Dill's Lying

The novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a first person novel told from the point of view of Scout, a young girl. One of Scout’s friends, Dill, is revealed through the course of the story to be lying about the adventures he has with his father. In truth, Dill’s father is not involved in his life, and Dill compensates by making up tall tales about his father. In my own life, my father was very much involved. I had a loving, caring, attentive dad who worked long days but always found time in the evenings to play with us. So I don’t have the excuse that Dill had, but I still told many tall tales about my dad.

I don’t know why I did it, but when I was in first grade, I lied about my dad all of the time. Our teacher would read to us each day after lunch, and at the end of the story, I’d always raise my hand eagerly. The teacher would call on me, and I’d immediately launch into a story. Maybe her story had been about a family living on a farm. If that were the case, after she called on me, I’d pause, take a deep breath, and then say something to the effect of “Once my family used to live on a farm, and we’d have to teach dogs how to herd goats, just like in the story. And my dad was a champion goat farmer!” And I’d go on with this fabulous lie, never letting on that I’d never even seen a goat in person before. And all of the other students in the class would believe the stories I told, and they’d all want to know more about my tales, and I’d gladly make up more details.

Occasionally my teacher would ask, “Now, Bryan, are you sure that really happened?” And she’d emphasize the “really,” but I’d always say that yes, it really had happened.

Finally, though, about two thirds of the way through the year, when the teacher had read us a story about an African villager who fought off a wild boar with his bare hands, I raised my hand. My teacher tried to ignore me, but when I insisted she called on me, and I said, “Once, when I was a little, little kid, my family lived in Africa, and we had a wild boar, and it tried to bite my older sister, and it ate our wild lion that we had, so my dad had to kill it.”

There was a long pause after I finished, and I could see all of the students in the classroom look at the teacher and look at one another, and finally, they all said—almost in unison—“Naaaah! No Way!”  (475 words)

And I never told another story about my father in that classroom again. 

The School Play

One memorable scene from To Kill a Mockingbird was towards the end of the novel when Scout appears in a school play on Halloween. She plays the part of a ham, and during the play she misses her cue, and then rushes onstage at an inopportune time and causes a laugh.

I had a similar situation with my first school play, which occurred when I was in the first grade. I don’t recall the title of the play that we were performing, but I remember the story. The play was designed to reinforce to children the need for brushing, and in the story a little girl (played by the prettiest girl in my 1^st grade class) refuses to brush and floss her teeth. As a result, all of her teeth leave her mouth, and the rest of the play involves this girl searching through a fantasy land for her teeth. In the end, she finds them, apologizes, and agrees to brush her teeth.

I played the part of King Tooth; that’s right, I was the the king of Toothland, and it was in my kingdom where she finds her lost teeth. For the entirety of the play, 20 classmates and I—all with giant paper drawings of teeth covering our fronts--hid behind the rear curtain of the stage, waiting for the main character to find us. When she did, I had a long passage to give, but I couldn’t remember the words, and I had to have them fed to me three or four words at a time. Like Scout, I was sure I’d ruined the play. And like Scout, I was told later that I hadn’t ruined anything, that I was the cutest, funniest part of the play. I guess what I’m saying with all of this is I understand why Scout was so upset at the end of her school play. (314 words)

Boo vs. Jenny

The novel To Kill a Mockingbird focuses on Scout Finch and her family, and a large part of the novel is spent on the fascination that Scout and her brother Jem have for their recluse neighbor Boo Radley. Growing up, I didn’t have a recluse neighbor, but there was a woman across the street that I was forbidden from talking to. And just as Scout had a series of encounters with Boo, I, too, had several with this neighbor.

Her name was Jenny, and she was mentally disabled. Back in the early 1970’s, which is the time that I am writing about, she would have been called moderately retarded. I was five years old at the time I met her, so I can’t say for sure that my memory is accurate, but she seemed to me to be an overweight, adult woman in her thirties or forties. And because of her mental disability, she was fairly unkempt.

But that’s the Bryan Sweasy of 2016 talking. The Bryan Sweasy of 1973 saw things differently. One day I was outside throwing a ball in the front yard of our house, and I saw her. She lived across the street from my house and one house down, and she was staring at me through a closed, front screen door. She was watching me, pressing her face against the screen so that all I could really see was her face, and it was a ghostly figure that I rightly (or wrongly, depending upon how you look at it) took to be the face of a grown woman. After a moment, though, the screen door flung open, and I quickly realized that this person was like no woman that I had ever known. It was how she moved that tipped her off. She skipped across her lawn and stopped at the edge of her yard, just before the street. She swayed her arms back in forth in front of her.

