Tina

As a teacher of writing at Salem State College, I hear a lot of stories: The mother who lost her husband early and was trying to stay enrolled, but at last couldn’t afford it; the woman who lived in a shelter with her infant; the man who had grown up in the projects. At thirty-six, he had suffered a serious motorcycle accident, then decided to come to college. “I just wish I had done this a lot earlier,” he said to me. He was my age.

For years, I have believed that my students bring a certain wisdom to the class, a wisdom that does not score on the SAT or other standardized tests. The old teaching cliché—I learn from my students—feels true, but it is hard to explain. I am not particularly naïve. I know that life can be difficult. So it is not that my students initiate me into the world of sorrow. It is that they often bring their sorrows, and their struggles, to the material, and, when they do, it makes life and literature seem so entwined as to be inseparable.

Tina came to my office because she had missed class and wanted to turn in her paper. My African-American Literature class had just finished Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son. It is a brutal book, whose protagonist, a poor young black man, Bigger Thomas, murders two women and shows very little regret. Readers, to this day, are not sure what to make of Bigger. Is he to be pitied? Is he a warning? A symbol? A product of American racism? Is he too much a stereotype? The class had read essays by African-American writers James Baldwin and David Bradley criticizing Native Son and had been asked to evaluate them. Baldwin, Tina tells me, was hard, “but he was such a good writer.” Did she agree with Baldwin, I ask. Was Bigger denied humanity by Wright? How does she feel toward him?

“I think he needs help,” she says, “but I felt sorry for him. I wanted him to be able to understand his life—” I cut in, offering some teacherish observation about how Bigger shows glimmers of understanding in the last part of the book, but her mind is far ahead of me, just waiting for me to stop. I do. “The book reminded me of the guy who killed my uncle. You probably saw it—the trial was all over TV last week.” I shake my head yes. The man and an accomplice had murdered her uncle, a Dorchester storeowner, three years earlier and the previous week had been sentenced to life without parole. The two had been friends of the uncle’s family and had played pool with the uncle the night before, planning to rob and kill him the next day. “When I saw him sitting there, with his head down, looking all sad, I don’t know, I felt sorry for him. I wanted to give him a copy of Native Son. I wanted to walk up to him and put it in his lap. It might help him to understand his life.” She looks at me, her light brown face just a few shades darker than mine. She is nineteen. Her hair is pinned back, but some strands float loose. Her eyes are wide as half dollars, as if she is asking me something. Without thinking, I nod slowly, trying to hold her gaze. On the shelves surrounding us are the papers and books of my profession, that giant horde of words that will pursue me until I die. “My family wants him to suffer—hard. But I want to talk to him. Do you think that’s bad? I want to know why he did it, what happened. I wonder how he’d react if he saw me—what he’d do if I gave him the book.” I imagined Native Son in the man’s lap. The glossy purple, green, and black cover bright against the courtroom’s muted wood, the man’s trousers. His hand, smooth with youth, holds its spine. His thumb blots out part of the eerie fulllipped face on the front. As the words of the court fall about him, the book rises and falls ever so slightly, as if it is breathing.

When I wrote the first draft of this scene, I was still in the middle of teaching that African-American literature class. It struck me then, and it still strikes me now, as a strong argument for the value of what happens in college. Although one person I know found Tina’s wish to give the book to the young man absurd (I remember her laughing when I read it aloud), to me the episode spoke of the way a book and the class dialogue about it can allow one to re-envision a life, or the world. Although Tina probably never gave him the book, the fact that she desired to do so, and that her desire triggered in my head the image of the man holding the book in the courtroom, seems important. Student and teacher both develop empathy, imagination, and maybe even a little wisdom. Can we ask much more from our work as educators?

By the time I wrote the final draft of the essay, the semester was over and there was some new information that I considered including, but eventually cut. Tina, good student though she was, had not finished the semester. Personal and financial difficulties led her to leave school, and she never did make up the incomplete that I gave her. I saw her once on campus that summer—“Hey, Scrimgeour,” she called out to me as I was playing tennis with my sons. She told me that she had plans to return to a college nearer her family, eventually. I do not know if she ever did.

Though I did not include these details about Tina’s future in the original essay, they seem important to me now, rising up from the past to challenge my assumptions about the value of the moment the essay describes. What did that moment mean? It did not get her through that semester, that class. It may not have changed her relationship with her uncle’s killer, and if it did, it may not have changed it for the better. Who is to say that Tina even remembers that conversation now? I did give her a copy of the essay, but these things get lost, misplaced, recycled, tossed.

In a sense, the moment seems too easy a triumph. And too small: A speck of water in a desert, evaporating before this sentence is finished, nothing substantial enough to be nourishing. Given that I do not know whether Tina will ever finish college or whether she will ever find rewarding employment or happiness, how much value can I really ascribe to that conversation in my office? Sure, for me it was moving (and I got an essay out of it!), but what about for her? Am I deluding myself? Should I insist on something different, or something more, from teaching?

Maybe it is not about her, or about me. Maybe it is about the words I wrote, the words I write, the act of making something of the details of our lives. The world moves so quickly and arbitrarily, but the scene on the paper remains, illuminating something, not necessarily for Tina, or for me, but for some anonymous reader, a young teacher maybe, who wonders about the value of what she does, wonders whether, in the flood of incompletes we live with, it is worth it to keep teaching.

Not all of us want to write essays about our experiences, but, as educators, we can all practice the art of making something out of what our students teach us. A meaningful exchange with a student can and should make us alter our syllabus, or teaching style, or the way we discuss teaching with others. Whatever the form of these changes, they are all, in a way, creative acts, taking something chaotic, confusing, or painful and shaping it into something elegant, beautiful and valuable.

J. D. Scrimgeour

English

Part one of this essay is adapted from J. D. Scrimgeour’s Themes for English B: A Professor’s Education In and Out of Class (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006). For more information about the book, visit www.ugapress.org.

Beacon, a regular column of ASpect, features noteworthy items in the School of Arts and Sciences.