Seventh Grade was an important year for me. I attended school in a small, rural town, and there were two school buildings there: the Elementary School and the High School. Seventh Grade was the year that my classmates and I shifted from swingsets and monkey bars to metal lockers and Physical Education in a gym that always smelled like dirty socks. Seventh grade was the year that I shifted from being a big fish in my elementary school building to being a nothing fish in the high school building, and during most of my seventh-grade year, I was scared to death. But fortunately, that seventh grad is = the year that Miss King became my English teacher. I can easily acknowledge that Miss King changed my life.

On the first day of my seventh-grade English class, Miss King took her position at the front of the room, and she scribed these words on the chalkboard:

Hitch Your Wagon to a Star

Then she looked out across the room of half-bewildered seventh graders and asked: “What do those words mean to you?”

I squirmed in my seat. I immediately knew what my new English teacher was getting at. No one else answered, and with a certain amount of trepidation, I lifted my hand, and I said that the words meant that we should aim as high as we can. I got it, and Miss King’s challenge that day became the mantra for my life. Later, when I became an art teacher, I would hang a banner that covered the top of one of my classroom walls, and it read:

Hitch Your Wagon to a Star – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I grew up in a tiny, rural, cotton-picking town, where not many of the adults attended college. Therefore, our teachers were imported from other towns and cities, and Miss King had come from a town in the neighboring state of Tenessee.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

During the 1950s, I feel sure that not many people in my little town had ever heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson,  but on that first day of my seventh-grade year, Miss King told the class about that great man, and she challenged us to strive for more–she challenged us to strive for the most, and I took her challenge to heart.

Miss King was an excellent grammar teacher, and by the end of seventh grade, I could diagram any sentence that you might toss my way and also by the end of seventh grade, Miss King had inspired me to reach beyond the confines of my little farm community and to be all that I could possibly be.

Because my town was so very small, teachers were expected to function in several capacities, and Miss King was also my English teacher during my tenth-grade year. Because of Miss King’s excellence as a literature teacher, I learned about HuckleberryFinn and his friend Jim. Having grown up during the 1950s in the rural South, I also learned to begin questioning how a loving relationship could have evolved between a Southern white boy and an African American man. More importantly, I simply began questioning.

Miss King also introduced me to the poetry of William Blake. A few years later, I earned a master’s degree in English literature, and my area of specialization was Romantic poetry. I wrote my master’s thesis about William Blake. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience became the light that directed me along the course of the rest of my life. I write and illustrate my own picture books now because of William Blake and also because of Miss King, who introduced me to Blake. Again, Miss King inspired me to Hitch My Wagon to a Star.