Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

On the corner of Vanderbilt and Myrtle Aves, in the heart of Fort Greene Brooklyn, there is an adjoined square house. The first house is orderly, and kept, while the latter favours a private, forgotten lot, filled with uneven weeds and two “guard” cats, that patrol the area. The house seems very out-of-place compared to the other straight houses on Vanderbilt, which had an evident view of Midtown Manhattan.

Elvira Sacco-Ponsot, no more than 5’6, waits at the door with a mint herb in her hand, which is wrapped in brown paper. Her curly hair is white, with faded hints of yellow, which is from working with paints on her past projects. Her garments consisted of a long, light fabricated, multi-coloured shirt with matching pants; Sacco’s signature style, for it is very “Himalayan, spiritual, and I can feel free,” Sacco claims.

As she waits at the door, her feet are bare, and she appears exhausted, with heavy dark circles under her eyes, yet, she still seems alert enough that if someone gave her a paintbrush, she would accept earnestly and begin painting.

Sacco has been home for two hours, after her day in Downtown Brooklyn at the detention facility for “corrupted teachers,” she jokes, blowing smoke and rolling her eyes. She leads the way into her small house, which is teeming with books everywhere; out-dated, rotten and new books. She walked passed an oversized iMac monitor into her even smaller kitchen, which had a dim orange light from the sunset. She pressed her cigarette into an ashtray, pulled out another one out of a green box (which reads “hint” in large letters) and says, “Well,” with a large smile, “what do you want to know?”

Sacco was a teacher at the new school Secondary School for Journalism, in the old John Jay High school campus in Park Slope. She, outside the school, was a known artist for her paintings and infamous family history. Sacco, is in fact in fact the 21st generation of artists in her family, which dates back to the blue prints of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.

However, in December 2008 when the fall semester was wrapping up, Sacco received negative credits for allegedly calling one of her students the “N” word.

Upon hearing the “N” word, Sacco, didn’t flinch. Instead she remained blank and knowingly, and in fact she rolled her eyes as if the word had no sufficient meaning or impact, on her life whatsoever. But it was rather a word that needed to be explained; quite thoroughly.

Sacco was actually the first visual art teacher the new school received since its start in 2000, when John Jay began to close. She started teaching at the school in fall 2005, after a heated debate when all three John Jay schools tried recruiting her as their school’s art teacher.

“Larry Woodbridge, asked me to join Law. Abbie Reif asked me to join Journalism, and Jill Bloomberg from Research asked me to join,” Sacco explains. “At the end of the day, it was whoever was going to give me my demands, a new computer, which by the way needed to be a Mac, and my own room. Abbie came through, but it wasn’t easy.”

Prior to her arrival at the School of Journalism, the only art course at the school was music with Mr. Castro. According to New York City criteria towards high school students and getting a state’s diploma, students needed to take both a semester of music and another visual arts class to graduate. However, majority of schools in the city, are lucky to have one of the programs in the school, so the students graduate taking a year of music or another visual arts class, instead of a semester, in which Sacco still insists is farcical.

Art classes are arguably the first department that gets either pulled from a curriculum or cut in budgets, in which pressured Sacco into teaching in the first place.

“Art was always apart of me, but I had a passion for teaching, to create change for a long-lasting positive effect. I wanted to work, and create for a better future, have enough influence to create, create a domino effect. That is positive. When I see art not being explored, especially in this great, talented city, it makes me feel bad. I was teaching for over 30 years, and it pained me to see students recognized artwork and inspiration, but not who created it. Because they were so misinformed, that drove me to work in the system,” explains Sacco.

Sacco’s initiative as teacher was to take her children, who are really her students, on “trips.” With these trips they would visit foreign lands unknown to them, for example: if the subject called for mandala, Sanskrit for “circle,” her children and she would visit the Himalayan Mountains. If they wanted to make masks, they would visit the Caribbean, African and Aborigines regions, and get ideas. However, all this would be done, without the students actually leaving the city. By bringing in her own creations for whatever assignment they were doing, and also by bringing into the class artifacts from that said region.

Sacco’s methods were to inform her children on the rich heritage of the world, outside the five boroughs. She indulged her classes’ grades six to twelve- as the Journalism school catered to middle and high school students- in the importance of past art eras.

In order for her children to create anything, they needed to know the history, and precision. The children were given affluent and adequate information on the Renaissance- which as Sacco claims is re-birth of new thinking, Baroque, Mannerist, graffiti, printmaking and Expression styles. All these styles of artwork have a common ground, a sense of expression; what Sacco wanted all her children to be able to do accurately and tastefully. The ability to think, create and express their minds, bodies and souls through the arts.

