. My mom wasn’t afforded even that scant degree of protection, and that’s what set me apart from my playmates and branded me with a big question mark.

I still remember that early June day in 1959, when though the frightened eyes of a six year old, I viewed my mother--still clad in her pajamas, crying the most anguished of tears and wailing in slurred speech--being carried out of the house by her father and mother. They loaded her in the cab of grandpa’s ancient pre-war pickup truck and drove off to Charity Hospital, the large public facility that treated the teeming masses, especially those like us who had neither money nor insurance. I didn’t see Mom for several months, while my aged grandparents tried their best to give me a normal upbringing.

Over the years, I found out, bit by it, what happened that day--but nosey neighbors didn’t require such a learning curve. They came out on the sidewalk and hung out of their windows as the spectacle unfolded, gawking, pointing, and passing judgment on our family.

Throughout high school, my pious mother had entertained thoughts of becoming a nun. Upon graduation, she entered the novitiate run by a St. Louis-based order, its convent situated on the banks of the Mississippi River. When she left New Orleans for the religious life, Monsignor and practically the whole parish had seen her off at the train station.

But as that first cold Missouri winter passed, the young lady who would give me life looked across the river to the Illinois side, where she saw smoke curling out of tiny chimneys. She knew in her heart that a life of celibate service to the Lord was not her calling; instead, she craved the hearth of family life represented by those modest little cottages. When she returned to New Orleans, after a chilly interview with Mother Superior, nobody but her own mother met the train.

A few years later, Mother gave up a promising undergraduate career in English at Loyola University, a Jesuit college, to pursue a curriculum leading to a Ph. T., “putting hubby through” medical school. Her dream of marriage and a family was falling into place; she would become a doctor’s wife!

Then my dad saw a path not only out of his lower-middle class existence, but also an escape route from an unhappy marriage. After obtaining his M.D. and enduring an exhausting internship, he took up a residency in military medicine. From a distant army post that June morning, he placed an operator assisted long-distance call. Pushbutton direct dialing came along a decade later.

He wanted a divorce.

* * *

Nervous breakdowns in that era prompted psychological care that can best be described as primitive and brutal. Anyone who has read Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or has seen the movie, understands the barbarism of late 1950s electroshock treatment. That’s what the doctors did to my mother. They shocked her, over and over again, until they broke her. Then, when she no longer sobbed in self-pity, they deemed her “cured.”

A few months later grandpa’s rattletrap pickup truck carried her home, and Mom emerged to scoop me up in her arms. But her problems had not ended. She took up drinking to relieve the pressures of single motherhood and the rock-bottom pay doled out to female clerical workers of that epoch. Bosses expected young women typists to quit in favor of marriage at any time, and they paid accordingly. But my mother’s marriage card had already been played.

We moved in with grandma and grandpa, who lived on the same block, while a “for sale” sign adorned the lawn of the shotgun house we could no longer afford. That provided some sense of stability, but did not calm Mom’s emotional turmoil. But the move may have saved my life, or at least my hearing.

One evening, I came down with a painful earache. No all-night pharmacies existed back then, nor did doctors have 24-hour answering services. The hospital’s emergency room was available, but was considered out of the question for an economically depressed family with no health insurance. In those days, emergency rooms didn’t have to treat those with routine ailments who couldn’t pay.

I cried for several hours from the searing pain, and then there ensued an even greater commotion. As I can piece together the blurred memories of that evening, first grandma and then grandpa wrestled my mother away from me. They were making a lot of loud noise.

In the spoiled judgment of a drunken stupor, Mom was trying to cure my earache by pouring a bottle of nail polish remover into my infected ear. She didn’t mean to hurt me, but she certainly picked the wrong vial from the medicine cabinet. My grandmother had been watching her like a hawk, and fortunately prevented tragedy.

Like always, the windows of that shotgun house were wide open and the commotion became everybody’s business. That evening, something out of the ordinary happened for that epoch. A Jefferson Parish deputy sheriff appeared on grandpa’s front poach, the rotating red beacon on his car announcing his presence by flickering into every house on the block.

* * *

How does anyone explain to a little boy that the neighborhood kids can’t play with him because their parents think his mother is crazy? For a couple of years, no children dared set foot on our property, under penalty of a severe whipping from their parents. Only my grandparents’ long-term standing in the community mitigated the ostracizing. Although I could still visit a few other neighborhood children under the watchful eye of their parents, the adults seemed to look at me with sad eyes as they shook their heads.

When my mom’s car wouldn’t start one morning for her daily journey to work, and my grandpa had already left for day shift, I had a hard time soliciting any of the husbands in the neighborhood to look under the hood. A divorced woman, especially a drunk, insane one, was a threat to the married women of our social class. They didn’t want their husbands going anywhere near Mom.

Those spectacles involving my mother made all of us leery of letting anyone else know the slightest detail of our family affairs. Every one of us made a conscious effort to lower our voices, even in the house. Loud laughter was discouraged, lest some neighbor think the booze flowed freely in our domicile. Mom tried as hard as she could to never show the slightest bit of emotion in public. Even a smile could be interpreted as the sign of insanity.

Naturally, this applied to discipline. On the occasions that I merited a whipping from my mom or grandpa, I tightly grabbed my ankles while the belt slapped my bottom. I wasn’t going to cry out at any cost, lest the neighbors find another reason to talk about our family. Sometimes, by mutual agreement with my disciplinarians, I took my whippings in the closed-door bathroom, and then buried my face into a pillow if I had to cry. Other kids yelled like Banshees while getting punished, and then gladly rehashed a blow-by-blow account the next morning at the school bus stop. I kept my mouth shut.

As the years passed and few additional incidents ensued, and mom held down a more-or-less steady secretarial job in town, the neighborhood shunning abated somewhat. By the time I turned ten, I became the leader of the neighborhood rat pack, a group of adventurous but maverick boys whom most of the adults thought would either join the military and become war heroes or would wind up in prison. It’s this group of kids I led into the Wanda Laningham’s backyard for after-school and Saturday afternoon ball games.

Continued

Shotgun Houses, Stolen Childhood, part 3

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:59:22 GMT

Oleanders are poisonous, but in this story they offer David a line of demarcation between
the public shame he underwent in his shotgun house neighborhood and the liberating
restoration of his childhood that Wanda provided.

Shotgun Houses, Stolen Childhood
Part 3

Wanda’s back yard also provided a bit of respite from the constant surveillance by the neighborhood busy bodies. A thicket of tall oleander bushes ran along the service alley that separated the back of the shotgun houses from the Laningham enclave. From time to time, we could see Wanda peeking out from behind the curtains, but as long as I checked in with her and we followed her ground rules, she stayed out of her way. I had never before enjoyed so much freedom from prying eyes in Old Metairie.

Then one sultry September afternoon after school, Joey Krebs tackled Bill Callahan too hard, and Bill came up swinging. Wanda just happened to crack open the door, to let her two daughters out to play, when Bill landed a roundhouse punch on Joey’s mouth, bloodying his nose and knocking a tooth loose.

“Boys, you stop that right now!” Wanda stormed out, wooden spoon in hand. I thought Bill’s would receive a crack with the spoon, but Wanda just told them to go home for the afternoon.

Then, she called me over.

“David, didn’t I tell you I’d hold you responsible for how your playmates behaved?” she lectured sternly, arms folded with that wooden spoon still in one hand, her bare feet spread apart at slightly wider than shoulder width. Wanda was dressed just as I saw her that first day--a tank top that clung to her bosom and exposed her midriff, and short, tight pants that bared most of her legs. This time she wore a shade of lip-gloss that complimented her red hair, and just a light coat of makeup.

Verbally chastised, I couldn’t bring myself to look into her hazel eyes, which were glaring at me like a police car’s searchlight. Instead, I couldn’t take my eyes off those long, shapely legs with their hundreds of freckles.

“I’m really sorry, ma’am,” I apologized in my most penitent southern schoolboy manner, putting on my best ‘don’t punish me’ air. “Those boys know better than that; I’ll bet they both get a whippin’ when they get home.”

Somewhat satisfied that justice might be done, Wanda’s tone became more inquisitive and conciliatory.

“David, do you get spanked at home?”

Well, that was a strange question. In my estimation, every kid in Louisiana got his hide tanned. Had my family’s reputation followed me across that oleander barrier that separated her private world from our very public one--where every neighbor knew everybody else’s business? Did she think so little of my mother that she suspected I wasn’t getting the discipline I needed?

“Well, yes ma’am, when I got it coming, I suppose. But I try to take it like a big boy and not raise a lot of fuss.”

I still couldn’t bring myself to look her in the eyes, but instead stared down at her well-cared-for bare feet. These were the feet of a refined, educated, middle-class woman—somebody who got regular pedicures and had the salon attendant apply her nail polish. Back across the service alley, in our crude world of shotgun homes, the women often walked on dried, cracked, scaly heels, and when they used nail polish, it was the cheapest drug-store kind that they dabbed on themselves.

“How old are you, David?” she asked in a mellow, almost motherly way. I was taken back by her sudden tonal shift, in just a few questions, from chastising to nurturing.”

“Ten, ma’am.”

“Tell me, David, when other ten-year-old boys get a hard spanking from their dad or mom, do they cry a lot?”

“Oh, yes ma’am,” I blurted out. “You can hear them all of the neighborhood.” I spoke without thinking of what her next question would logically be.

“But you try to keep quiet when your mom whips you, David? Why?”

Now I became very uncomfortable. Wanda was probing the inner sanctum of my fractured family’s secret little world, at least what little of it we zealously tried to keep to ourselves--given our open windows and exposed lives.

I was the only boy on the block whose dad didn’t wield a paddle or belt, because I was the only child of a divorced family. I was the only kid I’d ever heard of whose parents were divorced. I thought I was the only one in the world. That was shame enough. But, when the neighbors considered my mother incompetent as a parent, and consequently we tried to hide even my spankings, it was almost too much to bear. I never got to brag about them the next day at the school bus stop.

I looked up at Wanda Laningham, standing so tall and imposing over me, and met her hazel green eyes. They were no longer the probing eyes of an inquisitor, but instead those of a caring teacher or counselor. That wooden spoon no longer stood at the ready, but drooped in her hand, down by her side.

I felt a tear overflow an eyelid and run down the side of my face.

“Well, ma’am,” I replied while struggling to keep my composure. “We try to keep to ourselves.”

The next thing I knew, Wanda no longer stood over me, but crouched down in a deep-knee squat, looking me straight in the eyes from my level. She laid a soft hand on one of my shoulders. Gosh, her fingernails were beautiful. I had never seen nails like that before.

“David, do you ever hear the sound of me spanking my little girls, or their cries during or afterward?”

“No, ma’am,” I replied.

Of course not, I thought. A gun could go off in your house and we’d never hear it. It must have been the expression on my face. She seemed to read my mind, but wasn’t the slightest bit put out by the impudence of my thoughts.

Then she spoke to me in words I could understand, not in a condescending manner, but rather as a concerned aunt talking to talk to a juvenile nephew.

“David, spankings can do a child a lot of good because they allow a parent and child to clear the air, let out a lot of emotions, release built-up anger, and then start all over again. From what you’ve told me, you’re keeping a lot penned up inside you. I don’t think that’s good for you.

“If you ask my little girls, they’ll tell you their mommy gives good hard spankings, and they cry a lot. But when they’re all over, my girls get lots of hugs and they feel very good inside. Their little bottoms may sting for a while, but their conscience is clear and their hearts are joyful.”

Then Wanda made the strangest proposition a kid has probably ever heard.

“David, if you ever think you need a good, hard spanking, one that will let you cry until you feel better—but not have anyone in the neighborhood find out—you come see me, okay? It will be just between you and me.

“I give good spankings!”

* * *

I didn’t know what to think after we parted. I couldn’t imagine going to somebody else’s mother and asking to get my ass whipped. Heck, I couldn’t fathom asking my own mom for a spanking. Kids just didn’t do that, no matter how guilty they might feel about something they did wrong. We’d rather get away with it.

Getting spanked so that you can feel better once it’s over? That sounded screwy to me. I don’t cut myself with a knife so that I’ll feel better once the wound heals.

As I walked up the concrete back steps of my grandparents’ shotgun house, I noticed mom’s old car parked at the rear of the driveway. She usually wasn’t home from work this early. I sensed something was wrong. I opened the screen door and was about to set foot on the cheap linoleum floor covering that overlay the wood planks when I noticed Grandma and Grandpa seated at the table, their heads together, conversing in hushed tones. From the adjacent bedroom, I heard my mother’s sobs.

“David, you stay out and play, you hear?” Grandpa instructed sternly, but with an unmistakable trace of weariness in his voice. “We adults have something to talk about and we can’t deal with kids now.”

My grandparents had been having lots of these private conversations lately, and from what I had picked up, the subject was always my mother. I walked down the steps, but instead of heading out into the back yard, I crawled under the raised foundation, duck walked directly beneath where my grandparents were seated, and strained to hear what I could.

“This ticket will cost her at least $200," Grandpa said with a grim tone. To appreciate the value of money in those days, I remember Grandma told me Grandpa brought home $100 per week from his caretaking job at the cemetery.

“And I called her work earlier today and talked to one of the lawyers,” Grandma chimed in. “They said they sent her home this morning because they thought she had been drinking. The man told me they’re considering firing her.”

Great, I thought. Mom’s hitting the sauce again. Yes, dads in my neighborhood sometimes came home loaded, and you’d hear their wives raising hell with them in the late evening. But Mom was the only woman I knew of who drank to excess. This was so damned embarrassing!

But it was more than embarrassing. What if Mom couldn’t work? How would we eat? Grandpa couldn’t support all of us. I was scared.

“What’s that ticket say?” Grandpa asked.

“R.O.M.V.,” Grandma replied. What’s that mean?

“Reckless operation of a motor vehicle,” Grandpa replied grimly. “It’s what they cite you with when your blood alcohol content is just a little less than required for a D.W.I. Maybe she was legally drunk earlier but it wore off before the cop caught her. But this is serious. She could have killed herself and somebody else.”

* * *

I couldn’t take it anymore. I started wandering aimlessly around the neighborhood. I wanted to break down and cry, but I knew that eyeballs were following me. Neighbors would notice and talk. Probably they’d say something mean about Mom. So I held it inside.

Wanda Laningham’s words came back to me, and all of a sudden they made sense. What would it be like to live in that air-conditioned brick house, where secrets could stay inside the family? What would life be like if Mom didn’t have all these problems, and the biggest family upsets occurred when I misbehaved and had to be disciplined? That’s what happened in the other families on the block. The adults were pillars of stability and the kids screwed up—not the other way around.

At age ten, I didn’t want to be the bedrock of stoicism. How would it be if I could just cry and cry until the tears dried up, and nobody in the neighborhood would hear--or care, if they did hear something.

Mom was getting hard to live with, even when she was sober, which was actually most of the time. She seemed so angry and resentful. She’s snap at me when I really did nothing wrong.

I remember another hushed grandparents’ conversation that I wasn’t supposed to overhear. Grandma said that I was beginning to look more and more like my dad, and that I reminded Momma of his betrayal. That’s why she was being so mean to me, Grandma thought. Mom really didn’t want to hurt me, but one time she snapped, as we were driving alone in the car:

“And your father did this to us just because he wanted to stick his penis in some other woman!”

