While I was writing Post 306 I had some pretty
derogatory but, I thought, accurate words ready to use to describe the songs
that have now, I see, become mainstream in popular culture. But when the time came I left it to the
reader to guess that it was hip-hop, or rap, I was calling "bigoted"
and "barbaric."
Why this reluctance? Here's what I was looking at:
I don't fuck with you
You little stupid ass bitch, I
ain't fuckin' with you
You little, you little dumb
ass bitch, I ain't fuckin' with you
I got a million trillion
things I'd rather fuckin' do
Than to be fuckin' with you
And
further on:
From the Bay to the Murder
Mitten,
my niggas put murder missions
She choose him, that's her
decision, free my niggas in prison
On the phone with a bitch who
can't do shit
For a pimp but make a nigga
hella rich
(Kanye West and others)
When
I think of adding "trashy" to "bigoted" and
"barbaric" I begin to envy my elementary-school teachers, who used
that word freely. Obscenity was
trashy. Talking ugly to girls was
trashy.
Those
women teaching at the Williams Avenue Grammar School were a caution, I'll tell
you. Going to normal school
(teacher's college) so early in the early twentieth century they were practically
pure vessels of Victorian (in America, Genteel Age) values. They still used the word
"suggestive." Ogling or
slithering a certain way in the class play brought the word into their conferences.
The public performance couldn't be
"in bad taste."
To our Sunday-school teachers profanity was a
sin. To my seventh-grade teacher it
was "a sign of a limited vocabulary." That was cool,
and coming from her it had some force. She was the one who showed us how far poets' vocabularies
went. Edgar Alan Poe (oh my god,
"the tintinnabulation of the
bells") and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ("all in a hot and copper sky"). If you thought of her, up in the
classroom lined with the classics, your fourth use "son-of-a-bitchin"
("fuckin" was way in the
future) on the playground would catch in your throat.
In class we really wanted to please that teacher. When we
sang we kept our backs straight and enunciated distinctly. When we read
"Thanatopsis" or passages from "Snowbound" aloud to the
class we paid attention to the meaning
of the words. Making us want
to please her was part of her skill.
It seemed to be a skill of all of those teachers,
part of a general skill, even genius, that I recognized later, and found hard
to account for until I understood how the circumstances of the time had selected
them. Teaching and nursing were
all a woman, no matter how brilliant, could do. The women who taught
us at Williams Avenue might now, I think, be running Hewlett-Packard or laying
out genomes.
At Williams Avenue they used their genius in finding
just the right project to turn us on — making a papier mâché mummy, making the sarcophagus, doing the hieroglyphics, knowing the meanings of the hieroglyphics, to learn about Egypt; turning the
whole class into a formal club to learn Roberts Rules of Order, the way to
debate; diagramming the relation of all the Greek Gods to each other, an odd pyramid, with parallel lines to their Roman equivalents, filling the blackboard.
Talk about filling the blackboard. After Mrs. Davison got us into
sentence-diagramming, her own system, and challenged us with longer and
longer sentences, we competed
among ourselves. "Who can
diagram the longest sentence?"
We filled the whole damn board.
And completed my education as a teacher of English Composition. The courses I took later added nothing
new or, I thought, better.
These teachers got a hold of us before we had any
idea of what was "too much work for a teacher to assign." That came in college classes, if not in
high school. In Mrs. Davison's
class you had to read a book a week (from the floor-to-ceiling library in the
back of the room) and write an essay-review of it. If you wanted to you could read other books and get the
points she assigned to them, according to their importance and difficulty. She gave you your point total at the
end of the month, and you could compare it with other students' totals, which of course all the competitive
sentence-diagrammers did. (Oh she
knew us, and, of her time, felt no shame at encouraging competition.) We read like demons, three, four, five
books a week. Jumping on the
hardest ones for their point count.
I have an idea that, if you could see through the pants and skirts of
those students who went up to get their total (and a talk, to see how well you
read), you'd see a ring around every bottom. The bathroom was the place for undisturbed reading.
What we were getting in those last three grades (fifth,
sixth, seventh) was, essentially, our first course in Western Civilization. Heavy on the classical period. In Miss Sheets' class Egyptians and
Mesopotamians coming out of the dark past with written language, little
(meaning only the country) Phoenicians scurrying all over the Mediterranean,
spreading civilization, Greeks and Romans bringing it to glory, and to us. "You'll learn a lot more about this
in college." We could hardly
wait.
Every
sample of knowledge they gave us suggested great things over the horizon. "See here in your geography book [our
first one, big, full of color], 'young rugged mountains,' 'old worn-down
mountains,' 'sub-arctic
tundra,' 'dry plateau,' or 'fertile lowland'" (in the
book, dark brown, brown, light brown, and green). What variety!
