PRISONERS OF LANGUAGE: Racism, my third-grade teacher, the big pool of life ... and reading

Especially within a school setting, we are all potentially prisoners of language.

The first day of school at Wilson Elementary School in Fishersville, Virginia, in September 1964: it was a different world, although we didn’t yet know it. 

I was beginning third grade. 

Wilson Elementary was a red-brick, single-story, one-hall school (an extension would be built between my sixth and seventh grade years, turning the rectangular building into an L-shaped structure). It housed about 500 kids in Grades 1-7 (no kindergarten in rural Virginia in the early 1960s, and few junior high schools). It was an artifact of such a completely different time and American culture than we inhabit today that it is almost impossible to portray it in any meaningful fashion.

I have often told my college students that it was one of the only elementary schools they would ever hear about that could have had a student parking lot. In 1960s Virginia there was no social promotion yet, so it was not unusual for some of the sixth or seventh-graders to be sixteen, or even seventeen, years old. 

On the other end of the scale, our principal took all the boys in each new first grade class to the restroom to explain how to flush the toilets and carefully distinguished between urinals (which many had never seen) and water fountains. “One is to pee in, and the other is to drink out of,” Mr. McChesney said. “Remember that all the drinking fountains will be in the halls, not in here.”

Thanks to the Cuban Missile Crisis, we had civil defense drills once a month. Our teachers explained that Russian children went to school six days a week and played chess on Sunday because they were raised as atheists, and were being trained to kill us. They would probably attack the signal relay tower atop nearby Afton Mountain with an atomic bomb. We didn’t sit up nights worrying about nuclear Armageddon because we didn’t have the slightest idea what atomic bombs did, and we didn’t have much TV to inform us. In those days there were only channels 3, 6, 8 (sometimes), and 12 (WTVR: “The South’s First Television Station”); they only aired between 6:30 am -- 11:30 pm. I would not see color television -- an episode of Lassie -- for another year.

Still, we dutifully got under our desks whenever the teachers told us that Russian bombers had been sighted, and later went out into the hallway to crouch beneath white paper signs bearing our bus numbers. Apparently, in the aftermath of a mushroom cloud over the mountain, we were to brave the radiation storm long enough to rush out to the buses that would take us home.(1)

To this day I have no idea how seriously my teachers took this exercise, but I had first-hand knowledge that some local educators lived in real fear of those Red aircraft over the western counties of the Old Dominion. My Dad taught at Wilson Memorial High School (about two miles away), and two of his best friends were Jim and Nancy Cook, science teachers with whom we often socialized. They didn’t have any kids, but -- better! -- a friendly German Shepherd named “Storm” that I could play with. Jim had been so affected by the Cuban Missile Crisis that he began excavating the ground beneath his kitchen to build a fallout shelter. One night he pulled up the trap door under the rug between the refrigerator and the kitchen sink to show us a dank, clay-walled pit about six or eight feet deep, four feet to a side.

“Khrushchev,” he said with a gleam in his eye, “isn’t going to get us.”

Third grade was going to be a challenge. I realized that when I walked into the classroom and was met by Mrs. Gwynn. My first and second grade teachers had been young, attractive, single women in their mid-twenties. Mrs. Gwynn was ancient (in her early fifties), and I was certain that being trapped in this classroom with this wrinkly old woman whose hair was thinning and who wore tortoise-shell glasses, was not a good idea.

Third grade would also be the first year that we wouldn’t be having regular Bible Class. That this was disappointing -- or even that Bible Class still existed in public school in 1965 -- requires some explanation.

Bible Class was really Protestant Bible Class, occurring once a week, when an approved (by the Gideon Bible Society) single lady would come into our classroom to teach us about Christianity. In first grade we had an unmarried lady who strapped a felt storyboard to her chest, and told the tale of Genji, a Japanese boy who eventually found God and salvation. This was exciting, as the Gideons had provided her with professionally rendered felt cut-outs to portray the action. Genji, raised as a Buddhist, dutifully put coins in the little offering hole in the back of the statue of the false god Buddha every week, believing that this money would be used to help the poor. In reality, evil priests took the coins to buy saki so that they could hold wild parties and fornicate. (I don’t think our teacher had much more idea what fornicating was than we did.) Later, however, a blonde American missionary named Miss Julie (who always wore white) appeared. At great risk of life and limb (and probably virginity, if we had only known what fornication entailed), slowly taught Genji about the baby Jesus and the real God. Our teacher gave this show her everything (she was actually pretty gifted with the voices, and even sang some of the parts), and we looked forward to what would happen next week. When Fireball XL-5 premiered that year, I remember thinking that the spaceship was neat, but the show would have been better if the puppet actors had been replaced by something as good as the felt Genji, Miss Julie, and the cavorting Buddhist priest-fornicators.

Our second grade Bible teacher was a let-down. She didn’t utilize the huge storyboard, relying instead on reading from The Big Book of Illustrated Bible Stories. She was not a very evocative reader, and received a ho-hum response to tales of Jesus walking on water and healing leopards. (We weren’t clear on the distinction between skin diseases and big jungle cats in the second grade.)

The continuity between the two Bible Class experiences was provided by the Bible Class Notebook, which was duly stored in a cubby at the back of the room until Bible Tuesdays. I can’t remember what other activities filled the book, but I do remember the first page. It was a mimeographed picture of a stained-glass church window. In the center of each pane, the date of a Sunday during the school year had been carefully typed. Every Tuesday at the beginning of Bible Class you opened your Bible Class Notebook, located the date of the previous Sunday, and if you’d gone to church you got to color it in. Eventually, I suppose, the theory was that good little church-going children would end up with this beautiful crayon-colored page that a proud mother could put on the refrigerator over the summer (did we have fridge magnets back then?).(2)

If you had missed attending church, you had to use a pencil to put a crack in that pane of your window.

My family didn’t go to church -- ever. The first time I ever sat in a church on a Sunday was when I was eleven and visited the local Methodist Church during a Boy Scout camping trip. We weren’t atheists (code for communist in those days), but my parents didn’t get into organized religion. (At least not at the time. Much later they went through a passionate spell as evangelicals before settling down to be Unitarian Universalists, but that was after I’d gone to college, and then into the Army.)

Technically, I didn’t actually have to be in Bible Class in the first place. In theory it was completely voluntary, and one child always left the room. Andy Brown was Catholic. We didn’t know, in the first grade, just what Catholic was, but it didn’t sound good. Andy’s parents sent in a note testifying to this religious disability, and he was duly excused from class, and, if the Bible teacher’s weekly look of sadness as he left the classroom was any indication, also lost any chance of keeping his eternal soul away from hellfire and Buddhist priests. I considered asking Mom and Dad for a similar letter in second grade when the new Bible teacher turned out to be such a dud, but that was before I found out the truth about what they did to Andy every Tuesday.

They sent him down to the library and made him write book reports.

Uh, no. Not the kid.

Staying in Bible Class meant that I had to deal with the dreaded Stained Glass Holy Window of Weekly Church Attendance. A couple decades later, I’d just have lied about it and colored in the panes every week along with the other kids. Nobody would have questioned me, because there were enough churches in Augusta County (including at least one of those strange Catholic ones) that everybody would have just assumed that I went to some other flavor of Baptist worship over the weekend. That option never occurred to me. I told you it would be hard to make you believe our lives in the early 1960s.

For the first couple of weeks, I glumly drew in my cracked window, and also drew sad, disparaging looks from the teacher. Once this caused me not to receive the Magic Candy of Salvation everybody else received for coloring in their windows.(3)

I got pissed (I didn’t actually know the word “pissed” yet, but I understood the concept).

Aside from being an art teacher, Dad was a regionally well-known watercolor artist. I inherited some of his talent, and could always draw better than my peers. So I put my talents to sacrilegious use. I didn’t just crack my damn church windows, I filled those cracks with spider webs, skeletons, monsters, and vampire bats. The Mummy made an appearance. 

My very disturbed, haunted church began to draw attention. Karen McCray, who sat next to me, came to class one Tuesday and announced triumphantly that due to going out of town to see her cousins last weekend, she hadn’t gotten to attend church. So she wanted me to draw her a cracked window pane with a monster in it. It was my first art commission. She paid me with a gap-toothed smile, and we were boyfriend and girlfriend for the better part of the morning.

Unfortunately, this all came crashing down when Communists infiltrated the Supreme Court and made it illegal for American Protestants to have Bible Class in public schools and send Catholics (I’d not heard of Jews yet as modern people instead of merely the Biblical murderers of Christ) to the library to write punishment essays. 

Some guy named Earl Warren had done this to us. I recognized his name because our cousins lived in Powhatan County, and the three-hour, pre-interstate ride to visit them took us right past the giant John Birch Society billboard on Route 60 boldly proclaiming, IMPEACH EARL WARREN. My brother (who was in ninth grade and knew about such things) assured me that impeaching either meant killing Earl with a big, sharp stick, or cutting off his gonads and then killing him with the stick stuck up his ... Since I was just figuring out what gonads were, this punishment struck me as horrible enough that it must be reserved for really bad people. Like Catholics or Jews.

Not until years later did I realize he’d gotten IMPEACH confused with IMPALE.

My cousins, who attended the all-white, private Prince Edward Academy, were happy to fill me in. “Earl Warren,” they said, “is the man who lets nigras to go to school with white children, so that they can rape the white girls.” (I knew no more about rape than about fornication, but it sounded bad.) They said nigra because they had been raised to use nigger only around immediate family and friends -- not in polite conversation.

Back to Bible Tuesdays.

