Fictions of Integration: American School Stories and the Promise of Utopia After Brown V

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Fictions of Integration: American School Stories and the Promise of Utopia After Brown v. Board of Education

by Naomi Lesley

B.A. in Independent Concentration, May 1999, Brown University M.M. in Violin Performance, May 2004, Peabody Institute M.A. in English, May 2009, San Diego State University

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August 31, 2014

Dissertation directed by

Gayle Wald Professor of English

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University

certifies that Naomi Lesley has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy as of April 10, 2014. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Fictions of Integration: American School Stories and the Promise of Utopia After Brown v. Board of Education

Naomi Lesley

Dissertation Research Committee:

Gayle Wald, Professor of English, Dissertation Director

Marjorie Ann Romines, Professor of English, Committee Member

James A. Miller, Professor of English and American Studies, Committee Member

iii

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank my dissertation director, Gayle Wald, for her support, guidance, and well-directed feedback during the writing process. I also want to acknowledge the members of my dissertation writing group, in particular Elizabeth Pittman and Peyton

Joyce, for their helpful critical advice in reading drafts, and Monica Kisura Wells for her research suggestions and general support. I am grateful to Cynthia Voigt, Sharon Draper, and Jacqueline Woodson for generously responding to my queries, and am especially appreciative of the encouragement and the thoughtful conversations that Mildred Pitts

Walters took the time to offer me. Finally, I wish to thank my mother, Audrey Bernstein, and my husband, Daniel Lesley, for being fantastic editors and reminding me to be paranoid about clarity and precision.

Abstract of Dissertation

Fictions of Integration: American School Stories and the Promise of Utopia After Brown v. Board of Education

The Brown v. Board of Education decision marks a crucial moment, not only in

United States civil rights history, but also in educational reform, as it presumed that national reform would follow the success of changes in the educational system.

Surprisingly, within the vast body of Brown scholarship, little attention has been paid to the narratives that are taught to contemporary schoolchildren about desegregation, which presumably would help them to develop a framework for understanding their own racially fraught classroom experiences. Conversely, within children’s literature scholarship, narratives of desegregation have not received attention as stories that are also about school. This dissertation examines the archive of children’s novels about desegregation and makes the case that they can provide insights both for scholars of desegregation and for scholars of the school story genre. I argue that the often-discussed failures to realize the Brown decision’s utopian vision can be traced to the underlying assumptions about individual success, failure, and ability that are built into the institution of the school, assumptions which come into focus when these novels are read as generic school stories. Nevertheless, I also suggest that children’s novels highlight the potential agency of children, and suggest utopian methods of education, racial integration, and citizenship, in ways that policy discourse cannot do.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... iv

Abstract of Dissertation …...... v

Introduction: Mirrors, Windows, and Unspeakable Conversations...... 1

Chapter 1: Scripting History and the Genre of Desegregation Stories………………...... 49

Chapter 2: Counternarratives and the Persistence of White Privilege...... 115

Chapter 3:Pedagogies of Desegregation: Narratives of Disability and Giftedness ...... 180

Chapter 4: Desegregating Literacy, Enriching the State ...... 244

Conclusion: Schooling and Resistance ...... 308

Works Cited...... 328

Introduction: Mirrors, Windows, and Unspeakable Conversations

Preface: On (Not) Talking About Race in the Classroom

I can remember standing in front of a classroom full of ninth grade students and consciously choosing not to ask a fraught question about race. I was a young, white, middle-class, female teacher (the demographic most often found in the front of the classroom 1), and all of the students in ninth grade English at the Cesar Chavez Charter

School for Public Policy were African-American and Latino. We were having a heated discussion about everyday racism; as I recall, we were in the middle of reading Frederick

Douglass’s Narrative and we were discussing the legacies of slavery and the persistence of institutionalized racism. Students recounted their ire and shame at being followed in stores, or at seeing people in downtown D.C. eye them and cross to the other side of the street, or at riding crowded buses to their neighborhoods while more affluent white neighborhoods had Metro service. I wondered, as I frantically took down the names of students waiting to speak, whether anyone would mention the fact that nearly all of their teachers were white, while only three white students attended the school. None did.

Moreover, a recent school-wide reading test (administered because the school was under threat of being sanctioned for under-performance under George Bush’s No Child

Left Behind law) had revealed that most of our students in grades nine through twelve were testing at reading levels of third to sixth grade. No student mentioned these scores in our discussion, either. No one expressed anger at the quality of education he or she had been given. I wondered if I ought to bring up these factors, which, to me, were salient

1 See Gloria Ladson-Billings and Lisa Delpit. 1

aspects of everyday racism. Shy of introducing awkwardness into a seemingly open and rolling discussion, I kept silent.

Later that day, grading papers after school, I brought up my dilemma with my classroom-mate, a teacher of ninth grade American history who taught the same students and who, like me, was a white middle-class woman who had previously taught in predominantly white schools. She laughed.

“How exactly would you start that up? Do you just say, ‘Hey, you guys, have you ever noticed that all of your teachers are white and none of you are?’ Do you tell them their scores say they can’t read? You should totally try that out tomorrow. Let me know how it goes.” Needless to say, I did not “try that out” the next day. The subject was dropped.

The following year, my husband was transferred to Arizona, and I left Chavez for a rural public school district that was decidedly not progressive in its philosophy.

Nostalgic for the idealistic intensity of Chavez, I returned for a visit before the winter break. A former ninth grade student of mine was passing the front desk just as I walked in, and greeted me with a hug.

“You should come back, Ms. Lesley,” he said. “We miss you. Everything is still the same here. Adrian is still driving all the teachers crazy. Angela is still calling all the teachers racist. When are you coming back?” 2

“That’s funny,” I said, “I don’t recall Angela telling any of us we were racist when I was here.”

2 I have changed students’ names to protect their identities. 2

“No, not to your faces, she didn’t,” he replied with a broad grin.

From Classroom to Dissertation

In the years since, memories of these exchanges, and others like them, have come to summarize for me some of the contradictions and elisions that characterize how issues of race are handled in the classroom with students, many of whom identify as racial minorities. On the one hand, racial conflict is an open and approved topic, increasingly prescribed as a subject in multicultural curricula and state standards; 3 my room-mate taught the histories of slavery and the colonization of the American Southwest, and students in my class read works by Douglass, James McBride, Sandra Cisneros, and

Jamaica Kincaid, among others. Discussions of this literature, as I have already described, could not avoid raising the issue of racism. On the other hand, racial conflict in the classroom as it directly affects the students and teachers—for example, in continuing racial segregation, in teacher hiring, and in school funding—is a buried subject, relegated to silent undercurrents of anxiety. This remained true even at Chavez, which is a school that explicitly encourages, even requires, teachers and students to connect curricular learning to everyday public policy concerns. My room-mate and I, talking in the after- hours privacy of the empty classroom, could only wonder whether the students noticed the same facets of classroom racism we did; in the meantime, the students, evidently, not only did notice, but likely wondered the same about us. More importantly from the students’ perspective, the power differential between teacher and student, which in our case was reinforced by a racialized power differential, meant that students did not feel

3 For histories of the multicultural turn in curriculum development, see Sara Schwebel, Diane Ravitch (specifically, The Language Police ), Charlotte Crabtree and Gary Nash, Patricia Albjerg Graham, and Marilyn Edelstein. 3

safe broaching this aspect of everyday racism in the very place that was optimistically touted as a space for combating it—the classroom.

This dissertation project is, at least in part, my attempt to participate in the conversation I was too uncomfortable to raise in the classroom years ago. It is also an attempt to imagine how that conversation might find its way back into the classroom. In this dissertation, I examine a body of novels for children that address the legacies of legalized desegregation. These novels attempt to take up (even in limited ways) the conversation I dropped, narrating stories of the struggle to achieve racial justice both within and by means of the classroom. Through my analysis of this neglected subgenre, I explore how the subject of school desegregation might be introduced as a legitimate topic for discussion in the classroom. I show how this discussion might be constrained—or, conversely, might open up new kinds of classroom power dynamics and practices— through the novels that force attention to the topic.

One central argument of this dissertation is that the school setting operates within children’s books much as it does in real life—that is, it both limits what can be said about the racial inequalities and racially inflected pedagogies that take place on its grounds, and also provides material for dissent. Critical race theorist Derrick Bell argues, “ Brown . . . purported to clarify for Americans normatively who they were or should be” (136). In other words, by intervening in the school system, Brown also attempted to shape what ideal future citizens were to be like. He suggests that this institutional approach was flawed, however, because pursuit of justice through the fundamentally limited court system served only to re-legitimize this system as the only one possible for redress.

Within children’s novels, representations of school have a similar effect. In other words,

the demands of school articulate who children should be and tie their success as citizens to their success as students; furthermore, when the school is represented as unjust, as it often is, reforms are presented alongside an insistence that it will eventually be the primary engine of democracy, reinforcing the desirability of the institution and the utopian nature of the nation-state from which it derives its authority.

Part of the reason why stories about the legacies of Brown tend to soften or edit out the school system’s failure to correct systemic racism is that they are shaped by the narrative conventions governing school stories and historical fiction for children, the genres most often used to tell stories of desegregation. School stories, as I explain in

Chapters One and Two, tend to adhere to a fairly strict plot trajectory that requires, not just a happy ending for the protagonist, but specifically a happy ending in which the student achieves a sense of belonging in a benevolent school and nation. As I discuss in

Chapters Two and Four, historical novels that re-create past times and places sometimes re-imagine past practices of schooling in ways that not only critique the present, but also offer an alternative. Critics of this genre point out, however, that in many cases, historical novels for children often conform to still other kinds of narrative patterns; they tend toward a view of national history that is teleological and progressive, and portray the contemporary reader’s sensibilities as enlightened and evolved in comparison to a depraved past that has now been collectively overcome. 4

There is a third genre that shapes children’s desegregation literature: young adult realistic fiction, which sometimes overlaps with the “problem novel.” These novels specifically allow for critique of institutional injustice; however, as Roberta Seelinger

4 See Sara Schwebel, Anne Scott MacLeod, and Angela Hubler. 5

Trites points out in Disturbing the Universe , they are limited by other narrative conventions. While these novels may not have happy endings, Trites demonstrates that they do end by encouraging adolescent readers to accept the injustice of flawed institutions. Nevertheless, critic Sheila Egoff says of this genre,

The writers of the sixties, and even more strikingly those of the seventies, came to see realism not as a parallel to representational photography but rather as a kind of subjective, personal painting that transcends verisimilitude. Indisputably, this new view of reality has prevailed, and the present-day realism that writers seek to depict deals with the inner core rather than the surface of existence. (34)

In other words, this “subjective . . . new view of reality” incorporates a significant degree of fantasy—internal fantasy, that is, rather than supernatural fantasy. School stories and historical fiction have also, of course, been associated with certain kinds of fantasies about desirable childhood lives and national histories. 5 While all three genres are bound by the expectation to represent certain “realities,” the element of fantasy in each functions to reshape what aspects of this reality are noticed, forgotten, accepted, or problematized. Thus, while realistic novels cannot imagine a utopian alternative school like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts or Anne McCaffrey’s Harper Hall, they can disrupt assumptions about childhood “realities” in other ways; for example, they can alter the narrative timeframe of the plot so that it does not coincide with the school year and thus ask readers to recognize a timeframe of growth and learning that does not correspond to the prevailing system of class hours and school years.

5 See Gill Frith, Sara Schwebel, Laura Jones, and Kit Kelen. 6

Thus, a second argumentative thread of this dissertation is that critical stories about desegregation are molded both by the politicized space of the classroom (and, by extension, the children’s publishing industry) and by the generic format chosen to tell the story. Novels about desegregation draw upon these three genres to varying degrees, but they do not fit seamlessly within any of them. Many of the novels I discuss are shaped and limited by generic constraints, but they also break these conventions in ways that open up innovative alternatives to contemporary school practices. Furthermore, even when they adhere to the traditions of school stories and historical fiction, these fiction genres can often invite critiques of contemporary racism in the school system and imagine risky solutions that are highly contested in the politicized realm of educational policy and that might not otherwise be introduced to young students.

Nevertheless, as I discuss in Chapters One and Two, those novels that adhere most closely to the genre of the school story also tend to represent pedagogy and models of achievement that are quite normative in their visions of what the school ought to look like and what it ought to prepare its students to do and to be. As I demonstrate, some of the failures of the Brown decision occur through the mechanism of pedagogy; thus, while these novels often portray the implementation of Brown in a critical light, they also tend to divert attention from the ways that the classroom continues to be implicated in racial injustice. In contrast, novels within any genre that explicitly focus on the problems of pedagogy tend to critique the legacy of the Brown decision in ways that more directly call attention to the injustices of the present moment. As I discuss in Chapters Two, Three, and Four, novels that push the bounds of realism also tend to broaden their critiques even further, calling into question some basic premises of school “reality:” first, that the goal

of school is to achieve academic success, and second, that academic success will and should produce a useful citizen for the nation.

This does not mean, however, that I am arguing for abandoning the school, either as a literary object of study or as an institution of learning. Even in those novels that explicitly critique the school, its limitations and inequalities often give its subjects an education in a kind of productive discontent, inculcating students with a deep understanding of injustice and also providing them the language and tools to combat it.

As in Foucault’s notion of disciplinarity, the school establishes normative standards that are designed to produce deviants(ce); even if those deviants choose to leave the school setting, or to reframe their idiosyncrasies so as to join the mainstream, the school has nevertheless created the standards and the conditions for how all children (including dropouts) will be assessed. Given that, deviant and dissident students have options for how to inhabit their non-normative identities, options which these novels explore. 6 Some of these novels do explore fantasies of exiting from the school system altogether and creating radically alternate spaces for learning and structures of citizenship; others simply emphasize the additional, sometimes competing identities that children inhabit alongside their compulsory identities as students. Nevertheless, the expression of these utopian alternatives does not negate the force or importance of the school, or of the nation-state the school is meant to serve. Rather, they ask readers to consider why a reformed school is not imagined as the site of these alternatives.

6 Here, I draw from David Halperin’s analysis of Foucault’s ethic of liberation , as opposed to freedom. Halperin focuses on queer identities rather than on school identities, but his theorization of how to operate within an institution from which there is no exit is nonetheless germane to this project. 8

I emphasize the centrality, the inescapability, of the school, by way of introducing my third overarching argument, which concerns the nature of utopian education. In my first year of middle school teaching, I energetically implemented classroom policies that I felt would correct the flaws of my own education and replicate the methods I had personally found most useful and exciting. My students very quickly taught me a crucial lesson in education reform—namely, that my ideal classroom was not going to be very utopian, or very effective, for a large number of them. Over the course of several years, I have taught or tutored within a wide variety of idealistic educational structures, each of which expanded systematically so as to be able to serve more and more students in the area, on the assumption that its particular utopian educational philosophy was the best possible one for all students. Inevitably, I found myself in the position of cleaning up after the educational and emotional detritus created when those idealistic systems expanded to include students who did not adapt as planned, who did not fit the grand scheme and needed to be made to fit. Ruth Levitas suggests, in her overview of utopian thought, that utopian philosophy is most productive when definitions and approaches to utopian thought remain conflicting and unresolved. Similarly, I have come to believe that the only utopian system of pedagogy is a non-unified multiplicity of pedagogies. By extension, then, I argue that novels combining the desire for utopian schooling with the desire for utopian nationhood or community cannot be written in a model that would satisfy all readers, learners, and citizens.

As I have already stated, all of these novels about desegregation are limited in the ways they invite young readers to think about the continuing struggles of racial justice in their classrooms. Many of them are also limited in the kinds of solutions they imagine.

To say they are “limited” implies that they are somehow failed, unworthy, or insufficient.

While I may, in some cases, argue that they are, their failures and insufficiencies do not render them valueless as utopian visions. The project of education is also generally limited, and usually involves some failures on the part of students and teachers alike, but

I continue to believe that teaching and learning are meaningful pursuits. Thus, while I do find limitations in each of the novels I discuss, I also contend that each of these partial, incomplete versions of utopia may be visionary or necessary to some reader. I specifically wish to avoid offering any of these approaches to narrating desegregation as the ideal one to be imitated by novelists or extended to all students. Therefore, in each chapter, I outline the contributions each text makes toward thinking about utopian pedagogy and citizenship, and also acknowledge the students and citizens left out within the novel’s vision.

The central chapters of the dissertation are devoted to literary-critical analysis of the chosen primary texts, reading them as legacies of the Brown decision and as additions to the conversation about democratic utopian pedagogy. In this introduction, I establish the critical framework for my discussion of desegregation literature and draw back to consider broad issues of media and marketing that the narrower focus of the chapters does not allow. First, I provide an overview of the scholarly conversations about school stories and the legacies of Brown , and outline the contributions this project makes. Next,

I examine visual children’s media that, in my opinion, exemplify some of the elisions that take place when children are told stories of desegregation. I then place this dissertation project within the larger context of the children’s publishing industry, in order to demonstrate some of the ways that the school market shapes stories of the Brown legacy

regardless of genre. Finally, I offer a brief theoretical introduction to concepts of utopian democratic education.

Critical Conversations and Interventions

One of the central archives for exploring the children’s literature of desegregation is, of course, the extensive body of scholarship about the Brown v. Board of Education decision itself, its legacy within school systems, and its effects on the nation’s general approach to conceptualizing racial segregation and inequity. Its most immediate effects are well known. The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to legally desegregate American schools was hailed at home and abroad as proof of progress toward the full integration of the nation’s future citizenry. Historian Mary Dudziak offers evidence of enthusiastic headlines and extensive news coverage of the decision in Brazil, India, and several West

African countries. Even in some Southern newspapers, she says, the decision was praised because it gave “‘an effective and resounding reply to the Communist criticism of our treatment of our minority group’” ( Atlanta Daily World , qtd. in Dudziak 111). This perception of the Brown decision as a confirmation of American democratic ideals and, crucially, as a first step toward sweeping racial reform continues to the present day.

Patricia Hill Collins writes of the Brown decision as a milestone in the struggle against all forms of social inequality, and critical race scholar Derrick Bell argues that most legal scholars regard “the decision [as] the finest hour of American law. In their view, this long-awaited and now much-appreciated decision had erased the contradiction between the freedom and justice for all that America proclaimed, and the subordination by race permitted by our highest law” (2).

Of course, the other immediate effects of the decision are also well known. As

Dudziak, Hill Collins, Bell, and many others record, 7 one of the earliest legacies of the

Brown decision was the formation of an organized resistance from Southern whites, who pushed against the implementation of the decision using a variety of tactics from delay to exclusionary bureaucratic rules to open violence. Nevertheless, the narratives generally told about Brown emphasize triumph in the face of resistance, so much so that even scholars who critique the darker legacies of Brown must begin by acknowledging progress (Hill Collins 47). Others who discuss the failures of the decision frame their critique within a tale of rise and decline, arguing that the Brown decision and the legal battles which followed represented positive movement toward racial justice, and that subsequent legal and legislative actions undid and betrayed that legacy of progress. 8

Many other scholars, however, have in the last several decades increasingly argued that the failures of racial justice following Brown , both within education and within the larger nation-state, have not been aberrant betrayals of that decision, but effects integral to the decision itself. Critical race scholars (like Bell himself, who was an active litigator with the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund) have come to believe that the removal of formal legal segregation now not only stands in for more meaningful racial justice and equality, but worse, that it provides an excuse to avoid working toward racial justice. Bell and other scholars like Sonya Douglass Horsford, Patricia Albjerg Graham,

Antonio Viego, and Lani Guinier point to the many harmful effects of Brown , including academic tracking by race, the loss of black teachers’ jobs and of supportive all-black schools, and the self-fulfilling association of racially marked identity with psychological

7 See, for example, Guinier and Patterson. 8 See, for example, Jonathan Kozol and Linda Darling-Hammond. 12

damage. Bell and Horsford, in fact, suggest that the implementation of Brown actually caused, rather than solved, some of the problems and achievement gaps currently associated with majority minority schools. 9 Many of these scholars, like Guinier,

Horsford, and Patricia Hill Collins, contend that integration is a goal distinct from the

“body-mixing” approach of legal desegregation (Horsford 4), 10 and that full integration would require the teaching of concepts like racial literacy (Guinier) and social justice literacy (Collins) that might reframe our ideas about school achievement and essential skills for citizenship.

Many of these perspectives on the limitations of legal desegregation, and also on the distinctions between desegregation and integration, can be found in children’s literature. Often, however, novels that address such issues may not immediately appear to be “about” desegregation, and may not reference the Brown decision directly in any way.

Nevertheless, in order to fully understand how the legacies of legal desegregation are presented in the classroom—and in order for children and teachers to be able to discuss these legacies—such novels must be considered as responses to the classroom conditions arising in the wake of a long and complex post-Brown era. Thus, in each chapter, I address a different legacy, or a different historical slice, of that post-Brown era: in

Chapter One, I examine the standard narrative of liberal progress in the face of resistance; in Chapter Two, I explore Brown’s effects on historically black schools, through counter-

9 Bell goes so far as to argue that Plessy v. Ferguson should have been upheld rather than struck down, and that rigorous enforcement of “separate but equal” should have been the focus of Brown --in his words, “desegregating the money” (165) might have been a better solution than desegregating the children. 10 The terms “desegregation” and “integration” are often used interchangeably. Horsford suggests that “desegregation” ought to be used for the process of removing legal barriers to the entry of black children into a white-dominated institution, while “integration” ought to be reserved for those rare situations in which multiracial students, teachers, and pedagogies are meaningfully negotiated and given respect within a single classroom. In this dissertation, I follow her usage. 13

narratives of Afro-centric immersion; in Chapter Three, I discuss the re-segregation of schools by tracking and disability diagnosis; and in Chapter Four, I explore novels about closing the racial achievement gap through testing and accountability within the context of Brown ’s vision of racial justice.

While I draw upon the scholarship about Brown, I also believe that children’s novels might have something to add to this archive. Children’s literature often illuminates how the institution of school operates as a somewhat independent and often unruly arm of the state, rather than being fully and effectively influenced by the needs and policies of higher-level state actors. Conversely, those novels that are most critical of the Brown legacy also reinforce the extent to which the effectiveness of school reform is limited by national conditions of racial injustice. The students affected by the Brown decision, and by related educational reforms, tend to be discussed as innocent and moldable objects of adult decision-making. Many scholars do incorporate student voices into their analyses and critiques. 11 Nevertheless, they often present students as being victimized by various adult decisions. Children’s novels featuring child protagonists can invite us to think further about how children respond to the legacies of the Brown decision, not as future citizens, but as citizens, actors, and decision-makers in their own right and within their own everyday spheres of influence.

More surprisingly, desegregation novels have been insufficiently discussed within another crucial archive, that of children’s literature criticism. There is certainly a growing body of scholarship about media for black children and representations of black children in media marketed for schools. Kate Capshaw Smith’s Children’s Literature of the

11 See, for example, Thomas Cottle and Jonathan Kozol. 14

Harlem Renaissance provides a useful analysis of the literature from the pre-Brown era.

A number of scholars and reviewers writing since the 1965 formation of the Council on

Interracial Books for Children have discussed, in broad terms, the ways that racially

Othered characters are represented (or not represented) in all kinds of books for children published since Brown .12 And two recent volumes in particular examine some of the ways that contentious issues such as racial desegregation make their way into school libraries and classrooms. Julia Mickenberg notes in Learning from the Left that during the

McCarthy era, teachers dismissed for their supposed Communist leanings often entered the fields of children’s writing and publishing, bringing their Leftist pedagogies and beliefs with them; even so, critiques of racial conflict and integration tended to be more censored than subjects such as labor relations. She argues that even after the Brown decision, when books dealing with race relations were more in demand, depictions of past conflict, happily resolved, were more often published than representations of contemporary problems. Mickenberg’s extremely useful study, however, examines

Leftist children’s literature more generally and does not focus on the politics of desegregation. Similarly, Sara Schwebel’s 2012 study, Child-Sized History, offers a nuanced and well-researched analysis of how developments in educational practice have both elicited a number of historical novels dealing with the history of U.S. race relations and also constrained the kinds of novels published and the ways they are taught. Again, while the politics of desegregation is necessarily woven into Schwebel’s analysis, her focus is upon historical novels and the teaching of history, rather than upon how the everyday school experiences of children are mirrored back to them through reading and classroom discussion.

12 See, for example, Miller, Elliott, McCann and Woodard, Sterling, Larrick, Taxel, and Wilkins. 15

Thus, the second major goal of this dissertation is to contribute to children’s literature scholarship by considering portrayals of interracial and desegregated (and segregated) schooling as an important subset of books that represent raced subjects. I also aim to intervene more specifically in the area of school story criticism, which I believe needs to examine contemporary United States schooling much more than it currently does. Much of this body of work focuses on nineteenth-century British boarding school stories. Scholars that discuss American school stories, like Beverly Lyons Clark and Gill

Frith, tend to write about nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century novels, and those who write about more contemporary school stories tend, unsurprisingly, to focus on

Harry Potter. 13 Mavis Reimer, in her overview of school story criticism, notes that the

American high school story as characterized by films like The Breakfast Club forms a distinctive branch of the school story tradition; yet while individual novels involving a school setting are discussed, there is not a robust scholarly tradition that examines

American school stories written after the turn of the century as school stories —much less that examines how these stories interact with other public narratives of legal desegregation. Considering that most children in the United States between the ages of five and eighteen are compelled to spend at least six hours a day in school, I think that how this compulsory identity is presented to them, in their literature, is worthy of more consideration than it currently gets. In Chapter One, in particular, I make the case that the desegregation story should be discussed as an important revision to the traditional school story, much as the turn-of-the-century girls’ school stories are now discussed.

13 See, for example, Elizabeth Rose Gruner and David Steege. 16

This reconsideration of schooling as an important aspect of racial representation, and of the history of desegregation as an aspect of school stories, must also involve reconsideration of how school stories for children invest in projects of utopian democratic education. The decision to desegregate the school system in Brown v. Board of

Education , as I discuss earlier, has been enshrined as a landmark in the utopian democratic project. 14 Cultural representations of American schools since the Brown decision, however, often portray them as dystopically anti-democratic, riven by divisions of class and race and repressive in their relationships between students and adults (again,

The Breakfast Club is a good example). Nevertheless, the very act of considering the democratic failures of the classroom has the potential to bring about a renegotiation of power relationships, a reassessment both of the conditions under which students and teachers attend school and of the pedagogy and learning that take place there.

Therefore, the third goal of this dissertation is to ask how these children’s books participate in the national project of utopian, democratic education. Representations of pedagogy, both in and out of school settings, raise provocative questions (and offer a range of answers) about educational philosophy: what is a democratic education? How is it delivered? In what setting? How does a utopian education set limits on democracy?

What role should a democratically educated child have as the citizen of the larger state?

What kinds of changes to the status quo are invited by stories of desegregation, and what kinds of changes are seen as threatening? This aspect of the dissertation draws upon the field of disability studies in order to investigate how constructions of utopian, desegregated education often require progress toward success and achievement as defined

14 See Derrick Bell, Mary Dudziak, and Patricia Albjerg Graham. 17

by traditional school measures. In other words, while the school continues to be seen as a foundation, if not the foundation, of a democratic republic, the institutional memory and inertia of the educational system also limits the vision of who is considered “fit” to participate in democracy, excluding those who “fail” to do school the right way. At the same time, stories that highlight the injustice or immorality of failures at school also suggest new ways to think about not only effective pedagogy, but effective democratic citizenship.

Visual Representations of Desegregation: Three Patterns

I argue in this introduction that the issues raised within the children’s literature of school desegregation need to be more visible and prominent. What I mean, of course, is that we need a different kind of visibility and prominence. While the chapters of this dissertation focus on middle-grade and young adult novels without illustrations, I acknowledge that children are often taught about the legacies of Brown through visual media such as picture books and films; in this section, I provide an overview of the kinds of visual messages about desegregated schooling that saturate visual media for children.

Representations of integrated schooling are everywhere, for children of all ages, in picture books, films, and television shows as well as novels. Patricia Hill Collins argues, however, that “To function, color-blind racism needs visible images of blackness and brownness simultaneously to claim the universal, social-justice ethos of the Brown decision while deflecting attention away from the Brown decision’s failures” (70).

Accordingly, the ubiquitous visual representations of desegregated schooling directed toward children (and their caretakers) help to perform this deflection and reinforce the

“color-blind” ideal that is the dominant legacy of the Brown decision. In some cases, the

texts do not intentionally affirm the success of the Brown decision (in fact, affirmations of progress are strikingly absent in a few texts). Nevertheless, the absence or containment of direct portrayals of failure allows readers an “out” if they wish to maintain their belief in the triumph of universal, color-blind education.

In picture books for very young readers, this is most often accomplished simply by including children of color in the illustrations of stories that are otherwise about the

“universal” struggles of a white protagonist. 15 Books about attending kindergarten or preschool tend to feature a white protagonist (when they do not feature an animal protagonist) alongside a multiethnic cast of students and teachers; these characters may struggle together to put on a play or to convince the principal to shorten the school day, but they never have to struggle for racial justice. Integration is reassuringly depicted as a fait accompli .16 (Films and television shows popular with older children, such as High

School Musical and Glee, tend to operate in a similar fashion; social divisions in the school provide the primary source of conflict, but they are divorced from race.) Books that are specifically about the first day of school, such as Anne Rockwell’s The First Day of Kindergarten or Antoinette Portis’s Welcome to Kindergarten, generally follow the new white student through a school day in which he or she learns what to expect from school. In both of these books, the student says goodbye to his or her parent, circulates through a few learning centers, and—by the end of the day—makes a new friend who is black (although the illustrations portray multi-ethnic classrooms, the white protagonists specifically become friends with African-American children). White middle-class

15 See Taxel, “The Political Economy of Publishing.” 16 See, for example, Raffi’s adaptation of This Little Light of Mine, Sharon Creech’s A Fine, Fine School, and Trudy Harris’s 100 Days of School. 19

parents, the expected market for these books, can thus participate in teaching their children that making a black friend at school should be an expected and normal part of their educational experience, even when (sometimes through the residential decisions of the same parents) many of their children may not have much opportunity to do so.

Visual media featuring black protagonists participate in a different category of elision, that of the inspirational success story. Picture books about school that are directed toward black audiences tend either to be aimed at educating their readers about Africa 17 or to be promoting motivational messages about the joys of literacy. 18 Some of these books represent school, and school-related activities, as racially segregated. The conflict driving the plot is not the segregation itself, but the decision about whether to participate in school activities and thereby achieve success. In Sandra and Myles Pinkney’s Read and Rise, for example, all of the readers photographed are black, and they imagine themselves as future doctors, dancers, and explorers only through the act of reading. In

Roni Schotter’s Doo-Wop Pop, not only the shy protagonists, but also their beloved, musically adept custodian, find inspiration and uplift through paying attention to the music that can be found in the everyday life of the school.

A sizeable sub-genre of American school films involves stories of committed urban teachers who inspire their deprived nonwhite students to previously unthinkable heights of achievement. Films like Lean on Me, Stand and Deliver, and Dangerous Minds portray racially segregated schools that receive fewer resources and less experienced teachers than their whiter and wealthier counterparts; in Lean on Me, Principal Clark

17 See, for example, Africa Brothers and Sisters by Virginia Kroll and Elizabeti’s School by Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen. 18 I should note that Roger Sutton increasingly finds such messages in books for white audiences, too. 20

contends that if his school were equipped with door alarms like those in white schools, he wouldn’t be chaining them shut, and in Dangerous Minds, the newest and greenest teacher is given the most difficult students to handle. One of the first (and best) of these films, based on Bel Kaufman’s 1965 autobiographical novel Up the Down Staircase, emphasizes the structural and administrative difficulties faced by the would-be inspirational teacher. In Up the Down Staircase, Sylvia Barrett’s main antagonist is the school bureaucracy, which devotes hours of meetings and pages of memos to the proper filing of Delaney cards but consistently shelves issues of overcrowding, underfunding, and racial conflicts. The inspirational teacher films produced since the 1980s, however, succumb to what one editorial critic calls “The Myth of the Great Teacher,” leading to the misconception that “what schools really need are heroes ,” rather than, say, adequate funding and safe facilities” (Moore, n. pag.). Jonathan Kozol explicitly connects this myth of heroism to the burying of the social justice goals Brown was meant to accomplish, by enabling white administrators to deny money for new buildings and books and desegregation programs; after all, Joe Clark could carry a bat through the halls and get his students to pass the state exams without any of those frills.

From my perspective, another major problem with such portrayals is the way that they tend to pose achievement as the solution to racial desegregation. While racial injustice and inequality are often highlighted as issues, the way to rectify them is shown to be school success that opens the way “out” of the ghetto and into the wider, whiter world. Thus, the desegregation of adult society is posited as the reward for successful teaching and learning within a segregated youthful environment. In other words, desegregation is made contingent upon academic achievement. This situation is not what

Brown was intended to accomplish; and by highlighting social justice concerns while reversing the order in which desegregation occurs, these films seem to offer a solution to

Brown’ s failures while neatly sidestepping what those failures are.

There are some texts within this category that veer from the usual script of culturally deprived students being saved by a single committed teacher, coach, or principal and made worthy of desegregation. They are relatively rare, and, significantly, they tend to downplay the presence of the school. Read for Me, Mama, a picture book written by Vashanti Rahaman and illustrated by Lori McElrath-Eslick, is a story about a young African-American boy whose mother struggles to admit that she cannot read. The book opens in Joseph’s school, in the library; the text explains that Thursday is Joseph’s favorite day, because Mrs. Ricardo the librarian reads wonderful stories to his class and then lets each child take home two books—one he can read on his own and one just a little bit harder to read with a grownup. The illustration shows Mrs. Ricardo holding up an open book, and Joseph sitting rapt next to two white classmates. Joseph is not, however, simply placed as a spot of color in the illustrations, nor is he represented as a deprived child in need of saving. He clearly loves to read, and attends a desegregated school with a well-stocked library. He goes home to an urban apartment, where he fixes his own snack and waits for his mother to come home from her cleaning job at a hotel.

The text and illustrations carefully negotiate the line between making Joseph’s world culturally specific and stereotyping him. The apartment he shares with his mother is painted as clean, well-lit, and pleasant, and the text dwells on the details of the weekly routine they share; they cook dinner, visit the Laundromat, do the grocery shopping, attend church choir practice, and clean the house, all of which are rich sources of

knowledge and interest. The Laundromat, for example, is where Joseph spends time with his friend Mr. Beharry, a graduate student who helps him read his library book as they wait for the laundry together. Mama may come home late, but when she does, the illustration indicates that she and her son chop tomatoes together (no fast food in their house!); and though Mama cannot read, the text emphasizes that she is a gifted storyteller, entrancing her son with vivid descriptions of all the things she sees on her commute to and from work. The church community provides support for both Joseph and his mother, as it is in choir practice that Mama finally breaks down and asks for help in learning to read, and it is a fellow congregant who approaches Mama to share her own experiences with evening vocational school.

In many ways, I find this picture book to be complex and thoughtful in its representation of the negotiation between the school and the home; and yet, it also leaves me with questions that exemplify some of the silences common to stories of desegregated schooling. Why, first of all, did Mama never learn to read in school? She is depicted as certainly young enough to have grown up post-Brown ; what was her school experience like, and why does she not discuss it? Why are all the students at the evening vocational school (the subject of the final illustration) brown-skinned? Is the initial illustration of

Joseph sitting in a beautiful library alongside his white classmates meant to be evidence of progress? If so, does it represent the hope that things can be better for Mama’s son, or does it indicate that things now are better for most children like Joseph? The picture book is a necessarily concise genre, so perhaps many of these questions are unanswerable within the format; nevertheless, I think we must ask why such questions are consistently unanswered (and unasked) in visual media for children.

The question of historical progress is the one most often raised by a third category of desegregation stories, that of history and historical fiction. Stories of forced desegregation after the Brown decision are the subjects for several picture books and inspirational films, including Doreen Rappaport’s The School Is Not White, Toni

Morrison’s Remember: The Story of Integration, Robert Coles’ The Story of Ruby

Bridges, Ruby Bridges’ Through My Eyes, and Disney studio’s Remember the Titans and

Ruby Bridges. Historical narratives are where desegregation is most often portrayed as a conflict-laden, slow process following the passage of Brown ; and yet, as many scholars observe, they are also notorious for being popular because they can provide the illusion of progress. Zetta Elliott and Judy Richardson both argue that historically distant traumas presented to children not only tend to contain the violence of racism by presenting a

“happy ending” (Elliott, “One Hot Mess,”), 19 they also tend to appeal to white readers by emphasizing the roles of virtuous whites in ending slavery and segregation.

This pattern is certainly evident in some texts about school desegregation.

Remember the Titans, for example, begins with a bittersweet “happy ending,” a mixed- race group of young people and adults walking hand in hand toward a cemetery, before flashing back to a scene of racial unrest ten years prior; the viewer is reassured from the start that the problems depicted have been successfully solved. Toni Morrison’s

Remember: The Journey to Integration, which combines historic photos with fictional text, takes a more somber tone; still, it emphasizes progress in a way uncharacteristic for

Morrison. The picture book is framed with direct addresses to the reader. The first exhorts a reader (addressed inclusively as “you”) to “Remember. Because you are a part

19 See Dorothy Sterling’s critique of the pressure to write a happy ending onto traumatic stories of racism. 24

of it. The path was not entered, the gate was not opened, the road was not taken only for those brave enough to walk it. It was for you as well. In every way, this is your story” (5).

The story is not contained in the past, but spills over into the present, laying a burden upon the reader. At the end, the reader is told, “Things are better now. Much, much better. But remember why and please remember us” (72). This text is juxtaposed opposite the photographs of the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombings of 1963, providing a vivid reminder of violence next to the assertion of improvement.

Nevertheless, the statement that “things are better now” is not qualified with any more detail, and the headings by which the photos are organized follow a clear trajectory; first, there is “The Narrow Path,” then there is “The Open Gate,” and finally there is “The

Wide Road” that all may walk into the happier present.

Other texts offer more ambivalent endings, omitting a clear assertion of progress; yet even these tend to avoid direct or prominent criticism of present-day racism, and thus are sometimes read as un-ambiguous triumphs. Doreen Rappaport’s picture book The

School Is Not White tells the story of a sharecropping family whose eight children were the first to desegregate the schools of Drew, Mississippi. At the end of a narrative relating painful incidents of physical and psychological violence, the text offers a blurb about each of the Carter children as adults that details his or her future career and also provides a personal statement reflecting on his or her experiences of desegregation. Many of the

Carters state that they still want the same things for their children that their parents had wanted for them, and Larry Carter specifically asserts that many of the challenges he faced in the 1960s still remain for his children. Yet a reader simply skimming the series of blurbs might miss this comment completely; one reviewer on GoodReads praised it by

saying, “I was gratified to read at the end of the book that Mr. and Mrs. Carter and the eight children described in this book all went on to lead successful lives, some going on to college. I love reading stories like this, where good triumphs over evil, especially when the stories are true.” Nor is this reading limited to amateur reviewers; Publishers Weekly states that “An epilogue further carries the Carters' message of courage and hope.” These editorial statements are not altogether inaccurate; the Carter children did achieve much success, and their story is indeed indicative of courage and hope. I do not, however, think that one can interpret the ending as an un-ambivalent triumph without reading the epilogue selectively.

Through My Eyes , similarly, withholds a happy ending, but nevertheless seems to be read by many as a tale of progress. Ruby Bridges juxtaposes her own account of her first grade experiences with snippets of personal interviews from her teacher and her mother, and with public statements by politicians and writers of the era. At the end, she states that for many years, others told stories about her so often that she felt distanced from her own experience; only after the death of her brother in a drug-related incident did she decide to assert ownership over her own narrative. This is hardly a triumphant ending; the death of her brother indicates continuing difficulties facing the black community, and she ends the book fighting the appropriation of her own civil rights story by white writers. Yet Kerry Ramsay’s GoodReads review says, “This autobiography is a real eye opener that takes the reader back to a time of segregation, only to learn and move forward;” brm3301’s Amazon review says, “The civil issues [sic] are not something students today are faced with, so I think it is harder for them to grasp how different our world once was;” and Debbie Guthrie’s reader review, also on Amazon, believes the

book “shows how a little girl from a poor family can overcome adversity and make a historical difference.” Bridges never explicitly states that students no longer face civil rights issues or that the nation has not conclusively learned and moved forward, she merely strongly implies it; so in the absence of such a statement, readers provide it for her. Sara Schwebel notes that teacher guides for historical fiction (including complex novels with an ambivalent stance toward the present) often foster ahistorical readings, encouraging students to draw out individualistic morals about education and self- sufficiency or to make flattering comparisons between the past and the present. Such a framework for reading history may be the default approach even without explicit encouragement.

And yet, not all readers react by safely extolling the courage of the past in order to celebrate the present. Here and there, a few dissonant reviews pop up. Lynn Plotkin, who appears based on her reviews to be a teacher, writes of Through My Eyes that it “is a great way to not only introduce a history lesson but also how segregation still exists today in our schools.” And Javier Olmedo’s review of Remember: The Journey to Integration states that Morrison’s book provides “a strong reminder of how fresh (should I say present?) discrimination is.”

I can only hope that Plotkin discussed the still-existent segregation of schools with her class; I wonder how her students responded. Online reviewers rarely respond to one another (at least not within the review threads of these particular books) so that competing readings merely coexist for potential buyers to skim. Within the classroom, though, the sensitivities of students, teachers, parents, and administrators interact and come into more open conflict. If a young student asks a dissonant question about the

ending of Through My Eyes with a white teacher who reads the ending as triumphant, how will that teacher react? How will she manage the threat, not only to her authority as a teacher, but to her racial identity and sense of innocence? Conversely, if a teacher leads a class discussion in the direction of elisions and absences, how will she handle questions and challenges from parents and administrators who may hear about it secondhand?

Working through such questions requires consideration, not only of how we might read texts for the threats that have been edited out, and not only of talking points teachers might discuss in place of the “happy endings” of history, but also of what an integrated and democratic school would actually look like beyond “body-mixing.” If the stories of desegregation reflect, in various ways, how Brown did not fully achieve the goal of democratic education, they also beg the question of what else is necessary; for without an educational model that can sustain challenges and threats to authority, “body-mixing” will not result in meaningful integration. The novels in this dissertation explore a variety of models of utopian democratic education, some of which rely solely on access and some of which envision deeper pedagogical reform. Nevertheless, all are constrained and shaped by adult gatekeepers’ conceptions of national and educational utopias, as I discuss in the following section.

Markets, Mirrors, and Windows

Children’s literature publishing, marketing, regulation, and acquisition has often been bound up with questions about the effects books might have on children, for good or for ill. Hopes and (more often) fears about how naïve child readers will absorb formative lessons about a wide range of issues, including literary quality, patriotism, race relations,

sex, violence, grit, and optimism, continue to inform conversations about what books should be made available to children, at what age, and in what manner. 20 The problem, of course, is that, as Perry Nodelman points out, children’s literature tends to contain conflicting messages for child and adult readers, and it is impossible to know what messages children (and adults, for that matter) are actually taking from a book. In fact,

Nodelman suggests that children’s literature is not so much written for child readers as it is written in order to create the ideal child reader, one who needs and demands what children’s literature can provide; children learn how to perform an adult vision of childhood through repeatedly being placed in the position of the ideal child reader. Thus, he contends that while actual readers who are children may interpret the books they read in various unpredictable ways, children’s literature scholars can only reliably discuss the implied child reader, the child whom adult authors, editors, librarians, and other gatekeepers believe (or hope) is reading the book. 21

Therefore, although this project might seem to beg a discussion of how children from various communities respond to the primary texts, I choose instead to focus upon issues of publishing, marketing, and gatekeeping (that is, promotion or exclusion by teachers, librarians, and curriculum designers). In other words, I argue that how adults receive, or might receive, these novels is as or more important than how children receive them.

20 See, for example, Megan Cox Guerdon, Sherman Alexie, Perry Nodelman, Nina Mikkelson, Diane Ravitch, and Rudine Sims Bishop. 21 Nodelman provides an excellent overview of the debate in children’s literature scholarship between those who wish to discuss actual child readers and those who believe that there are no such things as child readers, the concept of childhood having been constructed by adults. 29

My reasons for bracketing an obvious discussion about child reader reception are as follows. First, it is extremely difficult to establish with any reliability or validity what children respond to when they read. Sales figures may indicate some measure of popularity, but the figures themselves do not indicate who bought the books or whether the children who were the intended recipients actually read them. Children do, of course, often provide feedback about the books they read (sometimes, now, on public forums like

Amazon reviews), and I think few teachers or parents would disagree that they are often brutally honest about books they hate. Nevertheless, reviews are still more often written by parents and teachers than by children, and adult assessments of how children respond to books are generally anecdotal. Granted, some of the novels in my study—Louis

Sachar’s Holes , for example—have sustained well-documented popularity with children, so that a quantity of feedback might be available. This feedback, however, would still be subject to questions about reliability. 22 Other books, like Dorothy Sterling’s Mary Jane and Mildred Pitt Walters’s Because We Are, are now out of print, and feedback generally reflects adults’ memories of reading the books as children. Because I believe that how children are constructed in the public imagination has real consequences for how they are written for and taught, I prefer not to make unfounded speculations about what messages they would take from novels about desegregation, even at the risk of leaving a key question unanswered.

22 One child-authored Amazon review of Virginia Hamilton’s The Planet of Junior Brown indicates some of the issues with feedback from children that is directed toward adult gatekeepers. The child reviewer titles the post “A Big Waste of Your Time But an Easy ‘A,’” and begins the review by stating, “I call this kind of book an easy ‘A’ because its tha [sic] kind of book that your older English teacher will shove in your face as ‘great’ and if you give it a good book report than you will get an ‘A’.” That child’s teacher might conceivably have a whole collection of laudatory book reports about The Planet of Junior Brown, on the basis of which she might have decided to publish an article about how successful the novel is with her students. It is even possible to make a non-cynical argument about these skewed responses; one can argue that whether or not the child felt it was a waste of time to read Hamilton’s novel, she still spent time engaging with issues and problems she might not otherwise have encountered. 30

A second, even more important reason for focusing on adult rather than child responses is that adult gatekeepers’ fears about social disruption or profit margins constrain how children are given the opportunity to respond to books. Adult constructs of implied child readers impact every level of the process of getting a book into a child’s hand: the writing and editing, the selection for publication, the marketing strategies, the review process (including whether a new book gets reviewed at all), the purchasing decisions by libraries, teachers, and bookstores, and finally the ways that classroom and library reading is framed and guided through adult-authored prompts. Given that school desegregation, as a legal policy affecting children, was itself authored and then fearfully managed by adults on behalf of children, 23 the children’s literature of desegregation— how it is edited, published, and chosen for or excluded from curricula—also needs to be viewed through the framework of how adults want children to encounter and to learn about desegregation.

The school, as an institution, tends to protect its authority; given its status and influence within the market for children’s books, this means that what school personnel and teachers perceive as “appropriate” shapes what books get written, published, and disseminated. Books that safely contain critiques of the school system—by placing conflict in the past, for example, or by elevating it as a source of hope despite its problems—tend more often to win major awards like the Newbery and Coretta Scott

King and to be found on state curriculum booklists. When more radically critical novels are published and made available in classrooms and libraries—and they are—it can only

23 Dorothy Sterling, in her 1958 book Tender Warriors, records numerous interviews with children (black and white) in recently desegregated schools saying that they felt they could negotiate the change if only the adults around them would leave them alone. 31

be through the partnership of committed adults who have alternate ideas about what children should be able to learn about the schools they attend.

The first crucial aspect of how the school market shapes publishing is before the book goes to press, when it is rejected or accepted and edited for publication. Laura

Atkins, Joel Taxel, and Zetta Elliott all testify to pressures at this stage, from different perspectives: Atkins as a publisher, Taxel as a scholar interested in the political economy of the publishing industry, and Elliott as a children’s writer and activist scholar. Atkins states bluntly that publishing houses try to avoid making school purchasers queasy:

What I found particularly striking was the degree to which perceived market requirements shaped the books that were acquired and developed. The publishers where I worked sold primarily to the institutional markets—to teachers and librarians. In my experience, there was concern about what teachers or librarians would accept, with a frequent “lowest common denominator” consideration of what the majority of those in the educational and library systems would tolerate. (n. pag.)

As a result, she says, editors (who were mainly white women) pressured writers to pitch their “multicultural” books toward a “universal” audience, editing out culturally specific elements or dark moments that might make middle-class teachers uncomfortable.

Similarly, Taxel notes that “multicultural” books written by and for people in a particular cultural community (what he terms “parallel cultural literature” (173)) are seen as limited niche books. Multicultural books that are meant to give white audiences a taste of difference, however, are seen as more widely marketable and able to satisfy the demand

for immediately high turnover; 24 thus, much of what is selected and packaged as

“multicultural literature” is what white people think of as universal and acceptable multiculturalism. Taxel argues that such market pressures may be causing authors to censor themselves and to write innocuous books of folktales that they know schools will use. Elliott’s experiences indirectly confirm this conjecture; while she does not censor her writing, she records having great difficulty getting her work published as a result. She notes, for example, that her chapter book about a girl whose father is incarcerated was rejected because the white female editor said she felt uncomfortable with the black protagonist’s anger (“One Hot Mess”). 25 In the meantime, she notes, publishers “continue to promote their endless books about Harriet Tubman and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., knowing that educators and librarians across the country need *something* to display when Black History Month rolls around” (“Something Like an Open Letter,” n. pag.). 26

Atkins, Taxel, and Elliott all comment that, while publishers actively market toward white children and their parents, they perceive little demand among Black and Latino families for books and assume that the market for these children is actually a market for their teachers . In such a marketing environment, it is likely that representations of school desegregation and its legacies (including continued racism in the classroom) will be heavily policed.

24 Taxel explains that new tax laws and the pressures of fast capitalism have discouraged publishers from warehousing books and maintaining backlists. As a consequence, books have a limited shelf life and then go out of print, and publishers tend to skew their offerings toward what they think will be of immediate, “mainstream, national interest” (157). 25 See also Dorothy Sterling’s reflections on her difficulties in publishing books about school integration, and the editing of Mary Jane . 26 Indeed, the problem of numbers continues to be acute. As late as 2006, out of 5000 new trade books published for children in the United States, only 87 were written by black authors, and only 153 contained black characters (Bernadowski). 33

Once a book has gone to press, its sales are heavily influenced by whether it is recognized by the Newbery Award committee (and, more recently, the Coretta Scott King

Award committee) and whether it is taken up for recommendation by widely referenced school-based programs such as the Common Core Curriculum, the Accelerated Reader

Program, and published state curricula like those previously used in Massachusetts and

California. 27 Kenneth Kidd, in his study of the Newbery Prize, notes that in a book culture of fast turnover and shrinking backlists, Newbery Award winning books remain perpetually in print. Furthermore, as Sara Schwebel observes, they remain in classrooms and recommended curricula, even when (as in the case of William Armstrong’s Sounder ) they have been repeatedly and publicly critiqued as racist. The Massachusetts State

Department of Education, in their published curricula from 2001 and 2011, lists a number of recommended authors by name for each grade level, and then recommends any book for the classroom that has been approved by the Newbery committee. 28 Significantly, although the Coretta Scott King Award for children’s books published by African-

American authors has recognized an alternate canon since 1970, Coretta Scott King award winners were not listed by Massachusetts as worthy of teacher attention until the

2011 revision of the curriculum.

27 I am indebted to Sara Schwebel for her methodology in tracking down how widely influential particular books might be in school systems around the nation. Since I began this project, more and more states have adopted the Common Core curriculum, and previous state curricula have been taken off the web; therefore, some of my data is now historical, and some is no longer available. 28 The Common Core standards, which are being adopted by an increasing number of states, does not specifically mention the Newbery in the appendix of text exemplars. The authors do, however, state as part of their criteria for text selection that “While it is possible to have high-complexity texts of low inherent quality, the work group solicited only texts of recognized value.” Since 1920, one of the most prominent and most-accepted ways to recognize value has been the Newbery; and indeed, Newbery winners are prominently represented among the 20 th -century texts recommended by the curriculum authors. 34

Thus, recognition by the Newbery committee confers a special status and influence upon a book; and the committee continues to be conservative about issues of race, even as it appears to have become more progressive. Kidd notes, “A common assumption is that the Medal is now more often awarded to books that grapple directly with social issues. But even now, most of the Medal books that address racism, for instance, are historical novels that give priority to the folk/vernacular and are set no later than the Depression” (n. pag.). As books set no later than the Depression are unlikely to address legal desegregation, this means that the books about racism teachers are encouraged to use are ones that elide the issues they and their students face in the classroom. 29 According to Kidd, the committee has been more progressive in their recognition of Honor books, which he calls a “shadow canon” of edgier books whose threat is safely contained by their having been denied the Medal; Honor books, he notes, tend to be much less well known than Medal books.

This pattern illuminates some of the obstacles to getting novels that evoke the

Brown legacy into the classroom. For example, Virginia Hamilton’s novel M.C. Higgins, the Great won the Newbery Medal, and is specifically recommended by both the

Common Core curriculum and the state of California, while her novel The Planet of

Junior Brown (which I discuss in this dissertation) is not listed on any state or national curriculum. Both novels address issues of intra-racial prejudice and feature a black adolescent protagonist trying to navigate threats to his safety; but M.C. Higgins, the

Great focuses on M.C.’s coming-of-age and his conflicts with his father, while The

29 While Kidd argues that Newbery books tend to circulate outside the classroom rather than being heavily taught in the curriculum, medal-winning books are heavily promoted by state curricula, and are often accompanied by teacher activity packs. 35

Planet of Junior Brown is far more directly critical of institutional racism. Although I personally find M.C. Higgins, the Great to be an intriguing and richly developed novel, I also believe that it would be possible for me to teach the novel—and to feel good about incorporating discussions of race into the classroom—without ever bringing up the specific dynamics of race shaping my interactions with the students. In contrast, such avoidance would be far less possible with The Planet of Junior Brown , which may be one reason why it does not appear on recommended curricula.

These elisions by curriculum committees are not limited to Newbery Award books. A similar example that does not involve Newbery Award winners is Ann

Cameron’s series about young black protagonists Julian, Huey, and Gloria. Stories Julian

Tells is a relatively innocuous book about an imaginative black boy who gets in trouble for eating too much lemon pudding and for fighting with his brother; it is described by

Nina Mikkelson as the kind of pluralist, “universal,” “transcendent” book designed to

“provide . . . cathartic, ‘feel-good’ experiences for white readers” (41). It is specifically recommended by the Common Core standards, California, New York, and Massachusetts

(which normally recommends only authors, but in the case of Cameron specifies the

Julian books). Cameron’s novel Gloria Rising , another in the same series, portrays

Gloria’s struggles with a racist white teacher who holds low expectations of her nonwhite students. That novel is not recommended by any published curriculum.

In arguing that literature packaged for educational use should more directly reflect contemporary issues of schooling, I seek to intervene in the curricular debates about

“mirror” and “window” books, where “mirror” books are considered to reflect a child’s own experiences and “window” books are those that provide her with a view of a world

outside her own. As Diane Ravitch notes, these terms are racially coded; “mirror” books, in the education world, mean books whose protagonists match the racial and socioeconomic background of the child reader, while “window” books are about characters of a different race, class, regional origin, or national origin. The prevailing curricular wisdom, she suggests, is that students will not engage with school unless they are constantly shown “mirrors” that reflect only their own racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds.

A number of critics object to this practice on a variety of grounds. Ravitch, representing a relatively conservative view, laments the “new canon” formed when authors like Cisneros replace Emerson in reading textbooks ( Language Police 128), and argues that students of color should be encouraged to look beyond their own experiences and those of their immediate communities rather than to expect only books and classroom topics that are made “relevant” to them. Author Mitali Perkins voices a similar objection, but from the opposite perspective, asking, “Why should we expect white kids to want to see their own faces reflected when it comes to race and ethnicity?” (n. pag.). Several antiracist scholars point to the distorting quality of the mirrors offered to racially marked children in the curriculum. Beryle Banfield and Geraldine Wilson, for example, protest the appropriation of black themes by white authors and note, “An increasing number of books on African American themes are being written by whites, even as works by Black authors are going out of print” (199). As a result, many scholars argue, black characters continue to be stereotyped in “sympathetic, cloying little books” (Lester 72) as “suffering servants” (Wilkins 4) or as “Super Negro[es]” (Taxel, “The Black Experience”). 30 Judith

30 See also Judy Richardson and James Miller. 37

Thompson and Gloria Woodard suggest that children are consistently presented with selective mirrors; they are encouraged to read about role models acceptable to whites, such as Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King, while biographies of Malcolm X and

Paul Robeson are harder to come by.

Scholars on both sides—those like Ravitch, and those like Banfield and Wilson— sometimes discuss books as though they provided mirrors or windows in the absence of classroom pedagogy or other adult direction. Yet, as Sara Schwebel and Katherine Simon point out, children often read books in the context of the classroom, and these reading experiences are not unmediated encounters between the text and the student’s mind.

Teachers (and before them, often, state administrators and curriculum planners) get to decide which aspects of a text students will be held accountable for knowing; through discussion questions, homework assignments, and assessments, they can direct students’ attention toward some aspects of a text and away from others, and they can, furthermore, incentivize choices to think about, say, literary elements like metaphor and plot structure as opposed to questions about racial stereotyping or biased historical representations.

Thus, it is possible for a book that is chosen in part for its “mirror” qualities to be taught in a way that sidelines these elements.

For example, Scholastic ’s teacher’s guide for Louis Sachar’s Holes emphasizes the importance of its physical setting in the middle of a desolate Texas desert, but makes relatively little mention of the equally important historical setting of the Jim Crow South.

In fact, the novel recounts a lynching, but in the character list, no mention of Sam’s race is made. The present-day racial conflicts evoked by the text, especially in the treatment of the character Zero, are barely mentioned at all. Similarly, a teacher’s guide to Hamilton’s

The Planet of Junior Brown “universalizes” the text by making no mention of race in the introductory summary. Even more astonishing is the treatment given a key scene, in which Junior expresses his resistance against intra-racial prejudice by painting a picture of himself participating in all the facets of black culture his mother wishes him to repudiate. This important scene, which leads to Junior’s running away, is made the subject of a multiple choice reading comprehension question that asks students what art tool Junior uses to paint the Red Man. In a guide to Cynthia Voigt’s Come a Stranger , a novel that deals directly with racism in education, discussion questions do ask students to consider whether Mina is dismissed from dance camp because of racism and to describe the ways she is pressured to “act white” in order to succeed. Still, the potential threat to white teachers is contained in a section entitled “Social Sensitivity,” which proclaims,

“Mina develops friendships from both races and behaves in an exemplary way by looking beyond color. Voigt, however, fails to balance her presentation as those people who behave in a prejudiced way are white” (n. pag.). Aside from my doubts about whether

“looking beyond color” is “exemplary,” I find these statements to be simply inaccurate based on my reading of the novel. Based on my admittedly hazy recollection of reading the book as a seventh grader, I do not think I found the novel either unbalanced or transcendent of race when I first read it; nevertheless, if I had been handed a study guide asking me to describe how Mina behaves heroically by transcending her race, I expect I would have done so. Katherine Simon, in a series of classroom observations, records how teachers often shut down discussion of ambiguous issues by providing the “right” reading, as the Come a Stranger study guide does, or else move these discussions “off- line” by focusing students’ attention on the completion of reading comprehension

questions like those in the Planet of Junior Brown guide (63). Simon notes that children continue to ask and to be engaged with sticky questions; however, reading is often structured so that “consideration of moral questions [is] relegated largely to the private realm . . . a kind of special interest,” rather than the subject of “collaborative, public thinking” (65).