And it explained the variety in people. Miss Aurand took us through sections on a Norwegian family,
an Eskimo family, a Bedouin family, and a French family. We could learn more about them, too, in
college. (Traveling to learn more
was beyond our dreams.)
The variety
of people. Did Miss Aurand "show
discrimination"? Only, as I
remember, in the neutral sense, looking at the differences determined by
geography, "If you want to understand people, find out where they grew
up." We left her class with
that fertile understanding, and carried it home.
Home was a
different matter, and its difference was explained by "variety of
people" too. The variety in
Norwood in 1934 was pretty well limited to three, and that only recent. To the people established in
comfortable, two-story houses spaced on shady streets had been added arrivals
from industrial sections (moving, joy, "out to the suburbs") and
arrivals from Appalachia, finding a better-than-mountain income in nearby
Cincinnati industry. The
Depression split many of the big old houses into flats, rented to
arrivals. (My family had arrived from
industrial South Side Chicago, and rented a flat.)
There was
discrimination in the bad sense, but — remember here that you're looking
through a child's eyes and hearing with a child's ears — it wasn't
emphatic. At home I heard the
contemptuous "briar hoppers" (for mountain people, incompetents) but
not much more, probably not anything near what a sensitive sociologist would
hear now in the jokes about (stereotypical) Jews, the laughs at blacks on the radio, prejudice casual and
habitual. I think it was pretty much the same in other houses. If lines were drawn inside our
all-white suburb they disappeared as soon as you got working with somebody on a
job or doing business with them in the world.
Lines are
worth mentioning here because that's what I instinctively want to draw when I
hear rap music, the line between the barbaric and the civilized, and then find
myself confused by lines between, oh my, races, generations, wealth, power, privilege,
lifestyle, moral status, who knows what all. With what's on each side of them easily stereotyped,
unfairly sampled, and mocked.
At Williams
Avenue when you went for a fly ball you were supposed to yell "I have it, I
have it" instead of the "I got it, I got it" heard on every playground away from school. A bug on the gym teacher would have
shown it. You could replay the
tape and make your point about that generation, with fact and a laugh. "Oh those prissy schoolmarms, over
the top on grammar as they were on chastity." Of course the real people, the manly boys, paid no attention
to such hoity-toities. As their
manly fathers paid no attention to women's temperance unions.
And so up
in the classroom brilliant, learned teachers with the respectable Victorian
cause of advancing "the best that had been thought and said in the
world," the people with the best chance of civilizing us barbarians on the
playground, are discredited by a young gym teacher who goes too far. As, to my mind, those advancing the
cause of tolerance now are discredited by those who carry political correctness
too far. The world is full of
hilarious, convincing
examples. You can
pluck them out for your case, as lawyers pluck out psychiatrists, and if you
run out of them the silly-siders will keep supplying you, until the movement is
done in. Victorianism, what my
teachers spoke for, had so many silly sides (imagine, avoiding the word
"leg" when you spoke of that part of a chicken!) it's a wonder any of
it got through the twenties. But
then, my busy teachers were probably unaware of "the twenties."
But back to
that boys' playground. It was
unsupervised most of the time because, forced by job cutbacks, the teachers had
to take on too many other tasks. Fighting
went unchecked. What we were
doing, I saw later, was regressing first to my father's playground in Chicago
(which I glimpsed when he said to me, "If you get in a fight, go for the
nose") and then to my older uncles' playground in the Illinois coal-mine
country, which I glimpsed in their talk about becoming "cock of the
walk" there, the boy nobody could lick.
Those ladies
now, in the classrooms above the playground. Dresses, high heels, hair dressed and in place. The only time you ever saw a lock of
Mrs. Davison's hair — molded, white, maybe a little bluish — out of place was
during a paper-drive to make money for the school. After she had been lifting papers from our wagons onto the junk
man's scale for an afternoon you could see two, maybe three, strands of white,
at her forehead, over beads of perspiration.
I say high
heels but only the young, still marriageable, women wore them. The heels on most of the women were too
blocky to be called high, though they still looked uncomfortable, and, after an
eight-hour day, probably were.
Their wearers were never out of earshot, in those days, of that cruel
word "Old Maid," carried here from father's mouth to son's, and up
from the playground to open classroom windows.
There it
is, there's what's powering this blog post. I want to go to the window and yell down, "That's
trashy, you little ape!" Exactly what I want to yell at that rapper.
I'll get to
that but first I need to adjust my picture of the teachers. They weren't all women. There was Mr. Dahl, to whom every
student was sent for arithmetic, apparently because women couldn't be trusted
with mathematics. He always wore a
black suit, the one suit he had, probably, and he would sometimes play ball
with us at lunch break, folding his coat over the railing. We were impressed by his ability to hit
the ball over the left-field fence, but we didn't see much of him.
