Serendipitous Wanderer's Blog

http://dmc.tamu-commerce.edu/u?/HCHC,149

This is a link to a thesis written in 1928 for the author’s Master of Arts degree.  It was presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of  Texas.  I am doing a research project focusing on my husband’s grandmother, Emogene Rabb Mize, who was a teacher in the 1920s and 1930s.  The reason for this research is to analyze what  a white teacher’s education consisted of in the 1920s and I am also researching what a black teacher’s education would have been at the same time.  This is proving to be a very valuable document for my research.

Richard Wright, author of 12 Million Black Voices, also wrote the acclaimed Native Son.  In 12 Million Black Voices, Wright chronicles the journey of his race, from the shores of Africa to the cotton fields and “big houses” of the South to the tenements of the North.  This chronicle, though, is anything but a dry accounting of a people’s history.  He writes it in first person and it is written in a lyrical poetic voice.  The beauty of his words sometimes makes the horror of the circumstances he is describing seem surreal.  Unfortunately, those circumstances were all too real.

Reading this was difficult because it brings home the reality that the slaves faced when they were brought to this country – this land of dreams.  To say that much of what was achieved in this country during its nascent years was built upon the backs of the black people is true.   Wright examines a world in which the “captors were hard men, brutal men; yet they held locked somewhere within their heart s the fertile seeds that were to sprout into a new world culture, that were to blossom into a higher human consciousness… these men leaped upon the road of progress; and their leap was the windfall of our tragedy” (12).  It was these men “whose blue and gray and brown eyes glinted with the light of the future,” yet these men “denied our human personalities, tore us from our native soil, weighted our legs with chains, stacked us like cord-wood in the foul holes of clipper ships, dragged us across thousands of miles of ocean, and hurled us into another land, strange and hostile, where for the second time we felt the slow, painful process of a new birth amid conditions harsh and raw” (12).  It is the harshest of ironies that these men who dreamed such noble dreams were the same men who saw the black race as less than human.  These men, who said God created all men equally, saw the black man as no man.

As I read Wright’s chronicle, which is accompanied by photographs taken during the Depression as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, I was at times taken with Wright’s lyrical prose, at times horrified by the circumstances he wrote about, and at times drawn and repulsed by some of the photographs.  Some of the photographs are charming – pictures of children going to church, people dancing.  Some of the photographs are horrifying – tenement kitchens in Chicago, and the hardest to see – a lynching in Georgia.  One repetitive theme throughout, though, is hope.  It was this hope that allowed these people to continually try to live, to maintain families when possible, to form communities based on family and common purpose.  It was this hope that gave some the desire to learn to read – to walk miles for an education, when they were finally allowed to attend schools.

It is for this reason, to learn about how and why people learn to read and write that I am taking this class; to learn about how people use literacy in their everyday lives.  While Wright chronicles the substandard schools that the government gave them, he also chronicles the desire many people had to learn to read books.  He says “in a vague, sentimental sort of way we love books inordinately, even though we do not know how to read them, for we know that books are the gateway to a forbidden world [emphasis mine]” (64).  He claims, “we are joyful when we hear a black man speak like a book.  The people who say how the world is to be run, who have fires in winter, who wear warm clothes, who get enough to eat, are the people who make books speak to them.”   Wright recognized that the way to power was through the portal of education, following the road of literacy.  Considering that this book was written just sixty years ago and today this country has a black president, has had other black leaders and captains of industry, is a testament to this country’s resilience as well as the resilience of the African-American people.  Reading 12 Million Black Voices was an emotional experience.  I felt sadness, admiration, and hope for the people whose journey Wright chronicled as well as this country we live in.

Wright, Richard.  12 Million Black Voices.  1941.  New York:  Basic Books,

2008.  Print.

Deborah  Mutnick writes about a project involving her graduate students and a local school celebrating its 100^th anniversary.  Claiming that “[P]laces are sensuous, laden with the repetition of daily life” (626), she talks in detail about the way the project was implemented and its results. Mutnick uses the concept of the geography of writing and what Bachelard called “the poetics of space . .. the human value of the ‘space we love’” (628).  In this project, Mutnick and her students met with people who had either attended the school at some point or those whose children attended the school.  They wanted these people’s stories to be told, stories which “have always been told; we were simply rendering them more public, more legible” (632).

As I read Mutnick’s piece, I was reminded of the concept of place as character in literature.  In reading literature or watching film and television, often the location of the story is as important as the characters who people the story.  For instance, what would a story like Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist be without the bleak inner city of Victorian London or a television show like “Sex in the City” be if the city was Podunk, Anywhere?  Mutnick says that their intent was to “engage students and other participants in research and writing that, as Christian Weisser puts it, “’highlight the ways in which material forces shape what gets said, who gets heard, and how these forces have structured public discourse throughout history’” (642).

Recognizing that each place is changed with each person who occupies it, either temporarily or long-term, she says that the “driving force behind the project [was] inquiry into the meaningfulness of place, infused always with the identities of those who pass through, traveling elsewhere, coming and leaving, and the mysteries for us as we take our turn.  Tracing a place’s history to its transformative moments and the global origins of past and present members is a means of reading ‘the inscription of time in the world’ that Lefebvre says produces space” (64 3).

Reading this article, knowing that we will be “inscribing the world” through our work with the Norris Community, makes it even more meaningful.  Helping people tell their stories—stories of the time they spent in their community, how it shaped their lives, how they helped shape the community itself – and to have those stories included in the written history of the Norris Community is exciting and it is an honor. I can’t wait!