Not to be daunted by the Supreme Court, the Augusta County Public Schools rented a tiny swatch of ground from the farm that bordered the school. There the Gideons had an old trailer hauled in, and we dutifully left our classroom every Tuesday to march down the property line, cross the fence, and take (purely voluntary and not at all associated with Wilson Elementary in the slightest) Bible Class for another year before the Communists figured that dodge out and killed Jesus in our school permanently.(4)

The Bible Class Notebook died in the transition to the trailer; there wasn’t enough time for it when you added in walking down the property line and back. Besides, there weren’t any crayons in the trailer. There wasn’t any heat in the winter, either. Damn Communists.

So: third grade. No more young, single twenty-something teacher ladies and no more monster-crowded stained glass windows. This was what I was afraid high school would be like.

The worst was yet to come.

Mrs. Gwynn got us arranged in our seats, dutifully went through the roll and pronounced everybody’s name, and then commenced her opening lecture on “deportment.”

We all knew what deportment was. Not only were vocabulary standards higher in those days, but lack of proper deportment could get you spanked.

“It is important for you children to know that our school has been integrated,” Mrs Gwynn said. “We have two young colored students with us this year.” We all looked around, trying to find them. “Since one is in the second grade and the other is in the fourth grade, you probably won’t see either of them until recess later this morning.”

I had heard of colored people before. They used to be called negroes, when they were not nigras or niggers. But I don’t have any memory of ever seeing a Black person before that day. I’m sure that reads strangely, but in looking back I find that the population of Augusta County in 1963 was only 5% Black.

In typical Virginia fashion for the early 1960s, some bureaucrat had dropped Dale and Howard Braxton into a sea of nearly 700 white cracker students, and then checked the block that said, “Integrated.” By the time I hit sixth grade, Dale, the older of the two, had been held back a year. We would go on to become familiar acquaintances if not quite close friends, and graduate in the same high school class. Once I had the opportunity and interest to ask him about that first day at Wilson Elementary.

“My mother signed us up because she said we wouldn’t have gotten any education at all in the colored school.” Dale told me. Then he shook his head as if warding off a blow, and said, “It’s pretty terrible at age nine to think there’s a good chance you’re going to die before you make it home that night.”(5)

Back to Mrs. Gwynn and deportment.

“I will not be humiliated in front of the other teachers by any displays of improper behavior. The proper way to speak of them is ‘colored '. We will have no hair-pulling, or taunting, or bullying. They are students.”

Later I would have confirmation that this was Mrs. Gwynn’s no nonsense tone, that you ignored to your distinct peril. She was almost done with her lecture, needing only to add the final line that I have remembered clearly for the rest of my life.

“And I will not having you call them ‘niggers’ to their faces.”

Fast forward more than a decade.

Home on break from college I chanced to read that Mrs. Gwynn had died of a heart attack. With the omniscience and arrogance that goes with very late adolescence, I said to my Dad, “Well, another racist bites the dust.”

He rounded on me, furious.

During the next few minutes I learned that Mrs. Gwynn had been a long-time crusader for school desegregation in Virginia. She had been called a Communist, nearly lost her job, and had once had a rock thrown through her living room window in an unsuccessful attempt to stop her political activism.

“The day they integrated Wilson Elementary,” Dad told me, “was the proudest day of her life.”

“But she called them ‘niggers,’” I protested, though much more weakly than I had intended. “She called them ‘niggers.’”

“She couldn’t change where and how she grew up,” he said. “None of us really can. She was a civil rights crusader, but she was still a prisoner of her own language.”(6)

A prisoner of her own language.

The phrase has remained in my mind for decades, along with Mrs. Gwynn’s lecture.

We’ll explore that, but it’s time for a little bit of personal honesty. Condemning Mrs. Gwynn had been one of those throwaway hypocritical pieces of self-righteousness that I suspect we all engage in from time to time. It’s always easier to confront somebody else’s supposed racism than to explore your own.

From 1975-1979 I attended St. Andrews Presbyterian College (today St. Andrews University) in Laurinburg, North Carolina. St. Andrews was an avant garde private, church-affiliated school. We had co-ed dorms, handicapped access, and avowedly Marxist professors who’d earned their chops in violent anti-war protests against the Vietnam War. In class we debated transactional analysis, the philosophy of Reinhold Niebuhr, and deconstructions of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. We drank excessively and smoked a lot of weed. I had hair down to my ass, and stumbled to class stoned as often as not.

I would like a time machine to go back to St. Andrews to find out if what I recall about race and racism there was representational, or just a characteristic of the group of neanderthals I hung out with in Mecklenburg Dorm. I’d like to think it was the latter, and I know that’s what other alumni would tell me. But I’m not so sure. We all become better people in the past the further we are removed from it.

Down the hall from my suite, Zeke, the only African-American guy there at the beginning of my Freshman year, had his girlfriend Teresa living with him. Such living arrangements weren’t unusual, but even in a liberal arts college this was still North Carolina, and his girlfriend was a stunning, pale-complected blonde.Their relationship was accepted on campus. Sort of.

One of my friends had a saying, that the acronym NAACP stood for “Niggers Ain’t Always Colored People.” Another friend remembered his roommate from the prior year as “Budgie, the White Nigger.” There was a self-satisfied sense that this was (had we known the term)  post-racial humor. We were enlightened, so it was okay. After all, we damn near worshipped Richard Pryor.

One day we were playing that crude adolescent male game of bringing up the names of various women on campus, critiquing their attractiveness, and making claims that we would or would not want to have sex with them. Somebody brought up Teresa, and I said she was hot. (She was hot.) Two of my older friends -- Sophomores and therefore more worldly -- contemplated me sadly. One said, “Son, you don’t want to go following the black snake up any tunnels. No disrespect to Teresa, but she’s gone over to the other side, and she’s not really white meat any more.”

I’m too old to lie now and say I argued the point. I took a swig of my beer and shut up.

Later, I even ended up with a Black roommate. Ronald was a tall, gangling young man from Atlanta, with one of the slowest drawls I had ever heard short of Mississippi. Ronald became part of our suite’s life; the cost was only that he tacitly acknowledged that our racial vulgarities proved we weren’t really racists. He played along, for whatever reasons of his own, and even made some “nigger” jokes, just to fit in.

I recall no more than two dozen African-Americans among a student population of roughly 600, and no other interracial relationships. Our dormitory’s Residence Manager in my Freshman and Sophomore years was Black, but I can’t remember a single Black professor or administrator. It is painfully obvious, as I write this, that I had not become much less racially isolated since the third grade.

Thinking back -- and the memories are admittedly hazy when I try to pin them down -- I cannot recall in elementary school, high school, or even college that I had a single non-white teacher or encountered a single non-white school or university administrator. Notice that I did not say, “Black.” I graduated from college in 1979 never having had a class taught by an Asian or a Hispanic, either. So this means that I never had a teacher who had been refused service because of what s/he looked like. I never had a teacher who looked at the world from a completely different perspective than I or my family did.

Simultaneously, Dale Braxton and his brother, along with the other Black students who had entered the August County Public Schools by the time I graduated in 1975, never had a teacher who looked like them or shared any of the same life experiences.

This racial cocooning -- which I do not believe my parents intended to occur, or even noticed -- ended dramatically during Basic Training in the US Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1980. That’s another story for a later day.

As I think back, Mrs. Gwynn and her opening day lecture on racial deportment in the third grade stands out as one of the few times I had a teacher consciously (and, in her own way, honestly) attempt to deal with the issue of race. But for the better part of a decade I had missed the point of that interaction.

Mrs. Gwynn’s use of the word nigger when she was actually trying to get white students to treat their African-American peers appropriately is a primary example of how we can become unconsciously trapped within our own linguistic frame of reference and our own unconsciously racist ideas, to such an extent that it compromises what we are attempting to accomplish in the classroom, or in life.

There’s another way in which students in particular are made prisoners of language in educational settings: by the direct manipulation of words and terms by teachers, textbooks, and other instructional media.

In what has gone before in this chapter, I’ve actually (intentionally) done that to you.

Think of this as a teachable moment.

Stop and consider the impression of Wilson Elementary School you’ve built up as a result of reading this far. I gave you a rural elementary school in the age of mid-Cold War/late Jim Crow, in which there was no “social promotion,” no kindergarten, Bible classes in public schools, a distorted view of school integration, students who didn’t know not to drink out of urinals, and corporal punishment.

Everything I’ve told you was true.

So think about the quality of education you’d have expected me to be receiving. Be honest.

The reality was quite different than you might expect.

In first grade, Miss Miller had us each design and produce our own books every six weeks. At the time, my parents had just bought the family a set of the World Book Encyclopedia (think of it as very early hypertext) and I’d become fascinated with the diagrams of the development of the human fetus in the womb. For my final book project I replicated those diagrams with notes as the central text of How I Got Where I Am. That was 1962.

In 1963, my second-grade teacher, Miss Strickland, created the Junior Writers’ Club, and we created poems or short stories every week to read aloud to our classmates, who then voted on their favorites (and had to explain why they did or did not like a selection). I had just learned the word “loch” from a television show, and my magnum opus for the year was a 2,000 word murder mystery titled How the Loch saved my Life. 

The dreaded Mrs. Gwynn had the entire class produce a biweekly newspaper. You might not realize how far ahead of its time this project was: no word processing, no clip art. The newspaper and illustrations had to be laboriously typed or drawn on mimeograph masters, and then individually hand-colored (all 200 copies) for distribution.

During the fourth grade, Mrs. Hiner (at whose home I first saw the color version of Lassie) decided that the math instruction adopted by the August County Public Schools was too slow, and started pushing us all along with materials she spent hours at home creating. As a result, over half of her class was ready to take algebra in high school in the eighth grade, which was a full year ahead of the normal practice.