And then
there was H. H. Maddux, the principal, who tried not to add to your fright when
you went to his office as a "serious case" (one the teachers lacked
the weight to handle) and who appeared in front of the class once a week or so
to give us "a serious talk."
He wore a vest with his coat, and a gold chain that ran to his watch,
but he was not pompous and he conferred smilingly with the teachers. For a long time he had a bandaged ear,
injured by an errant golf ball.
Not being a
spinster made Mrs. Davison an exception.
She was exempted by the death of her husband from the rule against hiring
married women, a rule designed to reduce competition for the jobs needed by
those who had to provide for families.
Mrs. Davison was the only woman teacher to have had a child of her own,
a boy who had died at three. (When
we came to Eugene Field's "Little Boy Blue," a poem about a boy who
had died at that age, she asked a student to do the reading.)
You had to
be deaf and blind not to feel the change when you came into those teachers'
classrooms after the bell — 8:00, 10:00 ending recess, 1:00 ending lunch break. But being boys, males, we (I, maybe)
had a hard time carrying what the teachers had civilized back onto the
playground. There: "He don't
take no shit off nobody." My
barbarian heart responds, under Mrs. Davison's frown. I tingle at the thought of being the one complimented, the
cock, maybe, of the walk.
How much I
was drawn to such fellows came to me one evening when I made a smart answer to
a teacher who tried to slow me down running in the halls of the high school,
where we had been taken to hear a concert. "Hold on there," she said, "where are you
going so fast?"
"Places,"
I said, and ran on. At the end of
the hall, a classmate, big on the playground, asked me who had spoken to
me. Having had a glimpse of her I
said, "Old lady Davison," adopting his language and view.
I was
ashamed of that betrayal of Mrs. Davison for a long time, but when I wish that
she and the other women had completely won the battle for my soul, and the
other souls, earlier and more completely, I think of another incident. In 1935 the head of the Boy Scouts of
America, Walter Head, had come to the Grace Methodist Episcopal Church in
Norwood to raise contributions, and had chosen me to come up and stand beside
him to illustrate a point he wanted to make. "Boys this age," he said to the large audience, "are
in Germany now marching in Hitler Youth organizations all over the
country. To make them strong and
ready to fight." He explained
Nazi militarism and went on to make some comparison that I realize now could
have been right out of Pericles' speech to the Athenians, comparing them to the
regimented Spartans. I was a
visual representation of our youth alternative, our only alternative, to the
modern Sparta. And democracy's
proper alternative. Give to the
Boy Scouts.
"Was I the proper alternative?" I ask
now. A kid half pacifist (after my
Scottish mother), half aspiring poet, with a weakness for powdered,
white-haired, gentle-speaking women? Considering the war that was coming
wouldn't the savage who "didn't take no shit off nobody" have been
better? Wasn't he the kind who won World War II? If that playground was our
"playing fields of Eton" (you know, where Waterloo was won) you'd
have a good case. For that war and
all preceding ones.
See how
that tangles the line I want to draw?
They, those roughnecks, would fight for civilization too. I wanted to draw a line between the
barbarians on the playground and the civilizers in the classroom, those ladies fighting
such a hard battle. Fighting for
poetry. And then I ask, "If
the playground fighters hadn't won the later battle, hadn't defeated the Great
Barbarian, Adolf Hitler, where would the poets be?"
"That'll
teach you not to draw lines," I might be told now. "Why draw lines at all? Why make judgments about people? Why categorize them?"
Tough
question now, but it would have made no sense to the parents of Norwood, nor, I think, will it make sense to any
parent. Parents have to draw lines
between kinds of people out in the world because that's where children go, and keeping
company with the wrong kind can ruin their lives. "In what crowd might there be the temptation to try that
first shot of heroin?" In
Norwood the word for that crowd would have been "trashy" and
"heroin" would have been "unmarried sex." I don't remember lectures but somehow
we knew that in high school you didn't go to the Norwood Roller Rink because
that's where the wrong kind of boys and girls hung out. You know, girls that got picked up and
then got pregnant, and boys who would do that to them — and then leave. If you wanted to skate you went to the
skating parties in the basement of the Grace M. E. Church, whose elders had put in special smooth
concrete for that purpose. Smooth
enough to keep you away from the trash on the other concrete.
(Somehow we knew not to go to the Norwood Roller Rink? Maybe we knew the way Arthur Winner's daughter in By Love Possessed knew not to go to a certain roadhouse: by a message from her womb, that pouch "no bigger than a pack of cards" that rode inside her and signaled its coming product, with its needs. Can boys know that way?)
