The Tragedy has Already Occurred
Hermione’s greatest secret – and later worst fear and truest love respectively, as it goes – is that she was really quite unremarkable. Born to an upper middle class white British family had its privileges, no doubt, but neither she nor anyone she knew at the time were capable of seeing that. Partly because of the privilege, until that curious letter came in its beautiful handwriting with its curiously moving designs, she had not experienced suffering or joy, except perhaps the overwhelming emptiness she felt after epic movies or books about great heroes.
The letter came exactly at the minute of her birth on her 11th birthday (9:37 pm, her mother later checked to be sure) in the middle of her first ever slumber party. Jenna, Brittney, and some other girl she’d only met twice before and whose name she soon forgot were camped out on the living room floor, playing the charades of budding young adulthood. For her part, she was valiantly inventing secret crushes for older boys at school, trying to impress the other girls with words and phrases about love and lust that she had only seen in TV shows and certainly not yet felt. Her parents decided to keep the letter for her to open the next day.
She opened it the next morning. Her parents commented on the beautiful handwriting and wondered which relative – probably Aunt Susan – had sent it and what surprise they had up their sleeve. She said nothing, but at the end of a long day of ice cream and shopping with her mother, she cried herself to sleep because with all her pre-teen angst she believed it was the first time in her life she had felt unique – and it was utterly impossible to believe. With her face in the pillow, she failed to see the tiny sparrows fluttering in circles above by the ceiling fan, disintegrating when sleep finally took her.
Her mother did know about the little birds. She had seen them when Hermione was a little girl, chirping above her at her grandfather’s funeral, hovering the day her father accidentally hit a cat on the road and killed it, fluttering nearby as she left Sunday mass one day. Unable to put her finger on the strange squeeze in her heart, she bought a big bird feeder and kept it full of birdseed in the backyard for years. Her daughter seemed to like it and that always gave her a sense of ease when she needed it.
A week later, two women called on the Granger residence. Mr. Granger, ever the gentleman, invited them in and offered tea. Mrs. Granger sat fidgeting with a fraying kitchen rag while Hermione gripped the table leg in front of her wanting but not summoning the courage to make eye contact. The tall woman with a Scottish accent explained she was a professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry – and had Hermione received the acceptance letter sent to her? All the Grangers nodded.
The professor – McGonagall, she said – explained the wizarding world in sufficient detail and introduced the young woman sitting next to her. “Dora Tonks, a seventh-year student at Hogwarts.” Dora smiled and reached to shake their hands.
Later, Hermione’s father would swear to his wife that in that moment the girl’s hair had washed teal and then pink and then back to her initial bright brown. Her mother would roll her eyes and scold him for fantasizing about a girl half his age. “The magic has gone to your head, Jim. Don’t imagine for a minute Hermione got it from you.”
The magic did go to Mr. Granger’s head very quickly. After Professor McGonagall took him and Mrs. Granger on a tour of Hogwarts, they met Hermione and Dora on an impromptu trip to a place called Diagon Alley, and he looked very much as if he had fallen in love all over again. His eyes glittered, sweeping to and fro across the street and the curiously normal shops that lined it. Mrs. Granger, slightly pale in the cheeks, toed the ground with short steps as if she were wearing heels, one of her quintessential tics that everyone but her knew she had. Hermione let Dora escort her through shop after shop: this one for wands, this one just for tea , potions-on-demand, an owlery (“like a post office,” said Dora), bookstore, and a sport (“Quidditch”) shop whose back door opened to a small plaza with two standalone toilets.
“That’s one of the entrances to the Ministry of Magic – it’s the wizarding government. I’m going to work there next year,” said Dora when they reached its front steps.
Hermione was feeling insecure about knowing so little, so she didn’t probe about the toilets and the Ministry entrances. “Doing what?”
“I’ll be an auror. Like a muggle federal investigator. I have an interview next week.”
“Aren’t you a little young for that?”
Dora sniffed and lifted her chin without removing her eyes from Hermione. “Oh, I’ll be a trainee for a bit. But not for damn long. Moody’s been told, or warned I guess. He’s the head auror. Just wait and see.”
