Читать книгу The Road Out - Deborah Hicks - Страница 11

INTRODUCTION

A Teacher on a Mission

When I was a young girl growing up in a sleepy Appalachian paper mill town, I had a lot of dreams for a girl with limited opportunity. Probably the biggest of all my dreams was just to get away from where I was. I spent most of my girlhood in a perpetual state of roaming. The road in front of the wood-frame house we rented in my early years was paved but it soon turned to dirt, as it wound out of town and toward the hills and “hollers” nearby. At home were my parents and one brother, only ten years old but already trouble. He was a gangly, miserable kid who was as disturbed as he was smart; possibly he suffered some neurological damage from his difficult entry into the world, a city doctor would later surmise. My father donned his workman’s clothes and packed his lunch pail, happy to get out of the house. My mother took Valium and Darvon and slept off her anxiety and depression. Off I would go, a plucky five-year-old in search of a little girl’s dreams in the unlikely landscape of working-class Appalachia.

The dirt and gravel toughened my feet, but in my head I was more a princess than a scrawny little blonde girl with dirt between her toes. I could walk to the local general store down the road, where old men sat on benches outside, their cheeks bulging with tobacco. I could wander in the other direction to visit Mrs. White, a sweet older church lady who played piano and sang hymns in her scratchy country voice. But even a curious, enterprising young girl could go only so far. Often my journeys ended at a pasture next to our house, where I played with a small baby doll and some dimestore plastic animals: my kingdom. The days passed in this uneventful way until two things happened that changed my life forever. I discovered the world of books, and I began a twelve-year journey through some of America’s poorest and worst public schools. It was an inauspicious start, but I can look back now and see my beginnings as a teacher.

Most people would agree that if there is a single ticket out of poverty and up the ladder of social mobility, it surely must be public school. Those of us who have struggled to climb that ladder would argue more than anyone that school was our hope. For me, school was probably more like my salvation. I went to school to find a place for my curious mind and shrunken heart to grow and flourish. But to succeed in school and beyond, an ill-prepared girl from an impoverished background needs some good luck: a teacher who spots her gifts and becomes her guide to the wider world, a good school that offers her a scholarship and a shot at success, one family member—perhaps an aunt or cousin—who has been a trailblazer and wants to help. As a typical girl of my background, I had none of these things.

My early childhood education was pretty much like that of any rural working-class girl in the 1960s. My mother had ordered some Little Golden Books from a mail-order source and stuck these on the same bookshelf that housed Reader’s Digest magazines, a collection of Bible stories, and a few older, worn novels from her Arkansas childhood: Little Women and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Men in my childhood didn’t read and women did house chores, so it fell upon me to make sense of this odd reading curriculum. Always a child in search of adventure where I could find it, I took the thin Little Golden Books and found an inviting niche on the bank that separated our backyard from the pasture next door, its unruly grass rising to my knees. There I could hear an occasional car making its way up the narrow two-lane road leading past the general store toward the laundromat and single-wide trailers set on the hill. I could smell the sweet honeysuckle, and hear an occasional voice echoing.

I dreamed, as I read from the Little Golden Books, of worlds I would visit someday and adventures I would have. I would travel to Holland, with its pretty windmills and dikes; I would don wooden shoes like the brave little Dutch boy who held back the flooding waters of the sea with his finger. I would go off to Africa and sit among the animals like Jane Goodall—the lady I had seen on our small black-and-white RCA. Only I would study the lives of tigers. I would sit quietly and become their friend, just as Goodall had scooted up next to chimpanzees in the jungles of Tanzania. At night I would sleep in a large white tent staked into the rich African soil.

Then I went off to our local public school, and my dreams were put on hold for over a decade. I came out trained in rote skills but was completely unprepared for the kind of thinking, reading, and writing you need to do in a good college. So my journey from a naïve, poorly educated rural girl to a woman with an advanced degree from Harvard was full of detours that drained and derailed me.

At seventeen I went to a local college on a scholarship. I recall the six months I dropped out of that college to work in a warehouse. I needed money and a car, so I put my educational future on hold while I assembled and packed up boxes, like a contemporary version of the city factory girls trying to work their way out of poverty in the early 1900s. No longer a young woman with a promising educational future, I was there to fill mail-order boxes with items ranging from travel sewing kits to sex toys. Oddly, the experience felt more normal and ordinary than any college class. Part of me even enjoyed my time taping together boxes in my place on the packing line, because this was the kind of thing I had been educated to do: work hard and follow orders. Still, as soon as I had the money I needed, I went back to college and fumbled my way through a higher-education system I barely understood.