“Hey!” she called out to me. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Playing,” I said warily.

She started shifting her weight back and forth and humming. “Oh.” She looked at the grass near her foot as if it were the most interesting thing in the world. And then she said, “Can I play, too?”

Looking back, I’m surprised that I said okay, but as I said above, I didn’t really see her as a grown woman—she struck me as just a great big kid. After a few moments, I called back to her, “Okay! Sure.” She quickly bounded across the street and into the yard.

“I’m Jenny!” she proclaimed happily.

“I’m Bryan!” I said in return. And we threw the ball back and forth for a while. Everything was fine until sometime later (Again, I was five, so I’m just guessing, but I think it might have been ten minutes) a very distraught looking woman threw open the same screen door that Jenny had been pressing her face against. She looked wildly in all directions before seeing Jenny and me in my yard.

“Uh, oh,” I heard Jenny mutter under her breath.

“Jenny!” the woman shouted at her. “What—what are you doing? Get away from that boy and get back over here now!”

“I gotta go,” she said to me as she slunk back toward her house. By now my own mom (who in her defense, was raising six kids at the time and that’s how she left me outside alone for 15 minutes) had heard Jenny’s mom, and she pulled me into our house and yelled at me, too.

“Did she hurt you?” my mother asked me insistently.

“No,” I said. “Jenny and me were just playing.”

My mom studied me before saying, “Well, I don’t want you playing with her any more!”

I didn’t understand. Jenny was just another kid. Sure, she might have been a really large kid, but she was just a kid to me. And despite the worry of our parents, Jenny and I became good friends that summer. I loved it. I’d never had a kid my own age who lived so close to me! We played together many times over the summer, though always outside (I was never allowed in Jenny’s house and she was never allowed in mine).

One day, though, we were having foot races up and down the street, from the front of her driveway to the sidewalk in front of my house. On the second or third race we hit the sidewalk at practically the same time.

“I win!” we both shouted in unison.

“Nuh uh!” Jenny said to me as she stuck out her tongue. “I win!”

“No way,” I argued. “I beat you! You lose!”

The argument continued for a couple of minutes, until finally, in a fit of anger, I kicked Jenny in the shin and said, “I quit! I’m going in!” I turned my back on her and started walking toward my house. I hadn’t taken but five or six steps, though, when my whole world exploded. I was face first in the grass with Jenny, who outweighed me by 125 pounds, sitting on top of me and pressing my face into the grass. She pulled my hair as she ground my nose into the dirt. “You’re a cheater!” she was shouting. “God hates cheaters!” She grabbed my head by the hair on the back of my head, lifted it out of the grass, and then starting banging my face into the ground over and over.

I don’t know if it was Jenny’s mom or my dad who pulled her off of me. By the time I turned around they were both there, and Jenny was crying into her mother’s arms. “He kicked me!” she kept wailing. “Ow! Owwwwww!”

Jenny lived across from me for another 10 years or so, but I was never allowed to play with her again. Eventually, I was too old to want to play with her anyway. She died when I was in high school. I remember that she was somewhere in her fifties, and died from complications from diabetes. I learned at the time of her death (via the eulogy at the funeral) that she was a sweet, sweet person most of the time, but that she also had a history of becoming violent. 

I learned from my time with Jenny, though, a valuable lesson. Pay attention to the emotions of those around you. Even as a five year old, I had picked up on the concern of everyone when they heard that I was playing with Jenny. But I didn't see the danger, and so I ignored everyone's warnings. I learned from this experience that--when that many people are worried about something--I should pay attention to it!
(1,100 words)

Mrs Bagget

NOTE: In this true story about my life, I use a derogatory name, one that I'm ashamed that I used then and that I would never use now. I used it then mostly because it rhymed. I use it now to be honest about the story. 

"Mrs. Bagget is a faggot! Mrs. Bagget is a faggot! Mrs. Bagget is a faggot!"

That's the chant that I made up earlier this year about Mrs. Bagget, my so-called Gifted and Talented teacher. What do you think? I know. It's not the most sophisticated thing I've ever written. But hey, it was effective in its intended purpose, which was getting under Mrs. Bagget's skin. 