Given the constraints schools exert upon the editing, marketing, and interpretation of novels, I would like to shift the terms of the mirror/window debate, which has remained largely focused upon representations of nonwhite characters. Instead, I would call for closer attention to how novels mirror the overall conditions of the post- desegregation era, which is deeply relevant to students and teachers of all races whether or not desegregation appears to have affected the makeup of their school. Patricia Hill

Collins states, “The classroom is already a political space, whether the teacher chooses to recognize this reality or not” (96). Including a novel such as Come a Stranger would make it more difficult, though never impossible (as demonstrated by its study guide), for a teacher not to openly recognize this reality. Given the ways that politically volatile representations of school can be edited out before books even go to press, a look into the mirror of school stories must also involve looking for absence, for what might be there but is not, and for what kinds of characters and classrooms seem to be too threatening to envision being included in a desegregated utopian school.

Democratic Education and Utopian Projects

“Utopia,” “democracy,” and “education” are three separate and potentially contradictory terms, although I and others often place them in hopeful conjunction within

phrases like “utopian education,” “democratic education,” and “utopian democracy.” The three terms are indeed associated in much utopian philosophy and educational philosophy. Nevertheless, many debates within these fields question how utopian democracy is, how democratic an education for utopia can be, and what kind of utopia a democratic education can produce. The Brown decision and its aftermath pulled open some of these philosophical fractures between the ideas of “utopia,” “democracy,” and

“education;” the federal government enforced a ruling of inclusive access in the face of resistance from white voters, and celebrated black students’ achievement of full citizenship rights within a school system that was increasingly dominated by a climate of anxiety and repression. 31 Of course, theorizations of literary and social utopia are far broader and more varied than the ones I examine in this dissertation. 32

The novels I examine engage three broad problems in utopian thought. First, and centrally, they are concerned with the education of desire 33 —their protagonists desire education, but also must learn to desire the right kind of education, and the right kind of society. Second, they raise questions about what a democratic education looks like in a society that assumes the immaturity (and hence incompetence) of youth and in which vocal and powerful constituencies of the republic voice support for racist, sexist, and elitist policies. Finally, they tackle the crucial utopian issue of realism, asking what transformations are possible and whether dreaming bigger will involve sacrificing gains that are in reach.

31 See John Holt and Andrew Hartman. 32 See Ruth Levitas for a useful and comprehensive overview of utopian social thought. 33 See Levitas for a discussion of how the education of desire is central to all utopian projects. 41

Tensions between desire for democracy and desire for justice (and an eventual better democracy), and between immediate realizable change and more radical dreams, are key to understanding the novels I discuss in this dissertation. The novels in the first two chapters tend to focus on structural justice rather than democratic pedagogy and to privilege small, steady reforms over wholesale overhauls; they depict the classroom as flawed and often antidemocratic, but nevertheless as necessary to fulfilling the desire for a fully realized democracy in adult life.

They also suggest that desire is central in other ways to these utopian projects of desegregation. Literature about young adults is always, at some level, concerned with the unruliness of their desires as opposed to what the adults in their lives want for them; and, of course, the crises over desegregation often evoked fears of interracial sexual desire.

The uncontrollable sexual urges of teenagers are often seen as antithetical to their less pressing goals for education and adult success; parental anxiety about interracial dating can thus be seen as a variation on a perennial concern, that school teaches children to desire each other rather than to desire good character, citizenship, and intellectual elevation. A common strategy and defense of black students desegregating white schools was to disavow any desire for contact with whites, citing their willingness to endure violence and isolation as proof that their desire for education was paramount; 34 some of the novels in the first chapter in particular, however, move toward the view that the desire for interracial mingling is the more utopian impulse.

In the novels I discuss in the third and fourth chapters, the students fail to desire what the school and the larger society want, and conversely, cannot find the satisfaction

34 See Eyes on the Prize, and James Baldwin’s “A Fly in Buttermilk.” 42

of their desires within the school (unlike the protagonists of the first two chapters, who encounter competing desires and satisfactions within the school). If the function of the school is to educate its students (and teachers) in the proper desires so that they may aid in the creation of utopia, then these novels investigate the various kinds of misfires that can happen in this process. As Henry Giroux argues, schools produce modes of resistance as well as producing inequality. Protagonists in these novels sometimes learn to desire a different utopia than the American democracy they are offered; and in order to construct alternate utopian models, they also investigate new methods in the education of desire.

A Note on Primary Texts and Authors

I have limited the books I consider to middle-grade and young adult American novels that in some way highlight the challenges of desegregated schooling. I say

“schooling,” rather than “education,” because so much of children’s media involves the informal education of children. I am concerned with the constraints placed upon this medium when it represents formal education. In part for this reason, I primarily focus on novels rather than on other kinds of media, as trade books are more widely used objects of study in the Language Arts classroom than are films or television episodes. It is also for this reason that I omit discussion of the wide range of children’s literature on other aspects of the civil rights movement and on other aspects of racial conflict, both historical and contemporary. Aside from a staggering number of children’s books about Martin

Luther King and Rosa Parks, there are books touching on children’s participation in protests, neighborhood gentrification, and interracial dating, many of which address

topics crucial to the issue of school desegregation. 35 Focusing specifically on one piece of the Civil Rights agenda—school integration—allows me to trace how this issue is represented over several decades as a continuing challenge rather than as a contained historical event. This narrowed focus, however, admittedly cuts out some of the interesting ways that novelists represent other continuing civil rights issues for young readers.

Furthermore, I limit my project to novels that portray the desegregation of black students and white students after Brown v. Board of Education. This, I realize, is a problematic choice that de-emphasizes the struggles of Latino, Asian, and Native

American students to be meaningfully integrated into United States schools. Novels like

Sherman Alexie’s Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese,

Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again, Francisco Jimenez’s trilogy The Circuit,

Breaking Through, and Reaching Out, and Juan Felipe Herrera’s Downtown Boy complicate narratives of integration and bring in questions about how the history of

United States imperialism impacts the school system as an engine of democracy. Each of these novels opens up an area of historical contention—about Bureau of Indian Affairs schools and the position of reservations within the American state, about school as a homogenizing force for immigrant students, about language inclusion and exclusion— that is crucial to how the United States conceives of its schools as integrated and democratic. Nevertheless, to give each of these issues the attention it deserves is outside the scope of this project. By focusing specifically on the nominal desegregation of black and white students, I am able to examine in more depth the ways that the potentially

35 See, for example, Doreen Rappaport’s Nobody Gonna Turn Me ‘Round, Jacqueline Woodson’s Between Madison and Palmetto and If You Come Softly, and James Howe’s Totally Joe . 44

explosive and unspeakable history of school racism that followed Brown has been represented in roundabout ways and made “appropriate” for child consumption.

Authorship is a highly political issue in books that deal with cross-racial topics.

As I note earlier, many novels published for children about racial conflict are written by white authors, and these novels are immensely popular with classroom teachers even when they are critiqued by antiracist groups. Because this kind of cross-racial writing is so prevalent in the books children see, I have included some examples among the novels I discuss. Overall, however, I include a roughly equal number of books by black authors and books by white ones. At times, this means I have chosen to discuss a book that has gone out of print in preference to one that is actively circulating; however, it is crucial to my project to examine not only what children are given to read, but also what they are not given.

In Chapter One, “Scripting History: The Genre of Desegregation Stories,” I review the body of historical novels chronicling the entry of the first black students into mostly white schools. Many of these, though not all, directly reference the experiences of the Little Rock Nine, as one of the most visible and violent of these contests over desegregation. I focus specifically on three novels: Dorothy Sterling’s Mary Jane, published in 1959 after her nonfiction interviews about desegregation failed to sell;

Andrea Pinkney’s With the Might of Angels, a 2011 addition to the Scholastic “Dear

America” series; and Kristin Levine’s 2012 The Lions of Little Rock , which covers the

1958-59 year of school closures in Little Rock following the violent year of forced desegregation. In this chapter, I argue that the historical desegregation novel forms a distinct subgenre of school stories, and I outline its generic characteristics. These include

a Cold War-era emphasis on the well-equipped science labs of the white school, and the formation of a close, sometimes passionate, interracial bond between two girls that emerges as the object worth saving from the violence of desegregation.

In Chapter Two, “Counternarratives and the Persistence of White Privilege,” I examine how critiques of the Brown decision surface within three black-authored novels.

I begin with Mildred Pitts Walter’s 1983 novel Because We Are , which tells the story of a girl who stops busing to a desegregated school and returns to her all-black neighborhood school. Two novels from 2007 “flip the script” of the desegregation narrative in other ways. Sharon Draper’s Fire From the Rock tells the story of a fictional girl who has a chance to be one of the Little Rock Nine and chooses not to because she feels that she will receive a better education at the all-black school. Jacqueline Woodson’s Feathers similarly follows a black protagonist who has no desire to cross to the white side of town; in Feathers, it is a white boy who desegregates the black school and wishes to be accepted in the community. These novels express some of the concerns within the black community that were suppressed during the immediate aftermath of the Brown decision but that resurfaced later, most notably the arguments that all-black schools were not inherently inferior to all-white ones and that segregation did not produce a psychologically spoiled identity. They resist complacent, white-supremacist narratives of desegregation in many ways; however, with the exception of Woodson’s novel, they also maintain normative models of achievement and ambition as the properly desired end of a utopian education.

In Chapter Three, “Pedagogies of Desegregation: Narratives of Disability and

Giftedness,” I investigate a legacy of Brown that is not generally discussed in children’s

literature: the growth of tracking and disability diagnosis as a way of re-segregating students within nominally desegregated schools. 36 Virginia Hamilton’s The Planet of

Junior Brown and Cynthia Voigt’s Tillerman novels tell different kinds of stories about desegregation, ones less focused on the decision whether or not to attend a desegregated school and more attentive to the details of everyday school life and policy after the initial shock of contact subsided. In representing the persistent problems schools have in educating students with racialized identities and students with disabilities, these novels also reject the school as a site where the education of utopian desire is possible.

Chapter Four, “Desegregating Literacy, Enriching the State,” pursues another legacy of Brown : the much-discussed achievement gap between black and white students.

In this chapter, I look at literacy learning (a popular topic of children’s novels) as a compulsory desire for children and a precondition for full citizenship rights. The novels I discuss provide two very different views of how literacy achievement functions as the key to utopian desire for democracy. Louis Sachar’s Holes offers the view that sharing the white proprietary knowledge of letters with black subjects not only restores justice, but literally heals the body of the nation. M.T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of

Octavian Nothing, Traitor to His Nation , a two-volume historical narrative of an educated slave who escapes to fight for British against the American Revolution, tells a much less celebratory and more equivocal story about literacy. Anderson’s text calls into question how both literacy and fitness for citizenship are measured and manipulated in the current educational context, and offers alternate models of literacy teaching as a way to form another kind of polity.

36 Sections of this chapter were previously published in The Children’s Literature Association Quarterly and The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. 47

In a brief conclusion, I return to thinking about the classroom and about how this archive of novels might be used, or misused, to open up conversations among students and between students and teachers about the realities of schooling after Brown .

Utopian, anti-racist educators like Patricia Hill Collins, Katherine Simon, and

Gloria Ladson-Billings offer ways to make the classroom feel like a safe, rigorous, and democratic environment, even as they recognize that teachers may be under time constraints and may fear for their own jobs if they are seen as devoting time to skills of critical thought and empowerment that lie outside of the required state standards. Sara

Schwebel’s discussion of historical novels offers analysis that can help teachers to do both and therefore preserve their jobs. It is my hope that this dissertation will, similarly, provide ways to think and talk about the current legacies of Brown —continuing segregation, disproportionate tracking and diagnosis, and anxiety about achievement— within the context of texts that “cover” important periods in United States history and that are often lauded for their literary qualities.

Chapter 1: Scripting History and the Genre of Desegregation Stories

Preface: Lessons Learned from Jackie Robinson

When I taught in Arizona, my reading classes were re-grouped, partway through the year, into “low,” “middle,” and “high” groups, so that each group could be pushed to jump “up” into the next quartile on the state test and thereby garner the school a passing grade under the No Child Left Behind law of 2000. Placements were made according to the students’ scores on previous state tests and textbook-created assessments. The students in my “high” and “middle” classes were fairly mixed in race and socioeconomic status, but the students in the “low” class were entirely nonwhite, and most of them received free lunch. The one white student in the class transferred out within a month, after his mother requested a retest. Technically, of course, the classes were known by the texts they were assigned (High Point, Holt, and novels, respectively), but the students knew what the groupings meant, as they always do. Previously eager and capable students placed into the ironically named High Point class quickly began to act sullen and slow.

It would be easy to assume that the students were performing the roles of “bad learners” in which they had been cast, and in fact I believe there was some element of textbook social psychology at work. In fairness, though, the High Point series was deadly, and I was bored by it myself—a fact which probably did not enhance my teaching. High Point, the teachers had been told, was a data-based program designed to quickly boost the reading performance of students learning English as a second language; but my class was instead a catch-all, filled with some students who were bilingual and

some who had diagnosed disabilities. Each reading was accompanied by a teaching script and specific supporting materials. Each unit designated a specific reading technique through which the text should be taught. Prompt questions were printed in the margins, to be asked at specific points in the reading. We were told that, due to the mysteriously data- driven nature of the program, we were not to veer from the script, or substitute the readings in the text for those of our choosing. The readings had been carefully chosen for their “accessibility” and their “high interest level,” terms which, in my experience, are code for one or more of the following elements: 1) nonwhite characters, 2) brevity, 3) sports stories, or 4) relatively tame evocations of “controversial” or “socially relevant” topics.

According to district plan, then, I obediently guided us through a few Gary Soto poems and a white “ethnic” story about a marriage tradition, to arrive at a nonfiction piece about Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson, of course, yields a jackpot for multicultural textbooks, being a black sports hero who is nonthreatening to whites; as such, he has been so heavily represented in reading for schoolchildren that scholars of black children’s literature since at least the mid-1970s have contended that his story has been used as a concession to avoid teaching children about more controversial black heroes like W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X. 37 The reading technique for which Jackie had been chosen as a vehicle was the “K-W-L” chart, a visual organizer in which children are supposed to fill in facts they already Know in the “K” column, questions they Want answers for in the “W” column, and items they have Learned after reading the selection under the “L” heading. Under some circumstances, the K-W-L chart can be a fairly useful

37 See Judy Richardson, Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard, the Council on Interracial Books for Children, and Zetta Elliott. 50

technique for reading nonfiction. In this case, it was a definite fail. When asked what they knew about Jackie Robinson, one or two students offered after a long pause that he was a baseball player and that he was black; all the students diligently scratched this information down, even those that had not known it. When asked what they wanted to know, there was silence. They really weren’t that into baseball, a few students finally offered. They liked basketball. There were shrugs. A few heads went down on desks.

Eyes wandered. Dutifully, I tried to generate interest with a few prompts. Did they want to know why he was important in history, perhaps? What it was like for him to be a black baseball star in a mostly segregated sport? Nobody responded, but heads came up and pencils began scratching, writing down the questions I’d asked. A few students asked me to repeat the questions so they could get them down. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Do you guys want to know this? Don’t just write it down!” They shook their heads, no, and continued to write. They knew the rules of these reading techniques, we all did; there had to be something in each column. Wasn’t that why I had just told them what they wanted to know?

By spring, I had become thoroughly disillusioned with High Point and had generally decided that I would not be deeply disappointed if I were fired. I went off script and began bringing in readings from my own shelves, ones that interested me. Ostensibly,

I was still sticking with the program of suggested reading techniques, and just using other texts as vehicles for skills, but in fact I was trying to sustain my own enthusiasm for teaching, and preferably also to repair my damaged rapport with the class. This may account for why I cannot recall what reading technique I was meant to be teaching when I brought in a selection of photocopied interviews from Casey King and Linda Barrett

Osborne’s collection Oh, Freedom: Kids Talk About the Civil Rights Movement With the

People Who Made It Happen . I chose a variety of interviews: some in which black children and their parents spoke about segregation, some in which they spoke of nonviolent resistance, and some in which they spoke of separatism. There were some interviews in which white children interviewed their parents about their own support for desegregation, and in some cases about their silence in the face of racism. Students paired up and read aloud to each other, taking the roles of interviewer and interviewee, then trading the photocopies around and reading different ones. Again, I am sure there was some specific reading technique I was emphasizing with this activity, but whatever it was got drowned in the flurry of questions I was fielding about the Civil Rights Movement, its varied possibilities for action and non-action, and the emotional reactions to the interviewees’ accounts. That was one of the only days I can recall when the students seemed really excited, when we could briefly stop belaboring the topic of how to read because we were actually involved in reading. Somehow, in fleeing from an authorized

“high interest” text about Civil Rights, I had stumbled onto an unauthorized one that actually caught their interest.

I begin my chapter about historical desegregation stories with this anecdote because it provides a reminder of the degree to which Civil Rights stories told in school are scripted, literally, by the framework of the classroom and the overarching demand for achievement according to certain measures. Tempting as it is to treat my foray into the forbidden territory of my private bookshelf as a liberating act of improvisation, it, too, was scripted. In my role as teacher, I gave a reading assignment, and that assignment was, literally, to read a script, with a goal of ultimately improving reading achievement. I

did not break out of my role in a number of ways: I did not march to the principal’s office and demand a renegotiation of the grouping system; I did not openly question the assumption that the students ought to desire the goal of jumping “up” to the next quartile in their test scores; and I did not turn the reading class into a history class that might have explored the Civil Rights movement in more depth. The reading class remained a class dedicated to reading achievement, and the segregated students remained shut out, by virtue of their presumed lack of achievement, from participating in the desegregation about which they were assumed to take an interest in reading. And yet, there was a difference between the Civil Rights-themed readings, a variation in the scripts that rendered one of our shared weeks in the classroom together miserable and another joyful and hopeful. This difference is hardly revolutionary, but (especially when one is suffering through one of the miserable weeks) it is not negligible, either.

I emphasize this variation because it would be easy, in considering what I will define as the genre of desegregation stories, to dismiss the entire genre as hopelessly compromised, providing an easy way for publishers and teachers to avoid talking about continuing racial issues by telling “high interest” stories of past de-segregation. I do believe that the genre can function in this manner. Nevertheless, I do not want to ignore the radical moments and antiracist possibilities that surface in these novels. At the same time, I have begun with an anecdote about my segregated “low” level reading class, because they are the students that these novels consistently erase. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to defining what the desegregation story includes, outlining its generic conventions through an examination of three novels. It is equally important, however, to bear in mind what it does not include—namely, those nonwhite students deemed to be

underachievers, who do not “perform” well enough to attend school even with underachieving white children.

Overview and Introduction

As I argue in the introduction, stories about the legacy of Brown v. Board of

Education should be seen to encompass all of the varied effects of that decision, including the movements toward black separatism I discuss in Chapter Two and the re- segregation trends I discuss in Chapters Three and Four. Nevertheless, when most adults hear “ Brown v. Board of Education, ” the stories they probably think of are a specific type of narrative I will call “desegregation school stories,” narratives of a specific historic moment shortly after the Brown decision, when Southern white schools were forcibly, and with varying degrees of violence and publicity, desegregated with small numbers of black students. Fictionalized accounts of these events were published for children from the late 1950s on; and, as James Miller observes, they tend to follow a predictable pattern: a black boy or girl enters a predominantly white school, makes a white friend who helps him or her to succeed in an extracurricular activity, faces down one or two bigoted bullies (who do not represent the majority of the white school population), and eventually achieves success and acceptance. I would also add that the black protagonist is always highly intelligent and ambitious, and that he or she comes from a middle class, or at least upwardly mobile, family. Furthermore, the specific academic opportunity that attracts black protagonists to white schools is nearly always the gleaming, plentifully equipped science lab that the white school possesses and the black school does not.

Finally, at least in stories about girls, the interracial friendship that is formed takes on a romantic quality that becomes a motivation as important as schooling, so that while the

protagonist initially decides to enter a white school for a better education, successful desegregation and interracial harmony become as important a goal as academics—and, in fact, are often necessary to white achievement.

Some of these plot elements are based at least in part on historical constraints.

The NAACP often deliberately selected middle-class black students as test cases for desegregation, and standardized test scores were frequently used as excuses for white administrators to resist desegregation, so that only very highly performing black students were allowed to enter. 38 Narratives loosely based on these events can therefore be expected to reflect these patterns; more recent historical novels in particular, with their goal of teaching history through fiction, emphasize the complex selection process as part of the history lesson about Brown. The importance of science, too, echoes the Cold War push to develop intellectual “manpower” to combat the Soviets in weapons and space technology. Nevertheless, some of the other elements of the ritualized plot arc tend to lead to the traditional liberal interpretation of the Brown decision that is now highly contested in the fields of law and history. Integration is assumed to mean a unidirectional movement of black students into “superior” white schools, and access to white institutions is conflated with racial justice. As Miller notes, these texts often “take it for granted that blacks are striving to become completely absorbed into American society.

Issues of black identity are therefore subordinated to the quest for acceptance by white society. …the obstacles to integration are represented by whites outside the mainstream

American traditions of fair play and justice” (107).

38 See Lani Guinier and James Patterson. 55

Nevertheless, as I show, some desegregation stories do subtly question or trouble this liberal interpretation. Moreover, in addition to drawing upon historical events, the desegregation story also draws upon a literary tradition of school stories, especially girls’ school stories, which both adds potentially radical dimensions to the desegregation story and also comes with its own limitations and constraints.

In this chapter, I contend that the “typical” desegregation school story, as I will define it, constitutes its own sub-genre, which extends, revises, and comments upon the existing tradition of the school story. Like earlier school stories, part of the point of the desegregation story is to pay homage to the institution of school. Revisions to this story type may expand the pool of students who “belong” in its narratives, but they also bend reforms to fit existing traditions. One of these traditions is a history of exclusivity, so that any new inclusion must be predicated on a new category of exclusion. 39 Another is the connection of school and empire, so that successful schooling results in a new human resource for the nation. As I discuss throughout the chapter, desegregation stories offer some unexpected and politically contentious solutions to the problems of segregated schooling, including queer friendships and critiques of classroom pedagogy.

Nevertheless, the resolution of the school story requires that the protagonist be welcomed into an authorized tradition and thus that she must relinquish some of the unconventional intellectual pursuits and friendships she has been pursuing.

The three novels I discuss are all girls’ stories, in part because this allows me to draw closer parallels with the tradition of girls’ school stories, and in part because girls’ historical novels have been specifically solicited and promoted in recent decades by the

39 See Beverly Lyons Clark. 56

children’s media industry. 40 All three share the generic conventions I discuss, but their emphasis on different elements varies; at times, considering the heavy Cold War emphasis of one novel (for example) illuminates the same threads, in a subtler manner, in another. The three novels are also quite different in their publication histories and in their negotiation of the always-tricky “happy ending” requirement of the desegregation story, and these differences provide insight into the degree to which direct portrayals of Brown v. Board of Education are managed and shaped by the publishing industry.

The earliest of the novels is Dorothy Sterling’s Mary Jane, published in 1959 as the highly contentious work of forced desegregation was in process. Sterling’s book was quite popular, and was promoted in Scholastic book club flyers for a few decades before going out of print; at the same time, Sterling, a lifelong Leftist, spoke openly about the compromises she made in order to get the book published, and about the work she still felt needed to be done toward racial justice. Mary Jane is based on a compilation of student interviews Sterling had published with a photographer the year before; however, the novel version hews much more closely to traditional school story plots. Mary Jane, the granddaughter of a prominent black biologist, elects to attend the local white junior high school so that she can gain access to their science labs. She is hounded by hostile students and hurt by the quieter racism of many teachers; but when she rescues a squirrel being tortured by some of her classmates, she befriends Sally, a lonely white girl with a similar interest in science. The two girls are unable to pursue their friendship (or to keep their new pet squirrel Furry) outside of school grounds, so they sneak off to the empty backstage dressing rooms of the school. After this hideout is discovered, they are finally

40 See Angela Hubler and Scholastic’s statement on “Dear America.” 57

allowed to form a science club that authorizes them to spend time together and to expand their circle of science-loving friends.

The other two books are both historical novels, aiming to educate young readers about a moment that is now ostensibly ended. Kristin Levine’s Lions of Little Rock , published in 2012 to laudatory reviews but little recognition from educators, is the only one of the three to follow a white protagonist. It also deviates from the usual script by telling the story of Little Rock’s 1958-59 attempt to block desegregation by shutting down the high schools altogether; thus, it implicitly resists an historical narrative of progress, as the school closures happened after the infamous year of the Little Rock Nine and Eisenhower’s federal intervention. The protagonist Marlee is a desperately shy math whiz whose parents passively support integration but fear to speak out. As a junior high student, she attends school while her older sister is sent away to continue her education.

Marlee generally does not speak to anyone outside her own family, but she is charmed by a new girl at school, who wins her trust and then is removed from school when she is revealed to be a light-skinned black girl passing as white. Marlee’s desire to be with Liz proves stronger than her social anxiety, and as the novel continues, her parents’ desire for her to overcome her shyness is paralleled by her own struggle to help them overcome their muteness in the face of racism.

The other historical novel, Andrea Davis Pinkney’s With the Might of Angels, was published in 2011 as part of Scholastic’s popular and lucrative “Dear America” history series for girls. This series encompasses more than 35 books, a spinoff HBO series, mother-daughter book club outreach efforts, and online resources and historical links for teachers. The novel adheres to the conventions Scholastic set for the series: a female

narrator, an epilogue describing the characters’ adult triumphs, an author’s note detailing the research used, and a diary format with the author’s name excised from the cover in order to enhance the apparent authenticity of the “historical” artifact. With the Might of

Angels is the only book of the three written by a black author, but this potential claim to credibility is both emphasized and concealed. Scholastic specifically recruits well-known and established authors for the series, and Pinkney’s author’s note emphasizes her own desegregation story and her own father’s involvement in the Brown decision; yet, as with all of the “Dear America” books, her name does not appear on the cover.

The diary of Dawnie Ray Jones begins in 1954, as Pinkney wished to include some mention of the actual Brown decision to establish a context for young readers.

Immediately after the decision is published, outspoken tomboy Dawnie Rae is one of three students chosen based on test results to integrate the white junior high school; she is the only one whose parents allow her to attend. From the beginning, her driving ambition is to gain the job of Bell Ringer for the school, a post that must be earned through academic achievement. She suffers through an entire semester of antagonism from teachers and students before Gertie, a Jewish girl from New York who is blissfully (and improbably) unacquainted with residential segregation or racism, moves to town and befriends her. The two girls study together for the end-of-year test that will determine who becomes Bell Ringer, and in the end, Gertie earns the highest grade and then somewhat strangely cedes the job to Dawnie Rae. Throughout, Dawnie Rae pours into her diary her other hopes and desires. One is to meet and to emulate—who else?—Jackie

Robinson, whose example of achievement keeps her going on her worst days, and another is to become a doctor, a vocation that will eventually enable her to research

curative therapies for her autistic brother Goober. Of all the novels, this one makes most clear the ways that desegregation is contingent upon achievement according to white norms, both because Dawnie Rae is continually bombarded with high-stakes tests as her tickets to belonging, and also because there is never any question of her beloved brother

Goober participating in desegregation; it is assumed that Dawnie Rae will carve a path that Goober will not follow as she works on his behalf but not by his side.

This chapter is organized somewhat differently than the chapters which follow.

Rather than examining each text sequentially, in depth, I instead discuss each aspect of the desegregation story genre in turn, using examples from the three novels to illuminate my points. First, I provide a background of the school story tradition and outline some of the ways in which the desegregation story comments upon it. The school story always centers on educational and national issues of a particular period, so I follow this section by discussing the pedagogical anxieties and changes prompted by the Cold War, concerns which are often neglected in discussions of school desegregation. I next contend that the romantic friendship at the heart of the desegregation story is the key to its utopian vision; specifically, the romantic friendship offers interracial desire as the true goal of desegregated schooling yet also posits it as supportive of the goal of academic achievement. Finally, I discuss the multifaceted issue of performance, arguing that protagonists of the desegregation story must negotiate how to perform a racialized identity, demonstrating academic prowess in ways that constrain their performances of resistance.

Extending the School Story Tradition

Many literary critics would not, at first, think of the novels in this project as school stories. 41 The school story genre stems from popular nineteenth-century British novels about boys’ boarding schools such as Tom Brown’s Schooldays ; later in the century, feminist advocates of women’s education placed girls within this tradition by writing stories about girls’ schools and women’s colleges, which borrowed elements from the boys’ tradition and also developed additional generic conventions. The canonic plot arc generally follows a middle-class British boy, who is good-natured and athletic but not terribly intellectual, as he enters a respected boarding school with certain traditions and rules to absorb. In his early years, he makes a couple of close friends (often at least one who is able to guide him through the unwritten codes of schoolboy society), looks up to the older boys, and learns the traditions of the school, including how to learn Latin without cheating, how to answer to school authority without tattling, and how to battle the school bully. In due course, he becomes a sixth form boy, distinguishes himself in sports, and graduates with his friends to love his alma mater and serve the British Empire at home or abroad. Education is primarily about learning patriotism (because he has learned to respect the school institution, he can learn to respect the nation) and about gender and class socialization; Latin is necessary because it is a school tradition, but it is the cricket field and not the classroom that trains men for leadership and the work of empire. The girls’ story, as it emerged in Britain and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century, kept the framework of a little microcosmic world within which

41 Mavis Reimer does include some desegregation stories, as well as other day school stories from the United States, in her overview of the school story genre. Beverly Lyon Clark, however, notes that day school stories from the United States tend to remain outside the generic canon because they spill over into settings outside the school; thus, even though key scenes might occur at school, the novels as a whole tend to be grouped with family stories for girls and “bad boy” tales for boys. Juvenile girls’ novels of the 1940s and ‘50s, which center largely around social conflicts in the high school, are described by critics like Anne Scott MacLeod as “teen novels” rather than as school stories, even as she discusses the ways these novels refract postwar schooling. 61

children could have adventures and develop their characters away from family, but revised some of the boys’ story traditions such as learning how to fight a bully. Most importantly for the politics of the early girls’ school stories, they made intellectual excitement and opportunity central to the protagonists’ development rather than depicting them as a boring distraction from outdoor games. 42 During an era when higher education for women was both increasingly common and also bitterly contested, girls’ school stories celebrated their temporary freedom to learn, to pursue their own interests, and to form passionate peer bonds.

Beverly Lyons Clark argues that school stories written across class, race, and gender boundaries often expose important contradictions within the genre, and allow authors alienated from traditional schools and literary traditions to voice critiques and envision alternatives. Desegregation novels often perform this kind of work; sometimes they reinforce school authority in the same ways that canonic school stories do, but they also train the critical gaze of the reader on the inside of the classroom in ways that are often avoided even in canonic girls’ school stories.

Some ideological elements generally cited as key to the canonical school story are clearly retained in the desegregation story. For example, the racist attacks suffered by the protagonists provide a “school of hard knocks” that is clearly unjust, but that also operates as an education in character and responsibility. Desegregation stories tend to validate the contest against the bully as a painful but necessary experience. Such contests were omnipresent; Melba Patillo Beals, one of the Little Rock Nine, recalls a barrage of

42 For a more detailed examination of how girls’ stories revised the tradition, see Beverly Lyons Clark and Gill Frith; for a more detailed history of the school story tradition, see Mavis Reimer. 62

daily violence ranging from ink on her clothes to acid in her face. Beals records that she learned not to bring complaints to the teachers and principals because they remained largely indifferent or blamed her for inciting the violence, and she credits her bodyguard from the 101 st Airborne Division with showing her how to protect herself. As the title of her memoir, Warriors Don’t Cry, indicates, she and her compatriots did indeed undergo a toughening process, becoming hardened warriors rather than innocent schoolchildren; nevertheless, she does not celebrate this transformation, emphasizing her trauma more than her resilience.

In contrast, the protagonists of novels based on Beals’ travails are portrayed as learning how to work through their anger in ways that make them successful. Mary Jane, for example, refuses extra help from her sympathetic French teacher, even though it is a bully in her French class that is causing her grade to suffer, because she fears that Miss

Rousseau merely pities her. Instead, she spends her lonely lunch periods studying how to say “I hate my enemies” in French, thus effectively if somewhat perversely devoting her time to her academics. Mary Jane’s next character lesson is to learn how to trust worthy and sympathetic whites, but she can do this only after retaliating against one of Darlene’s attacks and seeing that Miss Rousseau disciplines them both equally. Pinkney’s novel links violence to character-building even more explicitly. After Dawnie Rae’s good skirt is ruined by her hateful science lab partner, an act that is noticed but unpunished by the teacher, she writes in her diary,

Theresa, I will not pour anything on you. I will not, ‘cause I have a better plan. …I intend to do well in Science. I intend to be a good student at Prettyman so that I can become a doctor. I will not let you stop me from reaching my dream. …This letter should really be a thank-you note. To you, Theresa Ludlow. Thanks to you,

DAWNIE RAE JOHNSON’S INTENTION is stronger than ever! (155, emphasis in original) Variations of this passage occur throughout the novel. Its heavy-handed ideological emphasis on individual “intention” stands in contrast both to Beals’ bitterness about being abandoned by adults in the school and also to Sterling’s insistence that school personnel be involved in discouraging racially motivated bullying. Instead, Dawnie Rae is written as a strong and worthy model for a girls’ history series in part because she takes full (and sole) responsibility for her education. In addition, she processes her anger through “constructive” academic activities, writing in her diary and forming metacognitive resolutions. On the one hand, her character education does not require that she let go of her anger at whites, as Mary Jane, created by a hopeful white radical in the late 1950s, must do; Dawnie Rae merely needs to find some productive channel for it. On the other hand, Dawnie Rae’s diary clearly participates in the “no excuses” rhetoric of the

No Child Left Behind era. Her Science teacher is notably absent from this diary entry as a person who might share Dawnie Rae’s responsibility for her performance in class, and

Prettyman Coburn School is represented as a passive structure, a well-endowed vessel of learning from which Dawnie Rae has only to “intend” to drink. In contrast, critics of

Mary Jane note that the school is portrayed as failing to do its job of teaching Mary

Jane; 43 furthermore, her outbursts of anger are validated en route to her eventual success, showing that she does not “enjoy suffering as if her forbearance were to be admired”

(Bryant 104).

In canonic boys’ school stories, the protagonist’s struggle to develop the independence, discipline, and fortitude to handle a bully on his own is part of the

43 See Saul Bachner. 64

educational opportunity the school offers; it is part of how the school helps to form a bridge between the protected world of the family and the martial conflicts awaiting adult

British men. 44 While desegregation stories do not celebrate the value of racist attacks in the way that Tom Brown’s Schooldays celebrates fisticuffs, the attacks do function similarly, as a way to find some positive outcome from the violence in the supposedly sheltered world of the school. In the case of desegregation stories, violence ostensibly gives black protagonists the tools to succeed in a largely white world; significantly, these tools are academic as well as emotional, so that even the brutality of the white-dominated school renders it a superior academic opportunity. In the process, the school’s authority as an institution is reinforced, even if the authority of individual adults in the school is questionable. As in the canonic stories, the violent school is upheld as a worthy and noble tradition that confers not only legitimacy but also pride onto its graduates; Dawnie Rae longs to ring the bell that calls her racist classmates and teachers to school every morning, and Mary Jane is overjoyed to attend the kinds of athletic events that were sources of fear for Beals and her companions. As I discuss in detail in the following section, the protagonists’ school pride also serves as a bridge to their participation in nation-building, just as Tom Brown and his classmates advanced the imperial expansion of Britain.

Of course, the desegregation story also revises the older school stories, one of the most notable differences being that the black protagonist of the desegregation story must be intellectually talented and ambitious in order to enter the white system, rather than being an unremarkable “everyboy.” Like the handling of violence, this revision confirms

44 Beverly Lyons Clark discusses how the girls’ school and cross-written stories revised (and largely eliminated) this tradition of character-building violence, which is brought back in the desegregation story. 65

the authority of the white-dominated school; Dawnie Rae, Liz, and Mary Jane’s ambition prompt them to seek entry into the best school, which is of course the white one, and their intellectual ability renders them worthy of an “equal” chance at superior opportunity. In this respect, they resemble the marginal white female protagonists of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century school stories, who see the school as an enclave of learning instead of cricket, and who also, Clark argues, can only gain access to the public realm of the school if some other group is excluded in their place. In the case of desegregation stories, this other excluded group is often the “slow” learners. Nevertheless, reading the smart and ambitious protagonist against the backdrop of the canonical school story also allows us to see more clearly the critiques being made of the white school. 45 While segregated white schools are portrayed as preferable to black schools, they are also seen as unsatisfactory to smart white girls; Sally and Marlee both crave the company of intellectual equals until Mary Jane and Liz enter and provide some of the intellectual capital the “superior” white school has been missing.

A second, related difference is that while extracurricular social life is far more visible in canonic school and teen novels than classroom activities, the reverse is often true in desegregation stories. In the Anne of Green Gables series, for example, the reader is given to understand that Anne learns a great deal, earning a scholarship and receiving a

B.A. from Redmond, yet we rarely see the inside of the classroom; Anne’s extracurricular activities tend to involve poetry recitations and dramatic play in the woods rather than

45 Anne Scott MacLeod and Gill Frith both argue that by the mid-twentieth century, girls’ school stories and teen novels had abandoned a political emphasis on intellect and ambition, emphasizing adjustment or escapism rather than ambitious social change. In this respect, desegregation stories featuring female protagonists also comment upon white teen novels published after Brown v. Board of Education . They reject the image of the school as an institution where one learns to please family and boyfriend, and once again offer it as a harbor for girls interested in the life of the mind and in social reform. 66

cricket, but they are still more central to the plot than her algebra lessons, which we see her sighing over without seeing the thing itself. In contrast, a major problem for the protagonist of the desegregation story is often that he or she is barred or at least discouraged from participating in sports and clubs, so that time spent in the classroom becomes correspondingly more central. As Mavis Reimer points out, the traditional school story maintained the mystical authority of the institution in part through the invisibility of the adults in the story. Paradoxically, the invisibility and relative unimportance of the classroom could also shore up the mythology that superior educational opportunities were offered there, in part because classroom practices were rarely exposed to the reader’s view.

Desegregation stories, which render the protagonist’s social integration dependent upon classroom presence, have the potential to complicate this myth. Thus, while Dawnie

Rae continues to affirm that Prettyman School is giving her a better preparation for a medical career than Mary MacLeod Bethune School would have done, she also records pointless, nitpicking English lessons in which she is asked (ironically) to regurgitate the exact definition of a synonym, in contrast to more inspiring lessons at Bethune in which students create presentations about notable black heroes. Similarly, while Mary Jane enters Wilson believing that she will get a first-rate science education there, and finds a sympathetic haven in Mr. Stiller’s science classroom, she and Sally can also immediately predict the results of Mr. Stiller’s experiments, which all have pre-determined outcomes and thus are not particularly scientifically engaging or useful. While parodically lousy lessons certainly abound in earlier school stories for both boys and girls, in desegregation

stories they have more potential to dismantle the rationale for the violence the students undergo.

Finally, the correspondence between the protected juvenile world of the school and the broader national arena that awaits after graduation is more fraught in the desegregation story than in the traditional school story. In British boarding school stories, the cricket field is direct preparation for the Great Game of imperial conflict, while in desegregation stories, the protagonists’ parents frequently lose their jobs as a grim reminder that the character-building struggle to integrate the school may be rewarded with unemployment and poverty both before and after graduation. Reimer suggests that school stories featuring racially marked protagonists tend to present the school, not as an allegory for the wider world, but instead as a force for change, so that the changes within the “little world” of school expand into the adult world after graduation as the schoolchildren carry reform out with them (223). Desegregation stories, however, also function within the contexts of Cold War propaganda and the multicultural curriculum, so that the influence of school upon nation is reversed; the school prepares students to do the work of a desegregated nation, true, but it is implicitly the greatness of the utopian democratic nation that enables the desegregation of the school. In the next section, I explore this connection in more detail.

Cold Warriors and Classroom Practice

Historian Mary Dudziak has established that the early Civil Rights movement gained traction in part because of national security concerns prompted by the Cold War; international newspapers discussed racial violence and segregation in the United States,

and American diplomats faced sharp questions about the nation’s commitment to freedom and democracy around the world. In a war of ideas against the Soviets, with both sides seeking to influence newly decolonized nations in Africa, the Caribbean, and

Southeast Asia, the United States’ treatment of its nonwhite citizens at home was seen as an indication of how it would be likely to treat nonwhite nations under its sway. The

Brown decision, and Eisenhower’s 1957 intervention in the Little Rock crisis, were thus used as propaganda tools to demonstrate the nation’s commitment to justice, its willingness to openly discuss and heal its flaws, and its use of federal force for the protection of its most vulnerable citizens. In fact, both Dudziak and Derrick Bell argue that without the pressure of the Cold War and international opinion, school desegregation might never have occurred.

Education historians also discuss the influence of the Cold War on the desegregating school system, both at the structural and at the classroom level. Andrew

Hartman notes that international pressure was one factor leading to the Brown decision, but that another was the need for intellectual “manpower” and a loss of national human resources due to illiteracy and underfunded segregated schools. Conversely, widespread fear of Communism led to purges of teachers suspected of Leftist or Communist leanings.

Due to the American Communist Party’s history of anti-racist efforts, those teachers most active in redressing racial inequality in the schools were also those most likely to be fired.

Thus, students entering newly desegregated schools faced personnel that were more likely to be racist, or at least to stay silent, due to the same Cold War pressure that had prompted the desegregation. Hartman, David Tyack, and Larry Cuban record that the

Cold War shaped classroom curricula and pedagogy in other ways, too. Most famously,

the Soviets’ 1957 launching of Sputnik crystallized already existing anxiety over the quality of math and science education in American schools; the following year,

Eisenhower passed the National Defense Education Act, channeling federal money to schools solely in order to improve the areas judged most necessary to Cold War national security: math, science, and foreign language education. This money was not tied to desegregation enforcement, but neither was it explicitly tied to gender; as Tyack and

Cuban note, the money intended to develop educational “manpower” also ended up providing many girls with an exposure to science they might not otherwise have had. At the same time, the impetus to beef up American national security through the schools was also reflected in a push toward stricter, more traditionally authoritative teaching, as the

Progressive, child-centered philosophies of the 1930s and ‘40s were increasingly dismissed as overly soft and feminine.

Although the Cold War’s influence on school desegregation and its influence on classroom practice are both well documented, there has been little discussion of how the two factors combine and interact. Desegregation novels offer the opportunity for such a discussion, combining as they do the politics of desegregation with a child protagonist’s experience of the classroom. As I demonstrate in this section, the Cold War backdrop of these novels tends, predictably, to reinforce the idea that the United States offers a utopian ideal of prosperous equality, even if this ideal is not yet realized. The racist impediments suffered by the striving protagonists are thus presented as evils, not only because they block the progress of a sympathetic character, but also because they are shown to weaken the nation. This level of argument is fairly open. What tends to slide away from view is the way that portrayals of pedagogy offer a relatively conservative and

authoritarian model of the classroom as a democratic utopia that has already arrived, a meritocracy in which racial division is solved fairly by selecting the best minds for training and abandoning the others. The contradiction inherent in this (the nation needs to mobilize all its human resources, but all students cannot become national resources) reinforces the school as both a utopian and an exclusive institution. In this section, I focus on Mary Jane as a product of the Cold War and on The Lions of Little Rock as a novel whose Cold War nostalgia both shores up and undercuts its antiracist politics.

Due to the need to manage international perceptions of race relations in the

United States, images of desegregation were tightly managed in the years following 1954.

The shape of the desegregation novel genre was affected at its inception by this pressure.

Tender Warriors, Sterling’s 1958 collection of photographs and interviews with students in newly desegregating schools, went quickly out of print in part because it was disapproved for export and refused for the Informational Media Guaranty Program that would have made it lucrative for sale abroad. Tender Warriors includes blunt statements from children about being pelted with books and eggs and threatened with knives, nooses, and ice picks. It ends with a condemnation of continuing adult interference, racist teaching, and the exclusion of black students from extracurricular activities.

Unsurprisingly, Mary Jane, which was published in seven European countries, presents only selective information from these interviews. Mary Jane and Fred are permitted to join extracurricular activities, which Sterling knew very well was unrepresentative if not inaccurate, and the violence they encounter is mostly verbal, with occasional episodes of being tripped in aisles and hallways.

In a speech to educators, Sterling openly questioned her decision to censor Mary

Jane :

When you begin to write the truth, you bump into all sorts of obstacles. Consider the rule of the happy or at least upbeat ending. Should we tell children that in real life people do not always live happily ever after? I faced this problem in Mary Jane and didn’t really solve it properly. I compromised by letting her make one friend in school and ending with the hope that she would make more next year. When the book was published, the bright, warmhearted little girl who lives next door asked, “Is it really that bad?” “Much worse,” I answered. “Why, today’s paper tells about the bombing of the home of an eight-year-old boy because he went to a ‘white’ school.” ‘”Oh, don’t tell me about it!” she said and ran home. Should she be told? I think so. (“The Soul of Learning” 234) Sterling emphasizes not only that publishers and federal agencies pressure authors to present falsely innocent stories to children, but also that such cumulative pressure has destructive consequences; her young neighbor has been so conditioned not to expect disturbing information that she seems likely to grow into an adult who refuses to hear or to acknowledge it. Sacvan Bercovitch, in his study of early American texts, theorizes that dreams of a utopian nation have historically functioned as a way for the United States to incorporate and thereby defuse the threat posed by radical protest—a process that simultaneously defangs and actually elicits radical protest. Thus, in this speech as in

Mary Jane, Sterling frames her blistering critiques of white supremacy as serving the ultimate good of the nation. She asks, “Increasingly isolated from their darker contemporaries, how well are these white children being prepared for the larger adult world in which they are globally a minority?” (233). She thus makes the case that open and democratic airing of the nation’s sins will ultimately prepare white children to function as part of a better, more fulfilled American democracy abroad—just as Dudziak demonstrates the Cold War propagandists argued.

This kind of balancing act between protest and recuperation is especially evident in Sterling’s portrayal of Mary Jane’s education. The two teachers who treat Mary Jane fairly are her foreign language teacher Miss Rousseau and her science teacher Mr. Stiller.

These subjects, not coincidentally, are two of the areas identified as necessary for national security and resource-building, yet they are also places where Sterling can insert her own dissonant ideas. The fiery Miss Rousseau is named for a philosopher whose work on political liberties and republican education influenced the French Revolution, and she teaches Mary Jane a language spoken in many decolonizing nations of Africa.

When Mary Jane decides to enter the white school, she declares that she will be “‘like some ambassador from a foreign country’” (15), educating the white students in necessary knowledge about black students and in skills for getting along. On the one hand, she is already learning how to fulfill a role in national security; on the other hand, she understands that she is actually a foreigner in her own nation.

Science, too, had a special valence for radical Leftists as well as for conservative education critics. Julia Mickenberg notes that “an educational program designed to bolster U.S. military and economic strength in opposition to the Soviet Union …provided major benefits to people who were actively opposed to the Cold War, who were critical of the ‘military-industrial complex,’ and who challenged the idea that schools were key components of the national security apparatus” (176). Leftist and Marxist children’s authors, including Sterling (who wrote science picture books as well as novels and black history books), believed that the principles of rational scientific reasoning could empower children to look critically and dispassionately at social problems and to embrace change as an inevitable part of life. Antiracist education was part of this project for social change

through science. Books on blood, for example, emphasized that children with different skin tones might share the same blood type. On a more general level, the books encouraged children to ask questions about their everyday assumptions about the world and to analyze how these realities might change. And yet, as Mickenberg also emphasizes, these books were solicited and distributed precisely because they “fit into a larger educational, military, and corporate scheme” (179).

It therefore seems significant that the quality of Mary Jane’s science education shifts from to the beginning to the end, and from an informal setting to the formal setting of the classroom. Mary Jane comes to school already fairly knowledgeable in science because her grandfather is a distinguished biologist known for his work on agriculture and conservation. During her summers on his farm, she learns an approach to science that involves open-minded experimentation and appreciation for natural cycles, even when they are inconvenient. Grampa feeds the weeds in his garden, having discovered ways to extract rubber and oil from the wild plants other farmers see as useless. He even allows rabbits to eat some of his cabbages and chicken hawks to steal the occasional chicken.

The rabbits he merely likes, but he observes that the chicken hawks do a great deal of good by eating grasshoppers and mice; thus, his dispassionate observation of nature is seen to produce more interesting and useful discoveries than a more controlling, profit- minded approach.

In contrast, at Wilson High, Mary Jane and Sally follow steps set out in a textbook for experiments with predetermined, predictable ends (they already know what happens to beans planted in shallow soil and given little water). Grampa’s farm teems with all kinds of animals, both tame and wild, but Mr. Stiller’s science classroom cannot

accommodate the girls’ half-wild squirrel Furry, whose behavior is fascinating but far too unpredictable to be tolerated in the school. In the end, the girls must substitute their care of Furry, whose injury brought them together and prompted them to learn about veterinary care, feeding, and animal behavior, for controlled experiments on white mice from a hospital. What really interests the girls is simply being around animals, observing them and interacting with them, but, they realize, “For a science fair, it wasn’t enough to keep white mice in a cage. You had to do experiments with them” (211). Their eventual solution provides the novel with its ambivalent ending: they do a behavioral learning experiment and train the mice to run through a maze.

In some ways, this experiment seems to validate Sterling’s faith that rational scientific thought can address social problems like racism. They are aided in their project by Randall, an avid science enthusiast who stares at Mary Jane: “It wasn’t an unfriendly stare. It was as if he had never seen anyone like her before and was trying to figure her out” (214). Evidently, Randall’s dispassionate observation leads him to the rational conclusion that Mary Jane is worth welcoming to Wilson High, because he shares his resources with the girls and helps them build their maze. When the girls realize that winning the science fair will force the newspaper to print a photo of interracial friendship on the front page, it is Randall who suggests that they post a big sign above their experiment reading, “IF WHITE MICE CAN LEARN, SO CAN YOU” (218). The other white students in the Science Club laugh; they, like the white mice, have already learned to overcome their fear and confusion in response to change. Nevertheless, running white mice through a maze to fetch a treat placed there by an experimenter is hardly a liberatory or inspiring metaphor for desegregated education. Given Sterling’s own ambivalence

about her “happy” ending, the experiment is perhaps intentionally disappointing, at least in the sense that successful desegregation remains out of reach, floating in the future; not all the white mice in town have learned yet, although they might if given the opportunity.

Beyond this, though, the metaphor of behavioral learning is left unexamined. The novel closes with a contained utopia of rational scientists democratically overcoming racial prejudice in the classroom, when in fact the learning celebrated is a stilted and narrow education far from Grampa’s open-minded quest to learn from weeds. 46 In order for Mary

Jane to be a foreign ambassador and train white mice in the service of her country, she not only substitutes the latter kind of education for the former, she also celebrates this substitution as a successful experiment.

The Lions of Little Rock performs a different kind of elision, celebrating the democratic meritocracy of the classroom without considering how those with less merit will function as part of the wider democracy. Unlike Mary Jane, which indirectly references Cold War concerns by echoing an emphasis on science and foreign language,

Levine’s historical novel directly discusses its Cold War setting, placing the rhetoric of post-Sputnik anxiety against the anti-Communist rhetoric of Southern segregationists.

When the subject of Communism is first introduced, these rhetorics are connected. She says, “When our teacher told us last year that our country needs more of us to study math,

I think she meant more boys. I watched all those talks on TV about the satellite really closely, and I didn’t see any experts who were women” (6). She is recalling these previous televised messages because her family is in the midst of watching the evening

46 Contemporary education critic Paul Goodman also noted, and lambasted, the replacement of an open and playful approach to science education with one governed by pre-determined results. Another educator, John Holt, criticized versions of Progressive teaching that set up “discovery” learning with circumscribed right answers. 76

news together, and “Governor Faubus was on television, giving some sort of talk about

Southern pride and communists” (6). From the beginning, then, the fight against

Communism is understood, first of all, to take place in the classroom, and second of all, to exclude both girls and black students.

Patriotic rhetoric is thus compromised; however, the text airs the areas of needed reform while upholding the ultimate nationalist goal of American supremacy. Marlee burns to use her prodigious math talent to further the American Space Race, and the enlightened men around her realize what a boon she could be to the nation. Her brother

David, confessing his own inadequacies in math, tells her, “‘It’s up to you now to beat those Soviets” (50), and her math teacher “says he sleeps better at night knowing there are girls like me to invent those satellites” (142). Unsurprisingly, Marlee discovers that

Liz’s mother is also a math whiz who longs to design American satellites, and she realizes that “not only were there no women among those scientists on TV, there weren’t any Negroes either” (93). This conclusively establishes for young readers that both segregation and sexism were holding the nation back in its war against Communism.

Thus, when Marlee increasingly encounters segregationists protesting that desegregation is Communist, the patriotic fight against Communism appears to split into two, with a

“fake” enemy produced by reactionary elements in the South, and a “real” and worthy enemy abroad against whom the nation needed to deploy all of its students equally.

American Communists were, in fact, quite active in the fight against segregation, but the evil of “real” Communism is never questioned. 47 More troublingly, neither is the

47 Dorothy Sterling, when interviewed by Julia Mickenberg, did not confirm that she had been a member of the Communist party, but “suggested, only half-jokingly, that any book published by a white writer before 1965 and sympathetic to African Americans was probably written by a Communist or former Communist, so constricted was the political climate” (10). 77

worthiness of American scientific supremacy; despite the many references to the satellites and spaceships Marlee will build, there is not a single mention of a nuclear weapon. Her father is fired by the state for his participation in an interracial organization, but the House Un-American Activities Committee is completely absent from her family’s conversations, even those in which her father educates her about the complexities of current events.

It can be argued that having Marlee question the overall project of the Cold War would probably be ahistorical. Nevertheless, as critics Angela Hubler and Anne Scott

MacLeod point out, historical fiction for children is frequently presentist in an attempt to provide characters who are good role models for contemporary youth. MacLeod says,

“Their protagonists experience their own societies as though they were time-travelers, noting racism, sexism, religious bigotry, and outmoded belief as outsiders, not as people of and in their cultures.” Critiques of ahistoricity tend to focus on attitudes toward gender and race. Hubler, especially, singles out the Scholastic “Dear America” series, saying,“Particularly problematic is the substitution of an ahistorical conception of female voice for the representation of female historical experience” (99). The Lions of Little

Rock is not part of the “Dear America” series (though this statement certainly applies to

With the Might of Angels ), but Hubler’s criticism describes Levine’s novel fairly well.

The nearly mute Marlee, in fact, literally finds her voice through rejecting gender norms.

If historical representation is bent in a more “enlightened” direction for gender and race, but not for the questioning of imperialist national projects, it is because the beneficence of national power remains unquestionable within this genre—and, perhaps, within a novel written and published during the War on Terror. In Civil Rights narratives, the

federal government can be portrayed as being on the “right” side of history, sending troops to Little Rock and marshals to New Orleans. Portraying it as being on the right side of history in many other facets of the Cold War is trickier, however, so that many details need to be suppressed in order for the reader to wholeheartedly embrace Marlee’s dream of fighting the Cold War in interracial harmony. Sara Schwebel notes that such suppressions are common, saying that “historical novels are seen as an effective tool for cultivating democratic citizenship in a modern, multicultural nation” (33). In addition, this cultivation of citizenship is central to the school story genre, where the structure of the utopian school provides insight into desired models of citizenship.

Marlee’s school is an unfulfilled utopia, of course, because it remains segregated.

To Levine’s credit, she avoids a celebratory or triumphant ending; Marlee realizes at the end that after exhausting and anxious months of activism, only five black students are allowed to attend white schools, and only at the high school level. The brief happy period when Liz secretly desegregates the junior high nevertheless points toward the utopian system Marlee desires. This utopian system is reformed through racial integration, but in all other respects it preserves a relatively conservative hierarchy. Successful student citizens need not be white or gender normative, but they must be academically able and socially “normal.” Those who are not must either be educated into the desired mold or expelled.

Aside from her time with Liz, the utopian moments Marlee experiences in school are due to Mr. Harding, her new young male math teacher who “[gets] to work right away” (14)and injects some needed academic rigor into Marlee’s flabby American math education. Mr. Harding’s class is portrayed as an accessible meritocracy; Marlee

immediately notices that he calls on the girls as often as the boys (she counts). When she avoids the cafeteria after Liz’s departure, he eagerly adopts her as his protégée and teaches her high school algebra during lunch, a kind of intellectual nurturing she clearly craves and thrives on. In the meantime, Marlee’s tall, athletic crush JT, who barely knows his times tables, has finagled her into doing his math homework for him so that he won’t have to repeat seventh grade. Mr. Harding, it eventually transpires, knows of the cheating all along, but waits patiently for Marlee to develop enough citizenship to confess and for

JT to recognize that he needs to repeat the grade. Strangely, despite his obvious enthusiasm and strong work ethic, Mr. Harding at no point offers the struggling JT extra help; his spare time is reserved for Marlee, who deserves it due to her natural ability. As

Andrew Hartman argues, this kind of meritocratic division of educational resources was called for in the years after Sputnik as the best way to address the perceived mediocrity of

American schools. Even at the time, this approach was criticized as legitimizing inequality and leading to the exclusion of “inferior” students, setting up citizenship status as a competition rather than a birthright. 48 Notably, the idea of a meritocracy as a utopian school model continues to be popular, and to be accompanied by the rhetoric of national security; 49 in Levine’s novel, it is so naturalized as to go unremarked.

Marlee herself, however, does not begin the novel as an ideal citizen student, despite her academic talent. She must be made more conventionally sociable, recognizably “normal.” Marlee is permitted, in fact encouraged, to defy gender norms as part of her growth process; in addition to pursuing her love of math, she abandons her romantic pursuit of the masculine JT in preference for Liz, and, secondarily, for short and

48 See Kenneth Clark and Bowles and Gintis. 49 See Hertberg-Davis, Ravitch, and Plucker, Burroughs, and Song. 80

decidedly non-alpha Little Jimmy. Most importantly, she finds her “female voice,” as

Hubler puts it. Finding voice in this text, however, involves disability erasure as well as feminist liberation, because Marlee is not merely demure, in an over-performance of gender norms; she is terrified of social contact to the point that one character describes her as “the mute girl” (24) and a Publishers Weekly review calls her “almost pathologically shy.” Marlee is saved from pathology by Liz, who uses a combination of bribery (with a math book, of course) and coaching to help Marlee overcome her fear of a class presentation, and by Mr. Harding, who draws her out about algebra. Through a combination of feminist inclusion and racial inclusion, therefore, Marlee surmounts her social pathology and eventually functions as a “normal” student citizen who can participate in the full life of the school and community, making new friends, giving class presentations, and taking part in community activism. In the meantime, Liz, who gives

Marlee lessons in speaking out, is also socialized to get along in more conventional ways.

