Mrs. Patterson’s hands fluttered into my vision. “My goodness, Eden. What a vivid picture you’ve made! Now, where is this?”

“Gray is for ghosts!” I blurted out.

For a moment the other kids were quiet, but then a few began to giggle. The giggle traveled halfway around the room, then died of shame under our teacher’s withering frown.

“Class,” she addressed it as a warning. “Eden has drawn us a very good green swamp with alligators and snakes, and a house.”

I sank down into my chair and repeated myself more softly. “And gray is for ghosts, Mrs. Patterson. I haven’t put the ghosts in yet.”

Mrs. Patterson understood. Small and frail, she was a shriveled and sweet black woman who’d emerged from retirement to figure-head my kindergarten class. She made cookies every night before she went to bed because she knew some of her kids didn’t get any breakfast before school. She crocheted all twenty of us little sweaters during the winter and took us to the city pool for free all summer. She was simply kind, but all the same, she terrified me.

Not on purpose, of course. She wouldn’t have scared me deliberately, but whenever I saw her tiny, wrinkled hands I thought of dead birds; and every time she breezed by my desk they were flapping their bony, naked wings.

I think my fear hurt her feelings, or perhaps she thought something terrible was going on at home for me to be so silent and frightened all the time; but all was normal in our household so far as normal goes. I was raised by my aunt Louise and uncle David. They had no children of their own, so it was just me and that was just fine.

Everything was fairly ordinary until I started school. Until then I’d never had much interest in doodling, finger painting, or any of the other sloppy activities of early childhood, but once I entered the hallowed halls of elementary school, people handed me crayons and watercolors at every turn. Suddenly there was construction paper, glitter glue, Popsicle sticks, yarn, and paste. We used ink to make thumbprint caterpillars and paper bags to make cartoon hand puppets. We had sidewalk chalk to make Van Gogh-esque night scenes on black paper or hopscotch squares on the four-square courts outside. Our educators wanted us to expand our brains, to think outside the box—to look inside our gray-matter nooks and bring forth art. Most of the time, it was fun.