The end of the rail

Today when I set down The Underground Railroad after the final page, I crumpled. I had not experienced the overwhelm I expected to feel in each chapter while reading a book which I knew would text my limits of tolerance, but it all came in a wave at the end. 

Though it wasn't the graphic nature of torture, but the weight and hopelessness of the whole enterprise of slavery which made me cry. I had been steeling myself against descriptions of personal injuries on the page, but it's the book's overall message about the institutionalized atrocities of slavery that walloped me as a reader there at the end.

I don't read reviews of books until after I read them, and here is much more than a review: this New Yorker Article talks about our attempts to rebrand the UR as a white institution that saved blacks. It properly contextualizes risk and heroism in the pre-Civil War south, and refers several times to Whitehead's book. 

I think everyone should read this book. 

A short review by Toni Morrison

I'm now deep into The Underground Railroad, and the most recent lesson it has taught me is that North Carolina criminalized being black when the ratio of blacks to whites become worrying. Indentured servants from Europe were brought in and "the penniless black were replaced by the penniless white, except the whites weren't penniless at the end of the week." Eventual freedom, after earning enough to pay off passage, loomed for whites. Blacks found in North Carolina, free or fugitive, were lynched publically and strung up along the Freedom Trail. 

This book prompted me to watch the Netflix documentary 13th this week, about the 13th Amendment, and its disastrous loophole which granted freedom to everyone "except those convicted of crimes". The film demonstrates that mass incarceration for whatever crime is necessary has replaced slavery as a way to keep black men out of society's mainstream. 

Young Angela Davis

One segment of the film focuses on the history of Angela Davis, who was charged with aiding in a murderous scheme in 1970, at which point she was a professor of philosophy at UCLA. I had never heard of her, but was immediately compelled by her bravery, by the footage of her trial, by the seeming clarity of her commitment to communism and resistance against white tyranny. 

Davis, recently.

I looked her up in the nytimes archives, and found this smoking review of a biography of Davis. The biography was written by a white high school classmate of Davis', and the review was written, carved, by Toni Morrison. She takes the author to town for being a modern-day Harriet Beecher Stowe and presuming to tell the story of a black revolutionary - as if she could possibly know how a revolutionary black person's mind works, let alone is formed. Naturally, the biography gives all credit to white influences, and deems the subject "kind and funny."

Read the review here.

Cruelty - Bible, Shakespeare, Slavery

In adult Sunday school this week the pastor talked about Paul and his attitude on slavery. In his letter to Philemon, Paul tells Philemon to receive his former slave Onesimus not as a slave, but as a friend. Onesimus has come to help Paul survive in prison. Roman prisoners at this time got nothing from the prison, so they died if they didn't have care teams from the outside. 

Paul sends Onesimus back to Philemon saying "I am sending him—who is my very heart—back to you. 13 I would have liked to keep him with me so that he could take your place in helping me while I am in chains for the gospel.14 But I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that any favor you do would not seem forced but would be voluntary. 15 Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever— 16 no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord."

It was strange to read this and imagine such a suggestion - that a slave be received as a beloved brother, not as a slave - in the context of the book I'm reading, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad. 

In TUR, Cora is a runaway slave, and the cruelty she has escaped is so vicious it is hard to fathom. My friend I. says "It is my personal belief that slavery was so horrible that we can't even conceptualize it. There is no way we can imagine how bad it was. I feel the same is true of the Holocaust." Her words ring true as I read Whitehead's no-frills prose describing the everyday treatment of slaves, both delinquent and rule-abiding. Nothing helps me contextualize it in the kind of human treatment I have ever experienced or witnessed. 

It's bizarre to think of Paul's Letter to Philemon sitting on the shelves of all those slave owners who drained the life from the slaves that they owned, and did far worse than that to those that were returned to them. No semblance of brotherhood linked them, and still it seems nearly impossible for white and black to be in true brotherhood in this country. Perhaps that sounds harsh. There are certainly black and white friends. But I have the intense impression that I, as a white person, will never get it. I can try, and trying to get it is the right thing to do, but I'll never get it. 