In contrast to Marlee, whose gender-defiant coming into voice as a white girl is celebrated, Liz learns from Marlee how to be silent and bite her tongue on her witty and strident retorts. In a different way, Liz is compelled to adapt her racial performance to the demands of the school system; she learns to be quiet and forbearing, not in response to threats of white violence, but in order to succeed at the segregated school without being goaded and distracted from her studies. 50

Marlee’s foil, on the other end of the social extreme, is JT’s brother Red, a charming and athletic high school hero who pulls the wings off butterflies for fun and beats his mother and younger brother. Red is also an unreformed racist, and when he

50 See Patricia Hill Collins and Catherine Rottenberg for more detailed explanations of how gender norms interact with racial norms. 81

finally comes under suspicion for throwing dynamite through the window of the black preacher’s home, his father forces him to join the army at the age of seventeen, a solution that provides a kind of dubious resolution. Although the protagonists desperately need

Red removed from their lives, he is represented as a racist sociopath so incurable he cannot be included in any version of a safe and reformed school; giving him a gun and sending him to represent American justice and democracy in Africa, Southeast Asia, and

South America is clearly not an ideal solution. While Marlee, in the enclosed world of

Mr. Harding’s classroom, works toward peaceful intellectual Cold War victories, the student who cannot be normalized is ejected from utopian educational possibilities—but not from use for national security. Thus, the need to be socialized into the meritocratic classroom obscures the fact that the “little world” of the school neither directly matches the demands of empire, as in traditional school stories, nor functions as a way for the

“little world” to reform the bigger one. Instead, those excluded from the desegregated school disappear from the narrator’s consciousness in order to preserve the idea that the utopian school will lead directly to the utopian nation. Furthermore, while gender defiance and racial diversity are welcome in the proposed utopian school, differences due to academic ability and social behaviors are not.

Romantic Friendships and White Desires

Much segregationist resistance to Brown crystallized around fears of interracial dating and sex. 51 In response, many black students who participated in integration argued that their desires were solely educational and not social—a plausible claim, considering the formidable loneliness they were prepared to endure in order to desegregate hostile

51 See James Patterson. 82

schools. Footage of Ernest Green shows him telling a group of white students that he does not attend school to socialize. James Baldwin, asking the mother of another student why she has chosen to have her son attend the white school, quotes her as saying, “‘Well, it’s not because I’m so anxious to have him around white people.’ Then she laughed. ‘I really don’t know how I’d feel if I was to carry a white baby around who was calling me

Grandma. . . . White people say,’ the mother went on, ‘that that’s all a Negro wants. I don’t think they believe that themselves’” (“A Fly in Buttermilk” 190). At the same time, many activists, both black and white, argued that the situation for white students was different; they ought to be coming to school to socialize with black students, and the knowledge of their own racism and privilege they might gain through interracial conversation would further American education more than any shiny new textbooks might. 52

Children’s literature in general, and historical fiction in particular, tends to heavily censor representations of sexual desire. 53 For this reason, desegregation stories for children would seem to offer an ideal combination of the denial of interracial desire on the one hand, and the need for interracial emotional connections on the other. Girls and boys form same-sex friendships across interracial lines that often provide the emotional core of the narrative and the happy ending of the successful desegregation story. Once the special friendship is formed, both black and white protagonists feel more at home in the school, and consequently benefit more from their education. These relationships are never openly queer; as Kathryn Bond Stockton observes, children are compelled either to

52 See James Baldwin, Kenneth Clark, and Dorothy Sterling; Phyllis Palmer’s account of Walter Chambers’ Brotherhood Camps; and reflections many years after Brown by Derrick Bell and bell hooks. 53 See Perry Nodelman and Sara Schwebel. 83

be asexual or to be budding heterosexuals, so that the same-sex friendships in these novels can be read as attempts to avoid confronting the possibility that students attending desegregated schools might want to date each other.

Nevertheless, even before the recent advent of more explicit “problem novels” and coming-out stories for gay teens, school stories widely read by both boys and girls were always charged with homoeroticism through the portrayal of special chumships. In girls’ stories, numerous literary critics and historians have pointed out that these friendships have functioned politically to construct the girls’ school as a place where girls and women might avoid the constraints of heterosexual marriage and housekeeping and instead grow and develop intellectually with a community of like minds. 54 The connection between education and same-sex love is not coincidental, but mutually constitutive. Lillian Faderman suggests that women who loved other women sometimes chose higher education precisely because that path would lead to a career, ruling out marriage and legitimizing the life choice to form a household with another career woman.

Conversely, Diana Fuss suggests that desire moves through “channels of group identification” (123), so that sharing a teacher’s passion for learning also opens up passions for the teacher herself and for the other students who share the same goals and enthusiasms. A successful education—one that awakens intellectual desires—will inevitably awaken sexual desires as well.

Romantic friendships in girls’ desegregation stories sometimes function similarly to establish a politically contentious institution as an idyll; the fearsome desegregated school, like the suspect girls’ college, is represented as a haven for shared intellectual

54 See Jane Hunter, Lillian Faderman, Diana Fuss, Marah Gubar, and Corinne Blackmer. 84

excitement, which both nurtures and naturalizes the friendships formed under its roof.

Nevertheless, the desegregation story also alters this trope. Whereas the school in the earlier girls’ stories enables alternate lifestyles and loves for the women under its roof, the school in the desegregation story instead tames and domesticates the more radical desires and alternatives it stimulates. Furthermore, the structural power imbalance between black girls and white ones in desegregation stories alters the trope of the romantic friendship. In white-authored stories, the romantic friendship seems much the same as it does in the earlier girls’ school narratives, in which passion is fully reciprocal.

In black-authored novels, however, the white girl is portrayed as far more desirous and invested than her black friend. 55 Baldwin’s interviewee says that whites don’t even believe their own rhetoric about black desire. Desegregation stories open this statement up further, suggesting that white liberal integrationists want, not merely to alleviate fear and misunderstanding, but to imagine that their own desire for black contact is reciprocated.

Kathryn Bond Stockton observes that proto-lesbian children are often paired with dogs, suggesting that “animal/child affectionate bondings can offer opportunities . . . for children’s motions inside their delay, making delay a sideways growth the child in part controls for herself, in ways confounding her parents and her future” (90). In both

Sterling’s and Levine’s novels, animal/child bonds not only facilitate queer interracial loves and help the protagonists to alter the national future, they also function to make school seem the “natural” place for these “natural” interests. Nevertheless, these animal bonds are not with dogs, as are the relationships Stockton discusses, but with wild and

55 Although I only discuss Pinkney’s novel in detail, this pattern also applies to Mildred Pitts Walter’s Girl on the Outside and, to a lesser extent, to Jacqueline Woodson’s I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This . 85

potentially destructive animals that the children cannot control. Moreover, while Stockton cites animal care as one form of delay, school is famously another form of childhood delay, one that is controlled (tenuously) by adults and by institutional traditions. In girls’ school literature as described by Fuss, Gubar, and Faderman, girls use voluntary school attendance as Stockton’s lesbian children use their dogs. In Sterling’s and Levine’s novels, compulsory school attendance reinforces heterosexual delay, but also tames dangerously unpredictable interracial loves.

In Mary Jane , it is Furry, and not academic excitement in the classroom, that brings Mary Jane and Sally together; in fact, it is their joint effort to care for Furry that leads to the discovery of their shared interest in biology, and not the other way around.

Although it is Mary Jane who rescues Furry from bullying boys and splints his leg, Sally quickly assumes equal responsibility for his care, defying the racist Mothers’ League that she had previously been afraid to confront. After the Mothers’ League protests Furry’s being used as the school mascot, Mr. Stiller ejects him from the Science Room where he had been allowed to convalesce. Sally asks, innocently, “‘Whatever are we going to do now?’ Mary Jane scowled. There was Sally with that ‘we’ stuff again. It was her squirrel

Darlene’s mother objected to. Her squirrel who had no home” (132). When Mary Jane asserts that she will return to Grampa’s farm and take Furry with her, leaving Wilson altogether, Sally protests that she’d miss her only friend. From this point on, the goal of the novel becomes, not for Furry to have a home (which he eventually finds), but for the girls to have a home in the school ; ejecting Furry might have driven Mary Jane back to the segregated system and scored a victory for the Mothers’ League, but Sally’s

assumption of the word “we” renders Furry a subject of interracial concern who cannot be properly cared for under segregation.

And so, Mary Jane and Sally do infiltrate the school with Furry, as an illicit black- white-animal threesome, hiding during lunch and after hours in a backstage dressing room and pretending to be outlaws for justice and equality, like Robin Hood. They jointly furnish the room with comforts and treats, so that Sally says, “‘It’s like this is our home, yours and Furry’s and mine . . . I mean, everybody’s against the three of us being together. Your mother, I don’t think she really wants me to come to your house, and mine

– ‘” (148). This outlaw school “home” is where they discover that they both like biographies and folk songs, where they envision their future lives as a biologist and a doctor who will live together on an animal farm, and where they discuss the problems of racial prejudice. This cozy extra-curricular idyll functions much as the earlier girls’ school story friendships did; as critic Deyonne Bryant notes, it is both “puppy love” (111) and also meant “to establish the black girl’s budding feminist identity and reinforce the idea that girls could and should pursue educational opportunities and careers established traditionally for men” (112). The language of “home” and family resonates not only with queer love, but also with the language of antiracist activism during the early Civil Rights movement. As Phyllis Palmer notes, the activists who ran interracial Brotherhood Camps encouraged the formation of intense emotional bonds, believing that only when interracial friends thought of each other as family would they be willing to defend each other against slurs and injustices. Thus, this section of the novel establishes a utopian vision of what the school ought to be—an intellectually charged, homelike place where the natural bonds between black girls and white girls and the animals they love can be

nurtured and thrive. In the literal sense, the school already is this place, since the girls have no other space in their heavily segregated town to sit together and talk.

Nevertheless, their outlaw status cannot continue, as Furry is growing increasingly restive and the time for the winter theater production is approaching. In moving their friendship from the margins of the school to the center, the school benefits both intellectually and socially, and so, in a sense, do the girls; however, their bond with Furry cannot survive this move, and neither can their exclusivity.

The mechanism for transforming the girls from outlaws to legitimate friends is the

Junior Science Club, which Mr. Stiller helps them to start explicitly as a way for them to spend time together without getting in trouble. As it turns out, a number of other alienated students share their intellectual interests, so that their social and academic worlds expand while the school is able to offer more academic rigor in a much-needed area. At the same time, Furry is exiled to Grampa’s farm, where Sally is not allowed to visit, and the Science Club and the tame white mice that replace their outlaw home are clearly a second-best solution. As Mr. Stiller points out, “‘Don’t figure that a science club will solve everything. You’ll only have one meeting a week.’ . . . ‘Couldn’t we have experiments and stuff that we work on here other days?’ ‘Whoa! Wait a minute.’ Mr.

Stiller held up his hand, trying to sound stern. ‘If you work here, I have to keep an eye on you. And I can’t stay every single blessed afternoon’” (201). Legitimizing interracial friendship within school walls, like learning science in school, comes at a price, as the girls substitute participation in the more regimented science club for what they really want, which is open and flexible time to spend time together with Furry. Like the ending of the novel, this solution to the girls’ problems echoes Sterling’s stated ambivalence

about desegregation; on the one hand, she deeply desires it, and on the other, she recognizes that it has not sufficiently addressed the deep-seated problem of racism. In

Mary Jane, thus, the school is the starting point for interracial conversation and friendship, but it also fails to sufficiently sustain and support the specific kind of interracial relationships needed, promoting tame contact instead of the kind of loving, passionate family Sally and Mary Jane want.

In The Lions of Little Rock , the girls’ trajectory is the opposite; they are exiles moving to the margins of the school, rather than outlaws being incorporated. It is in the portrayal of their friendship that Levine betrays ambivalence about the school as a utopia.

Marlee and Liz do form a friendship through a classroom project, pairing up for an

Arkansas history presentation in part because they recognize each other as hard workers and they are both tired of group projects in which they are saddled with all the effort. Liz diversifies the curriculum, even when she is passing as white, suggesting that they research the Quapaw tribe of Arkansas rather than colonial white history. The two girls meet at the zoo, a place they both love, so that Marlee can practice giving her presentation to the animals, and as they talk about how they like to listen to the lions roaring at night, Marlee thinks, “For the first time, I understood what Judy was saying about finding someone who shares interests with you. . . . For the first time, I thought I might understand what it was like to have a real friend” (41). She already identifies with the lions, telling the reader that she imagines what it might be like to “just yell out whatever I was thinking or feeling and not care one whit who heard. . . . But by the time I wake up in the morning, the lions are always silent, and so am I” (20). Throughout, the lions reflect the girls’ friendship. On the first day they talk about the lions, the animals

are unusually playful and happy, but Liz asks, “‘Don’t you think they’d rather be chasing a zebra across the savanna?’” (41). She is referring, of course, to the lions’ captivity, but in light of segregation, her remark also suggests that the happiness of Marlee’s segregated social world is deceptive and constrained. Later, after Liz has been exposed and their friendship forbidden, they “accidentally” meet sometimes in front of the lion cage on

Tuesday afternoons, having just happened to visit the zoo at the same time. When Liz is targeted by a bomb threat, she tells Marlee that they need to move on and start seeing other people—that is, make friends at their segregated schools—but they meet one last time on the bench in front of the cages. In this scene, the lions themselves are never even mentioned, and their disappearance as a shared concern reflects the erasure of the girls’ special bond. And finally, after Marlee has effectively lost Liz, but gained her voice, she conquers her fear of the high dive at the still segregated pool by imagining that Liz and her family’s black maid are at the pool with her; after she jumps, she imagines the lions roaring.

The goal in all this, of course, is for Marlee to learn to roar; equally important, however, is that both girls remain caged and kept apart. Even during the brief period when they attend school together, Liz recognizes, as Marlee does not, that the utopian school, like the utopian zoo, is a falsehood. In Sterling’s novel, Furry serves as an intermediary between the races until the school is ready and fit to fulfill that function; in

Levine’s, when the school refuses to shelter interracial friendship, no animal intermediary can delay heterosexual adulthood long enough to keep them together. Liz begins dating a boy at her new school, and Marlee reluctantly agrees to give Little Jimmy a chance, hoping for a day “over the rainbow” (290) when she can be with Liz again. In some

ways, her increasing social bravery is presented as a necessary growth from a queer, illicit love into social “normality.” Even before Liz severs ties, Marlee curtails her idyllic math lunches with Mr. Harding in order to confront the social whirl of the cafeteria.

Significantly, she explains to Liz that, having learned to talk to Liz and Mr. Harding, she is ready to practice talking to more intimidating people: “‘If I change, maybe other things will change too. Maybe Sally will be nicer. . . . Maybe the schools will reopen!’ . . .

[Daddy] had said that things could be different in Little Rock, if only the right people could find their voice. I wanted to be one of those people” (164). Childhood delay, in one sense, is not desired, any more than further delay of integration is; childhood queer love prompts Marlee toward mature moral behavior, rather than furthering her sideways growth into interracial friendship and algebra. At the same time, Marlee is devastated by the loss of Liz, and her bravery is less a natural and mature outgrowth of her love than a desperate attempt to save it. In this sense, the desegregated school is deeply desired as a future institution of delay, floating as the alternate possibility “over the rainbow” where

Liz and Marlee could have been together. Because this option does not exist for them, as it does in Sterling’s novel, Marlee does not think about the ways that the school would still constrain their friendship, just as she does not give much thought to the cages placed around the lions. Thus, Levine’s novel both illustrates the American school’s distance from the earlier utopian girls’ colleges, which bring smart (white) girls together in a way that segregated schools cannot, and also reinforces the ideal of the school as a place where that kind of intellectual, sideways-growing delay can happen.

In both of these novels, the desire for access to white education begins the desegregation story, but what sustains desegregation efforts through obstacles and

violence is the desire to preserve the nurturing power of an interracial friendship.

Pinkney’s novel comments upon this trope by presenting it in a very different way.

Dawnie Rae and Gertie are, according to form, both smart and ambitious girls who question gender norms as well as racial barriers. In contrast to the other pairs, who concoct elaborate plots in order to be together and who share stimulating conversations about their self-directed academic interests, Dawnie Rae’s friendship with Gertie is quite lukewarm both intellectually and emotionally. Dawnie writes often in her diary about her dream of becoming a doctor, and Gertie intrigues her in part because she has witnessed black accomplishments that Dawnie herself would like to see; Gertie has seen Jackie

Robinson play in Brooklyn, and she has met black doctors, talking of these things in a way that seems to make Dawnie’s dreams real and reachable. Yet Dawnie never records any conversations in which she and Gertie actually discuss their aspirations. The two girls study together for the single comprehensive year-end test that will determine their classroom jobs for the following year, but outside of baseball, they never spontaneously share their interests with each other in the way that Sally and Mary Jane discover each other’s enthusiasm for animals or Liz and Marlee explore math and Quapaw Indian culture together. Their intellectual partnership is governed and overshadowed by a high- stakes examination. In defiance of the assumption that all snowpeople must be men, they make a snow lady together and dress her up for “going places” (255),but the strictures of gender, race, and ethnicity (Gertie is targeted by anti-Semitic harassment) that might hamper them from going places are topics Dawnie Rae discusses with her diary, not with

Gertie. After Gertie gives the Bell Ringer job to Dawnie, she writes in her diary, “Gertie

Feldman will be my true good friend for a long time” (286), but this is the most

affectionate statement she ever makes. It is a far cry from the longing expressed by

Marlee or the cozy family romance shared by Mary Jane and Sally. Despite Dawnie

Rae’s liking for Gertie, she never invites her over or wishes to have more time with her.

Gertie, in contrast, is continually making overtures to Dawnie Rae, offering her candy and finally even her coveted Bell Ringer job.

A number of black writers commenting on the legacy of segregation and racism note that whites often perceive reciprocal friendship and open dialogue where there is, in fact, suspicion and suppression. James Baldwin writes in 1965 that “a great deal of one’s energy is expended in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see. . . .

What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since in the main they seem to lack the energy to change this condition they would rather not be reminded of it” (“White Man’s

Guilt” 320). 56 Robin Bernstein calls this historical will not to see “racial innocence,” and argues that in children’s literature, a white child’s obliviousness to social categories could

“transfer innocence from white childhood to a political endeavor: abolition or post-

Reconstruction romanticization of slavery” (6)—or school desegregation, in later decades. In fairness to Sterling and Levine, the characters of Sally and Marlee are explicitly divested of their innocence and implicated in the responsibility to see and change conditions of racial injustice. Sally’s failure to notice the segregation of her favorite park is depicted as hurtful ignorance, not innocence, and Marlee becomes increasingly uncomfortable with her white community’s tendency to placate and reassure rather than to bear responsibility. Baldwin writes that most whites will not dare to open a

56 See also Kenneth Clark and bell hooks’ “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” 93

dialogue because it must “become a personal confession—a cry for help and healing”

(323). Certainly, these confessions of responsibility and cries for healing can be read into the interracial friendships in Sterling’s and Levine’s novels. Nevertheless, these narratives also imagine that interracial friendship will inevitably produce honest dialogue, and that such dialogue will result in healing on the one side and forgiveness on the other; this vision, in fact, is one of the utopian desires that drive these novels. Pinkney depicts interracial friendship as driven by a different kind of desire—not the desire for dialogue, but the desire for consumption.

In her recent study Racial Indigestion, Kyla Wazana Tompkins argues that the white body politic in the United States is in part constructed through fantasies of edible nonwhite subjects, which are desired, consumed, and digested by white citizens in need of nourishment. Tompkins does not, however, theorize a simple relationship between dominators and victims, eaters and eaten; she also contends that “black bodies stick in the throat of the (white) body politic, refusing to be consumed as part of the capitalist logic of racism” (8). She traces the ways that mouths are used for talking as well as for eating, and notes that scenes of eating are also comic scenes of sociality in which class, race, and even species boundaries are often upended and inverted. “Sauciness” from a black subject, then, becomes one way in which black subjects “feed” white ones ideas they do not want to consume and statements they find hard to digest (9). Tompkins focuses on the nineteenth century, but her formulations of consumption and dialogue are useful for thinking about the dynamics of romantic friendship in desegregation stories. Not only are these narratives saturated with white desire for healing and well-being through communion with a black subject, they often feature scenes of interracial eating as a way

to emphasize how the friendship upends well-established racial taboos that prevent black and white subjects even from mingling the food that enters their bodies.

In their handling of this trope, the three novels differ markedly. In Mary Jane , scenes with Mary Jane and Sally are almost entirely dominated by dialogue. The two sip soda together and eat in the school cafeteria, but sharing food is secondary to sharing talk. Bodily mingling is not entirely metaphysical, but it is envisioned as elevating and as equal—in one of their conversations, Mary Jane puts her brown arm against Sally’s pink one and tells her “about Red Anne [Mary Jane’s great-grandmother] and her Indian father and how there must have been a white great-great-grandpa too, a long time ago” (151). It is Mary Jane who directs the conversation here, looking at two different skin colors and conjuring up a history of racial mingling with her words. In The Lions of Little Rock ,

Marlee imagines that every person she meets is a kind of drink—those she finds easy to talk to are milk, juice, or soda, and those who make her nervous are coffee or tea. People exist for her to consume, or not, as she chooses. Her friendship with Liz, however, corrects this tendency somewhat. For one thing, Marlee cannot decide for at least half the novel what drink Liz “is;” instead of a food to be consumed, Liz becomes a talking partner who openly chides Marlee for “forcing [people] into one cup” (272). In

Tompkins’ formulation, Liz is “saucy” and does not go down easily. Nevertheless,

Marlee ingests her sauciness and absorbs it, becoming more and more saucy herself as

Liz becomes more and more controlled.

Dawnie Rae’s diary, in contrast, is dominated throughout by descriptions of food and hunger, rather than dialogue. Despite having ample food, her diary reveals her as constantly hungry. She longs for her “pie-in-the-sky” dreams of meeting Jackie Robinson

and becoming a doctor to come to fruition (18); she gets double the food anyone else in the school cafeteria does, courtesy of the black lunch ladies, but it “doesn’t taste good when you’re eating all alone” (121); and when her father is fired from the dairy company for sending her to the white school, the entire black community boycotts dairy products and Dawnie Rae fills pages of her diary with her longing for milk, butter, and cream.

Furthermore, she understands that she is being consumed by the same people who refuse even indirect bodily contact with her. Her mother pays money to a white store to buy

Dawnie Rae a dress labeled “Peach Melba” which she is not allowed to put on her body in the store and which does not fit her. This hated confection becomes the costume in which Dawnie Rae is offered up, first to the black community as a valedictory speaker, and then to the white school which refuses her entry for days while she sits at home wearing the Peach Melba dress for a first day of school that takes weeks to arrive. Later,

Dawnie Rae and her mother bake dozens of sugar cookies—made without butter or milk because of the boycott—for a school bake sale to raise money for a new bell. Their cookies sell out, adding more to the bell funds than anybody else’s, but Dawnie Rae cannot tell anyone the cookies came from her kitchen, or nobody will buy them. Later, at home, she licks colored sugar off of two cookies and writes, “It was their sweetness that let me taste how unfair the bake sale was. My cookies had earned the most money to help buy the school’s new bell, but I can’t ring the bell” (192). Dawnie Rae has successfully gotten white students to eat food adapted from a boycott of white goods. Nevertheless, she is still feeding white mouths and raising money for the benefit of white students, who will get a symbolic new bell while the students at Bethune lack books.

If Dawnie is consumed and hungry, Gertie is a voracious eater who observes no boundaries in either her choice of food or eating companions. When she sees Dawnie

Rae’s overflowing cafeteria plate, she demands the extra portions that Dawnie Rae gets, and then plunks herself down next to Dawnie in the cafeteria. In Gertie’s first appearance, she claims both black and white food cultures as a matter of course, provided that they involve privilege and not deprivation. In addition to claiming the extra portions of food

Dawnie receives due to the black lunch ladies’ support, Gertie also sees her empty cafeteria table as an expansive space, a gain of property rather than a loss of companionship: “When Gertie came to sit next to me, she said, ‘You get this whole table to yourself?’” (204). On the one hand, this statement indicates Gertie’s extreme racial innocence, as it does not even occur to her that Dawnie is being ostracized and that she,

Gertie, will be so too if she sits with Dawnie. On the other hand, her transcendence of racial boundaries is predicated on her being able to consume whatever Dawnie has, and whatever the white students get. While eating her extra portion and chatting with Dawnie about Jackie Robinson, Gertie slurps chocolate milk, a drink that the lunch ladies will not even put on Dawnie’s tray lest she be tempted to break the boycott. Her innocence of racial boundaries and taboos thus does not manifest as a politically motivated selection of nourishment, but only as an extension of resources. To be fair, Gertie does feed Dawnie

Rae in return, both with food and with company; her pockets are always filled with licorice and gumdrops that she shares liberally. Nevertheless, Dawnie Rae’s constant evocations of being hungry and being an edible product for white consumption highlight the extent to which Gertie’s racial innocence prevents her from being an equal partner in dialogue and simply renders her another kind of white consumer.

Dawnie Rae, as a heroine in an extremely lucrative history series, is the subject of another kind of consumption, too. As Hazel Carby points out, “The black female subject has become very profitable for the culture industry” (192). She worries that “for white suburbia . . . these texts are becoming a way of gaining knowledge of the ‘other,’ a knowledge that appears to satisfy and replace the desire to overcome existing frameworks of desegregation” (197). Pinkney works within this framework, both offering a black female subject for consumption and also shaping her in ways that comment upon this process. In addition to authoring several novels, picture books, and biographies featuring black characters, Pinkney has had an extremely influential career in the children’s book publishing industry. She founded the first imprint for African-American children’s books at a major publishing house, Jump At the Sun for Disney’s Hyperion books; and after fuming in the early 1980s that there were too few materials available for black children, she has been instrumental in acquiring and editing a wide range of black-authored children’s books for the imprint. 57 The black female literary subjects Pinkney collaborates in producing are clearly not intended only for consumption by white readers.

At the same time, as I noted in the introduction, publishing teams often have limited ideas about what kinds of black subjects they feel they can offer for consumption by a school market that is perceived to be white. With the Might of Angels offers, in many ways, a black female subject acceptable to white palates. Dawnie Rae is spicy, saucy, and outspoken, but in moderation. She takes as her role model Jackie Robinson, a man chosen to integrate the major leagues in part because he was seen as being able to control his speech and temper; and as I discuss earlier, she works hard to express her anger in ways that will shore up the white academic system rather than openly speaking her rebellious

57 See “Andrea Pinkney Profile” and “Andrea Pinkney.” 98

thoughts. At the same time, the prevalent metaphors of food and eating work as a counternarrative, dramatizing Dawnie Rae’s feeling of being consumed and forcing readers to share it. Furthermore, while Dawnie Rae does accept Gertie’s friendship, she withholds the easy co-mingling and the overflowing bounty of love and forgiveness that is imagined, and desired, by writers like Sterling and Levine.

School Performances: Race, Gender, and Ability

The final trope important to understanding desegregation stories is performance, both in terms of identity roles like gender and race and in terms of academic tasks that require “performance” from the student. Performance is implicitly embedded in earlier boys’ and girls’ school stories, in the sense that these narratives are meant to lead their protagonists (and readers) into acting out their adult roles as gendered adults and citizens.

In girls’ stories like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Anne of Green Gables , performance is also an explicit concern. The girl heroines often have dramatic tendencies and talents that need to be channeled into safe and productive formats like school recitations instead of poetic re-enactments that result in near-drowning (Anne) or melodramatic destruction of personal property (Rebecca). In these stories, however, the girls’ performances are presented as “natural,” even as they are problematized and seen as needing shaping and instruction. In contrast, desegregation stories make performance an explicit concern, forming the conditions for the desegregation process itself and setting the political framework for how desegregation can be seen as a success. Academic performance, in a “successful” desegregation story, seems to provide a substitute for the performance of racial identity, replacing an identity generally perceived as essentialist with one that is generally perceived as more fluid and controllable. In fact, academic

performance simply layers onto and reinforces existing racial scripts for youth, narrowing the parameters of the desegregation story.

Much has been written about race as a performed identity. Ample literature on blackface performance and on the phenomenon of passing establishes that if white performers can perform blackness and black subjects can give convincing performances of whiteness, then subjects who do not engage in cross-racial performance nevertheless act out racial scripts. As most scholars point out, the concept of race as performance rather than essence has the potential to destabilize racial binaries and disrupt the logic of inherent white superiority. Nevertheless, they also note that these performances can be compelled and scripted. 58 Kenneth Clark, a leading advocate of school desegregation, notes in a 1955 parenting manual that the black community enforces specific and stringent racial scripts in order to counter white prejudice: “The modern Negro hero must be generally free of the usual stereotyped behavior and personality; he must not present himself to the public as meek, subservient, unreliable, or comic . . . He must carry himself with dignity as an individual and accept the role of racial ambassador” (55). Middle- and upper-class black parents, he says, demand that their children “be a living refutation of the stereotyped picture of the primitive and inferior Negro” (58), expecting sexual moderation, cleanliness, and very high achievement. While Clark lauds the gains made through high expectations, he also laments the pressure and anxiety placed upon children to perform success and respectability at all times. Katherine Capshaw Smith argues that such counter-scripts draw upon norms of whiteness, but utilize them in the service of reinventing a black public identity not defined by minstrelsy. Nevertheless, Catherine

58 See Eric Lott, Catherine Rottenberg, Diana Fuss, and Katherine Capshaw Smith. 100

Rottenberg points out that such adoption of white-associated norms also reinforces their desirability and circumscribes the kinds of performances resistant black subjects are permitted to give.

Black students desegregating white schools were often selected precisely because they were seen as capable of performing a demanding and narrow script. Academic achievement as measured by grades and tests was one requirement, but Carlotta Walls

LaNier, one of the Little Rock Nine, records that they also had to pass a “Jackie Robinson test” ensuring that their personal appearance, conduct, and family backgrounds would render them acceptable to white administrators (60). As historian James Patterson points out, this kind of desegregation by type-casting meant that these “ambassadors” had limited ability to open the way for others in their community, as in effect, each incoming student had to audition anew for a role that never changed. Moreover, for the benefit of the black community, they had to prove at all times, through their grades, conduct, and public statements, that desegregation was succeeding. To Walls LaNier, this meant a constant stream of public interviews and televised events in which the nine students were expected to downplay the constant violence and suffering they experienced, and to

“[reassure] television viewers that we lived in a great country and that all was well at

Central” (109). In this historical context, academic performance was only one aspect of an overarching racial script that aimed to counter claims of black inferiority.

Nevertheless, the need for a “Jackie Robinson test” indicates that there were other kinds of resistant performances available, ones that whites controlling the desegregation process attempted to weed out.

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In Mary Jane, some of these alternate resistant roles are briefly presented. Red

Anne, Mary Jane’s storied great-grandmother, is a revered figure in Mary Jane’s life due to her commitment to education and her skillful role-playing. As an enslaved woman,

Red Anne secretly teaches herself to read and write, but feigns ignorance and stupidity to evade censure from her white mistress. When she finds a letter indicating that she is about to be sold down the river, she forges a pass and escapes North. Her son, Mary

Jane’s distinguished grandfather, studies with his books tied to the handle of a plow, works nights scrubbing floors, and takes pride in an all-black education that has enabled him to work with black farmers around the state; when Mary Jane asserts that desegregation is the only way for her to achieve her dream of becoming a biologist, he reminds her, “Some people . . . seem to think I’m a biologist and I never went to Wilson”

(7). Mary Jane chooses the role of the well-behaved, genteel, talented student, but there is an historical record of other options. The reader is encouraged to share Mary Jane’s conviction that the role of a bright and ambitious middle-class black student ought to be readily available to her, but academic performance, gentility, and resistance are not inextricably packaged together.

In historical novels about desegregation, however, academic performance and resistant racial performance tend to be depicted as mutually constitutive. Furthermore, both resistance and academic achievement are seen as being enhanced by, if not dependent upon, desegregation. In the process, performances of resistant black identity that would not pass the “Jackie Robinson test” tend to be invalidated as less desirable academically.

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In Pinkney’s novel, this narrowing of performance parameters happens in two ways: first, with the contrast between Dawnie and her brother Goober, and second, with the contrast between Dawnie’s two year-end performances. Dawnie is as conscious of herself as a performer as Walls LaNier records having been. Even before she learns that the special test she has to take is intended to disqualify her from attending the Prettyman

Coburn School, she wonders, “ What is this test really for? That’s when I struggled with the answers” (31, emphasis in original). As I discuss earlier in this chapter, she avoids direct retaliation and instead is careful to perform gentility and superiority, opting to resist by proving her academic qualifications. She also is keenly aware that any lapse in deportment and grooming will count against her; Dawnie may hate the girly Peach Melba dress, but she is even more upset when her mother puts Vaseline on her face in the cold weather and rubs her with camphor after she is sick, as this provides the white girls with reasons to believe that her body is an object of disgust.

In contrast, Goober is presented as existing in a simple natural state that excludes conscious performance. Dawnie insists that Goober is “different in certain ways . . . special,” rather than “slow” as others say (6). Nevertheless, she depicts Goober in her diary as a kind of holy fool who is incapable of understanding any kind of racial performance, resistant or otherwise. In the process of narrating her sibling relationship,

Dawnie projects a role for herself within the black community as someone willing to recognize and protect seemingly valueless and vulnerable members of the community; at the same time, her anxiety about Goober’s “natural” simplicity and innocence establishes her own acuteness and capacity for leadership—and therefore her difference from

Goober, whose reputation for idiocy threatens her position.

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At one point, Goober becomes intolerably thirsty after eating a bag of salted peanuts, and heads to a “Whites Only” fountain for a drink. Dawnie writes, “Every Negro child in Lee County knows that when you’re thirsty, and there’s no colored drinking fountain, you drink your own spit till you get home. But Goober, he doesn’t know nothing about colored water fountains, or those marked ‘Whites Only’” (57). Despite not being “slow,” and despite having survived to the age of nine under a segregated system,

Goober is apparently completely incapable of learning that he is expected to perform servility. Predictably, the two children are surrounded by a gang of hostile white boys who address Goober as “Negro retard” and clearly intend violence (58). The Hatch boys’ introduction to Goober later comes back to haunt Dawnie, as they not only target the family with physical threats and harassment, but also associate her with the slowness and inferiority of her “retard” brother, exactly the stereotype of blackness she is resisting.

Significantly, though, she never entertains the idea that Goober might be resisting white dominance in his own way, using the role of “retard” as a cover. In fact, after being threatened with violence, called a “Negro retard,” and directly told to go home by a black man nearby, Goober resists going home and instead disingenuously asks the elderly black man if he would also like a drink from the “Whites Only” fountain. This kind of performance, in which white stereotypes of black ignorance and slowness are exaggerated in order to thwart white desires, has a long history in black resistance. 59 I do not mean to argue that Goober’s performance is a superior form of resistance to

Dawnie’s. The problem I see is that paths of conscious resistance not tied to normative academic achievement are eliminated. Dawnie’s academic ability is clearly a performative quality rather than a wholly natural one; she works hard at her role, and she

59 See Thavolia Glymph, Ralph Ellison, Kenneth Clark, and John Holt. 104

is aware of factors like stereotype threat that might impact her performance. And it is because she can perform in the academic realm that she is able to perform racial resistance. In contrast, Goober’s disability is represented as essence rather than performance, and thus renders him incapable of other kinds of resistant identity performances.

Another kind of resistant performance, one that might have highlighted Dawnie’s academic talents, is also edited out. Before Dawnie desegregates the Prettyman Coburn

School, she is designated as the sixth grade valedictory speaker for her class’s Stepping

Up ceremony to mark their transition to junior high. Dawnie has plenty of thoughts concerning this event. When her mother takes her to the department store to buy the

Peach Melba dress, she writes that “the whole thing gave me a bad case of the how comes . That’s when questions pester me and will not let go. . . . How come the saleslady at the store wouldn’t let me try on any of the clothes? . . . How come Mama hushed me when I started to say this to the saleslady myself? How come Mama held my hand so tightly the whole time we were in that blasted store?” (25). Even the honor that prompts this ordeal gives her pause: “We’re not really stepping up to anyplace . . . we’re staying at

Bethune, like all the other colored kids in Hadley. We’re stepping over to more chewed pencils, more stinky bathrooms, more books with missing pages” (30). Conceivably, she could put some of these thoughts into her Stepping Up speech, using the opportunity to voice some of the persistent questions her mother stops her from asking. The Stepping

Up speech calls to mind other famous examples of black intellectual resistance staged through the drama of the graduation speech. Ralph Ellison’s unnamed narrator in

Invisible Man affirms the doctrine of humility, but not until his achievements have been

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mocked in the battle royal. Richard Wright, in Black Boy, insists on delivering a speech he has written rather than one the principal crafts for a white audience; his resistance costs him a job with the school system. And Patricia Hill Collins recalls being asked to deliver a speech so that her physical presence on the lectern could attest to the school’s inclusivity; when she decided to write about the contradictions between her parents’ patriotic service and the racist treatment they received, her teacher edited her speech so as to remove any critique reflecting poorly on the nation. None of these speeches are straightforward or “successful” examples of intellectual resistance. Hill Collins opted not to deliver any speech rather than give a bowdlerized one; Wright was punished for his speech; and Ellison’s fictional narrative provides a supremely ironic suggestion that the narrator might have opted for open resistance, since he was going to be punished anyway.

Nevertheless, anxiety and censorship surround these events precisely because they offer opportunities for black intellectuals to perform roles and speak lines that are threatening to white audiences.

Dawnie Rae, however, does not refer in her diary to any collective history of graduation speeches and their censorship; she does not write her how comes into a speech and then debate whether to deliver it; she does not receive advice from any adult in her segregated and heavily policed community who is worried about what she might decide to say. She simply has no ideas at all, never writes a speech, and is saved from humiliation on the day of the Stepping Up by a wardrobe malfunction when her Peach

Melba dress splits down the sides. Thus, not only is her intra-diagetic audience prevented from seeing her in the role of outspoken black intellectual (an elision which would have been quite historically accurate), her reading audience is also shielded from the

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knowledge that such a performance might have been possible or had any historical precedent.

Instead, Dawnie’s climactic performance of resistance is the ringing of the bell at the Prettyman Coburn School, a performance that rewards answering test questions created by her teachers and answered in private, rather than showcasing her intellect as a student-written speech would do. The reader has been prepped for Dawnie to publicly prove her merit, as she has longed to ring the bell for the entire novel and has studied fiercely for the single comprehensive test that will determine who is awarded the job.

Instead, it is Gertie who earns the highest score on the test, and then calls Dawnie up to ring the bell with her, so that Dawnie gets the job through her white friend’s generosity instead of through the terms set by the school. This denouement does not diminish

Dawnie’s merit or worthiness to ring the bell; her mother points out from the beginning that a single test is a ridiculously unfair way to determine such a thing, Dawnie establishes that she is highly able and persistent, and Dawnie and Gertie had not wanted to be in competition with each other. Nevertheless, it is a strange resolution for a novel that otherwise insists upon superior test scores as a primary enactment of resistant racial identity. Dawnie clearly feels that she rings the bell as a performance of resistance; she writes,

I’m sure Mr. Lloyd didn’t expect that I’d pull on that bell’s handle twenty times over. But I was there to introduce that bell. Mr. Lloyd could not stop me, me, me . I claaaannnggged that bell for Mama and Daddy. I claaaannnggged for Jackie Robinson and Mr. Dunphey. I claaaannnggged for Mr. Williams, Miss Cora, and Miss Billie [the black custodian and lunch ladies who help Dawnie]. I pulled on that bell’s handle doubly hard for Gertie and Goober, who both see things in ways others don’t. . . . Most of all, I christened that pretty Prettyman Bell for myself. Dawnie Rae Johnson. (289)

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In an echo of the unmentioned critical graduation speeches, Dawnie Rae feels that she is taking an opportunity to publicize injustice in a forum where white authorities are unable to silence her. However, she is not giving a speech, having ceded that opportunity. She is instead performing a non-speaking role, her thoughts about racial injustice voiced only through the clanging of the bell; and in doing so, she is testifying to the success of desegregation through her physical presence but not her words. The only mode of resistant performance available to her in the novel is thus one in which she proves the inclusivity of the racist white school, speaking through a symbolic medium (the bell of freedom, rung by a black female) that can easily be interpreted as national triumph instead of protest.

In The Lions of Little Rock, racial performance and resistance are linked somewhat differently, but they nevertheless disqualify disability, or academic difference, as a valid performance choice. I have earlier discussed how the novel’s presentation of

Cold War issues tends to erase disability. The trope of performance does so in a different way. In this novel, racial performance becomes a fluid identity available to resistant white subjects. The school is wrongfully hostile to diverse racial performances, but at its best, it also elicits these performances. In the process, because racial performance is seen as granting fluidity and agency to the performers, disability is also seen as an identity that is subject to performance decisions—specifically, as a role that ought not to be chosen.

The novel begins with Liz passing as white, but as it continues, Marlee also moves in and out of alternate racial identities in her path toward social consciousness.

Cross-racial performance becomes a way for both Liz and Marlee to say and do things that are unimaginable when performing as their “real” selves. Instead of fading into the

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background and evading notice to protect her vulnerable position, Liz openly sasses the daughter of one of the most prominent members of the racist Mothers’ League, which she can only do without censure because she is “white.” Upon first meeting Liz, Sally teases her about sharing a name with the Queen of England. Liz laughs, and replies, “‘Yeah, like the Queen of England. But you can just call me “Your Highness.”’ Nora tittered.

‘Your Highness?’ repeated Sally. ‘That’s right,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Unless you prefer “O royal one.” . . . The new girl suddenly grinned and slapped Sally on the shoulder. ‘I’m just kidding, of course. Liz is fine’” (13). Her flamboyant performance of wit earns her

Sally’s enmity and increased scrutiny, which eventually leads to her being discovered.

Despite her irrepressible display of spirit, however, Liz asserts that her initial decision to pass as white was solely at the behest of her mother, who wished only for Liz to have

“the best education possible” (266). Here, instead of the white school prompting a performance of dignified forbearance, as it does in Pinkney’s novel and in the memoirs of the Little Rock Nine, it instead catalyzes a more daring cross-racial performance that begins with a kind of “neutral” academic ambition but ends with open resistance.

More importantly, learning of Liz’s performance teaches Marlee that her own identity can be fluid. Liz’s identity is discovered the weekend before their class presentation, and Marlee enters school ready to perform only to be told by the teacher that Liz will not return to school; the teacher, knowing of Marlee’s difficulty speaking in class, allows her the alternative of writing the presentation out, and gives her extra time to do so. Instead, Marlee goes to the bathroom, and narrates, “I was careful not to glance in the mirror and see my brown hair and brown eyes that looked so much like Liz’s.

Could it be true? Can a girl be white one day and colored the next?” (64) Marlee might

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avoid looking in the mirror, but she nevertheless “sees” that she looks like Liz, and resolves not to lose her. Back in the classroom, she announces that she intends to do the presentation, and pulls out the black feather that serves as her good-luck charm. In a telling reference to Dumbo , Liz had earlier found the feather on the ground at the zoo and given it to Marlee, reminding her of the magic “Jim Crow” feather given to Dumbo so that he will believe that his large ears can help him fly. Before giving her presentation,

Marlee sticks the feather in one of her braids, “like an Indian headdress” (64), as a talisman of her Jim Crow friend while she talks to the class about the Quapaw Indians.

As she speaks, she imagines that the white schoolchildren are animals and that the classroom is a zoo.

The dizzying number of shifts in this short section seems to answer Marlee’s previous question: a girl can be white one day and colored the next, and if Liz can effect this transformation, then so too can Marlee. At first, this possibility appears as a threat, so that Marlee avoids the gaze of her colored self in the mirror; but it very soon becomes a chosen act of resistance. If Jim Crow laws are meant to keep Liz away from Marlee, then

Marlee will perform a “colored” identity that symbolically brings Liz back into the classroom. Clearly, this is a stylized performance of non-white identity, haphazardly mixing the Jim Crow feather with an appropriation of stereotyped “Indian” costuming.

As Eric Lott notes, this kind of stylized costuming has historically been adopted as an expression of political resistance in the United States and Europe, most famously during the Boston Tea Party. Marlee’s performance of “native” nonwhite identity thus echoes a founding moment in American mythology, when “native” colonists asserted the

American ideals of justice and redistributive equality. As the classroom transforms into a

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zoo, it evokes one of the threats feared by opponents of desegregation—that primitive nonwhite bodies will turn the transmission tool of civilization into a “blackboard jungle.”

For Marlee, though, the zoo is a utopian learning environment, where both Jim Crow and her disability can be sidestepped for a time. Racist white children transforming into animals might be an improvement. Phyllis Palmer argues that “civil rights inspired some white Americans to become new kinds of white people” (13), and this is certainly the ultimate point of the novel. Marlee does not continue to perform a nonwhite identity, but her temporary performance of “color” allows her to envision performing her white identity differently.

Marlee’s cross-racial performance is interesting in that it departs from the usual assumption that desegregation will involve black students absorbing white education and culture in a one-sided exchange. It also, however, causes a few problems. The most obvious of these is the issue of appropriation, as a Jim Crow feather in a stereotyped headdress is desirable only because it helps Marlee “fly.” In addition, however, Catherine

Rottenberg argues that “performativity all too often gets conflated with the notion of an autonomous agent who can choose identities at will or with rather simplistic notions of identity as fluid” (7). She stresses that while subjects do have choices in performance, racialized subjects in particular tend to be constrained in the kinds of dominant norms they are allowed to adopt; black middle-class women, for example, cannot emulate white feminist performances of sexual liberation without slipping into a censured kind of racial performance, that of stereotyped sexual promiscuity. Subjects who make conscious performance choices so as to rise up the class ladder or to forge a new kind of racialized identity also, in the process, tend to reinforce the “mythical norm” (112) of the white,

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able-bodied, determined, independent, sexually restrained, genteel, young, heterosexual male as the highest ideal to emulate. It is therefore crucial that Marlee’s shift to a “new kind of white person” occurs through her overcoming her muteness: “For so long I’d been the quiet girl. If I wasn’t her anymore, who was I?” (113). She cannot perform a more ideal version of whiteness without also learning to emulate ability; otherwise, her brief encounter with desegregation will not be legible as a “successful” schooling experiment.

Conclusion

The novels in this chapter are variations on the school story, and therefore focus on how the institution of the school can be maximized as an instrument for training citizens; this is the function of the school story genre. Therefore, while these novels expose many of the problems that occurred during the implementation of the Brown decision—daily violence in the hallways, social ostracism and loneliness, and intense public visibility and pressure for the chosen students, among others—the format in which the stories are told frames and softens how these problems are portrayed. Violence becomes character-building; inclusion and participation in the white classroom substitutes for unpredictable interracial connections outside the classroom; academic achievement becomes the primary mode of resistance; and if the protagonists are not always happy at the end, they at least affirm that the trials they have undergone for the sake of desegregation have been worthwhile for themselves, for the school, and for the nation. Because of their adherence to school story tropes, it would be difficult for these novels to measure the success of desegregation in any way other than normative

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academic achievement; any sprouts of utopian change must be made to fit into the framework of traditional school achievement in order to be recognizable and justifiable.

Nevertheless, these desegregation stories also demonstrate that the school can allow for and even produce a range of utopian forms of resistance. While the generic plot arc tends to domesticate or eliminate visions of racial justice that would not produce a protagonist happily incorporated into a traditional nationalist school institution, along the way these stories elicit and even encourage alternate, unmeasurable kinds of emotional connection, political solidarity, and intellectual quests. Perry Nodelman suggests that while children’s books usually resolve stories of topsy-turvy child-directed exploits by restoring a safe adult rule of law and reinforcing the immaturity of children, it is nevertheless the mayhem and role reversals that occupy the brunt of the stories and that often prove more memorable and appealing for readers than the tidy endings. Similarly, while the critical moments and radical educational alternatives in desegregation stories may be tamed by the end, they nevertheless appear as attractive possibilities.

Furthermore, while I argue that the desegregated school characterized by normative academic achievement and national absorption should not be seen as the only path to either “successful” racial justice or “successful” education, there is no question that many generations of students have desired exactly this option. Some of the protagonists I discuss in later chapters learn, as part of their utopian educations, to desire other models of education and national citizenship. Nevertheless, because the school story model of utopia has been so attractive to readers for so many generations, it is important to acknowledge the possibilities for resistance that it does allow. In the next chapter, I explore how the desegregation story is further revised by black authors seeking to openly

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question the liberal interpretation of Brown. Within some of the same generic constraints of the school story, these authors open up some alternate visions of utopian classrooms, even as they hew to some of the same limitations for defining success.

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Chapter 2: Counternarratives and the Persistence of White Privilege

Preface: Racial Hierarchy and the Meaning of Error

I did not explicitly bring up issues of racial justice in education as a topic in the classroom until I began teaching at the college level. College English classes are often famous (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view) for asking students to question their prior understandings of race. Moreover, by that time I had gained some perspective

(and, crucially, some knowledge and language) with which to think about my experiences in the secondary classroom. The contexts of these classroom discussions, however, also demonstrated how challenges to white privilege can be contained by the classroom walls, while the same old racial hierarchies continue to be constructed by the wider educational system.

For a while, I taught in two institutions with very different sets of demands, expectations, and consequences for their students. Montgomery College, where I taught both developmental and credit-level writing courses, is a two-year community college with a universal acceptance policy, attracting a wide variety of students from the

Washington, D.C. metro area. My classes contained eighteen-year-old high school graduates and adult students with families and full-time jobs; students who had never been further away from their homes than northern Virginia and students who had immigrated from Ghana, Cameroon, Senegal, Peru, and El Salvador; students who had been driven and ambitious their whole lives and students who had drifted or done jail time and were returning for a second chance at education. In many senses, therefore, my classes there were extremely diverse. Despite the students’ vast differences, however,

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most would have been identified within American racial categories as black, Latino, or biracial, and most were struggling financially. The George Washington University, where

I was a teaching assistant for an introductory American literature and Writing in the

Disciplines course, is a fairly prestigious four-year private university with competitive entrance requirements. My students there were by no means all white, nor were they all wealthy or middle class; but certainly, many more of them were so in comparison to the students at Montgomery College. Many were also more confident in their reading and writing skills, but the academic gaps were not always stark; some of my community college students had been licensed, highly educated professionals in their countries of origin, and university students often confessed to me their undying hatred of, and ineptitude in, all things literary.

At both of these institutions, the faculty were, for the most part, deeply invested in antiracist teaching, and committed to combating inequity and raising their students’ awareness of structural racism. They treated the classroom, to use ethnologist Amanda

Lewis’s phrase, as a “race-making institution” (188), where racial categories might be either reproduced or (more hopefully) consciously rethought and changed. Thus, readings and discussion in George Washington University’s introductory American literature class asked students to question much of what they had learned in high school about American literature, going beyond surface issues of “diversity inclusion” to rip apart the contents of the canon, the language privileged by authors and editors, and the physical boundaries of the nation itself. At Montgomery College, the novel chosen as the community’s Common

Experience book was Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time

Indian , a book that highlights racism in the classroom. Teaching this novel was the only

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time I have ever been asked by a student whether I regretted any of my past teaching decisions as a white teacher of black and Latino students (I said yes), and it was also one of the only times I have heard students openly talking about the structural racism they recognized in their own educational experiences.

In two different settings, therefore, faculty were trying to dislodge white privilege, and with some success in terms of student awareness. At the level of institutional and departmental policies, however, practices that might have been meant to challenge dominant racial constructions often worked to reinforce them. In public and scholarly discourse about higher education, community colleges are positioned as institutions that cater to students who are minoritized, disadvantaged, and lacking in competitive college skills, while universities are positioned as institutions for the white, the middle-class, and the comparatively better prepared, 60 even if significant numbers of these students do not fit these profiles.

The faculty at Montgomery College were quite aware of the prejudice facing our students. We were also aware that, in a “color-blind” society, this prejudice would rarely surface as an objection to the students’ race or class and would more often be expressed as a belief that they did not have the Standard English language skills to keep up in a college course or to compete with a middle-class or white applicant for a job. 61 Thus, portfolio grading in the department was designed so that students who passed would theoretically be able to satisfy the most stringent and crotchety of sticklers they might encounter. All student work, both in developmental/ESL classes and in credit-level

60 See, for example, Martin and Thernstrom and Thernstrom. 61 For more on this phenomenon, see Yoshino, Tatum, and the edited collection The Skin That We Speak . 117

classes, was graded using a common rubric, and semester portfolios had to be passed by at least two professors in the department to ensure that sympathetic instructors could not be swayed into passing students who were unlikely to achieve success with their next professor. Some aspects of the rubric were subject to individual interpretation; what exactly qualified as a “strong relevant thesis that is clear and logical” was an endless topic of debate at norming sessions, and no agreement was ever reached as to the meaning of any adjective in that phrase. The rubric items dealing with Standard English, however, allowed for no wiggle room. A passing essay could have no more than seven major errors (defined as any sentence structure problem such as a fragment or a comma splice, or any error in verb form, agreement, or tense) and no more than twelve minor errors (defined, basically, as anything else, including errors in capitalization, spelling, and punctuation not related to sentence structure). Some instructors guesstimated, but many counted scrupulously. Students with otherwise well-written, organized, and supported essays often needed to repeat a developmental writing course due to this requirement, and students in credit-level classes sometimes struggled to maintain their grades due to the

Standard English requirement. In addition to posing a hardship for individual students juggling jobs, families, and finances, such repeated classes and lowered grades also become statistics that reinforce popular perceptions that black and Latino students attending community colleges are unprepared for college and lacking in language skills.

In contrast, at George Washington University, the rubrics I was given as a teaching assistant rarely included references to grammar, let alone stringent and inflexible requirements for Standard English usage. This is not to say that nobody paid attention to or discussed Standard English usage; however, I heard professors and other teaching

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assistants express conflicted feelings about grammatical requirements, acknowledging that they were important as markers of “excellence” but also feeling that they were tools of exclusion and white privilege. Moreover, they knew that they were asking students to do reading and writing tasks that were likely to be much more challenging than any they had done in high school, and were aware that, regardless of expertise, the grammar skill of any writer will decline in proportion to the complexity of what she is asked to write. In the American literature class, grammatical corrections were encouraged in revised papers, but mainly insofar as the errors affected clarity. Thus, at the same time I was having to fail some engaging and thoughtful portfolios because they were sprinkled liberally with comma splices and shifts in verb tense, I had the luxury of being able to reward other engaging and thoughtful papers, which were also sprinkled with comma splices and shifts in verb tense, and which I would have had to fail if I had been grading them as developmental writing essays for the community college. At an institution coded as

“minority,” these errors mark students as remedial and underprepared; at an institution coded as “white,” they can be subsumed within an overarching assumption of high achievement.

My purpose in telling this anecdote is not to lament the declining grammar skills or the lax standards for students at supposedly elite institutions, although I have heard many such laments. Rather, it provides a reminder that the novels I discuss in this chapter, which envision the black school as an empowering and resilient “race-making institution,” nevertheless must be read within a framework of white privilege in which error and achievement mean something different, and are attached to higher stakes, in black schools than in white ones. These novels combat many assumptions embedded in

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the Brown decision, but they preserve the idea that the school ought to be a primary agent of change and racial equality. By doing so, they also continue to tie racial justice to academic achievement. The novels suggest that through these racially empowering classrooms, increased academic achievement will produce racial justice in other sectors of society, so that students who desire justice must also learn to desire broad-based achievement. My experience as a grader, however, reminds me that hitching racial equality to academic achievement just as often makes equality contingent upon achievement—and these definitions of achievement are unequally developed and enforced.

Introduction

The three novels I discuss in this chapter represent utopian schools as quite different institutions from the desegregated training grounds of empire depicted in the previous chapter. In revising the utopian school, they also voice critiques of Brown v.

Board of Education as a utopian decision, calling into question some of the fundamental assumptions about quality education that tend to be found within desegregation stories.

All three contradict the notion that a white-dominated institution provides a better education than a black-dominated one. 62 More specifically, all three suggest that black schools are preferable to white ones, and more successful, for two reasons: first, they offer love instead of violence, and second, they build community and responsibility for all instead of sorting students within a meritocracy, creating merit rather than just

62 All three of the novels I discuss are written by black authors. There are white-authored novels that also reflect this perspective, such as Katherine Paterson’s The Great Gilly Hopkins and Jeri Watts’s Kizzy Ann Stamps . I have chosen not to include them in my discussion primarily because I think white-authored texts about black characters already gain a disproportionate amount of attention in publishing, marketing, and criticism. 120

rewarding it. They differ, however, in the kinds of black communities they valorize, the degree to which they imagine the black school can be a safe haven from the white world, and the forms of equality and progress they imagine the black school producing. All of these novels are fairly explicit about the ways in which they provide counter-narratives to triumphant stories of desegregation. Throughout the chapter, I will trace the ways in which they also continue to adhere to the school story genre in ways that reinforce the role of the school as a powerful source of reform. Crucially, however, all three novels displace utopian classrooms either to the future or to the historical past. This displacement works in contradictory ways; it allows the novels to elide the question of how effective the school can actually be, but it also denies the reader the complacent sense that he or she is living in an era of enlightened utopian progress.

The first novel, Mildred Pitts Walter’s Because We Are , won the Coretta Scott

King Honor Award in 1984; but unlike many award winners (and unlike several other books by Walter), it appears on few recommendation lists, and is currently out of print.

While I have no way of knowing the reason for this, I can imagine that aspects of the novel might disturb or threaten some adult readers with its frank depictions of racism in a contemporary school context; Walter notes that some teachers were unhappy with how teachers were represented in the novel, and recalls that while she received many letters from children about her novels, she did not receive them from teachers. 63 The novel combines elements of the teen “problem novel” and the school story; it invites the reader to consider contemporary social problems besetting teenagers, including drug use, divorce, and conflicts over popularity, but it primarily follows a school story plot in

63 Personal email from the author. 121

which a new student is inducted into a hostile new school, faces a bully, develops school pride, and graduates to be a credit to the nation. Emma, the protagonist, begins the novel as an “opportunity transfer student” at a desegregated school. She is a National Honor scholar and a student government leader, and she hopes to pledge an elite black social club; but she encounters racist slurs from white teachers and students too persistent to ignore. Erupting in rage, she is removed from the school and sent back to finish her senior year at her neighborhood all-black school. This move represents a loss of status that ruins her chances of being a debutante and disappoints her parents—especially her upwardly mobile father, a doctor who has divorced her mother and replaced her with a younger white woman. The new school has several problems, including stark class divisions, crowded facilities, and an egregiously racist English teacher who fears his students and makes them scramble on the floor for the chance to use a textbook in class.

Nevertheless, the novel depicts Emma’s growing acceptance that she belongs at this school and not the desegregated one, and highlights her developing commitment to uniting the school community in resistance to the racist teacher. After forcing the teacher to end the scramble, she graduates in triumph and looks forward to a college career at

Stanford, a prestigious white university which she is prepared to survive because of her immersion in black community.

The second novel, Sharon Draper’s 2007 Fire From the Rock , is, of the three, the most explicit about revising desegregation stories and offering a counter-history of

Brown . While Draper discusses the many ways she feels that the story she tells is relevant to her present-day readers, the novel is set in the 1950s, not in her readers’ contemporary moment as Walter’s is. Perhaps as a result, unlike Walter’s novel, Fire From the Rock is

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required reading in many secondary schools, including most of the ones in Little Rock. 64

It imagines a protagonist, Sylvia, who is on the NAACP’s list of potential students to integrate Little Rock’s Central High, but who elects not to join the Nine. Sylvia’s brother

Gary wants desperately to be on that list, but is disqualified due to his fiery anger and his sympathy for militant tactics; in contrast, her little sister, Donna Jean, speaks of desegregation as a fearsome threat rather than as an opportunity for a better education or for justice. All three children struggle against the strictures laid down by their cautious and conservative parents, who are torn between their fear of violence and their desire for their children to inherit a more just world. The plot spans the school year prior to the desegregation of Central High (with a brief epilogue showing the beginning of the Little

Rock Nine’s travails), and it traces Sylvia’s gradual decision to work for racial equality from the vantage point of the black school.