I could go on, but the point is pretty clear: in the context of the times, Wilson Elementary (and then Wilson Memorial High School) provided a great education. (And I will return to that theme in greater detail.)

So why didn’t I say that up front? Why did I focus on almost lampooning the school with my choice of illustrative events and use of language?

The answer is that I wasn’t writing history: I was crafting a persuasive essay to make a particular point, using an historical background. In so doing (because, I suspect, I’m a historian) I attempted to insure that the historical facts and images I picked were accurate, but I used humor and a lot of other narrative tricks to divert you from the fact that I wasn’t trying to build up an objectively accurate picture of that school at that time.

Such a practice -- I’d argue -- is acceptable in the context of writing that kind of essay, which really focused on my teacher’s use of language and my interpretations of what that language meant.

Acceptable … with two caveats:

First, you can’t pretend it’s really history. No historian would ever argue today that what s/he produces is somehow completely objective -- we all engage in at least unconscious selection bias. Editorial selection is absolutely necessary to assemble a narrative that’s not so ponderous that no one will ever read it. Yet historians balance this against the necessity of doing our best to construct an accurate picture of the past we’re discussing. That means taking great pains not to cherry-pick details that, while factually accurate, are used in a misleading fashion. It also means dealing honestly with information that might contradict our conclusions. To put it another way, you shouldn’t just outright lie, which ought to go without saying. Sadly, it doesn’t.

The second caveat is that the historical writer needs to be crystal clear about the interpretation of the past that s/he is pursuing, and consistently transparent about the choices that interpretation imposes on the narrative or the analysis. This is a trickier proposition than it might first seem, because an openness about interpretation can be used by teachers and readers in many different ways -- not all of them good.

Consider two intentionally opposing interpretations:

In 2004 Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen published A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror to be a counterpoint to what the authors considered the “leftist bias” of most available college-level history textbooks. More explicitly (as you can tell by the parallelism of the titles), they were setting themselves in direct opposition to Howard Zinn’s perennial best-seller, A People’s History of the United States, which had first appeared in 1980.

Schweikart and Allen described their interpretive lens with complete candor:

Anything that has to do with patriotism has long been controversial in academic circles. The idea that the teaching of American history might actually foster patriotism is to some deeply problematic. The rejected assumption, which is the foundation of A Patriot's History, is that there are principles and purposes reflected in American history that make this imperfect country worthy of our affection, and that honest history should explain those principles and illustrate those purposes as the centerpiece of our nation's story.

That final clause in the last sentence is worth repeating: “honest history should explain those principles and illustrate those purposes as the centerpiece of our nation’s story” [emphasis added]. Aside from the dubious assumption that the only honest history is patriotic history, this is a pretty forthright announcement of the authors’ intent.

Zinn was equally candid:

In that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. 

(A note: these excerpts do not do justice to either book. Each lays out its premise and the intellectual/ideological justification of its perspective in much greater detail. Read for yourself.)

Most history textbooks fall somewhere on the spectrum between The Patriot’s History and A People’s History … sort of … . The careful reader can almost always glean some shreds of authorial political leanings, except when the narratives are produced by such large teams of pedantic scholars that all individual voice is leached right out of the writing. In that case it really doesn’t matter, because nobody (as we will see) -- not teachers or students -- is actually reading them. 

If a tree falls in the forest to be ground up into a textbook that no one reads, does it make a sound?

In other cases, however, the issue of interpretation is not so much political as the infighting of historians themselves over the accuracy of some particular perspective. Followers of Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History will stress westward expansion as the most important lens through which to view the nation’s story. Adherents of Charles and Mary Beard’s economic determinism that first surfaced in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution will stress the interest of the wealthier elites. Was the Civil War an irrepressible conflict, the product of a blundering generation, or the consequence of modernization? And so on.

But back to The Patriot’s History and A People’s History.

There is a larger problem here. Neither Schweikart and Allen nor Zinn are really laying out their interpretive slants as statements of intellectual integrity, but as selling points. Therein lies the rub. Progressives can read Zinn, and never find their outrage challenged; conservatives can read Schweikart and Allen to reinforce their pre-existing beliefs. In a sense, anybody who selects either book as the main text for a history course (and who does not use it as a foil against which to bounce contrasting views) is engaging in propaganda, not history. The affected honesty of the titles and introductions, therefore, is disingenuous: the authors are not warning readers, they are seducing them into an echo chamber intended to reinforce rather than challenge pre-existing beliefs.

Few school districts or colleges (at least not public institutions) would adopt either of these books as a main text in a US History course, if only because their respective ideological slants are so pronounced that such use would prompt immediate pushback. Still, that same battle gets fought out every semester. To use John Garraty’s American Nation (carried on after his death by Mark Carnes) is to make a right-leaning choice; to adopt Eric Foner’s Give Me Liberty! Is to angle left; and to settle on George Brown Tindall’s America (continued posthumously by David Shi) is to remain carefully if almost impenetrably somewhere in the middle. 

Unfortunately, in the K-12 arena, neither the students nor most of the teachers realize this.

Although, since one of my major premises is that they aren’t reading the books, anyway, I suppose one could argue that it doesn’t matter.

We are, at this point, a long way from Mrs. Gwynn’s third-grade class and the injunction not to “call them niggers to their faces.” Let’s see if we can circle back.

There are two distinct ways to be imprisoned by language in terms of history or education. The first -- as evidenced by Mrs. Gwynn being trapped by her own vocabulary so subtly that it undermined her intent without her having noticed it -- is internal, reflexive, and usually unintentional. Perhaps even unconscious would be a better description. This is literally a rhetorical prison that we build for ourselves, and its primary consequence is that it often renders us far less effective as teachers, reformers, and human beings than we could be. It is particularly difficult to teach critical thinking and a healthy skepticism about received wisdom when we’re not both conscious of, and in control of, our own language.

As teachers, we often construct the second set of linguistic walls around our students by the choices we make every day regarding the texts they read, the videos they watch, and the words they are allowed to use in conversation. In doing so, over a period of years, in intellectual terms we necessarily either fence them in or set them free. Believing that we are inculcating students with critical thinking skills, the language we employ on a regular basis quite often restricts their ability to employ those skills. 

On the other hand, sometimes carefully selected language can be quite subversive while seeming to impose limits. This is a tricky landscape to navigate, because the subtle reinforcement of limits while you think you’re being subversive is a far too common phenomenon.

Take the case of Mrs. Spotswood Hunnicut Jones and her contribution as co-author to Virginia: History, Government, and Geography, a seventh-grade history text published in 1957, but which remained in use in some Virginia public schools into the 1980s. I encountered it in 1968-69.

Virginia: History, Government, and Geography was one of three textbooks (fourth grade, seventh grade, and twelfth grade) composed at the behest of the state’s General Assembly during the early 1950s, primarily to preserve and defend the “Lost Cause” interpretation of the Old Dominion’s history in the uncertain times of the Civil Rights movement. All three books were cut from the same cloth: the pro-Confederate, happy Negro slave school of Virginia history.(7)

I never encountered the last book of the series (Republican Governor Linwood Holton had managed to halt its use in most school districts by the time I became a Junior in 1973), but the other two -- in fourth and seventh grade -- were my introduction to Virginia history, and, ironically, I ended up with personal connections to at least one co-author of each text as an adult.

Virginia’s History and Geography, by Raymond Dingledine Jr., Lena Barksdale, and Marion P. Nesbitt is now justly infamous for segments like this one on the loyalty of enslaved Black Southerners to their masters during the Civil War:

Some of the Negro servants left the plantations because they heard that President Lincoln was going to set them free. ... But most of the Negroes stayed on the plantations and went on with their work. Some of them risked their lives to protect the white people they loved.

Curiously, in that year after the integration of Wilson Elementary, that’s not what sticks out in my memory about the book. What my fourth-grade self recalls are the exceptionally lurid illustrations, especially the one about the Indian Uprising of 1622, which graphically depicted a Powhatan warrior sinking his hatchet into the forehead of a colonist with blood spurting everywhere as his helpless (and, one must assume, about to be fornicated) wife cowered in the cabin doorway behind him with the children. The girls in the class might not have appreciated it, but we boys had been watching Fess Parker as Davy Crockett on The Wonderful World of Disney, and we recognized quality mayhem when we saw it.

That was 1965; nearly twenty years later, after having completed four years on active duty in the US Army, I entered the Master’s program in History at James Madison University. The new and dynamic chairman of the department, Dr. Michael Galgano, became one of my more important influences as a budding young historian, and he also introduced me to his predecessor (then still teaching a few courses as a Professor Emeritus), Dr. Raymond Dingledine Jr. It would be another decade, and -- sadly -- Dr. Dingeldine would have passed away before I realized that he had been the co-author of that fourth-grade history.

When I did make the connection, it was disconcerting. By that time I had gone back and reread the book with the eyes of a later generation, and discovered all of its faults (and also, sadly, that the pictures were a good deal cruder and less evocative than I remembered them). It was difficult to square what I read about happy slaves, gallant Rebels, and demented Carpetbaggers with the gentle, genial scholar I met in Harrisonburg. Dr. Dingledine’s Virginia history course at JMU was not only legendary by that time, it was a decidedly liberal if still traditionally approached account of my home state’s past. He did not overly dramatize events, but he did not dodge them, either; slavery was evil, racism was poisonous, and long after Appomattox Afro-Virginians had suffered terribly from discrimination and even terror.