After college, I packed up and flew to France with some pocket money and a one-way ticket, not completely sure what I would do over there. I picked grapes (les vendanges in French) and did a stint as a nanny and house maid, my best attempt at the study-abroad experience. I came back to live in the big city of Washington, finding an office job at Georgetown University so I could take free classes in language studies and teaching. A professor spotted my work, and my life changed again: I earned a graduate fellowship. At last, two years later, I landed at Harvard University to finish advanced study in the subject that was closest to my heart: education.

Out I came with my student loan debt and my books and theories about teaching. I had become a specialist in childhood literacy education and had learned how to conduct research. But the rebellious part of me sought out a curriculum of a different sort than a university could offer. I read novels and dreamed about how I would change the world. I drank strong coffee and even scribbled out a few poems and stories. Then, one day, I found myself in Cincinnati for a teaching post in the education department of a local university. It wasn’t long before I discovered a neighborhood that made me feel I had entered a time machine and traveled back to my childhood.

The neighborhood was only minutes by car from downtown Cincinnati—nestled at the foot of one of Cincinnati’s famous hills—but the drive felt like one into a rural West Virginia hamlet. The community was poor. Once a neighborhood of German and Irish workers, Lower Price Hill had become a haven for southern white migrants from Appalachia in the postwar decades. Here, I thought to myself. Here is where I want to teach.

This is how I met a young girl named Blair Rainey.¹

I volunteered to teach reading in the local neighborhood elementary school, in the classroom of a second-grade teacher with a warm manner and a soft Kentucky accent. It was there I first spotted a tiny girl who looked even younger than her eight years. She looked sickly, more like a child from a coal-mining county in eastern Kentucky in the 1960s than a child growing up in a prosperous city at the turn of the new millennium. Her skin was pale and ashen. But her eyes expressed something else: toughness, spirit, and, most of all, precociousness. She had the same fiercely intelligent eyes as her grandmother, Grandma Lilly, brown with the mixed Cherokee heritage of their rural ancestors.

When Blair was born, too soon and with drugs in her system, she was so tiny that she fit into a shoebox. She shook at first from the effects of crack cocaine in her tiny body, until the drug worked its way out of her. Then Grandma Lilly, who had already determined that Blair was going to be her special baby and claimed child custody, put infant Blair in a crib. She was still so small that one morning she rolled over and fell out between the bars. From that day, Blair slept in Grandma Lilly’s bed. She began to grow up and walk and use language. Soon afterward, she started to speak and sit by her grandma’s side in bed, and, as Grandma Lilly read books to her, it became apparent that Blair was no ordinary girl. This one was special, and she was going to be the one who made it out.

Now I was determined to be the teacher who made a difference in Blair’s life. I wanted her to have what I never had: a first-rate public school education and a real shot at her grandmother’s dreams for her. The next fall I decided to create my own after-school reading class for Blair and the other girls in her third-grade classroom. I located a classroom in Blair’s elementary school that we could use once a week and during the summer. It was on the first floor of a three-story school building, with a large row of windows that peered out onto the school’s blacktop playground, and beyond that, to one of the neighborhood’s small side streets. During school hours, it was used for counseling and remedial tutoring. But for two hours each week and during the summer it became ours—a room of our own. The room at first looked sad. The gray carpet was frayed and soiled in spots. The walls that had once been white were yellowing, the corner paint peeling. To make the room feel like a place where girls would want to gather, I brought in wicker armchairs and a loveseat I bought on sale. I plumped colorful pillows on the makeshift furniture and began creating a library with books about girls’ lives.

Every Monday after school during the regular school year, and every day during summer school, my students met to read and talk about books and to write stories of their own. The girls in my reading class moved into fourth grade, and still we continued to meet. In summer of 2002, our second summer together, with drippy Ohio Valley heat descending upon the neighborhood like a moistened blanket, Blair and I drew together our two armchairs and talked about fiction.

“Doesn’t it keep you up at night when you read your book?” I asked.

“No,” said Blair quickly.

Just weeks before she turned ten, Blair had recorded her preferences in a journal she kept for my class: “Blair Rainey lives in Cincinnati. Blair likes to color and draw pictures of many things. Blair’s favorite food is pizza and her favorite drink is Mountain Dew. Blair likes to go swimming in the summer time and get her dog off of the chain. Blair’s favorite color is blue. She has blue folders, a blue swimming pool and blue teddy bears. Blair’s favorite book is Rose Madder by Stephen King and she is reading it at home.”