The third novel, Jacqueline Woodson’s 2007 Newbery Honor-winning Feathers , is in many ways quite different from the other two in the ways that it departs from desegregation story conventions. Its protagonist, Frannie, is an indifferent student, hardly the shining star that Emma and Sylvia are. The narrative covers only part of a school year, so that the plot arc of the school story is cut short; the story does not end with

Frannie’s being recognized by the school for her contributions. Moreover, she faces no clear-cut decision between a desegregated community and a segregated one; her community is clearly segregated, but she never has any desire to participate in the white world across the highway and in fact spends much of the novel wondering why her friends are so discontented. The novel is set in the early 1970s, against the backdrop of

64 Personal email from the author. 123

the Black Power movement. At the beginning of the school year, Frannie’s warm, encouraging teacher reads them the famous Emily Dickinson poem about hope, and she struggles to understand its metaphoric imagery of feathers. She does think about hope and longing, however, when she observes that her deaf brother Sean, 65 who attends a separate school, wishes he could participate in the hearing and white worlds from which he is barred; that her mother, who has miscarried many pregnancies, fears to lose another; and that her classmates talk about Black Power but long for what they see on the white side of the highway. In a reversal of the typical desegregation story, a white-appearing boy joins

Frannie’s classroom and is quickly nicknamed the Jesus Boy by the class bully, due to his resemblance to traditional white pictures of Jesus. The Jesus Boy, an adopted son of a black family, has been harassed and tormented at schools on the white side of the highway, and his parents assure him that the black community will be more welcoming.

They are wrong; most of Frannie’s classmates take out their frustrations on the Jesus

Boy, and only Frannie, secure in her own sense of safety within the black community, is willing to befriend him. Throughout, Frannie reflects on the Dickinson poem and comes to see its metaphors in her own life.

In this section, I offer an historical overview of critiques of desegregated education, both those directed at the Brown decision itself and those produced by advocates of African-centered education for black students. I then provide a theoretical introduction to some of the problems involved in relying on the school as an instrument

65 People in the Deaf community make a distinction between deafness and Deafness, with the change in orthography signaling the difference between an impairment and a cultural orientation. I use the lower-case form of the word when discussing Sean. Vivian Yenika-Agbaw argues, in her analysis of Feathers , that the novel offers a social model of disability, but does not position Sean within Deaf culture or even portray Deafness as a resistant culture. Therefore, I indicate Sean’s position by describing him as deaf rather than as Deaf. 124

of racial reform, focusing especially on Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s idea that the state is a racially structured entity and on Lani Guinier’s idea that racial hierarchies and inequalities continually mutate in response to new circumstances. Finally, I compare these counter-narratives of desegregation to some black-authored resistant texts that are not school stories. This juxtaposition highlights how the school stories discussed in this chapter place much more faith in the efficacy of schools to produce racial justice. In this sense, although these novels are alternatives to the more traditional desegregation stories of the previous chapter, they also repeat some of the same expectations and constraints.

Historians and legal scholars who analyze the Brown decision often draw a distinction between the overarching goals of the decision and the strategy chosen by the

NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund for implementing those goals. The goals, according to Jerome Morris and Derrick Bell, were, first, eventual racial integration and equality in all areas of society, and second, high-quality education for all black children, including those in low-income and rural communities. The strategies chosen to achieve these ends—legal desegregation and the creation of racially balanced schools—became adopted as ends in themselves, but in fact were chosen from a number of possible strategies. Focusing on a state institution that served children would, it was thought, bring up a new generation that was integrated from childhood and would thus be inclined toward justice and equality in other sectors of society. Furthermore, the inequalities in funding available for black schoolchildren as compared to white ones would never be rectified until they attended school together, as resources would follow the white students, and black students would benefit accordingly.

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In practice, both the wording of the Brown decision and its implementation limited the effects of this strategy so that the goals of racial justice, equality, and high- quality education were not achieved even though legal desegregation was eventually implemented. One of the most often criticized aspects of the Brown decision was, of course, the famous footnote eleven; this footnote incorporated the well-known doll experiments of Kenneth and Mamie Clark, among other psychological studies, which appeared to demonstrate that segregation instilled a sense of inferiority in black children. 66 Many scholars argue that the decision’s emphasis on feelings of inferiority in black children was one of its most destructive aspects, reinforcing a “cultural deprivation paradigm” (Morris, n. pag.) that assumed black communities were completely devoid of educational value and black children must absorb white culture if they were to succeed. 67

Furthermore, as historian James Patterson notes, Chief Justice Warren did not, in writing a decision that overturned Plessy v. Ferguson , reinforce one of the key ideas in Justice

John Marshall Harlan’s dissent to Plessy . Harlan had asserted that the Constitution was

“color-blind;” Warren stated merely that education “is the very foundation of good citizenship” (Patterson 66), thus limiting his call for racial justice and equality to the realm of education and specifically omitting the idea that such justice should extend to the Constitution, and the state, as a whole. Substituting the institution of education for the whole apparatus of the state has had far-reaching implications; as Patterson notes (and as

66 See Robin Bernstein for an explanation of how the doll experiments were manipulated to achieve the desired results. Specifically, the Clarks changed the order of the questions so as to produce emotional distress that had not been present in earlier experiments. Furthermore, during the Brown hearings, they downplayed the differences they saw between Southern and Northern black children; Northern children, who experienced integrated settings more often, showed more distress and displayed more preference for the white dolls than the more strictly segregated Southern children did. See also Derrick Bell for a critique of how the deleterious effects of segregation on white children was notably absent from the Brown decision. 67 See, for example, Viego, Morris, Patterson, and Bell. 126

contemporary critics like Paul Goodman lamented), liberal reformers concerned about racial equality have tended to funnel attention and funding into compensatory education for black students rather than directing it toward other areas of inequality. This critique of

Brown , however, is cited far less often than is the imputation of inferior black schools.

Portraying segregated black education (but not segregated white education) as inherently inferior had other implications for desegregation. Several historians note that black communities had, since Reconstruction, invested in education, and consequently had built a history of proud all-black institutions, staffed by committed and well- respected black teachers who worked to instill, not only knowledge of literacy, math, and history, but also ambition, community responsibility, and knowledge of how to succeed in a hostile white world. Ironically, during the time lapse between the Brown decision and its reluctant implementation, these black institutions were dramatically developed even further. Historian David Cecelski writes, “Hyde and other local school boards acted as if the Supreme Court had recently ruled on Plessy v. Ferguson, the court’s 1896 ‘separate but equal’ ruling, instead of Brown. They hoped that black children would want to remain in their own schools with their own friends and teachers if the boards finally provided the approximately equal education promised by Plessy sixty years earlier” (27). When desegregation plans were implemented, however, white school boards generally continued to operate on the assumption that the black schools were inferior and unfit for white students. Historic black schools were shut down, black students were crowded into white schools, and black teachers were fired, rather than utilize the resources of the black community for the benefit of an integrated student body. When historically black school buildings were used, their names were changed in an attempt to erase the history and the

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pride celebrated by naming schools after black heroes like Frederick Douglass and Paul

Laurence Dunbar. Even trophy cases were removed, so that white students would not be confronted with the symbols of black achievements in athletic and debate competitions.

Many alumni of these formerly black institutions, as well as others who witnessed the closures and the firings of black teachers, felt an overwhelming sense of loss as a result of such racist implementation plans, so much so that that Lani Guinier argues,

“There is an eerie nostalgia for the feeling of community that was destroyed post-Brown ”

(98), and NAACP leader Nelson Rivers says, “‘What I tell folk . . . is that there are a lot of romanticists now who want to take this trip down Memory Lane, and they want to go back, and I tell the young people that anyone who wants to take you back to segregation, make sure you get a round-trip ticket because you won’t stay’” (quoted in Patterson

194). 68 The novels I discuss in this chapter gesture to this kind of “eerie nostalgia,” mediating between the need to depict the very real violence of segregation and the need to combat a history of erasure.

In mediating between historical counter-narrative and nostalgic re-invention, these novels must gesture to, and engage, long-standing debates within the black community about what precisely a “black educational institution” is, and what a

“superior” education for black students ought to look like. During the 1930s, well before the Brown decision, public intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson openly criticized the quality of education provided in black schools, not only because they were comparatively underfunded, but also because they were too dependent upon white curricula and standards. In The Souls of Black Folk , Du Bois famously asserts the

68 See also Stuart Buck. 128

need for black education to center on broad intellectual stimulation rather than on practical manual training. In his 1935 essay, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” he further emphasizes that black students and teachers within black institutions of learning must think of themselves as contributing uniquely to the intellectual resources of the nation, rather than simply as gaining access to white knowledge and culture. While defending the right of black students and citizens to combat segregation, Du Bois also critiques the “utter lack of faith on the part of Negroes that their race can do anything really well” (330); as a result, he says, they put their energy into fighting for desegregation rather than into fighting for better pay and respect for their own teachers and institutions. White institutions, Du Bois suggests, are unlikely to nurture and love black children, whereas black institutions are better fitted to do so; however, in order to do so, black teachers must learn their own history properly rather than passing on the destructive lies about Reconstruction they were taught by white professors at Columbia.

Woodson, in his 1933 collection The Mis-Education of the Negro , goes even further and argues, “Negroes . . . are anxious to have everything the white man has even if it is harmful. . . . The author, however, does not have such an attitude. He considers the educational system as it has developed in both Europe and America an antiquated process which does not hit the mark even in the case of the needs of the white man himself” (xii).

He says that after passing through a degree process which elevates the achievements of

Europe while suppressing the culture of Africa, “The Negroes thus placed in charge [are] products of the same system” (23). In other words, educational institutions that serve black students and are staffed primarily by black teachers are not necessarily ideologically black institutions, no matter how warm and loving a shelter they may aim to

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create. This critique has resurfaced in recent decades as a hotly debated source of the

“achievement gap” between white and black students. Scholars and public intellectuals cite ethnographies of high-achieving black students criticized by their peers for “acting white” (and of lower-achieving students trying to avoid this criticism) as evidence that black students, in the years following desegregation, have come to see school as a domain established, defined, and controlled by white society—even in schools mostly attended and taught by black students and teachers. 69 Proponents of Afro-centric education, such as Jawanza Kunjufu, argue, as Woodson did, that black schools can only nurture proud, able, and resistant students if they convey the idea that intellectual achievement historically belongs to black students and is not merely borrowed or imitated from white culture. Similarly, novels that aim to counter perceptions of inferior black schooling must find ways to demonstrate the characters’ academic achievement in ways that will be recognizable to white readers, while also questioning to what extent segregated black schools are black in ideology and values as well as student body.

There is a key difference, however, between Woodson’s concerns and those of contemporary novelists and commentators like Kunjufu. Woodson and Du Bois were concerned with defining what academic achievement for black students ought to look like, rather than with combating a scourge of under-achievement. They argued that increased literacy and knowledge of black history might produce more proud, resistant, and cohesive black students and communities, but they did not argue that it would diminish white racism or would, in itself, result in more citizenship rights being granted.

In contrast, in the era of legal access since Brown , which emphasized equal education as

69 See Stuart Buck, John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham, Jawanza Kunjufu, “News and Views,” and Amanda Lewis. 130

foundational to citizenship, racial differences and inequalities in academic performance are framed as the primary ongoing barrier to equal citizenship rights. As advocates for testing and accountability reforms such as Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom write, “Racial equality will remain a dream as long as blacks and Hispanics learn less in school than whites and Asians. If black youngsters remain second-class students, they will be second- class citizens” (3). Of course, as both Woodson and Du Bois point out, racial equality seemed a “dream” long before Southern whites were even attending school, let alone learning more there than blacks and Latinos; white domination was its own rationale, and needed no defense of superior educational attainment. In recent decades, however, equality is nominally desirable, and closing the achievement gap is spoken of as the way to eliminate racism and structural inequality. This is the case for antiracist activists such as Kunjufu and Lewis as well as for proponents of cultural deprivation theories such as the Thernstroms. When Lewis writes of schools as “race-making institutions,” she is in part concerned with how schools “produce racial disparities in life outcomes. Children were not only learning racial lessons but were receiving different educational opportunities” (188).

I believe Lewis may be partly right in her assertion, at least in the sense that schools offer different educational opportunities to different students. Nevertheless, one of the problems I trace throughout these novels is the way that racial inequality has been redefined through ideas of academic achievement. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in their theory of racial formation, suggest that racial hierarchies and divisions have remained pertinent throughout successive eras of civil rights reform because ideas about white superiority have never gone away, but have simply been redefined or

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“rearticulated” (117) in response to changing circumstances. In the decades since the

1960s, they argue, “Racial equality had to be acknowledged as a desirable goal. But the meaning of equality, and the proper means for achieving it, remained matters of considerable debate” (117). In other words, inequality and racism remain, as the reasons and strategies for fighting it change. Similarly, Lani Guinier contends that Brown failed in part because its architects failed to recognize this principle of re-articulation, and treated the “symptom” of segregation without dramatically affecting the larger, mutating racial structure of which it was only the most visible part (99). 70 These observations indicate that when black, Latino, Asian, and white students score in the same percentiles on standardized tests, not only will disparities in employment, wages, and living conditions likely continue, but some other reason will be found for those inequalities, an idea I pursue further in Chapter Four. Thus, while I am certainly supportive of academic achievement for all students—or at least of intellectual stimulation and learning, which is not the same thing—I wish to question, in this chapter, the ways in which these contemporary counter-narratives of black schooling reinforce the conception that equality of achievement ought to be the condition for inclusive citizenship rights.

Omi and Winant caution that state agencies which attempt to intervene in matters of racial inequality are themselves internally structured according to prevalent racial hierarchies. Thus, as Lewis observes in public schools attempting to close the achievement gap, antiracist efforts at reform can, once incorporated into the system, help to produce inequality. The connection between the state-sponsored public school and the racially structured state raises another question about the “blackness” of the historically

70 See also Roderick Ferguson’s The Re-Order of Things , which focuses on diversity movements in higher education. 132

black school—specifically, how much of a safe haven from the white world it can realistically provide. Because We Are imagines that no ground is truly safe or sheltered; community cohesion can provide a psychological, but not a literal “safe space” for resistance. The other two novels, however, written during the No Child Left Behind Era of increased top-down requirements for standardized testing and accountability, nostalgically evoke black schools of the past that are imagined as exempt from such oppressive requirements.

In this, they depart from some prior literary representations of black education.

Critic Robert Stepto coins the term “ritual grounds” to describe enclosed, circumscribed spaces that function in black literature as cradles of community, protection, and learning, but that do so within the confines of a white world that surrounds and threatens the ritual ground (68). He notes that schoolrooms, in Richard Wright’s Black Boy , never lose the threat of whiteness; any taste of joy to be found within a schoolroom is ended or tempered by the constant presence of white power. Similarly, in Mildred Taylor’s award- winning and popular children’s novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry , the only “safe space” for learning is the black-owned and operated Logan family farm. The segregated school is taught mostly by black teachers who fear white authority and who consent to teach racist versions of history. Mary Logan, the protagonists’ mother, represents the kind of demanding, resistant teacher described by counter-historians who point to the black school as a community center; yet when her resistance attracts the notice of white authorities, her adjustments to the state curriculum come under scrutiny and she is fired.

Only on the shelter of the Logans’ land, with Mrs. Logan working as an unpaid volunteer outside of the state’s employ, can the children in the community come to her unofficial

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school to be educated in literacy and pride. 71 In contrast, in later historical novels like

Draper’s and Woodson’s, resistant and independent black classrooms operate under the aegis of an otherwise racist state.

This is not necessarily an impossible or unthinkable scenario. Louis Althusser, in his essay on ideological state apparatuses, suggests that organizations such as the school and the church may be designed to produce submissive and controllable citizens, but can also conflict with each other and work at cross-purposes; and as I discuss throughout this project, theorists such as Patricia Hill Collins and Henry Giroux argue that state- sponsored schools reproduce forms of resistance as well as forms of inequality.

Nevertheless, I argue in this chapter as well as the previous one that the genre of the school story also constrains the forms of resistance that can be imagined within the school. It is significant that neither Black Boy nor Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is a school story; the first is a memoir whose protagonist spends relatively little time in school, and the second is really a family story. The novels I discuss in this chapter thus raise key questions about how the genre of the school story shapes even critical counter- histories of Brown .

Because We Are : Cultural Immersion for the Post-Civil Rights Generation

In Because We Are , Mildred Pitts Walter directly addresses the Brown decision’s failures to achieve its goals in ways that are unusual in children’s fiction. Emma, the protagonist, essentially has two battles to fight. One is against a white power structure in the school system that seeks to groom token black stars while keeping the rest of the

71 See Let the Circle Be Unbroken , the sequel to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry . 134

black community down; the other, crucially, is against black adults of her parents’ generation, who celebrate legal access without protesting the price they and their children are paying for desegregation. Walter draws a clear distinction between legal desegregation and meaningful integration, and insists that the latter cannot be achieved until those privileged members of the black community granted an entrée into the white world refuse to serve as symbols of racial advancement until all members of the community have the same opportunities. The utopian school, in the complacent, “color- blind” post-Civil Rights era of the novel’s setting, does not yet exist; it may come into being, however, if a new generation of activists refuses to accept their parents’ victories as final. In this respect, Because We Are reverses narratives of forced desegregation such as With the Might of Angels , in which Dawnie Rae leaves her brother behind in the hope that her own struggles will improve the lot of the next generation; nevertheless, the positioning of the protagonists is similar, in that their natural ability grants them the privilege and responsibility to fight for, rather than with, their less fortunate brethren.

Because We Are is structured around a series of parallels and mirrors that appear to pit white against black, middle class society against lower class society, and men against women, but that actually demonstrate how both sides in each opposition are complicit in racism and gender oppression. There is a predominantly white school and a predominantly black one; a racist white teacher who tries to nurture Emma’s talent and a racist white teacher who tries to squelch it; a beleaguered peer group of middle-class black youth and a hostile group of lower-class ones; a distant father and a protective mother; and a boy friend who seeks white society and prestige and another who seeks black community and justice. The only character to receive unambiguously positive

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treatment is Allan, Emma’s best friend at the predominantly black school, who guides her and who provides the novel’s moral voice of authority. In this section, I trace how

Emma’s movement from one side of each parallel to the other illuminates both how

Walter critiques pervasive white power, and also how her vision for change is centered in the (white-dominated) school system.

Because We Are begins by highlighting the isolation and exclusion experienced by black students attending nominally desegregated schools. Entering the cafeteria,

Emma heads for the tables where the other black students congregate together, and where

“[t]he laughter at her table, everybody in their section talking at once, the handslapping— all the body language—made her feel warm, safe, at home” (9). Yet even as she makes her way through “their” section to “her” table, there are signs that this community’s warmth and safety is contingent at best. As she walks through the section, she hears another black student call her “‘white-girl lady,’” because “[it] was well known that she maintained a four-point average, was the only Black on the student council, and that she had white friends. Would she forever have to prove her Blackness?” (8). As a result of this remark, Emma decides not to tell her friends that she has just been elected to the

National Honor Society. From the outset, then, the desegregated Marlborough High

School is depicted as a white-dominated, hostile place. It resembles the environments described by psychologists like Beverly Daniel Tatum in Why Are All the Black Kids

Sitting Together in the Cafeteria and by scholars like John Ogbu and Stuart Buck, who fear that black students since desegregation have associated academic achievement with whiteness. Similarly, in Walter’s novel, black students clump together for psychological protection, and feel threatened by academic prowess.

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The reason for this sense of threat soon becomes clear. Ms. Simmons, Emma’s

English teacher and the faculty advisor for the Student Council, approaches her to remind her of an upcoming meeting, and expresses “obvious disapproval” at finding Emma in the midst of a black peer group (10). At the meeting, Ms. Simmons says nothing when a white student asks Emma (in fake dialect) to serve as an expert resource for a paper on welfare. She consistently praises Emma’s intelligence and leadership ability, but also sets the terms for her success, saying: “‘I can get you into the mainstream, but I can’t keep you there. You have to want to be there. I know your parents don’t approve of you isolating yourself with hall walkers . . . with riffraff’” (13). In other words, Emma is to depend upon (and presumably give credit to) Ms. Simmons to “get” her into the (white) mainstream, and she is to give up the black community that Ms. Simmons views as both threatening “riffraff” and as antithetical to achievement. Tatum suggests that white school staff feel threatened by seeing black students sitting together in desegregated schools because the phenomenon visibly challenges the notion that color-blind equality has been achieved in the post-Civil Rights era. Further, it implicates white administrators in creating an environment which is not safe or “color-blind” for black students. In Because

We Are, Ms. Simmons’ emphasis on “color-blind” meritocracy only exacerbates the hostility experienced by the black students. In order to accept Ms. Simmons’ compliments about her potential for the “mainstream,” Emma must not only leave her circle of friends, she must also ignore the insults embedded in the praise. Simi Linton says about such remarks that “To accept [them,] one must accept the implication that the group is inferior and that the individual is unlike others in that group” (18). Thus, when

Emma yells at Ms. Simmons, “‘Don’t be calling my friends riffraff’” (13), she

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understands at some level that Ms. Simmons is also calling her riffraff. When she physically pushes Ms. Simmons’ hand off her shoulder, her open hostility functions to strip away her exceptional status with respect to the rest of her black peers, and Ms.

Simmons has her removed from the desegregated “mainstream” school and returned to her segregated neighborhood school.

Walter’s narrator does not believe that Emma’s friends deserve the label of

“riffraff,” and certainly critiques the ethos of exceptionalism practiced by Ms. Simmons; but she also exposes the ways in which this peer group is pervaded by an internalized racism that renders it a flawed and tenuous shelter from white hostility. Despite the black students’ reluctance to be identified with “white” academic activities, they do attain status through proximity to whiteness. Specifically, attending an integrated school signals that they have enough “class” to be chosen as nominal participants in white institutions, and they use the same measures in determining the criteria for their own institutions.

In part, these criteria come from their parents, who fought for even nominal integration. Emma’s father explains why she is rejected by the Golden Slipper debutante society after being transferred to a segregated school: “‘Blacks who have class are no different from any other people with class—thank God for that—and anybody wanting to be considered by those with class have to measure up. . . . Whether Emma is a good girl, or bad, Manning girls are not considered Golden Slipper material. That’s that’” (84-5).

Emma’s mother reminds him that in the sixties, he “knew most authority is racist” (85); but from his new perspective as a wealthy doctor with a white wife, integration has succeeded, and further investment in black community-building is an anachronism and a

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shame to be overcome. 72 Thus, he adopts the tenets of color-blind racism, maintaining that class and merit know no color. In the meantime, the black Golden Slipper society depends directly on the approval of the white school for its criteria; if a girl has been deemed worthy to attend the desegregated school, she can be considered for the society, and if the white administrators refuse her entry, then she is not “material” for the black upper crust. Even Emma’s mother, in defending her, does so by saying that she is “not a

‘Manning girl’” (85) and by telling her to stay away from the working-class girls at

Manning lest she lose status. The fallacy of this position, however, is reflected in her mother’s fate, divorced for a white woman by a man who defines integration as access instead of justice. With the exception of the “self-segregation” their parents abhor,

Emma’s peers seem to be passively adopting their parents’ values. Her boyfriend Marvin is pursued by a wealthy white girl who thinks he has “potential” (77), and her friends sympathize with her rejection but do not fight on her behalf. The black middle class, therefore, has adopted an ideology of merit and has identified merit (accurately, as far as white society is concerned) as being proximity to whiteness. Meanwhile, Walter suggests, real merit, defined as the kind of academic achievement that Emma pursues and her classy friends reject, is neglected.

Walter’s scathing critique of desegregation, and of the Civil Rights generation, is especially poignant because she is commenting upon her own legacy as an activist; in

1968, together with her husband Earl Walter, who was the head of CORE’s Los Angeles chapter, she helped to file the lawsuit that desegregated the Los Angeles school system.

72 See Andrea Simpson on divisions between the Civil Rights generation, who tend to be more optimistic about opportunity, and the post-Civil Rights generation of the 1980s, who tend to see decreasing opportunity. 139

In an interview conducted in the 1990s, however, she reflected on her disappointment with the results of desegregation: “We felt we had no other choice but to try to become a part of the total system. We tried and saw that it was just not working for us even though we tried. Our children took the brunt of a lot of mental abuse to make the nation whole.

The nation didn’t want to be whole. And it still doesn’t want to be whole” (Jordan 281).

Thus, in Because We Are , Emma’s task is to figure out the other choices Walter and her compatriots overlooked, taking as a starting point a nation that does not want to be whole.

The first step in this process is for Emma to continue down the same path that has gotten her removed from Marlborough; rather than protecting her access to the

“mainstream,” she must increasingly identify with the “riffraff,” the segregated black students who apparently lack the potential to be adopted by white society. This portion of the novel uses a key school story trope to uplift the dignity of the segregated black school. The protagonist enters a school that signifies shame and social demotion, rather than one whose association confers pride; yet the trajectory of the school story plot remains the same. Emma, who is “not a Manning girl,” still needs to become a “Manning girl,” regardless of what her parents think being a “Manning girl” means. If Manning lacks the kind of virtuous school spirit engendered by the institutions of classic school stories, then it is incumbent upon Emma to create a new school spirit as a symbol of a resurgent community identity.

Her guide in this process is Allan, another star student, who has turned down

“opportunity transfers” to prestigious white-dominated schools in favor of the greater opportunity to attend the all-black Manning (98). Consoling Emma after her rejection from the Golden Slippers, Allan tells her, “‘Out there I was chosen. Here I can choose’”

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(99), thus directly refuting her father’s logic of needing to “measure up” in order to be accorded full opportunities to participate. Nevertheless, Allan’s insight is the exception and not the norm at Manning. The students still clump into cliques according to class status; the “boojies” still run all of the high-status activities, including the visible spirit- building clubs like cheerleading (25); and resentment between the different groups prevents them from working to solve the common problems that diminish the quality of their school. Emma shifts her allegiance to a new sports team and mascot relatively easily, but she is surrounded and harassed by a group of lower-class Manning girls at a football game against Marlborough, during which she has just demonstrated her loyalty to her new school’s team. This incident demonstrates that a more comprehensive and meaningful kind of school spirit is needed for Emma and for the Manning student body.

This new school spirit is developed through the classic school story event of standing up to the bully, a trial that teaches Emma to, as Allan says, “choose” her values for herself and prioritize her own judgments. The occasion for this moral lesson is provided in precisely the area for which she was ridiculed by her black peers—her desire to excel academically. In this instance, however, the bully is not another student, but a teacher, and Emma passes her test of character, not by demonstrating individual grit, but by insisting upon an environment in which all of her classmates have the opportunity to achieve.

For her final graduation credit in American literature, Emma is unable to secure a spot in the class she wants, taught by a new African-American teacher who is the only faculty member to include the work of black writers in his course. Instead, she must take the course with Mr. Kooner, an ineffectual white teacher who seems fearful of his own

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students and who makes no attempt to teach. In contrast to Ms. Simmons, who did not believe in equality but who did cultivate a few star students, Mr. Kooner announces,

“Your chance of holding a book is as good as anyone else’s in the room. I see to that. No one can say I do not believe in equality of opportunity” (134). In effect, what this means is that he provides opportunity for no one. Mr. Kooner’s class is defined by the

“scramble;” he provides only seventeen books for thirty-five students, and begins each class period by tossing piles of books on the floor and watching the students fight each other to get one. By the time they regain their seats, the class period is over and no work has been done. Worst of all, Emma sees a boy split his pants open while fighting for a book and witnesses Mr. Kooner’s “look of wild excitement and peculiar grin” (143) as he watches the mayhem. This scene, in a segregated school, works against the nostalgic romanticizing of pre-Brown education; as Walter notes in an interview, the scramble scenes recall a history of similar incidents, such as those represented in Ellison’s Invisible

Man and Wright’s Black Boy , and provide a reminder that education for black students was always overseen at some level by a hostile white power structure. In another interview, however, she also states that the scramble was drawn from stories told her by the high school students she tutored, and represented an actual classroom practice in a post-Civil Rights era high school. Thus, just as Omi and Winant suggest that the language of equality is repurposed to justify old injustices, so Mr. Kooner continues a history of inadequate and racist education for black students by using the language of opportunity.

The adults Emma consults try to redress the problem by trying to repeat their own histories and strategies of redress—namely, by trying to secure access for Emma without addressing the root problem of Kooner’s racist power trip. The principal advises her to

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find a handsome swain to scramble on her behalf; her father gives her money to buy her own textbook; and her mother checks out a copy of the textbook from the library. Emma refuses all of these solutions, and insists upon solidarity with the “riffraff”—until they all have books, she will not use one. Nevertheless, she is angry with the other students’ complicity in Kooner’s racism, as they scramble and laugh and attend each class as though Kooner were gifting them with a “fun” class instead of humiliating them. Into her state of static frustration, Allan slips a timely moment of re-education through an African proverb from which the book takes its title: “‘ Because we are, I am . . . The I is always included in we . We, never in I’” (170). Emma, who has been socialized, or “mis- educated,” by parents and teachers in the kind of internalized racism critiqued by

Woodson and Du Bois, has an epiphany when Allan introduces her to the wiser ideology of Africa. Recognizing that the class represents all of the divided groups at the school, she says, “‘Man, Kooner sure lumps us all together.’ ‘Now you’re getting the point.

When we all get the point, the Kooners of the world will be as useless as a robot without a programmer. We program the Kooners’” (171). Emma organizes the students in the class to boycott the scramble, and they stay quietly in their seats until Mr. Kooner obtains one more book so that each pair of students can share a text. The tactics of boycotting and collective action, of course, are not exactly radically different from those of the Civil

Rights generation; however, the strategies are repurposed for a slightly altered goal.

Instead of insisting on the opportunity to access books, the students insist upon their actual physical delivery. And, with respect to education reform, they flip the usual script.

Instead of racist teachers being told they ought to expect and demand excellence from their black students, the students demand more excellence from the teacher; instead of

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white liberal teachers and activists studying how best to produce results from the passive students who are the objects of their study, the black student body identifies its own needs and goals and determines how to milk an education from an unwilling teacher. 73

This temporary collectivity points the way to utopia, but it does not create a utopian segregated school or a haven from white power. In Walter’s novel, there is no haven, and utopia exists more as a psychological commitment to collective justice than as an actual place where the community can be free of oppression. The white world is omnipresent; it looms after graduation, and is even present in Emma’s own family, in the form of her friendly but alien stepmother. Belief in white superiority persists in the black community in the form of her father’s and Marvin’s pursuit of status and white approval.

Thus, Emma, Allan, and the students in Kooner’s class must be prepared to survive continued assaults on their psyches, their values, and their sense of unity. Nevertheless, in contrast to the character-toughening brutalities of the desegregation story genre, Emma’s reformed classroom succeeds only through collective love and support for all its members, building strength only when each individual’s needs are met and skills are strengthened.

Nevertheless, the representations of merit and academic talent slip away from this commitment to collective achievement, especially at the end. Emma and Allen, the star students who had the possibility of choosing to join the white world, are the enlightened leaders who organize the less talented brethren given no such choice. Allan, as valedictorian, National Honor Student, National Awards winner, and University of

73 For more critique on constructions of the white, active, adult who studies versus the minoritized, passive, immature problem to be studied, see Simi Linton, Roderick Ferguson, Amanda Lewis, and Shelby Steele. In educational philosophy, see also John Dewey. 144

Southern California music scholarship winner, delivers a speech at graduation. So does

Emma; despite being sabotaged by Mr. Kooner for a speech competition, she wins the honor of being class speaker, and is additionally introduced to the assembly as a National

Honor student, National Merit scholar, and soon-to-be Stanford freshman. Emma’s speech, entitled “Where Do We Go From Here?,” “declare[s] her proud to be a Manning

Girl, ready to go from this place into an uncertain world, certain that she now ha[s] the desire and will to help make earth a safer and healthier place for all living things” (192).

This resolution, which celebrates the protagonist’s school spirit and the preparation for service she has received through the institution, reinforces the school story frame that constrains the impact of the text’s many innovative critiques.

Most obviously, of course, Allan and Emma have worked for community unity and collective opportunities for expression, but the plot structure of achieving success within the institution and being recognized upon graduation requires that they voice their thoughts and insights on behalf of the community, whose voices are still not heard and whose destinations and aspirations remain unstated. Furthermore, the celebration of their school successes works to undermine the alternate conceptions of citizenship developed earlier in the text. In the battle against the bully Kooner, academic opportunity is treated as a universal entitlement of citizenship regardless of apparent “merit” or talent.

Furthermore, its inception with an African proverb suggests that the students are developing a kind of pan-African community whose tenets contradict the national

American creed of individualist striving. 74 Upon graduation, however, academic

74 “Multicultural” and Afro-centric curricula are sometimes targeted by conservative education critics as conflicting with the school’s mission of teaching strictly (white) American citizenship values. See Ravitch’s Language Police and Thernstrom and Thernstrom. 145

achievement is the ticket to a more fully realized public citizenship role, and Allan and

Emma are ostentatiously claimed, over and over, as national scholars who receive the state’s bounty and recognition for their success. Thus, despite the narrative’s overarching message of unity and its pessimism about the nation’s ability to meaningfully integrate any part of the black community, the structure of the school story works to separate Allan and Emma from the rest and to reinforce individual academic merit as the way to advance in the white-dominated nation.

Fire From the Rock : Recovering History, Rewriting Brown

The publication context of Fire From the Rock is quite different. Beginning in the late 1980s, as a result of the kind of disillusionment voiced by activists like Walter, the idea of immersion schools for black students (especially boys) became increasingly popular. 75 As Gloria Ladson-Billings notes about this movement, “African Americans already have separate schools. The African American immersion movement is about taking control of those separate schools” (3, emphasis in original). Shortly afterward, in the mid-1990s, the historiography of the Brown decision began to change, and a series of studies were published that sought to excavate the buried stories of cherished black schools closed or taken over by whites in the process of desegregation. 76 These histories seem to offer models of separate schools that were under the control of the black community, and thus offer hope that the proud institutions of the past might be recreated in new and perhaps better forms.

75 See Murrell, Kunjufu, and Ladson-Billings. 76 See Fairclough, Morris, and Cecelski. 146

Fire From the Rock (and, to a lesser extent, Feathers ) draws upon this recent historiography for a different, though related, kind of education project. Draper is not involved in reform movements like the immersion school movement, but she was a secondary school teacher for thirty years, and states that she thinks of herself as continuing to teach through her writing, both by explaining ideas so that young readers can understand them and by appealing to reluctant readers so that they can improve their literacy skills. 77 She has also published two books for teachers, and her website includes philosophical advice for teachers, as well as detailed teaching guides for each of her novels. Over and over, in published interviews and biographical anecdotes, Draper establishes her beliefs that high expectations and copious praise garner good results from students, that tracking and ability grouping damage them, and that effective literary study must involve interdisciplinary historical investigation and must feel relevant to students’ lives. She emphasizes the effect that the publication of Alex Haley’s Roots had upon her and her students, crediting the book and the miniseries with transforming both her view of history and also her teaching, as she began to incorporate the questions Haley’s work raised into her units on American literature. She says about this transformation, “My students devoured the concepts, accepted the challenges, and absorbed the underlying lessons that were offered through this integrated study. It was multicultural, cross- curricular teaching and learning at its best, and I didn't even know it. I just knew they were thriving and enjoying the learning process with no pain and much gain. Alex Haley helped me to do that” (Draper, “Digging Deeper”).

77 See Sharon Draper’s website, and Hinton’s interview “Reaching Reluctant Readers.” 147

Crucially, Draper explains Haley’s influence on her, not only in terms of her own approach to teaching, but also in terms of her students’ achievement; they accept challenges, devour concepts, and thrive on the learning process as a result of reclaiming a formerly shameful and occluded history within a vibrant, loving classroom. Draper states that she began writing historical fiction in addition to the contemporary teen problem novels that first established her reputation because “the past is a teacher from which we can learn much” (Hinton, “Reluctant Readers”). The question, of course, is what we are to learn. Fire From the Rock echoes Draper’s classroom use of Haley and also extends the new Brown historiography into a format for use in the secondary classroom. The novel suggests that learning buried and redemptive aspects of history will be helpful for students’ achievement; but furthermore, past philosophies and methods of education are recreated in a way that offers correctives for the present. Draper directly reverses the trajectory of the desegregation story in order to evoke what was lost for many black students (and thus to raise the question of what is now lacking). Her novel offers a thoughtful counter-history to the narratives generally told about Brown , filling in perspectives and complexities that are often omitted. Nevertheless, in order to portray the segregated black school as a utopian, nurturing cradle of academic success, Draper must portray the classroom as being more independent and self-contained than it has ever been, then or now. Furthermore, in order to prove the black school’s superiority, fictional students must fall into line and demonstrate their ability and commitment. While they curb their unruliness in response to a black authority instead of a white one, they must nevertheless conform to a certain level of respectability, lest their sexuality or their high spirits detract from their achievement. Thus, while the whole black community is

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portrayed as deserving citizenship rights, and as being driven to fight for these rights in a variety of ways, black youth in this novel must still earn their citizenship through good student-ship.

Fire From the Rock explicitly evokes many of the generic conventions of the desegregation stories discussed in the previous chapter. Like the protagonists of those other stories, Sylvia is an ambitious and talented girl from a middle-class family. She has a white Jewish best friend, Rachel Zucker, who has been her playmate from childhood and whose parents are among the few white people who treat black adults with respect.

Like the interracial female friends of other desegregation stories, she and Rachel notice and question norms of gender as well as race; and, of course, Sylvia has the opportunity to be a pioneer in school desegregation. Instead of telling the story of a child who becomes a Civil Rights hero for desegregating the schools, however, Draper suggests that

Sylvia becomes just as worthy a participant in Civil Rights history by deciding not to do so. In large part, this is due to her embrace of the benefits she can gain from the segregated black school. In the process of deciding against desegregation, Sylvia comes to a series of understandings: effective citizenship is nonviolent; school is both a form of citizenship and also a preparation for further action in the world; the best schooling is therefore nonviolent; so, finally, the loving and safe black school provides a better opportunity for development than the violent white one.

From the beginning, the three Patterson children establish a continuum of approaches to dealing with racism and fighting for civil rights. Gary, the oldest, leans toward militancy, and within the first few chapters is described by other characters briefly as “bold” and “brave” (55), but more repeatedly as “angry” (13, 21), “impetuous” (13,

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52), “volatile” (52), “outspoken” (55), and “violent” (55). He is completely disdainful of his parents’ prayers and dignified patience in response to racial insults, and dubious about nonviolent tactics, maintaining that “‘[t]he only law they [whites] understand is fists!’”

(59). As the novel continues, it becomes clear that Gary is gathering around him a group of like-minded militant youth who debate the use of violent tactics and sabotage. Gary is an impatient student and hates whites, but he passionately desires to integrate Central precisely because it represents the kind of violent fight for which he longs. At the other end of the spectrum is Donna Jean, the youngest, who cannot for the life of her understand why anyone would want to brave daily violence simply to go to school with white children, whom she can see are not particularly special. In the middle is Sylvia, who is increasingly impatient with her parents’ cautionary proverbs and pessimism, but also reluctant to undergo the pressure and daily harassment she knows she would face as a visible Civil Rights symbol. She does not condemn Gary’s militancy as the older characters in the novel do, instead reflecting, “If they pay you to fight, it’s acceptable, but if someone like Gary fights, then it’s wrong? Gary says he is willing to fight for rights and freedom and a better life. [Sugar Ray] Robinson fights for money. Which is better?”

(146). She is also, however, increasingly astonished by the precocious wisdom of her little sister, who advises her that she doesn’t have to be a hero no matter how many people she thinks are depending upon her: “‘It’s your life. Live it for yourself. . . . You’re the only one who has to live in your skin. It’s up to you, not them’” (100).

The inclusion of Gary and Donna Jean as advisors and models represents an important revision of the desegregation story, as neither perspective—the militant approach or the separatist—is adequately represented in most desegregation stories. In

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the novels of Chapter One, members of the protagonists’ communities castigate them for being “uppity” or for bringing danger to the community, but they do not simply shrug off white people altogether as Donna Jean does—and the militant perspective is written out entirely. Ultimately, like Emma in Because We Are, Sylvia must figure out how to live in her skin by finding her own approach, which is neither completely separatist, nor militant, nor heroically and symbolically integrationist in the way that the NAACP advises—even as she expresses respect and admiration for all of these tactics. An incident of violence brings her to a realization of her own preferred approach, which is based upon receiving an education.

The climax of the novel occurs when Sylvia’s boyfriend Reggie, who has been attending Gary’s militant meetings, throws a firebomb into the Zuckers’ store when

Sylvia just happens to be there visiting Rachel. The two girls are nearly killed in the fire that results, and both the Zuckers’ store and the adjacent black-owned business, Miss

Lillie and Calvin’s flower shop, are completely destroyed. As it turns out, Reggie was attempting to bomb the barbershop across the street, owned by the vicious Crandalls who are responsible for many of the scariest racist incidents in the novel. Unfortunately, his aim is so epically terrible that he lands the bomb 180 degrees away from its target. The lesson against violence is clear; Reggie’s bomb has left the racist business intact and instead harmed not only a white business that has been fairly helpful to the black community, but also a black business owner. Nevertheless, the racist police response to the bombing, on top of previous violent incidents, also makes Sylvia so angry that she cannot simply dismiss the issue of integration and retreat to the comfort of the black

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community as Donna Jean would like to do. Instead, as she processes her reaction to the bombing, she says,

“What terrified me when I was lying on that floor is that I’d never get the chance to learn what I needed to learn, never have the time to do what I needed to do. …I need what the colored school will give me for the next four years. I have to suck up as much pride and dignity as I can while it’s there for me. Integration will happen eventually, and we’re gonna lose something when it does—that feeling of being special when we walk in the school just because it’s us. . . . I want to go to college. I want to be a teacher like Miss Washington—only with better clothes,” she added with a laugh, “so little colored girls like me can grow up to be proud of their brown skin and fuzzy hair. I don’t think I can suck that in like I need to from teachers and kids at an all-white high school.” (200) Good education, for Sylvia, comes from love, pride, and feelings of specialness rather than from the shiny science labs desired by the integrationist protagonists of the desegregation stories. It is, in fact, incompatible with the violence that will accompany the desegregation of Central High. That kind of violence, she suggests, is necessary for a certain kind of civil rights fight—namely, the one being fought at that moment in her town—but it is not her civil rights fight. Hers will be fought on a delayed schedule, through the transmission of education.

Sylvia’s experience of education is shaped by the classroom culture created by

Miss Washington, the teacher she takes as a role model. Miss Washington is introduced as “a stern, unsmiling woman” (34) who wears stiff, dark-colored dresses—never a bright color or a flowered print—and who tolerates absolutely no nonsense in her class; when the reader meets her, she is reprimanding the class clown, Calvin, who has been calling her an “army truck” and an “old bird” (35) in what he thinks is a whisper. Miss

Washington’s discipline cows Calvin (momentarily, at least), but it is not portrayed as unnecessarily harsh or unproductive. She uses the opportunity as a teachable moment to

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make him demonstrate his knowledge about the recent Supreme Court Brown decision and to encourage him to achieve: “‘If you would stop your foolishness in class, Mr.

Cobbs, and apply yourself to your studies, you could become a lawyer like Mr. Thurgood

Marshall and help to implement that law” (36). In fact, Sylvia writes in her diary that while students do not like Miss Washington, they do recognize her commitment to them:

She tells us all the time that we have to be better prepared than the white children so that we can compete for jobs and opportunities. She told us she refuses to send incompetent, unprepared Negroes into a world that expects us to mess up in the first place. So she drills us constantly—grammar and vocabulary, states and capitals, continents and constellations, even the United States Constitution. Every single one of us—even Calvin Cobbs—can recite the Gettysburg Address and long passages of Shakespeare. We can spell and define every single one of the words on Miss Washington’s famous one-thousand-word list and can probably conjugate irregular verbs in our sleep. . . . Miss Ethel Washington also talks to us about real things—like how to survive in a segregated world. (38-9) Miss Washington is immediately recognizable as the kind of respected pillar of the segregated school described by numerous observers and scholars, 78 who insisted upon achievement for all students and who delivered explicit messages about how to combat the white world’s low expectations.

Moreover, although she insists that the students be able to display knowledge valuable to the white world, like Shakespearean passages and the conjugations of irregular verbs, she seems to avoid the mis-education in white superiority decried by

Woodson and Kunjufu; she also teaches the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and

Langston Hughes and requires research projects investigating topics in contemporary black culture: Jackie Robinson, Fats Domino, and the decolonization of Africa. When

Miss Washington asks Sylvia why she chose Africa as her topic, Sylvia replies, “‘I read

78 See, for example, bell hooks, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Sonya Ramsay, and Jawanza Kunjufu. 153

an article in the World Book encyclopedia and it made me angry. . . . I wanted to find something that would make me feel proud’” (92). As a result of her research paper on

Africa, Sylvia begins following news stories about Ghana with increasing interest and understanding, thus drawing upon the knowledge gained in school to further her emotional involvement with the international Civil Rights movement. Miss Washington’s teaching thus models for readers of Fire From the Rock what their own reading of historical counter-narratives ought to do—namely, to reach for corrections to the dominant historical record to find a source of pride.

One of the greatest causes for pride to be excavated from the history of segregated black schooling is the cultivation of achievement in “troublesome” or “at-risk” students.

As I discuss at more length in the next chapter, one of the legacies of desegregation is the increased use of tracking and special education classes as tools to re-segregate black students. In the pre-Brown segregated schools, however, one former student recalls, “‘We didn’t have special ed, because the children weren’t allowed to be that dumb’” (Buck

117). Draper, who writes extensively about her belief that no child, however reluctant, should be labeled “dumb” or given up as un-teachable, depicts Miss Washington’s class as a learning environment superior to many of the contemporary ones she describes in her biographical essays. The characters of Calvin Cobbs and Candy Castle exemplify two types of worrisome students whom Miss Washington brings up to the mark. The difference in their treatment, however, demonstrates some of the contradictions and problems inherent in the school’s cultivation of black achievers.

Calvin Cobbs is the kind of mischievous class clown who is identified in books like Kunjufu’s as being at risk of under-performing, and in books like Gloria Ladson-

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Billings’s as likely to be sent to the office by fearful white teachers. Yet, as Sylvia points out in her diary, “even Calvin Cobbs” can recite the Gettysburg Address and define vocabulary words under Miss Washington’s tutelage. Moreover, as the novel continues, it becomes increasingly clear that Calvin’s goofiness would only be a deficit to be overcome in a white classroom; in a loving black community, it offers the gift of laughter and light-heartedness during a stressful time. When she learns that she has survived several rounds of elimination for consideration to attend Central, Sylvia thinks about how much she will miss Calvin’s jokes; and Miss Washington herself, after tussling with

Calvin all year, advises him at graduation, “‘Calvin, never lose your gift of laughter and love of flowers. They will save you from despair’” (151). His mischief may be distracting, but it is ultimately compatible with achievement and ethical citizenship;

Calvin announces his pride in Sylvia and his determination to support her (by calling her to tell her dirty jokes after a hard day at Central), and when his mother’s flower shop burns, he tries to run into the burning building to find her and then cheerfully helps her rebuild her business.

Candy Castle, aptly named for her delicious appeal and lack of substance, is a different kind of “at-risk” stereotype; she is the precociously sexual teen-aged girl who uses school as an opportunity, not to learn, but to flirt with boys and to flaunt her curves in revealing clothing. When Miss Washington praises Sylvia’s sensible demeanor and attention to her schoolwork, Candy calls Sylvia a “teacher’s pet” (92) and proceeds to try to seduce Reggie away from her. Miss Washington, true to form, cares enough about

Candy to try to discipline her; rather than dismissing her as “riffraff” or taking her boy- craziness as a given, the way that the white teachers and administrators in Emma’s

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schools do, she instructs Candy to “concentrate on self-improvement instead of self- enhancement and the degradation of others” (93). While Candy does not respond to discipline with the same alacrity that Calvin does, she does appear to develop a more serious attitude over time. On the first day of the following school year, Candy wears a

“surprisingly simple navy blue dress that was not tight or revealing” (209) and expresses sympathy and concern for the Little Rock Nine who are to integrate Central High that very day. Like Calvin, Candy is given the consistent message that she can achieve in the future no matter what her academic performance or self-definition has been in the past; but while Calvin may be both a clown and a scholar-citizen, Candy must choose between sexuality and academics. Calvin’s antics support good students through cheer and laughter, but Candy’s attention to her own appearance is linked to jealousy and competition between girls, and thus drags down both herself and others. When Candy gets serious about school, therefore, she does not demonstrate her change by actually reciting her knowledge as Calvin does, but by wearing the kind of dark colors and plain clothing that Miss Washington favors.

This incompatibility between sexuality and achievement must also be reinforced for Sylvia—and for the reader. The narrator is sympathetic to Sylvia’s sexual longing for

Reggie, but romance also poses a threat to her ambitions. Repeatedly, Sylvia and Rachel discuss their mothers’ drab and disappointing lives and their own hopes for a more expansive sphere; and on a more immediate level, Reggie pressures Sylvia to take her name off the list for Central because he wants his girlfriend to be with him at the all- black Horace Mann School. Thus, when Sylvia does choose Horace Mann, it must be for the “right”reason—her own academic goals—unsullied by any possibility that she might

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choose based on romance instead of, or in addition to , academics. Reggie must therefore be eliminated as romantic potential before Sylvia makes her final decision; significantly, in her diary, Sylvia emphasizes that she is disillusioned with her first love, not only because he is involved in violence, but also because he is now a dropout. For Reggie, violence is tied to both poor citizenship and poor scholarship; for Sylvia, sexuality stands as a similar threat, tying her to bad associates and limiting her potential to accomplish her goals at school and in the world.

Roderick Ferguson, in his analysis of Ellison’s Invisible Man , observes a similar dynamic between the acknowledgement of non-normative sexuality on the one hand and the demands of citizenship on the other. He argues that in Ellison’s work, “As a symbol of democratic ideals, the African American is the figure from which the nation can develop ethically” (68). In other words, not only should African Americans hold equal citizenship rights, but they are in fact better qualified to do so, having a deeper understanding of the value of democracy and representing a complex element of

“difference” that the nation must be able to integrate and include in order to genuinely call itself a democracy. Draper’s project with regard to black education is similar. Her portrait of all-black institutions suggests that not only are black students, teachers, and schools not inferior to white ones, but they should in fact serve as a model for how all of the nation’s schools should operate, because they foster egalitarian achievement and communal citizenship in a way that the meritocratic, competition-oriented white schools do not. Ferguson, however, traces the contradiction inherent in this position, suggesting that the expansion of national belonging requires that other kinds of difference, such as non-normative sexuality, continue to be excluded. The disparities between the

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disciplining of Calvin, Candy, and Sylvia reveal a similar contradiction. The black school may be able to nurture a wider range of personalities, abilities, and interests than the white school, but it is still a state institution that functions to create normative citizens.

As numerous scholars observe, sexuality in adolescents is consistently portrayed as destructive to character and achievement, posing an aggregate threat to the state by spoiling the quality of its human resources. 79 Beyond this, the sexuality of black women in particular is portrayed as especially non-normative, excessive, and incompatible with other qualities of citizenship such as middle-class values and able-bodied independence. 80

Thus, in order to be a powerful and influential citizen in the black community, Miss

Washington must wear dark and drab clothing, Candy must learn to correct her own wardrobe, and Sylvia must consent to delay romance and sexuality on the understanding that they will interfere with the kind of citizenship she seeks. While Fire From the Rock does not end with Sylvia and her friends’ triumphant graduation and entry into adult nation-building, it does culminate with the anticipation of this successful and public- spirited future, a future that depends upon delaying sexual desire and framing it as antithetical to the desire for learning.

As in other desegregation stories, normative citizenship is conflated with academic achievement, while other aspects of citizenship and state compliance are downplayed. In Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry , Mrs. Logan is fired for non-compliance with state requirements; significantly, however, she is found out because T.J., a class clown who fails to achieve in her class, retaliates against her discipline by telling the white authorities that she is teaching resistant narratives of American history. In Taylor’s

79 See Males, Lesko, Hall, and Stockton. 80 See Catherine Rottenberg. 158

novel, not all students achieve simply because they are expected to; failure is still a part of school life. Moreover, when T.J. does fail to achieve, the costs of his failure are disastrous not only to him (he ends up on trial for murder) but also to the project of subversive black education. In contrast, Miss Washington never has to defend her curricular choices or her teaching methods to a white administrator, even though historically, the kind of resistant teaching she exemplifies was sometimes constrained by a white supervisory structure. 81

In more recent decades, Gloria Ladson-Billings notes that most of the teachers described in her study were not liked by their principals, and were tolerated only because they got “results” according to normative measures of test scores, classroom management, and student attendance records. For Miss Washington, “getting results” from black students meant pushing them to recite passages of Shakespeare or to spell vocabulary words; in the years since the passage of the 2001 No Child Left Behind law,

“getting results” means high performance on tests. In both cases, however, these results are meaningful as they compare to the results of white students, who serve as the norm by which academic achievement is set. Much public discourse about black students revolves around a data problem; as black students’ test scores rise with better pedagogy, white students’ scores rise at the same rate, maintaining a constant “achievement gap” despite movement in absolute percentages. 82 Heterogeneous groupings, multicultural curricula, and individualized research projects of the kind found in Miss Washington’s classroom are thus criticized as ineffective reforms because they have not as yet produced the particular form of achievement sought, which is normative (white) test scores. Miss

81 See Cottle, Busing. 82 See Thernstrom and Thernstrom. 159

Washington, like the resistant teachers upon whom she is based, does teach her class not only information valued by whites, but also information about black history and culture that she values for its own sake and that students will not be expected to measure against white norms. Nevertheless, unlike Allan in Because We Are, neither Miss Washington nor Sylvia questions the value of succeeding in comparison to whites. This acceptance of comparison as a necessity is believable; more problematic is that while many forms of injustice, including stereotypes of black incompetence, are questioned within the novel, the validity of academic achievement as a measure of intrinsic worth is not.

On the one hand, the novel’s selective depiction of an historical classroom idyll leans toward the “eerie nostalgia” critiqued by Lani Guinier. On the other hand, historical fiction is not history; while critics like Sara Schwebel and Angela Hubler warn that writers of historical fiction offer politicized fantasies of history rather than an historian’s contingent view of the past, one could argue that this is the point of historical fiction.

Draper’s vision of a classroom community reforms many of the institutional constraints that Draper (and I) find so damaging to teaching and learning for democratic citizenship.

Further, it offers a model of citizenship that does not depend upon surviving brutality, and acknowledges that young people may find many ways, and many timelines, for supporting the struggle for justice. This self-contained classroom probably has few, if any, actual precedents in mid-century United States education; in order to offer such a vision as a hopeful alternative, one must venture into the realm of fantasy. As with the selective presentism of The Lions of Little Rock , discussed in the previous chapter, I argue that the problem with Fire from the Rock is not that it fantasizes about historical alternatives, but that it fantasizes in some directions, while closing off other avenues.

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Like the more “typical” desegregation stories of Chapter One, Fire from the Rock depends upon a narrative of triumph and success in order to make its point. Just as the students, both black and white, of the forced desegregation stories must succeed academically in order to prove the worthiness of the desegregation project, so Sylvia and her companions must perform academically in order to demonstrate the validity of the supportive Afro-centric alternative to desegregation. As a result, there is no room for a citizen who is not also a good student, and good students must adhere to normative timelines of sexual delay in order to succeed.

Feathers : Finding Hope in the Past

Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Feathers , published in the same year as Draper’s book, offers a different kind of utopian haven from whiteness, one that redefines what academic achievement and ability mean. Feathers is one of the few school stories about black students that does not demand its protagonist be an academic powerhouse, and that addresses some questions of education for disabled students. 83 Nevertheless, like

Draper’s utopian classroom, Woodson’s is only possible because it is located in a past that allows for the creative re-invention of education.

As I note earlier, this novel plays with the conventions of school stories and desegregation stories more than the other two I discuss in this chapter. It explicitly evokes the typical forced desegregation story in that its action revolves around the entry of a single racially different student who forges an interracial friendship, stands up to a bully, and achieves some measure of classroom acceptance. Rather than assuming that

83 See also Sharon Flake’s Pinned . 161

black students wish to integrate white schools, however, Woodson imagines a white boy who wishes to integrate into the black community. She thus explicitly pushes the counter- narratives of Walter and Draper a step further; not only are black schools superior for black students, they may also be more desirable for white students. Nevertheless, just as the desegregation of the white school in the desegregation story pushes white society to develop toward a more inclusive form of democracy, so the desegregation of the black school in Feathers also demonstrates where the black community falls short of utopian fulfillment.

Unlike in other desegregation novels, the plot is not structured by the school year, so that there is no graduation or stepping-up ceremony at the end that renders the students up to the service of the nation. Thus, while the novel gestures toward desegregation stories, it also belongs in the generic category of “new realism,” which Sheila Egoff describes as “a kind of subjective, personal painting that transcends verisimilitude” (34).

As I argue in the introduction, I do not see such novels as “transcending verisimilitude” so much as re-framing or re-imagining how “reality” shapes young readers’ lives.

Feathers’ departures from the generic conventions of school stories allow it to open up some innovative critiques of the school system, most importantly the demand that learning occur according to an inflexible timeline. Nevertheless, as in Draper’s novel, the novel’s nostalgic setting both allows for some of its utopian solutions to be presented as

“realistic” and also limits these utopian solutions. Woodson’s utopian classroom breaks fairly entrenched institutional linkages between academic achievement and speed of learning, and it allows for a black “safe space” that may be integrated by white students

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willing to recognize the benefits of the black community; however, it is set during a period when students with disabilities cannot integrate the utopian classroom.

From the beginning of the novel, a schoolroom drama of racial integration is framed by an academic lesson on the Emily Dickinson poem, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.” The issue of integration and the poem are both, in turn, connected with the experience of time as a political rather than natural force. Some characters seek hope by looking forward to changing times; others cling to their own past and to a history of segregation; and Frannie struggles both to encode memories and to allow herself to hope for the future. Ultimately, as she lives with the poem in her consciousness, she facilitates both classroom integration and her own academic understanding by attending to each moment as it passes, rather than focusing either on the past or on the future.

The day the Jesus Boy walks in is the day after Ms. Johnson reads the Dickinson poem to the class. Frannie is thinking about the poem as the Jesus Boy is introduced to the stares of her classmates and the hostile comments of the class bully Trevor. She makes a face at him, then looks down at her notebook to face the immediate reminder of the poem and her mother’s response to it:

When I told Mama about the poem, she’d said, Welcome to the seventies, Frannie. Sounds like Ms. Johnson’s trying to tell you all something about looking forward instead of back all the time . I just stared at Mama. The poem was about hope and how hope had these feathers on it. It didn’t have a single thing to do with looking forward or backward or even sideways . But then Sean came home and I told him about the poem and the crazy thing Mama had said. Sean smiled and shook his head. You’re a fool, he signed to me. The word doesn’t have feathers. It’s a metaphor. Don’t you learn anything at Price? So maybe the seventies is the thing with feathers. Maybe it was about hope and moving forward and not looking behind you. (3)

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This passage establishes a few crucial concepts. First, Frannie is introduced as a character who is attracted to words and poetry but who struggles to understand her lessons

“correctly;” Sean’s remark suggests that she is somehow lagging, not learning what she ought to know at her grade level. This characterization is sustained throughout; Frannie frequently remarks that she has trouble remembering vocabulary words and schoolwork, and she knows that she takes longer than her classmates to grasp her lessons.

