Sable Monroe

Years earlier, before common entrance became terrifying, there was Unity Prep School, nursery rhyme songs on the piano, and Mrs. Hornsby smelling like piano polish and perfume.

I do not remember much about the actual academics at Unity Prep School in Kingston, Jamaica. I remember feelings more than curriculum. I remember the swings. I remember carrying a little tin lunch pail like the other children. I remember one little girl accidentally taking my lunch pail one day and eating my lunch, leaving me with hers instead. I remember being furious because her lunch tasted awful to me and it ruined my entire day.

But more than anything, I remember Mrs. Hornsby.

Mrs. Hornsby was the principal. She was fair-skinned with light brown hair always pinned up neatly with bobby pins. As a child, I used to wonder what her hair looked like when she took the pins out at night. She wore red lipstick every day, but never heavy makeup. Just lipstick. She was soft and plump in the comforting way middle-aged women sometimes are when they hug children often and smell nice.

And she always smelled like piano polish and perfume.

Even now, decades later, I still remember that smell.

There was a room at the school that may have originally been a classroom, but that is where the piano stayed. Mrs. Hornsby would sit at the piano and let us pick songs for her to play. Nursery rhymes. Sesame Street songs. Little children songs. Sometimes she would sing along while she played and all of us children would sing too.

To an adult, that probably sounds ordinary.

To me, it felt magical.

You have to understand something about my childhood. Many of the adults around me felt emotionally rough. There was yelling. Fighting. Fear. Tension. Adults who were overwhelmed or angry or harsh. But Mrs. Hornsby felt soft. Safe. Warm.

Children notice those things.

I remember asking teachers whether my parents were going to fight again because by then I had already started expecting chaos. My own mother later told me that Mrs. Hornsby once called my parents into her office and told them not to fight in front of me because it was affecting me emotionally.

They did not stop.

But I never forgot that an adult noticed.

That mattered to me.

Looking back now as a middle-aged woman, I realize Mrs. Hornsby may not even still be alive. She already seemed older when I was a little girl. But somehow she still exists perfectly in my memory: red lipstick, pinned hair, piano music, perfume mixed with piano polish, singing Sesame Street songs with children in Kingston heat.

Not every adult from my childhood made me feel safe.

She did.

Please read: “I Sabotaged My Common Entrance Exam.”