Day 319, January 28, 2021
Sleeping with Axes
Tonight's soundtrack: Beethoven Symphony No. 7 in A major, Seiji Ozawa, Boston Symphony Orchestra
In high school, Mr. Walker had us read Alan Paton's, Cry Beloved Country, and Jerzy Kosiński's Painted Bird, and Ms. Busse had us read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. These three books made an indelible impression on my young mind about literature and the power of learning.
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| Screenshot of my dad from tonight's soundtrack. |
Mr. Walker was my favorite teacher in the high school. He had the amiable eccentricity of being our own version of Garrison Keillor (pre-#metoo). He papered his bulletin boards with covers of the New Yorker, and he kept his radical curriculum locked in a glass doored cabinet, so curious readers like myself, would peer through the glass during vocabulary quizzes trying to make out what might lie in our future.
How could it be in a small public high school in suburban Massachusetts that a high school English teacher could bring us such radical material? How was it that not every child that was in his class that year instantly became radicalized activists for peace and justice? I think in some ways, Mr. Walker must have just assumed it would be so. I know something about teaching and high school teachers, and how, year after year, a curriculum can become almost like second nature to teach. I was that way with Hamlet, and at one point could ramble extemporaneously about almost any scene or act on cue. So, my class, my grade, may not have seemed any more consequential than any other, but it was tremendously consequential for me. I felt the suffering and pain reading Paton and Kosinski as if I had truly experienced and witnessed such horrors, such fundamental injustices.
It feels trivial to try to explain it here in this context. But I was changed by both of those books.
Ms. Busse was over 6' tall and had a shock of short white hair. She had a stocky body that wasn't intimidating, she radiated care and love, but she was by no means a slight person. The day we started reading Invisible Man, she brought in the school record player. It looked like a linen covered suitcase with a built in speaker. She uncoiled the gray two pronged electrical cord, lifted off the lid, and unsleeved a well worn Louis Armstrong album and played us, "Why Do I Feel So Black and Blue." That was the first time I heard Louis Armstrong. I felt like I did when I was in 8th grade and stood before the Vietnam War Memorial and burst into tears. It was something profound that reached deep into my being. And that was my introduction to Ralph Ellison.
A few days or weeks after that, Ms. Busse arrived to class with an eye patch. She had somehow managed to scratch her eye on her pillow while sleeping. She then proceeded to tell us how she hadn't been sleeping well recently. There had been a series of break-ins in her apartment building and she was feeling scared, so she started sleeping with an axe. But then, I'm sure, woken in the night by sounds outside, she lay there contemplating what she would do if a robber broke into her apartment and she realized that she would never be able to forgive herself if she struck down one of her old students who had fallen on hard times.
Just the idea of encountering a 6' tall Ms. Busse in the dark with an axe was a radical thought, but to also understand her profound love for her students was a tremendous thing to witness.
When I left high school to go to The University of the South, she gave me all her old paperback Faulkner books from her college days. I don't think I quite understood the incredibleness of that gesture, all those books held together with rubber bands, the pages yellowed and crisp with age. To have held on to such precious books for so long, she must not have given books away lightly. I know I have not.
The mind at that age is such a fertile ground for anything that helps one imagine greater meaning in life. Both Mr. Walker and Ms. Busse taught with a deeper purpose. They were not teaching rote skills, they were teaching us how to think about the world. They were teaching us how to imagine our actions out in that world. What would we be like? Who would we become? What would we stand up for? Who has the power? What is just?
All the things we are asking now, today, and everyday.
Take care and stay safe,
Leo
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| Oh, look at that blue on the horizon! |
From Our Friends:
From CERN:
CERN member Dr Christabel PJ from the University of Kerala is hosting a fabulous International Web Conference in the next few days on "Cooperatives, Mutual Aid and Solidarity Economies: Experiences from around the world".
A wide range of topics are being covered, including women’s self-help groups, municipal corporation areas in Kerala state, organic and sustainable agriculture, alliances among fisherfolk and more. Caroline Shenaz Hossein will present a special address on The Black Social Economy: The African Diaspora Experience in Solidarity Economics.
For more details and to register for the Web Conference please visit: https://forms.gle/j7gxAHTTjaRtnMdY6
The Web Conference will be live on Zoom. Live Streaming on Facebook and YouTube is also arranged.
From Teaching Tolerance:
Check Out What We’re Reading
“We’ve got to teach a more inclusive education that shows the contribution of all people, and the role of citizens in maintaining democracy. We have to work for it.” — The Hechinger Report
“Boarding schools across the country made it difficult for tribes to preserve their cultures, practices and languages.” — Indian Country Today
“When the pandemic forced schools and doctors' offices closed last spring, it also cut children off from the trained teachers and therapists who understand their needs.” — NPR
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