Most parents didn’t talk like that to their ten year olds, and immediately Mom seemed embarrassed. But the anger and resentment was consuming her, and it overflowed and threatened to engulf me.

I’ll bet Wanda never got this angry, even when she was about to give those little girls their butt-blistering spankings. Maybe that redheaded lady who lived across the oleander thicket had a point. I was being asked to grow up too fast.

I’d have to think about it some more.

Continued

Shotgun Houses, Stolen Childhood, part 4

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:56:00 GMT

Do redheaded, freckled moms spank harder?

Shotgun Houses, Stolen Childhood
Part 4

I don’t know if Mom kept her job or got fired and had to find another one. Somehow she paid the ticket, continued to work, and life went on. But there was always considerable tension at home, always worry about what the future held, and preoccupation with what the neighbors might say. Often at night I lay awake listening to my mother cry herself to sleep. It broke my heart.

Ordinary, common folk like us didn’t know much about clinical depression in those days, and modern drugs like Prozac and Lithium wouldn’t be marketed for a couple of decades. You were supposed to put your trust in the Lord, but the priest mom visited on Saturday evenings for the sacrament of confession could only counsel her to pray the Rosary. I was beginning to think religion may be useful in getting you to heaven, but it’s not worth a damn here on earth.

One day Mom came home with a young lawyer from work, and my grandparents were cordial if not a bit cool for the hour or so they spent chatting in the living room. Then, when he departed, the crap hit the fan.

“You’ll lose that kid!” Grandma admonished. She was mortified that mom was dating again. Divorced women in our Catholic culture couldn’t remarry without an annulment, and any hint of a social life on her part would set the neighbors to gossiping. Our little community already thought Mom was a crazy drunk, and my grandparents couldn’t tolerate the perception that their daughter would also be regarded as a loose woman.

I thought Grandma’s threat was poppycock. Who would want to take custody of me? Certainly not my dad, an Army major by this time, who was on his way to some strange place called Vietnam to run a combat hospital. He didn’t give a damn. I was lucky if he passed through town for a short visit every year or so. The subject of discipline never came up during the two or three hours that Dad and I would be together.

But Mom did stop dating. After fighting her demons day and night, she had no energy left to fight her mother and father.

* * *

I found myself spending more and more time in the Laningham back yard, mostly with friends, but sometimes by myself, kicking a ball around with nobody to catch it. I tried to say away from the shotgun-house side of the neighborhood as much as possible. Wanda's chain-link fenced yard was becoming my sanctuary

During one day of such solitary play, Wanda stepped outside, unprovoked by anything that went wrong. She just wanted to chat. She wanted to know how I was doing in school, what my favorite foods were, and if I had seen any movies lately. At the end of the small talk, she looked at me with a mischievous smile, pointed her index finger and asked:

“David, do you think you’re ready for one of my spankings yet? You know, I give good spankings!

This time, for reasons I still don’t understand, I just couldn’t give her the perfunctory, “No ma’am.” Instead, the words unexpectedly jumped out of my mouth.

“Uh, I don’t know, ma’am. Have you ever spanked a neighbor kid?”

Damn! Why did I ask that? Am I going nuts?

“Well, I most certainly have!” barefooted Wanda assured me with a wry smile. “Back when we lived in Georgia, all the moms in the neighborhood had an agreement. If somebody else’s kids misbehaved on our property, they went over our knee. I’ve had lots of little boys over my knee. I wore their little bottoms out.”

“Did they ever cry, ma’am?” I queried impulsively.

I couldn’t believe I was continuing the conversation. My legs wanted to propel my body out of there at high speed, but my feet seemed stuck to the grass. Somehow, I had to satisfy my curiosity about this mysterious woman I no longer feared, but instead for whom I felt some strange attraction.

Maybe I should have my head examined, I thought. Then I remembered we couldn’t afford the shrink’s bill. Even as the son of a doctor, we’d have a hard time getting professional courtesy, as Mom is divorced.

“Oh they all cry, David, just like you would if I reddened your little bottom. But the time one of my spankings is over, all the bad has been beaten out and nothing but the good remains. My spankings cause a lot of tears, but they all end with smiles and lots of hugs.”

I was speechless. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, but I couldn’t make myself walk away. All of a sudden I found myself mesmerized by the thought of being draped over this strong, beautiful woman’s lap, that cool air conditioning blowing across my naked bottom. Would my heart be racing in fearful anticipation of the spanking, or would I be in peace just before the first searing lick fell? I’ll admit, I had laid awake at night thinking about it. Now I had a chance at least to ask some more questions—to obtain the information necessary to allow my fantasies to blossom.

“David, would you like to come into the house and talk about this some more?” she asked. I baked some cookies. And it’s awfully hot out here.

I reached up and took Wanda’s large hand. She had lots of freckles on the back of that hand, and her nails were immaculately manicured as usual. But her palm was so soft and smooth, unlike the calloused hands of the working- class women in the shotgun houses. As we walked a few short steps to her back door, I felt like the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders.

I felt like a little boy again, and it felt so good.

Continued

Shotgun Houses, Stolen Childhood, part 5

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:50:19 GMT

Wanda's Wooden Spoon: The only old-fashioned item in her untra modern house.

Shotgun Houses, Stolen Childhood
Part 5

My first impression of this imposing house flowed upward from my toes. Wanda asked me to take my shoes and socks off as I entered. Those thick, luscious carpet fibers almost tickled me. My feet had never walked on something so soft. There must have been a one-inch pad below the carpet. The shotgun houses on the other side of the oleanders might have had a threadbare rug or two. Otherwise well-worn wood or cheap linoleum floor covering greeted the soles of your feet. I had heard of wall-to-wall carpeting, but never walked on it.

It was at least twenty degrees cooler in here, but the temperature change didn’t assault me as it had when I stood at her front door several months ago. Then I looked down at my skinny little arms and noticed the goose bumps. I didn’t know if they popped up because I was cold or scared.

Then I noticed the books, hundreds of them, maybe a thousand, on built-in shelves that lined the walls. Grandma and Grandpa might have dozen or so books at home, and I’ll bet they hadn’t read one. Wanda had met her husband at the University of Georgia, where she was a graduate student in psychology. She married her professor. Then, when she got pregnant with their first child, she settled for an A. B. D., “all but dissertation,” a master’s degree with all the course work but not the thesis required for a doctorate.

Her husband was now a full professor at Tulane University, and Wanda got to be a stay-home mom. I could hear her cherubs playing peacefully in the next room.

No wonder she could read my mind. She had been a shrink in the making.

I laughed inside. Wanda was an A. B. D., and Mom was a Ph. T. Both had taken academic consolation prizes, but Wanda seems so much happier. Maybe if Dad had stayed with us we’d have a house like this, a secure place for me to be a kid.

“Do you like chocolate chips, David?” The aroma of freshly baked cookies filled the air.

Seated at her kitchen table, half a dozen warm cookies and a glass of cold milk set before me, Wanda continued her gentle probing. “So little David, have you thought any more about what I proposed the other day? Maybe you might want to take a trip over my knee.

Okay, I wasn’t going to let her spank me, but why not play the game? I'll do so, at least until the cookies were safely inside my belly.

“Uh, maybe, ma’am. Uh, how do you spank?”

Wanda opened one of those kitchen drawers, which slid so easily on metal riders with ball bearings. She withdrew a formidable-looking wooden spoon and placed it in my hands. Unlike everything else modern in this house, this wasn’t a newfangled, production-made kitchen implement. This old spoon obviously had some history.

“My mother used to spank me with this,” Wanda said. I use it on my kids and I could spank you with it, David, if you’d agree it would do you some good.”

The thought sent chills running through my body. Then a funny idea occurred to me. I wondered if Wanda, herself, had freckles on her butt. I dared not even entertain such an unrighteous thought much longer, lest she read my mind. It was hard to think of this tall adult as once being a little kid who got spankings.

“Well, ma’am, I’ve see this in your hand, but what I really meant is . . . .” I paused and stammered. I knew what the words were, but I just couldn’t get them out.

“Uh, do you spank on the seat of the pants, on the drawers, or, uh, on the bare bottom? Would I go over your knee?” I had heard her threaten her kids with a pants-down “whoopin.” But I wondered if that was just an expression.

Wanda gently laid one of her soft hands on my shoulder.

“I’ll ask you to take your pants off, David,” she answered gently, “and then have you crawl up on my lap. I’ll position you carefully and ask if you are comfortable. Then I’ll ask you to raise your hips a little, and I’ll pull you little undies down to your ankles, or maybe I’d just let you kick them off.

“I always spank on the bare bottom, David. I have to see what I’m doing. I want to make sure your little tush is being properly tanned, but not abused. I wouldn’t want to bruise you.”

“How . . . How many, ma’am? Do you give a set number of licks?”

“David, I’m a mother, and a mom always knows how much a little boy’s bottom can take. I never decide on a number of smacks before I start. I see how you’re reacting, and what your attitude is. I let your needs tell me how many swats. Believe me, I will get it right.”

She spoke these words methodically and carefully, with the cadence of a caring a mother. Somehow, I could never imagine Wanda getting drunk and mistakenly trying to pour fingernail polish remover into my ear. Yes, her particular style of motherly care could be painful when called for, but she dispensed that pain in a disciplined and regulated way.

“Well, ma’am, I continued, “what if I weren’t so brave? I mean, at home, I just try to take it like a man and never raise a fuss. You know, I wouldn’t want the neighbors to hear me scream. That would embarrass the family.

“What if I cried out and what if I kicked? Suppose it hurt so much that I tried to jump off of your lap?

“Would you be mad at me? Would you be disappointed in me?”

Wanda smiled. She turned my chair toward her, and then reached out and drew me close, into her bosom. I could smell the fragrance of her perfume. This time, she wore a button-down blouse, and top two or three buttons were unfastened. She gently pressed my head between those two large breasts. Her skin was so soft. Equally soft hands cuddled and held me close.

Not since Mom had been normal, before the divorce, had she hugged me so. My heart melted. I felt the tears well up in my eyes.

“No David, I would never expect you to take my spankings like a man. I would expect you to take them like a child. You would be safe here. You could scream your silly little head off, and no neighbor would ever hear. You could struggle and kick and squirm, and I’d just hold you down, firmly but gently.

“My wooden spoon would do all the punishing on your naughty little bottom. As for the rest of you, I’d be holding you close like I am now.

“David, understand something. I spank long and hard. I give good spankings. But I spank with love.”

* * *

I melted in the embrace of this powerful woman. We stopped talking about punishment for a while. Instead she wanted to know all about me.

I told her as much as I could remember about the happier times before the divorce, as much as I could recall about Dad and me. Then I told her about that awful day four years ago, when grandma and grandpa took Mom to the mental ward of the public hospital, and how the neighbors stood on the street and hung out of the windows—seeming to enjoy the spectacle.

I told her about Mom’s drinking and about my grandparents’ worries.

I shared my own deepest fears. I was afraid Mom would hurt herself when she got drunk. I was afraid the policeman would come and take her away, as almost happened that night with the nail polish remover, and that day she narrowly escaped a D.W.I.

I wasn’t afraid for myself. Grandma and Grandpa would protect me, that is, if they didn’t die from the stress.

I was afraid for Mom. If they took her away again, they might give her more electroshock treatment. Sometimes she woke up screaming late at night and early in the morning. She had nightmares about those white-clad, dispassionate nurses who strapped her to that table--about the clear viscous conducting gel they dabbed on her, and about those cold steel electrodes.

I didn’t realize how many Kleenexes I used that afternoon. I cried my eyes out, but Wanda just held me close and soothed me with her soft hands and that softer Georgia accent. I sat on her lap like a little boy. It was the first time I’d sat on a soft, feminine lap like that in many years. Wanda ran her long, tender fingers through my hair while she dried my tears with the other hand.

It felt so good to get it out, to tell somebody who understood without worrying about what she'd think of my family.

* * *

“Now, David, would you like me to spank you?”

I looked up, met her warm eyes, and managed a little smile.

“Yes, ma’am.” I didn’t hesitate. I wanted more of her love, even if this particular variety of it would hurt.

She sent me over to the table to get the wooden spoon, and then asked me to step out of my pants. I tried to fold them neatly, just as I was expected to do at home.

“Leave them in a pile in the middle of the floor,” she admonished gently. You can behave like a kid here.”

Her strong arms helped me as I tried to mount her lap. She positioned me comfortably, face down. I looked down at her brightly painted toes. I loved the feel of her strong, bare legs rubbing up against my tummy and torso.

Then she gently inserted fingers into my underpants and slid them down over my knees, past my ankles, and off of my feet. She rubbed and patted my fanny with one of her soft hands, and then firmly pinned me into position with the other palm, planted into the small of my back.

She reached over to pick up the wooden spoon.

Any second now, I knew my bottom would explode in hot, searing pain. My eyes would once again well with tears. They’d overflow onto her knees and run down her legs. My sinuses would fill, and my nasal mucus would wet one leg of her ever-so-short shorts. I’d scissor kick my legs and squirm my butt, to no avail, as her strong grip held me in place. I’d yell and scream as my bottom seemed to catch fire with every lick, but nobody outside the house would hear a peep.

But at this instant, frozen in my memory forever, I just smiled, reached down with the index finger of one hand, and tried to count the freckles on her leg.

Wanda let me be a child again. I finally felt safe.

The End

Cassie Barefoot, part 1

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:21:17 GMT

Cassie Barefoot
Part 1

Cassie wasn’t the most attractive tenth grader at Salvation Christian School. Actually, it depended on how you looked at her. An early-childhood kitchen scalding left horribly disfiguring scar tissue on her left cheek. Viewed from her right side, her cute, vivacious adolescence charmed you. From her left, a tale of pain and social ostracism reached out and grabbed your heart.

When you saw her head on, enchanting eyes and an ever-present smile defined this spunky young lady, pleading to draw your attention from the facial mutilation that denied much-coveted popularity with her teenage peers--especially the boys.

Cassie endured a second problem. She struggled academically at the upscale, private religious school where parents pressured their children to excel in the classroom. Her difficulties with freshman algebra put her a year behind college-bound classmates. Her teacher was no help.

"Successful-students-succeed-by-working-lots-of-problems,” admonished Isidore Bartholomew Bone in his typically rhythmic cadence, pausing for emphasis between each word just an annoying fraction of a second longer than necessary.

I. B. Bone, head of the math department, had come to Salvation Christian several years ago from one of those exclusive prep schools back east. Why anyone with his teaching background would move to Oklahoma was anybody’s guess, but whispered rumors insinuated that he fled some scandal that made him persona non grata in the haughty eastern educational establishment.

Behind his back, students mocked their teacher as “I Be Bone.” The parody on his name, couched in the Ebonics-inspired language of the inner city, referred to his gaunt, almost emaciated frame, his protruding cheekbones, and his scarecrow-like, carrot nose.

Bone’s coke-bottle eyeglasses never deflected his penetrating stare. If he thought you weren’t working hard enough, he’d cast a laser beam your way. He’d look right through your eyeballs to the back of your head. His verbal reprimands burned similarly: “If you don’t work extra equations for homework, you’re laaaaaa-zy,” drawing out the first syllable in a mocking tone that pricked Cassie’s heart every time she heard it.

