The podium, she noted, was made of finer wood than the house in which she was raised.
Her hand gripped it confidently, though she saw faces in the crowd who would not like the truth that she had to tell.
“I am honored to be here,” Quelana Shepard said.
“I find the comparisons of my work to Theodore Geisel and Lewis Carroll to be high honors.”
Quelana lifted her left leg slightly and scratched her heel against the back of her Jimmy Choo Azias.
“I didn’t want to be a writer when I was young. I wanted, desperately, to be an auto mechanic.”
Quelana paused, scanned the crowd. Two of her Yale professors, Yancy from the Martha’s Vineyard workshop,t he lifestyle reporter from NBC’s morning show…whatshername…?
“I plagiarized much of this book from an illiterate man.”
Eyes throughout the room widened, some like small children looking at a shark approaching aquarium glass.
“I plagiarized this book from an illiterate auto mechanic.”
She paused.
The curiosity in the room shivered like a molded Jello dessert.
“My gratitude for my education is immense, powerful and permanent. But the person who made this book happen was my grandfather, without the ability to read or write but a genius in his own milieu.”
It was no longer just Quelana’s heel that itched. Everything itched, some sort of nervous response to telling herself that she would not become emotional, not let her voice waver.
“They say my grandfather could make an engine run using parts from a washing machine, and a truck with those parts once won a race north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I believe it.”
Quelana smiled at the crowd.
“My grandfather knew every component of every engine under every hood he ever hovered over. He tried to teach me his craft, his magic. I wanted with every ounce of my young being to learn, so I was at his elbow every morning.”
The crowd in the ballroom faded in Quelana’s sight and she saw the old man in the blue coveralls so oil saturated they were black.
“He didn’t know the proper name for the parts.”
“’Hand me that flickbanger,’”he would say. “‘Next to the pluzzlemucker.’”
“They tell me my book has been translated into fourteen languages, but much of the book reads the same way everywhere because they did not alter the words.”
“I accept this award today as an Ivy League educated woman with her name on the cover of the work. But I want the world to know that the words that are the engine of the book, words that are enthralling children and adults all over the globe, are those of an illiterate but highly intelligent man, whose only failure was in teaching his granddaughter to become an auto mechanic.”
***
I always wonder how people like the grandfather would fear if they were given a proper education. They are already brilliant, so would that brilliance be nurtured with schooling or stifled?
My Grandfather owned and operated an auto repair business. He repaired just about anything that ceased to operate for one reason or the other, including antique clocks. He was a high school dropout. Yet, he had a brilliant mathematical mind. He used to amuse himself with long algebraic equations as if they were parlor tricks. When I was a kid, I watched he and my Dad having a showdown of dueling equations; Granddad and his slide rule versus Dad and his Hewlitt Packard calculator. Granddad was a ninja on that thing. And he would win every time. At that point in life, Granddad had passed down the auto repair business to my uncle when he accepted a job to teach welding and applied industrial mathematics at the local state technical school. What I didn't know until after he died, he did go back, get his GED, then went to college so he could teach. He earned his BS in mathematics from Auburn University --that was after my Dad went there. He loved math. He loved learning. He just hated school. And as a young man, hated being told what to do. Maybe that's why he was such an effective teacher. He understood that most of his students struggled in high school abd the motivation behind it.