Childhood Icons
Write about a person you admire: Hercules is a person I admire. He lived a long time ago, in a time of myth and legend. Hera, his evil stepmother, sent a monster to destroy him. It might have destroyed someone weaker. It did not destroy Hercules.
My 8th grade student, James Louis, boy with two first names, answered his writing prompt with the story of Hercules. Not just any Hercules, but Hercules from the cheesy TV show where he stood in a ripped shirt, feathered hair flowing.
It was September 1995, I was twenty-two, and I had started as a teacher in a self-contained eighth grade classroom in the South Bronx. I had just completed my masters degree in English Education a few weeks before. Though I was hired as an English teacher, the day before school started, I was handed a class roll with thirty-six names and was told I’d teach those same thirty-six kids all day.
I remember each child from that list distinctly. James Louis was the most grown-up looking of the boys. On day one, my heart leaned toward him. In my head, I heard John Prine sing, Call that child James Louis, call these rooms a home. Running, laughing back and forth, the kid with two first names.
James Louis had grown-up arms and a grown man’s chest; there was a grown-up feel to the patient way he carried himself, almost like an old man. He smelled like dried sweat. His body odor was strong and acrid but none of the kids ever mocked him though they mocked each other relentlessly.
When I talked to him about completing his writing assignments, James Louis looked down and doodled. He would not write any of the writing prompts I gave. He nodded politely as if he were willing. He was not unwilling. He just simply would not. When he finally wrote words, he told the plot of the TV show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.
My graduate program had been based on the writing workshop model. Though I was critical of its formulaic nature—like so many educational theories it purported to answer every problem with a single method—I was influenced by the use of personal prompts to get students writing.
When I finished teaching at I.S. 306 in the South Bronx, I wrote a manuscript about the school. I wrote about the lack of books. I wrote about how I was hired to teach English, but was their only teacher for all core subjects. I wrote about the rat feces in the lunch room, the failure to provide gym, the lack of a green space, and a thousand other things that failed the students. I wrote from a sense of unfairness and outrage. Though I briefly tried, and had one interested publisher, I put the manuscript aside. Virginia Woolf said that if you cannot tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell the truth about anyone else.
When I was the same age as James Louis, I admired the actress Ingrid Bergman. I found a black and white photo of her at a garage sale and taped it over my bed.
She had a halo-golden face; one black-gloved hand rested on her chin. Her tears were slow-moving and they remained on her face like glass, like symbols. I was drawn to the golden haze around her, the vulnerability.
I missed a lot of cultural phenomena from my own 80s childhood. We didn’t have a TV until I was ten, and even after, I wasn’t allowed to watch freely. I didn’t have a radio or stereo. I remember pretending to have seen Dallas, pretending to know who Madonna was. When my parents weren’t home I watched old movies on AMC.
When Ingrid Bergman famously enters Rick’s Bar in the film Casablanca, time stops. She insists on hearing “their song.” Rick, her lost love, can’t bear the pain of hearing it. He wants the song to stop. But she can bear it. She wants to drown in it. Her eyes leave the present. There is a glaze around her, light emanates from her skin. She speaks haltingly, with an accent. Each word she says has a breathless electricity. The accent hardens the ends but also holds it suspended in uncertainty. Sometimes the words break with vulnerability. It’s her contradiction. Bergman’s black and white world was dangerous, but it was simplified, and she always looked slightly removed from the experience at hand.
Hercules: Legendary Journeys was both dangerous and simplified though I had never seen a full episode. The actor who played Hercules had chin-length straight hair, a kind on men that made me distrust them. He had a trusty sidekick. He stood with his chest puffed out, ready to handle any danger. In the opening of the show, the title glinted with gold lettering. It lit up the horizon behind Hercules, and colored his shirt, cheek, and biceps. He was aglow.
Write about a person you helped or a person who helped you: Hercules helps a woman find the lost city of Troy. Hercules saves the beautiful girl from the water god. The water god will drown you if you drink. The beautiful girl is the daughter of a king. The beautiful girl takes Hercules to the market. He sells himself as a slave to a queen. Hercules saves the girl. The girl is crowned queen and he is thrown from the sky.
Hercules helped the beautiful. Every child knows that if you free the beautiful it’s because you are really free. You have so much freedom that you have freedom to spare. You have so much strength that you can give it away.
I liked how beauty made people want to help Ingrid Bergman. When I was young it felt that I was on track to be beautiful, it seemed possible. Someone would notice that I needed to be saved, like in Notorious when Cary Grant pushes himself into the house where Ingrid Bergman lies helplessly in bed and carries her out down the spiraling stairs.