“Sacco was most definitely an impact at the school,” says Secondary School for Journalism Principal Abbie Reif. “The students loved her, and I loved all the visuals artworks that were presented in the school. You can tell time as well as effort went into the preparations.”

While talking, Sacco appears like a little girl in a candy shop. Her hand moves earnestly and rapidly, like her mouth. Sacco claims she was different from the other teachers because she never used the book.

“When one teaches,” Sacco starts, acting as if she really was teaching, “they’re bound to be mistakes, but being so trapped,” she actually fidgets herself to favour a rectangular shape, “doing what the book says, isn’t helping. A book is empty words that were written to inform. But how well can little information be if you don’t actually get a visual perspective of what you are being informed of? That’s why I teach, and teach by the language my students know.”

This particular language acceptance Sacco embraced happened to be what put Sacco in the predicament she is in, not teaching, and at a teacher’s detention facility.

December 2008, On John Jay’s third floor in room 318, the largest room to the Journalism school, was a room that favoured an art studio. The back section was a long table, which had artwork that was drying. After that table followed, six neat table-groups; three on opposite sides, then a bookcase, blocking Sacco’s infamous “cave,” this was actually her desk.

The day in which Sacco “called her student the ‘N’ word,” her group of seventh graders spent a period being loud and active. However, according to Sacco, the student who she called the “N” word to was acting up, excessively that day. The child, Sacco claims went as far as to throw “a frackin’ scissors under my eye”. Sacco claims that her students were that crazy, but that particular incident wasn’t a direct assault on her, more so, it just happened to land there. And that is the type of nuisance she claims she dealt with on a daily basis.

“I quieted the class down after that happened. Because I had enough, I really did, had enough at that point. And I firmly said ‘stop it; you are acting like a low-life.’ The child looks at me, and says ‘well what is a low-life.’ I looked at him like really, are you asking me that? I then stated to him, that a low-life is basically someone who was classless. Then the whole class wanted to know what was classless; I then stated, that while I was growing up, classless was something we spoke of against people who didn’t know how to act, basically a ‘n-.’ I then explained it had nothing against race, because according to the dictionary that word was someone being defined as classless. It ain’t say nothing about race,” She recalls.

The students reported to their parents about her calling her children the N word. Sacco does admit that it was nothing like reading it in the papers, and seeing it in black and white that she was being called a racist. Sacco then grew grey at this point, and got another cigarette, her sixth one at this time…

“To be called racist, she beyond words,” her daughter Marie Ponsot started; Sacco was shaking in disbelief, as if the event occurred yesterday. “How could she be racist, when we are made up of everything? We are African, European, and a little of this, and a little of that, and she felt betrayed. Everyone who knows her knows that whole incident was complete crap. Especially everything the media was saying.”

Sacco was placed in immediate suspension from her job, and she was restricted from going to Journalism, and any school near the John Jay campus. Immediately after her removal, there wasn’t a replacement art teacher.

But there was loyal Journalism students who were angered by her removal in the first place; particularly; students who graduated in 2008, and the current senior class at the time, as well as the juniors who favoured and appreciated Sacco’s teaching skills. The removal created a group on Facebook by her students to petition that city return Sacco to her job.

Sacco herself never saw the child again nor the parent that started this. In fact, Sacco claims they were media hungry, in an issue that was a lost cause: for the “tormented” child and its mother didn’t receive any money or condolences from the city whatsoever.

Sacco straighten up herself and smiled brightly, “Well, all this most definitely gave me a chance to finish up my new book. So out of this negative situation,” she in fact smiled even brighter, “I made a much better situation out of it.”

Her book is currently in the runs of being presented to publishers, and Sacco’s new motive is to go back to school and earn her PH. D in art theory.

With her new doctrine in Art Theory, Sacco wants to be an activist defending the protection of arts in New York City’s schools.

“Almost no one’s listening to anyone anymore. I could be saying the same thing without a PH.D and nothing gets done, but with my PH.D, I suddenly become revolutionary and noteworthy saying the same thing…” Sacco says, rolling her eyes in dismay.

She wants to challenges the city in what could be done if potential creativity is stripped from the minds of talented individuals of this city. For there is talent in everyone she claims, but sometimes the talent seems to go unnoticed or simply amiss.

She was taken out of the system, she wanted to change for the better, so no, with her new credentials, she could somewhat go back in, and challenge it even harder to secure a better positive future, and an even better domino effect than before.

“Now,” Sacco finishes earnestly, batting her eyes, playfully and blowing her twelfth cigarette in the conversation, “do you feel you know me, and my story?”

*photo courtesy from the Marie Sacco Ponsot collection