During that year I made the amazing discovery that Blair, a fragile-looking girl and barely ten years old, was a Stephen King fan. The heroine of her favorite book was a young woman named Rose. Rose’s husband, Norman, is a monstrous ex-cop who, in one bloody and gruesome scene, beats her until she loses her unborn baby. Fleeing her husband, Rose escapes to a new city, but Norman uses his old skills as a cop to track her down.

“I wanted my name to be Rose,” said Blair, clutching a blue Beanie Baby. Her small torso and spindly limbs barely filled the armchair.

“Does your grandma ever read Stephen King with you?” I asked curiously.

“Yeah, but my grandma don’t like him. She thinks his writing is terrible and his stories are horrible.” Grandma Lilly preferred old books, like Black Beauty and The Little House on the Prairie.

“What is it about Stephen King’s books that you really enjoy?” I asked.

“The parts when scary things happen,” said Blair. “And I like to read long books.” Rose Madder was 420 pages long.

This story of one precocious young girl, her Stephen King book, and a hopelessly idealistic teacher helps to shed light on a big dilemma. How can education open doors for girls such as Blair, the daughter of poor whites, and a girl with dreams as big as any girl in America? Her small but important life story is part of a larger American narrative. She is the young heir to a labor history, a slice of our national life that is disappearing. The courageous southern migrants who fled Appalachian poverty had come to midwestern cities in search of manufacturing jobs and a better future for their children. Now young Blair had inherited a forgotten landscape, tormented by job loss and a growing street-drug problem. Dropout rates were high too, reflecting an intergenerational history—the earlier workers in Blair’s neighborhood could find jobs without a high school diploma—but also a sense of detachment from school. What Blair most needed was a first-rate education that would allow her to create a new kind of future, leading her away from the streets and their torments and toward the life her Grandma Lilly envisioned for her. But when I set out to become an educational agent of hope and change for Blair, I discovered that the single thing that could have made the biggest difference in her life—public education—was itself part of the problem. In spite of the intentions of individuals at Blair’s school, who were as hardworking as they were big-hearted, she was caught up in the same two-tiered system of schooling I had lived through. It’s like John Dawson, an Appalachian migrant who moved to inner-city Chicago in the 1950s, remarked: “A poor kid don’t get the same teachin’ that a rich kid gets.”²

Educational reformers who talk about making a difference in the lives of poor students often cite the need to teach basic skills that will one day translate into jobs. But mixed in with the facts of economic disadvantage are clichés about poor and working-class students: we lack basic skills, we don’t have aspirations, maybe our parents or caretakers don’t care as much. Yet here I was, a teacher confronting a girl who in many ways was more like me as a young girl. She was a precocious reader, but one without a sliver of the opportunity that her more privileged peers received. Her love of Stephen King books was puzzling and even troubling for me, but it also spoke to her gift. This was no remedial reader. How many girls her age could handle a 420-page novel?

Now I have always been a dreamer, so I set out to do something that was as naïve as it was promising. I wanted to offer Blair and the other girls who joined my class something different, a class that went far beyond the teaching of basic skills. Part of me was always a traditionalist. Like any serious English teacher, I knew that it didn’t do my students any favors to ignore problems of reading fluency or writing mechanics. But I decided to focus on one of the oldest teaching tools—literature, stories—and create the kind of class that girls in elite schools in America might have: a class for the gifted. I turned to fiction, and especially to stories about girls with few resources but plenty of grit and intelligence. My students would read works of literature and use these as a basis for talking and writing about their own complex lives. We would read our way into a real education, and out of the hopelessness that Blair felt even as a young girl.

The stories that follow chronicle this odyssey, from its beginnings when Blair and her classmates were only eight and nine years old, through the years of middle girlhood and then into those of early adolescence. You will watch me as I struggle to gain a real understanding of my students’ lives—and of their strange love of horror. For it turned out that Blair was not the only fan of Stephen King’s gruesome stories. As I puzzled over the thought of girls so young reading horror fiction, I began to understand more fully the nature of their true lives and feelings. As this chronicle progresses, you will watch as these girls grow up and become young teens. Their dreams of better lives, their struggles, and at times their stumbles back into the streets that claimed so many of their mothers provide an intimate portrait of the grueling journey toward young womanhood faced by the daughters of America’s poor whites. You will see me grapple with a question that haunted me: How can one teacher truly make a difference when everything else is working against her students, and her? And what role can books and literature play in such a worthy cause? Can they open doors for other students, the way they once did for me? Could they help provide, in Blair’s case, a ticket to upward mobility and the things her grandmother wanted for her? This coming-of-age story is the story of one teacher’s struggles to create change and opportunity for girls in the other America.

