The Legend of Nothing

a story for young people
about girls and women and boys and men

by Clayton Bess

Read The Legend of Nothing on the Web.

Let me think a moment...

I guess The Legend of Nothing is pretty close to plagiarism. Well, no not really; but the final sentence is.

I may be conflating two different stories here, but I do remember that that final sentence came from a story written by one of my students in Liberia. I liked the concept of "crying for nothing" and I wrote my own story years later after I had begun publishing with Houghton Mifflin and was searching my brain cells for more children's stories, especially with feminist themes.

The copyright date on the title page of the ms. is 1988, and so I guess it was eighteen years later, to be exact. My last year as a Peace Corps volunteer teacher was 1970.

But when I woke up this morning with the intention of retyping The Legend of Nothing into electronic form so that I could put the story onto my website, I remembered a heartbreaking story from the time of my teaching in Liberia. This happened at a high school called KRTTI, Kakata Rural Teacher Training Institute.

KRTTI had students of all ages, from 15 well into their 60s. The more elderly students were men and women who had been teaching way back in the bush for many years but who Liberia wanted to bring back into high school to improve their teaching skills. It was challenging to teach some of these more elderly people because their English was not generally so good as the younger students. Although English is the "national language", people back in the bush are tribal and speak their own dialect almost exclusively.

One time I gave my students the assignment to write a short story on any theme they wanted. I was hoping to get a great range of many different tribal stories, and I encouraged them by telling them I would put the stories into a book for them to have as a memory of me after I came back to America — and for all of us to have of each other, of course.

I used the ditto machine provided by Peace Corps to make the individual copies of the book. That clunky old machine was invaluable to us Peace Corps teachers because it was our only way of making duplicate copies back in those days, but oh, how labor intensive. The students all loved it because the purple ink was so nice to smell. They would all lift the pages to their noses first thing upon receiving one of my tests.

Well, back to the heartbreaking story ...

One man in his 60s wrote a story of which he was utterly incapable. It may have been the same story as the ending sentence of The Legend of Nothing, or perhaps not. I no longer remember. But what I do remember is that this story of a couple of pages had absolutely no misspelled words. Impossible for this student. He could barely speak any English at all, and certainly he could not write English so well as this. We were deep into the semester and I had had plenty of evidence of this fact. So, I thought, he had clearly copied this story word for word out of a book.

I gave him an F and confronted him privately with my accusation that this was a very bad thing to do, to copy out of a book and claim the work as his own.

Cheating was rampant in the two schools at which I taught in Liberia, and this was not my first time having to confront students with such an accusation. One time with a different student ... Ha! I can't help laughing at this memory ... one such student answered brilliantly, "But Teacher Bob, I could NOT have copied this story because, look! It isn't even my handwriting!"

But back to the elderly student and this heartbreaking story. He valiantly denied having copied the story and he told me that to prove it, he would rewrite the story in front of me. He wasn't able to do it that very day, he said, but he would come back in the afternoon of the next day.

So we arranged for him to stay after class the next day, and sure enough, he sat at his desk and took well over an hour to rewrite the story for me. It was word for word, letter for letter, the same as the story he had turned in previously.

I was stunned, watching this old man laboriously print each letter of the story. He had it memorized. Yes, it was clearly out of a book, perhaps one that he had memorized when he was a young student in the bush. Or perhaps one that he had memorized during the entire night previously, though that was far more doubtful, if even possible for a person of his advanced age.

But it broke my heart to watch him work so hard to prove his innocence. And I ended up giving him an A on his story. And I apologized to him.

In any case, I admit here that I did borrow the final sentence of The Legend of Nothing and it may or may not have originally come from a published book that ended up deep in the bush of Liberia. But the rest of the story is all Clayton Bess.

By the way, the picture of Pegasus at top of this page is from a free-images website and its only identification is 1914 (the year of my dad's birth). If anyone knows the name of the artist, please contact me so that I can give correct attribution.

So read and enjoy The Legend of Nothing on the Web.

Bob/Clayton