Hopefully, the last damn first-year reflection blog I have to write
One Success and One Failure Story from the First Year
I am so oversaturated with reflection requests that it is now impossible for me--without some external and unrelated stimulus--to once again dredge up last years' memories. I read a Eudora Welty story about a husband who found a suicide note from his wife; she said she'd drowned herself in the river. He and a pack of friends borrowed a net to dredge the Pearl River, though it quickly became apparent that no one (least of all the husband) believed that the girl had really drowned herself. For some reason, they followed through with the charade, I guess because it was something to do. They enjoyed themselves, perhaps, but the idea of "getting together to do something" didn't justify their action, nor did it give it any meaning. They were just a set of folks doing a rather useless thing, but doing it nevertheless. On with the blog, right?
When Dr. Monroe asked for volunteers to run the summer clubs, I quickly volunteered to head up a Holly Springs Chess Club. My Simmons High Chess Club had been a big success during the year. Anywhere from 5-10 students stayed after school for two hours every Tuesday and Thursday to learn the game. At the year's start, maybe 2 people at Simmons High knew how to play chess. By year's end, 30-35 could move the pieces with some degree of authority, and 4 or 5 had become real, honest-to-god chess players. State chess competitions were always on these kids' minds--a thing which we weren't able to attend this year, but next year will be able to. The experience, as a whole, was a success (thus the blog).
The summer revealed the Holly High version to be something far different than I'd imagined: during its first incarnation, the club was 5 teachers, 1 student, and a hell of a lot of fun. Mr. E spent the 45 minutes whipping my ass, and the other teachers played each other and mentored our one student. After P.E. club was (rightly) canceled, we wound up with 7 more students and a bunch of checkerboards. The club became something I grew to hate: the students were not interested in playing chess, but in wasting my time, in leering at any females who entered, and in cursing under their breathes. It's the sort of adolescent shit that my chess club during the year did not have, because I kept the jackasses out; also, none of the jackasses would stay two hours after school to learn a white man's game from a white man. Being in a maladjusted chess club made me realize how much I missed MY chess club and how proud I was of my students who put in the time to learn the game.
Now to the failure story:
I've been told that the Delta's chemical fertilizers seep into the water supplies and into the peoples of the Delta, the effects of which supposedly explain the monstrously high early mortality rate. While the land does effect its citizens, I think this wive's tale goes wrong by using chemistry to explain the Delta's influence. There IS, though, a sort of gravitational pull that the Delta effects on its inhabitants, which changes mindsets as much as it does metabolisms.
After the last day of summer school, X, Y, and I visited a juke joint in Holly Springs. Driving east from the school, we took a right and left, drove under a (working?) railroad track, and parked in gravel to the left of the juke joint, to the left of the road. I was driving; I didn't pull into the juke joint the first time we passed it. I drove past, flipped a u-turn, and on the way back pulled into the parking lot. The shock of my first impression made me drive by and hope that, on the return trip, the joint looked different from south-to-north than it did from north-to-south.
It didn't, though. Ever read Dickens? Ever read Riis' "How the Other Half Lives"? Well, neither have I. As best I know, it's one of those books that shows up in history books ("The Jungle", "Bleak House", "Paradise Lost") but no one's ever read, though particularly influential people will have bought and displayed it for dramatic and social and political effect.
Nevertheless, I don't have a desire to read the book after having been in this juke joint (and after having taught in H-dale this year). A fat black man exhausted by sitting sitting out front; a passed out black lady in an easy chair ; pooltable, jukebox, stove, and cooler strewn inside. Ubiquitous roaches--when you move a stool, when you pull a napkin, when the black lady drops her purse on the table to make change, the damn things scamper in all directions.
They weren't the cigar-sized roaches that fly and buzz and scare the dickens out of you. They were the small, half-cigarette sized buggers that are too fast and too unobtrusive to physically represent the decay which they should symbolize. (Ever read Moby Dick? Where Melville extemporizes on the genus and species of whales?) The big roaches, while disgusting in appearance, are mostly harmless. 9 times from 10 you will catch sight of them outside, scurrying away from light or flying into your glass windows. They live primarily outside and eat decomposing plant matter. For all their girth, they're harmless and probably helpful. The little roaches, however, spell trouble. They, as best I understand, have hitched rides with migrating tribes since the Crescents became Fertile. If you see the big roaches in your house, you've left a door open too long; If you see the little roaches inside your house, you'd best check your Cheerios, chips, and sink cabinet corners. The little ones are signs of infestation, and feast on irresponsible human cleanliness practices. They're also nearly impossible to eradicate. Once you've erred in leaving week-old leftovers on your counter-top for a fortnight, the roaches will eternally remind you of your mistake (kind of like the Clap).
The little buggers were everywhere in the juke joint. We bought a couple of 24oz bottles from our strung-out hostess. The juke box ate 75 of my cents. I couldn't knock a billiards ball in a hole to save my life.
And I was viscerally uncomfortable the whole time I was in the juke joint. But it wasn't the filth, or the roaches, or the wrecks of humans serving us, or the hungry juke box, or my ten-thumb operation of a pool cue that bothered me.
After we left the joint and I had time to think about it, I realized that I was uncomfortable because I felt out of place. I was a white boy in a black joint. I had my culture, they had theirs, and I had no business pretending that the two of them intersected.
A year ago, the idea of being a white boy in a black joint would have exhilarated me; last summer's teacher corps visit to Club Ebony was a culmination of what I imagined the Delta would be about ("I played guitar on the same stage as BB King!!!" etc.). Myself especially, but many people I believe when they are in college pretend to live in a post-racial world; they (and I) not only make the mistake of thinking that this post-racial ideal can be exported, but also delude themselves into thinking that the ideal IS the real world. (is it any wonder that Barack Obama's support is strongest and most virulent on college campuses?) In college and covering blues standards with like-minded folks, a perfect pilgrimage for me was to rub shoulders in Mississippi with the black folks I'd read and sung about and listened to. What an idea, huh?
A year's reality in the Delta changed me. I don't know when, and I don't know how, but I have come to see and feel the Delta's racial demarcations. This life was for me; that life was for my students and my students' parents. Part of this is understandable: I have no business hanging out in a disreputable (even for black folks) juke joint in the same town where I am to represent the paragon of respectable education, culture, and restraint. As a teacher I know that the life I can live is circumscribed by my responsibilities to the community. In a way, we're like NBA players--I remember Charles Barkley saying, "I'm not a role model" after he'd thrown a man through a plate-glass bar window, but no matter what he said, kids looked up to him. No matter how young I am, or how I feel about it, I have to present an image consistent with...well, "the Man", if that means respectable moderation. I have no business being radical or paradigm-shifting; my actions, if emulated, need to produce results in the business world.
But the respectable/disreputable dynamic doesn't explain why I was uncomfortable in the Holly Springs juke joint. I was uncomfortable because I was crossing a racial/cultural line that I felt like I had no business stepping across. I was bucking a racial reality that I wanted to succumb to. The separate-but-equal, emphasis on "separate", had impressed itself upon me.
This is a failure story for me because I cannot cogently wrap my head around the experience. I don't know if I should be abhorred that the Delta's (and Mississippi's) racial status-quo has infiltrated my consciousness, or if I should be proud that I am no longer acting like a sight-seeing ignorant Yankee who would visit for a day to rub shoulders and flippantly ignore the painfully complex racial history of the state. And if there's a third way to see it, I don't see it yet.
I simply don't know.
