I taught school in Port Arthur for 31 years. English literature mostly, some composition. Thomas Jefferson High School. I had a lot of students come through my classroom. Hundreds over the years. Good ones, difficult ones, the ones you worry about, the ones who surprise you. But there is one I think about more than all the others put together.
She was in my class in 1957, 14 years old, wild curly hair, always carrying too many books. The other kids didn’t know what to do with her. I’m not sure I did either at first, but I saw something. And one afternoon after the other students had gone home, I told her what I saw. One sentence. That’s all it was.
I have wondered for 67 years whether that sentence mattered. I think it did. I want to tell you what I said. Port Arthur, Texas in 1957 was a specific kind of place. It was a working town. Texico and Gulf oil and the refineries that you could smell on certain days depending on which way the Gulf wind was blowing.
The men went to work and came home. The women kept the houses and raised the children. The children went to school and were expected to become the kind of people Port Arthur understood. Thomas Jefferson High School was the school where that expectation was formally delivered. You were taught the things Port Arthur thought you needed to know in the manner Port Arthur thought you needed to learn them.
Toward the future Port Arthur had already planned for you. For most students this was fine. They were Port Arthur children. They fit the place. The place fit them. Janice Joplain did not fit. She had not fit since she was old enough to be measured against what fitting looked like. The teacher was 29 years old in 1957. She had been teaching for three years.
She had grown up in southeast Texas herself, not Port Arthur, a town nearby. And she understood the specific calculus of the Gulf Coast oil town. What was valued? What was tolerated? What was simply not acknowledged because acknowledging it would require a response the town didn’t know how to give.
She saw Janice Joplain in her class in September 1957 and understood immediately which category she fell into. The girl read too much, not textbooks, everything else. She came to class with library books tucked inside her notebook. She drew in the margins of her assignments. She had opinions about things that 14year-olds in Port Arthur in 1957 were not expected to have opinions about.
art, music, the specific quality of different writer pros. She was not a troublemaker in the conventional sense. She didn’t disrupt the class. She did her assignments. She passed her tests, but she was always slightly elsewhere. Even when she was sitting at her desk, she was somewhere the classroom wasn’t. The teacher recognized this.
She had been somewhere the classroom wasn’t herself, at 14, and she knew what it cost. the other students had made their assessment. The specific cruelty of adolescence is not always violent or dramatic. Sometimes it is simply the consistent withdrawal of acknowledgement, the turned back, the laugh that stops when you approach, the group that closes when you try to enter.
The message delivered daily through small gestures that you are not the kind of person this place has use for. Janice Joplain received this message every day. The teacher watched her receive it. She watched the way the girl absorbed it, not with tears, not with anger, but with the specific practiced composure of someone who has been receiving it long enough to have developed a system for carrying it.
She carried it inward into the drawing, into the reading, into the somewhere else she went. When the classroom became too much of what it was, the teacher thought, “This girl is not wrong. The place is wrong about her.” She did not say this out loud. Not yet. Teachers in Port Arthur in 1957 did not say things like that out loud.
The town had a way of receiving such statements, and the way was not gentle, but she thought it, and she kept watching. October 1957, an assignment in class. She had asked the students to write about something they loved. The standard assignment, accessible, personal, designed to get language on the page without the paralysis that more abstract prompts produced.
Most students wrote about their families, about football, about summer, the expected things written in the expected ways, the words adequate to their subjects because the subjects required only adequacy. Janice Joplain wrote about music, not about a specific song or a specific singer, about what music did to her when she heard it.
About the specific physical experience of hearing something that was true, a truth the music contained that couldn’t be said any other way. About why she sometimes felt listening to the radio late at night that the voice coming out of the speaker understood something about her that the people around her had never tried to understand.
The teacher read it twice. Then she read it a third time. She thought, “This is not a 14-year-old writing. This is someone who has been thinking about this for years and has finally been given permission to put it down.” She gave it an A. She wrote in the margin, “This is the most honest piece of writing I have received from a student in three years of teaching.” She handed back the papers.
She watched Janice read the margin comment, watched her read it again, watched her expression, the specific expression of someone receiving something they had not expected to receive and did not know what to do with. After class, she asked her to stay. The other students left. The room went quiet.