Nevertheless, this passage also emphasizes that understanding Dickinson’s poem will not only involve the academic skills of memory and retention. Moving forward, Mama says, will mean letting go of some aspects of the historical past. Frannie may have difficulty retaining her lessons, but the flip side of this seeming limitation is that she also releases bad memories.

This ability turns out to be crucial to her willingness to accept the Jesus Boy’s attending school on the side of the highway where he “doesn’t belong” (11). After the

Jesus Boy is introduced to his new classmates and Frannie thinks about the poem, she discusses the Jesus Boy over lunch with Maribel Tanks, a middle-class girl Frannie despises, whose family owns a grocery store and who attended a black private school until it was shut down. When Maribel complains that the Jesus Boy belongs on the other side of the highway with the white people, Frannie replies, “‘It’s the nineteen seventies,’

I said. ‘Not the fifties. There’s no more segregation, remember?’ ‘Try telling that to the people on the other side of the highway,’ Maribel said. ‘Or the people on this side’” (11).

Maribel has a point; while nobody else specifically references the history of segregation, many of the people Frannie knows cling to the past in small ways as well as historically consequential ones. Maribel, for example, still wears her outgrown sweatshirts from the

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closed private school as a constant reminder of her past status. Trevor, who was teased as a younger child for being light-skinned and having an absent white father on the other side of the highway, continues to be alert to insult, lashing out and terrifying his classmates with his angry words and his fists. Conversely, a concern with getting the inheritance that is their due leads her peers to assert superiority as a way to protect their future status. For Maribel, this inheritance is literal, an expected bequest of property; she speaks of her mother’s store as “ my inheritance” (12), and replicates her mother’s disdain for her poorer classmates. For Frannie’s best friend Samantha, a devout member of a fire- and-brimstone church, the desired inheritance is spiritual, but she nevertheless indicates to Frannie that she is holy and (unlike Frannie) will not have to worry about her afterlife

(76). Samantha is briefly willing to welcome the Jesus Boy, but only because she hopes he really is Jesus, come to bring a better future; once she realizes that he is not, she loses interest in him.

Judith “Jack” Halberstam argues that the concept of time is structured so as to reinforce normative, heteropatriarchal social structures; it is characterized by the pressure to reproduce according to a biological clock and to pass along an inheritance to offspring.

He goes on to say, “It also connects the family to the historical past of the nation, and glances ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and national stability”

(Queer Time 5). In contrast, Halberstam argues for a construction of “queer time” that provides “specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (6). Thus, a strong sense of historic time shapes the future by framing capital, genetic material, and, crucially, normative values, as important pieces of

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inheritance that must be preserved for future generations. While Halberstam focuses primarily on issues of gender and sexuality, he also gestures to racial hierarchy as a construct that is preserved through the policing of sexuality and genetic inheritance. 84

In Walter’s and Draper’s novels, black schoolchildren must recover their lost inheritance in order to create a better future; in Feathers , however, a concern with inheritance is seen to be an obstacle to racial justice and equality. In part, this is because the children seem to have adopted a belief in white superiority along with a capitalist sense of time. Since, as Walter says, “[the nation] still doesn’t want to be whole” (Jordan

281), investing in national values of heteropatriarchal inheritance also means investing in a history of segregation that marks black cultural inheritance as inferior. Similar to the middle-class students at Emma’s desegregated school, Frannie’s peers mouth Black

Power and anti-white sentiments, but prize their own inheritance of community very little. Maribel straightens her hair; other kids carry Afro picks in their pockets, but seem to view Black Power as a fashion accessory rather than as an alternate set of values. They don’t want the Jesus Boy in their school, but neither do they want to be where they are, adopting both white attitudes toward desegregation (even when the desire to desegregate is reversed) and white attitudes toward their own community. Frannie’s brother Sean imagines building a bridge from his own window to the other side of the highway, and

Trevor tries to swing high enough to fly over the fence. Frannie thinks, “Seems kids on this side of the highway were always trying to figure out ways to fly and run and cross over things and . . . get free or something” (21). The other kids have internalized what

Frannie has trouble grasping; when she asks her mother why no white people live on their

84 Feathers does not deal with queer sexuality; however, Woodson is an openly gay author who incorporates queer characters (both children and adults) in many of her novels. 166

side of the highway, she says, “ They don’t want to live over here . And the way she said it made me wonder what was so wrong with our side of the highway” (16). Frannie wonders this because she seems to live outside of normative time and sees no better future (or present) on the other side of the highway. Rather than wishing to cross her brother’s imaginary bridge to the white side of town, she looks out the same window he does and says, “ It’s fine here. It’s beautiful. It was beautiful. Somebody had written some names on our building, and even though the grown-ups complained about it and tried to wash them off, I secretly loved the bright colors of the spray paint—the way the names looked super-big written out like that—like some giant had come along with giant markers” (17-18). Like Donna Jean in Draper’s novel, Frannie feels she has everything she needs right in her own community.

Frannie’s difficulty living within the normative time of inheritance, however, leads her to struggle in school. Having seen her mother miscarry pregnancy after pregnancy, she knows that family life involves a great deal of energy expenditure that does not result in reproduction or inheritance, but that her parents assure her is worthwhile for the joy it brings, even “if it means you only get to be happy for a month or two months or three months” (59). Happiness is not to be set aside for the future and protected from risk, but to be enjoyed regardless of personal risk. This approach to living in the present conflicts with the goals of the school, which are to preserve the nation’s cultural inheritance through the transmission of knowledge and to increase its capital inheritance through the development of its human resources. Educational discourse sometimes emphasizes this alignment; Stuart Buck, for example, says, “Education is like money in the bank. Someone who starts with ten thousand dollars will earn more interest

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from day one than someone who starts with ten dollars, and the spread between the two accounts will only grow larger as the interest is compounded over time” (28). In

Feathers , this approach to education is echoed ironically. When Frannie cannot remember a vocabulary word, she thinks, “I tried to find the word surreal in my mental vocabulary bank where Ms. Johnson had said we should save vocabulary words so that we could grow up and have rich brains, but it wasn’t there. Ms. Johnson said that the only way you can deposit a word in your bank is by committing it to memory. I hadn’t deposited surreal . I guess I must have spent it somewhere” (35). Arguably, of course, when one spends a thing, it means that one uses it. In the case of a vocabulary word, spending it through common use is presumably the purpose of learning it in the first place; however, the metaphors of depositing, saving, and spending here suggest that

Frannie is supposed to save her knowledge rather than spend it. Educational philosopher

Paolo Freire famously attacks the “banking model” of pedagogy for making students into passive safe-deposit boxes for inert bits of knowledge and thereby making them more compliant and oppress-able. Frannie’s disingenuous comment about her failure to deposit rich vocabulary words suggests a further critique of this method—that school learning is to be hoarded for personal gain rather than circulated for the common good.

In addition to wantonly spending her inheritance of learning, Frannie is out of step with normative time in another key way. Achievement within the state-sponsored school system depends, not only upon learning, but upon learning within a certain time frame.

Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom draw upon this discourse in arguing for increased accountability for standardized testing: “‘In education, the time we waste today can mean a lifetime wasted tomorrow,’ Lyndon B. Johnson said in introducing Title I in 1965.

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‘Wasted’ was a bit of hyperbole, but as long as the typical black or Hispanic student knows much less than the average white or Asian, racial and ethnic equality will remain an elusive goal” (247). Developmental time thus becomes a resource to be controlled and husbanded as part of the nation’s capital inheritance, and national progress toward racial equality must inexplicably be determined according to an age-graded academic schedule or not at all. 85 Frannie, who is “usually the last one to get it” (23)—“it” being any given academic subject—thus is framed within educational discourse as “wasting” the future lifetime belonging to the nation by remaining outside what I call the “time of achievement.”

Frannie’s and Sean’s black schools, however, operate according to a different philosophy and a different sense of time, one that might allow for meaningful racial integration precisely by avoiding normative white constructs of time and achievement.

Frannie’s teacher, Ms. Johnson, is a gentler and hipper version of Sylvia’s teacher Miss

Washington, expecting all of her students to succeed and providing constant support for them to do so in the form of discipline, snacks, and encouragement. Frannie says, “The other nice thing about Ms. Johnson is she wants you to understand stuff. I mean, she doesn’t just teach us and if we don’t get it, she keeps on moving. She really cares about us understanding things and she’ll take a real long time explaining something until she’s sure everybody’s got it” (23).Notably, Ms. Johnson’s flexible approach to the time of achievement does not seem to result in Frannie’s learning any less, even though she may appear to cover the material more slowly.

85 See Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish on time as a national resource; see Nancy Lesko on the control of developmental time; see Reese, Hine, and Vinovskis, Angus, and Mirel on age-graded schooling and the standardization of learning timelines. 169

Frannie learns in her own time, but she does learn. In a debate with Samantha, she surprises both Samantha and herself by rapidly spitting out several pertinent historical examples that she seems to have absorbed without realizing it. Then, months after Ms.

Johnson first reads them the Dickinson poem, Frannie continues to reflect on the metaphor of feathers, developing expanding interpretations. After thinking about

Samantha’s desperate desire to believe that the Jesus Boy is Jesus, and about the Jesus

Boy’s desire to grow up just like his cool, dark-skinned adoptive father, she tells her mother, “‘I guess the writer was thinking about how light feathers are and they can just float everywhere. And I guess that’s how hope is too—all light and everywhere like that.

There’s hope at this house. And at your church. And at OnePeople [Samantha’s church].

At our school. Across the highway and on this side too. Everywhere” (80). She has this insight soon after having her first extended conversation with the Jesus Boy. Shortly after that, the Jesus Boy faces down Trevor in the schoolyard and humiliates him. Frannie thinks about the poem again, and about Trevor wanting to fly over the fence and rejoin his white father, and she and the Jesus Boy both pull Trevor out of the snow and dust him off. Because of Frannie’s reflection on the poem, both Trevor and the Jesus Boy are thus reclaimed and redeemed for the community rather than abandoned for their transgressions, just as Frannie is redeemed as a learner despite her slowness.

This scene both revises and continues traditions of the desegregation school story.

Unlike in other desegregation stories, the bully is not ejected or dismissed as marginal to the majority community. The Jesus Boy’s desire to join the black community signals its utopian potential, but its rejection of him also signals its failure; the community must be made more worthy of his desire, and must also recapture Trevor’s strayed desire. The

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utopian success of this integration effort is not demonstrated by Frannie’s, or the Jesus

Boy’s, academic success in the form of high grades or test scores. Nevertheless, some form of school learning is necessary in order to catalyze the success of integration, as it is only when Frannie thinks about the poem that she realizes that Trevor needs to see some hope on his own side of the highway. Ms. Johnson’s warmth and flexibility allows

Frannie to absorb the poem more deeply; in turn, she internalizes not only the concept of metaphor, but also a community ethic that shapes the school as a loving rather than violent or vengeful place. If Ms. Johnson’s method is meant to make Frannie’s test scores equivalent to those of the kids on the other side of the highway, it may have failed, due to her “wasting” of time; but it may have made Frannie equal in the integration (pun intended) of meaningful learning.

The reader learns less about Sean’s education, given Frannie’s limited window into it; she knows mainly that he excels at math. In introducing her neighborhood, however, Frannie notes that one of its resources is the Daffodil School, “for kids who don’t learn like other kids. Like Sean. He can’t hear, so you have to use sign language with him. . . . Across the highway, there’s another school like Sean’s called the Starship

Academy. Mama said even if we lived on that side of the highway, she’d cross it every day to come to the Daffodil School because there was no way on God’s green earth she’d send Sean to a school that sounded like it was for people from outer space” (18). The contrast between the names of the two schools illustrates the difference between the black education Mama prefers and the white approach. The Daffodil School evokes a kind of

Romantic, Progressive philosophy from the turn of the twentieth century, when discourse about learning frequently compared children to plants that needed to be nurtured to full

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growth and allowed to unfold according to Nature’s timeline. 86 The white Starship

Academy instead gestures toward the rhetoric of “reaching for the stars” and recalls the national achievement of space exploration; but it also, as Mama recognizes, positions students with disabilities as aliens who are shot into the outer spaces of the school system. When Sean was born, Frannie says that her parents refused to allow an operation that might “fix” his hearing, saying instead that “it’s us we need to change ” (52) and learning sign language. Like Sylvia in Draper’s novel, they also believe that the black schools offer a superior education, consistently revaluing the polarities of black/white and abled/disabled.

Nevertheless, despite being educated under similar philosophies and within the same family as Frannie, Sean does not experience the same sense of contentment and security within the black community. Frannie’s loving school can eventually expand to include Trevor, who has a white father, and the Jesus Boy, who chooses the black community despite his white appearance. Racial ambiguity proves easier to include than disability, however. When two hearing girls approach Sean and flirt with him on the way to school, they make hurtful comments when they realize he is deaf, before losing interest entirely. One of the girls notes approvingly that she could use a boyfriend “who’s gonna just be quiet and let me talk” (82), and the other worries that Frannie would have to come as a translator on dates, dismissing the idea regretfully by saying, “‘Dang. . . . All that fineness wasted’” (82). While Frannie is never spoken of as though her slowness makes her a “waste,” Sean’s good looks are a “wasted” resource because of his disability.

Frannie is furious, but Sean tries to explain why he remains interested in the hearing girls:

86 See Kate Douglas Wiggin and John Dewey. 172

“When we were sitting at the window that day and I said what if we could build a bridge from every window. . . . The hearing girls are the bridges. They’re the other worlds.

They’re the worlds I can’t just walk across and into, you know. . . .I don’t just want my world. I want everybody else’s world too ” (83). As he points out, Frannie doesn’t understand the appeal of the bridges because she “ already [has] both worlds ” (83).

According to Frannie, and according to the ethos of Walter’s or Draper’s novels, Sean should not experience black hearing girls as “other worlds;” as part of the black community, Sean ought to be in the same world. He is aware that he is not; and Frannie says, “I watched him walk away, all dressed like a Black Panther but looking a little bit smaller than when we’d left the house that morning” (85). Sean may dress like a Black

Panther and attend a school that nurtures him like a daffodil, but he is still thrust to the margins of the black community. This exclusion partly accounts for Woodson’s ambivalent incorporation of the Black Power movement in the novel. Black Power, in the sense of Frannie’s embrace of her community, is celebrated, but Black Power is also diminished when Sean, who ought to be part of its strength, is made to feel small. 87

Sean’s exclusion from full membership in the black community points to one of the contradictions in the novel’s utopian vision of education. Considering how much emphasis is placed upon Frannie’s ethical wisdom in living fully in the present, it is somewhat odd that the novel is set in the historical past of the 1970s. 88 In an interview on

National Public Radio, Woodson explains that the overarching idea driving the book is one that she feels is necessary and pertinent to contemporary readers; she feels that we

87 See also Rountree on Woodson’s emphasis on diversity within the black community and her insistence that no one identity is authentically black. 88 In a personal email, Woodson indicated that she had no particular reason for setting the book in the 1970s; in answer to my query, she stated, “I just wanted to set it back in the past, that's all. The 70s was a time of big change and fun fashion.” 173

live in a society dominated by fear, and she wanted to think about the many different ways that children can find small moments of hope in their everyday lives. The historical setting does allow for Frannie’s school to be hopeful and utopian in ways that are increasingly difficult for schools in the era of No Child Left Behind; it also places

Frannie’s school out of reach of another kind of reform, that of disability inclusion.

I argue that the key to Frannie’s learning, and to the desirability of the black school and community, is the abandonment of the normative timelines of inheritance and achievement—timelines driven by individualist or capitalist goals—in favor of a flexible timeline guided by hope, love, and communal service. This kind of flexibility is precisely what is targeted by the move toward accountability and standards since the 2001 No

Child Left Behind Act. In my analysis of Draper’s novel, I note that the accountability movement regards achievement as valid only in comparison with white norms. In addition, it enforces a strict timeline according to which a student has failed if she is not able to demonstrate the knowledge that is determined to be standard for a fourth grader

(or fifth grader or eighth grader)—regardless of how much he or she has learned since the start of the school year. 89 This timeline is an important part of how schools are assessed and punished under the No Child Left Behind law; Jim Horn, in an article published in

2007, the same year as Feathers , notes that the ticking clock of impending consequences for failing Louisiana’s LEAP test greatly altered how teachers in New Orleans schools led their classes. In interviews, teachers complained of the “unyielding scope and sequence that [left] little latitude for dealing with the many students who are not on the fourth-grade level” (129). Principals had trouble staffing their fourth grade classrooms or

89 See Cris Tovani on the arbitrariness of determining what qualify as standard skills for any given grade- level. 174

mentoring teachers due to time pressures, and fourth grade students were throwing up and becoming sick from anxiety before the test. In my own anecdotal experience of teaching in Arizona, I found that the pressure of a high-stakes exam at the end of the year caused the district to micro-manage classroom timelines. In order to ensure that students would have mastered every single standard in the state’s published list, teachers were required to teach each standard individually, test for mastery at least every two weeks, submit the scores to the principal, and then move on to the next standard; in other words, students did not even really have a full year to “master” metaphor (whatever that means), but only two weeks. Horn offers statistics suggesting that this time pressure disproportionately affects black students; he cites studies which demonstrate that none of the ten states with the lowest proportion of black students require high-stakes grade-level tests of this kind, but all ten of the states with the highest proportion of black students do. The disparities are similar in looking at high school exit examinations.

Especially when written within such a context of fear and anxiety, Ms. Johnson’s approach to education seems preferable ethically and practically. The nuanced understanding of hope and its relation to time that Frannie gains as a result of this unhurried, nurturing approach can be read as a direct comment upon the pressured conditions under which the novel’s readers must find their own hope. Like Draper,

Woodson reaches back to the past for an alternative model of schooling and citizenship.

At the same time, her interview suggests that Frannie’s expansive, reflective time sense can serve as a model for her young readers, who may see their worlds as being as closed and unyielding as Trevor and Sean do. This provides an important reminder that Frannie is not entirely dependent upon Ms. Johnson for her approach to learning; she has, after

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all, had other teachers, who proceeded through material regardless of whether the students “got it,” and yet she has continued to learn, and to reflect, at her own pace.

Frannie’s neighborhood school does not look utopian to all the students who attend it; it is, in part, her vision that makes it so. In this respect, Woodson both opens a door for readers to escape to a freer, more utopian past, and simultaneously reminds them that the past rarely felt like utopia to those living through it. Utopian learning and citizenship, therefore, always require a willingness to resist normative pressures, during any time period and under any institutional structure.

And yet, as readers can see in Feathers, institutional structures do matter. Setting the novel in the early 1970s makes Frannie’s freedom to learn at her own pace (at least, in

Ms. Johnson’s exceptional classroom) more believable; but while it predates No Child

Left Behind, it also predates the Education for Handicapped Children Act of 1975

(EHA), later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This law required that students with disabilities be educated in the “least restrictive environment,” and moved many students from separated schools like Sean’s to mainstreamed settings like Frannie’s, but as I discuss in more detail in Chapter Three, it was far from effective in facilitating the full inclusion of students with disabilities. Nevertheless, setting the novel before the passage of EHA means that an environment that allows for Frannie’s learning style will also inevitably divide the nurturing black community and deny Sean a similarly utopian environment. Considering how much Frannie loves her brother and how much pain his alienation causes her, a school that excludes disability is not entirely utopian for Frannie, either. Resistant learning can take place within any structure; and conversely, as the novel makes clear in its depiction of desegregation, legalized structural

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change is no guarantee of progress toward more democratic or utopian communities.

Nevertheless, the ubiquity of the structural constraints that overshadow Frannie’s (and readers’) experience of school raises the question as to why a school-based utopia continues to be the desired end of so many novels, even when those same novels critique the exclusionary nature of most “real” school utopias.

Conclusion

As I noted in the introduction, children are compelled by the state to spend six hours a day in school, and so attempting to improve both their present and the nation’s future by envisioning more utopian schools is both logical and attractive. It matters to children how they spend six hours a day. Not all children wish to spend that chunk of their lives in daily resistance and struggle; while much utopian educational theory necessarily places a high value on everyday acts of resistance, 90 theorists tend to aim these messages of resistance at teachers. Defining ideal citizenship as a daily exercise in pain, insecurity, or isolation would be a heavy burden to place on children, or adults either, for that matter. Even the character-building violence of the classic school stories emphasized straightforward moral and physical challenges that were clearly supported by structural mores, rather than asking protagonists to pit their own values against those demanded by the institution. This is the great appeal of school stories, both classic and revisionist; they hold out the hope of a world in which the morals and values of the children, the teachers, the institution, and the ethical goals of democracy might be in harmony rather than at odds, even if this world can exist only within the temporary, limited space of an exceptional utopian classroom.

90 See, for example, Giroux, Freire, and hooks. 177

This is the kind of hope that the three novels in this chapter evoke. Each of them counters the assumption that the Brown decision produced a utopian school system; but rather than looking away from the school as a source of utopian reform, each looks to practices from black schools rather than white ones as sources of hopeful reform.

Specifically, all three counter the idea that the classroom ought to be a competitive meritocracy and instead offer the belief that merit, ability, and achievement can be developed through the nurturing of loving teachers or through the unification and pride of students themselves. All three suggest important ways that the entrenched racism in the existing system might be ameliorated, whether by valuing student learning on its own terms instead of by comparison to white students, by eliminating pressured timelines for achievement, or by empowering students to insist upon gaining knowledge from racist teachers determined to withhold it.

Nevertheless, in countering the claims of inferiority propagated by Brown , these novels also reinforce the idea that the quality of a school, and the achievement of the students it produces, are the truly crucial questions in considering the citizenship rights and abilities of voting adults. They are, after all, school stories. Granted, the institutional values of a school can be extremely flexible; schools can define “success” through cricket games, tests of character, or academic performance, can set a strict or a loose timeline for the required learning, and can incentivize individual competition or community cohesion.

Regardless of how they define success or what conditions they place upon its achievement, however, schools do exist to promote whatever kind of achievement they deem necessary; and school stories aim to give the reader the vicarious satisfaction of experiencing the protagonist’s success within a given school setting.

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This is a real satisfaction (whether vicariously or directly experienced), and it often carries real, positive consequences. My purpose in critiquing the connection between achievement and citizenship is not to say that achievement is a useless or unworthy goal, or that good student-ship ought not to provide one route to ethical citizenship. I believe that this model of utopia, and of utopian citizenship, is a valuable and necessary one. My critiques revolve around the models of utopian education and citizenship ruled out even by resistant school stories. First, given the mutability of racial formations and hierarchies in the United States, I believe it is unrealistic to expect that the creation of a utopian school will ultimately have the desired effect of racial justice, in the absence of other structural changes. Second, I believe that part of the fantasy of the school story is that student development and moral behavior can be predicted, controlled, and guided to desired ends, if only the right system can be discovered. My experience in teaching leads me to think otherwise. As author Cynthia Voigt (also a former classroom teacher), whom I discuss in the next chapter, suggests, school achievement and failure frequently have little correlation with learning or citizenship. The genre of the school story, however, does not allow for consideration of how failing students might have something valuable to contribute to the nation—even those who “fail” to be rescued by the school. In the next chapter, I examine constructs of disability and academic failure as fruitful alternatives for thinking about citizenship and racial justice.

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Chapter 3:Pedagogies of Desegregation: Narratives of Disability and Giftedness

Preface: Forming Coalitions Across Ability Lines

When I lived in Maryland, I volunteered with an organization that worked to end tracking and labeling in Montgomery County—practices that, in that county as in others, starkly segregate classrooms in schools that seem integrated on paper. The founder, a white woman with a learning disabled child, often told the story of how she began the group. At her daughter’s fourth grade Parents’ Night, the parents met briefly in one large group. Then it was time to meet the math and reading teachers. All of the white parents went in one direction, and all of the black and brown parents went in another direction. In other words, all of the white students had been identified as “gifted and talented,” and tracked into accelerated classes, while the African-American and Latino students were denied the “gifted and talented” label. “I drove a bus in Boston back in the ‘70’s,” she’d always say at this point, “and I said to myself, ‘I wasn’t fighting back then just so the schools could be segregated all over again.’”

During meetings, I heard a variety of stories from parents who struggled between their desire to see their children enjoying the rich curricula offered by the county to

“gifted” children and their discomfort at the inequities they witnessed. One Latina mother was told, both by white parents and by other minority parents, that they didn’t want her children entering the accelerated classes because minority students would bring the level of the class down and cause the other high-achieving students to suffer. Another parent, an African-American woman, decided to opt out of the district’s gifted and talented program after her child was accepted because she was so uncomfortable with the divisions the selection process was causing in her community.

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I had joined the organization because I had hated the practice of “ability grouping” when I was a teacher. However, I had little personal experience with the district, as I had never taught in Maryland and had no school-aged children. Meetings, therefore, often felt like immersion in long-standing county politics that I only dimly understood. One role I could fulfill, however, was serving as the organization’s representative on the district’s Accelerated and Enriched Instruction Advisory Board

(AEI). Five times a year, district employees from the AEI department would meet with community representatives from various organizations. In some ways, representatives were clearly aligned, with predictable positions and alliances. Representatives from our organization, from the NAACP, from the Hispanic Business Association, and from the district’s Equity Committee tended to be aligned in opposition to representatives from the

Gifted and Talented Association. Both sides generally argued that the policies they favored would be beneficial to all children, and not only to gifted children or to underrepresented children. Unsurprisingly, this tactic never worked for either side.

Instead, parents on both sides felt that gifted students, or underrepresented students, respectively, were trying to hog the district’s resources, to the detriment of the other group of students.

I was often surprised, however, by the stories related by parents in the Gifted and

Talented Association, as they told how their children had been punished or recommended for ADHD diagnosis for being bored in class, or had been reprimanded by teachers for asking questions outside the teachers’ range of knowledge. Although their organization and ours were in competition over resources and policies, the problems faced by our children were similar. As a result of such stories, the founder was fond of linking our

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organization to the famous orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally : “We’ve always said we were like that lady in the restaurant, you know—we’re always pointing over to the

G/T folks and saying, ‘We want what they’re having.’ But then we come to find out that they don’t really want what they’re having.” And, in fact, one active member of the organization was a former medical school teacher who joined because, having taught the

“cream of the crop,” he had come to believe that the so-called higher tracks of the education system were failing everyone, including the elite. Apparently, the school system was not serving anyone’s needs very well, regardless of track or label. Yet despite this basis for common cause, common cause was never made. And despite what I believe to be the genuine good intentions of the school district representatives, there was little opportunity to form coalitions during the AEI meetings. District representatives were firmly in control of the meeting agendas; they presented carefully orchestrated solutions to various complaints, asked us to “process” the news from their presentations in timed, organized small group sessions, and then asked us to report to our organizations. We were reacting to, rather than participating in the policymaking of the school district. And given that both the GTA and our organization were formed specifically in order to advocate for children within the Montgomery County school district, there seemed to be no other space or system through which we might develop a coalition.

Unlike the other anecdotes I relate in this project, this one does not highlight a classroom experience. I think it is important to tell, however, because for me, it illustrates the importance of what happens, or does not happen, outside of the classroom. The school system, in this case, opens up an opportunity to find commonalities between student populations generally placed in opposition to and competition with one another:

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gifted students (who may not be white or middle class, but who are disproportionately identified as being so) and racialized, poor, and learning disabled students (who may also be gifted, but who are less likely to be identified as being so). It is precisely through the school system that these students, and parents, can encounter one another and discover the similarities in the pedagogical challenges they face. At the same time, because of the institutional inertia involved in large systems, these students and parents continue to be placed in competition for resources, so that solutions often appear to be unsatisfactory compromises. While our organization and the GTA did not look outside the school system to find alternative spaces for common ground, the authors of the texts I discuss in this chapter do.

Introduction

The narrative of re-segregation through tracking and diagnosis is one that rarely gets told in the children’s literature of desegregation. As I discuss in the previous two chapters, stories that explicitly focus on racial mixing in the school tend to highlight the dilemma of the gifted black child, and assume that once access to a properly supplied and humanely taught classroom is secured, highly able black students will inevitably shine.

Disability, or at least the lack of ability, is the threat that hangs over these texts; as I have already noted, Goober’s slowness in With the Might of Angels nearly damages the powerhouse image Dawnie Rae works to project, and Emma’s parents and teachers fear her association with less talented peers. In other texts, the presentation of disability or academic struggle seems to threaten the antiracist credentials of authors and directors; in books like Maniac Magee, television shows like Sid the Science Kid, and films like High

School Musical, it is black characters who are almost invariably presented as academic

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superstars and white ones who are designated as hyperactive, unmotivated, or semi- illiterate.

As I discussed in Chapter One, Robin Bernstein critiques how the persistent trope of the racially oblivious white child is used to transfer an aura of innocence to a variety of adult political projects. Authorial insistence on associating blackness with intellectual giftedness is one such project of “racial innocence;” these narratives imply, or attempt to construct, a racially innocent child reader who, if she reads only narratives that reverse a history of stereotypical racist representations, will continue in her racial innocence and resist internalizing historical stereotypes about race and academic ability. Bernstein suggests that these projects require “an active state of repelling knowledge . . . [a] performance of not-noticing” (6). Child consumers of this media are asked to actively

“not-notice” knowledge of their everyday educational realities, knowledge of the ways that tracking and special education diagnosis tend to operate for children from different social strata. 91 In fact, as several scholars document, children do notice that they are inequitably segregated, both between and within schools, and comment bitterly upon this fact. 92 Thus, it is questionable whether such representations are meant to preserve

91 One comprehensive study of Newbery winners (Medal and Honor books) from 1975-2009 found that out of 381 prized books, only 41 contained any portrayal of disability; of those, 33 were white. Furthermore, the authors note that most of the novels depict mental retardation, emotional disturbance, and orthopedic impairment [the authors use the diagnostic terms from the IDEA legislation]. In contrast, only 3 of the characters are represented as having sensory impairments or specific learning disabilities, impairments that students are far more likely to see in schools (students with specific learning disabilities account for nearly half of the services provided under IDEA) (Leininger, Dyche, Taylor, and Heath). 92 See, for example, Cottle and Kozol. Thomas Cottle begins his article with a particularly blunt remark from a student: “[At school] they think I’m dumb and always will be. I’m starting to think they’re right. Hell, I know they put all the Black kids together in one group if they can, but that doesn’t make any difference either. I’m still dumb. … Upper tracks? Man, when do you think I see those kids? I never see them. …Some of them don’t even go to school in the same building with me. If I ever walked into one of their rooms they’d throw me out before the teacher ever came in” (Cottle 24). The interview from which the quote was drawn was conducted in 1974. More than fifteen years later, Jonathan Kozol records a student at a mostly black East St. Louis school as saying, “You asked a question about Martin Luther King. 184

children from absorbing stereotypes or to preserve adults from having to recognize that children notice inequality.

Children’s literature across a range of national traditions and genres has, however, historically featured satiric scenes that skewer contemporary classroom practices; even those child readers who escape into fantasy worlds like Alice’s Wonderland and Diana

Wynne Jones’s multiverse often find themselves encountering the same mind-numbing moral recitations or bullying problems (turned topsy-turvy, of course) that they thought they were leaving behind. 93 Within the tradition of American realistic fiction for children, novels often tell stories about how nobody’s interests are being served by traditional school institutions. As I note in my discussion of Feathers , realistic fiction does not operate as a direct, unmediated mirror of reality; it frames and focuses certain aspects of reality in preference to others, and sometimes reflects spaces and time frames that are outside the purview of the school. Discourses of desegregation and disability inclusion reinforce a vision of the school as the main source of valuable cultural capital and opportunity for two good reasons. First, the school does offer some valuable cultural capital, and so wanting equal access to it is a logical desire. Second, it is the most centralized and therefore the most seemingly manageable space for large-scale policy intervention into children’s lives, and by extension into the future of the nation. Nobody denies that learning takes place in homes, neighborhoods, and community spaces, and nobody denies that the unmeasured forms of pedagogy and racial socialization taking place there may be quite powerful; but these areas of daily life are, accurately or not,

I’m going to say something. All that stuff about ‘the dream’ means nothing to the kids I know in East St. Louis. So far as they’re concerned, he died in vain. He was famous and he lived and gave his speeches and he died and now he’s gone. But we’re still here” (36). 93 Roberta Seelinger Trites’ Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel provides a good overview of school reform literature within American realistic fiction. 185

perceived as being messier, more slippery, and further outside the state’s sphere of influence than the school.

Into these areas of “private” messiness, novelists can intrude with greater authority than policymakers, and can therefore reflect—or imagine—alternatives that lie outside the official limits of school policy. The novels I discuss in this chapter—Cynthia

Voigt’s Tillerman series and Virginia Hamilton’s The Planet of Junior Brown —step outside the genre of the desegregation story, and straddle the boundaries of the school setting. In doing the first, they may treat the issues of racist and able-ist pedagogy as entwined rather than separate issues; and in doing the second, they may question the moral value of success within such a system. The generic conventions of the school story insist that the protagonist ultimately achieve some kind of school success in preparation for contributing to the nation as an adult citizen. Utopian education—and utopian national identity—therefore depends upon access and is measured by student achievement. In contrast, Voigt’s and Hamilton’s approach to realism allows them to question how desirable access and achievement are, and what they cost students. Instead, they illuminate the possibilities of failure, asking what alternative rewards students might gain by failing according to the norms of the school. The protagonists of these texts turn away from the institution of school as the site where the nation might be healed, and in the process, imagine other goals for education besides nation-building and alternate ways to define citizenship and community membership.

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A number of scholars who discuss the intersections between race and disability 94 note that disability remains stigmatized in black communities, and conversely that racially marked subjects are further marginalized by some disability advocacy movements. Researchers who write about culturally sensitive pedagogy or about strategies for disability inclusion sometimes assume that teachers and systems are serving their “central” populations—the white, the abled, and the middle class—appropriately, 95 and primarily need assistance in serving their more marginalized students. Voigt’s and

Hamilton’s novels demonstrate otherwise. In addition, they imagine how students positioned differently within the school system, marked variously as racially subordinate, learning disabled, or academically gifted, might form coalitions in order to develop alternate systems of pedagogy that serve them all better than the official school systems they attend. While these coalitions do reach across identity categories, they do not present the children as innocent and transcendent, but instead as modeling the kind of fraught, sometimes tense, commitment to dialogue and conflict resolution (outside of the school) that was desired by many of the early proponents of legal desegregation (inside of the school). 96 In doing so, they offer alternative routes to citizenship besides school success.

In fact, school success in these novels often involves moral passivity and abandonment of democratic values. Characters become worthy of democratic citizenship, not by preparing themselves for future compliance and productivity, but by taking on a responsibility that many of the adults in their lives have abandoned, to uphold democratic ideals in the present.

94 See Patton, Malacrida, Rodas, and Maybee. 95 See, for example, Delpit, Ladson-Billings, and Honos-Webb. 96 Sterling’s Tender Warriors and Cottle’s Busing provide good illustrations of this hope. 187

This chapter has three goals. First, I extend the discussion of the previous chapter.

The novels in Chapter Two suggest that historically black institutions offered pedagogy and opportunities superior to white ones; here, I further develop this critique by examining novels that expose how white-dominated schools (white, that is, either in ideology or in population) were failing even to give many of their white students an appropriate education. Second, I suggest that these novels offer a collective disability identity as an alternative to successful citizenship, one that seems unmentionable within school stories or policy discourse. The well-meant integration of disability resembles forced racial desegregation; 97 it is framed as an opportunity, but results in some of the same feelings of threat and loss (unsurprisingly, since it sometimes involves the same students). Rather than asking for acknowledgment of hidden gifts, several characters in these novels claim the stigma of disability as a way to radically reshape the concept of a utopian educational community. Finally, I examine how these representations of disability contribute to the utopian visions—both of education and of the nation—that are part of the legacy of the Brown decision.

Parallel Battles and Lost Hopes: Historical Context

The history of school desegregation (and re-segregation) and the history of activism for students with disabilities are intimately tied together. The Brown decision and the subsequent battles against racial segregation in all arenas provided a precedent for disability activists to fight the segregation of students with disabilities from their non- diagnosed peers (Nolan 2). At the same time, despite the landmark1975 Education of All

Handicapped Children Act (EHA) requiring students with disabilities to be educated in

97 See Beth Ferri and Mark Connor’s Reading Resistance . 188

the “least restrictive environment” 98 possible, African-American and Latino students have been disproportionately diagnosed with disabilities since at least the 1970s; significantly, they are also more likely than white children with similar behaviors to be placed in separate classrooms or separate schools. In effect, since Brown, disability diagnosis has become a way to continue racial segregation by tying it to the segregation of disability. 99

And yet, in their parallel advocacy for school success, learning disability and antiracist activists do not always adopt each other’s causes.

Both Voigt’s and Hamilton’s texts critique discourses of race and disability within education that were prevalent at their times of publication, many of which remain problematic in the current decade. In this section, I outline some of those discourses so as to establish how these texts offer alternate ways of thinking. 100 More specifically, I argue that discourses of antiracist and inclusion pedagogies, respectively, have emphasized what I call “hidden giftedness” as a way to claim proper attention and respect for marginalized students. Reforms, in both cases, have centered on having children achieve normative success in school (that is, by staying in school, by completing classroom tasks, and by demonstrating engagement and achievement). Often, this has meant pushing for schools to reform pedagogy so that marginalized students can close achievement gaps.

Hamilton’s and Voigt’s texts redefine success and failure in terms of principled resistance rather than achievement, and they push against the rationale that children are worth

98 Under this law, students diagnosed with disabilities must have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), which in many cases specifies accommodations that the student is entitled to have in the general education classroom (for example, a trained aide, untimed tests, or assignments in alternate formats). However, the wording of “least restrictive environment” also allows for a determination that the most appropriate environment might be a separate classroom or school. Furthermore, schools and teachers sometimes comply reluctantly, and incompletely, with legal accommodations (Slee). 99 See Ferri and Connor, Patton, Berube, and Horsford. 100 Due to issues of scope, I focus here specifically on the history of disability activism in education rather than on disability activism more generally. 189

teaching because they have hidden gifts. Even so, they share activists’ faith that educational institutions can be fashioned as flexible, responsive constructs.

Virginia Hamilton’s novel The Planet of Junior Brown was published in 1971.

Only the year before, the Supreme Court had decided in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg

Board of Education that school districts must remedy school segregation even when caused by residential patterns, and Mississippi Senator John Stennis had proposed that desegregation measures be enforced in the de facto segregated areas of the North and

West as well as in the de jure ones of the South. According to education policy scholar

Linda Darling-Hammond, the period of time between 1965 and the early 1980s saw more advances in desegregation and equity than any period before or since; Great Society programs to address community poverty, combined with busing programs and increased funding for urban schools, narrowed achievement gaps dramatically. 101 None of these hopeful possibilities, however, are reflected in the novel. The protagonists, Buddy and

Junior, live and attend school in Harlem, and they inhabit a social world that is almost entirely black. Furthermore, the advances in equity and child poverty that Darling-

Hammond observes do not seem to have reached Buddy and Junior’s neighborhood; their school is a “modern, well-kept building” (143), but it is also noisy, overheated, smelly, and so overcrowded that the stairwells must be lined with prison mesh to keep students from falling over the banisters between periods.

Buddy and Junior do not actually attend this school—not the classrooms, that is.

Instead, they play hooky in the basement of the building, where Mr. Pool, a teacher

101 She specifically emphasizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which in its 1965 incarnation contained strict funding comparability requirements for schools that were still segregated. 190

turned custodian, teaches them math and science; when the novel begins, they are building a scale model of the solar system. Each is a refugee for a different reason:

Buddy is homeless and trying to avoid being placed in the state social system, Junior is a talented pianist who is ostracized for being fat, and Mr. Pool has exiled himself from the teaching he loves because of his frustration with the school system. As the novel continues, Junior is denied his usual outlets of making music and art, and he has a psychotic break and runs away from home. Rather than let Junior be institutionalized,

Buddy reveals his secret; he helps to run a network of underground shelters for homeless children, known as “planets.” Despite the risks involved in including Junior in his secret community, Buddy asks Mr. Pool to help him lower Junior into a relatively inaccessible hideout, and he reframes his philosophy of individual survival to one of community caring.

In 1971, EHA had not yet been passed, so that discussions of how race and disability interacted in the schools were somewhat different. Prior to 1975, if Junior were to enter the official system of medical diagnosis, he might never re-enter the system of mainstream schooling; he would either be institutionalized in a medical facility with no provision for education or would be placed in a segregated school that might have very little instruction (Aron and Loprest 100). Within mainstream institutions, therefore, few students carried an official diagnosis. Nevertheless, even without an official label of disability, black students after Brown were disproportionately guided to lower academic tracks and therefore defined as lacking ability. (This was, historian Vanessa Siddle

Walker argues, one of the results many black educators feared might happen if teachers were not integrated along with students.) As a host of scholars has noted since the late

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1960s, such tracking practices have functioned, not only to continue racial segregation, but also to reify labels of nonmedical disability; after several years of the ineffective teaching and curricula reserved for the officially less abled, students in the lower tracks do, in fact, tend to display less academic ability than their peers in higher tracks. 102

Education scholar James Patton sums up the problem quite neatly with the derisive comment, “[I am] suggesting a new category of disability called ‘ABT,’ which translates into ‘ain’t been taught’”(7).

Just as the Brown decision failed to improve instruction for many black students, so the 1975 passage of EHA also created a series of new problems for students with disabilities. Thomas Skrtic, one of the most prominent advocates for special education reform in the 1980s, notes that after the “mainstreaming revolution” of 1975, activists knew that “an implementation revolution would have to be mounted and won”

(“Paradox” 148). These activists decided to pursue this revolution by insisting that the letter of the law be followed (possibly because the letter of the Brown decision so obviously was not followed). Unfortunately, he notes, by the early- to mid-1980s, special educators and policymakers had come to realize that “the letter of the law [had] become the principal barrier to achieving the spirit of the law” (“Paradox” 149).

Prior to 1975, segregated special education services were critiqued for being racist, educationally ineffective, and psychologically damaging; by the early 1980s, the mainstreaming solutions provided by the EHA were critiqued for exactly the same reasons. According to Skrtic, as well as others like Roger Slee and policymaker

102 See, for example, Ogletree, Cottle, Rose, and Patton.

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Madeleine Will, the bureaucracy of the system meant that mainstreamed students were still being assisted by a completely separate organizational structure (the special education apparatus) that had no influence on the school’s central structure; thus, students were still pulled out of class by special education instructors, and they were not always given appropriate instruction in mainstream classes by general education teachers. Black and Latino students were increasingly diagnosed with specific disabilities that would allow for teachers and administrators to decide that the “least restrictive environment”

(the guiding requirement under EHA) would be a segregated classroom. 103 The Regular

Education Initiative, proposed in 1986 by Will and supported by advocates like Skrtic, was meant as a new revolution, one that, as Skrtic says, would create a “new mainstream”

(“Organization” 3). Rather than simply giving students access to mainstream education as required by EHA, the new approach, which has come to be known as “inclusion,” called for mainstream education itself to be reconceived and restructured so as to be more responsive to all individual students, whether diagnosed or not. 104

It was during this period of critique and advocacy for students with disabilities that the Tillerman novels were published: seven in all, from 1981 to 1989. 105 It was also during this period that the Reagan administration began to defund many Great Society programs that sought to address inequities of income and class, and to strip the

Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act of the enforcement mechanisms meant to ensure that majority-minority schools were equitably funded. Linda Darling-Hammond argues that desegregation progressed to its best point in 1980 but worsened steadily

103 See Patton. 104 As a number of critics from the 1990s to the current decade note, that goal has not yet been realized. See, for example, Slee, Honos-Webb, and Connor and Ferri. 105 Due to issues of scope, I primarily focus on Dicey’s Song and Come a Stranger . 193

thereafter. 106 Historian Phyllis Palmer also notes that by the late 1970s, “a language of color-blindness was displacing the racial power and antiracism messages of white responsibility for undoing the effects of the nation’s rigorously enforced, historic racial inequality” (86). As novelists like Mildred Pitts Walter and educators Lisa Delpit and

Gloria Ladson-Billings have pointed out since the mid-1980s, this “language of color- blindness” has frequently proved damaging to black children in classrooms dominated by white teachers. Often, they argue, color-blindness simply means that white teachers ignore any skills students bring to the classroom that do not fit into a framework of white achievement. Furthermore, teachers fail to take responsibility for continuing inequities, attributing achievement gaps to slavery and Jim Crow rather than to current racist practices (Ladson-Billings 32). Voigt’s series reflects some of this contradictoriness, placing narratives about disability and difference in parallel with narratives about continuing racial prejudice in the schools.

The Tillerman cycle follows the development of four white siblings: Dicey,

James, Maybeth, and Sammy; their close friends, Jeff and Mina; and their grandmother,

Gram. In the first book, the siblings are abandoned in a Connecticut parking lot by their gentle, mentally ill mother, and make their way to Crisfield, Maryland, where their bitter, eccentric grandmother lives alone. She eventually agrees to take them in, and the remainder of the series deals with how they come to terms with their family history

(including a legacy of racism) and with how they navigate the challenges of school and community in Crisfield. Maybeth is never diagnosed with a disability, but she is nevertheless affected by special education debates. At one school, her teachers want to

106 Sadly, even then, 63% of African-American students remained in majority-minority schools. 194

diagnose her as mentally retarded and place her in a separate school; at her next, she is mainstreamed with no accommodations and continues to struggle for the duration of her school years. The other siblings are not diagnosable, but they all struggle with the rigid mainstream: Dicey is bored and frustrated; James is intellectually curious, but fears standing out; and Sammy loves physical work but is frequently punished in school for his energy and its attendant mischief. Their friend Mina, who is black, is asked to leave a summer dance program due to racism, and later fights to include black history and current events in the social studies curriculum.

One book in the series, The Runner , is set in the 1960s and follows the children’s uncle Bullet as he begins to question his own racism. In it, Voigt explicitly counters the

“language of color-blindness” (and, by extension, obliviousness to disability) prevalent both in the novel’s setting and in its decade of publication. Bullet, whom Voigt identifies as her “spokescharacter” for a philosophy of difference (Jordan 295), responds to his white liberal classmate’s assertion of color-blindness by saying, “‘We aren’t all the same,’ . . . You’ve got to honor the differences, or what’s similar will be useless to you”

(260, emphasis in original). This statement almost exactly parallels educational theorist

Antonio Teodoro’s assertion that “the principle of equality [should be] put on par with the principle of the recognition of difference: we have the right to be equal when difference makes us inferior; we have the right to be different when equality takes away our character ” (91, emphasis in original). The counter-hegemonic push to honor difference has been a strategy of antiracist and disability activist educators since at least the mid-1980s. Nevertheless, Bullet makes his statement shortly before he drops out of school, in part because his own differences feel irreconcilable with the project of

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schooling. Within the school setting, honoring difference has usually involved an attempted reconciliation; specifically, educators emphasize the hidden gifts of students, which remain invisible or appear as liabilities when the system “blinds” itself to difference, but which reveal themselves as strengths when those differences are both recognized and respected.

In 1986, Lisa Delpit became an influential proponent of the “hidden gifts” approach to antiracist teaching when she took white progressive educators to task for insisting upon using so-called “progressive” pedagogies even when it was increasingly evident that these methods were not helping black students to “progress.” Black teachers who insisted upon using more traditional skills-based methods were dismissed by their white peers as “repressive,” ( Other People’s Children 13) focusing on normative skills when they ought to be simply encouraging the children’s fluency and comfort with language. She notes, “The subtle, unstated message was, ‘They just don’t realize how smart these kids are’” (13). Ironically, when Delpit spoke to the black teachers, this was exactly how they felt about the white teachers: “‘What do they think? Our children have no fluency? If they think that, they ought to read some of the rap songs my students write all the time. They might not be writing their school assignments but they sure are writing.

. . . What they need are the skills that will get them into college’” (16). Delpit, and those like Ladson-Billings who follow her, insist that black students should be seen as bringing knowledge and skills to the classroom, rather than deficit. Only when those knowledge bases are seen and recognized as such—and recognized as being different from the knowledge white students bring to the classroom—can educators appropriately respect and build upon their skills so that they can learn the rules of Standard English and be

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recognized as college material. While Delpit does not discuss disability, Maybeth’s teacher rigidly adheres to the whole language approach that Delpit criticizes, suggesting that white educators were also harming white students who deviated from the norm.

In fact, disability scholars like Mike Rose used much the same logic to argue for more recognition of students of all races with disabilities . While Rose and Delpit disagree about the pedagogical methods they value, Rose also emphasizes the intelligence and creativity he finds in his lower-tracked classes. He notes that students in the lower tracks are “thoroughly defined as limited” (107) and are often sent to be diagnosed medically as

“a final abdication of potency: The teacher looks to the medical expert outside her domain” (121). Repeatedly, Rose presents student writing riddled with error, and notes the ambition and creative experimentation that inhere in the samples. He argues, “Error that crops up because a student is trying new things is a valuable kind of error, a sign of growth” (151). Like Delpit, who argues that black students bring unrecognized linguistic fluency to the classroom, Rose contends that “remedial” students are rarely asked to write or to use language in ways that matter to them, so that school assignments fail to tap into the language abilities they possess. And, like Delpit, he insists that these remedial students are, contrary to common belief and practice, remediable; while he decries how standardized tests assess language ability, he also emphasizes that students diagnosed as lacking ability can become able, can close gaps in achievement and perform successfully in school. Later disability activists make similar arguments. For example, Lara Honos-

Webb, author of a book that is popular with ADHD families, contends that the qualities associated with ADHD make children more intellectually stimulating and engaging;

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given more less repressive learning environments, children with ADHD would not be pathologized as biologically disruptive, but would instead be recognized for their gifts. 107

Delpit, Rose, and later activists who follow their work, have contributed enormously to the parallel projects of improving education for black students and for students with disabilities. The strategy of claiming respect by demonstrating previously unremarked gifts has provided a powerful platform for working against segregation through diagnosis and tracking—it is, in fact, the strategy used by my own organization in Montgomery County. When access to stimulating curricula and high quality teaching is reserved for those who are thought to have ability, then it makes sense to claim the label of giftedness. Nevertheless, disability theorist Michael Bérubé points out that this approach also poses problems. He notes that the questions he is asked about his work on black authors and the ones he is asked about his son with Down syndrome are basically the same:

Underneath, there’s the same subtext: Do we really have to give this person our full attention? And underneath that: Why should we? After all, the burden of proof is yours. Say all you want about the variability of aesthetic judgment or the multiplicity of human intelligences, but let’s get to the bottom line and let’s do it now. Is this person sufficiently similar to the people we already value? (180, emphasis in original)

The problem with the hidden giftedness defense is that, as Bérubé suggests, the “burden of proof” rests upon minority and diagnosable students to prove that they are worthy of

107 This perspective has also entered popular culture, in Rick Riordan’s wildly popular Percy Jackson series. Percy, who carries multiple diagnoses and who is expelled from every school he attends, is ideally suited for a world-saving quest against the forces of evil and chaos because his battle reflexes are honed by his ADHD. 198

“full attention.” The purpose of encouraging culturally sensitive teaching methods and inclusive education was always to revolutionize the mainstream normative classroom so that marginalized students would not have to be “sufficiently similar to the people we already value.” Instead, as Bérubé notes, and as several decades of the giftedness defense support, institutional inertia has meant that the rhetoric of “multiplicity of human intelligences” has become widespread but practice has changed very little.

Education historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban refer to this kind of entrenched institutional resistance as “the grammar of schooling,” and contend that any reforms aiming to alter “what a real school is” (87)—precisely what antiracist and disability advocates aim to do—have tended to fail, precisely because they are shaped,

“spoken” as it were by the grammar of schooling rather than altering the grammar itself.

Tyack and Cuban do not claim that reforms have no effect; rather, they describe a multivalent process in which reform attempts affect school practices, but also, in the process, are shifted away from their previous goals by encounters with existing school structures and layers of previous reforms. This is what I contend has occurred with the strategy of hidden giftedness, and this is also the reason why the protagonists of

Hamilton’s and Voigt’s novels decide to form alternative, unofficial support systems rather than trust to the state’s well-meant efforts to aid them.

As these protagonists recognize, the hidden giftedness strategy has had the unintended effect of reinforcing deficit models of both disability and race. In theory, claiming giftedness is thoroughly compatible with trying to reclaim a stigmatized disability or racialized identity. In practice, the process of battling for access has meant that the nexus of disability and race has become what Cathy Cohen terms a “cross-cutting

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issue” (9) in both communities. Cohen defines a cross-cutting issue as a concern that affects one subset (usually a particularly vulnerable subset) of an already marginalized community disproportionately, exposing “hidden differences, cleavages, and fault lines”

(9) and often seeming to threaten whatever progress toward middle-class respectability and full inclusion has been made by more normative members of the community. She focuses specifically on the issue of AIDS within the black community, but the concept can be extended to learning disability. Within some learning disabled communities, issues of racially tinged diagnosis and de facto racial segregation have become cross- cutting concerns. Conversely, issues of disability diagnosis seem to have become cross- cutting concerns in black communities.

As several scholars observe, 108 the parents (most often the mothers) of diagnosed children must be seen as normative, “fit” parents in order for their children to be taken seriously. Those who also wish to claim a politicized disability identity—that is, they wish to assert that the “problems” their children are diagnosed as having are social rather than medical—must therefore demonstrate that their children can achieve without medical intervention. Claudia Malacrida critiques the robust discourse that has sprung up in learning disability communities about alternatives to medication. She argues that while these parents are extremely active in fighting a biologically determined deficit model of disability, they also establish strict community norms that can be met most easily by families who are financially secure and college educated and who have two parents present and one at home. Families who are not able to spend the time and money to pursue alternate therapies (often, she argues, single women of color) must choose either

108 See Maybee, Malacrida, Singh, and Cassiman. 200

to medicate their children to help them succeed or to allow them to struggle without medication or alternate support. In either case, they are labeled as “bad,” unenlightened parents who remain outside that particular disability community. 109 The issue of medication, in fact, seems to be what Cohen terms a “consensus issue” in learning disability communities, an issue that is perceived to affect every member of the community, even if solving the associated problems disproportionately benefits more privileged members of the community and has relatively little effect on less privileged ones. Many learning disability advocates fail to acknowledge the issue of race as an added barrier to full inclusion or as a factor in diagnosis (and thus in parental resistance to claiming a disability identity). 110

In fact, while white learning disability activists like Lara Honos-Webb advocate for the “deviant” qualities of students with disabilities to be recognized as gifts, this advocacy does not always extend to the deviant, disabling qualities perceived to be associated with race. Natasha Warikoo and Prudence Carter argue that, not only are individual students marked as deviant and diagnosable, but African-American culture as a whole is infantilized and depicted as “subtractive from the goal of academic mobility”

(367). In other words, when white cultural norms in the school are taken as a given, cultural difference is assumed to be a disabling factor for the student. Similarly, James

Patton argues that “over time, the terms ‘difference,’ ‘culture,’ and ‘disability’ have become linked so that children’s cultural ‘differences’ may, as a result of this association,

109 Clearly, class is a divisive issue as well. Although class and race intersect in complex ways, I prioritize race here because there is some evidence that, where issues of inclusion are concerned, race does trump class. Kozol, for example, notes several instances when overcrowded black school districts have attempted to rent vacant buildings and classrooms in white suburban districts and have been turned away or else allowed to do so only on the grounds that the black children were kept strictly separate (165-6). 110 See, for example, Elke and Emerald, and Breggin. 201

contribute to a diagnosis of ‘disability’” (“Nexus of Race and Disability”14). Thus, after decades of black students being denied access to gifted programs, shunted into lower tracks, and disproportionately diagnosed as emotionally disturbed or mildly mentally retarded, 111 many parents, teachers, and activists in the black community are understandably reluctant to identify with disability movements, even though their children are disproportionately affected by deficit models of disability. 112 One form of resistance to racism becomes a resistance to association with disability, a process that is abundantly evident in The Planet of Junior Brown .

As a result, even some scholars who fight against a biologically determinist view of disability also continue to associate disability with deficit and stigma. 113 Patton, for example, calls for rewriting the “scripts” of special education to reform “objectivist” assumptions (“Disproportionate Representation”), and argues that “special education should be an array of services, not a place where students are sent when they don’t perform” (“Nexus of Race and Disability” 12). He also, however, calls for black students to return to the general education classrooms where they belong rather than acquiring a stigmatizing label along with services they don’t need. Given the poor quality of the special education he describes, this is a reasonable desire; however, it also implies that, in the absence of disability stigma, black students would “belong” in the general education classroom, an assumption that is flatly contradicted by a number of researchers including himself. Julie Miele Rodas, a disability activist, describes being thwarted in her attempts to include a consideration of disability culture to the discussion at her school about

111 See Patton and Berube. 112 See Davison and Ford. 113 Abbye E. Meyer argues that even children’s novels about disability activism focus on the social construction of physical and learning disabilities and disavow the stigma of intellectual disabilities by insisting upon the intelligence of the protagonists. 202

diversity. Her statements offended many of the parents of color: “To link race identity with the typical deficit understanding of disability entertained by most in the group was an unpopular maneuver” (116). Rodas argues that the inclusion of students with disabilities markedly improved the achievement of all the students in the school,

by adding to the explicit individualism in the classroom; by helping to generate a sense of allowable and desirable difference; by demanding creative teaching practices; by exposing students, teachers, and families to a more complete range of learning and personality styles; and by affirming the sense that conflict and resolution are natural and valuable aspects of human interaction.(116)

Nevertheless, even when fear for student achievement and success is not a factor, the

“deficit understanding of disability” remains and the gifts and contributions claimed on behalf of a disability identity go unrecognized.

Hamilton’s and Voigt’s novels stand out because they abandon the defense of giftedness and advocate identification with stigmatized identities without justifying this identification by reason of the gifts concealed by the stigma . In doing so, they also abandon academic achievement as the measure of successful inclusion. Instead, they embrace what Judith Halberstam calls the “queer art of failure.” Halberstam points out that “capitalism produces some people’s success through other people’s failures” (3). As

I noted in the previous chapter, the school system defines achievement through comparison, so that if some students score in a higher percentile on standardized tests then others must place in lower percentiles, and if some are identified as gifted then others must be denied that label. This framework is part of the “grammar of school” that,

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according to Tyack and Cuban, is so resistant to change. 114 Policymakers, educators, and even, as we have seen, writers of school stories, are bound to deal with the reality of this grammar. So-called “realistic” novelists are, ironically, not so constrained. By imagining creative modes of failure, Hamilton and Voigt also offer fantasies of what flexible, inclusive educational institutions might look like.

Including Junior Brown: Disability in the Black Community

As previously noted, The Planet of Junior Brown predates the passage of EHA, so that it cannot be a book about disability inclusion in the same way as a novel published after 1975 might be. Nevertheless, I read it as a text about disability in the schools.

Concerns about low-income, racialized, and “at-risk” students are often couched in terms of their ability (or, usually, inability) to do the work expected of them, 115 so that being identified with one stigmatized term also, unofficially, means being associated with disability. Lennard Davis’s concept of disability as a “modality” or “moment” (3) is helpful here for understanding how both Buddy and Junior can be read as disabled characters; disability is not an essence, embedded in a clear binary of abled/disabled, but a way of temporarily living in the world. Thus, even though Junior is not specifically identified as a character with disabilities until the end, and Buddy prides himself on his able-bodied status, both boys move in and out of situations in which they are assumed to be impaired, incapable, or dangerous.

