PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES : Cooking Up Miracles in a ‘Clean Pot’

Fear is the city’s bad breath. It holds at bay, it reduces all to distant images. Here, for instance, is Berendo Junior High--a place of darkness, alarm and danger--or so neighborhood sixth-graders would have it. A primeval curse, not next year’s destiny.

Mean streets surround Berendo. People on them are hard-set, wary, fat with being poor and always tired. Why is it that the city never looks beggared? Is it the palm trees? The pastel washes? That there is nothing poor about the color pink?

Berendo students in teams have painted the walls and houses next to the school so that this whole corner is bathed in a safe, ice-cream light: a truce zone at Berendo Avenue and 12th Street in a no-man’s-land of rumbling violence.

Berendo’s old-fashioned facade itself is spanking clean. By the front steps, there are heroic, Art Deco figures carved on the wall; they stare upward, invincible, noble.

Inside the school’s front door there is a beautiful fish tank. Tiny tropical fish dart through the water in silence, but for the faintest bubbling. It takes a while to notice the sound, to see what it means: that in this strident, rasping corner of the city, there is refuge. People answer the phone with quiet voices. There are spaces around their words, patience around their tempers.

This is what is missing from Berendo’s landscape: graffiti, garbage, trampled earth, bare yards. “If the pot’s not clean,” says Cecilia Duran, the principal, “the soup’s not going to taste good.”

Duran is energetic, vibrant, small, smoothed over by the security of doing well in The Man’s world. She is Spanish, from New Mexico, daughter of a house painter and a seamstress but granddaughter of a U.S. marshal. Do those who once owned the territory need to beg for acceptance?

Her silk suit is full of color: purple, corn yellow, scarlet, fuchsia. It is an announcement of an outfit: full of pride and certainty.

Principals come in many ways--cold and impersonal, charismatic and tense, smug and bureaucratic--and they make a school. Duran is nice. She is very nice, and full of good heart. She has taught in rough schools, rough areas. She has taught troubled students: huge, great men deemed to be boys. She is afraid of no one. “Afraid? Not even close.” These tall, lowering eighth-graders who walk so close to danger? “Just be nice to them. That’s all they’re looking for.”

In the garden outside, someone has planted purple stocks, lilies, ferns, beds of pansies and gladioli. In summer, students raise vegetables: squash, corn, peas, beans. A rock garden, delicate, exact, has been created beneath a mural full of Latin American color and suggestion. Huge, red, painted poppies flower on another wall. The yards are quiet; the walls are clean.

Nineteen hundred students mill around the cafeteria at lunchtime. A few teachers keep charge, tiny women for the most part, dressed in delicate fabrics, their fingernails long and painted. The badge of success: soft hands that are no longer plunged into hard and rough labor.

In the classrooms, the teacher is monarch. In one, a gentle, sweet-faced man teaches against a strange smell of rabbits, a whispering tickle of baby rabbits, squeaking and huddling together. The air is flaccid. Heads nod, arms cradle the dreamers. Painters come in with ladders and trestles. They interrupt nothing; the patient droning goes on. But in another room, the atmosphere bites with attention. The walls are covered with posters: Walden Pond, American Realist art, Leonard Bernstein, Tanglewood, a Francis Bacon, twisted and despairing. Here the teacher barks and points, and no one sleeps.

This is a neighborhood school. No one buses into Berendo. But no one smashes its windows, either, defiles or destroys. How quiet are its students: drawn together, talking, waiting in line, eating--and everywhere, dark eyes that take in everything. What is feared from afar, is, in fact, a sanctuary. It is a nice school--clean and good-hearted. There is only one problem: that learning is hard and gritty. Meaning well is not enough. Excellence is not a “nice” commodity.

These young people walk in the shadow of the system--a system that defies them to dream. How can anyone, lost in this crowd of underdogs, believe that he will be special, she will stand out, succeed, be paid attention to?

The miracle is that some do.