“Will I see?”
“If you want.” Dora paused. “You don’t have to do this, Hermione, if you don’t want to. My dad, he’s a muggleborn, grew up not too far from you actually, just a few kilometers. He says it was pretty hard to come from the muggle world into the wizarding world… but he also said it was worth it – mostly because he met my mum. But I don’t think anyone would blame you if you didn’t want to do it.”
Hermione felt like there were some things Dora was not telling her, but she didn’t know how to ask about them. The professor and her parents arrived before she could reply, and too quickly they were back home. Their visitors bundled themselves out the front door.
A black and yellow scarf hung on the coat rack behind the door when it closed. Hermione grabbed it and ran out the front door, calling, “Wait! Wait! Is this your scarf!”
Dora gave the professor a sheepish grin and walked back toward Hermione. “Oops, thanks.”
“Of course. Dora?” The older girl looked at Hermione. “Good luck with your interview.”
The older girl chuckled. “I don’t need the luck.” Placing a hand on Hermione’s shoulder and lightly pressing the pads of her fingers into her skin, she said, “If I see you in Diagon Alley, don’t you dare call me Dora, or I’ll kick your ass. It’s just Tonks.” Her kind smile and the light pink ripples in her brown hair softened the threat.
Then Tonks was by Professor McGonagall’s side, and they disappeared into thin air.
**
Even after she had accepted the invitation to Hogwarts, she could not remember much about that day. The sights, sounds, colors, movements, and smells of Diagon Alley had overwhelmed her. For the next several months, when she lay in bed at night or daydreamed at school, all she could remember clearly was an invisible ripple the prevailed on her with every step, a measurable lightness, a creeping warmth that flooded her extremities. She imagined her cells – she was learning about cells at school – filling up with golden liquid and bubbling over with something new and true.
Her parents argued a few nights after the witches’ visit. Her father was sold. “Of course, she should go to Hogwarts; we’ve worked our whole lives so our daughter could have a good life, so she could do something great. Magic! Our little girl! she will be great!”
Her mother squinted with her arms crossed, leaning against the kitchen counter, still dressed in scrubs from the office. “She is already great, Jim. Magic isn’t what makes her great.”
“Of course not. That’s not what I meant.”
“What does this lead to? What can she use this for?”
“I think we have to let her figure that out. It’s a whole world that we don’t know about.”
“You’re obsessed with it.”
“It’s exciting, Joan. I’m excited for her. She deserves to shine like this. You’re the one who knew all along that she was different. Why are you resisting this now?”
Her mother sighed in frustration. “I don’t doubt that she will learn many useful and great – yes, Jim, great – things at Hogwarts, but I am a ‘muggle’ mother whose only goal is to love my daughter and make sure she is equipped to thrive in the real world. From my perspective, seven years at a magical boarding school does not prepare her to do that.”
“It is a real world, Joan! And she can thrive in it in addition to ours.”
“Maybe. If she even wants it.”
“If she wants it, but I bet she does. Who could turn down an opportunity like this?”
By the time her parents asked her what she wanted, Hermione was ready to say yes to Hogwarts. They made an agreement to give the wizarding world a trial period. She would attend Hogwarts and be tutored in her muggle schoolwork during the summer and winter breaks. Before the beginning of the second year, they would revisit the subject. They all left the conversation feeling satisfied, and Mrs. Granger herself sent the letter of intent back to McGonagall when an owl arrived at the window with instructions tied to its foot.
Though both her father and mother felt that Mr. Granger had won this battle and that Mrs. Granger had conceded, it was Mrs. Granger who got what she wanted in the end. She simply would never know about it. Over the next several years, Hermione retreated from a world where she held privilege at the expense of so many people she had never once considered, and she became part of a world where she was oppressed in many ways but wielded a power beyond that which was endemic to that world. If Mrs. Granger had truly understood this, she wouldn’t have allowed it. Her success, though, was securing a situation where Hermione had the most invisible privilege: the ability to choose between power in the wizarding world and privilege in the muggle world. This was something even those most prominent or progressive in wizarding Britain never achieved or recognized. By the time Hermione would realize it, it wouldn’t matter anymore.