114 According to educational philosopher David Labaree, this is because the school system was founded in order to advance the common good, but has always been treated by parents and students as an opportunity for individual competitive advantage; while the first goal requires that all students succeed, the second requires that some students fail, which means that parents and students have an interest in resisting egalitarian, redistributive reforms. Thus, Labaree’s book is entitled Someone Has to Fail. 115 See, for example, Thernstrom and Thernstrom and Kyburg, Hertberg-Davis, and Callahan. 204

In fact, nearly every character carries some kind of stigmatized identity on top of a racialized black identity. Buddy is homeless. Mr. Pool has been demoted from teacher to school custodian. Junior’s mother Junella suffers from chronic severe asthma, and it is unclear whether her husband has left her or whether he is simply always away on business. Junior’s piano teacher Miss Peebs lives in a filthy, roach-infested home and hallucinates. And Junior, by the end, seems to be a dumping ground for everyone else’s stigma in addition to his own; he is fat, fatherless, homeless, and hallucinating.

Each character also identifies with some form of privileged identity and clings to it. The teachers and assistant principal at the school are middle-class citizens proud of their achievements. Miss Peebs is from an elite family who had never been enslaved. Mr.

Pool is well educated. Junella is cultured and has money enough to lead a middle-class lifestyle despite her husband’s absence. Buddy is healthy, strong, and independent. For most of the novel, these characters put significant energy into protecting themselves from being contaminated with each other’s stigma. Junior alone seems to insist that his stigmatized qualities be seen and acknowledged. He refuses to diet. He draws himself into paintings of street scenes his mother finds disreputable. He runs away from home.

Thus, from the beginning chapter of the novel, when Buddy adds an additional planet resembling Junior Brown to his model of the solar system, to the end, when Junior has run away, the guiding concern of the novel is what will happen, not merely to a classroom, but to a society that includes Junior Brown. Just as the gravitational pull from the imaginary additional planet must be accounted for and managed, so Junior’s multiple stigmas threaten the orbits of the other characters and thus call for management. In the beginning of the novel, both Buddy and Mr. Pool do what the other characters do, and try

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to cling to their own orbits of privilege; at the end, they elect to place themselves in danger and rebuild the solar system.

Junella and the school personnel are the characters who most obviously dissociate themselves from stigma. They are also the characters most obviously critiqued by the narrator as chasing respectability at the cost of others in the community. Junella tries to uplift both herself and Junior by taking them to plays and concerts, cultivating the acquaintance of elites like Miss Peebs, and setting her dinner table with tablecloths and napkin holders. Her son, however, poses a problem. Her claim to privilege is being a respectable middle-class wife and mother, so that Junior’s achievements reflect her own; 116 however, his deviations from the norm also reflect her failures and necessitate her intervention. Thus, she can take pride in providing her son with a well-cooked turkey dinner served in a mannerly way, but she also tries to take Junior to Weight Watchers and to place him on a restricted diet. She gives Junior piano lessons, but takes the strings out of his piano at home so that his sound will not disturb her rest. She discourages Junior from befriending Buddy because he is poor; and when Junior insists upon bringing

Buddy home, she cooks the fancy turkey dinner in part to shame him. (Ironically, it is after this dinner that Junella’s own stigmatized identity appears, when she has an asthma attack and coughs sputum all over the dinner dishes.) And finally, when Junior uses the paints she has provided to create a picture of everything in the neighborhood Junella has tried to exclude from her life—street crime, sex, drug abuse, poverty—Junella burns the painting and removes Junior’s paints.

116 For fuller accounts of uplift and black middle-class mothering, see Kevin Gaines and Kate Capshaw Smith. 206

Significantly, her rationale is framed, not in terms of silencing Junior’s expression, but in terms of helping him uncover his true potential for achievement. She imagines saying,

“I destroyed that painting, Junior, because I know you weren’t yourself when you thought to paint it.…You can never have materials for painting, Junior, until you can demonstrate to me you will occupy your mind with thoughts proper and normal for your age group.” Yes, she could say that. Junior had always been the kind of boy who was obedient, who listened to his parents. (166, emphasis in original)

She imagines that when Junior is being deviant, he is not being “himself;” underneath, he is a different “kind” of boy, one who is properly obedient and normal. Her response to

Junior’s painting implies an important critique of the hidden giftedness defense. Junior does have extraordinary gifts as a musician and an artist; however, cultivating these talents would involve, not only achievement, but also a failure of respectability. In her own way, Junella is trying to adjust her perception of Junior, to maintain that he is a person who deserves to succeed. For her, however, this involves, not seeing his “deficits” as gifts, but seeing beyond the fat and the emotional fragility to the normative boy she feels confident is in there, somewhere.

The teachers and administrators at school police deviance and manage stigma even more dramatically. When Junior and Buddy finally show up in class, they are immediately noticed by the teacher, who is described as a potentially sympathetic “cool lady” with “warmth of humor behind the dark of her eyes” (143-4). Nevertheless, when

Buddy asks for a science book so that he and Junior can join in the lesson (which they are capable of understanding, since they have been studying with Mr. Pool), the teacher “let

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the humor die away. …Wise enough, she had come too far and had worked too hard trying to teach something to let one fast-talking kid put it over on her” (144). The narrator voices a key contradiction between the teacher’s having “come too far” and between her having “worked too hard trying to teach something.” If her primary goal is, in fact, to teach something, she could presumably give the boys a science book or direct them to share one. Instead, she resists being bested by a school boy and sends them out of the room.

Once ejected from the classroom, they must meet with Mr. Rountree, the assistant principal, who is similarly proud of his own achievement and selectively helpful to students. The boys immediately know that Mr. Rountree is satisfied with his suit, his hair

(which, Buddy notes, will not make an Afro), and his position, and they also begin to see that while Mr. Rountree has good intentions, he has no idea how to help them. Initially, when he looks at their files, he threatens them with legal action and reform school as a consequence of breaking compulsory education laws. Later, he eases off and tells them,

“When are you going to learn that the school is all you’ve got? We want you here and getting an education!” . . . The dude was serious, that’s what Buddy couldn’t get over. Rountree really believed what he was telling them. So you get an education, Buddy wanted to tell him. So what? Half the educated cats on the street couldn’t remember the last time they had a lousy job. (154)

Like the science teacher, he believes that his job is to educate; and like her, he attempts to solve the problem of the boys’ absence from class by threatening to remove them from the classroom on a more permanent basis. This chain of events, in which students (often those who are marginalized due to race or disability) are removed from the classroom for

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an infraction and thus become visible to the juvenile justice system, has come to be known as the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and it is a key concern for antiracist activists and disability activists in education. 117

Furthermore, both the teacher and Mr. Rountree value their middle class roles as educators without either educating their more vulnerable students or working to make the school and the surrounding neighborhood places where an institutional education is worth getting. They may punish the students for not attending class, but the school remains crowded and overwhelmingly noisy, and the streets remain repositories of the educated unemployed. Jonathan Kozol describes this behavior as characteristic of some of the compromises black administrators have felt forced to make, before and after Brown . He quotes one principal as saying,

The truth is that we are, to a degree, what you [white society] have made of us. The United States now has, in many black administrators of the public schools, precisely the defeated overseers it needs to justify this terrible immiseration. … We accept some things and we forget some other things and what we can’t forget we learn to shut out of our mind and we adopt the rhetoric that is required of us and we speak of ‘quality’ or ‘excellence’—not justice. (152)

Kozol also notes that a popular maneuver for principals has been to raise the quality of the school by removing troublemaking students; this raises scores without addressing civil rights concerns (162-3). In a similar way, Rountree remains blissfully unaware of his successful students’ fates after graduation, and he becomes more amenable to keeping the boys out of reform school (and in his own school) when he sees that their grades were high before they went on the hook.

117 See Verdugo, Christle, Jolivette, and Nelson, and Fenning and Rose. 209

Cohen describes this kind of pattern, in which elite members of the black community are placed in charge of managing and policing the less normative members, as “advanced marginalization” (63). She says, “New ideological narratives that emerge under advanced marginalization highlight the formal equality achieved by marginal groups, while actual inequalities are overlooked and avoided” (64). The school in The

Planet of Junior Brown is a space populated entirely by black characters, so that black teachers and administrators might be presumed to have an interest in antiracist pedagogy.

In fact, however, this school is far from representing the pre-Brown Southern tradition of resistant black-led classrooms represented in the novels of the previous chapter, in which all black youths are told they can achieve and are diligently taught and encouraged so that they all do. Instead, in this Northern space of nominal opportunity, students like Buddy and Junior who are marginalized in multiple ways are allowed (even directed) to weed themselves out; even black teachers and administrators dedicated to achievement cannot accommodate them. In the meantime, Mr. Rountree, who does not wear an Afro, is able to achieve an administrative position and tout the benefits of a good education, while the majority of graduates remain unemployed.

In many respects, Mr. Pool provides an antidote to this way of thinking and teaching. Yet even he must learn to value disability as well as giftedness. Mr. Pool is described as similar to the teachers Ladson-Billings praises, who value intense interaction with students, encourage frankness and dissent, and believe that all students (including ones given up as hopeless by other teachers) can succeed. Like them, Mr. Pool is passionate about teaching:

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Surely he had been successful in his classroom teaching. Tough, black children of city streets could lay bare their minds in his loud and open classes. But I lost heart, thought Mr. Pool. I could no longer teach in so rigid a regime. … Only now, through his work with Buddy Clark and the example of Buddy’s devotion to Junior Brown, did Mr. Pool slowly begin to believe in himself again. (13)

Mr. Pool’s philosophy of teaching is clearly different from that of the science teacher’s; she resents Buddy as a “fast-talking kid,” whereas Mr. Pool values and cultivates this quality so much that he clashes with the school system.

Nevertheless, while Mr. Pool can see gifts in “tough, black children of city streets,” he has a harder time seeing them in Junior. He sees his primary “work” as being with Buddy, while Junior Brown is only important as an “example of Buddy’s devotion.”

In fact, Mr. Pool has set up the basement room expressly in order to tutor Buddy, whom

Mr. Pool has discovered doing advanced math in an abandoned classroom after hours.

When Buddy comes for tutoring, he shows up with Junior Brown, so that Mr. Pool allows

Junior’s presence but has not solicited it. Having heard Junior playing the piano in the music room, Mr. Pool does recognize that Junior, too, has gifts worth cultivating; however, Junior’s fatness dissuades him from taking Junior on as a protégé: “With his talent, Junior should have been given all the care he needed. But so fat, so awful to look at. The school, like Mr. Pool, had left him alone” (12). Mr. Pool can recognize Junior’s neglect as a shame; however, he does not seem to feel that rectifying this is his responsibility. Junior “should have been given” attention, but not necessarily by Mr.

Pool. The narrator, voicing Mr. Pool’s thoughts, lists the school as the primary agency that has left him alone. Why, then, should not Mr. Pool have done the same?

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This rationalizing stands in stark contrast to Mr. Pool’s treatment of Buddy, another student abandoned by the school. When Mr. Pool looks at Buddy, his “heart swell[s] with pride. No telling what Buddy would think up next. A boy like him, with a mind like that” (3). In contrast, when he watches Junior, he thinks, “He hoped the sad, fat boy realized how much work big Buddy had put into the planet of Junior Brown. But maybe the huge fat boy was only a selfish black boy, too heartsick at his own fate to reach out. … No, you do what you can, thought Mr. Pool. You can’t expect to save generosity” (4). Buddy is nearly always named in Mr. Pool’s thoughts, whereas Junior is an unnamed “sad, fat boy,” a “huge fat boy,” or a “selfish black boy.” Buddy has “a mind like that,” and redeems Mr. Pool’s efforts, whereas Junior is a project that exceeds what

Mr. Pool feels he can do. It is not surprising, then, that when Junior begins to hallucinate,

Mr. Pool wants him placed in a hospital. Like the teachers Rose observes, who abdicate responsibility by invoking the medical mystery of disability, Mr. Pool has already come to see Junior as past saving. His antiracist pedagogy, his commitment to tough cases like

Buddy, cannot extend to students he sees as disabled.

The moment when Mr. Pool suggests an institution for Junior, however, also propels Buddy to reconsider his own attitude toward disability and community. Prior to this point, Buddy values strength and independence above all. In his memory, the boy who first welcomed him into the underground system of “planets” told him, “‘We are together only to survive. Each one of us must live, not for the other …The highest law is to learn to live for yourself’” (73). Despite his increasing sense that it is not working, this is the creed that Buddy adopts, and repeats with his own newly homeless charges. Since his highest law is absolute independence, he thinks of sickness as a curse that renders

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people incapacitated and dependent; he despises Junella for being asthmatic and needing

Junior to care for her, feels grateful to his own mother for abandoning him and sparing him the sight of her suffering, and becomes afraid whenever he himself feels unwell, fearing that he will be a burden on his “planet” instead of its provider. 118

When Mr. Pool suggests sending Junior to a hospital, however, Buddy feels

“betrayed and choking, he wouldn’t let Mr. Pool touch him” (187). Buddy himself, of course, has been evading the gaze of state institutions since he was nine, and he suddenly identifies with Junior rather than with the world of the well and the independent. He connects Junior’s threat of diagnosis to his other stigmatized identities, some of which

Buddy shares: “‘They’ll hit on how fat he is,’ Buddy cried, ‘they’ll say that’s it, we got to get him skinny. . . . They’ll see how black he is,’ Buddy said, ‘and they’ll say that’s the problem, we got to get to the white inside’” (187-8). Buddy does not hallucinate and he is not fat, but he is black, and he realizes, as the others have not, that in the eyes of institutions like hospitals and schools, one stigmatized identity can take precedence over all the privileged identities a person can claim. Like Mina, a character I discuss in the next section, Buddy decides that if he already identifies as black and poor, he may as well join forces with disability as well, since repudiating it will give no protection.

In part, this involves accepting the visibility that comes with stigma. Buddy must learn to recognize how much effort it must involve for the school to have avoided helping

Junior, to have left alone a boy who takes up so much physical space. The refusal to see

118 This dovetails with gendered critiques of the novel; see Roberta Seelinger Trites for a fuller critique of Buddy’s masculinity. 213

Junior’s fat is in part what has caused his stress. Earlier in the novel, Junior describes the failure of his trip with his mother to a modern dance show:

“We both looked all right but once we were practically there…I got to thinking that everybody would stare at us. By the time we were in the lobby, it looked to me like everybody was shrinking away from me. You know, like they were trying to keep from looking at my fat. And Mama, she looked like she wasn’t sure of what she was doing. Even she started to shrink away.” (32)

The fear of people staring at him doubles with an awareness that they are consciously trying not to see him at all; again, standing out translates to invisibility. Although it is the crowd shrinking away from Junior, the implication is that it is Junior and his mother who are metaphorically shrinking away to nothing.

For Buddy, as a homeless child trying to escape detection, visibility has been even more of a threat; he has cultivated erasure as a strategy. In order to avoid being picked up as a vagrant, Buddy not only tries to avoid looking conspicuous, he also tries to think himself out of existence: “I am harmless, Buddy thought. I am nothing at all” (89). By doing this, he is trying to avoid being neutralized, standardized, and negated by the school system and the child welfare system; however, the effect is the same, since he must negate himself to avoid detection. Similarly, disappearing into the dark has a downside. Buddy tells himself that he keeps his eyes closed in his basement hideaway in order to avoid dirt and mortar: “That’s not why I keep them closed, he thought. Actually he didn’t want to be reminded of his blindness in the dark” (68). Making peace with the dark and being invisible are survival strategies; Buddy erases himself on his own terms before others can do so. However, the price is, again, the same erasure he wishes to avoid. In addition to being safely invisible, he is also unable to see, losing a small part of

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his sense of subjectivity and agency. Self-erasure is thus not a permanent solution; by remaining thoroughly invisible, Buddy, Junior, and Mr. Pool reinforce the power of the cultural forces which are erasing or absorbing them. 119

Once Buddy decides to identify with Junior’s visibility as a disabled person, though, he breaks all of the rules he has set for his own life and that of his community.

Instead of absolute secrecy and independence, he tells Mr. Pool about the underground system and enlists his help. Instead of telling his charges, as he does at the beginning, to completely forget the homes and families that make them vulnerable, he tells Junior,

“Home is never far” (203). And instead of insisting that all his charges be as nearly self- sufficient as possible, Buddy tells them, “‘We are together . . . because we have to learn to live for each other” (210). Admitting Junior, who cannot enter or leave the basement without assistance, means that the philosophy of the community must be reframed for everyone; and, as Buddy has already observed, the previous philosophy of independence was proving difficult for some of the other children.

The two utopian learning communities that frame the novel—the less inclusive one at the beginning and the more inclusive one at the end—would, if presented in a policy brief, almost certainly be regarded as failed models. They are populated by dropouts—a dropout teacher who caused turnover and wasted the system’s investment in training, as well as dropout students. These escaped bodies are never happily returned to the system to realize the error of their ways and be counted as successes, as they might be in many adolescent “problem novels;” Mr. Pool does not return to his middle-class

119 Although Hamilton does not directly reference Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man , she clearly engages with some of the same questions of safety, invisibility, and resistance. 215

salaried teaching job and the children do not turn themselves in. Nor does the system successfully reform so as to accommodate its deviant students, as it might in a revisionist school story. In effect, Buddy and Junior assign themselves to special education, in the dank, forbidding school basement (where, in my anecdotal experience, special education is usually housed), as taught by teacher-turned-custodian Mr. Pool. The situation they voluntarily choose is, in fact, exactly the kind of scenario that James Patton and Mike

Rose, among others, have spent their careers desperately trying to eliminate. Thus, the novel poses a political problem; how can a text that presents this model of education as an individual “choice” be considered a critical educational utopia?

Policy writers and activists, whose job it is to reform existing structures and to garner support from state agencies, are not generally free to posit education outside of state power. Like school story writers, they cannot suggest solutions that involve abandoning the measures of achievement and success recognized by the school system— graduation rates, test scores, grades, and college admissions—given that state funding, teacher assignments, and quality of instruction often depend upon such measures of success or failure and thus materially affect the conditions and opportunities of the students they represent. As Kozol points out, white suburban politicians and administrators are only too happy to frame “failures” of achievement as valid individual choices made by inner-city parents and students, so that the dominant power structure may be relieved of responsibility to provide equity. Thus, while many activists, like

Kozol, Rose, Delpit, and Slavin, do question how success is framed and suggest that students might have good reason to choose failure, they must also fight for these compromised forms of achievement so as not to abandon the fight for equity. Given their

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roles in public discourse about education, I believe that to do otherwise would probably be irresponsible.

Nevertheless, I want somebody in public discourse to say the un-sayable and think the un-thinkable, to unequivocally question whether the school as a training ground for citizens can ever fulfill its promise of full inclusivity—even as I ultimately want to believe that it can. That somebody, I argue, is novelists (in this case, Virginia Hamilton), whom I believe can afford to raise these questions in the minds of child readers precisely because they will not be taken seriously as contributors to public education policy. 120

Furthermore, The Planet of Junior Brown does not directly and openly challenge the mythology surrounding the Brown v. Board decision in the way that some of the novels discussed in Chapter Two do. Despite being more radical in some ways than Mildred

Pitts Walter’s Because We Are , Hamilton’s novel won the Newbery Honor, remains in print, and appears to be at least occasionally taught in the classroom (though, as I discuss in the introduction, not as widely recommended as her less radical novels), while

Walter’s novel is out of print and does not even appear in the capacious Accelerated

Reader program. Paradoxically, in critiquing the school and its pedagogy so radically and completely that the only solution is to exit the school altogether, the novel also evades the kinds of scripts about the school as a site of opportunity and progress that tend to constrain the genre of desegregation stories. The Planet of Junior Brown is not easily classifiable within recognized genres of children’s literature, and thus manages to say a number of things that are un-sayable, not only in public policy discourse, but also in many young adult novels.

120 For a useful analysis of how American children’s authors have historically been able to make radical political statements because of the low profile of children’s publishing, see Julia Mickenberg. 217

Some previous scholarship on The Planet of Junior Brown describes the novel as a kind of fantasy, despite its grim realism. Marla Harris places it alongside dystopian/utopian science fiction in a new genre she calls the “urban survival novel”

(64); she describes novels in this genre as being “fantasies of empowerment in which children and teens prove themselves more resourceful and resilient than their parents, teachers, or classmates ever suspected” (73). Eric Tribunella reads Buddy and Junior as child flâneurs, creative wanderers in New York City who transform hostile or indifferent urban spaces by imaginatively recreating them as “places of safety and beauty” (85).

Both Tribunella and Harris emphasize that cities are traditionally seen as dangerous to children, places from which they must be protected. Children thus provide the justification for state intervention and action that renders the city ever more exclusive and hostile. In contrast to the school story, which fantasizes about how adults might provide a space for child learners, The Planet of Junior Brown fantasizes about how children might surpass adults in creating their own safe spaces. As Christopher Kelen and Bjorn

Sundmark point out, countries ruled by children according to childhood logic (Neverland,

Oz, and Narnia being notable examples) have been a staple of children’s fantasy for centuries. These “nations of childhood” (263), they argue, can support nation-building projects and socialize future citizens, but can also lure the child temporarily to a more desirable alternative community where he or she can more freely exercise governance rights. Thus, in addition to being a fantasy of youth empowerment, inclusion, and transformation, The Planet of Junior Brown is also a fantasy about revolution, co-opting the institutions and ideals of the nation-state and severing their connections to state power. 121

121 I discuss Buddy’s reconfigurations of power in more depth in my article, “Solar Systems and Power 218

Over the course of the novel, the characters openly adjust their relationship to science, fiction, and fantasy; they not only fantasize about a utopian social universe, but also begin to work against the underlying rules and scripts that have structured their previous fantasies. In the beginning, the trio’s model of the solar system is described as scientifically accurate except for one change--a new planet: “Glazed in beige and black, the planet of Junior Brown was shaped in the soft, round contours of Junior Brown’s own face. It was a stupendous mass in a brand new solar system, and it claimed a powerful hold on a green, spinning earth” (3-4). Rather than looking away from Junior, Buddy has lovingly put his image into the natural universe, and Mr. Pool proceeds to argue that by

“natural” laws of science, it belongs there:

Junior’s face was placid when at last he said, “There’s no way to balance the earth against the pull of a planet the size of Junior Brown.” “Indeed,” Mr. Pool said. “And when the Astros calculated the planet’s weight, they found it solid beyond all wishing otherwise. However . . . everything worked out just fine when a band of some thirty asteroids was discovered in the same orbit.” (7-8)

Although Mr. Pool claims, “science demonstrates that nature is the same everywhere”

(15), he and the boys actually bend the laws of nature and spin stories that rationalize the new natural laws. Instead of using the laws of gravity to argue that the planet of Junior

Brown must not exist, Mr. Pool explains that the planet of Junior Brown simply proves the existence of other invisible bodies. Nevertheless, he and the boys continue to insist upon the fiction of natural laws, and their fantasies work to maintain the balance of the solar system and keep the earth spinning in its proper orbit. When the boys defy the natural protection of adult institutions and take the risk, instead, of lowering Junior

Systems.” 219

Brown into Buddy’s basement planet, they also implicitly suggest that the earth is no longer in balance, and should not be sheltered from the pull of Junior Brown’s massive presence.

In doing so, they also disrupt common scripts of young adult realistic novels.

Trites suggests that young adult literature commonly tells the story of a dangerously rebellious adolescent who first questions the status quo and then is contained by the teaching of an “ideology of maturity” ( Disturbing the Universe 74); this containment occurs when a sympathetic adult character simultaneously displaces the power of the adolescent narrator and teaches the adolescent reader to accept some form of societal injustice and repression. In The Planet of Junior Brown , it is Buddy, an adolescent character, who remains the ultimate narrative authority, converting Mr. Pool to his way of thinking. The ending does not offer a resolution, and the adolescent characters do not recognize the value and necessity of dominant adult society. In this respect, the novel directly counters much public discourse about adolescence, which, as a number of scholars observe, relies upon the adult fantasy that adolescents are both admirable in their youthful energy and dangerous in their immaturity, necessitating adult intervention, protection, and control. 122

Buddy, Junior, and Mr. Pool may very well begin the novel in exactly the place the school system would have placed them, and many like them—in a segregated, cramped basement with few resources and a teacher who is not “really” a teacher.

Ironically, however, having found this “solution” for themselves, they are liable to legal action. Similarly, Buddy’s system of “planets” may not be significantly different from the

122 See, for example, Trites, Nancy Lesko, and Mike Males. 220

legal system of foster care, but running it places Buddy and all of his charges in danger.

Thus, the novel highlights a central problem of state institutions; what matters is not the specific solution or reform that is introduced, but the fact that it is the state that controls the solution on behalf of the “problem” children under its care. Buddy and Junior embrace many of the ideals that state institutions were created to address—that schools should be places of learning, that learning is worth having, that children should be cared for and valued—but they imagine a society in which they are not indebted to the nation- state for fulfilling these ideals.

Lauren Berlant, in Anatomy of a National Fantasy, suggests that nations compel allegiance through a process of “suture[ing]” (25); through acts of collective fantasy, individuals imagine themselves as “the people” and local territories become “the nation”

(25). School is supposed to make children into citizens, educated into democratic duties and privileges through the grace of national funding and compulsory education laws.

When Buddy, Junior, and Mr. Pool invent their own educational solutions, they deprive state institutions of their reason for existence, and also sever the sutures binding them to the nation. Their renegade class studies the solar system and the universe, not American history, and Mr. Pool imagines that he is preparing his students to be “make life ready”

(13) for a new human race, rather than drawing his inspiration from the idea that he is educating the future citizens of America.

Hamilton presents a utopia that is created not through institutional restructuring but through imagining how education might work if it remained largely the same but were separated from its originating institutions. In the process, she provides some critique of what happened to historically antiracist, inclusive black education after Brown ; once

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African-American teachers and students became nominally included in the national fantasy of citizenship, they also became included in practices of advanced marginalization and in state institutions engaged in protecting their own interests.

Lennard Davis argues that the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century helped to produce disability, by positing that the fit bodies of individual citizens must contribute to the fitness of the body politic. In Hamilton’s novel, a disability-inclusive learning community is incompatible with learning to be a citizen. Her protagonists embrace marginality rather than access. Similarly, in Voigt’s novels, bad citizenship is often associated with disability, and it generally reflects poorly upon the citizenship models and the education offered by the school rather than upon the characters.

Cynthia Voigt’s Tillerman Novels: The Mis-Education of the White and Gifted

Hamilton’s novel emphasizes the stigma of disability and the ethical need to embrace it. In contrast, Voigt opens up a disability category that allows for black students, gifted students, and diagnosable students to share a sense of identity without feeling stigmatized. Specifically, like Patton, she suggests that the students in the school system share the disability of “ain’t been taught.” By reading this series from a disability perspective, I argue that Voigt’s novels also contribute to critiques of Brown that object to the assumption that white education is superior. While the critiques discussed in

Chapter Two focus on the quality of Southern black schools and the racist pedagogy black students encounter in predominantly white schools, they do not address how white schools were educating white students with disabilities. 123 While Voigt’s depiction of the

123 Although bell hooks does not specifically discuss disability, she does suggest that many white students also flourish with more liberatory teaching methods. Darling-Hammond also suggests that American schools are failing even white middle-class students. 222

school system is admittedly dystopian, the community that is formed by acknowledging a common source of disability suggests a utopian vision for how the promises of integration and inclusion might better be accomplished.

The genre of young adult realistic fiction tends to be characterized by a very dark and cynical stance toward adults and adult institutions. This convention has attracted more critical attention, in fact, than most of the other generic aspects outlined by Trites, with some critics praising the genre’s gloominess as relevant, appealing, and supportive of literacy (and therefore, appropriate for the classroom) and others condemning it as overly depressing, precocious, and artistically inferior (therefore, inappropriate for the classroom).124 The Tillerman series, unsurprisingly, has consequently received attention, both positive and negative, for its pessimistic portrayals of adult characters and institutions. Crucially, however, this attention has revolved around the usual concerns over the artistic and emotional merit of presenting an array of flawed adults, rather than addressing the specific (potentially radioactive) concerns about race, disability, and pedagogy raised in the novels. Dorothy Clark, in her examination of Homecoming, argues that adult institutions meant to protect the children consistently fail in the novel. As a result, the children often choose orphanhood over the patriarchal and repressive versions of “home” offered them. For Clark, this provides a useful critique, pointing out the collapse of the social structures meant to protect the innocent Romantic child. For most other reviewers and critics, however, the dark depiction of institutional failure is an obstacle to be overcome or glossed over. Reviews of Homecoming and The Runner take

124 Praisers include Cart and Alexie; nay-sayers include Egoff, Cox Gurdon, and Feinberg. Both camps tend to draw a distinction between high-quality realistic fiction (good) and the sub-genre of the “problem novel” (bad), but the line is often fuzzy. 223

the novels to task for their “alarmingly hostile characterization of most adults” (Leverich) and for stereotyping teachers and parents as ineffectual or bullying (Nelms, Nelms, and

Horton). Other critics simply skate over the problematic social institutions in the novels, treating the series as primarily being “about” self-development (Reid 31) or personal triumph, with “modern reality” serving only as a backdrop for “mythic themes” (Jameson

14). Critics writing for an audience of secondary school teachers also tend to bracket the social issues raised; they tend to focus on the presence of metaphor, allegory, allusion, and lessons in personal resilience in order to make the case that the books are teachable in secondary school classrooms. 125 Given the especially harsh depictions of classrooms, this avoidance is perhaps understandable in publications directed toward teachers.

As with Hamilton’s novel, however, Voigt’s critiques of desegregation seem to go unnoticed and are therefore accepted into the classroom. 126 The many painful school scenes that take place in the six novels set in the 1980s effectively undercut any lessons of progress and equal opportunity that might be read into the desegregation story The

Runner . Yet, by broadening the critiques of pedagogy to include all of the poorly served students—white and black, gifted and disabled—the perceived threat that comes from representing how black gifted students are badly taught seems to be defused; the accusation of continuing racism in schools after Brown is evidently much more potent than the accusation of globally poor teaching, which has been a target of children’s literature for well over a century.

125 See, for example, Reid, Dresang, and Hylton. 126 In a telephone interview, Voigt said that she is not sure whether the Tillerman books are still widely taught, but for several years after their publication, they were quite popular for classroom use. 224

I contend that the Tillerman series ought to be read with some attention to its tense dialogue with many of the assumptions and philosophies underpinning the school system. Voigt’s protagonists, to varying degrees and in various arenas, do pursue individual growth and do overcome personal obstacles. In each case, however, personal development is never merely personal; the protagonists’ problems are always partly caused by character, but also prompted by their reactions to endemic social problems.

Furthermore, nearly all of them reject a central assumption of school stories, the school system, and American society as a whole, which is that success is the sign of personal growth and societal progress, while failure is the sign of stagnation.

Scholarship on achievement gaps is frequently tied to anxious rhetoric about the future of the nation. And, after 1975 and the advent of mainstreaming and inclusion, the education of marginalized students is often discussed alongside the education of gifted students, with the fear that including disabled students will mean neglecting the national resource of the gifted student body. Investment in gifted education is called for because not doing so will have “potentially serious consequences for the long-term economic competitiveness of the U.S.” (Plucker, Burroughs, and Song 1). Scholars like Robert

Slavin who advocate passionately for more equitable gifted education (that is, more accessible to minority and poor students) must equivocate:

If the U.S. is to maintain its standard of living, it must develop a workforce capable of thinking, learning, and making decisions. Writing off a substantial portion of our students never made sense from a social standpoint and is rapidly becoming suicidal from an economic standpoint . . . corporate leaders’ concerns with the types of graduates produced by our public schools is not limited to cognitive and technical skills, but also includes social skills and especially the ability to relate to persons of different backgrounds and to be good team players. (Braddock and Slavin 14)

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Others critique the pre-packaged AP and International Baccalaureate programs as providing the sole measure of student worth; however, they then discuss ways that overstressed minority participants in these programs can be given additional enrichment to offset their “absence of cultural capital” (Kyberg, Hertberg-Davis, and Callahan 185) so that they can demonstrate success within these admittedly flawed programs. Successes of various kinds are thus conflated in potentially contradictory ways. Good critical thinking and decision-making skills, as demonstrated by selective standard assessments, will naturally lead to students’ making the mature critical decision to participate in the corporate economy of the United States in such a way that the nation will be advanced along with its students. An alternate future, in which the nation’s gifted decide to invest their critical thinking skills in other ways, is either unimaginable or unlikely to garner funds and thus unadvertisable.

It is this alternative that Voigt forces readers to imagine. As Eliza Dresang points out, the series features a number of protagonists who might be labeled as gifted, including

Maybeth. Maybeth’s character most closely adheres to the model of “hidden giftedness” prevalent in learning disability discourse; she has difficulty passing tests in school, but is consistently presented as a notable musician, abled in ways that her classroom teachers

(with the exception of her music teacher) are unable to tap into or even to recognize. The other characters are talented in ways that are recognizable to the school system, yet they generally refuse to succeed according to the terms of that system. In fact, their academic successes are often framed as ethical failures. Judith Halberstam argues that failure has the potential to “[allow] us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and

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manage human development” (3); further, in a society that designates success and failure as purely individual traits of character, an appreciation of failure is necessary in order “to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life in the United States” (4). Halberstam notes that failure is a necessary and inevitable product of capitalism; however, she suggests that it can nevertheless be a principled choice, a thing that can be done well and with style, rather than a victimizing force. Similarly, Voigt’s characters frequently choose failure, and do so in a way that showcases injustice.

The most dramatic example of artful failure is performed by Mina. Mina’s first encounter with failure is forced upon her rather than chosen; during her second summer at an elite dance camp, she struggles to adapt to her pubescent body and is asked to leave.

During the final interview, she learns that she was accepted as a token so that the camp might gain federal funding designated for racially integrated programs. Furthermore, she notes that the director, Miss Maddinton, designates black bodies as deviant while ascribing her views to seemingly color-blind observations about puberty. While Mina does resist, she is finally convinced that the failure in this scene belongs to her rather than to camp; even her resistance is turned into evidence of an immature reaction to failure and she is accused of being a troublemaker in order to hide her own inadequacies.

Nevertheless, this encounter raises her awareness of institutional racism, so that when she begins junior high, she chooses not to outgrow or overcome her troublemaking tendencies, but rather to make more purposeful and directed trouble.

When she enters junior high, her Social Studies teacher makes it clear that success in school demands rigid standardization and regurgitation: “everything had to be done exactly his way, even the place where the date went on your papers and the way the date

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was written . . . There was only one particular set of words that made an answer right”

(133).Mina initially deals with her feelings of helplessness by doing well on her battery of biased standardized tests, but eventually elects to wage a campaign against Mr.

Bryce’s curriculum and teaching methods. She asks Mr. Bryce questions about the roles of blacks and Native American tribes in the Maryland history he is teaching, even though he ignores her, and “dismisse[s] her questions, without seeming to hear them even though he was looking right at her” ( Come a Stranger 133). As Mina’s mother points out, Mr.

Bryce feels as though he is being shown up when he is unable to answer questions about his own subject; Mina responds, however, that her questions indicate an area he ought to know better. Rather than assuming her questions are disrespectful, he might make an effort to learn more so as to answer them. Similarly, during current events, she persists in reporting about race riots in South Africa and decolonization in Rhodesia [Zimbabwe].

Notably, although another student in class reports on “obscure” incidents, “Mina was the only one Mr. Bryce kept saying it to: ‘The assignment was to cover “significant news”’

(136).

As a result, she receives a ‘C’ in Social Studies, the only grade on her report card that is not an ‘A.’ Her reaction is pleased laughter:

Mr. Bryce should have given her an A, she knew; all of her homework papers were perfect, all of her test papers were perfect. He wanted to fail her, she thought, but he didn’t dare to. … So he gave her a C and wrote a comment in the blank where teacher comments went: ‘Wilhemina is disruptive.’ The whole thing just made Mina laugh. She guessed she’d gotten through to him, all right. (136)

Mina is, in effect, being officially labeled as “disruptive” and academically sub-par precisely because she is using the independent critical thinking skills called for by

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advocates of gifted education, which in her case are evidently going to be more threatening to national mythologies than supportive of national growth. Margaret Price discusses the labels that resistant students acquire when they are being inappropriately taught and decide to push back; they have a “‘bad attitude’” or lack the magic quality of

“motivation” (67) and thus become designated as problems who refuse to be solved, students with spoiled identities whose protests are un-hearable (27). Price focuses on diagnosable mental disabilities, but Mina is marked as an unreliable speaker in the same way, and for the same reasons—so that her protests will not be recognizable as a critique of teaching.

Nevertheless, Mina’s reaction to her unfair ‘C’ and unwarranted diagnosis as

“disruptive” is not internal collapse, as it was when she was forced to leave dance camp.

Significantly, however, she also does not renew her commitment to school success, as

Emma does when she is labeled as too disruptive to succeed in the “mainstream” white school. Instead, Mina laughs, knowing that “she’d gotten through to him, all right.” Her grades mean a great deal to Mina, contrary to what her shocked parents initially think; but she does not take from them the meaning, and the chastisement, that she is meant to. In

Voigt’s acceptance speech for the Margaret Edwards Award, entitled “Thirteen Stray

Thoughts on Failure,” she says, “Failure can . . . reveal false or inadequate measures of that [failed] work. I can’t be the only person here who got what I call a bad A, in school, a high mark for mediocre work, or a good D, or even an exhilarating F?” (29). Mina’s ‘C’ and poor comment are exhilarating in a way an ‘A’ would not have been. They are signs that her agenda of resistance is succeeding, so much so that she must be labeled as a “bad rhetor.”

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While this is the most obvious example of purposeful, artful failure, it is not the only one. In Dicey’s Song, Dicey is placed in a home economics class for girls instead of the mechanical drawing class she requested, which is reserved for the boys. She is bored and resentful in class, and fails spectacularly. When she is asked to make an apron and display it, she designs the apron so as to avoid having to make buttonholes. The project requires her to use two buttons, but instead of sewing a buttoning apron as she is meant to do, she places the two big red buttons on the bib for decoration. As it happens, she has sewn them so that they sit over her nipples, a fact she does not realize until she is forced to put the apron on to display it to the class. The narrator says, “Dicey wasn’t sorry she’d done as bad a job as she’d done, but she wished she didn’t have to stand up so everybody else could see. … She glared at the laughing faces, her chin high” (54). Dicey has not intended her failure to be a public one; however, the humiliating classroom fashion show turns her resistance to home economics into a stylish failure (in the literal sense) that vividly and hilariously points out the gendered inequity of the course requirement.

Furthermore, like Mina, Dicey does not learn the prescribed lesson from failure; she is not sorry for doing a poor job, and she does not mend her ways. Later, the class is given the assignment of planning meals for a family of four on fifty dollars, a task that Dicey had performed out of necessity the previous summer. She writes down what she and her siblings ate during the summer, and promptly sees the red pen coming down to scratch out: “F. Nobody could live for long on meals like this. … Dicey almost said, We did. But she stopped herself” (111). Unlike Mina, Dicey does not make a public protest out of her failure; nevertheless, it is clear to the reader that her failure is actually a punishment for straying from gender norms and for poverty.

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Even the children’s mother, who eventually is overwhelmed to the point of breaking down and abandoning them, fails on her own terms. Suzanne Reid describes

Liza as “fail[ing] to thrive . . . not strong enough to cope with the irresponsible wanderings of her children’s father, Francis Verricker, whom she never marries” (41), but this description is somewhat inaccurate. Liza has not failed to thrive; she has left a troubled home in order to better thrive. Nor has she failed to marry. Having witnessed her own parents’ marriage, she refuses to turn her relationship with Frank Verricker into a distasteful obligation and will not marry him or give their children his name. Like many of the other characters, Liza has a chance to succeed conventionally, and declines to pay the price of success. When she does fail, it is, as Clark points out, in such a way as to dramatize the nation’s own failures to support its more vulnerable citizens.

Conversely, successes within the school system are often framed as empty and meaningless and serve to highlight ineffective or unjust pedagogy. When Mina finally earns an ‘A’ in Social Studies, she knows it is merely because she has worn Mr. Bryce down and not because either her work or his views have changed. When Dicey writes a brilliant essay imagining her mother’s breakdown from Liza’s point of view, she is publicly accused of cheating and shamed before the class. After Mina intervenes, the teacher admits his error and promises Dicey an A+ for the essay and an A for the year, but the grades are meaningless to Dicey, since at no point does the teacher acknowledge the significance of the work she has done. While this is not a “high mark for mediocre work,” it is a different kind of “bad A.” Similarly, the active and mischievous Sammy succeeds in repressing his energy in order to please his teacher and be “her idea of good”

(72); he becomes almost unrecognizable to Dicey and Gram, who have to reassure him

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that they value his troublesome self. Sammy’s success reveals yet another form of “bad

A,” as the praise he garners reflects the school’s hidden agenda to reward compliant behavior rather than academic inquiry. And in The Runner, while most of Tamer Shipp’s conflicts lie outside the classroom, he notes that his newly integrated school isn’t providing him with the kind of intellectual challenge he’d like, so that his grades say little about his abilities.

In various respects, then, students with considerable potential and talent are constrained by the school system, the abilities they bring to the classroom denied scope or actively repressed. Dresang suggests that Dicey’s Song is adapted to the needs of gifted readers, providing them with various examples of gifted children to take as models and virtual peers. I argue, however, that the series as a whole resonates more with narratives of disability than it does with narratives of gifted development. Moreover, by focusing consistently upon the political potential of failure and the high price of success,

Voigt allows for a reframing of dialogues about antiracist teaching and special education.

Furthermore, questioning the framework of academic success and failure allows for a conversation about school reform that acknowledges the need for pedagogical reform without using it as an excuse for retaining segregation and tracking. Jonathan

Kozol sharply criticizes the argument that schools serving white children are failing; as he rightly points out, disparaging the value of smaller class sizes, higher teacher salaries, and better-equipped facilities is only used as a way to deny equitable treatment for poorer schools, never to take these advantages away from wealthier districts (135). Voigt’s novels, however, point out serious problems with pedagogy and curriculum that do affect a variety of white students as well as minorities. She deals less with issues of funding and

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class size, and more with the problems of how success is defined for both white and black students. Martin Luther King’s statement, “I fear I have integrated my people into a burning house,” is echoed by Tamer’s disappointment; as discussed in the previous chapter, participation in the white-dominated and ableist school system doesn’t seem like much of a reward for the Civil Rights battles of the 1960s, and the students—both black and white—deserve better.

Similarly, inclusion fails to significantly improve the problems of diagnosably learning disabled students, because the basically inflexible measures of assessment do not change. Thus, Maybeth’s general education teacher insists that if she simply tries hard enough, she can memorize lists of sight words, and if she cannot do this, she is incapable of learning. As both Gram and Dicey realize, even tutoring provided by the school (one of the legal accommodations accorded by EHA) is unlikely to help, as any tutor trained within the system will be using the same methods that have already failed Maybeth.

Ralph Cintron, writing about learning disability education in the 1980s, describes the

“magnificent circularity of schooling . . . schooling historically has trained students into a fill-in-the-blanks conception of reading and then complained when students have thoroughly absorbed that training” (101). Tutoring, he notes, “is meant not to interrupt the cycle but to return the student to the fold” (107). Thus, the legal provisions meant to help Maybeth do nothing to address this systemic “magnificent circularity.”

Maybeth only learns when her instruction is treated, not as a set of accommodations, but as a project of learning how to teach. In some ways, this means recognizing Maybeth’s “hidden gifts;” Dicey is able to resist allowing Maybeth to be diagnosed as mentally retarded in part because she reminds herself that Maybeth can read

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music and remember the words to songs. However, simply honoring Maybeth’s musical gifts is not sufficient. She still must be taught. James, the family’s resident intellectual, is given the task of figuring out how to tutor Maybeth more effectively, which he does by researching approaches that will play to her strengths. After thinking about how Maybeth reads musical notes, James first researches phonics, and employs Maybeth’s musical sense by having her read Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham , thus combining phonics and whole language techniques. James is not trained within the circular pattern described by

Cintron. The teacher has been trying to help Maybeth to complete classroom-specific tasks of learning (memorizing sight words) that is supposedly necessary as a precondition for reading; James simply works on getting Maybeth to read. Needless to say, he is doing what Maybeth’s teacher ought to be.

Crucially, however, Dicey and Gram push James to help Maybeth partly because he needs more mental stimulation than he gets at school. Gifted education advocates frequently cite instances of gifted students being asked to tutor struggling students as horrifying evidence that inclusion and differentiated instruction are inappropriate for advanced students, who are stalled in their individual progress and asked to stagnate intellectually in the service of others. 127 In fact, the tasks of researching and thinking about pedagogy are not incompatible with intellectual growth. When Dicey finds the two of them giggling over Green Eggs and Ham , James says, “‘You had to understand everything to get the jokes. More than just the words. They said in my book that learning to read with phrasing and fluently, that was a sure sign [of reading capability] . . . His whole face lit up. ‘She’s [Maybeth’s teacher] sure gonna be surprised. … I wish I could

127 See, for example, Hertberg-Davis. 234

see her face when she figures out what’s happening” (109). James’s successful absorption and application of complex literacy pedagogies is not going to be rewarded or recognized at school; he will not get to see the teacher’s face. And yet, his face still lights up.

Maybeth’s success does not subtract from James’s, but both lose when inclusion is practiced with rigid pedagogy and when success is defined as the completion of individual work.

The tutoring of Maybeth, which continues throughout the series, is one example of a coalition between two kinds of learners that, as I previously note, adults frequently assume to have opposing interests and needs. Furthermore, these opposing needs are posited as irreconcilable, due to the school’s limited resources of teacher attention and money; what one side gains, the other must lose, and if both sides are given what they desire, the system will be bankrupted. James’s familial rescue of Maybeth would be, for many parents and education advocates, just as fantastic and politically dangerous a solution as Buddy and Mr. Pool’s illegal creation of alternative state services in poorly equipped city basements. Are all intellectually gifted students really better at pedagogy than their teachers? Would they all extend the same feelings of familial responsibility to their metaphorical brothers and sisters? And what are taxpayers paying for, if James is just going to do the teacher’s job? In its own way, this extracurricular coalition provides a utopian fantasy for how the classroom might work; but such methods tend not to be implemented because they can be difficult to manage on a large, systemic scale. James and Maybeth’s idealistic partnership works because it occurs outside the context of a large system where students are allotted a certain “fair share” of state resources and where reforms must be easily adapted to a mass scale. Nevertheless, it provides an

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important reminder that a reform that may not transfer well to the school system may still be a valuable alternative. Furthermore, it provides an alternative space for utopian common ground between poorly served gifted and disabled students; just because that space may not be within the capitalist, competitive school system does not mean it does not exist.

The friendship between Dicey and Mina, and their respective families, is another kind of coalition, one that must work through stigmas of both disability and race. Dicey is hostile toward most of the students, assuming that most of them are either laughing at her, her slow sister, and her eccentric grandmother, or that they will if they get the chance. For her part, Mina knows that Gram’s husband was openly racist, and she assumes that Dicey and her siblings are, too, especially after Dicey repeatedly snubs her.

When Mina defends Dicey from accusations of cheating, then, it is not out of a sense of innocent friendship, but out of a sense of duty to herself to be “one of the minority who stood up against . . . whatever was trying to press people down by lies. She was already stuck in a couple of other minorities, she thought to herself, she might as well join this one” (199).

Even after this incident, when Dicey finally unbends, the two have work to do.

Mina knows that Dicey’s essay was about her mother’s breakdown, and yet she unwittingly trips Dicey’s defenses by talking about her grandmother: “’Maybe you don’t know this, …but your grandmother’s—people around here have considered her—‘ As she realized what she was saying, her voice slowed down. ‘I mean—she’s got a reputation for weird chess. As long as I can remember.’ Dicey could feel her anger mounting” ( Dicey’s Song 148-9). Mina, in turn, is defensive about race, assuming that

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Dicey’s brother is making disrespectful faces at her mother and only later realizing that

Sammy was trying hard not to cry because his own mother has just died. And, in fact, the

Tillermans do need to be more aware of institutional racism; when Mina eventually praises Gram because Gram hasn’t asked Mina’s mother if she does daily cleaning, Dicey begins to have an inkling of everything she does not know and can never understand about Mina. In racially innocent representations of childhood friendship, such as those in

Maniac Magee, children instinctively like each other and use this liking as the foundation for their understanding that racial prejudice is indefensible. In contrast, here, political decisions precede and form the conditions for friendship. Mina makes the decision to join yet another minority; Dicey makes the decision to let her family’s vulnerabilities be visible to “outsiders.” Their mutual suspicion is too great for simple liking and attraction

(which is, in fact, there from the beginning) to surmount it; they must continue to make conscious decisions to trust each other and to work through the hurts they feel at unintended slights.

In this respect, they resemble the interracial friends of desegregation stories, such as Sally and Mary Jane, who also must work through conflict so that their friendship can testify to the success of desegregation. For Sally and Mary Jane, however, the integrated classroom both nurtures their connection and also represents the fulfillment of their desires. For Dicey and Mina, too, the classroom facilitates their initial connection, as they notice and appreciate each other’s intelligence. Unlike in desegregation stories, however, in which the school is the desired primary shelter for the interracial friendship, the hostility of the classrooms in the Tillerman series have a different kind of effect. The competitive nature of the classroom threatens to drive the girls apart; Mina is one of the

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crowd of girls who giggles at Dicey’s public display of her failed sewing, and in turn, she risks chastisement for standing up for a fellow student in English class, so that she has little incentive to maintain solidarity. At the same time, the hostility within the school encourages interracial bonding to continue outside of it, which was ostensibly one of the goals of desegregation.

Voigt argues in an interview that Dicey and Mina are able to form a friendship across racial boundaries because they are involved in the “common endeavor” of the classroom (Jordan 254). Considering how little “common endeavor” the classrooms she depicts encourage, this statement strikes me as reflecting utopian hope rather than describing her novels. Similarly, after winning the Newbery Medal for Dicey’s Song,

Voigt writes that “school is, for students, probably the only place where they can learn how their minds work, learn to discipline that working so that they can do more with their own abilities” (“On Teaching,” 741); again, this inspiring statement is not reflected by the novel, in which all of the siblings quite pointedly are not encouraged to learn how their minds work. Nevertheless, while James and Maybeth’s coalition represents the success of an unofficial, extracurricular learning space, Mina and Dicey’s partnership demonstrates the possibilities for utopian citizenship education that still inhere in the school setting. While the classroom pedagogy they suffer through may not afford common intellectual endeavors, it does involve them in the common endeavor of survival and resistance. Through their failures, they frequently persist in acting as though school were the utopian place Voigt describes in her interviews.

Utopian educational theorists, especially those working in the “realist utopian” tradition associated with Henry Giroux, often identify two key goals for utopian

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education. First, as Giroux emphasizes repeatedly, institutions of higher education need to be vital public spheres that help to “[make] visible the contradiction and tension between the reality of existing democracy and the promise of a more fully realized democracy” (“Dystopian Nightmares” 50). For Giroux, this means that educators serve as public intellectuals whose responsibility is to “[enter] into public conversations unafraid of generating controversy or of taking a critical stand” (“Utopian Thinking” 36-7); in modeling this kind of democratic participation, they can also empower students, not merely to be consumers of existing institutions, but to fight for and “create those institutions they deem necessary for living lives of decency and dignity” (“Dystopian

Nightmares” 53). Second, education should both educate students to participate in democratic government and should allow them to maintain identities outside of their state citizenship. As Mark Olssen notes, schools are public institutions, but they are also

“semi-autonomous from the state” (120) in the sense that they are connected to local communities and have the potential to “involve minority groups in participatory projects”

(120). These theorists believe that state-sponsored schools should prepare students to be active citizens of a democracy, but not necessarily citizens of the existing state; rather, the very skills of deliberative democracy fostered by the schools ought to threaten the neoliberal state and the normative model of citizen as consumer.

These theorists, however, either tend to focus on higher education and other forms of adult education, as Giroux does, or to highlight the roles that adult stakeholders and community members play in elementary and secondary schools. Those who discuss youth tend to discuss youth culture as a kind of extra-curricular education. 128 Generally,

128 See Cultural Studies and Youth. 239

however, utopian theorists neglect the agency of youth in formulating their own concepts of democratic education and in finding ways to resist when the institutions do not meet their hopes. This kind of agency is exactly what children’s literature often highlights. I discuss earlier how fantasy genres offer opportunities for active childhood citizenship, but “realistic” genres do as well. As Julia Mickenberg and Roberta Seelinger Trites both argue, authors of realistic novels often deeply believe in the ability of youth to enact political and social change, and they display these beliefs both by creating activist youth protagonists and by trusting their child readers to read and understand complex, politically volatile material.

In Voigt’s Tillerman series, youth protagonists take on the roles of public intellectuals, coalition builders, and critics of the state that utopian scholars generally ascribe to adults. They often fail in these roles; and conversely, as in Hamilton’s novel, their acts of resistance are sometimes expressed through failures to be conventionally good student/citizens. Thus, Mina is “disruptive” because she persists in behaving as though Mr. Bryce’s classroom were going to live up to her ideal of what education ought to be—a place where she can ask critical questions and challenge biased narratives of

American history. She is, in fact, doing exactly what Giroux argues a public intellectual should do, and her actions are working, as he says they should, to open up the slippage between the existing state and the ideal democracy. Dicey is not a public intellectual in this way; however, she, like Mina, uses the school to figure out her values and the workings of her mind, even when the school does not reward this activity. Additionally, she consistently works to maintain a democratic community composed of her immediate family and trusted friends, in which she is often challenged and forced to re-assess her

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roles and responsibilities. Yet this identity (and her considerable ability to participate in democratic governance) is held separate from her compulsory identity as a student in school, where she is a noticeably non-participatory “bad citizen.” Dicey’s character is valuable in thinking about utopian education and community precisely because her allegiance is so difficult to win; she will not consent to be a citizen of any community she cannot help to govern.

Conclusion

Classrooms in these novels are not the sites of “common endeavor” that Voigt imagines. Nor are they the sites where children can grow up learning how to participate in a racially integrated, disability-inclusive society, as scholars like Kozol and Bérubé hope. They are not places where Mina and Dicey can explore their common intellectual interests, or where James and Maybeth can work together to the benefit of both, or where

Mr. Rountree or even Mr. Pool can help Junior and Buddy without further marginalizing them. Those ideal sites of common endeavor migrate outside of the school, to the

Tillerman home or to the streets of Crisfield or to the abandoned basements of

Manhattan. Nevertheless, in both Hamilton’s and Voigt’s texts, the dystopian space of the classroom contains what Mark Olssen calls a “‘latent’ or ‘repressed’ utopian ideal” (100), a sense of the way democratic classrooms and communities ought to work, which the adolescent protagonists draw upon in forming the networks that help them survive their schooling. Thus, although much of the meaningful education that takes place does so outside of the classroom, the idea of the classroom provides the occasions for Dicey and

Mina or James and Maybeth to form alliances, and also provides the “latent” ideals that guide them. Similarly, in Hamilton’s novel , actual classrooms and state-defined identities

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are rejected, but the desire for what they represent—critical education and democracy— inform the creation of a new classroom “universe.”

In both texts, creating a site of common endeavor that can include both race and disability means that the stigmas of marginalization and potential failure must be embraced rather than repelled. In the shared history of race and disability inclusion after

Brown , the schools have not made space for everyone to succeed, but there has been plenty of room for everyone to fail. These novels take that reality of failure and reconfigure it, finding the space within failure to create political coalitions that seem otherwise impossible.

Nevertheless, these alternative spaces do not replace the school in either text, but rather exist in parallel. While these texts highlight the ways that the school system limits and excludes valuable forms of citizenship, they also underscore the dangers and limitations of unofficial systems that do not have the backing of state authority. Mr. Pool,

Buddy, and Junior live with the daily threat of discovery and the expectation that each new haven is only temporary; Maybeth and the other Tillerman siblings must renegotiate their compromises with the classroom each year; and the interracial coalition formed between Mina’s family and Dicey’s never seems to extend to the rest of the town.

Official recognition and institutionalization would reduce the flexibility and responsiveness that allow these learning communities to function as inclusive utopias; but without official recognition and support, they can be hard to sustain and perpetuate, not only for future generations of students, but even for the same generation from one year to the next. School story utopias are also temporary, in their own ways, as students must expect to graduate and face the world; however, in school stories, progress made tends to

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be progress kept. The battle with the bully, once conclusively won within school grounds, rarely needs to be re-fought. In contrast, protagonists who opt out of the school system and its scripts also continue to fight the bully, over and over again.

Nevertheless, this mode of continual struggle speaks to the continued failures of both legalized desegregation and inclusion education, and validates a way of talking about the legacy of Brown that is neither complacent nor cynical. In many ways, this model of a continually re-negotiated educational utopia is actually quite hopeful. If improvement and success are temporary, so too is failure, and while struggle may be perpetual, it is nevertheless portrayed as being worthwhile while it lasts. The novels in the next and final chapter further explore the tricky relationship between unofficial, alternative forms of desegregated pedagogy and state-sponsored forms, as the protagonists in these novels face the difficult choice to improve the flawed, desegregated nation-state as a secure citizen or to seek an alternative, more meaningfully integrated form of community despite the risks involved.

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Chapter 4: Desegregating Literacy, Enriching the State

Preface: Collecting Data from Domesticated Animals

The story I tell in this preface, the Infamous Dog Clicker Story from my days in

Yuma, Arizona, is one of my favorite teaching anecdotes. My husband loves it too, and urges me to repeat it whenever the topics of either secondary school teaching or life in

Arizona come up in conversation. I think we both feel it is somehow definitive of my secondary school teaching career, although I don’t believe we have ever clarified precisely how. I retell it here, because in the course of researching this chapter, I have been forced to revisit and rethink what it is actually about.

The story goes like this: When I was teaching in Yuma, the teachers attended a mandatory professional development workshop once a week, and sometimes more often.

The district administrators, in general, assumed their teachers to be incompetent and barely literate, and many workshops were run as model elementary school classrooms, with development staff patrolling up and down the aisles of teachers to enforce full and enthusiastic participation. I was fortunate, in that my school’s professional development coordinator, Deb, treated her staff with an unusual degree of respect and trust (although, as a former math teacher, Deb sometimes had trouble understanding that not every reading standard could be easily translated to a ten-question multiple choice assessment whose scores could be tabulated and submitted to her every two weeks).

On the day of the Dog Clicker Workshop, Deb began the session by standing up and swinging a collection of brightly colored plastic objects strung on lanyards. Many of the teachers looked at each other with raised eyebrows; I, not being a dog owner, did not immediately recognize what she was swinging. “I got these at Pet Smart,” Deb

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announced, shaking the bundle at us. “Two bucks apiece. Used one of these to housetrain my dog. You can actually use these to raise your kids’ reading performance. I’m going to let Wilda tell you about it. We are going to spend the rest of today learning how this works, so you can try it out tomorrow.” Here, she settled herself in a chair and gestured to

Wilda Storm. Wilda Storm was the author of the “Write Up a Storm©” series, and she had been brought into the district as a professional development contractor to assist in faculty training. In our previous workshop with Wilda, she had made us read a passage in chorus. The passage contained no punctuation, and at points where there ought to have been punctuation, we were instructed to hop for a period, clap for a comma, and so forth.