Cassie wasn’t lazy. Each math problem frustrated her. Mr. Bone, who gave her a failing grade the year before, remained convinced of his young student’s indolence and pestered her with merciless daily criticism. He seemed unaware that Cassie spent countless late nights at the kitchen table, sometimes falling asleep with her forehead resting in the crack of the algebra book. She tried as hard as she could, but linear equations with two variables just kicked her butt.

Sometimes, after one of I. B. Bone’s cutting admonitions to try harder, tears ran down each of Cassie’s cheeks: effortlessly down the smooth skin on the right side, meandering and zigzagging over the scar tissue on her left.

* * *

Although Cassie never burned up the academic or social scenes, her lively personality and fierce competitiveness emerged when she changed out of her long-sleeve white blouse and knee-length blue pleated skirt, the standard religious school uniform, into the scarlet and gold of the Salvation Crusaders. Cassie’s role on the championship girls’ basketball team meshed with her underdog status in other aspects of life.

Standing five-foot-two in her Pumas, she was the shortest player on the district championship squad that played deep into the state tournament last season. Her American Indian heritage, three-quarters Cherokee, didn’t provide a bloodline of athletic talent that her taller, more agile African-American teammates inherited. Nor could her blue-collar father, who struggled to pay the monthly private school tuition, afford the succession of basketball camps and off-season amateur league expenses generously doled out by the parents of her well-heeled Caucasian teammates.

Instead, she learned and refined her basketball skills in the hardscrabble arena of street ball, as she competed against boys a head taller and several steps quicker. Quite often her shots flew back into her face, fiercely blocked just as the ball left her hands, bloodying her nose and knocking her to the hot, summer Tulsa playground asphalt. Busted noses and skinned elbows hardly discouraged Cassie, as she had endured physical pain and emotional turmoil for years--beginning on that fateful day more than a dozen years ago when her mother’s pressure cooker exploded.

Naturally gifted with nothing, Cassie grew a heart of gold. If her mediocre talent didn’t earn her a spot in the Crusaders’ starting lineup, her fierce demeanor made her the fans’ favorite—the proverbial “sixth girl” who came off of the bench to fire up her teammates and lead them to victory when the more talented players fell short of their potential.

Exhibiting an unrelenting determination developed while competing against the boys, her ball-handling, fierce-guarding, and boisterous leadership stunned the Crusaders’ opponents and delighted their fans. Those sparkling eyes in the hallways turned jet-black on the basketball court, intimidated opposing players, staring them down with the ferocity of a Cherokee warrior.

Her facial disfigurement, a drawback socially, became an advantage in athletic competition. It was this little Indian’s war paint. Those privileged girls reared in the comfort of the Oklahoma City or Tulsa suburbs didn’t know what to make of her intensity. She scared them. While they tried to come to terms with an opponent the likes of which they’d never seen, Cassie would steal the ball and drive the length of the court for a layup.

* * *

Self-confidence gleaned from newfound athletic success spilled over into her daily life at school, but unfortunately prompted the greatest crisis of her school days. She gregariously interacted with her fellow students on the days after big games, as her growing athletic notoriety began to overcome the social handicaps of her hallmark physical scar and her limited classroom success. Kids who had shunned her previously suddenly wanted to be her friend.

Never purposely disruptive in class or disrespectful to teachers, Cassie nevertheless began accumulating her share of small classroom disciplinary infractions for talking out of turn, arriving a few seconds after the tardy bell had rung, or giggling at an inopportune time during the lesson. School had never been so much fun!

Nobody noticed a marked change in her behavior; she was just a happy kid reaping the fruits of her hard work on the basketball court. Everyone, teachers included, understood that kids misbehave from time to time, and the system at her school included a built-in buffer for occasional minor offenses.

Discipline at Salvation Christian ran the normal gauntlet of punitive measures found in southern religiously based private schools: warnings, detentions, and the traditional “licks” with the paddle that most boys received and most girls avoided. For minor infractions teachers handed out demerits, little pink slips of paper that offending students had to sign, acknowledging their culpability. If they kept their demerits down to a reasonable number they suffered no consequences. At the end of the semester, the demerit slips that gathered in a child’s file were thrown away and the slate wiped clean, giving him another chance to “be a kid” the next semester.

It was only when demerits began accumulating that a warning system turned into a punitive one. At seven demerits in one semester, the young miscreant was summoned to the principal’s office and firmly warned about the consequences of continued misbehavior. This did the trick for most students, especially the athletes, who could hardly afford the penalty that the next step in discipline would bring.

Somehow, through an administrative foul-up or because of a rare absence from school, Cassie missed out on this warning. Hardly aware that her demerits were approaching a dangerous level, she continued to enjoy her sophomore year as she had never before appreciated school. Things were even looking up in math class, as her continued late-night study began to pay dividends and Mr. Bone noted more progress. As the basketball season progressed, the Crusaders held on to first place in the conference standings, and Cassie’s relentless hustle even merited a couple sentences in the sports columns of the city newspaper.

* * *

Then, one morning during a particularly difficult lesson on exponents, her world began to fall apart.

“Cassie Barefoot, Cassie Barefoot,” the loudspeaker blared her distinctive Native American surname. “Report to the school office, immediately!” The principal’s stern voice, coupled with that ominous suffix, portended trouble. Routine calls to the office for administrative purposes never sounded so menacing, and students leaving for a doctor’s appointment were not admonished to report “immediately.”

Math class stopped as if the Second Coming of Christ had been announced. Shocked by the summons, Cassie froze. She had never before been called to the office for disciplinary purposes. I. B. Bone, like a shark that tasted blood in the water, beamed his characteristically menacing laser-look though those coke-bottle spectacles, seeming to burn holes in Cassie’s retina.

“Young lady,” he announced with an unmistakable degree of sarcasm in his shrill voice, “I think the principal wants to have a little chat with you.” Everyone noticed how quickly he backslid from newfound encouragement to his old poisoned personality. He seemed almost delighted that his student he picked on the most was finally receiving her comeuppance.

Confused, her head swimming at this sudden ill-omened turn of events, Cassie forced her legs in motion and walked out of the classroom as thirty sets of eyeballs followed her. Down the long hallway lined with scarlet and gold metal lockers she reluctantly proceeded, then up three flights of stairs to the school office. It was the longest climb of Cassie’s adolescence. Her feet grew heavier as she climbed the steps toward the landing in front of the principal’s office. All the joy of newfound camaraderie disappeared. Cassie made this trip alone.

Mrs. Hines, assistant registrar and office manager, had seen thousands of students come to the office for discipline during her three decades at Salvation Christian School. With the dispassionate courtesy of a doctor’s office nurse, but the firmness of a school administrator, she greeted Cassie with the customary: “Have a seat, young lady. Mr. Bone will see you momentarily.”

Hamilton Bone, no relation to I. B. Bone, was also in his third decade of service to the Lord’s children. A public schoolteacher and football coach in his early years, he migrated to religious private schools because, in his view, the newfangled liberalism that pervaded the public system interfered with the job as he saw it. The public schools had to take everybody who walked in the door, and if they wanted to expel a rowdy student, the district had to first give him a second chance at an expensive “alternative school.” In the private schools, if you didn’t toe the line, you walked the street.

Cassie knew that “Ham Bone,” as students called him on the sly, earned a reputation as a fierce disciplinarian. Students in the science laboratories co-located on the fourth floor often heard their principal’s booming voice dressing down an errant student. Then followed--more often than not, especially with a male student--the unmistakable crack of his wooden paddle impacting tender flesh. Shortly thereafter, the school office disciplinary machine spat out a thoroughly chastised recalcitrant, struggling to contain the tears within his eyes while assiduously rubbing a burning posterior.

Ham Bone, like most evangelical Christians, believed in the paddle. Corporal punishment remained a fixture in the American south, especially at religious private schools. After all, it was in the Bible. Right? Parents signed a blanket authorization allowing their children to be spanked for whatever reason the school administrators thought appropriate. If they objected, they could always send their kids to the public schools. No mom or dad ever raised a fuss.

“Cassie Barefoot, get in here!” Ham Bone boomed.

The young sophomore quaked in fear. Not since that awful day more than a dozen years ago had she been so afraid. Then, Big Jim Barefoot scooped up his critically burned toddler, screaming in pain, in his steel-muscled arms and made a mad dash for the public hospital’s emergency room, fortuitously situated only blocks away from their squat, single-story, wooden shotgun-style house. This time, no strong daddy protected and reassured her. Cassie faced the principal’s scalding wrath by herself.

Hamilton Bone was the antithesis of his namesake Mr. Bone, the slightly built math teacher. Everything about the principal’s continence denoted physical strength, resoluteness of character, and an indomitable determination to run his school like the squared-away Marine Corps platoon he commanded in his youth. For all of his 57 years, as a high school and college athlete, an infantry platoon leader, and then as a teacher, coach, and principal--Ham Bone wore the same flattop, military-style haircut.

Protruding facial muscles suggested he munched on nails for a snack. A square jaw that would have rivaled Pete Rose, the Cincinnati Reds baseball legend, finished out his countenance. His steel blue eyes bore down on the diminutive young Cherokee who just walked into his lair.

“Cassie Barefoot. You have ten demerits. Do you know what that means?”

Behind Ham Bone’s desk hung the Rod of Correction. The biblical name belied its dimensions. It wasn’t a rod at all, but rather a formidable-looking paddle. Fashioned like a bottom-heavy hourglass, its ovular spanking end connected to the oblong handle by a narrow wooden isthmus. A leather cord, tied in a square knot, ran through a hole in the handle. When wrapped around the principal’s wrist, it insured that the paddle wouldn't fly across the room if he lost his grip during a particularly energetic spanking.

The Rod hung right next to a picture of Jesus. Cassie wondered if her Savior had used an implement like that when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple. She made a mental note to study the Gospel of Mark to find out. But for now, she had more immediate concerns.

“Do you know what happens when you accumulate ten demerits?” Ham Bone asked again, those blue eyes seeming to search every square inch of her body and soul.

The color drained from the right side of Cassie’s face, where the undamaged blood vessels still delivered blush to her countenance. She wasn’t afraid of that paddle. If she could atone for her demerits with swats, she’d obediently bend over Ham Bone’s desk, grab the other side with her outstretched fingers, rise up on her tiptoes, and deliver her upturned, bulbous rump for chastisement.

No stranger to spankings at home, Cassie bought into her school’s belief in the spiritual cleansing afforded by the Rod of Correction. She certainly didn’t like whippings, but she understood and accepted them. She’d had her share growing up. It was the Lord’s way. She’d gladly submit to a scorching one now, if only she could get out of this unexpected trouble.

Atonement wasn’t that easy, however.

“You have allowed a disciplinary system to turn into a punishment system,” Ham Bone admonished. You’re now on disciplinary probation, young lady. A letter will be going home to your parents this afternoon. They will be required to meet with me within one week.”

Then he dropped the bombshell.

“You are herewith suspended from all participation in extracurricular activities. No after-school clubs. No field trips. And this afternoon you will visit the athletic equipment manager and turn in your uniforms and all school-issued athletic gear. You are dismissed from the basketball team for the remainder of the season. You may neither practice nor play in the games.”

Cassie was stunned. Yes, she knew the rules. But she never thought she was anywhere near this degree of discipline. She was a good kid. She didn’t misbehave on purpose. She didn’t give the teachers any trouble, at least not deliberately.

How could this be happening? Oh, why this? She’d gladly take a blistering paddling if it would make everything better. She’d gladly study her math problems standing up, and good naturedly endure her teammates’ teasing her about her reddened and bruised backside while they frolicked naked in the locker room after practice--if only that would solve the problem.

As the stern principal continued, the tears ran down Cassie’s cheeks, straight down on the right side, meandering over the scar tissue on the left. Mucus flowed from her nose. Her chest heaved with sobs. She sucked in deep, quickening breaths.

“You have let down your teammates. You have betrayed your coaches. You have saddened your teachers. Your parents will be bitterly disappointed . . .”

Ham Bone’s lips kept moving but his words seemed to fade to silence. Cassie’s world started spinning. Her legs turned into rubber. Tunnel vision set in. Her perception became a steadily decreasing clone of light that closed to a faint pinhole surrounded by darkness.

Then everything went black. She didn’t feel herself fall.

* * *

Cassie eyes first focused on the school nurse, as she wiped the 16-year-old’s flushed face with a cool, wet towel. As the darkness receded and the room filled with light, she became conscious of another person in the nurse’s office.

A different Hamilton Bone looked down on her, this time the loving father of his own daughters and a former coach of a girls’ basketball team. The stern, no-nonsense, punishing principal seemed to have stayed upstairs in the office. When the nurse assured him that Cassie had suffered no lasting damage when she fainted, he spoke to her in soft, almost hushed tones.

“Cassie I looked over your record and found that we forgot to warn you at the seven- demerit level. Also, your infractions are of a very minor nature. I have spoken to your mother and some of your teachers. While it’s true that many small mistakes do indeed add up to big trouble, and you must indeed be punished, we’ve all decided to give you an alternative to disciplinary probation. If you follow the road to repentance we offer you and you’re good for the rest of the semester, you can continue playing basketball.”

“But it will be painful,” the principal warned gently but firmly. “Come see me in the morning. Okay?”

Then, for just a fleeting moment, he did something very uncharacteristic of Hamilton Bone in the disciplinary mode: a warm, loving smile crossed his face.

Cassie had a pretty good idea of what her principal had in mind. Tears again appeared in her eyes, but this time they were expressions of relief. She underestimated how painful her rehabilitation would be until she visited Ham Bone’s lair the next day.

Cassie Barefoot, part 2

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:17:00 GMT

Cassie Barefoot
Part 2

Cassie showed up before the school bell rang the next morning, ten minutes early for her appointment with the principal.

“How are you feeling, Cassie?” asked Mrs. Hines, the office manager who ordinarily maintained cool distance from students facing discipline. “You gave us quite a scare yesterday,” she added tenderly. “Mr. Bone is waiting for you. Go right in.”

Ham Bone was calm this morning, neither the stern disciplinarian who lectured Cassie yesterday nor the kindhearted rescuer who had carried Cassie, unconscious, in his strong arms down four flights of stairs to the nurse’s office.

Cassie was surprised to see that the paddle still hung on the hook beside Jesus. She half expected to see it on his desk, ready for use on her cute little round posterior. She had mentally prepared herself for a bottom blistering that morning. In fact, she had prayed about it on her knees after awakening, asking the Lord to help her take her chastisement with courage. But she’d find the road to redemption longer and fraught with potholes.

The principal’s well-organized desk held only two items. The first was a neatly stapled pack of 10 pink demerit slips, arranged chronologically by the date of offense. Next to it lay a single white sheet of paper containing six lines of double-spaced typing. Cassie was able to read the title, upside down, in bold 36-point type: Swat Team.

“Cassie, normally in situations like this I would offer you the opportunity to have one or two demerits removed in exchange for five hard swats each,” Ham Bone began. “Then I’d put you on your honor not to misbehave for the balance of the semester, so as to keep your balance below the probation level. I’ve done this in the past for a few deserving students, and each time they behaved like angels afterward.

“But I talked to your mother again last night and she’s upset that her darling daughter would achieve such an ignoble record. She’s also afraid of how your dad will react if he finds out. So to get out of this, we’ve agreed you’ll pay a heftier price.”

