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Friday aTONEment Launch 8:30 pm

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aTONEment: The Podcast

https://moonstoneartscenter.org/moonstone-podcasts/ 

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aTONEment Jazz Inspired Fables from Improvising Lives.

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Shawn’s Story*

Shawn’s fable unfolds along the banks of the rivers that authors, Langston Hughes and James Joyce traveled. Also, here to be found is the River Delaware as it flows through Philadelphia and environs. Among other themes, this is a tale of incarceration and deportation. Waiting at the story’s edges, readers will notice that we also meet with a lot of homework,  –and a very discerning librarian.

(Above) Image Taken from Salmon Ireland’s web site (Salmonireland.com), is a landscape photograph of the River Foyle.

The Letter

Hi Pops, thanks for your letter. Too bad, the prison blocked a lotta words out. What I got was that you’re getting to go out with work crews to pick up trash on the highways. It must be weird being chained together like that and having guards with shotguns and such watch over you guys  while you’re just basically cleaning the roadside. I really like the part where you said that you all go up to the highway right next to the river and that you always take a minute from sweepin or whatever  to look out over the riverwaves and see the sun reflect on the swelling banks and feel the breeze. So, that was a really good idea where you said if after work some day I walk to the far end of the Wal-Mart parking lot on Delaware Avenue where it comes up on the river that I’ll be looking out over the same Delaware River as you seen earlier, and I’ll be seeing the same waves, and the same currents, and the same mists and breezes playing off the wave- tops, hearin the same sounds and tasting that little bit of sea salt that the river has from its trip out to the ocean. Imma do it. I miss you, Pops. If I go down that parking lot where it looks across to  Camden on the opposite bank on the same day maybe when y’all been out on the highway cleanup crew in your orange prison suits, I’ll be able to catch up with your spirit, at least. And, I’ll say all the stuff you used to listen to me carrying on about. How muad I get at everything and how sad and sorry I feel about other stuff. Remember? I ain’t seen Mom or Dad at all for a long time. But Aunt Helen came down from the convent last week and helped me clean the place. So, we scoured the joint from “stem to stern” just like you always used to say. “FROM STEM TO STERN.” I kept repeating that and then Aunt Helen and me was laughing about the way you used to say it and about how you talk and your Irish accent, “From Stem To Stern,” like a pirate or something. Haha. Don’t get mad. I miss you. Pops. Love You. Shawn.

Saturday Morning: The Library

Shawn:  Did you see a piece of paper with writing on it? … like a letter?

Librarian: (Curtly, not looking up from her desk.) No.

Shawn: I was in here after work last night trynna do my homework, and wrote the letter, and now I can’t find it.

Librarian:  (Still not looking up.) Why don’t you check around the table where you always work.

Shawn:  Where’s the maps of Ireland. They say my grandfather might have to go back there even though he doesn’t want to.

Librarian: (Still looking down. Staccato.) Geography. Under Great Britain.

Shawn: (With an angry edge.) It’s not in Britain.

Librarian: (Looking up.) Yes, It is. Aisle 4, Shelves 10 through 17. Clearly labeled Great Britain including Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Shawn: (Pointing to the green tattoo on his forearm) Just remember, 26 Plus 6 equals ONE.

Librarian: (Loudly, Pointing Finger at Shawn.) Quiet.

Shawn: (Louder.) No!

Franklinville High School

I had already found the letter on the floor in the back of the classroom while grading papers and cleaning the room on Friday evening. That’s when I read the letter and realized that Shawn must have dropped it that day during class. Shawn was new in our school. His body language was terse. He seemed beaten and bent inward. He refused to make eye contact. He never talked in class. When I asked him why he slept on his desk everyday, he said that he worked most nights and that he was exhausted all day. That’s all I knew about Shawn. But then, I looked at the address on his file and recognized that the neighborhood where Shawn lived was near the  block where my grandfather owned a bar many decades ago. Jimmy’s Pub opened at 7 in the morning for guys coming off the night shift at the Stetson factory and for other graveyard workers. And some 7 a.m. drinkers were guys on their way out to jobs they hated in center city offices and, then, there were the guys who had been out all night drinking and wanted one last shot before they did their daily perish. Cousins right off the boat from Ireland lived above the bar. I worked there while I was going to college. It was a hole of a place where I learned the codes of the Belfast streets thousands of miles away, streets that I’d never actually seen. I could imagine Shawn’s grandfather, his aunt and the way that prison must have  shaken them up and spit them out emotional wrecks fractured by fear, frustration and anger, fractured people living fractured lives.