In Twelfth Night, which was at Pioneer Theater on Saturday night, Olivia is called "Fair cruelty". I bring this up only because it was another use of this word this weekend which fit into so different a category it was also hard to accommodate. Olivia rebuffs the amorous declarations of Orsino, and is labelled cruel for it. Poor Orsino. The obliviousness of the wealthy people in this play reminds me of my Renaissance Theater class at Bread Loaf last summer, where we talked about the atrocious waste of human and physical capital that took place in Renaissance courts. Good people, who wasted their time chasing love and wasted their people's money on clothes and frivolities. Large scale cruelty against the poor. 

At least Shakespeare gave those an opportunity to laugh at representations of the courtiers on stage.

Last week I used this video to talk with my students about how to give a group poetry performance. It candidly talks about cruelty that is subtly dealt out to students by teaching them certain lessons that never appear on the official curriculum. The students found it very impressive.

Matthew Madness: Bach's Passion

I have to follow up this morning's post with a website I found as I browsed for performances of the St. Matthew Passion. This is a group of Dutch musicians who have created a project called "All of Bach". This link shows a filming of the entire piece, and you can navigate to different pieces using the drop down menu. My suggestions: 

65

66b

60

49 (if you're in the mood to cry - this one is so heart-wrenching. It's Mary Magdalene saying "For love my savior now is dying.")

To find my favorite chorale, navigate to 2:03:00 and keep listening. 

listening And this delightful paragraph about March Madness counterpart in The Netherlands. I hope they're not exaggerating, this sounds so wonderful: 

The ‘Dutch’ passionWhether or not they are lovers of classical music, practically everyone in the Netherlands knows the St Matthew Passion. Every year, there is a real ‘Matthew madness’ in the month before Easter. Each town has its own performance and any reasonably large concert hall has at least two or three. The first performance of the St Matthew Passion in the Netherlands was in Rotterdam in 1870. Amsterdam followed suit in 1874. With the Concertgebouw orchestra, Willem Mengelberg then instituted a Passion tradition in Amsterdam that still continues today. In reaction to the Mengelberg performances, the Netherlands Bach Society was formed in 1921. The founders thought that the St Matthew should be performed where it belonged – in a church. The annual performance by the Bach Society in Naarden grew to become ‘the’ Dutch St Matthew Passion. 

The power of a shared story

This week  missed the traditions that linked my high school community at Emma Willard. I have been experiencing a more-than-usually intense Holy Week as rehearsals with the Salt Lake Choral Artists for the St. Matthew Passion ramped up. And up, and up, until our Good Friday performance last night which was... breathtaking to be part of. 

I have wished to share with others the intensity of the feeling I have being part of the telling of the Easter story this week. This is, for me, the most powerful part of the Christian calendar, Thursday and Friday of Jesus' final supper and then conviction and crucifiction. Easter is, by contrast, not an important or compelling part of the story for me. I think Jesus defeats death in the way he dies, not in the way he rises. 

Anyway, the story is so powerful, I want to be able to talk about it with people who are around me. I love working in a multi-cultural school, but this week I wished I were working in a Catholic school so we could talk about the power of Holy Week, the feelings and thoughts that come up this week. There is such power in being part of a story together - knowing the important parts and communing over them. 

At Emma Willard, part of this story was Revels, the play we put on at Christmas. The roles were the same from year to year, but who played them was a secret until the performance night. The songs we sang on stage were part of the tradition. The idea of being at a great feast together to celebrate the year was part of the tradition. 

There are other parts of Emma Life that speak of a shared narrative. For me some of the biggest ones were the award ceremonies for upper class women. At Honors Convocation and the awards night in the spring juniors and seniors received awards for their accomplishments and their service to the community. It was an important part of our shared lives, as if we were affirming: "This is what we honor and value in this community - hard work, authenticity, service, creativity..."