Janice stood near her desk, not sure what was coming. The expression of a student called back after class in Port Arthur in 1957 was rarely the expression of someone expecting good news. The teacher said, “I want to talk to you about what you wrote.” Janice said, “I know it wasn’t really about the assignment.
” The teacher said, “It was exactly about the assignment. You wrote about something you love more honestly than anyone else in that room.” Gorge VT Snatcher. Janice didn’t say anything. The teacher said, “I want you to hear something, and I want you to remember it because this town is going to spend a lot of time telling you the opposite.
” She said, “The way you see things, the way you wrote about music, the way you think about what things mean, that is not a problem to be corrected. That is a gift. It is an unusual gift.” Port Arthur doesn’t have much use for it, but that doesn’t make it less of a gift. It makes Port Arthur a limited place.
The Janice looked at her for a moment. Then she said, “Do you really think so?” The teacher said, “I’ve been teaching for 3 years. I’ve read a lot of student writing. I know the difference between someone going through the motions and someone saying something true. You said something true. You should keep doing that wherever it takes you.” Janice picked up her books.
She said, “Thank you, Mrs.” and she left. The teacher stood at the window and watched her walk away down the school path, the wild curly hair, the too many books, the slight separation from the other students, but something different in her walk, something that had not been there before.
She did not become Janice Joplain’s special mentor. She did not become the teacher who guided her to greatness. This is not that story. Janice was in her class for one year. They had the ordinary relationship of teacher and student for the rest of that year. She passed her assignments. The teacher graded them. The year ended.
The next year, Janice was in a different classroom. The year after that, she went to Lamar State College of Technology. Then she left Texas for the first time. Then she came back. Then she left again. The teacher stayed in Port Arthur. She taught for 28 more years after Janice sat in her class. She had hundreds of other students.
She thought about Janice Joplain more than any of them. In 1967, she heard Peace of My Heart on the radio in her kitchen. She stopped what she was doing. She knew that voice before the DJ said the name. Not because she had a sophisticated ear for vocal recognition, because the voice had a quality she had read about in an eighth grade composition in October 1957.
the specific experience of hearing something true, the truth that couldn’t be said any other way. She stood in her kitchen in Port Arthur, Texas, and listened to Janice Joplain on the radio. She thought she kept doing it. Wherever it took her, she kept doing it. October 4th, 1970, she was in her classroom when she heard.
A colleague came to the door during her lunch break. The news was in the wire services. Janice Joplain had died in Los Angeles, 27 years old. She excused herself. She went to the bathroom. She stood there for a few minutes. She thought about the afternoon in 1957. The empty classroom. The girl who thought she was in trouble.
The words she had said. She thought, “I told her to keep doing it. Wherever it takes you,” she thought it took her 27 years. She thought, “Was that enough? Did she have enough time to do what she needed to do? Vorets do is a tasty ways. The old jset vorets. She has thought about those questions for 54 years.
She has not found a satisfying answer to either of them. What she has found is this. She kept doing it. From the bedroom in Port Arthur where she listened to Bessie Smith records to Threadgills Bar in Austin to San Francisco to Mterrey to Woodstock to the Pearl Sessions in Los Angeles. She kept doing it.
The thing the teacher saw in October 1957. The thing she told her was a gift. She gave it to every room she ever stood in. She gave it completely until there was nothing left to give. The teacher retired in 1988. She has lived in Port Arthur since she was born. She has watched the town struggle and change and remain in certain essential ways exactly what it has always been.
The town has a Janice Joplain Museum now. The house where she grew up is a landmark. The name that Port Arthur once laughed out is now the name Port Arthur uses to introduce itself to the world. The teacher has been to the museum. She stood in front of a photograph of Janice at 14. The wild curly hair, the expression of someone who is already somewhere else, already the person she was going to become.
She thought, I knew you when this photograph was taken. I sat across from you in an empty classroom and I told you the truth. She does not know if Janice remembered the conversation. She does not know if one sentence from one teacher in one classroom in Port Arthur, Texas in October 1957 had anything to do with anything that followed.
But she said it when the town was telling her the opposite every day, that she was wrong, that she was too much, that what she had was a problem and not a gift. One person told her the truth. That is the whole story. That is all she has. That is enough. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you
