Who Was Maggie Mahoney?

The Lord in his great and infinite wisdom created us, his children, all differently, and surely this is how it should be. As the years have swept by, there stands out in my memory an individual, a girl named Maggie Mahoney. But who was Maggie Mahoney?

Maggie first entered our lives when I was in the eighth grade in our small farming community in southern California. As Maggie walked into our classroom that day, she wore what must have been at one time, when it was new, a white dress, now sallowed and grayed by both age and soil. It was wrinkled and much too large for her scraggly little frame of a body. Her shoes were black, with thick heels, sort of like the shoes our grandmothers wore to church on Sundays. Her hair was the color of over-ripe tangerines. I think, though, the thing that made us all stare so long and hard was not her shabby old clothing. No, it was her freckles. Hers were not the ordinary freckles that many of us had sprinkled across our noses. Hers were gigantic brown blotches that covered her face, arms, neck, and legs. The boys began to giggle and whisper, and we girls, well, we looked at each other in that kind of knowing way we had of communicating without actually speaking. We knew then she would never be one of us.

In reflecting over the situation, what really made the entire episode of Maggie more pitiful was not just the fact that we kids didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t accept Maggie, but that our teacher, Mrs. Saunders, likewise did not accept her. From the first day Maggie entered our room, it appeared that she and Mrs. Saunders had some kind of power struggle going on between them. When the teacher asked Maggie to come forward and read, as we were all asked in turn, Maggie stated firmly she would not come up to read now or ever in front of the class. I realize Maggie probably did not know how to read, as her background was that of an itinerant farm worker, moving from town to town with her family who harvested the crops. Words such as educationally handicapped or dyslexia were foreign to a teacher at that time. So, it was assumed that Maggie was simply stubborn and determined to have her own way.

Thus began a long series of verbal encounters between Maggie and Mrs. Saunders, many of which ended with Maggie’s getting paddled with a large wooden paddle that was usually reserved for the boys. Often she would be made to sit in a corner for long hours without being allowed to even move, or sometimes it was an actual physical encounter with the teacher in the cloakroom, as Mrs. Saunders at times had an uncontrollable temper.

What about me? How did I feel about Maggie? I was quiet, almost to the point of being shy. I was a follower. I went along with what my friends did. I didn’t always feel they were right, but I was too timid to ever protest. I recall one occasion when we were planning a party for graduation, and the subject came up about Maggie coming. Since it was to be a class party, it would have to include her, but the girls stressed that everyone would be expected to wear a party dress, and we all knew that the only dress we had ever seen Maggie in was the one she wore to school day after day. Something inside me wanted to reach out and help Maggie, perhaps offer to help her make a dress or give her one of my better dresses, but I knew what would happen if I crossed the barrier between her and my girl friends. There really wasn’t much I felt I could do.

That summer was especially memorable as we had graduated from eighth grade and were going into high school in the fall. We felt we were being liberated into a whole new world of dances, football games, and boys, especially older boys. My friends and I spent long hours on the phone talking about all the exciting events that were about to transpire in our lives. Vaguely I can recall someone mentioning that because of Maggie’s problems, she might not be passed on into high school, but this was a problem that we didn’t want to become concerned about.

I recall vividly that autumn morning, about a week before school started, when my mother came quietly into my bedroom and sat down on the edge of my bed. I knew by the tone of her voice that something was wrong. She related to me that the previous night Maggie had been involved in a terrible accident, an accident that had taken her life. The circumstances were vague, and there was even talk going around by some of the people in the town that Maggie had taken her life. It was a question that was to go forever unanswered.

I was stunned, bewildered, and then I began to cry. Deep sobs racked my body, but they were not for the dead Maggie. No, they were for all the memories that flooded into my mind of the cruel injustices, the hurting remarks, and all those terrible, cruel things we had in our self-righteous way dealt to the living Maggie. We had literally shut her out of our lives.

In the following years, I was to find the gospel, and thus came a great spiritual awakening in my life. There has come, too, a feeling of deep regret for what might have been had I known what I know now. Maggie had come to this earth not to be endowed with great beauty, wealth, or intellect. She had come in her own uniqueness only to be shut out by her peers who didn’t even care enough to look beyond outward appearances to find out who Maggie Mahoney was. She was our sister, and we didn’t even know it!