As our journey is revealed, so are the lives of my other six students. Adriana is one of them, a girl with big dreams. When she was a very young girl, Adriana traveled by Greyhound bus to Las Vegas with her mother. The trip left a strong impression, and Adriana wanted to do things that no one in her family had ever done. She wanted to be a biker, she wanted to see the world, and she wanted to go to college. Over time you will see Adriana contend with the bone-crushing loss of the thing that meant the most to her: her family. Her mother, Kelly, would be sucked into the destructive orbit of a street-drug culture, with the prescription painkiller OxyContin as the first step into an abyss ending in heroin. It is a story that tragically repeats itself across an eight-year journey.

Alicia, our group’s tiniest member, a girl with a baby-doll face, soulful eyes, and a sweet, comic smile, would lose her mother at age ten. Her distant stepcousin, Mariah, who eventually joined our group, had faced a similar trauma at an even younger age in the East Tennessee hamlet where she was born. Adopted by a new family in the city, this troubled past haunted her, even as it drew her back to the sweet mountain land where she felt she belonged. My small class would, over time, become a gathering of sisters, orphans in one sense—victims of the reach of drugs such as OxyContin into the lives of the most vulnerable. This was a new chapter in the history of the resourceful but poor laborers who came to the city from Appalachia. It was also one that I knew could destroy a young girl’s dreams.

You will follow the unexpected twists—the surprises, the disappointments, the moments of epiphany and change—in the lives of girls such as Shannon, Jessica, and Elizabeth. These three students struggled at first with their attachments to books, to education, and to me—the Teacher. Shannon was our group’s self-proclaimed tomboy as a young girl, more interested in basketball than books or school at age nine. She found a voice as a journalist in my class and by the age of eleven was writing moving essays about the challenge of being a girl in such an unforgiving place. But as much as she found herself in an intimate gathering of girls, she lost herself in larger public school classrooms. She would give up on school at sixteen, shortly after losing her baby, who was born at just twenty-three weeks. Shannon’s story of alienation in public school is one that repeats itself across time in individual girls’ lives and in family histories.

Jessica struggled too. She was from the start of my class an academically weaker student. Still, in my special literature and creative writing class she blossomed. One year older than most of my students, Jessica became our outspoken leader and a poet in search of peace and a better world. But the closer Jessica got to adolescence the further she distanced herself from public school. “How do I help her change this?” I asked myself continually as I watched and worried.

The same was true of my concern about Elizabeth, a passionate girl in search of love. The holes in her heart would get too painful to bear when her family was torn apart and she was sent to foster care. She too became part of our sisterhood: a smart girl who struggled to hold on to her fragile connection to education when the world around her was changing so fast she couldn’t understand things.

And Blair, our group’s Stephen King fan? Like all of the girls in my class, and like me, Blair was a girl with big dreams. Grandma Lilly thought her gifted grandbaby might someday become a criminal lawyer, for Blair had a way with words. At age nine, Blair herself saw a lot of possibilities for her future. She could be a singer, or maybe someone who lived on a farm. By the time Blair turned sixteen, she would have fallen in love for the first time and become a poet, with a dream of publishing her first book of poems. This Stephen King fan and aspiring writer would also have dropped out of school.

The journey I undertook is based on the belief, indeed the conviction, that things can and must be different for girls such as Blair Rainey, and all of the girls who share her dreams and her crushing obstacles to opportunity. My own life journey, from a poorly educated girl in a small mountain town to a Harvard-educated writer, teacher, and social advocate is one message of hope. But then so are the stories of seven determined girls who were every bit as gifted and promising as I once was. Each different, but all steadfast in their desire for a better life than the one they had inherited. These daughters and granddaughters of southern Appalachian workers have grit and resolve, but they need much more if they are to succeed in our new unforgiving economy. The stories that follow provide a chronicle of one teacher’s odyssey in poor America, and of the pitfalls and possibilities that arose along a road carved out of simple materials: literature, reading, and stories of childhood dreams.