From the moment I met her, I pretty much hated her. I don't know what it was about her that bothered me. Maybe it was the way she dressed like a hippie. After all, it's 1980, not 1969. Get with the program. Or maybe it's the way she always talked to us. We’re in sixth grade, practically grown ups, but she still talks to us like we’re little kids. Or maybe it’s the way she talks about every activity we do as “just costing a couple of dollars each, and I’m sure your parents can afford that,” as if some of us maybe didn’t come from a big Catholic family and had parents who maybe couldn’t afford everything but who were too proud to sign up for free lunch, but who complained every time we brought home a form that needed money.

More than even that, though, it bugs me the way that she treats us like we’re a big deal or something. “You eleven kids are so lucky,” she told us in that stupid, slow, southern drawl. “Each of you has a special gift. You’re not like the other kids in your class. You, Trevor, you’re gifted in math and science,” she said as she pointed to the tall, awkward, scraggly boy beside me. “One day you might be an engineer. And you, Selena,” she said as she pointed to the only good-looking girl in this little pull out classroom, “you’re gifted in social studies and Language Arts. You might be a lawyer. And you, Bryan,” she said as she looked at me, smiled, and then glanced down at a sheet of paper, “you’re gifted in leadership and writing. You might be President someday.”

I don’t know if I’m gifted in leadership, but if I am, then I bet Mrs. Bagget rues the day we ever met. Because something about the way she tried to play up how great we were ticked me off, made me feel like she was putting down the other kids in our class, a bunch of whom I’m friends with. So I decided to use my so-called leadership skills to convince the other ten kids in my class to hate Mrs. Bagget. If I’m a leader, I thought, let me see if I can lead the others into making life a living hell for her.

“Mrs. Bagget is a faggot” was just the start of my plan. It worked out okay. I could pretty much only get the other boys in class to chant along with me, though, and there were only two of them. The first time she turned her back and the three of us did it, it sent Mrs. Bagget—holding back tears—out of the classroom for a few minutes. While she was gone, Laura, one of the other girls in the class, looked at me and said simply, “That was really, really mean.” I didn’t know how to reply, and after that, it was pretty clear that all of the girls were out.

But the day Mrs. Bagget left the classroom to go talk to another teacher, I was able to convince EVERYONE to leap up and turn all of the furniture in the classroom in the opposite direction. We even picked up her desk and moved it from one side of the room to the other. When she came back in the room, she was pretty angry. I think maybe we broke the strap on her purse or something when we dragged her chair across the room. I got detention for that.

I only have 1,000 words, so I can’t go into everything we did, but I can tell you that I spent as much time as I could making that boring Gifted and Talented class “fun” by making Mrs. Bagget angry, and I can also tell you that the straw that broke the camel’s back happened just a few days ago. Mrs. Bagget was telling the class how we were all going to Washington D.C. for a special Gifted and Talented trip. We were going to get to see the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial and a bunch of other things. At first I was excited about this. Then she handed us a form that we had to take home and get signed. It was a permission slip, and on the form, on the line where it said that the cost of the trip was $400, she had hand-drawn this little picture of the Jefferson Memorial.

Something about that picture of the Jefferson Memorial was so baby-fied to me. It made me so angry. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever been that angry. She had her back turned to me, sorting out something on her desk, but I walked over to her, and I could feel my face was a bright red. “I’m not going,” I said to her under my breath.

She turned and looked at me. “What do you mean, Bryan?” she said enthusiastically. “Don’t you want to go to Washington D.C.?”

“I don’t want to go to Washington with you,” I said as low and menacingly as possible. “I hate you. I hate this class. I don’t want to go to Washington, and I don’t want to be in this class anymore.”

She looked uncomfortable but tried to laugh. “Well, of course you’re in this class. You’re gifted. You HAVE to be in this class. It’s for your enrichment.”

Telling me I HAD to be in the class made me angrier than before. Now I wasn’t speaking in low terms at all. I was shouting, shouting loudly enough for the whole class to hear. I was shouting loudly enough for the principal down the hall to hear. I knew I was shouting loudly enough that my parents were going to hear about it soon.

“Listen to me, Mrs. Faggot!” I shouted. “I am NOT going to Washington with this class. And I am NOT going to ever come into this classroom again! I hate you! You’re a terrible teacher!”

So that’s why I’m here tonight, sitting in this office. My mom and dad are meeting with Mrs. Bagget, Principal Johnson, and some lady from something called the “Central Office.” They’re all in the next room talking about me. And in just a few minutes I’m going to have to go in there and tell them why I acted the way I did, and why I don’t want to go to Washington, and why I don’t want to be in the class anymore. And I doubt they’ll understand.

But you understand, don’t you? It’s all because of that stupid Jefferson Memorial picture.
(1,171 words)