One July in the mid-1970s, after I returned to Louisiana from summer camp in western North Carolina, my parents signed my older sister and me up for day camp where we would swim, craft, and learn some Spanish. The day camp setting included a swimming pool and a modest pool house where we gathered, though the exact location escapes me. From my hazy memories of a very typical backyard pool, I assume we were at the home of the teenage boy who ran the camp, which he likely organized to earn summer money, just as I would later organize teaching swimming lessons when I was his age.
Certainly this day camp didn’t compare to Camp Green Cove in the North Carolina mountains, but with our three weeks there over, my mother looked for other activities to occupy us, getting at least the two oldest of her children out from under her feet. Day camp was a dream come true for her—all she had to do was work out with the other mothers a carpool schedule for driving us there each morning and picking us up in the afternoon. At most, ten minutes each way, maybe fifteen or twenty with stops to pick up and drop off. It was a small town.
The chance to swim in a pool every day for a couple of weeks sounded great to us campers. I wasn’t too fond of swimming at Green Cove, where the mountain lake water was far colder than the bayou and bay I was used to swimming in back home. In North Carolina I had preferred being on rather than in the lake, canoeing across it rather than swimming in it. But in south Louisiana, jumping into a body of water is the only way to spend time outdoors during the summer. Indeed we likely would have welcomed the shockingly icy water of lakes topped by melted snow but settled for this pool’s lukewarm relief from the scorching heat.
There were not a lot of us at this pop-up day camp—not even a dozen, I’m guessing, as I picture us gathered in the pool house on a couch and surrounding chairs for the Spanish lessons. The other kids were many of my usual summer playmates, kids of my parents’ tennis-playing friends. I was about ten at the time, one of three of the youngest “campers.” In addition to the high school boy in charge, I think there was a girlfriend helping him, which would make sense, given the crafting. Boys in 1970s south Louisiana did not “craft.” (They likely still don’t.)
While I have a flash of recall of playing in the pool, and I can vaguely see the pool house in my mind’s eye, my only specific memory of this summer day camp involves a Spanish lesson. Each day we learned different series of words—numbers, days of the week, months of the year. By the time we got to words for the parts of the body, I had apparently distinguished myself as outspoken. When the “camp counselor” taught us la boca, he touched his mouth, “la boca,” then pointed at me. And from that day through the rest of the camp, I had a nickname, La Boca, inspired, I’m guessing, by my voicing disagreement, an opposing opinion, a different perspective, an alternative activity suggestion. And I was a girl. I was supposed to just go along with what the “man” in charge directed. But I had my own ideas and opinions and no compunction about sharing them.
Also I’d just gotten back from a summer girls’ camp run mainly by women, where we’d been encouraged to participate in the many activity opportunities provided, yet could devise our own schedule and eschew those activities we had no interest in. In the later years I attended that camp, my friends and I would often take our own hikes up Thunderhead Mountain rather than sign up for a supervised hike with a counselor. In other words we were inspired to pursue what we enjoyed, not compelled to participate in activities we didn’t. We were encouraged to make our own fun. Sometimes that was as simple as taking a book from a shelf in the lodge’s library back to my cabin to read.
On the Green Cove library shelves one year, I found Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which I would then pull from the shelf every summer after. I had no idea yet that I would find myself some years later trying to rescue my dad, as the novel’s protagonist does, though of course from very different dangers. In my case, my dad’s devastation when my mother revealed she was not satisfied with being a Stepford wife, that she had aspirations of her own. The summers I read this novel, I could not have imagined my parents ever separating, but they did, when I was in high school. The scene in the novel that haunted me back then was all of the children outside their homes bouncing balls in unison, and when the one child loses control of his ball, the terror of his mother as she swoops him inside before anyone notices he has fallen out of sync with the other children.
My mother, as it would turn out, would eventually support, even champion, my not being in sync with my peers, but only after she was able to escape the tedious sameness of her own daily life. In the meantime this day camp counselor would not be the only person to try to shame me into conforming my behavior to his expectations.