Wilda did not move on to the next sentence or phrase until each teacher had performed the requisite hops and claps. This was supposed to model for us how we should make our own students’ comprehension mandatory, but we resented being treated like our students, which probably should have told us something about how our students might feel toward us. At any rate, my experience with Wilda’s teaching made me resistant to the Dog

Clicker Workshop from the outset.

Wilda explained to us how we were to use the clickers. We were to ask the students to chorally read a passage aloud. Then, in the middle of a paragraph, in the middle of a sentence even—we should keep them on their toes so they’d pay full attention—we were to click the clicker, and then continue the reading ourselves. Click again (at an unpredictable moment having nothing to do with the structure of the text), and they were to take over, smoothly, in chorus. (Here, Deb cut in, “Of course, this all assumes that you’ve been training them to read in chorus. Some of the classes I’ve seen are fantastic—the kids can all read in chorus when the teacher gives the signal.” I had not

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been training my kids to read in chorus.) Wilda held up the clicker triumphantly. “Studies show,” she said, “that when you do this activity with kids, their scores go up.”

At this point, I raised my hand. “That’s very interesting,” I said. “Which studies?”

Wilda stopped and gave me a look. “There are studies,” she said. “This is new research coming out.” I persisted. “I’m sure we’d all be really interested to read those. Do you happen to know any of the authors’ names?” Wilda, correctly interpreting my questions as a sign of disguised hostility, snapped, “This is research based . There is data . These are tested methods .” And that was the end of that conversation. Deb invited us to obtain our own personal clickers (“Two dollars! I got them at Pet Smart!”), and the workshop was dismissed. I did not get my own personal clicker, either from Deb or from Pet Smart, and

I did not adapt the reading pedagogy for use with another kind of signal.

The story does not end there, however; there is a coda. A few days after the workshop, I was called in to substitute for another teacher during my planning period.

Her lesson plan, in three bullet points, was written on the whiteboard: 1. Take roll. 2.

Practice reading using clicker technique (this followed by some page numbers from the textbook). 3. Answer comprehension questions. Beneath this, in large letters underlined several times, was an additional statement:

DO NOT BARK AT ME! THIS IS MANDATORY !!!

Not having a clicker (and not being willing to use it if I had had one), I simply had the students read to each other in pairs. There was no barking. And over the course of a few weeks, those teachers who had adopted the Dog Clicker Technique quietly abandoned it, discouraged by persistent outbreaks of student barking.

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For many years, this story seemed to me to have a relatively straightforward punch line and moral: to wit, teaching an adolescent child how to read should not be made analogous to teaching a domestic pet to pee outdoors. In retrospect, I am not entirely sure whether I was more horrified by the assumption that we should treat our students like dogs, or by the assumption that literacy education was a mechanical, reflexive behavioral process and not the work of Learning to Think Critically About

Literature that I regarded as my Sacred Task. While my opinion about the first issue remains the same, I have come to question my own assumptions about the latter problem; as I discuss in more detail later in this chapter, many constructions of literacy, even those that appear humane or elevating, ultimately function to exclude. Just as importantly for discussions of desegregation, Bronwyn Williams and Amy Zenger argue, is that conceptions of literacy education as a kind of sacred, empowering calling work to confirm the white teacher’s power as the sponsor and provider of literacy, retaining the ability to grant (or withhold) social and personal goods.

Moreover, in the course of preparing to write this chapter, I have come to think that I missed the key point of my story entirely. My rage had arisen in part because I regarded literacy as a kind of individually held personal property to be gained by each student and used as he or she chose. Under this view, the kind of literacy students acquired, and its value relative to other forms of literacy, was of grave consequence; I believed that a valuable form of literacy, the making of critical meaning, was being withheld from students and replaced with a more debased form, the ability to read in chorus and respond to signals. (And, despite my changes in thinking, I am not, I confess, ready to abandon that particular value judgment.) While I had little respect for the state

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test, I nevertheless believed that my preferred literacy pedagogy would produce test scores as good, or better, than Wilda Storm’s methods, simply as a natural result of producing more critically literate students. What I now feel I missed is that the students’ literacy abilities were not, in the context of the public educational system, their property at all. They may have cared which kind of literacy education they received, and I certainly cared, but the state of Arizona did not. What the state of Arizona wanted was scores, tabulations detailing the knowledge of its youth. Either pedagogy might have produced knowledge not measured by those scores (the knowledge of how to read chorally, or a personal connection to a particular text), but those knowledges were extraneous to the Arizona Board of Education’s need to demonstrate its management of competent student-citizens.

As James Scott observes, centralized state agencies often codify knowledge about their subjects so as to make state resources (including human resources) more legible texts for the state to metaphorically read. In the process, forms of knowledge that fall outside the state’s purview of management may be designated as irrelevant, but often persist nevertheless. Significantly, these unofficial forms of knowledge even enable ill- conceived state reforms to succeed. In thinking over student and teacher resistance to the dog clicker technique, I wonder whether in resisting the method, without resisting the rationale of state testing, we were aiding the project of state education reform through our very resistance. And I am ambivalent about the extent to which I wanted the particular state reform project of No Child Left Behind, a project that aims both to equitably redistribute the goods of knowledge and to collect comprehensive data on the nation’s students, to succeed. I was, and still am, pessimistic about the ways that No Child Left

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Behind has redefined knowledge and pedagogy. Moreover, as I argue in the previous chapter, I believe that school failure can be a powerful, and underestimated, political and pedagogical tool. Nevertheless, I also know that individual failures may not result in systemic failures, and often carry a high price for students.

Introduction

In the previous chapters, I examined the various ways that desegregated schools fail to desegregate, or to fairly distribute, the knowledge they offer. The novels in this chapter imagine what might happen if that ostensible goal were achieved; though set outside of traditional public school settings, they portray scenes of education in which white teachers successfully distribute literacy skills to black students, a transfer that does not happen in the novels discussed in earlier chapters. Both novels obliquely reflect upon an era of re-segregation, when busing programs and voluntary desegregation programs have been abandoned or struck down by the Supreme Court. Thus, instead of portraying desegregated school settings, they address the newest iteration of the Brown legacy—the idea that it is knowledge, rather than actual school settings, that needs to be desegregated in order to achieve national equality. 129 Both are works of historical fiction that specifically draw upon founding myths of the United States as the land of freedom, equality, and opportunity; and both highlight the gaps between the ugly details of that history and its utopian promise. In combining this historical mythology with narratives of cross-racial literacy education, they also invoke the goals of national healing and

129 Theron Britt, Amanda Lewis, Catherine Prendergast, Linda Darling-Hammond, Jonathan Kozol, Derrick Bell, and Jennifer Trainor all note both the institutional removal of desegregation enforcement and also the move toward increasing re-segregation. Britt, Kozol, and Darling-Hammond, among others, deplore this trend; Derrick Bell and Abigail and Stefan Thernstrom accept it with more equanimity. 249

prosperity envisioned by the architects of the Brown decision, who wished to close those gaps by constructing an intellectually enriched and racially unified citizenry.

These novels alter the setting and plot structure of the desegregation story in multiple ways. As in the novels of the previous chapter, learning takes place outside of the contemporary public school, but also within situations that are controlled or overshadowed by state power. Furthermore, like Hamilton’s, Voigt’s, and also

Woodson’s novels, the texts in this chapter place both academic learning and racial integration within a time frame other than the bounded school year. This movement away from the school and toward a sweeping national-historical time frame tends to problematize the societal retreat from the Brown -era vision of school desegregation, rather than celebrating the Brown decision as the culmination of progress. Furthermore, the texts play with conventions of linear, transparent narrative in ways that ask the reader to question the goodness of the nation-state which the integrated school is meant to serve.

Nevertheless, in Holes, the playful disruptions of genre and narrative convention ultimately (as in other kinds of play) function as a way for Sachar to safely contain his critiques within an overarching framework of order. In contrast, The Astonishing Life of

Octavian Nothing breaks with narrative conventions in ways that refuse easy resolutions to either the narrative or ideological problems presented. In both cases, departures from narrative convention open up possible departures from pedagogical convention, suggesting a range of purposes for literacy and modes of citizenship besides success in school.

In the first novel, Louis Sachar’s Holes , the desegregation of literacy becomes the way for the United States to fulfill its utopian promise. The sharing of intellectual

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property leads directly to both personal and national prosperity, enabling the state to better fulfill its Constitutional mandates to promote unity, administer justice, and foster the material welfare of its citizens. Holes follows three interlocking story lines, in which two historical injustices continue to curse the land and the present-day citizens of central

Texas. The first historical storyline follows the family history of the protagonist, Stanley

Yelnats, revealing how his Latvian ancestor betrayed the trust of a Gypsy friend and thereby drew down her curse. This curse resonates to Stanley’s generation; Stanley is falsely convicted of theft and sentenced to rehabilitation at a juvenile penal institution,

Camp Green Lake, which has neither greenery nor a lake, but only miles of unproductive desert. This desolation is the result of a different curse, which is explained by the other historical plot line. The Warden of Camp Green Lake is the descendant of a white landowner. The reader learns through flashbacks that one hundred years earlier, this landowner had lynched a black man for becoming romantically involved with the town’s white schoolteacher. After her lover was murdered, the schoolteacher, Kate Barlow, cursed the town and became a feared outlaw, robbing Stanley’s ancestor and burying his fortune in the newly formed desert. Stanley, along with the other boys at Camp Green

Lake, now digs holes in order to recover the fortune which the Warden regards as hers.

During his time at Camp Green Lake, he meets Zero, an illiterate, orphaned black boy, who later turns out to be the descendant of Madame Zeroni, the Gypsy woman who cursed his ancestor. Stanley reluctantly teaches Zero to read, and then saves his life when the two boys escape from the camp; in return, Zero reads Stanley’s name on the box of buried fortune found in one of the holes. The curses are broken; the boys are restored to society; the lost fortune is restored to Stanley’s family; Camp Green Lake is restored to

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its former utopian greenery; and all of this healing is enabled because a white boy agrees to share literacy with a black one.

In contrast, M.T. Anderson’s two-volume The Astonishing Life of Octavian

Nothing, Traitor to the Nation , asks the reader to draw far darker conclusions about the rewards of literacy and the ways in which it is necessary to the nation. Octavian is a slave in Revolutionary War-era Boston, held by the philosophical College of Lucidity as part of a human experiment. He is given an elite classical education from birth, and his every movement and response is observed and recorded, in order to scientifically measure the humanity of African princes in comparison to white European ones. Partway through the experiment, the college falls into financial distress, and acquires funding from new investors who are slaveholders and traders, and who therefore have an interest in proving his inferiority. His education and assessment change accordingly. Octavian escapes with his sympathetic white tutor, Dr. Trefusis, and joins with the Revolutionary forces attacking Boston in the name of Liberty. The two later leave the rebels to join the British regiment of Lord Dunmore, who has promised liberty to escaped slaves willing to fight against the rebellion. In this regiment, he teaches literacy and classical mythology to some of his fellow escapees, and in return learns some of the Oyo language his mother refused to speak with him. When the Royal Ethiopian Regiment is abandoned by Lord

Dunmore, Octavian and a few of his compatriots escape once more, in search of a safe harbor. Before following his friends, however, Octavian returns to the hated philosophical college in order to destroy the years of data collected about him and to replace it with his own manuscript. Thus, in this novel, a highly literate narrator

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ultimately strives to alter the records of his literacy, and he rejects the concept of nationhood in the search for some other form of community.

Despite their differences, in both novels, the welfare of the nation is tied to the protection of its citizens’ private property, both intellectual and material. Educational philosophical debates are often framed as contests between concepts of education as a publicly held common good and education as a private commodity to be acquired and used by individual consumers, and education critics generally lament the decline of the former construct. 130 These novels, however, tend to collapse that distinction, suggesting that there is no real conflict between them. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing , in particular, asks readers to question whether a commonly distributed literacy is a good in itself that will reform the nation or whether, conversely, a nation founded upon rationalized racism will always appropriate this common knowledge for the brutal ends of private gain.

In this introductory section, I provide an overview of some of the key theoretical conversations necessary for discussing universal literacy as an alternate means to desegregating the nation. I begin at the most focused level, by outlining some of the debates and assumptions prevalent in literacy education scholarship, before drawing back to consider two wider issues: how the state has connected literacy education to utopian national goals through reform efforts, and how the state appropriates its citizens’ skills as a national resource.

130 See, for example, David Labaree, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Jonathan Kozol. 253

The topic of literacy education is so contested as to be almost impossible to summarize coherently. As a number of scholars note, the word “literacy” itself might describe skills from memorizing and verbally repeating well-known texts, to interpreting novel and complex material as demonstrated through sophisticated writing tasks, to a range of activities in between. 131 The word “literacy” is, in fact, applied to any neglected skill thought to be necessary to students’ development as citizens; Patricia Hill Collins, among others, recommends media literacy, Evan Watkins speaks of derivatives literacy, and Lani Guinier offers the idea of racial literacy. This multiplication of meanings speaks to the power that is attributed to literacy and the benefits it is thought to garner for the nation and its citizens.

Again, however, these anticipated goals and benefits multiply astonishingly, often in contradictory ways. In one formulation, literacy (nebulously defined) is framed as a tool for personal upward mobility, a form of cultural capital that can be traded for grades, academic opportunities, jobs, and ultimately material capital. Equalizing access to this cultural capital is consequently framed as necessary for achieving racial and economic justice. It forms one of the rationales behind the No Child Left Behind Act and behind the push for marginalized students to enter and succeed in Advanced Placement classes. In the decades after the abandonment of busing programs, it also provides a rationale for desegregating knowledge instead of classrooms, based on the assumption that narrowing racial gaps in achievement tests will also narrow gaps in material capital. An often-cited alternative (and not entirely compatible) goal is that literacy can empower and politicize learners, conferring not only the tools but also the activist desire to challenge existing

131 See, for example, Harvey Graff, James Allbright, and Mike Rose. 254

systems of cultural and material capital. A third benefit attributed to literacy, which potentially conflicts with the previous two, is that it develops students’ minds and civic capacities, strengthening the republic and leading to both economic and socio-cultural development for the nation. 132 As Amy Wan notes, literacy education has proven to be an attractive component of education at all levels, in part because of its very stretchiness; educators, administrators, politicians, and students can all agree that it is crucial to citizenship education, without having to agree upon (or even discuss) what is meant by either literacy or citizenship.

Even assuming these conflicting goals could be resolved, however, numerous scholars question whether literacy education can actually fulfill the expectations of those who believe in its benefits. Alfred Tatum, for example, notes that college degrees have not always produced returns for black students in the form of jobs, and Cathy Prendergast suggests that literacy is constructed as “white property” in such a way that any gains black students make in achieving higher literacy levels will result in that level of literacy being devalued as cultural capital. Heather Andrea Williams and Susan Kates both note that successful literacy campaigns in black communities, both after the Civil War and during the Civil Rights movement, were pursued in the hopes of gaining civic empowerment, but that the successes of these campaigns did not result in increased respect from whites, increased community control over education, or freedom from violence and repression. As for contentions that literacy, in and of itself, develops individual analytic skills, numerous scholars suggest that analytic skills have very little to

132 For overviews of conflicting goals for literacy, see Sylvia Scribner, Harvey Graff, and David Labaree. For literacy as a tool for upward mobility, see RC Foust, Holly Hertberg-Davis, and CM Callahan; Cathy Prendergast; Perry Gilmore; and William Carpenter and Bianca Falbo. For literacy as a tool for political empowerment, see Paolo Freire, Steven Schneider, Susan Kates, and David Levine. For literacy as a tool for self-actualization and civic training, see Diane Ravitch, Mike Rose, and James Ottery. 255

do with most definitions of literacy. 133 Furthermore, critics such as Linda Brodkey,

Richard Marback, Perry Gilmore, and Frederick Erickson suggest that schools and adult education programs tend to define literacy in ways that create student resistance.

Specifically, when students’ facilities with words are labeled “illiterate,” they may resist both normative literacy and normative citizenship. Brodkey and Marback, in fact, both argue that the purpose of literacy education appears to be to construct a population of

“illiterate others” (Brodkey 161) whose illiteracy implies an unfit character and attitude toward normative middle-class civic society.

Many of these critics do suggest that, with reformed practices or attitudes, literacy education might be able to better achieve its varied desired goals. Nevertheless, before I move to a discussion of how the state constructs literacy projects for the benefit of the nation, it is worth keeping in mind that these projects often misfire. Contemporary children’s literature is generally, for obvious reasons, enthusiastic about the joys and benefits of reading. Literacy is given such a hard sell, in fact, that critic Roger Sutton sardonically remarks, “Car commercials aren’t there to convince us to take up driving.

Why do so many [children’s] books, especially for younger readers, belabor the point that reading is fun?” (“What Hath Harry Wrought?” 12). Holes certainly peddles the advantages of reading; and even Octavian, despite his disillusionment, retains his love of reading and teaches his fellow slaves. At the same time, both novels reveal slippages where literacy education does not produce the proper results. In general, this occurs when the personal goals of literacy learning conflict with the state’s goals for its citizens.

133 See, for example, Shirley Brice Heath, Perry Gilmore, and Mike Rose. 256

Horace Mann, one of the architects of the Massachusetts common school system, is often cited as the foundational philosopher behind the idea that a state-financed common school ought to serve the public good, by training citizens who share a body of knowledge and who learn to serve their fellow citizens, and their nation, above their own selfish private interests. 134 In one of his early lectures as Massachusetts Secretary of

Education, canvassing for a project that would represent an enormous claim on the public purse, he suggests that education is a sound property for state investment because it might produce infinitely multiplying rewards:

Education, then, is to show to our youth, in early life, this broad line of demarcation between the value of those things which can be owned and enjoyed by but one, and those which can be owned and enjoyed by all. … The same truth may enrich and ennoble all intelligences at once. Infinite diffusion subtracts nothing from depth. None are made poor because others are made rich. In this part of the Divine economy, the privilege of primogeniture attaches to all. (“Means and Objects” 85) This eloquent utopian conception of knowledge as a property that can and should be evenly distributed among a nation’s citizens often serves as a touchstone for generations of critics who see knowledge being unevenly distributed and common schools serving private interests instead of the public good. 135 In a later lecture, however, Mann also invokes the cause of social stability and the protection of private property:

Does any possessor of wealth, or leisure, or learning, ask “What interest have I in the education of the multitude?” I reply, You have at least this interest, that, unless their minds are enlightened by knowledge and controlled by virtuous principle, there is not, between their appetites and all you hold dear, so much as the defence of a spider’s web. Without a sense of the inviolability of property, your deeds are but waste-paper. (“What God Does” 198)

134 See Labaree, “Public Goods, Private Goods.” 135 See, for example, Bowles and Gintis, John Dewey, and Michael Apple. 257

In this appeal to wealthy taxpayers, the democratically shared property of literacy serves to maintain the value of deeded private property; the common good translates to the private good. This equation between public good and private interest is crucial to the value of literacy in both Holes and The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing .

Furthermore, historian William Reese points out that while Mann is often honored as the father of the public school system, his role as the father of standardized testing is less widely acknowledged. In fact, Mann achieved public support for reforms such as age grouping, common textbooks, female teachers, and normal schools for teacher training by collecting and publishing written, standardized data about student performance in a move that took students and resistant schoolmasters by surprise. The results of the first written and standardized exams were published in the form of tables, so that newspaper readers could, in a glance, compare different schools and share the centralized gaze of state officials. The publication of this data encouraged a kind of equivalence; common taxes paid for common schools, so taxpayers, in a sense, were entitled to ownership over the successes and failures of those schools. Reese also notes, however, that the move toward standardized testing was tied to the spread of state influence and authority; not only did it provide political support for more centralized, state-controlled schools, but it also was enabled by government subsidies for the cheap printing of common tests and textbooks, and by the spread of reformers’ ideas through the growing postal service.

In more recent decades, the testing of literacy, like the rationales for literacy I discuss earlier, has also functioned as a link between publicly funded and owned knowledge and private wealth. Todd Farley and Dan DiMaggio, both long-time scorers for the reading and writing tests mandated by No Child Left Behind, write about the near-

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monopoly of a few testing companies who secure enormous government contracts and then hire temporary seasonal workers to score the tests for low wages and no benefits.

DiMaggio notes that in 2010, Pearson received a corporate tax break under the HIRE Act for “creating jobs” (n.pag.), and both authors report that scorers are pressured to adjust the grades to comply with the desires of state officials, so that the same testing companies will continue to receive state contracts (a fact I wish I’d known when I was teaching in

Arizona). In the era of No Child Left Behind as in the 1840s, easily legible statistics and knowledge of student performance is framed as knowledge that ought to be commonly shared, the literacy or illiteracy of the nation’s students being the symbolic inheritance of all citizens; at the same time, this common property is shaped and disseminated so as both to legitimize state power and to enrich private corporations.

In the South, of course, state governments took a different kind of interest in literacy and property protection. Beginning in 1739, many Southern states passed anti- literacy laws that forbade enslaved people to read, lest they become discontented or use writing as a tool for organizing rebellions. The reality, however, as Heather Andrea

Williams carefully demonstrates, was far more complex. Some plantation owners did teach their slaves to read, either in the interests of evangelical conversion or, significantly, in their own monetary interests, as a slave who could read could also provide skilled labor for construction that required the ability to decode drafts and plans.

On a plantation, then, the literacy of the enslaved might increase both human and land property value, while in sale transactions, that very literacy might make those same slaves less attractive for purchase. Literacy was of value only when it could be denied or concealed from view—when it could not be counted by state or capital networks. Even

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this literacy, however, tended to be limited to reading, rather than writing. Concealed knowledge of reading and writing could, of course, also be quite valuable to the enslaved themselves, for forging passes and papers to be used for travel and escape. In this respect, the Southern states’ lack of literacy measures and standards for their white population impacted their ability to protect “property” rights; Williams points out that slaves’ use of forged papers was often successful because the whites checking them had only rudimentary reading skills themselves. The disinterest in a common school system in slave-holding states has sometimes contributed to the perception (an inaccurate one, scholars point out) 136 that Southern states were “backward” and pre-modern.

Thus, in discussing literacy education, the problem of how citizens’ abilities will be measured, demonstrated, and recorded is as central a problem as the best way to teach a common body of skills. The state cannot use its human resources effectively unless it knows what those resources can do. James Scott argues that “legibility [is] a central problem in statecraft” (2). That is, in order to tax and control the land and population under their purview, governments must find ways to reduce disparate local customs to some kind of standard, simplified format that enables a centralized authority to take in and understand complex and unwieldy issues at a glance. This kind of standardization improves the state’s ability to perform functions from maximizing tax collections to conscripting soldiers to neutralizing regional dissenters who resist incorporation into a centralized nation-state. Scott analyzes state projects such as forestry, cadastral mapping, and language unification, but the project of literacy education (and schooling in general) in the United States can also be understood in this way. The process of standardized

136 See Saidiya Hartman. 260

testing is meant to produce an easily readable text about literacy. As Scott notes, and as many critics of standardized testing support, the “state simplifications” designed in order to reduce confusion and chaos also, “when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade” (3). In the previous chapters, we have seen that schooling, as a system, tends to define what citizenship means by how children can be practicably managed within a classroom setting. Similarly, at the level of nationwide assessment, scores do not measure literacy so much as they define what literacy is, and what kind of literacy students will acquire; literacy skills that can be tested in a standardized format, such as the identification of main idea and supporting details, will be defined as more essential and central skills than, for example, the close reading of a passage with multiple interpretations. Regardless of how they define literacy, critics of the educational system in the United States tend to fear that the skills, or canonic texts, or resistant texts, they feel ought to be central to citizenship are exactly the ones being left off of standardized tests and therefore defined out of official existence. 137

Roderick Ferguson suggests that a similar process of simplification for state understanding can explain racial policies in the United States since the 1960s: “To render racism illegible, the U.S. government would manage and incorporate the relative illegibility of minority difference and culture through administrative and financial machineries that would turn minority difference and culture into categories intelligible to the nation-state and its protocols for managing consent and elaborating systems of inequality” ( Reorder 38). One of these tools for “managing consent,” Ferguson argues, has been the desegregation of higher education, which has incorporated both minoritized

137 See, for example, Darling-Hammond, Kozol, Ravitch, and Delpit. 261

subjects (students and professors) and interdisciplinary knowledge about minorities. He suggests that the conditions of belonging in the university have been twofold. First, in order to belong in the university, these students, professors, and knowledges must belong to the university and the nation so as to provide a visible affirmation that difference has been successfully incorporated. Second, students and professors must support only those possibilities for activism, citizenship, and community identity that reinforce the political and capital interests of the nation-state. Although Ferguson discusses higher education rather than elementary and secondary school literacy education, his framework is nevertheless helpful for understanding some of the investment that both the nation-state and corporate interests have in presiding over the desegregation of literacy.

Perry Gilmore, observing groups of African-American students stepping in an elementary schoolyard, notes that “A spelling exercise, ordinarily practiced in the classroom, is transformed through linguistic play and dance with a market shift in ownership” (69). This “market shift in ownership” is so threatening to the school staff at his observation site that they ban stepping altogether, suspending students who step and barring them from access to prestigious academic tracks. In the novels I discuss, the threat of this “market shift in ownership” looms over the literacy learning of both Zero and Octavian. The desegregation and redistribution of literacy is only legitimized, and in fact is only recognized as being literacy, when it clearly and firmly legitimizes the nation- state in return. At the same time, both Zero and Octavian desire literacy for their own purposes and use it to redefine their own sense of citizenship roles and obligations. Scott contends that “[the] state . . . is the vexed institution that is the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms” (7). The challenge facing Zero and Octavian is not how to

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avoid the gaze or the control of the state, since this is impossible, but how to come to terms with what the state offers (literacy, among other things) and the price exacted for that knowledge.

Holes : Literacy and the Rehabilitation of the Capitalist Nation

The education of Zero might have been expressly designed to demonstrate Horace

Mann’s philosophy. As an illiterate orphan, whose care and education is neglected both by his biological mother and by paternalistic state institutions, he walks into a homeless shelter and steals a pair of used, smelly sneakers because he needs shoes, reasoning that if he must steal, it is better to take a used pair than a new one. The shoes are in a glass case adorned with a placard announcing that Clyde Livingston, famous baseball player, has donated his shoes for a fundraising auction so that the shelter can raise money for supplies for the homeless children under its care. Zero, of course, cannot read the sign, and does not understand why everyone is so upset when the shoes are found missing; he tosses them off a highway underpass, where they land on Stanley’s head and lead to

Stanley’s arrest for the theft. The next day, Zero is caught stealing a new pair of shoes from a store. Zero is thus constructed as both criminal and innocent; he has stolen the shoes and caused the arrest of an innocent person, but he cannot respect private property if he is unable to read a label designating whose property it is. (I must point out here that the shoeless Zero is, in fact, one of the homeless kids that Clyde Livingston was ostensibly trying to help through the donation of his shoes, so I question whether his initial theft is actually a theft. Within the text, however, it is constructed as theft, and

Zero learns to be properly remorseful.) After he learns to read, Zero is presented with a parallel test of his citizenship; he is confronted with another piece of extremely valuable

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property bearing a label, at which point he confirms his fitness for citizenship by publicly reading the label and ensuring it is restored to its proper owner.

I emphasize the public nature of Zero’s reading performance, because it is in part this demonstration, staged before representatives of the State of Texas, that marks both

Zero’s transformation into a valued citizen who “counts” and is counted, and also the transformation of the state into a more racially benevolent entity. For much of the novel,

Zero resembles Buddy of The Planet of Junior Brown in his desire to evade the gaze of the racist state, to protect himself by appearing to be “nothing at all” (Hamilton, Planet

89). When Stanley first begins to teach Zero, he is astonished to discover how quick Zero is to learn, and how good he is at math. When he questions Zero about how he has gone about working out a problem, however, he is repeatedly met with silence. At last, Zero— still not answering the questions—says, “‘I’m not stupid. … I know everybody thinks I am. I just don’t like answering their questions’” (99). As Scott notes, the state can do nothing with resources it doesn’t know it has; so, in the era of standards and accountability, Zero must not only be taught to read, but also be convinced to let his literacy be certified and recorded by agents of the state. The novel emphasizes how the racist, white supremacist violence of the historical State of Texas continues to permeate the state agencies of the novel’s present, so that the narrator is sympathetic to Zero’s evasion. Ultimately, however, the resolution of the nation’s curse depends upon Zero’s changing his mind and consenting to become a legible citizen.

In this section, I track the various arguments made within the novel for why Zero should decide to let himself become a visible symbol of racial healing in return for the rewards of literacy. The novel, appropriately, is structured around a series of holes, both

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literal and figurative, and the three plot lines achieve “closure” by healing these gaps and imperfections into “wholes.” 138 There are the literal holes that the boys dig in the desert; holes in the history of the Old West that hide acts of gender and racial violence; 139 holes in the present nation-state’s ability to track and care for its citizens; holes in cyberspace into which unwanted orphans’ files can disappear; and holes in the tripartite narrative itself which readers must fill in. None of these holes can be filled in without literacy.

Nevertheless, not all of the holes become whole; moreover, the filling of the holes acts to re-bury some of the shameful national past (and present) that the narrative has sought to uncover. I begin by outlining the holes the novel openly highlights, areas where the novel asks readers to see an empty place or a wound and invites them to participate in healing. I then discuss how the use of literacy as a tool for healing creates other holes which the readers are not invited to contemplate or to fill—the gap that opens between illiterate non-citizens and literate citizens, and the gap that opens between the nation as a utopian concept and the state as an administrative apparatus. Finally, I argue that this hole into which illiteracy disappears is the mechanism that allows the nation to ultimately triumph and bury the sins of the racist state.

Holes begins with the lines, “There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas. That was over a hundred years ago.

Now it is just a dry, flat wasteland” (3). The problem with the physical setting is eventually resolved, as the last sentence of the novel’s climactic section ends, “[F]or the first time in over a hundred years, a drop of rain fell into the empty lake” (225). Upon turning the page, the reader sees that Part Three, the final resolution, is entitled “Filling in

138 See Gold, Caillouet, and Fick, and Cummins. 139 See Kirsten Mollegard, and Bronwyn Williams and Amy Zenger. 265

the Holes” (228). The development of characters parallels the changes in the landscape.

Stanley is introduced as an unlucky boy who blames his ill fortune on a Gypsy curse he doesn’t really believe in. At the end of the novel, the supposedly nonexistent Gypsy woman turns out to have a descendant, Zero’s mother, who sings her son a version of the same song the Gypsy woman taught to Stanley’s great-great-grandfather. The movement is similar in both cases. First, there is an absence or an emptiness that conceals an important history. There is a “dry, flat wasteland” whose apparent barrenness belies the history of a lake and a thriving town; and there is a rational disbelief in curses where there should be a full family history. Through the course of the novel, these deceptively empty spaces must be laboriously excavated. As Kirsten Mollegard demonstrates, the seeming emptiness of the land is haunted, and the layers of history must be dug up, both literally and figuratively; as the boys dig holes in the old lake, the ghosts of silenced women and black men surface in the text to reinscribe themselves into a history and regional mythology from which they are often erased. Similarly, Stanley’s family curse is at first only used as a convenient source of blame when something goes wrong, but its truth must be uncovered. The Gypsy herself must be recognized not merely as the source of a past curse, but as the ancestor of a living human being whom Stanley continues to wrong in the present. Only after the process of excavation is complete can the empty holes be filled and the wounds healed, in a process of “natural” restoration. At the level of national landscape, the barren lake begins to fill with water, and at the level of family history, the gaps between and within families are closed. Stanley’s family and Madame

Zeroni’s family, friends before the curse, are reunited, and Zero’s lost mother is found, restoring him to a “whole” family. Instead of being an orphan and a “zero,” he recovers

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his full name, Hector Zeroni. Even the name seems to fill in a hole, connecting his post- literacy self to his early, beloved-son self; he is inspired to share his real name, the name his mother called him, because Stanley teaches him to write the incomplete name “Zero.”

The task of digging up the truths that haunt those initially empty spaces occupies the brunt of the novel. It is presented as a tiring and painful task, requiring labor on the parts of both the characters and the readers (although the readers’ labor is far more entertaining than the characters’). For the boys at Camp Green Lake, this work is physical; they dig holes in the hot sun, blistering their hands and wearying their bodies.

For Stanley and Zero, it is mental and emotional as well; after digging holes in the hot sun, they do the work of teaching, learning, and building rapport in a situation that engenders suspicion more often than it encourages mutual trust. Attempts to evade pain, however, only open up ugly wounds further. A central tenet in Holes is that literacy labor is analogous to physical labor, and that when done correctly, both build character.

At the surface level, the notion of character-building is made ridiculous within the novel. The premise of Camp Green Lake as a juvenile penal institution is summed up in the novel as follows: “If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy. That was what some people thought” (5). Stanley quickly realizes, however, that the boys are not “just digging to ‘build character’” (71), but in order to find something of value which the Warden wants very much.

Nevertheless, as Annette Wannamaker points out, even though the task of digging holes is revealed to be the corrupt, unjust ruse of a state official, it still works as a successful character-building, masculinizing task within the construct of a male coming-of-age story

(19). In fact, both Stanley and Zero get a more successful education through the juvenile

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penal system than they do through the school system. 140 As I note in the previous chapter, youth who “fail” in school remain under the state’s responsibility for training, but move through the justice system instead of the school system, where their citizenship education is expected to continue (although it is not, perhaps, expected to succeed). 141 While Holes does not take place at school, it broadens the gaze of the reader to include other state-run educational institutions. Nevertheless, its ironic, critical depiction of these decidedly dystopic institutions resonates weirdly with the hearty school spirit and patriotism of canonic school stories. As in those school stories, the students’ real education takes place outside of class hours (that is, outside of digging hours for Stanley and Zero); their extracurricular learning, literacy and interracial friendship, is what both the school and the justice system are failing to teach them in curricular hours. As in many classic school stories, however, the seemingly pointless work of the central curriculum (whether Latin or digging) provides the conditions of discipline under which the “real,” student-directed learning can take place.

This legitimate purpose for physical digging is only validated, however, when the boys begin to perform literacy labor. When Zero initially reveals his illiteracy and asks

Stanley to teach him, Stanley refuses, because “After digging all day, he didn’t have the strength to try to teach Zero to read and write. He needed to save his energy for the people who counted. … His muscles and hands weren’t the only parts of his body that had toughened over the past several weeks. His heart had hardened as well” (82).

Physical labor, on its own, brutalizes Stanley, strengthening his character in the wrong

140 A discussion of Holes ’s companion novel, Small Steps , is outside the scope of this chapter, but that novel also emphasizes that the children released from Camp Green Lake have developed productive work habits from their time in a corrupt and unjustly managed facility. 141 See Sharma, and Torres and Callahan. 268

ways. When Zero begins digging part of Stanley’s hole each day, however, Stanley consents to teach him, as he is now less fatigued. This is when physical labor becomes established as necessary for Stanley, but it is also when the reader learns that Camp

Green Lake’s social education in race relations produces yet another kind of smooth, empty surface that hides tension. Stanley, as Wannamaker argues, is initially in denial about his white privilege, choosing to see sameness and unbroken unity: “Stanley was thankful there were no racial problems. X-Ray, Armpit, and Zero were black. He, Squid, and Zigzag were white. Magnet was Hispanic. On the lake they were all the same reddish-brown color—the color of dirt” (84). As soon as Stanley and Zero begin their extracurricular learning, however, they also begin to divide their curricular labor of digging. The division of labor also breaks the apparent racial unity of the camp. When the other boys see Zero finishing Stanley’s holes, they begin to accuse Stanley of being a slave-master and exploiting Zero’s labor. Ironically, they are more right than they realize, considering that the boys are unwittingly digging in order to retrieve Stanley ’s property; thus, the boys’ extracurricular literacy activity does not create racial and class division so much as it reveals an inequality that was already present. The incident escalates into a three-way fight, and the camp officials are brought in to arbitrate the matter. Stanley pleads that Zero needs literacy in order to build his character, indirectly accusing the camp of neglecting its educational responsibilities; in response, the Warden and the counselor Mr. Pendanski give Zero his first public examination, and humiliate him in front of the boys when he fails to demonstrate a phonics skills that Stanley has not yet taught. Stanley is forbidden to continue teaching Zero, because, the Warden says, “‘It leads to trouble’” (139).

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The teaching of literacy brings the ghosts of slavery into the present, both in the ways that Stanley extracts physical labor from Zero and in the rationales given for keeping Zero illiterate. As an illiterate boy, Zero rebels in a way that aids the state. When pressed by Mr. Pendanski to articulate a goal for his adult life as a citizen, he insists that he wants only to dig holes; ironically, while he understands that Mr. Pendanski wants him to embrace a citizenship role of active ambition and upward mobility, his refusal to consent to this model of citizenship actually provides the justice system with a strong, passive body who digs for the advancement of others. As a literacy learner, however, he does what Mr. Pendanski has earlier asked him to do—he rejects the role of lifelong hole- digger. In fact, he not only rejects the idea that his future as an adult citizen is to provide labor for the State of Texas, he rejects the idea that this labor should comprise his youthful citizenship obligations, and he runs away rather than be rehabilitated for adult citizenship through this method. Literacy “leads to trouble” because it exposes the ethical breaches embedded in official citizenship education. The eruption of violence in the camp also, however, forces Stanley to realize why his own official character education in digging is necessary, even if the system is corrupt: “If Zero could dig all day and still have the strength to learn, then he should have been able to dig all day and still have the strength to teach” (141). Having been responsible for the violence that drove Zero away,

Stanley now digs Zero’s holes as well as his own, building his strength (as it turns out) for the moment when he must carry Zero up a mountain to save his life.

Ultimately, successful citizenship education is depicted as hinging upon a melding of intellectual and physical skill. The two interracial pairs depicted in the historical plot lines are similar to Stanley and Zero in that literacy and physical strength

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are unevenly divided according to race and gender, problematizing stereotypes about white minds and black bodies and about masculine strength and feminine weakness. In

Stanley and Zero’s family stories, the white Elya Yelnats is a bookworm who becomes physically strong, while the Gypsy Madame Zeroni is an elderly oral storyteller with one leg; Elya leaves Madame Zeroni behind, taking both physical strength and literacy skills with him, and leaving her with unwritten stories to which nobody but him ever listened.

In the story of Green Lake, Kate Barlow is a well-read white schoolteacher, and Onion

Sam is a repository of African-American folk medicine and a handyman who makes the schoolhouse watertight. Sam is not represented as all brawn and no brain, as he knows the poetry of Poe and Longfellow from memory. Nevertheless, he is never actually seen reading, and is not allowed to attend Kate’s classes in the schoolhouse he fixes so well;

Kate, in turn, can only adopt masculine physical pursuits and activities as an outlaw after

Sam’s death. The racial and physical literacy gap between the strong, illiterate Zero and the fat, bookish Stanley establishes that historical racism still lives on in the bodies and minds of youth in the present, and harm the productivity of both; Zero’s illiteracy unfits him for citizenship and blocks his economic prospects, while Stanley’s physical weakness more subtly leads him into immorality and signals a lack of the persistence needed for entrepreneurship. While their differences in color might remain, Stanley’s and Zero’s bodies and minds are imagined as converging in other ways, so that the black boy and the white boy are both capable of performing the same kinds of labor for the nation.

Wannamaker suggests that Holes responds to widespread cultural anxiety about boys’ disinterest in literacy and about a perceived lack of books for young male readers,

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by establishing literacy as a key task for achieving heteronormative manhood and by tying this intellectual task to stereotypically masculine feats of physical strength. I would add that healing the nation’s troubled racial history is also held up as a central task for the two heroes. Reviewers and critics of Holes inevitably comment upon the novel’s skillful mixing and overlapping of several recognizable genres; it is variously referred to as a fairy tale, a tall tale, a hero’s quest, a Western, a Bildungsroman, and a mystery novel. 142

What several of these genres have in common, of course (and what they also share with the school story) is a plot arc in which a young protagonist is given a series of tasks to accomplish toward the achievement of some larger goal. The end goal might be to advance to a productive and successful adult role (Bildungsromans, fairy tales, and school stories) or to save the kingdom from an evil force (fairy tales, hero’s quests, and mysteries). In Holes, which combines all of these genres, both goals are emphasized, and the mundane school tasks of sounding out words and participating in physical education are elevated to world-saving status, necessary to maintaining the interracial friendships that will save the country from its historic evil. The protagonists are posed similar educational tasks in this modern fairy tale/hero quest as they were in the classic school stories, but these are taken out of the context of the school institution. This movement acknowledges the troubled status of the school as a site of national healing, in that it becomes an inappropriate and unconvincing setting for a successful heroic quest to save the nation. At the same time, the reader is asked to value the same tasks that are valued within the school, and thus to view his or her own life as a student as a Manichaean heroic quest.

142 See Sutton, Cummins, Wannamaker, Gold, Caillouet, and Fick, Mollegard, DiMarzio, and Ott. 272

Despite the novel’s emphasis on its protagonists’ physical labor, the important work of historical excavation and healing must be done almost entirely by the reader, and purely in symbolic form. Stanley and Zero never actually learn the full story of Elya

Yelnats and Madame Zeroni, nor do they learn that Kissin’ Kate Barlow turned outlaw and robbed the first Stanley Yelnats because her heart was broken by racism in the town of Green Lake. It is the reader who must confront these painful histories. It is the reader alone who must be forced to remember that immigrants “innocent” of slavery brought their own racial sins across the water and that the American landscape is the site of violence as well as dreams.

Sachar suggests in an interview that Holes has been popular with children because

“there's the whole puzzle aspect. Kids are rewarded for reading further” (Trierweiler, n. pag.). The layering of the three plot lines does, indeed, present a rewarding puzzle to solve, but Sachar’s metaphor of puzzles and rewards is crucial. The reader must do a bit of mental work to fit all of the pieces together, and in fact is told by the narrator, “You will have to fill in the holes yourself” (231). Critic June Cummins argues that Sachar’s conscious challenge to piece the text’s meaning together is his way to teach young readers the task he values: “[T]he deeply materialistic, satisfying, and emotionally fulfilling ending of the novel is payback for doing the hard work of writerly reading.” She further suggests that reading, in and of itself, is not the desired end: “I contend that

Sachar invites hard work from his readers not just to show them how to read but to teach them these [American] values. For the reader is rewarded not just with a happy ending but also with the knowledge that certain personality traits are the right ones to cultivate.”

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Specifically, she cites “optimism, perseverance, industry, and hope” as the quintessentially “American” traits desired as a result of literacy labor.

I would extend this argument to note that within the structure of the quest narrative, the reader is rewarded in still another way; he or she can actually feel like the hero who has lifted the historical curses upon the nation by completing the literacy task, since it is only the reader and not the characters who has the full knowledge of how the curses operate. As Cummins suggests, through the process of completing the novel, the reader becomes the desired citizen, who is competent in both literacy and racial awareness and who has earned the right to possess the intellectual wealth of national literature. This goal for reading is especially important, given the novel’s publication context within a period of retreat from the desegregation and busing programs of the

1970s and ‘80s. In an essay published a few years earlier than Holes, Hazel Carby suggests that texts authored by black women are “frequently the means by which many middle-class white students and faculty cleanse their souls and rid themselves of the guilt of living in a society that is still rigidly segregated” (192). In other words, desegregating college students’ reading becomes a replacement for desegregating everyday life.

Jennifer Trainor and Amanda Lewis observe a similar phenomenon in segregated elementary and secondary school classrooms, but draw different conclusions. Both scholars describe the resistance of white students and parents to antiracist, “multicultural” reading materials, and suggest that even this nominal, symbolic level of desegregation is more contested than Carby indicates, as segregated white school communities protest against texts that assert the persistence of racial inequality into the present day or that highlight cultural difference. Within this context, Holes aims to teach readers (many of

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whom may attend segregated schools) not only how to read, but how to accept certain assumptions embedded within antiracist reading programs—namely, that the stories of disenfranchised black citizens are central and pertinent to traditional narratives of

American history and that historic racism persists in new forms. 143

Nevertheless, there are two holes left unresolved at the end. The more conspicuous one is a “hole in cyberspace” (222) into which Zero’s state records disappear. After Zero runs away, the Warden and Mr. Pendanski erase his files from their system, rather than report his absence and risk an investigation. When Stanley and Zero return to dig the one last hole that will uncover Kate Barlow’s lost trove, they find that

Stanley’s parents have hired a lawyer to clear his name; as she arrives at the camp while

Stanley is missing in search of Zero, the Warden refuses to let her remove Stanley, knowing very well that Stanley is no longer there for her to remove. When the boys are discovered digging their hole, Ms. Moreno demands Zero’s file as well as Stanley’s, and the Warden is forced to concede that Zero’s records have somehow disappeared down the electronic rabbit hole.

The records are never retrieved. This hole is permitted to remain, because in order for Zero to be rehabilitated as a legible, whole citizen, the illegible portion of his past must be wiped away. From the time his mother abandons him in a playground, Zero has

143 This begs the question of whether Holes implies a white citizen-reader. Holes certainly does not explicitly imply a specific race for its reading audience, and Wannamaker suggests that its pitch for literacy is prompted by a concern about a gendered achievement gap in literacy, rather than a racial one. Holes does have two protagonists, one white and one black, both of whom develop adult skills. Its concerns about literacy levels echo some of the concerns about black achievement voiced in the novels of Chapter Two, and the companion Small Steps reinforces these concerns; the development of Stanley’s character, in contrast, appeals to concern over the antiracism of white children. I would add, anecdotally, that I have found Holes extremely popular with boys and girls of all racial backgrounds, so that if the novel is, indeed, implying a white male reader, significant numbers of readers who do not fit that description seem to be ignoring the implication. 275

tried to remain invisible and unknown, fearing to be officially taken from his mother and placed under the wardship of the state. He is illiterate because he has avoided attending school, as the same institution which would teach him would also collect knowledge about him to be used in ways that would legally change his family identity. When he is caught stealing, of course, the state learns of his existence and places him under wardship; however, his file also necessarily records the holes in the state’s knowledge— the absence of a social work case file, the absence of school records. Zero’s file indicts both him and the State of Texas; it contains evidence of his criminal behavior, but also evidence of the state’s failure to serve as a paternal substitute in a way that would justify its power.

For Zero, who has never wanted either his orphan status or his illiteracy to be visible, the cyberspace hole is providential. In fact, when he runs away, it is not specifically because of the abuses of the camp, but because his struggles to read are exposed to public view. Once he gains more confidence in his skills, however, he is willing to risk the humiliation of a public examination and the danger inherent in state knowledge, in return for the rewards that literacy can bring him. This turns out to involve a literal reward, since Stanley shares half of the lost Yelnats fortune with Zero. Catherine

Prendergast argues that whites in the United States have, since Brown v. Board of

Education , marked both literacy itself and the monetary rewards of literacy as white property, so that whenever black students gain access to a level of literacy previously reserved for whites, white subjects perceive that particular form of literacy currency to be debased in value and strive for a more prestigious and more valuable level of literacy.

She traces, for example, how white dissatisfaction with the public school system began

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with the desegregation era, how Supreme Court decisions subsequent to Brown have focused on redressing “what [racial] remedy might cost Whites” (11), and how white workers encountering workplace desegregation sought higher levels of education as a way to maintain cultural prestige in the face of change. Holes explicitly calls for a corrective to this pattern when Stanley not only shares literacy skills, but also recognizes that Zero’s literacy has been the cause of Stanley’s economic restoration and that he therefore deserves a share of the monetary reward. Bronwyn Williams and Amy Zenger, however, suggest that Zero also has an alternative kind of reward in mind; he becomes interested in learning to read and write when he sees Stanley writing a letter to his mother, and realizes that he might use literacy to regain his own mother. And, in fact,

Zero uses his share of the fortune to do just that; after state and federal taxes are collected on the treasure, Zero hires a private investigator to find his mother.

Zero, in other words, has had his own agenda all along, and he is only willing to be “counted” by the state if he can be properly on record as the child of his mother—and furthermore, on record as a literate child. As Marie Wallin points out, however, the alternative system of education that Zero and Stanley set up threatens the authority of the camp and highlights the failures of state institutions; thus, Zero can only receive the rewards of his literacy if he consents to return to state jurisdiction. Zero may have private uses for the literacy he now possesses, but he must allow the state to share some ownership and responsibility for his future learning and productivity. Just as importantly, the fact that his illiteracy is permitted, in fact encouraged, to disappear down a hole, reinforces the unbridgeable identity gap between literate citizens and illiterate others.

Brodkey argues, “Because all definitions of literacy project both a literate self and an

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illiterate other , the tropics of literacy stipulate the political as well as cultural terms on which the ‘literate’ wish to live with the ‘illiterate’” (161). In Holes , in the end, the

“literate self” does not wish to live with the “illiterate other” on any terms whatsoever, within the body personal or the body politic.

This unbridgeable gap between “literate self” and “illiterate other” points to the other, less obvious gap—the split between the racist state and the rehabilitated, antiracist nation. Even in the climactic scene, when the Warden’s corruption is revealed before the

Texas Attorney General, the agents and institutions of the state are incompetent at best; the Attorney General, who is properly horrified at the loss of Zero’s files, nevertheless has clearly neglected his own duty to oversee the penal system he runs. The school system, reflecting the larger condition of the state, is filled with bullies (both students and teachers) who torment Stanley, and the state agencies in charge of family welfare fail to track and to care for Zero and his mother. The Texas of the past, of course, is openly racist; Kissin’ Kate Barlow turns outlaw precisely because she refuses to recognize the justice of its laws. As I note earlier, the antebellum Southern states are constructed as failing in their governmental duties because they do not implement an apparatus for surveying and tracking the literacy of the souls under their jurisdictions. In Holes , the state governments of the New South are indicted because they fail to make their territory legible as a modern state should; this inability to modernize leaves them stuck in the past, re-creating both inefficiency and racism (which are thus yoked together conceptually).

The agents of the inefficient, pre-modern state are not visibly reformed by the end of Holes ; the Attorney General and the Warden are allowed to remain in the shameful, scandalous hole they have metaphorically dug for themselves. The state in the abstract,

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however, is still legitimately entitled to Stanley’s and Zero’s taxes and records, in part because it is absorbed by a reformed nation. Green Lake is filled with water and the land surrounding it is “bought by a national organization dedicated to the well-being of young girls” (229); and the final scene in the novel is a multiracial Superbowl party held to celebrate Stanley’s father’s first successful invention, which is being advertised during this prime-time slot. The nation has thus apparently fulfilled its promise as a prosperous, feminist, and antiracist utopia, despite the failures of its states’ institutions. How is this possible?

Jodi Melamed’s analysis of the changing rhetoric of antiracism offers one possible answer to this question. Like Omi and Winant, she argues that in the years since

World War II, a series of “official antiracisms” have worked to correct the most obvious racial injustices of the Jim Crow era, without actually ending racialized privilege or stigma. Instead, she argues, new racialized subjects have been produced, which correspond only loosely to essentialized race or phenotype. Thus, in the 1960s, the white liberal held privileged status over the backward white racist; in the 1980s and 1990s, the multicultural American was superior to both the monocultural and the race-conscious

American; and in the 2000s, the global citizen is preferable to the “illegal” or to the locally identified citizen. Consistently, she says, “Official antiracisms create conditions that have required the health and security of the U.S. state to be one of the primary goals of antiracism” (10). Thus, a welcoming attitude toward cultural pluralism is valued and privileged because, and only if, it helps American companies prevail in global capital networks by enabling the claim that “we are the world.”

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It is this kind of shift that enables the healed nation to take the place of the failed state at the end of Holes . The last few chapters suggest that while the State of Texas may have remained mired in the past, the nation has moved on. In contrast to the illiterate, victimized racialized subjects of the past (including those of the “backward” Camp Green

Lake), the nation’s modernized private sector brims with successful and literate racialized representatives, such as Ms. Moreno, Stanley’s feisty, private-sector Hispanic lawyer, who retains “a little bit of a Mexican accent” (213), and Clyde Livingston, the black baseball player who spends his childhood in a homeless shelter and his adulthood as a celebrity beneficiary of homeless children. Of course, there are still racial gaps to be overcome—namely, the divide between Stanley and Zero—but the healing of this divide fixes, not the state, but the national economy, which is needed for continued modernization and progress. Zero’s literacy puts long-lost company stocks back into circulation, and also enables Stanley’s father, a failed inventor, to finally become a successful entrepreneur. His invention to combat smelly foot fungus uses traditional, comforting elements of American heritage (Kate Barlow’s spiced peaches) to advance medicine, but it more importantly reinvigorates the fabled American tradition of individual, free-market ingenuity that made America almost great, until the curse of racism corrupted the nation’s productivity along with its innocence. It is no accident that the novel closes with the triumph of a nationwide commercial that uses a successful black man as the visible face of a product invented by a white one. It implies that Zero’s literacy may safely be collected and recorded by the state, because the private sector of the free market is what brings the real rewards of literacy; and this pluralist market, not the racist state, is where the reality of national identity and allegiance lies. The continuing

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divides of the nation-state—the fact that the successful white man is inventing products, for example, while the successful black man is playing baseball, or the bullying problems at Stanley’s school—are allowed, in this final scene, to remain buried, covered over with the plenitude of the rewards literacy has brought.

This replacement occurs in part because the meaning of literacy in Holes is locked down unambiguously; as Wallin points out, not only is literacy in Holes “stable” and

“reliable” (108); it also provides links exclusively to good adults and not to bad ones. The official examination of literacy never produces unexpected results, and there is no question over what form literacy should take or what level of literacy should count. All demonstrations of literacy—Zero’s phonics, Stanley’s letter-writing, and Katherine’s canonic poetry reading—are collapsed into the same category and assigned the value of

“good.” The work of literacy can only produce antiracism, economic success, and national stability, and the neglect of literacy can only produce the opposite. In part, of course, these simplifications are because of the fairy-tale elements of the novel, which suggest that certain virtues must inevitably produce certain story endings, in ways similar to the school story. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing , however, not only disturbs the correspondences between personal interest, national interest, and national virtue; it simultaneously upsets the links between literacy and national stability.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing : Literacy and the Treacherous Citizen

Holes demands, and creates, a reader willing to dig through painful history in order to find the information needed to piece together and heal the broken present. In the process, as Cummins suggests, the novel implies a certain kind of citizen as well as a

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certain kind of reader, a citizen committed to righting the wrongs of the past, but also to supporting the present goals and needs of the nation-state. Octavian Nothing demands and creates an entirely different reader-citizen. The two volumes of Anderson’s novel are written in a credible imitation of eighteenth-century literary prose, and Octavian uses words like “animadvert” in casual conversation (“Kingdom” 319). His journal entries are packed with references to classical philosophers and historians; the ideas of John Locke,

Heraclitus, and Apollonius are not merely relegated to epigraphs, but are discussed extensively. In short, Octavian’s manuscript keeps its historical distance and makes no attempt to be “relatable” or “accessible” to twenty-first century teens in any conventionally recognizable way. It is consequently placed in curricula less often than other children’s texts about slavery, and certainly less often than Holes .144

Anderson, however, maintains that a Bildungsroman about an unusually erudite eighteenth-century slave might be less exotic and distant a subject than his critics assume.

In an interview on National Public Radio, he argues,

I do think that by the late teen years, kids are ready to take on these questions. I mean they know what it's like in this country to be the subject of academic experiments of some kind. I mean the series of rigorous tests and things which we now force our kids to undergo - I mean they know what it feels like to be observed and that kind of thing, even if not in as excruciating a manner as happens in this book. (Chideya, n. pag.) This, of course, references the No Child Left Behind Act, which specifies in its statement of purpose that it is intended to ensure that minority and nonminority students receive the same education, and that student data will be used to distribute resources. The experiment

144 See Barker for an overview of conventionally appealing narrators, and Schwebel for various reasons why the books are not adopted into many secondary school curricula. Reviews on Amazon and Goodreads indicate that many adults struggle with the language and concepts (and many love the books despite their difficulty) and question the books’ placement in the “Young Adult” category for this reason. 282

in which Octavian is a subject is similar in purpose, only in his case, the data are being used and manipulated to “prove” his inferiority in a more explicit way. In this statement,

Anderson suggests that Octavian’s enslaved condition is not the only thing that alienates him from citizenship. The processes of state observation and measurement that he shares with contemporary citizens are another form of violence, and contemporary readers are encouraged to see that these processes are perfected and developed on slaves, non- citizens, before being applied to compulsory students, future-but-not-yet citizens—many of whom, of course, are racialized subjects. Anderson further proposes a linkage between literacy, citizenship, and critical alienation in his acceptance speech for the Printz Award, which he received for The Kingdom on the Waves :

It sometimes strikes me that there is only one taboo left in young adult literature. By and large, no one complains any more when we write about drugs or sex. We can write about masturbation; terminal illness; the horrors of war; illegal organ transplants; matricide; the chilly delights of necrophilia; scenes of locker-room bukkake – none of this raises an eyebrow. No, the one thing which still causes people pause – the final hurdle – the last frontier – the one element which still gets a few adult readers up in arms about whether a book is appropriate for kids – is intelligence. Some adults still balk at the assumption that our readers, the teenagers of this country, are smart, and curious, and get a kick out of knowing things. … But it is unbecoming for us to be fearful of teens who love to think. (“On the Intelligence of Teens,” n. pag.) Anderson here opens up a gap between literacy and citizenship that remains firmly closed in Holes . The “teenagers of this country” become objects of fear for adult citizens, not when they fail to share the national wealth of knowledge or to recognize property, as

Horace Mann and Louis Sachar suggest, but when they are too literate, independent, and curious.

The Octavian novels make clear why the prospect of a horde of intelligent, curious, philosophy-devouring teens might be such a specter of fear for the nation. The

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subtitle of the novels, “Traitor to the Nation,” is initially puzzling, as Octavian first of all is barred from citizenship and therefore cannot be a traitor, and second of all betrays a nation that does not yet technically exist. When he and his tutor escape, however, Dr.

Trefusis informs him, “‘A slave who seeks to kill his master, as through poison, is always hanged for treason. In attacking your master, you attack the system of sovereignty itself’”

(“Pox Party” 348). Over the course of the second volume, Octavian, who has the critical skills to be a democratic citizen but who is denied by both sides in the war, continues to question systems of sovereignty. He finally rejects any promise of Enlightenment progress through nationhood, and travels in search of a “different place” (“Kingdom”

559), where he hopes to join a community of other survivors of the Royal Ethiopian

Regiment. While he hopes to find “a land where we might discover new bonds of amity and social union” (561), he also notes pessimistically that “no other human generation hath done other than despoil” (561). Furthermore, in leaving his narrative behind at the

College, he says, “I sing your tales [the Royal Ethiopians’] so that none of this shall pass from remembrance; so our fleet shall always be sailing, shall always be populated by the brave, anxious for fight; and shall never reach its destination” (560). Hopes of utopian nationhood, in other words, are only acceptable on the page, where violence can remain suspended and where the disillusionment of achieving nationhood can be infinitely deferred. The “real” fleet of Royal Ethiopians has already arrived at a destination of betrayal and massacre, and the brave sailors have consequently lost the hope as well as the reality of citizenship.

As both Anastasia Ulanowicz and Sara Schwebel point out, the Octavian novels are written during the second Iraq war, and they critique the ways that the rhetoric of

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American exceptionalism continues to be used as justification for perpetrating violence and for violating the sovereignty of “‘othered’ populations” (Ulanowicz, n. pag.).