I wonder if my school, if a public school with a highly mobile and highly diverse population, can achieve this sense of tradition. At five years old, it seems that we don't have too much shared narrative at the school. The students arrive with much in common as immigrants - how significant is it that I, the teacher, don't share that part of their story? 

I was surprised by the conviction with which I spoke to the Alto next to me last night about the power of the story of the passion. 

I was even more surprised this morning when, as I read The Alchemist, my heart fairly fluttered as Jesus was mentioned. The story at this point focuses on a Andalusian shepherd working in a north African crystal shop, about to start a caravan toward Egypt in the company of Arab Muslims. The shepherd meets an Englishman, and when he asks what the Englishman thinks of shepherds, the Englishman responds, "It was shepherds who were the first to recognize a king that the rest of the world refused to acknowledge." 

I felt my spirit flip as I read this allusion to Jesus' birth, because here was a shingle of "my" story, embedded in a wall of shingles from other traditions. I could locate myself in this story, all of a sudden. It became much more "mine" in that moment. Which is funny because I don't even believe most of what Christians believe about Jesus! But it's the power of story here I'm talking about, not of truth. 

This article talks about the Muslim perspective on Jesus, which is actually closer to what I believe than the Christian one (Jesus was a prophet, was not the son of God, did not resurrect). But still I felt more at home yesterday in the Cathedral of the Madeleine listening to the choir sing Pergolesi's Stabat Mater Dolorosa (about the Virgin's woes) than I would have in a mosque. 

Cathedral Choir School

Even though I don't believe in the virgin birth, I find the story compelling, and I certainly feel for Mary's pain at the foot of the cross, even if it never happened. This story contains the power of fiction which I try to harness for my students all year long: the power of tapping into universal themes and feeling a connection to tradition by linking those themes with your own experience. 

"The world turned upside down..." (upsetting the patriarchy)

What does it take to destabilize the patriarchy? Not much. In Arthur Miller's A View From The Bridge, the young Katherine is able to do so simply by telling her uncle that a movie she went to with her beau ended late, causing her to arrive home later than usual. Eddie, the uncle, isn't able to verify the story of course. Can he trust her? Did she, despite her words, go to some bar and sit in a dark corner doing dark deeds with her young Italian immigrant boyfriend? She has never lied to him before - could this be the beginning of a downward spiral in whose twists she learns to be deceitful? His hitherto unquestioned grasp on her life is shaken loose with remarkably little disturbance. 

His authority over his wife is also challenged, not even by any action on her part, but by her tone of voice when she tells him "What do you want from me? I did what you asked." And so she did. He cannot relroaach her action but tries to reproach her tone. "I don't like the way you're talking to me!" he replies, and it sounds like a confession of weakness. He's already lost the respect he is telling her he wants. It turns out, the legitimacy of this patriarch rested on wobbly posts. It's rather shocking how little recourse he has. Not only does he find that the law offers him no reinforcement when his women start defying him and young men come a-calling, but even taking things into his own hands by becoming violent and then setting immigration police on those he perceives to be his enemy, he cannot reassert the authority he has until now enjoyed without having to do anything except be a man. 

The patriarchy was turned in its head for a few minutes in an auditorium of Roland Hall on Friday night, where Junot Diaz and Leo Espinosa gave a book talk for kids. Their joint effort, Islandborn, is a beautiful children's book about a young girl named Lola growing up in the Bronx. She finds out about the island of her origin, the Dominican Republic, from her neighbors who weave a tapestry of memories for her. The illustrator, Espinosa, lives in Salt Lake City with his family. Diaz is from the Dominican Republic and won the pulitzer prize for his book on Oscar Wilde. At the end of the talk he asked for questions from the king kids only, and then when those had been exhausted, suggested that we "turn the world on its head and ask for question only from women of color." There were hollers of approval. 

Dias posed for pictures with the kids afterwards.