Cassie lived half a year with each of her divorced parents. This semester she stayed with her dad, who only knew that her daughter had fainted at school yesterday. He didn’t know why. He didn’t know how much trouble she was in. Good thing. Cassie thought about the long, menacing razor strop that hung in the hall closet and said a silent prayer of thanks that mom and the principal had negotiated her discipline—although she was nervous about what Ham Bone meant by “a heftier price.”

Paddling was a regimented activity at Salvation Christian School. Ham Bone had authored a 36-page manual, Standard Operating Procedure for Christian CP, which prescribed the spanking standards in his school. First there were the dimensions of the standard paddle, 24 inches long and three-eighths inches thick for girls, 27 inches long and half an inch thick for boys. Both paddles were three and one-half inches wide. Allowances could be made for diminutive boys or heftier girls, although miscreants should never be told they were being punished with a paddle designed for the opposite gender.

As the first project each fall, the woodshop class manufactured the year’s supply of paddles. Students received their first expert in using the jigsaw, lathe, and power sander, and then drilled and manually beveled a series of holes in the business end of each chastising instrument. The manual was long on practical application and short on theory, so every autumn a lively debate broke out about the purpose of those holes. Some said it lessened air resistance and allowed the paddle to fly faster.

Some veterans of this disciplinary measure thought holes added to the “edge area,” noting that the spanked bottoms were most sore where the edge of the paddle contacted flesh. Others ventured that holes just gave the paddle a more frightening appearance.

“Your mother is quite upset at your behavior,” Ham Bone explained methodically. “She’s just as peeved about your first demerit as she is about the tenth. She doesn’t think you should skate by with one or two spankings, and then live on the edge for the rest of the semester.

“She wants you to receive a meaningful paddling for each and every instance of misbehavior that caused you to sign one of these pink slips.”

Cassie winced at the thought, and it wasn’t the pain that worried her.

She was tough. She could withstand five licks a day for ten days. Mom wanted her to pay the piper for her misbehavior and she would. The Lord would help her through the ordeal. After all, corporal punishment was biblical. She would endure her spanking ordeal like a loyal disciple and emerge from the ordeal morally clean, just as when she had risen from the waters of baptism.

She’d make her teachers, the principal, her mother, and God proud of her—no matter how painful. Fifty licks spread over several school weeks wasn’t a Draconian punishment, not for physically durable and mentally tough daughter of the Cherokee nation.

Instead, it was the notoriety that such a punishment would earn her--the good natured kidding that would redden her face, at least the undamaged side--that would be so embarrassing. By this afternoon, everybody in the school would know their newfound basketball hero would sport a sore bottom for weeks. Cassie had never heard of a girl receiving so many licks. Perhaps she’d earn her way into the unofficial “record book” the boys kept regarding such matters.

In the large, multi-nozzle gang showers after practice, she’d be putting her reddened, blistered bottom on display for her teammates. Nudity wasn’t as much of an issue among the female athletes as it might have been for the girls in physical education class. Frolicking the showers built camaraderie. Whenever a teammate got paddled, her derriere became the butt of jokes, and perhaps a few good-natured but painful slaps from teammates to accentuate the redness. Gosh, those tall black girls had big, heavy hands, and it really stung when they playfully whacked an already tender bottom!

“So will you give me my first spanking this morning?” Cassie bravely inquired of her principal.

Around Big Jim Barefoot’s campfire, as a little girl, Cassie heard the passed-down oral history of her tribe, not only the heroes, but also those who made mistakes and honestly atoned for them, no matter how severe the consequences. She heard the story of Yellow Jacket, the squaw condemned by the tribal council for malicious gossip, to her choice of either permanent banishment or one thousand lashes with a horsehide whip. She courageously took the unmerciful whipping that tore her skin to shreds, rather than suffer the pain of expulsion from her society.

Then there was Bee Smoke, condemned to death for adultery with another squaw’s brave. Granted a two-year reprieve, during which she could have run far away, Bee Smoke nevertheless returned to her village promptly on the day set for her execution. So impressed were the elders that they did not tie her to the stake. Instead, she stood stoically while her executioners surrounded her with wood and underbrush. As the searing flames consumed her body, she screamed in terrible pain, but did not try to escape. Her bravery earned her a new name that became legendary in Cherokee lore: Stands in Flames.

Big Jim Barefoot used that story to help Cassie be brave about the consequences of her childhood accident. If other Indian woman could endure such physical pain, certainly she was strong enough to accept the social stigma of having been burned. Today, his daughter would use his counsel to bravely face the consequences of her misbehavior. She knew the scalding paddle licks would make her cry. But she was determined, as Bee Smoke did, to stand bravely and take it. She figured Big Jim would hear of her dilemma eventually, and most of all she wanted to make her daddy proud.

“No, Cassie,” Ham Bone replied, “that’s another aspect of the agreement I made with your mother. It would be too easy on you if I paddled you every day here in the privacy of the office. You misbehaved in several different classes, disrupting the teaching of different faculty members. Your classmates witnessed your poor conduct and it hurt their concentration. You’ll be punished in the classroom in front of the students whose studies you interrupted.”

The principal explained the details, all of which had been agreed to by Cassie’s mom. He handed Cassie the stapled stack of 10 pink demerit slips and invited her to make notes: two demerits in Mrs. Mitchell’s typing class, two in Miss Vaught’s English, one in Mr. Spandau’s biology, one in Mr. Laningham’s history, and four in Mr. Bone’s algebra class!

* * *

No ordinary teacher could paddle at Salvation Christian. The principal had drawn up a list of trusted disciplinarians, the Swat Team, who had demonstrated the physical skill and emotional maturity to inflict effective but not excessive physical punishment on young derrieres. When a new candidate was needed, volunteers came from the ranks of experienced faculty. No rookie teacher need apply.

A prospective Swat Team member underwent a paddling boot camp, studying adolescent psychology, anatomy of the human buttocks, and Principal Bone’s Standard Operating Procedures for Christian CP. After successfully passing a written examination, candidates practiced delivering wallops with both designs of the regulation paddle, the boy’s and the girl’s models.

On the day of the practical exam, existing Swat Team members gathered to watch a candidate demonstrate his paddle swing on the heavy punching bag in the gymnasium’s weight room. To pass, prospects had to deliver swats of sufficient intensity between a series of chalk lines without getting any chalk dust on the paddle. A successful candidate could pinpoint paddle strokes accurately over the entire surface of a student’s bottom without overlaying one lick atop where another had landed—unless, of course, he wanted to.

Since intensity of swing was a subjective criterion, veteran Swat Team members evaluated how hard the neophyte swatted the dummy. Ham Bone wanted miscreants to receive intense, stinging chastisement commensurate with their age and physical build, but not so much as to bring a horribly bruised derriere home to their parents. Cherry-hued transient redness defined the goal, not black and blue. Tears and sniffles were the targeted reactions, not intense, uncontrolled wailing and crying. After all, this was a Christian school.

Members of the Swat Team, believers in the divine property of biblical corporal punishment, encouraged students to request paddling in place of other forms of discipline. If a student’s parents hadn’t spanked much, the teacher helped the young offender prepare both physically and mentally for an unfamiliar, often initially terrifying punishment. Swat Team members let the paddle do the punishing; verbally they remained friendly and encouraging to a frightened student.

Students on the verge of tears after a hard five-stroke paddling often hugged and thanked the teacher or coach who punished them, vowing to reform their behavior so that they’d never again have to suffer such chastisement. Some kids never again needed a booster shot; others were regular clients of the Swat Team. In either case, once a spanking took place, all was forgiven. Neither the teacher nor student held a grudge. It was God’s way.

Just to supplement divine will, all Swat Team members received a $50 monthly supplement. Their pay stubs read: “special skills.”

* * *

Cassie had expected to emerge from the principal’s office with her bottom in flames. Instead, she once again found herself in emotional turmoil. Ham Bone had given her two days to compare the names on the demerit slips with the list of teachers authorized to administer corporal punishment—the Swat Team—and to arrange her entire disciplinary regimen. Allowing for unavoidable absences and conflicts, she was to take 10 five-lick spankings over 15 school days, and the first had to begin within two days. If not, she’d be visiting the equipment manager to turn in her basketball togs.

Cassie compared the names on the demerit slips with the Swat Team roster. If they coincided, the task would be easier. If the offended teachers weren’t on the list, she’d ask them to allow another faculty member, a qualified spanker, to administer the punishment. That left open the possibility that some teachers might balk, believing she’d benefit more in the long run from losing a basketball season than having her bottom paddled.

Oh, that couldn’t happen! She couldn’t let her teammates down. She couldn’t embarrass Big Jim, who always occupied a seat on row one of the bleachers, despite his imperfect knowledge of basketball rules. Cassie once again felt tears come into her eyes.

On the other hand, the notoriety she was receiving wasn’t totally embarrassing. True to her prediction, just about the whole school knew about her impending ordeal within an hour of her meeting with the principal. She received more than her share of understanding smiles from faculty and staff, some sympathetic comments from the girls, and a few crass ones from the boys: “Hey redskin,” one humongous football player taunted, “heard you’re gonna get a red butt.”

But, overall, it wasn’t all that bad that boys seemed to be taking an interest in her posterior. Cassie had one of the cutest bottoms of all the girls. Not at all fat, each buttock protruded outward nicely, round and symmetrical. Especially prominent in her basketball shorts, her rear end seemed to shine under the high intensity, metal halide lights of the gymnasium. While the dedicated basketball fans watched her dexterous hands dribble the ball down court, many of the boys and more adult men than would admit became fixated on another part of her anatomy.

Now students would get to see that cute little rump up close and bent over in one of the positions specified in the manual for Christian CP.

* * *

Mrs. Mitchell, the spinsterly typing and shorthand teacher, regarded Cassie as one of her favorite students. Cassie admired her as well, particularly because she was the former basketball coach—back in the old days, when girls played the half-court game.   In that era it wasn’t considered feminine for girls to run from baseline to baseline. Girls were not supposed to perspire like the boys. Consequently, each team had six players, three girls on offense and three on defense, whom the rulebook forbade to cross the half court line.

When the girls’ game went to the full-court, fast-breaking, physically demanding style played by the boys, Mrs. Mitchell decided she had accommodated enough change in her lifetime. She retired to classroom duties, where she could be assured nobody would ever change the order of keys on the typewriter or the time-honored symbols used in Gregg shorthand.

“Well, Cassie, what brings you here this afternoon?” Mrs. Mitchell inquired with pleasantly disguised sarcasm. Teachers knew Cassie would be calling on them for a bottom warming. They were prepared to accommodate her, but to teach a stinging lesson in the process. Cassie’s chastisement, and the public humiliation each spanking session would entail, would serve as a deterrent to students who were approaching their limit of demerits for the semester. It would also do the young lady a lot of good, in Mrs. Mitchell’s opinion.   Spankings built character and brought a sinning child closer to the Lord.

“I’m in trouble,” Cassie sheepishly admitted, struggling to maintain eye contact, the right, unscarred side of her face reddening, “and I need your help.”

“Why, my dear, I’ll do everything I can to help a wonderful student like you,” Mrs. Mitchell said in a sugarcoated voice, struggling to maintain a straight face. “How can I be of service?”

Cassie relayed the story of how the demerits crept up on her, that she didn’t realize how much trouble she was getting into, and how she faced the horrible prospect of being barred from the basketball team. She just couldn’t let her teammates down and, oh how her father would be so disappointed in her! The tears started welling up.

“Mrs. Mitchell, would you consider spanking me in place of the demerits you gave for my foolish and inconsiderate behavior?”

“Well, of course dear, the Bible mandates physical chastisement. But are you sure you want to take my spankings?” Mrs. Mitchell asked. “You know, I paddle very hard and some of the older students can tell you I really don’t pull any punches.”

“Yes ma’am, I’m sure.”

“You do know,” Mrs. Mitchell continued, “that I don’t spank girls any lighter than boys. Female bottoms aren’t the slightest bit physiologically weaker that male rumps, and I paddle them all very hard.   It will really hurt! Most students cry.”

“Yes ma’am, I know it will be very hard, but I’ll do my best to take my punishment like a woman, not like the little girl who misbehaved in your class. I’ll really try to be brave and take my licks. I’m so sorry I was bad.”

“Well, Cassie, everybody makes mistakes. You’ll have the opportunity to repent in front of the same students who saw you misbehave,” continued the teacher. “You do know you’ll have to bend over and take it in front of the class, don’t you?”

“Yes ma’am, I guess I deserve the embarrassment as much as the pain,” Cassie admitted.

“Now, tell me child,” Mrs. Mitchell inquired, “how many sets of licks do you have in mind?”

Well, ma’am, I only got two demerits from you, one for gum and one for talking in class . . .”

“Tisk, tisk, tisk,” the teacher admonished, “I can understand your talking out of turn. That was spontaneous. But the chewing gum . . . Cassie, that was premeditated! You certainly knew better!”

With the more strident tone in Mrs. Mitchell’s voice, Cassie had trouble maintaining eye contact. As the young teenager stared at the floor, a tear dropped and splattered on the hard, linoleum tile.

“I wish that was it,” Cassie continued, as an occasional sob broke the continuity of her words. “But Miss Vaught, Mr. Spandau, and Miss Laningham aren’t allowed to paddle students, but they said they’d take their demerits away if I found a Swat Team member to spank me for each one of them. I know this is asking an awful lot, and will take up your valuable time, ma’am, but would you be so kind as to spank me for those demerits?”

“My, my, young lady,” Mrs. Mitchell admonished, pretending to be surprised, “you’ve really got yourself in trouble, haven’t you? And how many spankings will I be giving you for mischief in their classrooms?”

“Four, ma’am,” Cassie blurted as she could no longer contain her emotion. “In addition to your two.” She sobbed quietly but continuously as the tears spilled out. This was so embarrassing.

As Mrs. Mitchell handed Cassie a Kleenex, she once again softened her tone and inquired, almost in a whisper: “You know Cassie, all those paddle swats, day after day, will make for a very sore bottom. You might even get bruised a bit. Is that okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I think I’m tough enough to take that. I know my daddy would be disappointed to learn I have misbehaved so much, but he’d be proud of me for taking my punishment.” With that, Cassie regained control of her emotions as she wiped the last tears from her eyes. She even managed a bit of an embarrassed smile.

The two females embraced as Cassie stood on her tiptoes to give her teacher a soft kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for taking care of me, Mrs. Mitchell,” she said with genuine gratitude in her heart.

“You know we all love you, Cassie,” the teacher replied. “Do you have any other demerits that you have to cleanse from your record?

“Yes, ma’am, after you spank me I’ll have to take four, five-lick spankings from Mr. Bone, the math teacher.”

Mrs. Mitchell acknowledged with a nod, hoping she didn’t frown too much. Nobody on the faculty liked I.B. Bone, that condescending little twirp from up north. She almost wished the real Mr. Bone, her principal, would give Cassie a pass for those offenses. She planned to blister the young girl’s bottom over the next week, but she’d do it with love. She didn’t trust the I. B. Bone. Nobody knew what was in that man’s heart. Or why he showed up in Oklahoma!

