311. Gangsta Rap and Elementary Schooling in the Thirties

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.