Naomi Shihab Nye
Central Elementary School
Ferguson, Missouri
By Taylor Fox
There’s a haunted feeling that comes with walking around an empty schoolyard. Barren playgrounds and darkened windows convey emptiness, dejection. It’s unnatural for playgrounds to go quiet. Yet, outside the historic Central Elementary School in Ferguson, Missouri, that eerie feeling is missing, replaced by a comforting glow provided by the towering trees, climbing vines, and community garden of fragrant herbs.
Did you know there was a time Ferguson was all a farm?
Central alumna Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry is filled with imagery that conjures up the aura of her former school. She specifically reflects on the Ferguson of her youth in a poem honoring Jamyla Bolden, a 9-year-old black girl shot and killed in her Ferguson home in 2015 when a man shot into the house, targeting someone he believed stole from him.
The poem illustrates the commonalities between the author and Jamyla, who attended Koch Elementary School, just over three miles east of Central. In the poem, Nye wishes she could pass her own lived years on to the girl who was taken too soon.
Drive down Florissant Road today, and it is hard to imagine as farmland. The asphalt street is lined with barbecue restaurants and dozens of murals honoring the Black Lives Matter movement. Outside the Ferguson Police Department stands a row of signs and artwork remembering those killed by police violence in the United States.
Leaving Florissant Road and all of its restaurants, you immediately enter the quiet, calm neighborhood surrounding Central Elementary. Nye has described the area as a “leafy green historic suburb” and fondly remembers her old brick school. Built in 1880, the school flaunts a plaque acknowledging its listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The original bell tower — visible from both the playground and the community garden — still crowns the old building.
Considering Nye drafted her first poem when she was six years old, it’s easy to imagine the young artist gazing out the school’s wrought iron windows onto the large garden below and piecing together her earliest works.
Nye attended Central from kindergarten until sixth grade, and in 1966 her family moved to Palestine, her father’s country of origin. She has often spoken on her experiences as a Palestinian-American going to a then all-white school and in a 2014 essay wrote, “In Ferguson, an invisible line separated white and black communities. In Jerusalem, a no-man’s land separated people, designated by barbed wire.”
Nye’s poetry often reflects the parallels between her two childhood homes. Her first published collection, Different Ways to Pray, is entirely on the topic of cultural similarities and differences, using her own Palestinian-American identity as a model.
As a first generation Cuban-American with an ethnically Jewish heritage, my own parallels to Nye are too striking to ignore. I can imagine the feeling of other she must have endured in Ferguson, accepted in neither the white nor black communities. After moving to Palestine, where she may have felt even more of an outsider, she began to study culture and identity, perhaps to find her own sense of belonging. I too have felt the drive to study my heritage in order to feel enough, to feel like you deserve to claim your roots.
Despite our commonalities, it is also not lost on me that, while I cannot trace my ancestry back to Israel, we are from opposite sides of that barbed wire fence, belonging to two cultures with more in common than they are willing to admit. We are from two cultures that historically villainize the other without the effort of understanding and respect.
We share this severing too with Ferguson itself, represented by the seeming innocence of the empty Central Elementary School across town from the home where Jamyla was killed and next to a street so often shown as a scene of violence against black people — violence portrayed to make a point, without respect for the motivation behind the movement or any attempt to amend the systemic issues that have led to this point.
Taylor Fox recently graduated from the University of Missouri with a Master of Arts in Geography. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, she has spent her career learning and writing about cultures and hopes to continue sharing this passion with others. Fox has also been published in Missouri Life Magazine and the Columbia Daily Tribune.