Cassie Barefoot, part 3

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:08:52 GMT

Cassie Barefoot
Part 3

If Cassie was embarrassed to ask her typing teacher for discipline, she absolutely dreaded the confrontation with I. B. Bone. She knew Mrs. Mitchell was fond of her; her math teacher had a different attitude. Mrs. Mitchell’s spankings would sting like hell, but they’d be personal. Whippings from Bone would be a visit to a cold, dispassionate executioner.

“Yes, Miss Barefoot?” Isidore Bartholomew Bone inquired. The wiry little man insisted on addressing his students as Mister and Miss, just like he did at the blue-blooded prep school in New England. The form of address belied his contempt. This Mr. Bone seemed to respect none of his students.

“I’m in trouble and I need to ask your help,” Cassie gulped as she struggled to look him in the eyes.

An agonizing period of several seconds passed as I. B. Bone eyeballed her from top to bottom, side to side, as if he were a warehouse manager inspecting a newly arrived pallet of freight.

“Yes, Miss Barefoot, I heard,” he responded in his typically condescending tone, his conspicuously protruding Adam’s apple bobbing up and down inside his skinny throat as the words came out. “You’ve been acting up in your classes without regard to the consequences. You’ve found that your comeuppance will be a bit painful. And now you seek my help?

“Just how many demerits did you earn by disrupting my algebra class?”

Cassie felt herself tremble. With Mrs. Mitchell, the girl’s sadness had been triggered by a genuine sense of shame at having to admit the extent of her immature behavior, like tearing up while admitting a series of transgressions to a loving grandmother or aunt. With I. B. Bone, it was raw terror, such as in the first interview with detectives at the police station after having been arrested. She admired Mrs. Mitchell and feared this man.

“Four, sir,” the words stammered out, barely audible.

“Look at me, young lady!” Bone insisted. His right hand lifted Cassie’s chin, forcing her downcast eyes to meet his penetrating laser beam.

“I’ve got half a mind to make you turn in that silly basketball uniform, so as to concentrate on what’s important—such as passing my algebra class on your second try. That’s what I ought to do.

“But when I joined the Swat Team, I committed to helping young miscreants like you learn the valuable lessons with a hard piece off wood applied to your soft bottom.

So, yes, you can expect a very sore posterior when you get done with my punishment, young lady. But you’re not going to get off that easy. I don’t have to offer you an even trade, demerits for licks,” Bone resolved. “I can add a few requirements.

“How long will it be until you’re finished with the other teachers’ licks and will be ready to bend over my desk?”

Trembling, Cassie pulled out her Daytimer. It was Thursday, February 8, and she’d take her first installment of five stinging paddle swats from Mrs. Mitchell tomorrow on Friday morning. Then she’d suffer five licks per day for the balance of the next week, the last ones occurring on Friday the 16th. Fortunately, her well-worn little bottom would be able to recover on the weekends.

“I’ll start your punishment on Monday, February 19th, sir.”

“Okie Dokey,” I. B. Bone mused in a fake colloquial manner, “that will give you eleven days from today to complete my prerequisites. On the 19th, when you present your naughty little bottom to me, you’ll also hand over one thousand completed algebra problems. I’ll assign them from your text and you’ll show your work.

“If you screw up this assignment, all the demerits stay, and I think you know what that means, young lady. After taking all those licks from Mrs. Mitchell, you’ll still be off the basketball team.”

* * *

Cassie’s mind wandered back, to that time 11 years ago when she lay in the critical care unit of the public hospital, surrounded by her family. The excruciating pain tore at her horribly burned face, and for the first time in her short life, a kiss from mommy or a hug from daddy couldn’t make it all better. The lid hadn’t been properly secured on the pressure cooker and when it blew, a glob of scalding, sticky chicken fat impacted the left side of her face, causing third-degree burns and the kind of searing agony that she’d remember for a lifetime. A feeling of helplessness, the inability of anyone to abate her pain, also permeated her memory and returned at times like this.

How in the world could she complete 100 algebraic equations per day? At most she could do 25, from the end of supper until she’d invariably fall asleep at the kitchen table after midnight. She couldn’t fake it, either. The answers lay in the back of the book, but I. B. Bone insisted she show her work.

He was setting her up to fail. Why did he hate her so much when she had tried so hard to please him? For the first time in a year and a half’s struggle with Mr. Bone, she hated the man. This was not God’s will, she admonished herself, but she couldn’t help it. Walking out of his classroom that day, she felt as helpless as she had years ago in the hospital bed. There seemed to be no solution. She was no math wiz and a thousand algebra problems was an impossible assignment.

“What’s the matter, babe?” inquired tall, gangling LaToya in the locker room before basketball practice that afternoon. “All down in the dumps because of the whuppin’s you gonna get startin’ tomorrow?

In racist Tulsa of the early 1970s, the Salvation Christian basketball team served as a model for the community. Black, white, and Indian blended together as sisters, a family that knew no ethnic division. LaToya, who had descended from black Texas sharecroppers who picked cotton in the Brazos River bottoms for generations, was a second-generation Oklahoman. Her father had broken free of stoop labor when he migrated north to take a job in aircraft production during the Second World War. His rise to foreman allowed him to pay his LaToya’s private school tuition.

“I can take my lickin’s,” replied Cassie, borrowing some of the characteristic black speech she heard every day in the locker room. “But I Be Bone hates me so much! He knows how slow I am and he has made my basketball eligibility dependent on completing an impossible number of algebra problems.”

Cassie told her teammate the details of her math teacher’s assignment.

* * *

Cassie slept fitfully and awoke with a sinking feeling. She really didn’t dread the first day of her paddling ordeal.   Five stinging paddle swats a day for 10 days, with weekends off, was nothing for a trooper. Her physical stamina, combined with her belief in the redemptive nature of corporal punishment, would carry her through. She feared all would come to naught, however. Last night she tried to solve algebra problems quickly. It was absolutely frustrating.   Rushing only led to errors. There was no way she could complete I. B. Bone’s impossible requirement, she despaired.

Cassie dropped to her knees in prayer and then sought solace in scripture.   She turned to the Old Testament, to the Book of Proverbs: “The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left [to himself] bringeth his mother to shame.”

Cassie knew her mother was disappointed in her behavior. Otherwise, one or two demerits purged for swats would have restored her basketball eligibility. Mom wanted her to suffer punishment for each and every disciplinary transgression, and her daughter saw her point. She vowed to take her chastisement valiantly, regardless of the consequences, even if her basketball season would be cut short.

Cassie rose from her morning devotional and walked a few steps to the bathroom. As she prepared for her shower, she checked her unmarked bottom in the full-length mirror. It was the last time for a month that her cute little buns would appear so virgin, so innocent. Her brownish skin, slightly lighter than full-blooded Native Americans, reflected her mother’s half-Indian, half Okie heritage. Otherwise, the DNA of Bee Smoke and Yellow Jacket, those brave Indian women who so bravely withstood the excruciating pain of their punishments, coursed through her veins.

Her shower ended, Cassie stood totally naked in front of her bureau. Not well endowed with cleavage, she wore only a size A cup.   Perky little breasts nonetheless protruded straight out, each capped by a prominent flesh-toned nipple. Owing to the stringent physical conditioning drills mandated by the basketball coach, not an ounce of extraneous fat appeared around her waist or on her hips. Her cute, diminutive navel rested three inches above a neat crop of midnight black pubic hair that hid her most sensitive spot.

Rummaging through her underwear drawer, she selected a single pair of unadorned, white cotton panties to cover the target zone. Only that sole, seemingly microscopic layer of cloth would lie between her regulation school skirt and the cute, bulbous bottom that would soon pay the price for her series of classroom misdemeanors. Cassie had thought, only fleetingly, of wearing multiple pairs of panties to cushion the blows, as some kids did when they expected a spanking that day.

But she quickly quashed the thought. Jesus would know she was cheating and she would hate to be confronted on Judgment Day for such dishonesty. Cassie knew she deserved what was coming to her, and was determined to soak up every stinging paddle lick for the character-building lessons it offered.   Proud daughters of the Cherokee nation honestly accepted their punishments.

She would make both mommy and daddy proud by the ways she took her licks, even if the entire episode concluded unsatisfactorily in the frustrating end of her basketball season.

* * *

As the third period bell rang, she felt like the sinner called before the judgment bar of God. This was it, third period typing class: 50 minutes of the clack, clack, clack of manual typewriter keys impacting a single sheet of paper wound around a hard rubber roller, interspersed with soft bell chimes that signaled the typist to throw the carriage. This morning, five uncharacteristically loud pops would intrude on the normal, orderly clatter of Mrs. Mitchell’s class.

“Cassie, would you like to explain to your classmates what will happen at the beginning of class for the next several days?” the teacher began.

Every kid in school knew about Cassie’s ordeal, although few had heard about the complication the math teacher had imposed. Nevertheless, Mrs. Mitchell wanted the young malefactor to fess up in front of her peers, and to acknowledge the class disruption she had caused.

Cassie positioned herself in front of her classmates. Neatly adorned in her regulation school uniform—starched white blouse with an embroidered school crest on the left breast pocket, blue tie neatly hanging from her collar, the hemline of her pleated navy skirt bisecting her kneecaps, plain white bobby sox folded over an inch, and neatly polished brown penny loafers—she was fit to be photographed for a school advertising brochure. As the school handbook allowed only light makeup and no lipstick, she presented an image of clean Christian womanhood, an innocent countenance that belied her status as one who would soon undergo severe chastisement for serial misbehavior.

Accustomed to letting her dribbling, shooting, and guarding speak for her and already on the verge of tears, Cassie took her position in front of her classmates. She wasn’t used to addressing a crowd larger than the circle of teammates during a basketball game time out. But she summoned all of her courage and spoke in a soft, humble voice.

“Most of you know that my behavior in class lately hasn’t set the proper example for an athlete and student leader,” the penitent young lady began. “Because of my inconsiderate and selfish attitude, I have earned 10 demerits. That would normally result in my suspension from the basketball team. But our principal and several of my teachers have been kind enough to offer me this alternative punishment. I want to apologize to each and every one of you for disrupting class in the past, and for the few minutes of your time it will take over the next couple of weeks to set me straight.”

Then she turned to her teacher and said: “ I am so sorry, Mrs. Mitchell. I’m ready for my licks now.”

“Well said, Cassie,” Mrs. Mitchell remarked firmly but with a hint of love in her voice. You may position yourself.”

* * *

The 1919 model Underwood #5, America’s first mass-produced typewriter, rested in its position of honor in front of the classroom. No longer used routinely for assignments, as repair parts were getting hard to come by, it served special purposes. Today, Cassie positioned herself over the venerable machine, resting her palms with fingers outward on each side of the table. She then arched her back and bent at the waist until her upper body and torso formed almost a 90-degree angle. Finally, she carefully positioned her feet, about six inches wider than shoulder length—just as Hamilton Bone’s Manual for Christian CP prescribed.

She had last been in this position at school two years ago, when she and several eighth grade classmates impulsively broke the closed-campus rule and snuck across the street to the convenience store during lunch break. The owner, a member of the evangelical church that sponsored Salvation Christian School, promptly telephoned the principal, who met the recalcitrants as they set foot back on school property—his trusty Rod of Correction in hand. That day Cassie took her licks in assembly line fashion, the fourth of six girls methodically paddled and then sent, sniffling, back to class stripped of all their contraband and much of their dignity.

That day Cassie submitted to her punishment aided by the collective bravado of half a dozen fellow students who, although caught and punished, would remember the incident with increasing fondness as the years went by—a page in their mental scrapbook of junior high mischief to be reviewed at subsequent class reunions. Today, she stood alone.

Mrs. Mitchell, a former high school basketball star herself, positioned her six-foot-two frame in paddling position. Normally appearing taller in two-inch pumps, she wore flats on spanking days. They were more stable. In her right hand she grasped the regulation girl’s paddle, a 24-inch model crafted in the school’s woodshop just months before. Her spanking swing, perfected over decades in the teaching business, featured a roundhouse, sidearm delivery, passing through almost 270 degrees of arc before the paddle impacted upturned buttocks at blistering velocity. A second before the sharp crack of wood meeting flesh, she would pivot on the ball of her lead foot, putting more of her body weight into the delivery. It was a brutal stroke that had left burly football players slobbering in their tears and runny noses. She would swing with the same intensity today for the rising star of the girls’ basketball team. She owed dear Cassie no less.

As typing class contained only girls, Mrs. Mitchell performed the last preliminary step. She lifted a foot and one-half of Cassie’s pleated school skirt and folded it neatly over her almost horizontal back. Only those plain, white cotton panties would serve as a barrier between the paddle and the quivering flesh of the young girl’s buttocks. The rush of cool air felt strange to a bottom that would soon catch fire.

Mrs. Mitchell hiked her student’s skirt not as an act of sadism to enhance the resulting pain, nor as a mean-spirited attempt to shame the young girl. Rather, the all-female environment of the typing class afforded the veteran spanker the utility of studying the impact area as each paddle stroke landed. The Manual, although it discouraged bare-bottom spanking, mentioned such a step as a precaution against unwanted bruising and blistering. By monitoring where each stroke landed and how the flesh responded, a skilled spanker could precisely place every lick where she wanted, minimizing the damage.

Like a condemned prisoner standing on the scaffold, waiting for the hangman to open the trap door, the young Native American girl spent these last preliminary seconds with her eyes closed in silent prayer. She asked the Lord for courage. She knew she’d cry. That was okay. The boys’ code of ethics in such as situation proscribed tears, but girls were only admonished to hold position, limit the volume of their cries, and take it like a woman.

As Cassie quietly mouthed “Amen,” the air whistled and eight ounces of white southern pine impacted the white cotton panties and compressed the tan skin that lay a fraction of a millimeter beneath. The sound of wood meeting flesh was heard at the other end of the hallway.

* * *

When the three-and-one half inch wide, 3/8-inch thick paddle slammed into Cassie’s buttocks at a velocity of 43.5 miles per hour, thousands of microscopically thin sensory receptors, embedded in her subcutaneous flesh, sent emergency signals to her spinal cord. Traveling the biologically efficient neural network at 30 meters per second, the electro-chemical impulses sped upward to the thalamus, the brain’s central processing unit for pain.

Instantaneously, commands flowed in the opposite direction, urging Cassie to move her bottom out of danger. Unlike the incident 13 years ago, when boiling, molten chicken fat struck the left side of her face, Cassie overrode this emergency command—all of which occurred in a fraction of a second. This indicated an important difference between humans and animals, or in this instance, between a relatively mature adolescent and a toddler. Cassie’s grip tightened on the desk, her gluteus maximus contracted, she rose on the balls of her feet, and a sharp cry emanated from her larynx and flew out of her mouth—but the brave young lady held her position.

Cassie’s bottom burned and throbbed. Searing pain continued well after Mrs. Mitchell withdrew the paddle and cocked for another stroke. Two lacrimal glands, located beneath the corner of each eye near the bridge of the nose, began production against her will, filling the tear ducts that drained the salty fluid into her nasal cavities. After only the first of 50 licks, she could taste emotion in the back of her throat. It was not a good sign for the brave young Indian princess who so desperately wanted to take her punishment stoically.

As the second blistering stroke landed, a quarter inch beneath the first, near the fold of Cassie’s buttocks and thighs, the young miscreant began losing her ability to override the fight-or-flight biological reaction. Her knees buckled and her buttocks dropped involuntarily almost six inches. Her death grip on the side of the table broke loose. A louder, pained yelp came out of her mouth. Now her tears, too voluminous to pass through the tear ducts, began to flow over the lip of her lower eyelids down the side of her face, falling from the point of her chin into the inner workings of the ancient Underwood typewriter.