*
So back to that pool house, on the day of that Spanish lesson, sitting on the couch with a couple of the other kids, I remember being embarrassed by my new nickname, angry and humiliated by being cruelly singled out. I also recall being hurt that no one, not even my big sister, spoke up in my defense, and disturbed by how quickly everyone used the new moniker, oblivious of my feelings. I determined immediately not to let on that the nickname stung, recognizing that doing so would make things worse, not better.
I was troubled, particularly, that no one noted the unfairness of this attack: this boy in charge (for he was, I realize now, still a boy) had not singled out anyone else with a label. Perhaps they remained quiet to avoid their own denigrating label. (Or perhaps I’ve forgotten how he targeted others of us? Not noticed the injustice until it was directed at me?) Still, it wasn’t fair. S——, another of the youngest girls like me, was much louder than I was. She was also bigger than me and had sometimes bullied me herself when we played together. I’m guessing this new bully in my life recognized that S—— would not have responded so quietly if he had singled her out. (In high school, I would come to appreciate S——’s ability to assert herself in this society that tried to hush and control us.)
I feigned indifference to the counselor’s jab, and the nickname did not stick past day camp. So I forgot about it. The memory surfaced briefly when I took Spanish in college, but I did not yet recognize the significance of this attempt by a boy on the brink of manhood to silence a little girl. I was still living in the patriarchal society in which a girl’s outspokenness was the anomaly, the teenage boy’s criticism of an outspoken girl the norm. In the years between day camp and university, many more people tried to shut me up—and sometimes succeeded as I endeavored to fit in more comfortably than my inclination to express myself often left me.
*
Throughout my youth, teachers, friends, boyfriends, and a husband tried to quiet me, just as that day camp counselor had. At the end of my junior year in high school, one of my favorite teachers pulled me aside in the hall between classes to ask me why I was bothering to run for Student Council president. I wouldn’t win, she not so subtly suggested. I’d lost all my runs for class president the previous years of high school. Why was I putting myself through it again, against the same opposing candidate? “You can’t win if you don’t run,” I responded, hurt that she did not at least admire my perseverance. Even if she was trying to spare my disappointment, why didn’t she praise my willingness to put myself out there? And who was she to tell me not to at least try? I’d been elected president of Camp Council my last year of summer camp in North Carolina, after all, I thought.
It took me years to realize I was probably much more fully myself during the three weeks I spent in western North Carolina for a half-dozen summers of my adolescence than I ever was during my youth. Indeed I didn’t fully grasp how oppressive home was for girls and women until I left Louisiana for graduate school in Tennessee. In Louisiana my ambition and outspokenness were simply not normal. But camp had been a place where my natural leadership was welcome, encouraged, and appreciated. My teacher was right. I did not win the Student Council election. I took my loss as stoically as I took my nickname at day camp. I also took over both the yearbook and newspaper editorships my senior year and came to realize the power of the press, of being the one who tells the story. It was in my hands how our school activities would be reported in the newspaper, how my classmates would be memorialized in the yearbook. I believe I was very generous.
*
About a dozen years later I found myself living on the other side of the same Appalachian Mountain range as Camp Green Cove, where I had thrived as a child. My PhD program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville felt a lot like being back at summer camp to me, and I was as pleasantly surprised to be elected president of the English department’s graduate student organization as I had been to be chosen to be Camp Council president so many years before.
Early in my time in Tennessee, a fellow graduate student, also from the Deep South, who would become a lifelong close friend, said to me after class one day, “You don’t use ‘girl speak.’”
“What is ‘girl speak’?” I asked her. She explained that in a linguistics class she’d learned how girls tend to qualify their responses in class: “This is probably wrong, but . . .” or worse, “This is probably a stupid question, but . . .” She was right: I do not use such phrases, which, as I learned, is particularly unusual for a girl who grew up in the South. The day camp director’s attempt to shame me into compliance had apparently failed in silencing me. And my friend’s bringing to my attention that more often than not these self-incriminatory prefaces are used by female students inspired me when I became a professor to call them out—compassionately—when I hear them used in my classrooms, asking the young woman to rephrase, with confidence and assurance of her right to ask her valid question or to share her observation, opinion, or argument.