It was also after Dr. Dingledine’s death that I discovered that he had led an effort beginning in 1966 (the same year I was reading his book, some thirty-five miles to the south) to revise Virginia’s History and Geography along more, ah, let’s just say sane and responsible lines. He had never been happy with the original product, which had not only been the result of a committee of writers, but which had been edited and essentially rewritten at the direct behest of several legislators in the state’s “Byrd Machine.” He went back to try to make things right.

Unfortunately, this proposed revision, which was still quite conservative in tone yet no longer overtly racist, never enjoyed broad circulation. Virginia was a “pay as you go” state, which meant low taxes, abysmal infrastructure, and textbooks that lasted for decades if not generations before being replaced. By the time Governor Holton pushed the books out of Virginia schools in the early 1970s, most of the copies still in use were -- amazingly enough -- still from the earliest printings between 1957-1961.

One of the minor disappointments of my life is that I never had the opportunity to ask Dr. Dingledine in 1984-1986 about that book and that experience. I am quite sure he would have smiled, then answered my questions honestly. As a man, I don’t think he ever allowed himself to act otherwise (and this was another of the numerous occasions in my life when I learned just how multi-dimensional people inevitably are). But I wonder to this day how he would have explained his participation in the project and the later evolution of his thought; I would like to have known what he thought about the concept of being a prisoner of language.

In 1987, however, I did get to have that conversation with Mrs. Spottswood Hunnicutt Jones, co-author of my seventh grade Virginia history textbook. Her book has withstood the test of time equally poorly, thanks to prose like this:

Slavery made it possible for the Negroes to come to America and to make contacts with civilized life and to play an important part in the development of Virginia. …

It was not difficult for the Negroes to adjust themselves to Virginia life. They had worked hard in Africa, and so the work on the Virginia plantations did not hurt them. In Africa they had known a form of slavery more stern than that of the Virginia plantations …

In his new home, the Negro was far away from the spears and war clubs of enemy tribes. He had some of the comforts of civilized life. He had better food, a better house, and better medical care than he did in Africa. And he was comforted by a religion of love and mercy.

Mrs. Jones had attended both Harvard University and the College of William and Mary. She was a renowned and beloved educator in Virginia for several decades, and the list of education and/or charitable organizations that she either led or served as an officer is very long. By the time I met her, she was in her sixties, just retired, and judging a bibliophile contest in the basement that housed Special Collections at the Swem Library on the William and Mary campus.

I was an impoverished History doctoral student to whom the $125 first prize meant eating well (relatively speaking) for at least 2-3 weeks, so I trotted out the best pieces in my collection, including a much bedraggled copy of my seventh-grade Virginia history textbook. It was probably that book which helped me win the prize, as Mrs. Jones (now a dignified blue-haired Southern lady of grand, slow-moving charm) stopped to pick it up and page through it for a few moments. It was only then that I realized who she was.

(An aside: if you don’t know what “a dignified blue-haired Southern lady” was, except for some comments on the primitive nature of hair dye in even the recent past, I’m not going to be able to help you. Unless they grew up near Richmond or Charleston, even your grandparents are probably not going to be able to make it clear.)

At the luncheon, I nerved myself to approach Mrs. Jones, and requested permission to ask her about that textbook (and, by implication, that language and its controversies).

“Of course you may,” she said in a patient tone, drawn out by a drawl almost as powerful as gravity near the event horizon of a black hole that is capable of slowing light to a stop. “But I do have to caution you that you may not understand my answer. You young people” -- I bridled there, as I was thirty-one at the time, not used to being dismissed on account of my age -- ”haven’t really developed an appreciation for history, after all.”

She then explained to me with great patience and absolutely no apparent defensiveness that she remained proud of the passages that had portrayed slavery in America as an unlovely but necessary part of the Negro’s transition from savagery to civilization. “I had to fight to get this interpretation into the book; after all, this was the first public-school textbook in the entire South to even imply that the Negro had the capacity for civilization under any circumstances.”

I was dumbstruck -- and mumbled something incoherent as the conversation ended. Years later I keep coming back to this exchange, comparing it to my third-grade experience with Ms. Gwynn, and wondering if I was dealing with someone else imprisoned by language but consciously pushing against the bars of that prison, or just someone who had repeated a bland rationalization for so long that she could no longer even (if ever) feel the dissonance, someone who had become a trusty, if not a jailer in the prison of language.

I do know, however, that in both the fourth and seventh grades I was presented only with images of enslaved Africans as happy darkies of limited capacity for civilization, and that any unfortunately regrettable aspects of their servitude (which was only rarely referred to as slavery) were brushed past with breezy abandon. Apparently Mrs. Jones’ intended sedition regarding the Negroes and civilization had been too subtle for my teachers to notice.

By the seventh grade, I should note, Wilson Elementary had a far larger percentage of Black faces in its classrooms. We had two classes -- 7A and 7B -- relentlessly tracked in academic terms prior to reaching high school. 7A was the province of those children clearly being groomed for high school graduation, and -- for a few -- possible continuation into college. Strangely, I can recall that the idea of college didn’t penetrate my brain until sometime in the ninth grade, even though my Dad, as a teacher, was obviously a college graduate. I think that’s partly because 1966-1969 most of us boys just assumed that we were fated to be drafted into the jungles of Vietnam.

(I remember vividly investing twelve cents in Dell Comics’ Tales of the Green Beret #1 in 1966, just as Barry Sadler’s Ballad of the Green Berets was winding down its relentless nationwide airplay, having remained in the premiere spot in the Top Forty for five weeks. The comic book was illustrated by Sam Glanzman, who was one of the best unheralded war artists of his industry. He would later receive at least a partial measure of deserved acclaim for a series of deeply reflective stories about his World War II experiences on the USS Stevens. There was, however, very little reflection in Tales of the Green Berets: it was a stock story of American nobility almost -- but not quite -- undermined by a traitorous Army of the Republic of South Vietnam Captain who turned out to be a North Vietnamese double agent. “That’s ridiculous,” my brother told me, from his teenage vantage point of omniscience, “we’d certainly never let the Gooks who work for us to have guns. How would you tell them apart from the Cong?” Later, when President Richard Nixon began proposing Vietnamization of the war, I was confused; had we started arming Gooks to fight Gooks?)

But back to seventh grade.

7A was over 90% white, with only Dale Braxton (having by now been held back a grade as I mentioned above) and a female Black student whose name I have forgotten representing integration among twenty graduation-bound students. 7B, with whom we only shared PE class, was populated by twenty-five students, including fifteen Black kids. They were taught by the same teachers, but not -- I eventually realized -- from the same curriculum. The math in 7A and 7B differed as dramatically as did a Roy Rogers movie from what really happened in the Old West.

I have two really clear memories of that year. The first is that 7B was packed with far better athletes, mostly because the young men there were generally about two years older, four inches taller, and fifteen pounds heavier than the rest of us. Our PE teacher, Mr. Patterson, merged kids from both classes for competitiveness into what he called (without the slightest irony) integrated squads.

My other strong recollection is our Social Studies/English teacher, Mr. Livick.(8) He was in his first year as a teacher, a soft-spoken, slightly overweight, white (there were no Black teachers, keep remembering that) liberal. Habitually wearing a black suit with the white dress shirt and narrow tie to school, he was as far in appearance and demeanor as it may possibly have been to get from Mrs. Gwynn, but her soulmate a generation removed. Mr. Livick had no crowd control, primarily because he didn’t believe in the draconian physical discipline that still remained the staple in rural Southern schools, and suffered from the delusion that the inherent power of ideas could overcome our youthful barbarism even as our hormones battered at the gates of puberty.

And yet …

He gave in -- probably out of a personal interest in military history -- to the standard interpretation of the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression, fought over State’s Rights and tariffs rather than enslaved Afro-Virginians. Because we lived in the Shenandoah Valley, and therefore Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was as close to being a secular Jesus as it was possible to be (eclipsing even Saint Robert E. Lee), Mr. Livick made us all memorize, line-by-line and skirmish-by-skirmish the tactics that had led Jackson to victory in the Valley during the summer of 1862. We learned geography by understanding the strategic importance of Massanutten Mountain, and why the South River in fact flows north. He was so passionate about Jackson’s wizardry that I attribute to him in deep respect my earliest interest in military history that would lead one day to a Ph.D., a career, and many books, including at least one in which “Stonewall” Jackson figured with some prominence.

But what I remember even more clearly was the day he was proven at least temporarily right about the power of ideas to hold us spellbound.

He read us what I thought then was a short story, but later discovered to be an excerpt from Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. It was a prolonged passage in which a German Jew attempts to leave the Third Reich on a train during the late 1930s. Eventually he is arrested, and the protagonist -- American George Webber -- is left holding money -- blood money -- that the fugitive had entrusted to him. In a voice that would have done proud any professional actor narrating an audiobook today, Mr. Livick brought this story alive. Years later, as with my fourth-grade Virginia history textbook, I would set out to find this piece -- hindered for the longest time by the fact that I did not know the author’s name, nor realize that it was not a short story. Finally, I found the denouement that has remained with me for decades:

George put the money away. Then he said:

“I feel exactly as if I had blood-money in my pocket.”

“No,” she said. She leaned over, smiling, and put her hand reassuringly upon his arm. “Not blood-money — Jew-money!” she whispered. “Don’t worry about it. He had plenty more!” George’s eyes met Adamowski’s. Both were grave.

“This is a sad ending to our trip,” Adamowski said again, in a low voice, almost to himself.

The woman tried to talk them out of their depression, to talk herself into forgetfulness. She made an effort to laugh and joke.