This is not going well, she thought. The tears she expected. Her inability to control herself physically was a surprise. Come on, girl, she urged herself. You’re an athlete! Think of all those skinned knees and bloody elbows suffered on the hot summer playground asphalt. Remember how you’d bounce right back up and face those boys? Dutifully, she snapped herself back into the receiving position. Cassie didn’t know it, but she wasn’t the only one affected by the aggressive whipping.

As Mrs. Mitchell’s third violent lick slammed into Cassie’s hindquarters, sounding like a cannon shot, 29 typing students reacted with a variety of emotions. The freshmen, not used to seeing such intense corporal punishment, flinched with every loud pop. A couple of them shed tears of compassion; others found themselves gripped with terror and vowed never to earn such an intense punishment. Upperclassmen dissipated their emotional tension by doodling, fidgeting with their fingers and curling their toes, or pretending to study the details of the day’s typing job from the pages of their text. Many stared transfixed at the drama that occurred just a few feet from them; others had a thousand-yard stare in their eyes, mentally trying to flee the scene. One girl buried her head in her arms.

As nasal mucus drained onto Cassie’s upper lip and entered her mouth, now open to emit quiet, rhythmic sobs between her painful yelps, a strange mental transformation seemed to rescue her from an embarrassing total breakdown. Her thoughts wandered back to one of Big Jim Barefoot’s campfires, where her Indian cousins recited ancient oral history, chanted, and danced late into the evening hours. Ceremonially cutting themselves as part of otherwise long-lost spiritual rituals, they felt no pain. Having smoked their quota of peyote that evening, the mescaline coursed through their veins, serving as a natural anesthetic.

Cassie’s agony induced an analgesic reaction of its own. Not yet totally understood by medical researchers, the process began when her pituitary gland, reacting to the pain she felt, began secreting opioid biochemical compounds that quickly flowed to other parts of her brain. Known as an endorphin rush, it served as nature’s second line of defense. Pain, the first defense mechanism, warned an endangered member of the species to retreat from danger. Endorphins gave a hiker with a severely sprained ankle, for example, the ability to overcome the pain and walk for miles out of the mountains.

As Mrs. Mitchell’s fourth unmerciful paddle swat landed, Cassie felt the pain in its full, burning, radiating intensity. Her bottom still blazed, like the ankle of that injured hiker who still felt pain with every step. But, somehow, she grew stronger emotionally, getting hold of herself. She could handle the agony. Her tears slowed to a trickle. Her nose quit running. She gripped each side of the table beside the old typewriter with renewed determination, thrusting her derriere outward--inviting her tormentor to take her best shot with the fifth, final, and brutally powerful lick.

Cassie Barefoot, part 4

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 02:51:18 GMT

Cassie Barefoot
Part 4

That afternoon in the locker room after basketball practice Cassie put her raspberry-red, swollen bottom on display for her teammates. The welts appeared darkest where the edge of the paddle contacted flesh, a disorderly hodgepodge of sometimes parallel, sometimes intersecting lines. Mrs. Mitchell had tried her best not to place one swat directly atop another, but the limited area of Cassie’s bottom prevented some overlay.

A Salvation Christian tradition mandated that a spanked athlete submit herself to the additional torment of good-natured, stinging hand slaps from her teammates under the cooling flow of the shower. Cassie had been the tormentor in the past; this time it was her turn to undergo the ordeal. All fourteen of her teammates took their shots, and once again Cassie’s bottom pulsated with pain. No tears resulted this time, however. She took it like a good sport, breaking into smiles between every wince. This time her yelps were all in fun. Although she didn’t quite understand it, she derived an inner, almost sexual pleasure from having the other girls’ bare hands slap her behind. The giggles and frolicking became so loud that Coach Jones threatened to come in with her own paddle to restore order.

Saturday, Cassie’s alarm clock rang at 6:30 a.m. She dutifully reported to the kitchen table for a daylong session with the algebra book. She had to admit that this was the real punishment for her misbehavior, a penance that her athletic prowess and pain tolerance did nothing to help her endure. By nine she had solved only 17 problems, having thrown away a trash basket full of scratch paper. The panic had once again begun to set in when the doorbell sounded. The cavalry had arrived to rescue her.

LaToya, the team captain whose heavy handed slaps on Cassie’s derriere the previous day had been the most painful, introduced her delegation of two: an older sister, LaTricia, a mathematics education major at Tulsa Community College, and a 15-year-old nerd named Oscar, the winner of last year’s Salvation Christian Freshman Math Award.

“Hey, baby, you tole me how much trouble mister I Be Bone been givin’ you,” LaToya began. “So I thought I’d call in the heavy artillery.”

“Okay, Cassie,” the older sister began, “obviously you’re not mentally deficient or else Salvation Christian wouldn’t have admitted you. Your difficulties probably aren’t with aptitude, but rather with technique.”

A couple of years of higher education had refined LaTricia’s speech, as she had shed the ghetto talk her athletically inclined younger sister still embraced.

“Let’s see that assignment,” brainy little Oscar suggested. “We’ll group the problems into categories, give you some shortcuts, and help you speed up your problem solving.”

LaToya, her teammate, continued: “We ain’t gonna do the problems for ya, ‘cause that’d be a violation of da Honor Code. But if these guys can’t help you get past dose thousand math problems, nobody can.”

For the next seven hours, broken by a pause for oven-baked frozen pizza and Cokes, this new “swat team” concentrated on refining Cassie’s problem solving skills. As the afternoon wore on, it became obvious what a lousy math teacher Mr. Bone really was. Most of the other students, more academically gifted than Cassie, had endured his incompetence and found better methods to conquer algebra on their own—or with the help of parents or friends. Big Jim Barefoot only went through the sixth grade. As much as he would have liked to help, the algebra in his daughter’s textbook could have been in Arabic.

“Look, Cassie,” Oscar pointed out, “instead of changing minus five to a plus five on one side of the equal marks and then adding five to the other side, just bring the negative five across to the other side of the equation and change the sign as you cross over. See how easy it is? It’s called transposition. Bone never showed you that?”

“What an incompetent asshole!” LaTricia muttered under her breath. Fortunately, she had passed freshman algebra before I. B. Bone arrived several years ago, but she had heard plenty of horror stories. With him as a teacher, she’d probably never have made it to calculus with differential equations.

The older sister resolved to do a bit of background research on this Bone follow. She couldn’t understand how such a ham-fisted excuse for a mathematician could graduate from an Ivy League university.

As the clock struck four, and the kitchen table revealed an impressive quota of 150 math problems, all in Cassie’s handwriting, the two younger girls panicked.

“Oh my God,” Cassie blurted, using the Lord’s name in vain in a rare instance. “We’ve got to be at the locker room ready to go in an hour. Coach will tan our hides good if we’re as much as a minute late.”

The bus to the game in Oklahoma City left promptly at five, and that meant reporting to the gym in enough time to pack one’s gear. Coach Jones gave unmerciful paddle swats to any tardy player, and heaven help the girl who missed the bus. Not only would she be riding the bench for the next two games, but also she’d be sitting on blisters.

LaTricia drove the younger girls across Tulsa as if she were navigating an ambulance, as terrified little Oscar hung on for dear life. Fortunately, no flashing blue lights appeared in the rear-view mirror. They arrived fifteen minutes early, in just enough time to avoid a menacing glance from the coach. Cassie wasn’t sure how much she liked living on the edge lately. Her sore bottom still beckoned her during the two-hour bus ride to face the defending state private school champion Pentecostal Pioneers.

* * *

Principal Hamilton Bone found a full platter of duties awaiting him Monday morning. His habitually neat desk sported a copy of Sunday morning’s Tulsa World, open to the prep sports page’s blaring headline: “Crusader Squaw Tomahawks Pioneers.”

OKLAHOMA CITY--Diminutive sophomore Cassie Barefoot came
off the bench Saturday night to score a career-high 17 points, including
a lay-up and clutch free throw in the last seconds, to propel Salvation
Christian to a come-from-behind 56-54 win over Pentecostal, in a
run-up to a probable state tournament game next month.

Skipping down a couple of paragraphs:

“Cassie has had a lot on her mind lately,” Crusader head coach
Lisa Jones remarked. “I’m very proud that she was able to
put aside her off-the-floor situation and come through in the
clutch for us.”

Ham Bone instinctively knew this referred to more than Cassie’s disciplinary problems. In a late-night telephone call with his girls’ basketball coach, he had learned how much character the gutsy little sophomore exhibited. A group of Pentecostal students, mostly boys but with a few girls included, decided to poke fun at Cassie’s facial disfigurement.

“Scarface, Scarface, Scarface,” they taunted Cassie repeatedly every time she touched the ball. Down by one point on the last possession, Cassie drove the lane and sunk the go-ahead lay-up, drawing a foul from a frustrated defender. Then, with two seconds left on the clock, she went to the free throw line to the jeering taunts of: “ugly, ugly, ugly.”

Cassie’s free throw touched nothing but net, and when Pentecostal attempted the inbounds pass, the little ball-hawking guard stole it. As Cassie boarded the bus for the long ride home, her teammates chanted: “Cassie, Cassie, Cassie!” Her bottom still felt tender, but boy it felt good!

Ham Bone vowed to call the Pentecostal principal to ask why teachers in attendance hadn’t interceded with their crass and unruly students. But the next matter of business perplexed him more.

An anonymous fax had been waiting for the school office administrative team when they arrived early this morning. A clipping from the Hartford Courant’s obituary page, dated just over a year ago, delivered the most perplexing news he’d seen in thirty years as an educator:

Isidore Bartholomew Bone, a long-time mathematics educator at
Green Preparatory School in Waterbury, died Monday afternoon
after a long illness. Bone, a graduate of Brown University, had
been on a leave of absence from Green Prep for several years after
suffering a debilitating stroke.

What the hell was this?

Ham Bone dialed long distance directory assistance: “Waterbury, Connecticut, please. Green Preparatory School. The headmaster’s office.”

* * *

Cassie, some 300 completed algebra problems in her ring-notebook, stood in front of Mrs. Mitchell’s class Monday morning. As usual, she wore her uniform flawlessly.

“The whole school is very proud of you, young lady,” the tall, gangling teacher led off. “We heard not only about your exploits on the basketball floor, but also how you disregarded those unchristian-like students from Oklahoma City. You showed a lot of character.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Cassie replied with characteristic humbleness.

“Unfortunately, you still have some debts to pay, don’t you?” Mrs. Mitchell inquired.

“Yes, ma’am, I know. I’d never expect otherwise.”

“Very well then, Cassie. Please get into position.”

Mrs. Mitchell opened her large desk drawer and withdrew her trusty paddle. Like a batter in the on-deck circle, she cut the air with several whistling warm-up swings. The sound still sent chills up Cassie’s spine as she bent over the Underwood #5. Making game- winning baskets in front a hostile crowd was one thing; staying calm when your bottom is about to be torn up remained a challenge she had yet to master.

“Cassie, do you know what particular offense you’re being punished for today?” her typing teacher inquired.

Cassie thought momentarily, and then her heart sank at the realization: “The gum, ma’am?”

“Cassie,” the teacher directed, “take a look down into that beautiful told typewriter, where the metal typeface strikes the platen—yes, on the right side of the carriage. What do you see?”

Hard, dry chewing gum, several years old, still clung to the rubber roller.

“That was my personal typewriter, the one I learned on as a little girl. My father gave it to me. I brought it to school years ago when the budget didn’t allow the purchase of much equipment. I replaced broken keys. I even repaired a broken carriage belt when a careless student threw it too hard. But when some inconsiderate child stuck gum on the platen a few years ago, I found there were no more repair parts in stock.

“My personal machine is no longer functional. Do you know why I’m so particular about gum?”

Cassie remembered one of her dad’s favorite expressions: “Hearing the nails hammered into your own coffin.” All of the exhilaration from Saturday night, and even the satisfaction gained Sunday when she completed more than 100 algebra problems using her new techniques, faded to black.

“Yes, ma’am,” Cassie mumbled dejectedly. She now knew why her typing teacher had her miscreants bend over the venerable old machine.

Mrs. Mitchell administered a savage paddling. Few endorphins interceded to deaden Cassie’s pain. Through sheer courage and strength of character, she maintained position. By the second lick Cassie was crying hard. The third and fourth strokes elicited the anguished cries of a wounded animal. The fifth dropped the 16-year-old to her knees.

Crying uncontrollably, Cassie picked herself up and slowly walked back to her machine. She wiped her tears and runny nose, winced as she sat, and then placed a single sheet of paper in her typewriter. She started typing as she sobbed, reading her assignment through watering eyes. Champions always got on with the game.

* * *

“Have a little problem sitting, Miss Barefoot?” I. B. Bone inquired. “Are you going to be able to tough this out, or would you rather just call it quits and turn in your basketball uniform?”

Cassie resisted the temptation to be sassy. “No, sir, I can take my punishment.”

“Well, then,” Bone replied. “I’ll see you over my desk on Monday. That is, if you have satisfactorily completed one thousand algebra problems!”

Cassie let her guard down. “I have 300 already,” she said with a twinge of defiant pride.

“Hmmmmm,” the little weasel replied. “We’ll see about that!”

* * *

That afternoon, Cassie’s teammates once again inspected her bottom, but the results dulled their enthusiasm for smacking her again. Raspberry red was beginning to turn earthen dark, as new welts appeared to swell out of earlier injuries. Cassie was game to continue the locker-room grab ass, just so long as Coach Jones didn’t intercede with her own paddle.

LaToya, the senior, had other ideas. She visited the athletic trainer and obtained a jar of Vitamin E skin cream, which women’s magazines had recently featured as the miracle healer for bruises and blemishes. For the balance of the week, Cassie’s teammates would not playfully swat her behind in the showers. LaToya had other uses for their hands.

“Listen up, girl,” the tall, rangy African-American team leader told Cassie. “We black kids, we knows all about whuppin’s. I seen a lot given to my cousins growin’ up, and I got my share. As brave as you is, girl, your butt ain’t gonna make it into next week without some help.”

After her shower at the end of practice, Cassie toweled off, wiping her sore bottom gingerly. Then she lay down on the training table, fully naked, sunny side up, while several of her teammates took five minutes each, gently massaging her sore, bare bottom with the healing Vitamin E cream.

Conscious of the time, she propped herself up on her elbows, algebra book open, working problems on notebook paper fastened to a clipboard. LaToya stayed behind with three teammates, assigning other members of the squad comparable duties on subsequent evenings. Their precious little teammate had gotten in trouble on her own, but they loved her nonetheless. No member of the team would refuse to do this for another girl.

As for Cassie, the hour-long massage felt wonderful. It felt so good, almost erotic, to have her teammates passing their hands, lubricated by the creamy, viscous liquid, lovingly over her bottom. It almost made the paddling worthwhile.

“Just remember, little Injun,” LaToya whispered as they prepared to go home, “you gonna pay for this later. Understand?”

Cassie grinned.

* * *

Hamilton Bone hung up the phone with Green Preparatory School’s headmaster, who had never heard such a preposterous story. One of his deceased faculty members is now teaching in Oklahoma! The New Englander had heard of dead people getting up out of the grave to vote in elections in the American south, but never taking a job.