But "trash"
now. As a reference to people the
word possibly came to us from the South, which (according to Kentuckians) began right across
the river: "white trash."
"Trashy" was the way those people talked and acted. Those
people and us people.
But again,
the exceptions and complications.
The friend who turned me on to the The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner was from West Virginia. "With throats unslaked, with
black lips baked,/ We could nor laugh nor wail;/ I bit my arm, I sucked the
blood,/ And cried, A sail! a sail!"
He, equally smitten by Mrs. Davison, recited that during one of our
evening walks. Then another
friend told me that when he had stayed over at John's house for dinner he heard
his father say, as he was coming down the stairs, "I'm sa hungry I could eat the ass off a skunk."
It's hard
for me to tell whether the teachers drew any of the lines I saw drawn in town because
I saw them only when they were concentrating on their jobs. I got a glimpse only once, when after
school I told Mrs. Davison that I
might be moving to a mixed neighborhood in Chicago. I remember her fearing bad influence on my education.
What I say
about lines drawn in the classroom won't make sense unless you understand the seating. Tall
students were put in the back, short students in front, "where they could
see." But with the practice
of holding students back to repeat a year and advancing quick students a year
this, certainly for the students, located ability. The "dumb kids" sat in the back. That was my perception, a casual one,
then. Now I realize that children
from the arriving families, particularly from mountain families, were the
majority in the back.
A line was
drawable. Did my teachers draw
it? Memory and a child's
attentiveness give me so little, but there's this. When the class put Roberts' Rules of Order into practice, in
motions and amendments and maneuverings and debate, nearly all the action, the energy,
was in the front half of the room.
And that's where Mrs. Davison's attention was, that was where, as she
looked on, her smiles and pleasure were generated. It's where (I say, looking at my college teaching
experience) mine would have been.
So yes, she
drew a line. But I don't think it
affected her actions. When
back-row Oliver was too sick to prepare for a big spelling test she sent me
over to his house to coach him. I
went over the words he had missed on preceding spelling tests.
"Choir." When I put it
to him his listening mother said, "Oh, is that how you pronounce it." In her coaching she had pronounced it "chore." I didn't understand, but I'm sure Mrs.
Davison did.
Then, more
than a glimpse. I remember being
sporadically affected by Mr. Maddux's talks, which were sometimes about
"life," sometimes about what we had read in My Weekly Reader (a child's news magazine), and sometimes about
citizenship and the reasons for our rules, and for all rules, We shouldn't forget how long the arm of
the law was, and we should be glad we lived in America. The talks were consistent with the
routine he (or the Superintendent of Schools) had established for pupils in
every class. 8:00: stand up, hand
on heart, while a member of the student Drum and Bugle Corps played "To
the Colors" at the end of the hall (while other members, outside, were
raising the flag). At the
conclusion, hand out to the classroom flag, pledge allegiance, then fold your
hands, drop your head, and say with the others "The Lord's Prayer."
The talk
that affected me the most was the talk about what was wrong in America. It was pretty new to me, and was
consistent with only one thing I had read before in school, in our arithmetic
textbook (newer than the others, published after the recent Crash): a warning,
in the section on interest and dividend calculation, against the great evil
of STOCK MARKET SPECULATION (yes,
it was capitalized). Mr.
Maddux talked about slums and scams and Al Capone and corruption and all kinds
of crime, filling us in on so many bad things that he thought (I guess) we were now ready for.
I don't
remember much of the detail but I
remember what it did to my eyes.
While he talked Mr. Maddux often hooked his pudgy little fingers over
the ridge of my front-row desk, playing them there while he spoke. Two fingers,
then three, then four, then back. I couldn't take my eyes off of them. In this talk, though, I remember raising my eyes,
toward the end, to the big map of the U. S. on the front wall. Bad stuff filled it. Sea to shining sea.
Then came
this, in another talk, near the end.
A joke about TNT. Rastus
saw the initials on a box and immediately ran away, at full speed.
"Why
are you running, Rastus?"
"I
know what dat mean. It mean Travel, Nigger, Travel."
Now here's
a question about line-drawing.
Would any of the women in that school have told such a story? From everything I heard from them,
through six years of listening, I feel sure that they would not even have come
close. Is there a gender line
here?
I think
there is and it comes very close to that line I want to draw between the
civilized and the barbaric.
What? Are women the great
carriers of civilization?
And if they are, what words will they use to carry it and protect it? What words would they need? What words would men need to protect them? Out on the playground: "Shut
up, you little ape, that's trashy."
That's back
on a thirties playground, but how about now, listening to a black rapper?
Some kind of line appears, and it's a heavy one, cutting across one line after
the other. The line cries for explanation, but it's all so terribly
complicated.