“These Jews!” she cried. “Such things would never happen if it were not for them! They make all the trouble. Germany has had to protect herself. The Jews were taking all the money from the country. Thousands of them escaped, taking millions of marks with them. And now, when it’s too late, we wake up to it! It’s too bad that foreigners must see these things — that they’ve got to go through these painful experiences — it makes a bad impression. They don’t understand the reason. But it’s the Jews!” she whispered.

The others said nothing, and the woman went on talking, eagerly, excitedly, earnestly, persuasively. But it was as if she were trying to convince herself, as if every instinct of race and loyalty were now being used in an effort to excuse or justify something that had filled her with sorrow and deep shame. For even as she talked and laughed, her clear blue eyes were sad and full of trouble. And at length she gave it up and stopped. There was a heavy silence. Then, gravely, quietly, the woman said:

“He must have wanted very badly to escape.”

I lacked the intellectual maturity to comprehend all the subtexts in Mr. Livick’s reading, and yet I think I must have been dimly aware of them, because I never forgot the passage, which haunted me for years until I tracked it down. I wonder if anyone else in that long-gone class remembered it past that afternoon (I know today only one person who would have been present then, and she doesn’t recall it), and I also wonder if he attempted the reading in 7B. I tend to doubt it.

Mr. Livick also read to us from William Faulkner’s The Reivers and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which had precisely the opposite of the effect he obviously intended. Instead of being grossed out and appalled by the images of workers being ground up into the bologna, frankfurters, spam, and potted meat, we -- at least the boys -- were fascinated by the prospect of having become unknowing cannibals, and looked for several weeks to see if we could find discernable human parts in the hot dogs served in the lunchroom.

What is the possible connection between Mrs. Gwynn’s don’t call them niggers to their faces and Mr. Livick’s blood money?

The first thing that springs to mind is that students remember teachers more than content. Or that they recall content because of the teachers, not the curriculum. This is critical to anyone stepping into a classroom: nothing that you present is inherently interesting to your students. It becomes interesting and important only when it is interesting and important to you, and when the fact that the material matters to you, the teacher, also matters to them.

Although I have spent more than two decades working with both novice and veteran teachers, I have not yet found a magic system for getting this idea across to everyone. It’s apparently a binary concept: 1=”you get it” and 0=”you don’t get it.” There have probably been Eureka moments for disconnected teachers throughout the years, but I’ve never witnessed one.

Let me show you exactly how that works, at the risk of a little repetition. At over fifty years removed I can still focus clearly on certain things that teachers so thoroughly imprinted on my brain that I still recall them, the teacher who presented the lesson, and how they affected my intellectual development. Here’s what they were:

• First grade: Miss Miller liked to have us make our own story books. Five to ten pages with pictures and a few words on each page. She didn’t tell us what subjects to pick, and always encouraged us to find our own voices. “Every one of you is a writer, an author,” she said. “You have just as much to say as all the people who wrote the books in our library.”

• Second grade: Miss Strickland read to us every afternoon. While I am certain she read other books, what I remember most is the Brer Rabbit stories by Joel Chandler Harris. She did lovely, evocative readings in a drawl as thick as Mississippi molasses (we had too much Virginia drawl for anything else to make an impression). It wasn’t until years later that I understood the direct connection between these stories and the issue of memory in the Old South, along with literary analysis of exactly what Harris had been doing. That’s when I also remembered that Miss Strickland always asked us questions about the stories. “What do you think it means that Brer Bear is so much bigger and stronger than Brer Rabbit?” “Suppose these characters were people -- who would they be?” I remember these questions because it was Second Grade in rural Virginia in the early 1960s (call it “late Jim Crow”), and I had the good fortune to have a teacher who taught me, implicitly, that stories often meant more than you thought they did.

• Third grade: Mrs. Gwynn made us into reporters. I’ve mentioned above that we produced a class newspaper every month. “Always answer five questions,” she drilled into us: “Who? What? When? Where? Why?” If you couldn’t point to where you’d answered them in your article, it didn’t go into the paper until you could. She’d have made a great flight director for Apollo 13 if Gene Krantz had not been available: Failure was never an option, and deportment was not negotiable.

• Fourth grade: Mrs. Hiner made us write plays about historical events, then act them out and direct them. She assigned critics to sit in the back with their books open to look for mistakes. If you played a major historical character, you had to pass an audition by answering five questions about that person correctly, or you didn’t get the role.

• Fifth grade: If I feared Mrs. Gwynn, I loathed Mrs. Harris. Fifth grade was the first time we received letter grades for our work. My Dad was a teacher, and my Mom did freelance writing. They had expectations. I had coasted all the way through the first four years with accolades, praises, and awards. Mrs. Harris minced no words: “That’s sloppy, do it over.” “That might be good enough to get Larry an ‘A,’ but you’re not Larry.” She gave me a “C” for the first six-weeks’ marking period, and my Mom went ballistic. She wrote a long note on the back of the report card demanding an explanation and a teacher conference. Mrs. Harris stuck to her guns: “You appear to be one of those parents who believes your son should get ‘A’s’ simply because he’s smart, and not because he does good work.” Then she pulled me aside two days later, and said quietly, “Next time you want to change my mind, fight your own battles. How do you think we won the Revolutionary War? By asking our mommies?”

• Sixth Grade: Miss Amiss was young (probably twenty-two, but cursed to look barely eighteen). She sometimes wore shiny black fashion boots that came nearly up to her knees, which were revealed by what we naively thought were mini-skirts. (In the rest of America it was 1968, and the “Summer of Love” was under way; in Virginia we still thought young women’s knees were both sexy and risque.) In the throes of early pubescence we (boys) were smitten, and showed it by being uncooperative. She shouted at us a lot, because she didn’t have classroom management down yet (it was her first year). But here’s what she taught me: texts belong to the readers every bit as much as the writer. “What do you think it meant to the writer?” she’d demand, followed by “What does it mean to you? Which one is more important in your life? His opinion or yours?” It took me years to understand that without Miss Amiss I would never have been prepared to comprehend concepts like postmodernism. Virginia, 1968, who’d have guessed?

• Seventh grade: I’ve already mentioned Mr. Livick’s impassioned readings, and his penchant for details of the Shenandoah Valley campaign down to regimental positions on the Kernstown Battlefield. Before he let us get the history, he insisted on spending six weeks mastering geography (“George Ellison’s oldest girl rode a pig home yesterday”). “History is when something happens. Geography is where it happens. You have to know both, or you don’t really know anything,” he insisted. On every test, you had to prove it.

Are you getting the pattern here? More than fifty years later I can remember the fundamental intellectual foundations those teachers gave me. I have no doubt (because every time you call up a memory, you change it, at least a little) that I have modified their original words in the retelling. (Except for Mrs. Harris. She still scares me, and I’m pretty sure she went on to her reward -- or punishment, as the case may have been -- many years ago. I remember her words exactly, like I remember the little flying wads of spittle hitting my cheek.) But I carried the concepts with me, and I never forgot the teachers who handed me those tools, and I remember them even today whenever I stand up in front of a class.

I personally received an excellent education at Wilson Elementary School in the 1960s, even if it was necessarily imperfect. I harbor no illusions that a lot of kids did not have the same experience. By fifth grade, we were already tracked for high school, and kids in the vocational track got a different education. So this is a critical point from a social, instructional, and even historical standpoint: we are all aware that students in the same school will experience their education differently, but sometimes lack the consciousness that students in the same classroom, or even the same small group will also follow that pattern. This is not necessarily an inherently good thing or bad thing (in fact, there are many positive strategies that turn this reality into a powerful teaching tool). Unfortunately, our current reliance on the homogeneity of standardized test results to determine teacher effectiveness and student achievement not only depersonalizes education, but also smooths out our individual students into rounding errors as if by the application of a belt sander.

This was also the time when being labeled “Special Education” meant that you didn’t even have a classroom, you had a teacher, and nobody really noticed what he did with his students as long as they showed up to stand behind the cafeteria serving line counter at lunchtime and sell ice cream.(9)

It was also not a great time to learn math -- at least until fourth grade. Created right after America’s wake-up call from the Soviet launch of Sputnik, and in the midst of the Civil Rights movement and early school desegregation, the “New Math'' changed the emphasis in our schools from rote learning of basic arithmatic to actually understanding how math worked. I had workbooks in the First Grade on nothing but sets. New Math actually was a great leap forward, and would eventually become the standard in teaching both computation and theory, BUT …

… 1963 (my first grade year) was a really bad time to encounter it.

Our teachers hadn’t been trained to teach that way. The textbooks and workbooks were in their first, almost experimental printings. Most education administrators were so tied up in the politics of how to do desegregation correctly (or how not to do it at all), that they simply rubber-stamped it without really examining the instructional materials. In Virginia, a pay as you go state, this meant that even if the new books were bad (and they were), they’d be stuck with them for at least a decade. Far better New Math materials were available by 1965-1966, but in Augusta County we never saw them.

Things got better in fourth Grade, because Mrs. Hiner just dumped all the existing workbooks and rewrote them herself. She wasn’t rebelling against New Math, just against bad New Math materials. Then she challenged the teachers in the grades above her to do the same, and several of them did. Results varied, but overall quality improved dramatically. She got away with this for two reasons: the first is that her husband was principal of Wilson Memorial High School (into which our school fed all its students) and he agreed with her. The second is that in the 1960s the textbook was the curriculum. This has its drawbacks (many of them serious, to be sure), but it also meant there was no district curriculum committee with parent representatives and people from the State Department of Education all taking two years to hash it out. There had actually been a Virginia Department of Education since 1918, but I doubt anybody in the Augusta County Schools from the Superintendent on down paid much attention to it, except for funding issues.

