Literacy Biography

This is the second (and final) installment of the personal essay portion of my literacy biography:

For years before seventh grade, I'd relied on reading circles, chapter reviews, and worksheets to lead me along through books. For years after, I would learn to pretend that I had read, listening like a detective when the teacher spoke about a book's material and turning these clues into an entire narrative essay or response paper, complete with limited source materials that reflected this same viewpoint. But when my teacher Ed (we used first names) introduced the reading log book, I panicked. We were expected to record the date, the book, the number of pages we read, and a small synopsis. We were expected to write in the book at least once a week.

The book sat on a low shelf underneath the blackboard, free for anyone to peruse during transition periods or lunch time (we ate in the classroom). My failure to read would be more than a shared knowledge between myself and Ed. The whole class would see that nice, quiet Austin Murphy was lazy, uninspired, unmotivated, unfit to join the ranks of the best and the brightest.

There were many ways to respond to this new challenge. You could lie, write that you read pages whatever to who-gives-a-shit, and copy something it took you twenty minutes to load up on dial-up AOL about the plot. You could pretend to be actively reading a book that you had actually read in an earlier grade, shrug your shoulders thoughtfully when the teacher asked if you'd consider reading a more difficult book. You could pick a book that looked way above your level so that you could do a cursory, sloppy job in the log book, falling back on the semi-truth that you were challenging yourself, so it was OK that you only read ten pages last week or that you're description always involved the phrase, "I'm not quite sure what's happening..."

It was through this third route that I discovered Richard Wright's Native Son. It was the perfect ruse; a stern, uninviting black cover, over five hundred pages in length, and filled with words no white suburban seventh grader would have any reason to understand. I borrowed it from the class shelf and settled in for a semester of faux-intellectual wrangling.

I don't remember how long I went on like this; this lack of memory is probably testament to how little I thought of Wright or his giant book. All my basketball cards were alphabetized, I updated all the old rosters on my NBA Live '95 game to reflect all the off-season trades, I learned the finishing moves of every character in Mortal Kombat, I read the phrases "Knicks suck!" and "Yankees RULE!" in more chat rooms than I care to remember. Occasionally I would pick up Native Son and thumb through the pages. It seemed like a story about a black chauffeur working for a rich white family. I'd think of my rich classmates, and wondered if they had these kinds of people working for them. I'd put the book down and watched an episode of the Simpsons that I had seen five times.

Through it all, I buried the feeling that I was falling behind, that everyone else had made a seamless transition to independent reading. I was happy-go-lucky with my friends, got As and Bs in all my classes, and tried to present myself as the model embodiment of the student I knew deep down I was not.

The change came when Ed announced late one week that we were all required to move on to another book by the beginning of next week. After class, I asked him if I could get extra time because, you know, my book was so big! He said it had been clear at the beginning that we had a limited amount of time to read our book, and I should have been pacing myself or picked an easier read. He was not mean, he did not scold me. In fact, he told me that he allowed me to pick such an advanced book because he thought I could handle it. But it was time to complete the job, and that was that.

The tough thing about memory is that I often have trouble accessing specific details about times when I felt inadequate. I made every effort to avoid listening to my screaming conscious at the time, so it doesn't surprise me that I have no idea what I did on the Saturday afternoon before I was to complete Native Son. Maybe I went to Scotty's Music downtown and visited every listening station, even the country-western. Maybe my friend Jesse and I walked to the newsstand and snuck peeks at Playboy magazine when the cashier wasn't looking. Maybe I said, "Patrick Ewing SUXX you dont know what ur talkin bout!!" to KnicksRDaBomb2543.

Whatever happened during the daylight hours, my dad's insistence that I start tackling my homework before Sunday night led me to the leather chair in the study. And for the first time, I had an experience that I have replicated countless times in the years since; I forgot to check the time, forgot that I even had a body. I was reading.

It wasn't just the act of reading that shocked me; it was the story itself. Without giving away spoilers, I will say that Native Son is a story of how much of life is decided by circumstance and dumb luck, how a small misunderstanding and the fear of being misunderstood can conspire to create grave tragedy, how easy it is to lose everything even when you have almost nothing to begin with. Wright challenged everything I thought I knew about race, class, and power in America. On Saturday afternoon, I was a seventh grader who assumed I had no advantages, that people make it or not based on what kind of people they are, how hard they are willing to work, and whether or not they choose to be good or bad. On Saturday night, my view was so distorted and shattered that I cried for Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of the novel.

My reading of Native Son may be why I have spent my brief adult life working in urban public schools, trying to close the societal gap I first learned of on that Saturday night in seventh grade. I know that it's why I value questions over answers, why I'm always interested in hearing points of view that my limited personal experience doesn't touch upon. Native Son taught me to question everything I think I know. I'm glad I had enough nags in my life to force me to read it.