Okay, so this guy’s a fraud, Ham Bone thought. But why would somebody use identity theft to seek employment at a religious school in Oklahoma? The damn job only paid $18,000 a year. That’s sufficient to live on in Tulsa of the 1970s, but who would go to so much trouble? Especially some Yankee. Why would he show up in the Bible Belt?

Who the hell is this guy and why the devil is he at my school?

He studied “I. B. Bone’s” personnel folder. The transcripts from Brown University were in order. The letters of recommendation from Green Preparatory seemed to be authentic. Of course, they weren’t addressed personally to Salvation Christian. They were the “To whom it may concern” variety. And they were dated a full year before the real I. B. Bone suffered his career-ending stroke. They seemed to be generic letters of recommendation, such as someone would solicit if he were thinking of moving on, but remained in good graces with his present employer.

He dug further into the folder and read the math teacher’s application for the Swat Team. Then the light went on. Why hadn’t he seen this before? Part of the answer was in Waterbury, Connecticut, and the other at a cross-town university.

He telephoned the same headmaster, who by this time had his fill of idiotic calls from the oil patch. They talked for only a few minutes. Then Ham Bone ran a photocopy of the math teacher’s photograph and loaded it into the fax machine.

Five minutes later the phone rank and Ham Bone had his first solid lead.

* * *

Big Jim Barefoot held his precious little daughter in his arms. When you’re six-foot-five, there’s still a lot of room in your lap for the light of your life, your five-foot-two-inch, 16-year-old princess.

Cassie was sure she could endure the whippings, even those meted out by that uncaring math teacher. She seemed to have found her confidence with regard to the algebra problems, which she now worked until after midnight while sitting on a fluffy down pillow. Basketball had never been better, as she was now the talk of the school. She didn’t even mind the notoriety her disciplinary regimen had gained for her. The boys were circling and sniffing now, like hounds chasing a bitch in heat—although she suspected they just wanted a peak at her butt!

But she hadn’t been honest with her dad, and she chose Thursday night to come clean—well, almost. She decided not to tell about the girls rubbing cream into her ass, but confessed everything else, including her disciplinary problems.

Big Jim just laughed. He reached up and thumped the point of her little pug nose several times with his index finger. “Hey, Pocahontas, you really got your little butt in trouble this time, didn’t you?” He laughed again.

She finally got up the courage to ask: “Daddy, what would you have done if that letter announcing my disciplinary probation had come home?”

“Oh, I’d have taken that strap to your naughty little tail. It might still happen.” Then he laughed again. “Hey, kid, I’ll be at the game Saturday night. I hope you’ve worked hard in practice so you can play. I take it your bottom’s in no condition to sit on the bench.”

This time Cassie’s tears were the happy kind.

* * *

Ever since Monday’s horrific paddling to atone for her gum infraction, Mrs. Mitchell had become more perfunctory with Cassie’s swats. The rest of the week’s swats were surrogate punishments for non-spanking teachers, and she now felt sorry for the young teenager. By the second half of the week, she was sure Cassie had learned her lesson, but unfortunately she had to endure the rest of her punishment ordeal. The tall veteran typing teacher regretted having to turn Cassie over to I. B. Bone for her last four whippings. She had half a mind to approach the little twirp and demand that she be authorized to spank Cassie in his stead.

Now it was a race between the damaging wood of the paddle and the healing power of the Vitamin E miracle cream. The paddle was winning. Although Cassie’s ability to withstand the mental strain of the daily spankings was improving—she barely cried now—her bottom was deteriorating. Bright red blood blisters now appeared in the dark black and blue bruises. There was no way was Cassie going to chicken out and go on disciplinary probation now. She had done 850 math problems, and so what if sitting was intolerable? No ordeal was too much for a proud Cherokee princess.

It took the Native American team doctor to put a stop to the ordeal. Valerie Runninghorse, the first American Indian female to graduate from the University of Oklahoma’s medical school, was touring the locker room on Friday afternoon before practice, just after Cassie had taken Mrs. Mitchell’s final set of swats. She took one look at the 16-year-old’s bruised and blistered bottom and called Hamilton Bone. Cassie could get no more spankings for at least a week, preferably two, the doctor decreed. But she told nobody but the principal.

Ham Bone had no intention of turning the basketball team’s newfound hero over to I. B. Bone--or whoever the shyster was. His after-hours search of the math teacher’s desk had produced the final damning bit of evidence. This man wasn’t fit to continue teaching, much less paddle students. But there were still a few technicalities to be taken care of before the snare could be sprung. Knowing that Cassie was scheduled for no more spankings until Monday, he kept the news from her and everyone else associated with the school.

As far as Cassie knew, she would walk into I. B. Bone’s classroom Monday with 1,000 math problems in hand and then bend over his desk. The math teacher couldn’t wait.

The principal sent home notices to the parents of all Salvation Christian students that there would be a parents’ meeting on Monday night. It wasn’t one he looked forward to conducting.

Cassie Barefoot, part 5

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 02:36:44 GMT

Cassie Barefoot
Part 5

I. B. Bone arose early on Monday morning. This was the day he had been waiting for.

Sunday’s sports section only infuriated him more. Cassie Barefoot, now the starting point guard for the Salvation Christian Crusaders, scored 32 points, dished out seven assists, and stole the ball three times in the district championship-clinching game against Tulsa Episcopal. The score wasn’t even close, and all the girls got to play. When Cassie came out of the game, she did so to a standing ovation from the crowd. Only a few wondered why she didn’t take a seat on the bench.

The sports writers now wondered how Cassie, a latecomer to the starting lineup, could be kept off of the all-district team.

A racist and a misogynist, I. B. Bone hated Indians and he hated women. The latter had been an obsession all of his life, the product of deep-seeded sexual inadequacy. He also had another personal characteristic that would have to be explained to the parents that night, at a meeting called because of him, but which he knew nothing about.

Oh, how he looked forward to paddling little Cassie Barefoot today! It would be his first spanking since being certified as a member of the Swat Team.

Of course he would find her math problems unacceptable. Probably somebody had shown her how to use transposition, and he’d declare that to be a dishonest technique. He would yell at her in front of the class, saying her basketball season was over. He’d let her break down in tears.

Then he’d offer her another condition. He’d still remove her demerits, preserving her eligibility, if she’d agree to a double dose of her original punishment. The extra licks would scald her bottom because she had cheated, he would allege. Then he’d get to paddle her cute little behind every day this week and well into the next.

Eight brutal five-swat whippings! He’d tan that little redskin’s rump like she’d never been tanned before. He’d make her jump. He’d make her cry. He’d make her beg for mercy. The thought sexually aroused him. He just hoped he wouldn’t sustain an erection when the time came.

Hurriedly dressing, he gathered his papers and dashed out the door. He wanted to check his paddle one more time to make sure it was in place and ready.

In his haste, he almost ran into the burly deputy sheriff who had been sent to take him into custody.

* * *

When Cassie arrived for math class late Monday morning, she found a substitute teacher. The young man, a graduate student from the University of Tulsa, had no idea why she tried to turn in 1,000 unassigned algebra problems. Nor did he know what she meant by the “licks” she was to receive. Having been reared up north, he didn’t even know schools down here still gave spankings. He asked Cassie to take her seat and do the assigned work. He just shrugged when she asked to stand in the back of the classroom and write on a clipboard.

At police headquarters that morning, local detectives and the visiting officer from the Waterbury constable’s office interrogated Matthew J. Johnson, alias Isidore Bartholomew Bone. They held him on charges of making a false declaration to obtain an Oklahoma state teaching credential, but it was really a stopgap measure while detectives in investigated his other activities. How did he obtain that Connecticut driver’s license under the name Bone, which he exchanged for an Oklahoma one? Did he use any of the real Bone’s credit cards? Given his almost erotic interest in spankings, did he have inappropriate contact with students while an employee at Green Preparatory School or Salvation Christian?

They were getting nowhere, as Johnson continually ranted and raved about women and Indians.

When Hamilton Bone convened the parents’ meeting that night, he told the bizarre story of a failed prep school teacher from Connecticut who assumed the identity of a critically ill colleague, passing the associate’s Ivy League college transcripts and letters of recommendation as his own in order to obtain a teaching job at Salvation Christian.

Matthew Johnson worked for several years as a math teacher for Green Prep, an upscale, coeducational private school. Hired on a part-time basis while he completed his master’s in mathematics at a local college, Johnson was on track for a permanent position once he earned his degree. But he never hit it off with students or fellow faculty. He seemed to insist on using older pedagogical methods when more efficient ways to teach math had been introduced. He seemed contemptuous of female students and teachers, and especially minorities.

He caused so much consternation that the department head, a Brown University-educated mathematician named Isidore Bone, asked the administration for generic letters of recommendation while he shopped around for another position. Two related incidents solved the problem for Green Prep. First, the college where Johnson studied notified the school that its student had failed comprehensive examinations and would not be awarded a master’s degree. Second, a couple of parents complained that Johnson had been speaking and acting inappropriately with their children, not molesting them, but behaving provocatively nonetheless.

Johnson didn’t appear at the administrative hearing to determine his employment future, and colleagues sent to his residence found his apartment abandoned. The real Isidore Bone noticed some of his personal papers missing, but saw no connection. Hamilton Bone apologized to the assembled parents for not catching Johnson’s fraud in the hiring process several years ago. Checks with Brown University revealed the transcript to be genuine, and a call to the academic dean at Green Prep had resulted in a glowing recommendation of Isidore Bone. A criminal record check came back clean. Yes, the real Isidore Bone would have been a delightful employee for Salvation Christian, that is, before his subsequent stroke and confinement to a nursing home.

“But why would this guy come to Oklahoma?” one parent asked the obvious.

It was the question Principal Bone anticipated but dreaded answering. Never in three decades had a Salvation Christian employee shown a perverted interest in a student. He responded by introducing Dr. Willard B. Anderson, professor of abnormal psychology and sexual deviancy at Oral Roberts University.

Dr. Anderson presented a term no parent in the room had heard: a “spanking fetish.” Normally, the professor said, it’s a harmless proclivity, used inside a relationship or at least among consenting adults as an enhancement to otherwise normal sexual relations. Sometimes, adult spanking enthusiasts held parties at which they spanked each other without having sex, just because they found the practice of exchanging power to be stimulating.

In its detrimental form, however, spanking fetishists abused the trust placed in them. Certainly the erotic spanking of a minor under the guise of ordinary discipline would be considered the most reprehensible form of perverting an otherwise harmless activity.

Dr. Anderson told of Hamilton Bone’s call last week, and of their appointment on Friday. He reviewed “Isidore Bone’s” Swat Team application, especially the page on which the applicant wrote an essay describing why he wished to spank. The math teacher’s unhealthy interest in juvenile chastisement, cleverly disguised from a layman’s perspective, practically leapt off the page to the trained psychoanalyst.

No, Dr. Anderson explained, most teachers and parents who swatted kids for punishment did not have a spanking fetish, and most erotic spanking enthusiasts had no interest is disciplining real juveniles. The perverted teacher now in a jail cell downtown represented the rare but dangerous intersection between the two distinctly separate interests.

Why was he in Oklahoma?

He wanted a job in spanking country. He wanted to paddle kids, preferably girls and minorities. No corporal punishment was allowed in Connecticut, so he stole the real Isidore Bone’s credentials and applied for the first opening down south.

Fortunately, Hamilton Bone assured his tuition-paying parents, Salvation Christian School had caught this interloper before he had the chance to act on his sickening desires. Yes, he replied to another question, future interviews for the Swat Team will include psychological screening.

In the rear of the room stood tall, smiling black woman. Barely a week had gone by since LaTricia found some startling news on microfilm. It certainly was fortunate that Tulsa Community College maintained such an extensive collection of out-of-town newspapers. She had been surprised to find the Hartfort Courant available to her, and she practically jumped out of her seat when she read the old obituary. But she had remained silent this night. That anonymous fax was her gift to her alma mater and to that young American Indian girl she had coached in algebra.

After most of the parents departed, satisfied with the school’s handling of this near miss, the principal approached Big Jim Barefoot with the unpleasant news that his daughter had been the student targeted by the pervert. Not only was Johnson sick, but also dishonest. In his middle desk drawer last week, the principal found a month-old memorandum from Mrs. Hines, asking Ham Bone to call in Cassie and warn her at the seven-demerit level.

The bastard stole it! He wanted Cassie to get in trouble! Studying the stack of pink demerit slips, the principal noted the math teacher had issued the last three.

Grateful for Ham Bone’s candor, and receptive to the new tuition waiver offered Cassie as a basketball scholarship, Big Jim consulted with Ham Bone on the one remaining issue—the young Native American girl’s remaining four demerits. Even though they hadn’t been issued under the best of circumstances, Cassie had indeed misbehaved. The transgressions were legitimate. The pair thought they reached an amicable solution, but were surprised the next day when Cassie’s teammates offered an even more interesting approach.

* * *

Coach Jones postponed basketball practice Tuesday afternoon for a special meeting between the principal and members of the squad. The subject was their newest little star player and the general responsibility that athletes had to their fellow students to act as behavioral role models.

Hamilton Bone, a longtime coach before moving to administrative duties, explained what almost happened to one of their teammates, and how the school would never again allow a faculty member to take advantage of a student. Of course, his revelation was not news. By half an hour after the parents’ meeting last night, the entire school knew about the situation.

The principal then proposed the solution to Cassie’s remaining demerit dilemma—a special kind of probation under which the young girl would promise to conduct herself with utmost discretion for the remainder of the semester while disciplinary action was held in abeyance. He asked Cassie’s teammates to help her walk the straight-and-narrow path, and he appealed once again to all players to set the example for the rest of the school.

LaToya, the team captain and one of four seniors on the squad, then spoke up. She revealed the results of an impromptu team meeting on the subject held over the weekend—before the controversy with Isidore Bone had become widely known. Knowing Cassie still had four demerits to work off, and hearing through the grapevine about the team doctor’s ruling, the girls wanted to preserve Cassie’s eligibility.

“We don’t think you should hold Cassie to any higher standard than the rest of us,” LaToya suggested. “Instead, the four senior girls on this team volunteer to take the rest of her whuppin’s. We’ll be sure Cassie behaves in the future,” LaToya said to giggles from the rest of the squad. The adults understood the kids’ laughter. They knew how much peer pressure teammates could bring.

Stacey, a tall Caucasian junior who everybody thought would take over the team leadership next year, then spoke. “Hey, why just the seniors? When Coach Jones makes one girl run sprints for dogging it in practice, don’t we all run with her?”

Stacey referred to the team-building concept introduced earlier in the year. If one player got lazy and needed to be punished, her teammates considered it their fault for not motivating her. Everybody ran stairs or wind sprints when one girl screwed up. It was a marvelous incentive for everyone to hustle all the time.

“Hey, but what about me,” a high-pitched voice in the back of the ranks sounded. “I can’t let all of you take my punishment while I stand here and watch,” Cassie objected.

“Don’t worry, Pocahontas.” The booming voice came from a tall, rugged Native American man sitting in the bleachers across the gymnasium. “I’m going to fix your little bottom. We’ll just wait until it heals a bit.”