So Math got better from the Fourth Grade on because one teacher could and did take ownership of the problem.

Before I wrap up this ramble, there’s another bit of unfinished business: the Pattersons, Glen and Pat. I think their first year at Wilson Elementary was my Fifth Grade year, and I’m reasonably sure that they were still relatively new teachers, though they both exuded a confidence that Mr. Livick and Miss Amiss would have found incredibly useful. Mr. Patterson taught Physical Education and Health, Grades 5-7, and Mrs. Patterson taught Science in the same grades. Both were no-nonsense, high-energy teachers, and (back then at least) Mr. Patterson was not an advocate of sparing the rod. You could get your butt smacked but good if you didn’t pay attention.(10)

That’s not why I remember the Pattersons.

There are two reasons (actually, there are a bunch of them, but two that are germane here). The first is that in my fifth grade year they made the decision (again, teachers who could and did own a problem) to start teaching sex education. I can still remember that Mr. Patterson told the boys (she had all the girls) as he pulled the door shade down over the narrow window, that he could get fired for this. I remember him drawing a diagram of a penis and testicles on the chalkboard as he explained how this all worked. (I also remember him -- because he wasn’t a fool -- thinking twice and erasing the head of the penis after two minutes, just in case Principal McChesney or anyone else stopped by.)

This was where I first learned about human reproductive biology, because nobody’s parents ever talked about it -- and, trust me, I had about the most liberal parents in the county. But remember what I told you earlier -- we had students of both genders as old as sixteen in that elementary school, and the Pattersons were nothing if not realists. They knew that nobody else was going to talk to those kids before high school (if then!), so they took a terrible career risk to do what they considered ethical.

They took other risks, too.

Our Seventh Grade class trip went to Jamestown, where I remember buying a black tri-cornered hat and a gigantic red plastic comb at the gift store. I am sure we took a tour of the colonial settlement, but apparently I wasn’t paying attention. What I do remember clearly (if incompletely) is that on the bus ride home I somehow ended up in the next seat to the Pattersons, and talking to them together for the only time ever. When I say my memory is incomplete, what I mean is that I have absolutely no idea how we ended up on the topic of religion, which was -- if anything -- a more dangerous topic for a teacher in the South in those days than the penis. At some point, however, I must have flat out asked them about their religious beliefs, which is difficult to believe even today, though nothing else can account for them answering that question.

The two of them shared a look that said plainly, Should we tell him? Is there any good reason to tell him? I’ve never been sure why they did (this interchange included no words in the audible sense), but I think it may have had to do with their philosophy as educators and human beings that every child deserves your best attempt at an honest answer to any legitimate question.

“We believe in life,” Mr. Patterson said. “That everything we see here and experience here is connected to that great pool of all life, and that after we’ve finished here, we go back into it.” If my memory is not playing tricks on me, they were holding hands as he spoke, and she was nodding, looking very serious. Mrs. Patterson had a smile that could light up an auditorium if the power ever went out during an assembly, but, trust me, her students knew that her serious gaze could make you contemplate the mortal sins of your youth -- even if you were only fourteen.

I almost certainly have the exact words wrong, but I am confident I have the gist of it correct, because that instant has stayed with me for decades. My understanding of what they meant, and the risks they took in telling me have changed over the years, and it is useful to unpack that here.

These were not remotely Christian ideas, at least as Southern society understood them during late Jim Crow: they were not Protestant, Baptist, Methodist, or (even) Catholic (at least so I suspected), and that pretty much exhausted my sketchy knowledge of the religion. They didn’t seem to evoke either the false-god Buddha or those Christ-killing Jews. (I had never actually heard of Muslims beyond a few references in adventure fiction that I didn’t have the context to understand.)

I also did not even vaguely understand the possibility of LGBTQ+ people, which is relevant only in that I later realized that to admit you were not down-the-middle-of-the-Bible Christians with a Jesus calendar on your refrigerator in Virginia in 1968 was more dangerous than coming out of a closet in the 1990s. Or, at least, so I would be told throughout my entire liberal arts education through the Ph.D. in History (more about that particular piece of mis-education later).

But it struck me at some point in the 1980s, that the Pattersons undoubtedly knew who my Dad was (the Art teacher at Wilson Memorial High School), and probably had met him by then. My parents, as I’ve noted, did not go in for organized religion, though they were careful (as Robert Heinlein once advised), “Whenever the locals rub blue mud in their navels, I rub blue mud in mine just as solemnly.” Dad would lead the Scout Troop in the Pledge and the Scout Laws, including “reverent,” with a completely straight face. But they wouldn’t ever outright lie about their beliefs no matter who asked, or what the potential fall-out (which means, I now think, that a lot of people intentionally, never asked). 

I can remember that, in 1973, when I appeared before my final Eagle Scout Board of Review, there was a requirement on the form to have the recommendation of your minister as to your good character and religious standing. This was a puzzler I had not anticipated. How did you get a minister to vouch for you if everybody in the whole small town of Fishersville knew you didn’t go to church? I asked my Dad (who would normally have chaired the Board of Review, but not when his own son appeared) what to do. He just shook his head and said, “That’s one you are going to have to figure out how to answer to both get past them and not violate the Scout Oath in the process.”(11)

Thus, about fifteen years later, I puzzled out that maybe the Pattersons thought it was safe to be honest with me because they knew I wasn’t about to run home howling about the closet pagan-atheists in our midst, and that even if I did, I would get set straight. Fast forward another couple of decades and I realized, Hey, that’s not right. As L. P. Hartley observed, “The past is another country; they do things differently there.”

What did I figure out? That living in a time is a hell of a lot different than looking back on it.

My perspective of life in Virginia, of life at Wilson Elementary, and of the Pattersons, was that of a kid between the ages of about seven to fourteen years old, whose attention to, and interpretations of, what he saw and heard were pretty much right down the middle of the road. The camera inside my head was recording, but it was many years before I took the time to interrogate the (not so) instant replay..

For example, you should already have noted that I did not possess a clue about Mrs. Gwynn’s life as a civil rights/integration agitator outside the classroom (partly because, in third grade, it never occurred to me that teachers had a life outside the classroom), despite gobs of evidence to the contrary. I knew that Dad had to work a second job every summer because teachers literally got paid only nine months out of the year; but that thought never generalized into wondering what other teachers did over the summer. I knew that Mrs. Varner, my sixth grade English teacher, was the wife of a local minister, but again that never generalized into the insight that -- Bible Class aside -- I had no idea what churches my other teachers attended, or even if they did attend church. Could Miss Miller, Miss Strickland, or Mrs. Gwynn -- the teachers who turned us over to Bible Class every Tuesday -- have secretly been Catholics, like Andy Brown? This led me to realize that I didn’t even know where any of my teachers lived (with two exceptions), if they had families, what they did for fun, … anything. They were … teachers. In rural Virginia during the 1960s (if my experience was close to typical), the teachers then, unlike teachers of today, simply did not bring their personal lives into the classroom. (Although that would definitely change in the 1970s, in high school; or, maybe, I was just more cognizant of it.)

Thus, in reality, I had absolutely no idea whether sharing their spiritual beliefs with me actually was risky for the Pattersons. While it would have been daring and foolhardy to stand up in front of a class to profess atheism, or Unitarian Universalism,(12) or even (apparently) Catholicism, in a private conversation of maybe a minute’s duration I doubt now they ran any great risk. There were two of them, and they could always agree that I had simply misunderstood what they were saying.

Yet that does not square with what I knew of them -- even through a child’s eyes -- that they would have denied the substance of the conversation. If you pull in my experience a few years later with the Eagle Scout Board of Review, it now occurs to me that they probably wouldn’t have had to.(13) More than likely, other people in the school community already knew. Yet if you go back now, starting as a researcher approaching Augusta County (or any other randomly selected county in the country), without having ever lived there, you would miss all that. You would always miss all that. You would miss the subtle diversity in the ordinariness of small town life in an era and a place where Jim Crow was not quite dead, and the Summer of Love had certainly not arrived.(14)

I will talk about that later; for now, back to Wilson Elementary and the lessons I learned from my very first teachers (whether they intended to teach them or not) about the potential prison that language often is, instead of the landscape for wide-ranging thought and creativity.

Because … and this is an absolutely critical BECAUSE … it took me years upon years to realize how thoroughly they had impacted me, long before high school teachers, college professors, US Army drill sergeants, or co-workers had their shot.

Intellectually, they built a large part of the foundation of my mind.

Here’s what I learned:

• What you don’t talk about with your students does not exist, and when you do talk about something, your first words are DECISIVE. Colored people did not exist in my imagination or reality until Mrs. Gwynn spoke of them. I would have encountered them on the playground a few hours later, anyway; but by the time I did so, I had already been patterned to understand many things about these peculiar young boys: They had three different classifications (colored, negro, and nigger -- but you weren’t supposed to say that last one where adults could hear you, even if it was an adult who taught it to you); there was some reasion that Mrs. Gwynn expected at least some of us not to like them, and that reason seemed to have something to do with this thing called integration. (This whole vignette, by the way, is also an object lesson in the necessity of making sure you check for understanding when you’re talking about that subject for the first time.)