Inner Turmoil

When I have described John Banville's The Sea, I've said that the narration is imbued with a bitterness, resentment, and fear of a narrator recently walloped by an awareness of mortality. The wallop came in the form of his wife's death. In the chapter I just read, close to the end of the book, his inner turmoil finds its reflection in a mighty storm which rages in the beach town from his youth which he has made the sight of a post-mortem pilgrimage. Listen to this passage: 

"We have had a storm. It went on all night long and into the middle of the morning, an extraordinary affair, I have never known the like, in these temperate zones, for violence or duration. I enjoyed it outrageously, sitting up in my ornate bed as on a catafalque, if that is the word I want, the room aflicker around me and the sky stamping up and down in a fury, breaking its bones. At last, I thought, at last the elements have achieved a pitch of magnificence to match my inner turmoil! I felt transfigured, I felt like one of Wagner's demi-gods, aloft on a thunder-cloud and directing the great booming chords, the clashes of celestial cymbals."

First of all, a catafalque is the ornate platform upon which a casket rests during a funeral. Later in the passage he goes on to declare his life-long belief that life thus far has been a rehearsal, and at some point he will pass on and the "real drama for which I have ever and with such earnestness been preparing will at last begin". He sees his end as imminent, but he also believes (though he himself admits it is "a common delusion") that the end of this stage is the beginning of a more significant one.

I don't think I believe that. I think this is the drama, and I don't get to prepare forever and earnestly for it. Right now there is snow falling hard outside on 6 already-accumulated inches. This storm does not mirror my inner state, which feels neither tumultuous like the storm in the story, not quietly stifling like the snow. It feels like a bright cloudy morning, with a desire to go out and converse. Luckily I won't have to go very far to converse this evening, when the Literary Classics book club is meeting at the O'Falafel near my house to discuss another stormy book, The Tempest. 

The Sea's example of pathetic fallacy (when nature's events mirror the events or emotions of the story) is the second of this 24 hours. Yesterday, on the beach inhabited by the nascent savages of The Lord of the Flies, Ralph and Jack approached each other, words flying like thunder bolts, while real thunder bolts interrupted their aggressions from the sky. The climax of this human storm is Piggy's fall to his death on the wavy rocks below the cliff, at which point a thunderclap of great intensity seems to summon the waves 

...ok I have to stop. I just made that storm up. Isn't that funny. I went back to the text after writing "waves" and realize there was no storm going on. Ha! It was my own inner turmoil at the intensity of the scene which generated the storm in my head! Anyway, here is the troubling paragraph in which the storm abates for a moment, but only like those storms in Maine that would become gentle enough to give me hope they were over, then return with great booms and gales, made more dramatic by the brief respite that preceded them. The hunt is about to get more intense, as Jack and his hunters seek out Ralph to finish off the outlaws. Here's Piggy's end: 

"The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, traveled through the air sideways from the rock, turning over as he went. The rock bounded twice and was lost in the forest. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy's arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone."


Lois Lowry wrote this article for the occasion of TLOTF's 60th anniversary. She points to the character Simon, who is the only one on the island who intuitively knows that the "beast" that haunts them is really inside them. "Maybe it's only us," he says timidly, and no one takes him seriously. 

I sometimes feel the sense in the classroom that the students who make the most incisive analysis of the world are the least listened to among their peers. They speak less, and more quietly, and with more hesitation. It seems to be my job to bring their comments out into the open and build on them with others. I hope that hearing their ideas highlighted will make them more confident in a world where no teacher will ask them to repeat what they said, louder, or paraphrase it for their peers.


We do have storms inside us. To ignore them is to invite violent outbursts. Yesterday I went to a documentary film workshop for teachers, and saw trailers for two films about the consequences of unaddressed internal pain. One was Bully, a trailer I couldn't even watch in its entirety because it was so distressing. The other was The Mask You Live In, made by the creators of MissRepresentation, this one about how American masculinity is codified and then shoved down boys throats, at great cost to everyone, especially the young men.