During graduate school, too, another peer urged me to own my success rather than make excuses for it. When he’d commented on my already having a publication record at the start of our PhD program, I’d pointed out that one of these publications was in a special issue edited by the professor who was my mentor during my master’s degree program. “He would not have asked for your essay if he didn’t think it was strong,” my new friend replied, noting that, as editor of the issue, my professor would be judged by the content. I’ve always been grateful for that pushback against the youthful lesson that talking about one’s accomplishments was akin to bragging, and bragging was particularly unattractive in a woman. He was the first of numerous friends I would make in graduate school and during my career who supported rather than tried to stifle me.
Alas, that could not be said for everyone. As any ambitious woman can tell you, there were many who resented my successes. Who does she think she is?
Eventually the memory of my day camp moniker and its painful significance surfaced again, in my middle-age, midcareer years. Perhaps most poignantly when I was publicly belittled and harassed by another bully, an interim department chair, when I led efforts in defiance of his corrupt leadership, pointing out the emperor’s naked injustices during meetings. I would not be silenced by this man even as he tried threatening my professional reputation. Calling out the inappropriateness of his behavior eventually led to his removal from his position—and to women in my own and other departments seeking me out for advice in dealing with sexism in the workplace.
I was done with men trying to quiet me.
*
In recent years the elections I’ve been interested in are far more serious than camp or student or graduate councils. I watched in horror in 2016 as many of the people, including women, I grew up with criticized a candidate for U.S. president for being an outspoken woman while they supported her unqualified, xenophobic, dishonest, and all-around corrupt male opponent. And even after the victor proved he was not up to handling the crisis of a pandemic on his watch, then instigated a shocking insurrection against the peaceful transition of power after he was not reelected, I found in my social media newsfeed that the source of my La Boca nickname was still supporting him.
I don’t know why this person friended me on Facebook. I admit I accepted the friend request out of sheer curiosity: I wondered what happened to the teenage boy (now past-middle-aged man) who I recognized, in hindsight, had bullied me as a child. Though I recall the unfair nicknaming so vividly, I realize it is doubtful he remembered how he tried to quash my youthful, innocent pushback against the quiet complacency expected of girls (and even more doubtful that he would have recognized that his childish name-calling was bullying). But even though it is unlikely he remembered the La Boca label he tried to humiliate me with, still, after “friending” me, he resumed his effort to silence me, commenting critically in response to my left-leaning political posts. My guess is that this is just how he always responded to “mouthy women” (just as he had done with a mouthy girl so long ago).
Oh, darlin’, I thought to myself, after a couple of his rude, ignorant comments in response to my posts, I am not a misbehavin’ little girl from Franklin anymore. I will not be silenced. It—is—on. I used my PhD’s worth of critical thinking skills to deconstruct the drivel he posted, inspired by the Fox News Kool-Aid he had drunk, and I did not use any “girl speak” in my responses to him. Nor did I hold back out of the politeness of my raisin’. If you are still this sexist and ignorant in the twenty-first century, I reasoned, you might want to watch out whom you engage with.
And here’s an additional rub: we both went to the same Catholic school as children, just a half-dozen years apart. So intermingled between this still-patriarchal Neanderthal’s Facebook posts in support of a sexual-assaulting, tax-evading insurrectionist’s campaign to return to the U.S. presidency were posts about the love of Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ. Did he really not see the contradiction between his proclaimed Christianity and the behavior of the man he supported to run our country? Well, La Boca pointed that out to him, too. Every—single—time one of his shared religious memes showed up in my Facebook feed. No, I did not change him—or his mind. But maybe some woman in his life saw my responses and was comforted to know someone shared (and voiced) her opinion of his hateful vitriol and hypocrisy. And I’ll admit, it felt good to speak out so candidly to someone who once tried to shame me for expressing myself. I noted that only one or two, usually (but not always) men, responded with a thumbs-up to any of his posts, so I’m guessing there were women in his life who were thinking to themselves, Go, Margaret, as I challenged his MAGA propaganda and Christian hypocrisy. I also noted that he would delete the whole post when I pointed out factual errors in one of his shares. Eventually he unfriended me.
De nada (You’re welcome), I say, to all las bocas out there whom he tried to silence in the half century since he failed to silence me.
[Addendum: Between the time I first drafted this essay and its publication, I learned via social media that the bully had died. I am sorry he is not here to read this. Rest in peace, L.A.]