• A sense of voice as voice, and text as text, is essential to reading, writing, and speaking. No kidding -- I learned this in rural Jim Crow Virginia. Go back and look at my grade by grade breakdowns above, and you will realize that if they had planned a curriculum to do so (and I know they hadn’t), the teachers I experienced in elementary school could not have generated a better foundation for understanding voice and text.(15)

• Getting the details right matters. Again: look back at my notes. All the way through Wilson Elementary, nearly every teacher I had reinforced the idea that getting the details right matters, because you have to build the big ideas from the details. They did not have Common Core, AP Placement Tests, SATs, corporately-generated curriculum guides, state standards, or teacher evaluations to tell them to do this. Nor could you convince me that they talked it out as a faculty, because -- for example -- Miss Miller and Miss Strickland had left the school before Mrs. Hiner, Mrs. Harris, or Mrs. Varner arrived. On the other hand there was a consistency of approach in my mental reconstruction that leaves me room to wonder,and also to speculate that Mr. McChesney was probably doing other things throughout the year besides admonishing students with outhouses at home not to drink from the urinals.

• Literature is an indispensable tool for investigating the world and expanding the mind. Having Miss Strickland read us Brer Rabbit stories in Jim Crow times probably doesn’t surprise anybody (although the subliminally subversive way she did it is another matter).(16) But having Mr. Livick read Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again to seventh graders in 1968, and having us hang on the edge of our seats waiting to see if the Jew would get out of Germany with the money was another matter. Miss Amiss had us read the works of Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson without the names attached, and then decide which poems had been written by a man, which by a woman, and how we thought we could tell the difference. A majority of the class argued vehemently with her that no guy would ever have written a poem that started, “The fog comes in on little cat’s feet.” (Sorry, Carl Sandburg.) Other authors I was introduced to in elementary school (and not because they were in some reader) included Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemmingway, Homer, Mark Twain, Jack London, William Faulkner, and even James Branch Cabell.(17) It was a Western canon, of course, and heavily male dominated, but for all that it was (and is) incredibly impressive.(18)

• Reading is the ONLY fundamental skill you MUST teach in elementary school. I am going to catch crap for revealing this, in world that insists our students must be bombarded with English/Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and Math, and tortured by high-stakes testing to prove from the get-go that they have not fallen behind in becoming college and career ready, but it is true. It remains true today, no matter how technology has changed, no matter how obsessed we have become with integrated curriculum. Our math education was abominable from first through third grades, and only the top kids really benefited from Mrs. Hiner’s small revolution; we figured it out in high school. Our science courses were actually taught entirely on TV through fourth grade(19), partly because our science materials were -- even by the standards of the time -- laughable.(20) Social Studies existed as Virginia history and geography, about which I have already said enough. That we succeeded -- and large numbers of us did (nearly 25% of my 1975 graduating class at Wilson Memorial High School went to college,(21) an unprecedented percentage) -- was because all of our teachers were united on exactly one non-negotiable point: EVERYONE would learn to read.

Dale Braxton’s mother had been absolutely, 100% right: if she wanted her sons to get a first-rate education by the standards of the time, they needed to be in Wilson Elementary, not Cedar Grove Elementary School for Colored Students. Without her resolution, Dale would never have ended up the 1975 State Champion for Boys’ Prose Reading and Runner-up in the State Spelling Bee.(22) On the other hand, that education came to Dale -- and me -- with enormous gaps and considerable costs -- more on that, eventually.

There’s another point to be made here: during the seven years I spent at Wilson Elementary, at least six of the most talented, influential teachers I’ve mentioned repeatedly (Miss Miller, Miss Strickland, Miss Amiss, Mr. Livick, Mrs. Patterson, and Mr. Patterson) were either first-year teachers or still very new in the profession. As a professor and researcher, I am aware that many factors are involved here, and that the prevalence of new teachers on that faculty may not relate, either by correlation or causation, to the subjective perceived quality of one student’s education, remembered over fifty years later. As that human being, however -- and as someone who has mentored young teachers for years -- I believe it completely. From the first day of their professional careers, enthusiastic, well-trained new teachers can change their students’ lives.

They certainly changed mine.

NOTES:

(1) Ironically, it was Walt Disney (courtesy of our teachers), who inadvertently taught us to be scared of atomic bombs, though probably not in the way he, or they, intended. In 1965, Mrs. Hiner showed us the 1957 episode of the Wonderful World of Disney entitled,”Our Friend the Atom.” The film was actually a really good science lesson for kids about the state of the art of atomic physics back from when I was still contemplating toilet training. As the title implies, if focused heavily on the peaceful uses of nuclear power, but in making it just twelve years after Hiroshima and Nagaski, Disney could not ignore atomic bombs completely. In fact, there is not an explosion and mushroom cloud until the 36:40 mark. But then it goes off the rails. Probably intent on keeping it light, Disney had a powerful, haughty animated genie grow out of the fireball … and we were suddenly terrified. One of my best friends, Alan Balsley, said, “And they think getting under our desks is going to protect us from that?” You can watch it for yourself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PwllA-CyJU.

(2)It turns out that we did have refrigerator magnets in the 1960s -- sort of. According to “The Birth of the Fridge Magnet,” on the Dandy Badges and Magnets blog (n.d.): “In the 1970s, William Zimmerman obtained the first patent for fridge magnets. He patented the idea of using small cartoon magnets that would be both decorative and useful. But as early as the 1960s, fridge magnets were already popular in the form of plastic letters and numbers with a magnet attached to the back. These magnets were widely used as educational materials in schools as well as homes.” Accessed on August 9, 2020, at https://www.dandy.com.au/the-birth-of-the-fridge-magnet/#:~:text=In%20the%201970s%2C%20William%20Zimmerman,magnet%20attached%20to%20the%20back..

(3)Okay, okay, she didn’t really call it that.

(4) Researching this period after I wrote the original narrative, I took great pains to get the years right for each grade I attended. This led me to an interesting discovery, which was that Wilson Elementary School (and therefore, presumably, the entire Augusta County School District) was openly flouting the Supreme Court by engaging in this dodge. Engel v. Vitale (1962) had outlawed prayer in the public schools, and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) similarly nixed Bible readings there. Thus, by the time I hit Third Grade in September 1964, what the school was doing had been illegal for nearly two years. Don’t believe that court decisions always result in immediate compliance. It was unfair of Virginia’s John Birch Society to blame Chief Justice Earl Warren for this, as he had actually dissented in Engel v. Vitale. See Michael D. Waggoner, “When the Court took on Prayer and the Bible in Public Schools,” Religion & Politics Fit for Polite Company (2012); accessed August 7, 2020 at https://religionandpolitics.org/2012/06/25/when-the-court-took-on-prayer-the-bible-and-public-schools/

(5) This was more true than I knew at the time. Dale’s mother had signed him up. In Fall 1964 the population of August County (not counting the independent cities of Staunton and Waynesboro) was about 40,000, of which 10,000 were school-age children. Of those 10,000, records show that only 500 were Black. September 1964 represented the first time since Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that Black families in the Old Dominion had been allowed to sign up to attend white schools, per Kier v. School Board of Augusta County (1966): “Prior to the current 1965-66 school session, a small number of Negro students, approximately eighteen, were in attendance in formerly all-white schools pursuant to their requests for transfer or initial enrollment. In preparation for the 1965-66 session the school authorities in Augusta took their first affirmative steps to bring about a legal desegregation of the county's schools.” Such was the power of late-stage Jim Crow even in the Upper South that only eighteen Black students were so applied by their parents. So I didn’t  know it, but the Braxton brothers by themselves constituted 11% of all Black school children attending white Augusta County schools that year. See “Kier v. County School Board of Augusta County, Virginia, 249 F. Supp. 239 (W.D. Va. 1966),” Justia US Law (n.d.) accessed on August 7, 2020 at https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/249/239/1457608/

(6)By relying heavily on a rhetorical explanation for the maintenance of racist thought, I realize that it appears that I am at odds here with Ibram X. Kendi’s well-argued theory of ideas rather than language, which identifies three different categories of thought about race: segregationism (racist), assimilationism (racist), and anti-racist. I’m still working through that issue, partly because I have been employing that rhetorical analytical strategy for decades (which means, dangerously, that I’m comfortable with it), and partly because I think, provisionally, that Kendi may underrate the extent to which linguistic patterning impacts the ideas you can have without serious reflection. See particularly Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Bold Type Books, 2016).

(7)This thematic approach, in an intellectual sense, represents an outgrowth of the so-called “Dunning School” of American History, named for its originator, Professor William Dunning of Columbia University, who drew an influential cadre of young historians around him around the turn of the 20th Century. The Dunning interpretation of Reconstruction (which started the ball rolling) was an inherently racist enterprise, which then expanded to the entire Civil War and Reconstruction era. His disciples influenced if not outright controlled much of American historiography until the 1950s, when younger historians like T. Harry Williams began to push back. But it would be a mistake to believe that the Dunning School does not continue to have an impact on our students. In 1978, when I took a Civil War course at St. Andrews, the text was The Civil War and Reconstruction, originally by Dunning adherent John G. Randall and later updated after his death by Pulitzer Prize winner David Herbert Donald. Unfortunately, Donald, who is a brilliant Lincoln scholar, saw his task as updating Dunning’s research, not seriously modifying his bias. The Dunning School continues to have a definable impact on interpretations of the Civil War and Reconstruction into modern times. As late as 1991, for example, I can find an article in The Social Studies, a mid-level education journal, lauding Randall’s paragraph composition in his 1952 edition as a teaching opportunity. See Tommy Song, “William Archibald Dunning: Father of Historiographic Racism Columbia’s Legacy of Academic Jim Crow,” Columbia University and Slavery (n.d.) accessed on August 11, 2020 at https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/william-archibald-dunning-father-historiographic-racism-columbias-legacy-academic-jim-crow; John G. Randall and David H. Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, 2nd Edition, revised (D.C. Heath, 1969); Roland G. Green, Jr., “Reconstruction Historiography: A Source for Teaching Ideas,” The Social Studies (1991) accessing on August 11, 2020 at http://www.alaskool.org/resources/teaching/socialstudies/Reconstruct_historiography.htm; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion; The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001).