Cassie turned red with embarrassment and then giggled. It was the first time she found the prospect of being whipped with Dad’s awful leather strap the slightest bit amusing.

A few minutes later, after a messenger removed the Rod of Correction from the hook next to Jesus in the principal’s office, Hamilton Bone lined up 14 girls by the gymnasium wall. In turn, each came forward, bent over and grabbed her ankles, and submitted to five blistering swats with the ovular, custom spanking stick.

LaToya went first. As she assumed the position, her teammates started clapping and chanting rhythmically, just as they did during free-throw drills.

“La-Toy-a! Clap, clap, clap. La-Toy-a! Clap, clap, clap. La-Toy-a!”

Whack! Hamilton Bone’s searing first lick echoed off of the gymnasium walls.

“La-Toy-a! Clap, clap, clap. La-Toy-a! Clap, clap, clap. La-Toy-a!”

Whack! The encouragement of her teammates helped their captain take the brutal swats courageously. The tall, African-American girl hardly batted an eyelash.

And so it went with the remaining 13 girls. Five savage licks each, interspersed by enthusiastic chanting and clapping.

Only one girl cried. It was Cassie.

* * *

Three weeks later the Salvation Christian Crusader girls’ basketball team, dressed in warm-ups and letter jackets, arrived at Oklahoma State University’s Gallagher Arena. It was the day before the state championship game and this was the biggest gymnasium these girls had ever played in.

The state’s newspapers crowed about a team that played not only with skill, but also with a remarkable sense of camaraderie. The sports writers couldn’t say enough about the five-foot-two-inch Indian warrior who had come out of obscurity to lead her team to double-digit victories in each of the playoff games. Now the Crusaders, winners of the private school bracket, would be pitted against pre-season favorite Oklahoma City North, a public school with almost ten times the enrollment of the tiny Tulsa religious institution.

The Crusaders were decided underdogs.

The last three weeks also signaled a new attitude with regard to the team’s deportment and academic performance. While basketball fans crowed about the girls’ play, teachers observed a renewed determination by each player to work hard on her academics and set the example with her classroom conduct. Nobody remembered so long a period when not even one basketball player had to be corrected for misbehavior.

Little Cassie Barefoot excelled under her new algebra teacher and actually looked forward to taking the string of advanced mathematics courses in subsequent years that would qualify her for college admission.

Coach Jones gave her best motivational speech, which could have occurred years later in the movie Hoosiers. She had LaToya mount a ladder and measure the height of the basket. Ten feet, just like the gym at school. Baseline-to-baseline, the court was the same. The seats that surrounded the arena would be filled with hostile fans of the opposing team tomorrow night, were not to be considered. The Crusaders would play their game between the black lines.

Then, one more unfinished item of team business provided the catalyst for the fairy tail that would unfold the next evening. Big Jim Barefoot, the only parent allowed to accompany the team into the gymnasium, unzipped a small canvas handbag and withdrew a menacing, three and one-half foot razor strop. The implement took the breath out of everyone watching, but Cassie only smiled.

“Pocahontas,” her dad announced, “three weeks ago your teammates stood up for you. It’s now your turn to take what your little bottom couldn’t back then. It’s time to square the account.”

“Okay, daddy,” Cassie chirped in the innocent, childlike tone that her father loved so much. Her teammates detected an almost cheerful inflection in her voice. For the first time ever before a whipping, Cassie laughed. “I’m ready!” she announced.

Cassie took off her scarlet and gold letter jacket, and then bent down to remove her warm-up pants. One thin layer of cotton basketball practices shorts lay between her father’s double-tongue leather strap and the now-recovered skin of her bottom. Cassie wore a thong below her basketball shorts. Sporting a smile that never left her face during the intense ordeal that followed, she bent down and put her hands together, resting them on the padded vertical standard that supported the goal and backboard.

Her bottom upturned, she spread her feet apart and then leaned forward.

Her teammates formed a semicircle around her. As Big Jim got into position to Cassie’s left, they began their rhythmic chant of support, stressing the last syllable of her name.

“Cas-SIE! Clap, clap, clap. Cas-SIE! Clap, clap, clap. Cas-SIE! Clap, clap, clap.”

“You know I love you, princess,” her father said quietly between chants.

“I know. I love you, too, daddy. But next time, could you find a little different way of expressing it?”

It was the first time ever that Cassie felt cocky enough to make a smart-ass remark before one of her dad’s patented razor strop whippings. The first stinging pop, only a fraction of a second later, caused her to regret her good-natured insolence.

* * *

In the decades that would follow, several hundred thousand Oklahomans would claim to have witnessed the “Miracle in Stillwater.” Gallagher Arena in that epoch had only 6,381 seats.   It certainly didn’t begin like a miracle; rather, like a massacre.

Cassie played horribly. Easy passes sailed out of bounds. She traveled. She double-dribbled. She missed lay-ups and her longer shots fell as air balls, never touching the iron. Coach pulled her out of the game, spat a few choice words her way, and exiled her to the end of the bench. Sitting on that raw bottom that Big Jim had blistered and bruised with the razor strop the day before wasn’t a pleasant experience. Neither was losing by 20 points at halftime to the taller, faster, and athletically superior girls from suburbs of the state capital. Cassie’s only consolation, not a very satisfactory one, was that her teammates played just as badly.

Coach Jones lit into her troops at halftime.

“Why are you sitting apart?” she shouted. “Get together on this one long bench, shoulder to shoulder. Now hold hands. That’s right, inside of forearms to inside of forearms. Interlock your ankles. I want you close together as possible.

“Do you feel your sisters on each side of you? You’re not individuals. You are one flesh. One body. You are family!

“You didn’t play like a family during the first half. You played like a brunch of stepsiblings, jealous of each other. I don’t care if those public school kids are faster than you, or if they can shoot better. You’re not playing as well as you can. What’s the matter?   Has second place become good enough for you?”

Her words stung. Fifteen sets of eyeballs stared at their coach’s livid countenance. Tears appeared in most.

“There is a movement in this state to take the private schools out of the state playoffs,” she continued, lowering her volume. “They say small schools like ours can’t compete with the large public schools from the big cities. Well, they’re wrong but you wouldn’t know it by the way you’re playing.”

Then came five minutes of X’s and O’s on the blackboard, the technical adjustments in the Crusaders’ offense and defense that she thought would open a gateway to success in the second half.

With ten minutes remaining until tip-off of the fateful second half, Coach Jones reached deeply into her reservoir of motivational techniques.

“Most kids only dream of sitting where you are now,” she began. “Most coaches get to the state championship game once in their careers, that is, if they’re lucky. Some never make it. I love being here, but I don’t like what the scoreboard says. We worked too hard all year to get blown out and laughed at.

“The off-season will be an awfully long time. You can spend it as champions, the team everybody remembers, or as forgotten also-rans. It’s your choice.”

Then she did something uncharacteristic of her coaching style. She reached into a canvas duffle bag and withdrew a 27-inch paddle. Normally, Coach Jones paddled for disciplinary infractions: being late, violating dietary restrictions, or because of reports of bad behavior from classroom teachers. Never did she spank her girls for not playing up to their potential.

“Nobody has to submit to this,” she assured, holding the paddle in both hands, moving it closer—but if you need a booster shot for motivation, here it is.”

The girls examined the newly cut, virgin spanking stick. At the top, someone in woodshop had burned in “Salvation Crusaders – 1971 State Champs.” Neatly inscribed below were the names of each player. A space had been left above each name for the players to sign the paddle.

“If we lose tonight, this gets thrown in the fireplace,” Coach Jones said. If we win, I’ll ask each of you to sign it. It will occupy a place of honor in my study, as that State Championship trophy will remain at school.

“I’ll leave it up to you to decide, in the next few minutes, if it needs to be used now.”

Still holding hands, flesh touching flesh, the girls looked at each other. Then LaToya, the team captain, uttered a rare expletive as their collective answer:

“Damn straight it does!”

LaToya rose from the bench and moved next to her coach.   She reached down and lowered her basketball shorts, then turned and placed the palms of her hands on the wall. Two charcoal-black muscular buns glistened with sweat in the fluorescent lighting. Clearly, her ancestors had not practiced miscegenation with the sons of white slave-owners. The tone of her flesh indicated pure African ethnicity.

Coach Jones’ brutal, stinging swat bisected both buttocks about midway down. Instantly the girls noticed a horizontal white streak across their captain’s bottom. Then, just as quickly, blood flowed back into the impact area. Even though LaToya’s bottom was as black as they come, they all discerned an angry looking, rising red welt where the paddle had landed.

Not uttering a peep, the captain raised her shorts, tucked in her jersey and took a few steps toward the door. Then she turned to her teammates. “I be waitin’ for you out there. We gonna win!”

With grim determination and fire in their eyes, each girl rose in turn, lowered her shorts and received one savage, well-aimed stroke across her naked bottom.

Cassie’s turn came last. Coach Jones, inspecting the damage done by Big Jim’s razor strop the day before, felt tempted to grant her a pass. But she knew her little point guard wanted this searing lick and would be greatly disappointed if excused.

The coach smashed her unmercifully.

“Now, young lady,” the coach said to her floor general, “go out there and win a state championship for us. Go out and be a hero!”

* * *

As this is a spanking story, the reader will be spared a sports narrative. Suffice it to say that lowly Salvation Christian School, enrollment 210, defied Herculean odds by overcoming a huge deficit to defeat powerful Oklahoma City North, a public campus with 2,500 students to fill its talented athletic rosters.

The front page of the Daily Oklahoman featured a six-column photograph of a young Native American player on a stepladder, cutting down the net. Two figures standing in excess of six feet, a tall black player and a rugged, brown-skinned, middle-aged American Indian, steadied the ladder for Cassie.

Astute readers noticed one additional detail. The Oklahoman’s newsroom artist, unfamiliar with the sports scene, thought the scar tissue on the left side of Cassie’s face was a defect caused by electronic transmission of the photograph from Stillwater. He airbrushed the disfigurement out. For the first time since she was three years old, Cassie’s broad smile appeared without distraction.

It’s a tale that will live on in the hearts of a generation of Oklahoma sports fans. If they only knew the whole story!

As fifteen girls frolicked nude in the plush collegiate locker room that evening, each sporting a bright red blotch that spanned the width of their posteriors, they exchanged stories that would become the staple of team reunions for decades to come. Under the cooling water of the shower nozzles, the marveled at their change in attitude from the first to the second half.

As the opposing players helplessly watched their lead dwindle and then evaporate under the single-minded, savage Crusader charge, one bewildered opponent asked: “What did your coach say at halftime?”

Cassie, who played like a girl possessed, dispassionately replied: “It’s not what she said.”

After they emerged from the showers and toweled off, they lined up, still buck naked, to sign above their names on that very special paddle. The expensive wooden and metal state championship trophy they received after the final buzzer belonged to Hamilton Bone and the rest of the school.

This paddle was their trophy.

The Story Behind Cassie Barefoot

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 02:05:19 GMT

The Story Behind Cassie Barefoot

Stephen King sets his horror stories in Maine. John Grisham writes his legal thrillers from a Mississippi perspective. The best fiction writers draw upon their own background and then let their imaginations run. I tried that strategy in this story. I grew up in New Orleans, not Tulsa, but attended a small Baptist school that used corporal punishment extensively. Most of the characters in Cassie Barefoot are modeled on classmates and teachers, although the story exaggerates their actions and the intensity of the discipline meted out to the students. We were spanked, but never to the extent that the protagonist suffers in this narrative. One could exchange demerits for licks, but never so many at a time.

Cassie is a composite character. I sat behind Malinda, left, in algebra class more years ago than I’d like to admit. She struggled with both math and discipline. When we were in ninth grade, Malinda and I found ourselves in roughly the same situation as Cassie. I chose to take five “licks” to avoid going on disciplinary probation. Afraid of how her mother would react to her probation, Linda begged the teacher for the same dispensation, but he refused because he wouldn’t “spank a girl.” Malinda was bitterly disappointed. Like Cassie, she thought she could “take her licks,” but wasn’t allowed to. Notice how she’s photographed, with one side of her face in the shadows. She had a birthmark on the right side, which she always tried to hide from the camera. That became the inspiration for Cassie’s scar. On the right is Juanita, a fictional name for a present-day, real-life character. She’s three-quarters American Indian of various tribal bloodlines. As a freshman last year at a major Midwestern university, she became the hustling, ball-hawking “sixth man” on the ladies' basketball team. She got quite a bit of publicity because few Native Americans excel at sports. Indian delegations would attend games and meet with her afterward.

I. B. Bone, that little weasel that gives Cassie such a hard time, is based on my freshman algebra teacher. He was actually a very good teacher and quite a disciplinarian. For the high school yearbook, the editors chose a photo of him filling out demerit slips. And he did indeed earn the privilege of administering corporal punishment several years into his career at our school. I think he liked it. We students thought he was gay, or “queer” in our vernacular. He may have had a spanking fetish, but we didn’t know about those things back then. He did leave the school’s employ suddenly one year, but administrators never told us why.

Hamilton Bone, “Ham Bone,” was also a composite character, an amalgamation of our principal and head football coach. The principal was a very spiritual man who fervently desired that all students “accept the Lord Jesus Christ as personal savior.” He designated which faculty members were allowed to spank. There was no formal “manual,” and the paddling “boot camp” referred to in the story is a wholesale exaggeration. But he prescribed rigid verbal guidelines about how that disciplinary measure could be carried out. Also, like the principal in the story who looks into the fraudulent teacher, he was also a skilled investigator. When one of the young assistant coaches had an affair with a cheerleader and the coach denied culpability, he obtained motel records, witness statements, and other evidence to nail him. The head football coach (right) was the most feared disciplinarian in the school. When walking past his office students often heard his voice booming and paddle swatting. I visited from time to time.

Mrs. Mitchell, the deceptively kind, “spinsterly” typing teacher who paddles Cassie so unmercifully for the chewing gum infraction, actually stood 6-foot-2 in her high-heel shoes, which clicked as she the paced the floor between rows of manual typewriters. As far as I know, she never spanked a student but easily maintained discipline because nobody in the class would have wanted to anger their kind “Aunt Edna.”

Coach Jones is based on the girl’s physical education teacher and basketball coach, who also earned a fearsome reputation in the classroom as a no-nonsense senior English teacher. She spanked misbehaving girls with a leather belt. Students either loved or hated her—there was no middle ground. But her basketball players, who felt the sting of her belt more than other girls, admired her immensely. One told me they still have periodic team reunions that their coach, now in her 80s, attends regularly. The girl in the lower left corner is one of her star players. Sadly, her teams never won a state championship. That was a fantasy I added to the story.

By the way, here’s an Underwood #5, like the one Cassie bent over to take her punishment from Mrs. Mitchell. There was one in my school’ s typing laboratory, although nobody got spanked over it.

Unfortunately, the most redeeming feature of the mythical Salvation Christian School, the racial harmony among its multiethnic students, is sadly the greatest literary license I took with this story. Some of our parents actually enrolled their children in my school for perceived advantages in academics, discipline, or the religious climate. Regrettably, the student body was lily white, as numerous other parents sent kids there to avoid the black children in the city’s integrated public and Catholic school systems. When I went back for my 30-year reunion several years ago, I was happy to see that the school was fully racially integrated; alas, corporal punishment had also become a relic of the past