Octavian persistently questions the “system of sovereignty” in part through his deep engagement with literacy, and so too, Anderson implies, should his readers; therefore, he constructs a reading experience for them that will develop the necessary critical citizenship through form as well as content.

In the remainder of this section, I analyze how the Octavian novels first expose the troublesome connections between literacy, nationhood, and abusive power, and then seek to disentangle those threads in an attempt to imagine alternative literacies and de- nationalized utopian communities. The Brown decision suggests that a more utopian school will create a more utopian nation, but within the Octavian novels, a nation founded upon racism can only corrupt the project of schooling. Nevertheless, Anderson’s novels maintain the premise that nation-building is intertwined with schooling, so that re- envisioning utopia must still rely upon appropriately educating citizens for that utopia.

The first novel, The Pox Party , focuses on the problem of literacy education within the context of nationalism and imperialism; the second, The Kingdom on the

Waves , explores how literacy might function within a utopian project of decolonization.

Within this section, I discuss the ways in which Anderson constructs desired “selves” and devalued “others” through depictions of different kinds of literacy. Specifically, he constructs a continuum of desirable citizens through the representation of their literacy skills. Through historical analogy, Anderson obliquely criticizes how the nation’s current educational project of standardization and measurement tends to undermine its own goals; its presumed intent is to create a desegregated body of citizens who have the skills

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to participate in egalitarian, democratic government, but in the process of measuring these students for fitness, it also widens racial gaps and leads students toward forms of literacy that are not conducive to egalitarian, democratic government. On a more explicit level, the novels takes readers back to the inception of the utopian American nation and asks them to meditate on how other kinds of utopian, racially just communities and institutions might have been imagined.

From the beginning, Octavian’s narration demonstrates that the philosophers at the Novanglian College of Lucidity share knowledge and literacy, but only as an exchange that ultimately benefits them. He acknowledges,

Whatever I have felt about these men, I have much to thank them for. They lavished luxuries upon me. They supported my every interest and encouraged my curiosity. They instructed me in the Christian religion. They taught me the tongues of the Greeks and the Romans and opened for me the colonnaded vistas of those long-forgotten empires, in this, the dawning of a new empire. They schooled me in music, which is my greatest delight. These are not little things. (“Pox Party” 13) Before the reader (or, in fact, Octavian himself) even learns that Octavian is a slave, however, he tells us the price he pays for this knowledge; not only is every morsel of his food and feces weighed and recorded, his intellectual and emotional output is also recorded and traded for prestige. After Mr. Gitney, the College’s director, poisons the food Octavian gives his beloved dog, he takes the grieving boy on his knee and inquires whether Octavian thinks the dog has gone to an afterlife, and what the nature of this afterlife might be. This paternal scene of comfort is jarred by the statement that

“carefully, nodding, he transcribed my answers for study, comment, and future publication” (16).

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The scene when Octavian learns what his intellectual labor is being used for is a key moment in the novel, even more fraught than the moment when he learns that he is a slave. Although Octavian has observed numerous animal experiments in the various chambers of the house, one room, with his face pasted on the door, is locked and forbidden to him. After learning that he and his mother are slaves, Octavian picks the lock on the door, to find a scientific anatomical diagram of his mother’s naked body and the volumes of his own records. He immediately realizes that this information is partial and selective, commemorating “the quantification of [his] appetites” (48) but not his memories of playing and walking with his mother. Nevertheless, despite his recognition that the knowledge recorded about him is skewed, he still misinterprets Mr. Gitney’s explanation of the experiment: “[Mr. Gitney] gave me a canny look, and replied slowly,

‘We are providing you with an education equal to any of the princes of Europe . . . We wish to divine whether you are a separate and distinct species. Thus, we wish to determine your capacity, as an African prince, for the acquisition of the noble arts and sciences.’ ‘You wish to prove that I am the equal of any other?’ ‘We wish to prove nothing,’ said 03-01. 145 ‘We simply aim at discovering the truth’” (49). Octavian is then, in punishment for his disobedience, made to stand with his arms outstretched, bearing the weight of the volumes that contain the College’s incomplete and reductive knowledge about him; as Mr. Gitney warns him, after hours of this punishment, his arms will “yearn for the stance of punishment” (50). Of course, this proves true metaphorically as well as literally, as Octavian determines that he “would not fail 03-01” (52), and devotes himself to study, providing Mr. Gitney with the kind of data he needs.

145 Initially, everyone at the College except for Octavian and his mother are addressed by numbers instead of names, in a scheme to rationalize human relations; later in the first book, this scheme is abandoned, and for the bulk of both novels, the characters are primarily known by name instead of by number. 287

This scene exposes a central problem behind the assumption embedded in the No

Child Left Behind Act, to which Anderson explicitly compares the Octavian experiment.

Both educational experiments purposefully desegregate knowledge, aiming to provide equal access to literacy and cultural capital; and yet this sharing of cultural property does not translate to the sharing of power. Octavian’s knowledge of Greek and Latin gives him much less power than the College’s knowledge of Octavian gives them, and their knowledge feeds directly into the networks of knowledge and capital that help the expansion of the British Empire (and later the internal expansion of the new American empire). Any knowledge gained by Octavian will thus also benefit the College and its backers; and conversely, resistance to them means that Octavian must be correspondingly dispossessed. When the music teacher at the College importunes Octavian to ask his mother for lullabies from Africa, that they might be recorded and studied, his mother responds by reading to him the verse from the Book of Psalms, “ By the rivers of

Babylon ” (65). The Psalm simultaneously asserts that the children of Zion cannot sing their songs in a foreign land, and asks that if the singer forgets Jerusalem, “ let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth ” (66). While the child Octavian is confused, the adult

Octavian (and the reader) understands that she is trying to protect the knowledge of her homeland from being used for further empire-building and colonization. Nevertheless, as the Psalm indicates, the price of this protection, like the price of Zero’s resistance in

Holes , is steep; Octavian, after his mother’s death, finds himself nationless and without a trove of cultural memory that was not gifted to him by his captors. The flip side of this dispossession is a trove of intellectual property that is unwanted and disavowed by both the white slaveholders and Octavian. Pro Bono, the slave who attempts to teach Octavian

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the survival skills of his condition, keeps a book of purloined knowledge about the horrors of slavery, a collection of articles and illustrations that depict shackles, torture devices, and hangings. Mr. Gitney burns the book when he finds it, and whips Bono, but

Octavian says, “I could not rid myself of it. It was the common property of us all” (165).

This shadow property, like Zero’s records of failure lost in cyberspace, haunts the project of nationhood throughout.

Through Octavian’s descriptions of animal experiments, the reader can see from the beginning of the novel that the utopian College of Lucidity, with its walled Edenic garden, 146 is morally compromised; however, it is not until Octavian’s educational experience changes that the sublime love of reading is explicitly separated from the sullied experience of national citizenship. After the College falls into financial distress (in part because Octavian’s mother has refused to serve as a concubine for a potential investor), the philosophers’ search for “truth,” which was always suspect, becomes openly corrupted by financial interest. The philosophers’ new backers are merchants and plantation owners who, Mr. Gitney admits, “‘have some interest in proving the inequality of African capacities’” (“Pox Party” 169) and who therefore demand that the nature of

Octavian’s experimental education be changed. He is barred from reading narratives of any kind, on the grounds that they will appeal unfairly to his “hereditary savage nature”

(130), and is limited to construing decontextualized fragments of Latin and Greek

“chosen for their convolution, recondite meaning, dryness, and insipidity” (133). These fragments, shorn of meaningful narrative, are intentionally much more difficult for

Octavian to understand and to translate. Therefore, unsurprisingly, Octavian continues to

146 See Ulanowicz. 289

deliver the results desired of him (although the requested results are now the opposite), and begins to fail in his studies; the new director, Mr. Sharpe, informs him in the climactic scene of The Pox Party , “‘You have done us a wonderful service, through your failure. We have publicly noted the decline in your abilities’” (337).

As a number of critics have noted, even before, but increasingly since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, the teaching of decontextualized sub-skills, insipid fragments, and drills emptied of engaging narrative are notoriously inflicted on poor and minority students more often than on middle-class and white students. As I note in

Chapter Three, these students are often assumed to enter school with deficits rather than skills; the presumption is that they need to master sub-skills before they can be permitted to encounter meaningful and engaging narratives and ideas, whereas middle-class and white students are more often assumed to possess these sub-skills already and are thus permitted to engage directly with narrative. Middle-class and white students then

(surprise!) tend to perform better on tests that appear to confirm an already-presumed achievement gap. 147 At the Novanglian College of Lucidity, the shift in the “market ownership” (Gilmore 69) of literacy from seemingly disinterested philosophers to openly interested slaveholders correspondingly changes the definition of literacy itself, but it also changes definitions of citizenship and national belonging.

This shift happens in two ways. First, when Octavian is barred from the

Shakespeare and Pope and Virgil he has come to love, he feels “exiled from [his] own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one’s familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful

147 See Mike Rose, Lissa Paul, Jonathan Kozol, Lisa Delpit, and Todd Farley. 290

strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways; immobile and thus unfettered” (143). Octavian’s vision of his “own country,” where the limitless potential for travel contrasts with his constrictions under slavery, echoes W.E.B. Du Bois’s vision of reading as the temporary creation of a more utopian America. When he reads, Du Bois says, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.

. . . So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly

America?” ( Souls 90). Here, unlike in Holes , literacy once gained can lead the citizen away from national loyalty, to another “country” altogether that claims a metaphorically higher, wider, more cosmopolitan loyalty.

Dr. Trefusis, unlike Octavian, does have mobility and citizenship privileges; yet changes in literacy ownership lead him to question his own loyalties. When the College changes ownership and Octavian and his mother are whipped for their insubordination,

Dr. Trefusis begins (without any outward remark) to assign Octavian Latin translation exercises drawn from historical narratives about Roman slave revolts and notable enslaved philosophers. Shortly afterward, he is relieved of his teaching duties when he praises Octavian’s accomplishments to Mr. Sharpe. Williams and Zenger suggest that

“triumph-of-literacy” narratives appeal to teachers, in particular, in part because “it isn’t only that characters become better, more fulfilled people through literacy: it is also that the characters need a sponsor to be able to acquire the literacy and then become new people” (159). In other words, these narratives construct mythological white benefactors who are “ providing literacy to those who do not have it” (158). This is at least partly true for Dr. Trefusis, who clings to his prestige as a rational, disinterested philosopher and

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who frequently overlooks his own privilege. Nevertheless, while he resents being deprived of his metaphorical sponsorship role, the ownership change at the College also prompts him to question the imperialist worldview that ties the Enlightenment pursuit of truth to actual financial sponsorship. Mr. Sharpe, upon introducing himself to the

College, voices the conditions upon which the restive colonies will continue to support literacy: “ No institution, like no fox, may long be sustained on its own flesh. We must devour elsewhere if we are not to devour ourselves, and so perish! ” (124, emphasis in original). Dr. Trefusis raises his hand to point out an exception to this rule—Ouroboros, the alchemical worm that encircles the earth and eats its own tail. At the end, when Mr.

Sharpe once again describes a world vision of endless, all-encompassing consumption and competition, Dr. Trefusis poisons him, reducing his grand speech to gibberish and joining Octavian’s treachery against the system of sovereignty.

Abbie Ventura and Jodi Melamed both suggest that neoliberal citizenship, the anachronistic perspective which frames Anderson’s historical fiction, defines the citizen’s value by his or her ability to consume and expand the market. Octavian, within this framework, is an object to be consumed, but has no citizenship rights because he is not allowed to be a capitalist consumer. Thus, as Ulanowicz points out, he is essential to neoliberal citizenship, but outside its protections. In contrast, Dr. Trefusis may be outraged by the threat to his own sponsorship role, but he does have the option to change his vision of literacy to align with Sharpe’s vision of citizenship as consumption. He chooses instead to assert his allegiance to a mystical realm of disinterested ideas—in this case, maintaining the existence of Ourobourous, the worm that encircles the whole world in disregard of national boundaries and capitalist expansion.

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These movements away from a nationally based citizenship, moreover, bracket a section of the first volume that emphasizes how valuable a citizen Octavian might be, if allowed. After Octavian’s mother dies of her smallpox inoculation, her mouth so encrusted with sores that she is barely able to tell her son the one thing about her homeland he begs as her last words, Octavian follows the advice of the Psalm and lets his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth; grieving for the mother who concealed herself from him as well as from her captors, he crosses out several pages of writing, and then escapes and falls silent for several months, refusing to write in the language of his captors. The voice readers have come to know, layered with philosophical references and deeply reflective insights, is replaced by a series of letters written by various white citizens, none of whom seem nearly as fit for democracy as Octavian does. Williams and

Zenger suggest that in popular culture, the feared opposite of literacy is frequently not illiteracy, but “[i]ncomplete literacy—having the literacy skills to read and write but not the wisdom or education to correctly interpret and evaluate” (105). Incomplete literacy in

Anderson’s Octavian novels operates in a similar manner. Rather than constructing wholly illiterate characters who are unfit for citizenship, Anderson instead constructs many characters who possess the wrong kind of literacy and hence citizenship.

Some of these insufficiencies in literacy are obvious targets. For example, a brief diary entry from a white farmer in Acton records an encounter with the runaway Octavian that is couched in ungrammatical and unsympathetic prose; the writer sees a starving boy shivering in the pouring rain and writes, “I yellt at his worthless hide and told him did he stand around Id take the whip to him and then he dropt the ax and walkt away” (240).

Ignorance of spelling and grammar are here constructed as analogous to social and

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emotional ignorance and lack. Mr. Sharpe’s and Mr. Gitney’s writing represents the opposite extreme of erudition, but it reveals them as being similarly devoid of the feelings needed for imagining a national community.148 When Octavian’s mother dies, they publish a scientific tract dispassionately describing the horrific treatments to which they subject her and the subsequent dissection of her body, which Octavian interrupts and witnesses. This horrifying interruption, which reveals to the reader the reason for

Octavian’s despair, is commemorated only as being “of behavioral interest” (230) and “as an example of possible recidivism” (232). As a letter from Dr. Trefusis points out, their account excises emotion and thus leaves out a crucial moment—the moment when Mr.

Gitney spends the day before the dissection “bowed by the insensate corpse of the woman he would soon dissect, holding its hands, touching its face, weeping and whispering, ‘I love you. I loved you. I love you’” (234). This emotion for an enslaved experimental subject is incompatible with Mr. Gitney’s conceptions of both scientific writing and citizenship, and so he omits it from his writing; in doing so, according to Dr. Trefusis, and also according to the implied reader, he reveals the inadequacy of both his writing and his fitness for democracy.

The bulk of this section, however, is a series of letters penned by a much more appealing writer, Private Evidence Goring, an innocent American whose sweeping prose seems to allude to canonic American authors. His reflections on the rebels’ grand goal of

Liberty recall Cotton Mather’s visions of New England as a cosmic battleground in the wilderness: “I . . . said to him simply, ‘Slavery & Subjugation shall soon enough fall away, sir.’ And so they shall, in the coming Tumults, as Peter’s Chains slipped off from

148 See Lauren Berlant, Christopher Kelen and Bjorn Sundmark, and Gargi Gangopadhyay, for example, on nationalist writing and national feelings. 294

his Wrists when the Angel smote him upon the Side; & the Gates shall be opened, &we shall issue forth, & the Meadows shall lie before us all” (254). After a devastating battle, he comforts the dejected company with an extemporaneous speech that sounds remarkably like one of Walt Whitman’s utopian verses:

I spake of what we fought for—our Homeland—and the Beauty of my New England, and the Hills & Forests; & the Broad Fields cleared for Bounty & the Vales with Pools where Boys kick at each other’s Shins to force a Slip & the Rock of the Coasts &the Summer & the Winter & my Cooperage in the Morning, when the Work is sharp & neat & Clabber-Girls with their Skirts tucked into their Waists for Work & Threshers catching breath against Stone Walls (297) Goring continues this quite beautiful list for some time; however, his poetic vision of

New England and the American Revolution, which evokes the kind of nationalist

American cultural literacy often called for in the classroom, 149 is not allowed to stand.

Octavian, at a certain point in the speech, bluntly tells him, “‘Sorrow is best spoken through Silence’” (298); in other words, Goring’s frantic optimism conceals and hinders the important work of grief and self-examination in the face of violence. Furthermore,

Goring’s ecstatically abundant imagery betrays his lack of awareness of the market entanglements of the new republic he seeks to build; as a result of his innocence, he unwittingly betrays Octavian to Mr. Sharpe, and congratulates himself upon aiding his friend even as Octavian is being recaptured.

149 See Ravitch and Thernstrom and Thernstrom. 295

It is at this point that Octavian’s manuscript testimony resumes. The innocent

American cannot speak adequately for him; and although Goring’s hoped-for republic could use Octavian’s depth of thought, it will use him only as an object, a tool for labor, and not as a consenting subject who can govern and be governed. Octavian’s final torture in The Pox Party , an iron mask with a bit that stops his mouth, evokes a central problem of colonial masking and mimicry. Post-colonial theorists like Frantz Fanon and Paolo

Freire, as well as African-American writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar, describe how colonized subjects perform conflicting roles for the colonizer; they are “constrained to impersonate the image the colonizer offers them of themselves” (Fuss 146), and also asked to imitate and identify with the colonizer in order to claim any degree of humanity.

As Diana Fuss points out, the process of repeated performance has the potential to make the mask difficult to distinguish from the “real” face underneath, becoming an internalized identity and not merely an external performance. Octavian reflects, while wearing his mask, “At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you” (314). This statement applies, not only to the literal mask he wears, which defines him as a slave, but also to the classical European languages and narratives he has come to love, which define his subjectivity, shape his voice, and also become a technology that “binds” him and dispossesses him. From this point on, he acknowledges the compromised literacy he has been taught and adopts it as his own; he has no other literacy available, and silence has not served him. His challenge in the second volume is the problem of decolonization, how to possess the knowledge of the oppressor while divesting it of its attendant baggage—how to own his literacy without trying, as his masters have done, to own other things to which he has no claim.

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Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth , argues that the reconstitution of a national culture (that is, a formerly colonized and dispossessed culture) cannot occur without the reconstitution of a nation-state to give it frameworks for protection and support.

Nevertheless, he says, “The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; . . . After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man. This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others”

(1445). These statements more or less describe Octavian’s project in The Kingdom on the

Waves. The “kingdom” of the title refers to a fleet of British ships anchored off the coast of rebel-held Virginia. It also, however, refers to a kind of sub-national identity that is forming. Lord Dunmore, the commander of the fleet, has been recruiting and enlisting escaped slaves to join the fight against the colonies, and has formed a special regiment for them called the Royal Ethiopians, with uniform shirts that differ from the rest of the

British Army’s and bear the insignia “Liberty to Slaves.” The Royal Ethiopians are fighting for the British Crown, but their name and uniforms also mark them as a community apart, recall a Biblical kingdom of origin, and promise a hopeful future within this reconstituted kingdom. Fanon writes during an era similar to Octavian’s, when the futures of new nation-states are in flux and seem replete with possibilities for new social visions. The difference, of course, is that readers of the Octavian novels, whatever they may know about the complex fates of the decolonized nations of the African diaspora, certainly know the end of the story of the American Revolution. British soldiers, in this familiar narrative, do not end up figuring as heroic victors who secure abolition in the colonies; and slavery, within the brave new decolonizing American

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nation, is not abolished until the Civil War. The Royal Ethiopians never gain a national land, but rule only an unmoored kingdom on the waves, and then a river island, both of which are subsidized by the British Empire.

The foreknowledge of this failure overshadows The Kingdom on the Waves from the beginning. In a move that echoes Malcolm X’s rejection of the surname “Little” as a hated reminder of slave history and a symbolic internalization of the conqueror’s identity,

Octavian enlists in the British imperial army as “Octavian Nothing” (130); and in signing his name to do the violent work demanded by a nation of its citizens, he says, “for the first time, I knew freedom” (132). This tension—between mental decolonization and service to the British Empire, between abstract freedom and the immediate constraints of military violence—persists throughout, as Octavian and his companions are increasingly horrified by the acts they commit in defense of their own freedom and by the despair, internal dissent, and institutional neglect that afflict the Royal Ethiopians. In the genres of school stories and desegregation stories, the violence of nation-building tends to remain at a safe remove. It is implied by the analogous violence of bullying, but its full horrors and ethical implications are buffered by the setting and time frame of the enclosed childhood world of school; in Anderson’s novels, the violence involved in achieving citizenship is more explicit, and problematic. As Chandan Reddy argues, the anti-racist state envisioned by both Fanon and Octavian ends up, in twenty-first century America,

“expanding the apparatuses of legitimate violence to do the work of securing and reproducing those [racialized and gendered] inequalities through the very institutional sites, occasions, and acts that ensure racial inclusion” (20). It is for this reason that

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Octavian wishes to preserve the nation of the Royal Ethiopians as continually sailing and thus perpetually innocent of violence.

Nevertheless, it is within the protection of this floating, unfixed, semi-official nation-within-an-empire that more utopian forms of literacy education and citizenship develop. At first, Octavian is overwhelmed by the multinational Company he joins. Freed slaves from different tribes, many of whom retain long-standing mutual animosity, mix together with slaves born on plantations in various parts of the colonies. While he is moved by celebrations when all share their stories, perform dances and songs forbidden for years, and find others who speak the languages of their native tribes, he is also uncomfortably aware of his own estrangement: “The men now call me Buckra , which is their word for a white man; for having seen me read, they say that I am a white man hidden in a black skin. And I have just called them ‘they’” (149, emphasis in original).

Crucially, his friend Pro Bono (now William Williams), 150 who can also read and write, is not called “Buckra,” because he has mastered an oral tradition of storytelling and language use that Octavian lacks. Octavian, of course, cannot shed his particular classicist literacy any more than he can shed his black skin. His first effort to use literacy to lessen the distance between himself and the others, however, only replicates the pattern of knowledge collection and possession used by his own captors. The varied stories he hears inspires him to begin a nationalist project of cultural re-creation that evokes

Fanon’s decolonization projects, but he records the stories as an elite outsider, without the tellers’ knowledge or permission, in a book he calls “ my Itinerarium” (253, emphasis

150 Pro Bono tells Octavian from the beginning that he intends to shed that name, and he does. Nevertheless, throughout the second volume, Octavian persists in referring to him as “Bono,” and so I do so as well in order to avoid confusion. 299

mine). When Bono finds the book, he shames Octavian publicly, and Octavian abandons the project.

Later, however, at the request of his friends Pomp and Slant, Octavian forms a small literacy circle, “to spread among others the gifts lavished upon me for my pains in the College of Lucidity; to loose knowledge from its corral and allow it free pasturage”

(323). Initially, Octavian is clearly in the position of teacher, the others clearly in the position of students, albeit at their request. When Bono introduces him to the Oyo drummer Olakunde, however, Octavian becomes a seeker of knowledge. After each literacy lesson, the class swaps stories from their various cultural traditions, and instead of recording stories about the others, he records stories with them. As Fanon suggests, these stories change as they are exchanged within the context of community-building, so that the cultural inheritance of Oyo that Octavian once believed died with his mother mixes with the ghost stories and trickster tales of American-born slaves and with the retold myths of ancient Greece and Rome contributed by Octavian. This hybrid cultural heritage, he imagines, will be the foundation of the new utopian nation (though what nation, he does not specify):

I envision the future day when this campaign is finished, and we grown older and commenced men of means—with wives of our own, and children, and farms, perhaps, laid about with barns. Olakunde shall be the Ovid of far Oyo, writing the tales of Africk metamorphoses; and Pomp recording his ghost stories for a winter night. I shall write sonatas en trio ; and Slant perhaps shall be proprietor of his own plantation. Grant us, Lord, a Thanksgiving feast together in that distant day. (395) In many ways, this combined literacy class, story exchange, and nation-building project is a Freirian endeavor, a pedagogy “forged with , not for , the oppressed . . . in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity” (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed 48).

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Furthermore, it is carried out in the context of organizing for freedom (54), as Freire argues is necessary for utopian pedagogy. Octavian’s vision of nationhood, however, also threatens to replicate some of the problems of other established nations.

Kevin Gaines suggests that the pan-African international civil rights movement suffered as a result of the replication of gender inequality within newly decolonizing nations; and Octavian’s utopian vision similarly provides no role for women, either as writers or as citizens, except as wives to be possessed alongside farms and barns. While knowledge may be temporarily “loose[d] from its corral,” the image of farms, and plantations, and non-literate wives suggests that corrals of many kinds may be re- established as part of the apparatus of financial security. This dilemma is similar to the one faced by Buddy in The Planet of Junior Brown . Buddy opts to sacrifice the security of his system for inclusiveness; the utopia thus created is ethical, but also temporary and haunted by anxiety. Octavian, living in a similar kind of precarious, contingent situation, longs for a pastoral utopia that promises warmth, safety, and the possibility of belonging to an establishment. The ending of the novel highlights—and does not resolve—the difficulty of choosing between the benefits of secure citizenship and the moral compromises of establishing and institutionalizing any kind of community.

Linda Bosniak argues that most discussions of citizenship take up questions of who can be citizens and what their obligations and rights should be, but neglect the question of where citizenship might be located. She suggests that concepts of citizenship are, and should increasingly be, detached from concepts of nationhood and extended to other kinds of community identities, circumventing the inevitably exclusive nature of a nationally-based citizenship. The ending of The Kingdom on the Waves gestures to this

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kind of de-nationalized citizenship, but also suggests that a placeless citizen that belongs to nowhere still faces problems outside of a national structure. After the destruction of the

Royal Ethiopian regiment, Octavian returns to Mr. Gitney’s house and writes his two- volume history (presumably, the volumes which the implied reader of Anderson’s novels is now perusing). Appropriately, he creates the firelight necessary for his writing by burning the College’s records of him and his mother, creating a new, more enlightened account of himself out of the ashes of the older racist knowledge. He makes the dying

Mr. Gitney read this re-written version of his upbringing while he (Octavian) observes, and then leaves to find Olakunde, Bono, and Bono’s wife in a maroon community they hope to locate.

This ending is both satisfying and troubling. Satisfyingly, Octavian replaces Mr.

Gitney’s partial, stolen knowledge with his own self-knowledge, which he leaves behind as a corrective before he “light[s] out for the unknown regions” (“Kingdom” 561). The last line of the novel both recalls and revises the ending of The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn , that canonic American novel in which the un-civilizable Huck undergoes an anti-racist reform process—and then famously proceeds to “light out for the

Territory” (352), where he will serve as a representative of the reformed American

Empire, colonizing new territory on the frontier. Octavian, significantly, uses almost the exact words to end his novel that Huck does, but avoids the word “Territory” and its connotations of possession and colonization. Through the account he leaves for the nation, therefore, he in some measure seeks to correct the conception of national citizenship the implied American reader might have absorbed through other narratives about the racial and imperial history of the United States. Troublingly, however, Octavian

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cannot claim ownership of himself except by leaving his history, his literary product, behind as a record for the nation. Although he has previously claimed his literacy as that which “binds” and constitutes his identity, the last section of his manuscript is entitled

“Tabula Rasa,” and he writes, “There are some who believe that the mind is a blank tablet, on which experience is writ until the page be full, and the cryptic world is known; but I see rather that my own life hath been one long forgetting, the erasure of what was drawn, a terrible redaction; til all that remains is blank white and comfortless” (561). His literacy, narrative, and identity are not shareable properties, as Horace Mann envisions, but exclusive ones, and in leaving the sins of the nation behind to be “owned” and acknowledged by the nation, he also becomes what he has wished to avoid—namely, a

“blank white” mind emptied of nation, history, and race. Even if Octavian cannot reconcile himself to the violence of nationhood, and even though literacy opens up other conceptions of citizenship, ultimately Anderson suggests that these alternative conceptions of de-nationalized community depend, as Scott and Reddy contend, upon the privileges and prices exacted by the state.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing is, indeed, an astonishing set of novels, and despite the narrative’s avowed skepticism regarding citizenship and literacy,

Anderson does place a great deal of faith in his implied readers. In fact, the degree of effort spent to re-educate American readers about their own history, and to introduce them to philosophical questions about citizenship that are generally screened from children’s literature, belies the cynicism of the ending. The fact that the complexity of its prose keeps it out of many school curricula may work in its favor as a text for citizenship education, considering how inextricable the ties between school knowledge and nation-

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based power are. Gargi Gangopadhyay, in discussing the development of Bengali children’s literature under British rule, emphasizes that resistant Bengali nationalist texts were meant to be leisure reading, set “in opposition to the public and formal reading areas related to schools, education, and examinations . . . essentially situated beyond the precincts of institutional control” (140). The Octavian novels seem similarly to have been relegated to the private realm of leisure reading, in contrast to Holes , which has been firmly ensconced within public institutional settings. Like Du Bois, Gangopadhyay imagines this private space of reading to be a space that can exist above or beyond national boundaries and institutionally sanctioned inequities, in an “uncontaminated space, which naturally has the sanctity of belonging to the self” (156).

The world of leisure reading need not be imagined as completely private and separate from public institutions. The public library, for example, is a state-funded space where librarians encourage and nurture interested readers; they even provide structures for communal discussion such as monthly book clubs, which offer opportunities for patrons to share knowledge in a setting where this knowledge is not evaluated or recorded by the state. Students who feel alienated within the classroom are not necessarily excluded, or even monitored, within the public library. 151 Nevertheless, a sense of belonging in the public library still depends upon literacy skills offered within the public school (even if literacy is not taught exclusively by the public school). There are good reasons why educational critics tend to favor concepts of education as a public good over those that frame it as a private good. Anderson, to his credit, may assert his faith in his

151 Young adult author Walter Dean Myers records in his autobiography that in his final years of high school, he felt so out of place in the classroom that he simply stopped attending, and became a fixture at the public library instead. 304

readers’ abilities, but he also constructs insufficiently literate villains whose writing resembles that of some of my students. Are these students also his intended readers? If not, are they excluded from utopian citizenship? The implication, in both Anderson’s and

Sachar’s novels, is that literacy is needed for the formation of a utopian community; it may not be necessary for resistance, or utopian desire, or critical thought, but it is formulated as a technology that produces a common vision and a feeling of community.

Given the proliferation of possible literacies, a common literacy must be articulated and shared in a common place; thus, even in disavowing the utility of the current public school system for communicating citizenship, both Anderson and Sachar re-institute a different kind of ritualized learning community or proto-school. At the same time, they suggest that while a school of some form might be necessary, the assumptions and pedagogies of our existing schools do not have to be inevitable.

Conclusion

The school stories of the previous chapters demonstrate that Brown v. Board of

Education , in desegregating the school without significantly altering its institutional structure, failed to either distribute the goods of education or to create a utopian, equitable nation. Sachar’s Holes seems to suggest that placing education outside the structure of school might be a way to more fully realize the goals of desegregation; share the knowledge, it implies, and the institutions of the nation will follow. The Astonishing

Life of Octavian Nothing demonstrates, however, that this is potentially a further retreat into the private, voluntary sphere of commerce and capital. As numerous scholars from

Bell to Ferguson to Reddy have pointed out, the American nation-state in the twentieth century has consistently altered specific aspects of its institutional structure without

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ending its overall practices of producing inequality. Furthermore, racialized inequalities are co-constructed by the nation-state and by global capital markets. Sharing literacy and closing the achievement gap would be unlikely, in and of themselves, to end this pattern and reform the American nation-state, as the architects of Brown hopefully envisioned.

Literacy and citizenship education can help readers envision heterotopic spaces and communities that are alternatives to the nation-state, but these spaces still do intersect with the boundaries and constraints of the neoliberal nation-state.

The public school, vexed and flawed as it is, will and probably should remain one of the key places for literacy and citizenship education. This public space is still the venue where the property of literacy can be spread most widely, opening the possibility that proto-citizens may enter imaginative spaces like Octavian’s undiscovered region and re-emerge wanting to reframe their nation-state according to those other visions.

Furthermore, the novels in this chapter, which break with the generic framework of the school story, provide a crucial reminder that resistant learning within the school does not always have to pit students in need of socialization against teachers who represent the values of the institution. Schools can introduce teachers like Dr. Trefusis, Octavian, and

Stanley to unofficial forms of knowledge, too, and can provide the opportunity for coalitions. As James Scott and Henry Giroux suggest, the official knowledge and literacy sanctioned and produced by the state-sponsored school inevitably leaves a residue of unofficial knowledge and resistance, which may be discarded by school and state as useless, but which are produced through the same processes that the state uses to reinforce its own authority. This proliferation of resistant alternative literacies may, in fact, be the most important thing the school produces. Consequently, although in many

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ways I am critical of the ways that Sachar’s Holes lumps together all kinds of literacy with all kinds of morality and prosperity, I also find its blunt distinction between literacy and illiteracy to be in some ways more useful for democratic reform than Anderson’s careful attention to the nuanced varieties of literacies and citizenships. Within the sphere of the state-sponsored school (and, in fact, within Anderson’s novels), some literacies are made official and standardized, while others are devalued and labeled as insufficient. It is the production of literacies labeled incomplete, underachieved, and inadequate, however, that may permit readers to construct unauthorized readings and unofficial visions of citizenship.

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Conclusion: Schooling and Resistance

Preface: On (Not) Talking About Race in the Classroom, Take Two

I began this dissertation with a story of my own cowardice, when I feared to openly discuss contemporary school-related racism in the very setting where such a discussion would seem to be most relevant and necessary. Many of these opening anecdotes have been stories about regret, and as I researched and wrote, I often thought about the things I might do differently if I had the chance to relive my secondary school teaching experiences. This sense of regret and self-examination has, I believe, probably shaped and in some cases constrained my research. As an example, when I read articles with titles like “Safe Encounters Not First-Hand Experiences,” I was reflexively skeptical of their claims; from the outset, preoccupied with memories of my own mis-steps, I was suspicious of the idea that a classroom could, or should, be preserved as a “safe” place to discuss racism. Safe for whom? Safe at what cost? (I should note here in passing that that particular article, by Wanda Brooks and Gregory Hampton, did prove to offer some valuable insights.)

Thus, when I was offered work as an adjunct instructor at a local community college in North Carolina, where I now live, I was eager for what felt like a second chance to be more courageous. Accordingly, I incorporated a research topic on definitions of cultural identity into one of my composition assignments, and chose a few texts that addressed issues of racism in contemporary society. From my perspective, readings like Kenji Yoshino’s “The Pressure to Cover” were actually quite gentle in speaking to a potentially hostile audience about how race- and sexuality-based employment discrimination has persisted in other forms despite the passage of laws

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meant to prevent such discrimination. In fact, I had taught Yoshino’s article previously at

Montgomery Community College and had some success with it. I apparently had forgotten a few things: first, that my classrooms at Montgomery College did not tend to have significant proportions of conservative military-affiliated white men and women (or, in fact, any), and second, that I had spent a year steeped in critical race theory, which might have shifted my sense of what would constitute a “gentle” approach to race relations. I was unprepared for the student who, even before I assigned any readings on race, sported a Confederate flag tattoo and wrote a reflection about his pride in the flag and his belief that anyone who is offended by its display is simply ignorant of United

States history and Southern heritage. I was not prepared for students’ responses to the

Yoshino reading, which ranged from simply saying that he was “racist” (for some, because he talked about race and acknowledged racial difference, which meant he was not being color-blind, and for others, because he spoke of receiving angry reactions from some white audience members, which meant he was racist against white people) to resisting classroom activities that involved discussing the reading.

I received less resistance in my course on American Literature from 1400-1865, where students certainly expected to have to confront the topic of slavery, and where the question of racial violence was safely contained before the Civil War. Even there, however, I was taken aback by one (white) student’s creative project on Uncle Tom’s

Cabin , in which she managed to write an inspirational children’s picture book based on the story of Little Eva without ever mentioning the word, or depicting the institution, of slavery. In her written artistic defense of the project, she explained that Little Eva was color-blind and did not recognize difference (similar, the student emphasized, to how she

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herself had been raised), and she wanted her book to reflect Eva’s perspective rather than the dominant view of the time.

My forays into classroom discussions of race were not entire failures, however.

Although they had less controversial options, several students in the composition class chose to base their final research papers on investigations of their own cultural identities, delving further into the very topics that had caused so much tension; I received papers on changing definitions of African-American religious identity, and on competing definitions of black identity, biracial identity, Wiccan identity, and sexual identity (as well as the one paper on Southern heritage that aimed to correct the misguided stereotypes of “Yankee haters”—me—and that nowhere acknowledged that some people who identify as Southerners might not be white). In the American literature class, alongside the Little Eva project that edited out slavery, I also received a picture book adaptation of Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” that placed the text and pictures against a background of the present-day (not antebellum) American flag. The student began her defense by asserting that many black people in America, herself included, celebrated Juneteenth because the sentiments that Douglass expressed in the 1850s still felt relevant in 2013. Despite overt expressions of resistance, I also heard undercurrents of interest and engagement. Many students, of all backgrounds, were tense and uncomfortable when asked to speak about race in a desegregated setting; but some of the same students who would not disrupt the implied social rules of the desegregated classroom would, with more privacy, write about the continuing areas of racial segregation that they did, indeed, notice and think about.

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In telling the story of that first summer semester in North Carolina, my point is not to lament my woes as some enlightened, racially innocent Northerner forced to confront the horrifying backwardness of the rural South. On the contrary: the reason why my students’ resistance surprised me more than it perhaps should have is because even the most avoidant students also, by and large, demonstrated some degree of thoughtful engagement with issues that challenged their worldviews. When students did push back, they indicated that they resisted, not because they wanted a world of white superiority

(not even Southern Heritage Student argued for this, or not openly, anyway) but because they really wanted to believe that we had achieved the color-blind utopia of equal opportunity that they desired. And, despite my frustration with the degree to which many of these students ignored (and were very happy to keep) their own white privilege, I do believe that at some level, they wanted an end to racial division, so much so that they resisted any implication that it had not yet occurred.

Instead, I have offered this closing anecdote as a way to re-introduce, and to reflect upon, some of the ideas about utopian texts which I discussed in the introduction to this dissertation. Throughout the course of this project, I have argued that school stories about desegregation are limited, in part because they insist upon a feel-good happy ending in which progress is definitively achieved. I have also contended, however, that a variety of utopian models is necessary, both for readers and for students in the classroom.

Finally, I have suggested throughout my analysis that the desire for utopian education is often connected to the generally impossible desire for education to be a controllable and predictable process. My own most recent experiences have reinforced these convictions.

A classroom dominated by dissent, tension, and the open airing of critical conflict

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(desirable in many philosophies of anti-racist teaching) did not seem to be utopian for those quiet students willing to write, but not to speak, their sympathy with more controversial readings. At the same time, more direct readings, which sparked resistance from some, seemed to offer relief for others, a sense that someone else had said what they were thinking and that had seemed un-speakable in a public forum. I have belatedly began to take more seriously those articles that investigate how children’s texts might circumvent resistance and provide “safe” opportunities for discussion; and yet, I am reminded as I retell this story that no text, and no method of teaching a text, can really ever be “safe,” because teachers do not have some kind of ultimate control over what, or how, or when students learn. A single classroom, like a single text, cannot offer multiple models of utopia at the same time, nor can it dependably create a utopian environment by containing just the right, magical, scientifically tested components—and yet, even encounters with less-than-successful, non-utopian reading options and pedagogical methods may suggest utopian possibilities. In this concluding chapter, I reflect on the value of continued, persistent failure—on why continuing to fail at antiracist education, at desegregation, at educating citizens in general—is a worthwhile enterprise.

Introduction:

I began this project by asking what students in the post-Brown era are told about the racial dynamics of their own classrooms through the books aimed specifically at them. The answer, developed throughout the preceding chapters, is both “A great deal” and “Not much.” When we mine these books for the legacies of Brown decision , certain effects of the decision lie close to the surface, while others are buried deeper, and require more digging to bring to the reader’s consciousness. Stories of the violence and resistance

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in the immediate aftermath of the decision, stories of bravery and of interracial friendship and even of a pre-segregation foundation of black education, are relatively transparent in how, and what, they aim to teach students about their educational history. Stories of the more insidious legacies of the Brown decision—the disparities in disability diagnosis, the re-segregation, the unequal pressures of standardized testing—are more obliquely told, so that students and teachers may have the opportunity to think about these legacies, but are not asked to directly confront them.

I have argued that the structure and the expectations of the school institution shape and constrain not only school-based social reforms, but also the ways in which these reform efforts are narrated. This process occurs in a variety of ways, from limiting the criticisms that can be published about the desegregated school for an education market, to shaping the plot lines of stories, as when academic success is used to legitimize antiracist reforms. Even when the existing school system is no longer the ideal site of reform, a new or alternative kind of communal learning environment is still imagined as being necessary to developing a shared utopian dream of racial justice.

Thus, while the focus of this dissertation has been on what school stories tell children about desegregation, I would like, in this chapter, to ask instead what the legacies of desegregation—and the stories that are told about it—can tell us about school.

Critics of the Brown decision have rightly faulted it for constraining its call for change to the public school system, without making a broader statement about racial justice.

Nevertheless, this means that the process of desegregation is inextricably linked with all of the other processes of change and reform that the school system undergoes, so that we cannot ask how desegregation has succeeded or failed without asking whether the school

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system is succeeding, or failing, as a whole—and, more importantly, without asking what we think it is meant to be succeeding or failing at doing. If desegregated schools educate a mixed-race student body equitably, but do so through stultifying or rigid methods of pedagogy, is this a success? If equitable desegregated schools educate children of all races to perpetuate global inequality and an ethos of American exceptionalism, is this a success? Child readers may not be encouraged to think too much about the school-to- prison pipeline, or about disability diagnosis, as continuing issues of racial justice that were unsolved by the sacrifices of the Little Rock Nine; nevertheless, novels that occlude these issues reveal, even highlight, central questions about the school system that cut to the heart of how the legacies of desegregation can even be conceptualized and evaluated.

In this conclusion, I explore how the problems of representing desegregation also open up the implications of using education to achieve utopian ends. I discuss, in turn, three recurring issues that have surfaced throughout the course of this project. First, I address the conjoined problems of control and resistance both as potential obstacles to desired utopian education, and also as utopian desires in themselves. Next, I reflect on how different utopian educational schemes account for students’ failure. And finally, I consider how the failed school might continue to function as a necessary component of a utopian democratic project.

Control, Resistance, and Incompatible Utopias

The novels discussed in this dissertation are roughly divided according to how they depict the respective benefits of educational control and resistance. In the school stories of Chapters One and Two, a healthy educational setting is characterized by a sense

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of calm control, in which inappropriate resistance is disciplined and ultimately

(hopefully) erased. This inappropriate resistance may take many forms; white students at

Mary Jane’s or Marlee’s schools may resist desegregation, white teachers like Mr.

Kooner and Dawnie Rae’s science teacher may resist teaching black students, and reluctant students like Candy Castle and Travis may resist their schoolwork. These varieties of resistance share a common quality, however, which is that students and teachers have clear “jobs,” whether paid or unpaid, and any behavior that interferes with those jobs is clearly inappropriate. Once desegregation becomes part of the school environment, any tasks associated with the ultimate goals of desegregation are stamped, not only with legitimacy, but with compulsion. Resistance to racist teaching may, of course, be legitimate, and in fact necessary, as in the case of With the Might of Angels and

Because We Are . The legitimacy of this resistance, however, is recognizable by the restoration of order to the learning environment. In insisting that Mr. Kooner do his job,

Emma and her compatriots transform the classroom from a chaotic place where there is no time for learning, to a calm place where students have the time and emotional security to do their work. When Emma triumphantly announces, We program the Kooners ” (171), she is reversing the usual sequence of who programs whom; but she also supports the idea that a certain degree of programming is necessary for education to work. In contrast, the novels in Chapters Three and Four portray programming as a suspicious form of control, regardless of who is doing it; Mr. Pool, Stanley, and Octavian all lose credibility within their narratives when they momentarily replicate dominant methods of educational control, even for worthy purposes. In these novels, successful education is characterized by resistance, and by the upset of established order; educational methods of control are

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portrayed as being parallel to, and supportive of, methods of racist, classist, and able-ist social control.

This split between supporters of utopian educational method and utopian educational resistance also appears, unsurprisingly, in educational theory and philosophy.

Reformers such as Mike Rose, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Lisa Delpit, whose work tends to focus on pedagogical praxis, express a continued belief in the power of good teaching, suggesting that effective, reliable educational methods can be developed to decrease inappropriate resistance to tasks both academic and social. Many of these theorists emphasize that the end goal of these methods is to foster resistance to dominant ideologies of inequality; nevertheless, if teaching is successful, this resistance will be expressed outside the controlled zone of the classroom, against its proper antagonists, and not inside the classroom, against the curricular material. Patricia Hill Collins sums up this conundrum by stating, “On the one hand, they [youth] must learn to value sufficiently the ideals and traditions of schooling itself so that they can achieve within existing norms.

On the other hand, they must challenge current practices that claim to represent those same norms” (10). She argues that students’ anger and resentment of school signals a degree of caring that can be harnessed for productive resistance (91); at the same time, she warns, “Youth often do not submit willingly to school discipline, even when their resistance jeopardizes their academic school success” (103), emphasizing that academic resistance and ideological resistance must be kept separate. On the other side of the split, theorists such as Michael Apple and Henry Giroux tend to view any kind of school praxis as completely inextricable from the larger social structures to be resisted. Giroux does caution that “not all oppositional behavior has ‘radical significance,’ nor is all

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oppositional behavior rooted in a reaction to authority and dominance” (103); however, he also urges resistant teachers to create educational settings outside of the school, because the school is too closely tied to state interests and therefore is limited in the kinds of resistant critiques it can allow students to make within its walls (174). Similarly, Apple argues that changes in pedagogy cannot change the basic function of the school, which is to produce an illusion of critical democracy, a manufactured consensus that supports existing forms of oppression (78). For these theorists, resistance to classroom pedagogy may not be sufficient for resistance to dominant ideologies, but it is one necessary component.

Both sets of utopian thinkers optimistically hope that resistance, in some form and in some location, will, in fact, be directed toward the goal of social change. Other critics caution, however, that the controlled educational setting sometimes raises resistance both against the curricular material and against the goal of fighting racial injustice. Jennifer

Trainor, for example, does an in-depth analysis of a high school English classroom taught by a consciously anti-racist, Freirian instructor. She concludes that the daily rules and rituals of the school reinforced emotional habits that “made racism persuasive” (110).

Specifically, students were exhorted daily to be cheerful, to view themselves as being strong and in control, and to view themselves as being equal to everyone else. Antiracist reading and pedagogy specifically challenged these habits of thinking and feeling, but did not change them; rather, the strength of the school’s reinforced routines and values undermined the antiracist teaching: “It stemmed from a sense of unfairness: students weren’t allowed to complain in or about school—they were exhorted constantly to ‘look on the bright side’ and ‘focus on the positive,’ to ‘have a great day,’ even when they had

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reasons for their discontent—so why was Angelou allowed to write ‘a book about complaining,’ to use one students’ words?” (25). Marshall Alcorn suggests that this kind of double resistance—to academic content and to social change—arises because

“successful” pedagogy depends upon the manipulation of the students’ desire. “Good” students are good because “they can show that they want what [the teacher] wants” (59).

The kinds of desires teachers want students to have may change over time (62), but the basic premise of pedagogy remains the same. Alcorn notes, however, that we experience changes of desire as changes in our basic sense of identity, and that many subjects vehemently resist such pressure. Thus, when antiracist teachers are unsuccessful in altering their students’ desires, many students do opt for various shows of hostility toward both academic tasks and ideological change.

As I have noted throughout, utopian education is, in part, about this underlying education of desire; utopia cannot be utopia unless its citizens are not only capable of sustaining it, but also desirous of doing so. Ostensibly, all of the desegregation novelists and antiracist theorists discussed thus far share the utopian desire for a racially and economically just society; a stance of compliance with or a stance of resistance to the classroom are merely alternate, debatably effective means to that goal. Nevertheless, in reflecting on these desegregation novels, it also seems apparent that while the model utopian subjects in these novels may all want racial justice, they also seem to want such different educational experiences that they work, effectively, for quite different utopias.

It is hard, for example, for me to imagine Dicey Tillerman or Buddy waving their hands around excitedly, burning to participate, as Mary Jane does when she finally feels comfortable in her science classroom; and despite Octavian’s eagerness to please, I

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cannot picture him cheerfully complying with the boring, pre-determined science experiments Mr. Stiller assigns, friendly and anti-racist though his classroom may have been. Conversely, Mary Jane, Emma, and Dawnie Rae would be horrified if asked to model themselves after Mina, or Dicey, or Zero, or Octavian, even though they encounter similar problems in academic environments. Mary Jane might struggle in French, because her book teaches only phrases of friendship, rather than the phrases of hurt and anger she needs for combating bullies (77); Dawnie Rae may struggle in science and English, because her teachers work to sabotage her; and Emma is faced with a teacher who foments combat instead of learning; yet these characters define themselves, and their desired subjectivities, according to academic success. They would struggle to work harder, or in alternate ways, for ‘A’s, rather than deliberately courting a politically demonstrative ‘C,’ as Mina does; and even though their success might make racist teachers also look successful, they would never intentionally botch a performance, as

Octavian does at one point, in order to make those teachers look bad.

If we take seriously the Deweyan notion that school is not a preparation for life, but the actual “real” life of the students and teachers who spend their days there, then we must consider the idea that a racially just society, for these protagonists, would not be sufficient for a utopia. Even were that end to at last be achieved, they would still desire fundamentally different lives and forms of education, which are, in some cases, incompatible. Furthermore, beyond the conflicting “happy endings” imagined for the

Brown decision, there clearly remain other problems to be solved for American’s desegregated schoolchildren. If we consider desegregation novels as a body, we must begin to ask whether we actually agree on the definition of a “happy ending,” not only

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with respect to racial justice, but also with respect to the daily routines of education. The divide between writers who privilege resistance and those who want an ultimate, eventual zone of safety is a very real one, which affects the kind of subjects readers are encouraged to want to be and the kind of racially just world they are supposed to create.

Academic Failure in Utopia

The legacies of desegregation are intertwined with the educational function of the school; therefore, desegregation novels must account for the role of failing students in their utopian vision. In many, failing students represent a problem to be erased; they demonstrate the persistent evils of a racist system, and their transformation indicates the success, and the desirability, of racial justice and antiracist pedagogy. In others, failing students are critical model subjects who expose the pedagogical and ideological flaws of the system, and who demonstrate that academic success and good citizenship are not always synonymous (and in fact are sometimes incompatible). Even in novels that grant a moral credibility to failure, failing students sometimes function as symbols, indicators of desired reforms. The implication is that in a more utopian school system, Buddy and

Junior would not need to cut school, Dicey would not need to be disengaged, and Frannie might be recognized as gifted. One might argue that these representations of failure very predictably echo the dominant representation of disability as a “problem” that should ideally be eliminated. Nevertheless, I want to take the desegregation novels’ treatments of failure seriously, as they offer insight into the questions of utopian citizenship, and of utopian education, that these novels consider.

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The first of these questions is whether a utopian society can incorporate the permanent, ever-present existence of failure within its borders, or only temporary, soluble failures. Novels that most strongly privilege resistance as a utopian quality also tend to imagine utopias that not only accommodate, but require failure as an integral part of their structure. Utopias like Buddy’s and Dicey’s are based upon the desire for constant, restless critique of the status quo; and without some source of failure, not only would their alternative worlds be lost, there would also be nothing to feed the critique that defines them as contributing citizens. Failed students, and failed citizens, in these versions of utopia, will never lose their jobs. This vision of utopia offers one potential model of reform for the desegregated school, reinforcing the idea that there might be other ways to measure the success of desegregation, and other goals for the school, besides the “success” of all its students. In this model, failure should not be a byproduct, but a central product of the school that should be valued and taken seriously; it provides a constant horizon of possibility, a constant source of alternative ways of thinking and doing.

Utopias that frame failure as temporary also raise a second question: Is the concept of failure relevant in a system that frames education as a common good to be shared, rather than as a commodity to be competed for? David Labaree argues that failure is already an integral, ineradicable component of our educational system, but not because any utopian value is placed upon the contributions failing students might make. Rather, failure is needed because without it, the value of education as a limited, rare commodity drops. He notes that as each successive level of education becomes touted as a

“universal” goal for citizens (first grade school, then high school, then college), that

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educational level is perceived to be “inflated,” relatively worthless currency. Within each level of school, “competitive” institutions, to which some students may fail to gain admittance and in which they may fail to achieve, are perceived as selling a higher quality of educational goods. Between each level, students who “fail” to graduate from high school, or from a four-year college, or from a Master’s program, help to secure the elite cache of the next stage. Many scholars attribute more recent devaluations to the

Brown decision; Catherine Prendergast notes that educational institutions lose cache when they become accessible to African-American students, and Michael Apple and

James Beane similarly suggest that public schools, like public housing, are associated with raced disadvantage and with poverty. Failure, Labaree suggests, is the system’s solution to preserving the worth of an increasingly accessible commodity; moreover, he suggests, it always was, even before the Brown decision.

Because the commodity value of student failure is a component of the system that predates the Brown decision, the desegregation novels that seek to eliminate student failure can be read, not merely as calling for educational goods to be evenly distributed, but also as envisioning a utopian system in which failure does not shore up the value of education. While Horace Mann originally advanced the idea that education should be a public good, he also instituted some of the mechanisms (such as standardized testing) that enshrined failure as a measure of rigor and that held schools, and students, accountable for using taxpayer money efficiently. Novels that imagine away the need for failure do not necessarily imagine away student struggles or differences in aptitude. Rather, they conjure classrooms in which students’ struggles are not framed as wasting the system’s time and money—and therefore are not defined as failure.

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As I have stressed throughout, the time frame of the school year is crucial, not only for school story plots, but also for setting the boundaries of academic success—and therefore, for establishing education as a limited commodity. The age-graded school year helps to establish “use by” dates after which the system’s investment in a student is deemed to be lost. Thus, while I have argued that novels such as Because We Are, Fire

From the Rock, and Feathers tend to reinforce the perception that academic success is the primary legitimating quality for citizenship, I also believe that these novels attempt to envision a system in which struggling to keep up with a prescribed curricular schedule is not synonymous with failure. Frannie, Calvin, and Candy “succeed” in part because they are taught through effective antiracist pedagogies, but also in part because their difficulties never reach a deadline at which they are conclusively labeled as “failure.” In different ways, then, whether by framing failure as temporary or by enshrining it as permanent, all of these novels claim “failing” students as worthwhile investments.

Failed Schools in Utopia

Most of these novels suggest that when students fail, that failure ought to belong to the school rather than to the pupil. This revised attribution of failure is central to writers’ and activists’ calls for meaningful racial integration beyond body-mixing.

Integration (as opposed to desegregation) requires that, on the one hand, antiracist activists acknowledge the struggles students have experienced both academically and socially through the process of legal desegregation, without simply telling a glossy, celebratory tale of unalloyed success and progress; on the other hand, re-attributing failure to institutional causes helps these writers to simultaneously affirm that those same struggling students, given a different institution, are capable of making school integration

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work. Thus, it is unsurprising that so many desegregation novels are invested in reclaiming failing students as valuable citizens, even though (or rather, because) such failures are sometimes used as evidence that desegregation is a collapsed social experiment.

What is perhaps more surprising is that, in addition to claiming failed students as valuable citizens, desegregation novels continue to claim the failed school system as a necessary and valuable training ground for those citizens, despite the responsibility it bears for mis -training citizens. In my introduction, I suggest that this continued re- affirmation of the school as integral to utopia occurs at least in part because desegregation novels for children are deeply embedded in the educational publishing market, which addresses readers who have a vested interest in maintaining the cultural power of the school system. Nevertheless, teachers and administrators are not a monolithic force dedicated to preserving the status quo , as these novels (many written by former teachers) demonstrate; many influential adult readers within the school system also desire a different institution, and a different society, from the one in which they live and work. Therefore, in this section, I think it is important to consider some less cynical, more utopian reasons for this phenomenon.

I have emphasized throughout this project that school-based utopias are attractive in part because of the element of compulsion attached to the school. Children have to go there, and most of us (adults and children alike) would prefer that that experience feel exciting and fulfilling rather than miserable. Beyond the practical level, identity theorists and utopian theorists both recognize that the school is a valuable tool for instilling ideology because it provides a compulsory identity for children. Althusser and Foucault

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suggest that the school provides students both with their identities as “students” and also with a set of behaviors, beliefs, and desires that go along with that identity; utopian theorists build upon this idea to inquire which utopian desires ought to be instilled in children, and how they can be most effectively internalized.

Yet in school stories in general, and desegregation stories in particular, the school is not merely an engine for the transmission of desire; it is an object of desire in itself.

Despite being bullied and excluded, Mary Jane, Emma, and Dawnie Rae long to feel school spirit; despite playing hooky, Buddy, Junior, and Mr. Pool want a congenial classroom; and despite his horrifying experiences with the Enlightenment, Octavian still fantasizes about a future community of philosophical exchange and inquiry. These protagonists (and their writers, and their readers) may “know better;” yet they do not merely want the better world that a desegregated school may create. They also want a school. As Anne Anlin Cheng asks, “[C]an ‘knowing better’ or ‘political correctness’ redirect or correct, as it were, one’s desires and fantasies?” (112). Cheng contends that antiracist activists in the United States have tended to focus on the imperative to claim grievances rather than on the ongoing experience of grief, and on solutions rather than on the less conclusive process of working through, and mourning, ongoing problems. In the same vein, I suggest that, despite its proven and perhaps insoluble flaws, there is no

“getting over” the school (Cheng 103). The work of public policy, of pedagogical reform, of utopian thinking in general, requires a commitment to looking for solutions. At the same time, desegregation novels provide a reminder that the problems of the school system are not necessarily obstacles to be gotten past. Utopian thinking might require a

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commitment to coping with critique and failure and disappointment, because the school is part of our desired utopia, not just instrumental to it.

If, as desegregation novels suggest, the experience of failure should not render students worthless for citizenship, then perhaps it should not render a social goal, or an institution, worthless either. If failure is essential to ethical learning, critique, and growth at the personal level, then it is paradoxically probably necessary to the effectiveness of institutions, too, given that institutions like schools are made up of individual teachers, administrators, community members, and support staff, who must have some leeway to fail if they are to work toward any kind of genuine utopian vision. Committing to an idea of the school system as both failing and potentially utopian would, of course, also require a shift in how we think about the society we want students to desire. The United States has a long history of teaching its youth to desire a narrowly defined version of success, both for its citizens and for the state. To not only admit failure, but accept it and value what it might teach, has historically been framed as an almost unforgivable sin against

American values. 152 Critics of the school system sometimes suggest that the way to make

America successful is to eliminate this source, and emblem, of failure embedded within the state, whether by making it a success or by eliminating it altogether. Valuing failure as an inevitable and necessary part of learning would also require coming to accept and appreciate it as a quintessential and worthy quality of United States society and state identity—that is, of present and ongoing identity and not merely of an “overcome” past identity. This, I believe, would be a significant change in the direction of utopia. I recognize that it is unlikely to happen anytime soon, or, in fact, ever; after all, as Alcorn

152 See Ralph Waldo Emerson’s complaints on this subject, as well as more recent analyses from June Cummins, Cynthia Voigt, and Judith (Jack) Halberstam. 326

and Trainor point out, antiracist teaching sparks ire precisely because it attacks this fundamental orientation to refusing the existence, or the value, of failure. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to continue the work of shifting desire, not only in our students but also in ourselves, even—or especially—when this work fails.

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