(8)What follows in the text is my remembrance of Gerald L. Livick in his first year of teaching. I wish I’d been lucky enough to have him once his passion and tremendous intellect were seasoned with experience. He went on to have a distinguished twenty-seven-year career in the August County Public Schools, much of which time was spent as principal of Wilson Elementary. He was a local kid, grew up in Staunton (about three miles away from Fishersville), and his obituary in 2004 notes that he was a leader in the local Democratic Party. Passing at age 57, he died much too soon. It would be something to hope for, that another student from another year might read this, remember this good, gentle man, and smile. See “Gerald Lee Livick,” Find a Grave (n.d.) accessed on August 7, 2020 at https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/41063914/gerald-lee-livick

(9)That’s how it appeared to elementary school me, a picture that I was content to accept for a long time. And while I don’t think that is an appropriate model for special needs students, details pricking around the back of my memory suggest that I was too unkind, particularly to the male special education teacher at Wilson Elementary whose name I don’t recall, if I ever knew it. I can remember glancing out a classroom window to see him taking his six or seven students on what must have been nature walks. In my mind’s eye I can see them on the floor of the library sitting in a reading circle with him. There was more going on here, I suspect, than I knew. On the other hand I also recall that, for whatever reason, during my years at Wilson Elementary there was never either a girl or a Black student in his class.

(10) Mr. Patterson went on to his own exceptionally distinguished career of multiple decades as a teacher and school administrator. I’m absolutely sure that corporal punishment was an artifact that disappeared from his repertoire long before it disappeared from the list of approved disciplinary tactics in Virginia. Nor do I advocate any semblance of a return to those days and that practice. But I promised myself to try for accuracy in my memories here, and that stands out. I usually avoided such punishments, but on at least one occasion the entire class -- with me every bit up front in mayhem -- got lined up against the wall for three swats each. I was surprised to find that the fear before was way worse than the thing itself.

(11)If it matters to you (it doesn’t really matter to the narrative), I looked the three men on the Board of Review in the eye (I had known them all since I was eleven), and said, “I don’t have a Minister’s signature. You know that we are not a church-going family, so there’s really nobody I could ask. But I think I’ve tried as hard as I could to live up to all the parts of the Oath and the Law, including reverent. I guess you’re going to have to decide what to do.” It wasn’t until that instant that I realized I couldn’t have lied successfully if I’d tried, because all of these men had known both Dad and me for so many years. “Mr. Bill” Shaver (the former ScoutMaster), looked at his son (“Mr. Billy” Shaver, Assistant ScoutMaster), and Mr. Williams (Assistant ScoutMaster), and they all shared a small, wry smile. “I guess that’s good enough for me,” Mr. Bill said, signing the form.

(12) I mention Unitarian Universalism partly because (I discovered while researching this book) that within a couple of years after our conversation on the bus, the Pattersons became lifelong members of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Waynesboro (the other independent city in Augusta County, about seven miles from Fishersville). They shared that “As young parents, we felt the need to provide our children with a caring, diverse community of people who felt a desire to find their way through teachings, philosophies, and religions of the world. We found that we needed to be around those people, too.” When I read this, I realized that they had been almost as young in the late 1960s as Mr. Livick when I first encountered him, but they were so confident (and so good at classroom management) that I always assumed they were much older. It also forms an interesting “what if” for me personally, as I believe (though I am not positive) that my parents also joined the Waynesboro fellowship for at least a few  years in the 1990s - early 2000s. I wonder if they met again; degrees of separation are narrower than they seem. See “Member Testimonials,” Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Waynesboro (n.d.) accessed on August 8, 2020 at https://uufw.org/about-us/our-congregation/member-testimonials/.

(13)It also--quite egocentrically--never crossed my mind that I wasn’t necessarily the only student special enough for them to have spoken about their beliefs. In late 1975, one of my first undergraduate professors, Dr. Ron Crossley of then-St. Andrews Presbyterian College, perceptively noted to me (causing great annoyance at the time), “Your problem is that you think you are too special, too unique. For you, much of life is going to be the process of figuring out that you’re not. Over and over again.”

(14) Our local pop radio station, WANV, proudly announced in 1969 that it had edited the Beatles’ “Ballad of John and Yoko” to make it morally acceptable for Shenandoah Valley listeners. “It sounds pretty good,” I remember the program director saying over the air. Later -- because I didn’t worry about such things at the time -- I would wonder exactly how you could censor that first line of the chorus (“Christ, you know it ain’t easy …”) and end up with anything left. Not having heard the bowdlerized version since then, and assuming that it probably doesn’t even exist any more, I still have no idea.

(15) I’d love to say that I figured this out a long time ago, but I didn’t. By the time I started taking my writing seriously enough to understand that I was pretty good at it (late high school/early college), the idea that I’d developed some special understanding of voice and text, and of the inherent difference between written and spoken language would have seemed ludicrous, even if I had been aware of the terms for voice and text in that context. What they taught me was how to learn how to write by disassembling other author’s writings, and putting it back together. Combined with a rigorous understanding of grammar and syntax (that’s high school), I had been handed the necessary tools to be a writer. I mistakenly thought -- for decades! -- that this process had begun in high school or college, and that generated a really significant professional conundrum throughout my entire teaching career. I knew how to write professional-quality prose, but because I did not know how I learned to write, I discovered I could not teach my own students how to do it. I could edit, and if a student miraculously brought those same understandings into my office (it happened three times in over thirty years), I could help them move forward. I really should have started examining my own early life much earlier.

(16)Again: another subliminal message that snuck into the crevices of my brain. In order for us to comprehend a story about a Jew fleeing Nazi Germany, think about all the things he’d have to have made us understand before and during that reading. Hogan’s Heroes was literally all most of us knew about World War II.

(17)For James Branch Cabell, thank you, Mr. Livick, wherever your soul is now. You were not crazy enough to let me get hold of your copy of Jurgen, but Figures of Earth and The Silver Stallion were quite enough; you also introduced me to Mervyn Peake and the Gormenghast trilogy. (Titus Alone changed my perception of self almost as much as Samuel Delany’s Dahlgren.) My best friend in Seventh Grade was named James Branch; looking back I strain at memory trying to find some oblique reference by you to the similarity of name. I cannot remember one, but I recall that little half smile you had; I bet I missed it because I am sure it was there. 

(18)  Truth in advertising: as with Thomas Wolfe, I have had to reconstruct some of these by later tracking down what I remembered of the stories. Nobody ever said, “These are the authors you need to know.” Instead, they said, “These are the stories you need to hear (or read) because they are so interesting.”

(19)This is actually not a cheap shot at Virginia science education in the 1960s. At some point after Sputnik, some really smart person in the Virginia Department of Education seems to have looked at Science in Action, which was one of the early first-rate general science shows produced by the California Academy of Sciences between 1948-1966. It would have been a stretch for high school students, let alone elementary kids, but it generated the spark of an idea. Unable to buy laboratory equipment for the schools (pay as you go, remember?), they bought lab equipment for a scientist (or science teacher -- my details here are sketchy) named Edward Oge, rented studio space at WTVR-TV in Richmond, and began a half-hour weekly science show for every elementary grade up to at least Fifth Grade. Oge did the experiments our teachers couldn’t do, and explained science in developmentally appropriate terms. I still remember that in one third grade lesson he told us, “When you were in first grade I told you that the Sun is a ‘ball of fire,” because that is what you could understand at the time. In the second grade we learned together that fire cannot burn without oxygen, which would make a ball of fire in space impossible. Now you are old enough to learn that the Sun is really a giant globe of very hot gas, extremely hot gas like you would find in an atomic reactor, but, oh, so much bigger.” He went on to show us a basketball and a pea, explaining that these were the relative sizes of the Sun and Earth. It was a far more imaginative, effective approach than is often employed even today.

(20)Sixth Grade was when I encountered Mrs. Patterson. Handicapped by the complete lack of any hands-on or laboratory materials, and given textbooks from the early 1950s, she nonetheless managed the miracle not so much of teaching us science, as making us look forward to learning science in high school. When I think of it, for a relatively new teacher this was an incredible -- almost unbelievable -- insight into how to make a difference. To this day I remember her spreading out the map of the Solar System, and telling us that if we wanted to know why those planets kept going around the sun without ever stopping or colliding, we were going to have to learn a lot of math and science. She made it sound important to know this, and that was critical. In one of the rare lessons where she had literally any props, I remember her teaching us about the Doppler Effect. And human evolution, definitely human evolution (those Pattersons could be downright seditious).

(21)The average percentage of high school graduates in rural America continuing to college in the 1970s was between 8-10%. See Bill Ganzel, “Education in Rural America,” Wessels Living History Farm (2007) accessed on August 11, 2020 at https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe50s/life_12.html.

(22)This was for A-level schools (Virginia has AAA, AA, and A, based on school size); modesty forbids me to mention in the main narrative that in the same year my teammates and I swept the A Debate awards at the State level, winning both Best Affirmative Affirmative Team (Gay Leach and Mitzi Roadcap) and Best Negative Team (Montine Jordan and I), while I won Best Overall Speaker. Gay, Dale, and I were all Wilson Elementary alumni. See “VHSL Record Book--Virginia High School League” (2013), accessed on August 9, 2020 at VHSL Record Book - Virginia High School League; see also “Full Text of Hornets’ Nest, the” (1975), accessed on August 9, 2020 at https://archive.org/stream/hornetsnestthe1975wils/hornetsnestthe1975wils_djvu.txt.