The Easter I was seventeen, my parents were talking in the living room and I hated to disturb them. Normally I did not share my pains with them or anyone, but I sensed that this particular pain should be announced. I went partway down the stairs and leaned across the bannister to say that I thought I needed to go to the hospital.
“What is wrong?”
“I have pain in my stomach.”
“Well, go lie down, it is probably something you ate.”
I had eaten these terrible bagel crisps at my grandmother’s. I could taste them in my mouth, like an old chemical. Not really food at all. I went upstairs and lay down. A little later my stepfather came in my room. I was staring at the wall trying to manage the pain in my abdomen.
“It is probably just menstrual cramps,” he said. I had never had a period, but I didn’t say that. I was a senior in high school and I was ashamed that my body hadn’t done what it was supposed to so I had never told anyone. I was perpetually ashamed and lied and hid what was true about myself. My stepdad left and came back with pepto bismal. It was repellent but I forced it down and it caused an explosion inside me and then the severe pain subsided to a dull pain. I turned out my light and slept on and off. That was appendicitis, but we didn’t know.
A week later I checked into the hospital, still not better, burning with a fever. That first night in the hospital I didn’t know what to do. I did not sleep, the pain was unbearable. No one had told me I had been prescribed pain medication that could be given on request. I thought I was going to die in the night. The only person with me was a girl in the opposite bed whose mouth was wired shut. She stared at me sympathetically but could not speak.
Write about a time you felt powerful or strong: When the light went out that was when Hercules stopped Ragnarok from destroying the earth. He saved the world and all the people in it.
In Saint Joan, Ingrid Bergman must defy everyone, including her family. She saves the Dauphin. She saves France. She kneels in a black dress laced with leather at the chest. She lifts her chin and tilts her face to one side and then to the other. Again the frozen tears on her cheeks.
Every few weeks, the second grade teacher called my room and asked James Louis to come down to her class because she could not manage his little brother. There was a security guard three floors down, but none of us ever called him into our classrooms. James Louis would rise wearily, looking at no one. He had to restrain his own brother, holding him in his arms while the little boy raged. During his rages, his brother stabbed other kids with his pencil, overturned desks, and ripped up papers. There was no father. I never met the mother.
Write about a time you missed someone. Use vivid sensual details:
Hercules lost his family. That was like losing himself. He wandered and did good deeds. He didn’t think about his dead family. He didn’t think about anger and revenge. He was too busy rescuing people in the world. He left the hurt back with the dead family.
When I was ten, our neighbors gifted us their used, little black and white one because my brother kept going over to their house to watch TV at their house. My brother would sit sullenly on their floor and grunt if the neighbor girl spoke to him. He did not pretend to be her friend, but he did not say no if a snack was offered. Sometimes he told the girl to shut up. That’s when the neighbor decided that he shouldn’t be in their home. That was the beginning of my brother becoming a stranger.
Early on we shared a bed, but at five I was no longer welcome in his room. We once, (I believe, I have no memory of it) talked together, but gradually our words to each other stopped. Every morning, from age five until high school, he put the cereal box up between us to block my face. We never talked again until he left home at eighteen to join the marines. Someone who read this told me there is no way that can be true, of course we must have talked. But I have no memory of it.
Write about a time you doubted what you knew: Hercules goes to help the townspeople who are terrorized by a giant cyclops. But Hercules learns that maybe the Cyclops has a reason. Evil is not always what it seems. Hercules needs help from his father Zeus. But Zeus sometimes acts like he wants to kill him. Why does his father want to kill him Hercules might wonder. He might wonder what he has done. Hercules might think he is not loved. Hercules might think the world is against him with all the people plotting bad things from his stepmother to his father to Ares God of War to a sea monster to a enchantress. With all these things against him he might not believe in the good but Hercules does.
When I was seven, I lay sick in bed and overheard my mother answer a visitor who’d asked how I was feeling. I overheard my mother say, “She’s fine. She exaggerates her sickness. She lies in bed to get attention. She’s an actress.” I listened with no sense of outrage or anger, dispassionately, like I was learning what I did or who I was. I was an actress. I exaggerated. I turned onto my side to assess how true it was. My head was not stuffy. I was not tired and achy. Was not. Was. Was not.
In Gaslight the lights flicker. I see the lights flicker. I imagine things, Ingrid says, saying what she sees. She repeats. Then repeats what she is told to see.
The child I was made little distinction between Ingrid Bergman and the character she played in Gaslight. That character existed. That woman was her, a made-up woman inside a fog of light, stuck inside dialogue and a black gown. I was a made-up girl, told what I was. I was that. I was this. Jessie likes this. Jessie hates that.
Life can live inside you without names, without precision. A blur of senses and imagery.
Giving words to experience meant a story could be critiqued, lost, shot down as wrong. For students, adults could step in. Telling your story could alter your life.
Write about a time you tried to be something you weren’t: Hercules must pretend he is just a man. It doesn’t work because Hercules is a god too. He is both.
Once on a long car trip, I could not stop coughing. It was pneumonia. “Stop coughing, Jessica. Stop coughing,” said my brother aggressively. Why couldn’t I hold the cough down into my lungs? I closed my eyes to will it away.
“Shut up.”
He made an abrupt motion with his fist in my direction. I said magic spells to dispel the desire to cough, to turn the raspy part of my throat into smoothness, to keep it from rising forth, to turn smaller, to make a face of stone, and if my shut eyes put me into the trance that my mother called witchy, I stared out at the trees as if we were the same silent being.
Ingrid Bergman gazed away in photos. She never looked fully present in the moment. She looked off in the distance where her real thoughts went, where her character was not, where she was free.
Write about something you are good at: Hercules possessed a strength the world had never seen, a strength surpassed only by the power of his heart.
“There are children this year with behavior issues I cannot handle,” the 2nd grade teacher confided in me, “They were born addicted to crack.”
The sidewalk outside the school each morning was littered with needles from a methadone clinic. I stepped over them, not really seeing. In the autumn months, I carried bags of books in each hand. The school had no textbooks and though I was hired as an English teacher, I borrowed an eighth grade math book to teach them math. They copied the problems from the board like it was Little House on the Prairie. I read aloud to them. Each day for months, I brought bags of books onto the subway until I had a little class library. A couple I babysat for bought the class a set of Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, our only classroom set of a book. The last line “for those who cannot out,” quieted the whole room.
Write about a time you wanted to leave a place: Hercules walks up a snowy mountain in the cold and finds a beating heart in a cave. Fires begin to go out all over the earth. Hera has stolen the eternal torch. Hercules must fight his father. He must climb the cold mountain. His father saves him in the end and Hercules lights the fire. He lights the straw and it burns. It burns, burns, everywhere. There is nowhere else to go.
James Louis had long dirty fingernails. His hand moved the pencil gracefully. He filled only a few pages of his notebook that year. Graduate school taught me to sit beside him, my own story inside me. It took so little to reach most students: respect, kindness, patience. Good lesson plans. These are cliches but they work in the classroom even more than cheesy movies would have you believe. I wanted to be believed, and being believed comes with being a teacher. Kids believe you simply because you are standing in front of them.
Before my brother turned away from me, we were close. We walked hand in hand. We slept in the same bed. The only picture from childhood shows both of us on a bed in long white nightgowns. They go past our feet. How did we run, I wonder. We are both holding a plastic black horse. My brother holds the feet in his hand and the horse is tipped to the side. With tentative fingers, I touch the plastic mane.
We had a neighbor boy who hurt us. We had a sitter who hurt us. The sitter was pregnant and my mom later said that she believed pregnancy meant she would be good with children, yet this sitter kicked and beat my brother. In the story I am two or three. In the story I can barely speak. When our mother returns, my brother has bruises and marks on his body. I point to the marks and say the sitter’s name, “Reggie.” But I have no language to say more. I point, I repeat. Image, sound. I explain nothing. I am hardly verbal.
In those old-style photos Ingrid Bergman looked lit from within. There was something untouchable about her. There would never be trouble that didn’t fall away from her. She would never be broken, never lose her beauty.
In James Louis’ lined notebook, mythical monsters were slain one after another by an unflappable hero.
There were a lot of flaws in the writing workshop model and as I gained teaching experience, it became only a sliver of my curriculum.
Once I yelled so loudly I lost my voice and made myself sick. I vowed never to yell at students again and in twenty-nine years of teaching I never have.
After eighth grade, the kids scattered to different high schools throughout the city. James Louis went to the neighborhood high school. I moved out of state and eventually lost touch with those students. I can’t give closure to his side of things. I only know that his love of story was a torch he carried into the world.
Even by the look of him it was plain that he was a son of Zeus; for his body measured four cubits, and he flashed a gleam of fire from his eyes; and he did not miss, neither with the bow nor with the javelin.
—Apollodorus, The Library Book 2, trans. J.G. Frazer
Jessica Cuello is the recipient of the 2025 Adele and Robert Schiff Nonfiction Prize from The Cincinnati Review. Her newest poetry book, Feral, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2027. Her first volume of translations, While Percival Fell by Tania Langlais, a book-length poem about Virginia Woolf’s last day, is forthcoming in 2026. She is also the author of Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize and three other collections. Her work has been supported by a 2025 Saltonstall Fellowship and a 2023 NYSCA Artist Grant. She is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review and teaches public school in Central NY.