Over the weekend, I read the letter over and over and wondered how Shawn would feel about my seeing his message to his grandfather. I put it in an envelope and wrote a simple note, “Found on Floor of Classroom” and, then, I noticed that I had planned for our class had to read Modern writers like Langston Hughes and James Joyce. So, I decided to begin on Monday with with a meditation. I planned for us to read the Langston Hughes poem that begins, “I’ve Known Rivers.”

Before class, when I gave the envelope to Shawn, he tore it open and sat down immediately in one of the desks at the front, disclosing the letter’s folds and smoothing out the page while he read it, running his fingers along each line as he read. Class started and he looked at me and I smiled at him hoping to silently say, “yes,” with the smile, yes, I read the letter. Shawn hesitated, looked down, then looked up again and smiled back, nodding. Then, I handed out a worksheet asking the entire class to meditate on the lines that Langston Hughes wrote as a young poet, traveling along the Mississippi River in a train headed South:

“I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

I played the music that the jazz musician, Gary Bartz composed to accompany the Hughes poem. I asked just one question beneath the poem’s lines.

“As you read, how do you connect the poet’s rivers to his soul?”

After class:

Shawn:  Mister, thanks for finding the letter.

Me:  I felt lucky to read it, Shawn.

Shawn: I’m not sending it cuz I just learned that my granda is going to the prison’s hospice which means that he’s very sick.

Me: (Pausing, lump in throat.) He must be very proud of you. I think you should send it to him or give it to him when you visit.

Shawn: I ain’t got the time or the money.

Me: Still, he must be proud of you.

Shawn: I don’t know if they’re gonna send him back to Ireland or keep him here cuz he’s so sick. My aunt told me about this hospice thing on Friday night when she visited from the convent in Allentown where she works.

Me: The worst part must be not knowing what’s gong to happen, right?

Shawn: (Crying, as he looked away as if he were seeing the far shore of a river through his tears, and quoting the poem.) And My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Me: It’s quite a poem, Shawn.

Shawn: I’ll think about it at work. It’s really good.

Me: Don’t forget your homework. (Smiling, ironically).

Shawn: I never forget my homework.  (Smiling back, ironically).

Homework

Translate the following passage from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into your own words. Remember that this excerpt is taken from the end of Anna Livia Plurabelle’s section of Joyce’s novel. Hint: The River Liffey is the scene of this passage, all of which occurs not during the day but at night deep in the language of a very long dream about all rivers.

Monday Evening: The Library

Shawn: Do you wanna hear my homework?

Librarian: I’m busy. Don’t you work today?

Shawn: I skipped work to do my homework first then walk up to the Wal-Mart parking lot to be on the river for a minute.

Librarian: (Smiling). Aren’t you very organized, Shawn?

Shawn: This guy from Dublin’s book is all rivers. You wanna hear my translation of his story about rivers?

Librarian: Yes. But quietly.

Shawn: I’ll whisper it. It’s even better that way.

Librarian: You are a very strange young man. Have you been told this?

Shawn:   (whispering)

I can barely hear you with the waters of the river.

The waters chitter. The bats flitter.

Are you not going home alone?

Think of the waters of the River Liffey in Dublin?

Think of the waters of Lough Neagh near Belfast?

I feel as old as that Elm Tree over there.

This is Shawn’s story. This is Seamus’s story.

Good Night, Grand farther, the farther away you go.

Shawn means John.

Seamus means James.

Who were John and James sons or daughters of?

Goodnight, Pops.

Tell me another story about plants and rocks.

Please tell me.

Beside the waters, there hither like the Delaware River.

There thither like the Liffey, the Shannon, the River Erne,

The River Boyne, The River Foyle.

Now, I’m with you beside the rivering waters

The hitherandthithering waters of

Goodnight ……..

Librarian: (Looking up, mouth open in astonishment.) And you wrote that based on the passage in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake?

Shawn: (Nodding. Smiling. Agitated). And now I have to get over to the Wal-Mart parking lot to listen to see the river and tell it what I can hear and telepath it all to my granda who’s up north waiting for the words to echo their way up and back to him.

Librarian: You seem relieved.

Shawn: Of course, it’s sad but I have to say good bye.

(Above) Clinton Cahill’s exhibition “Illuminating the Wake,” which are Cahill’s interpretive drawings on the text of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, synthesizing his encounters with the novel’s dreamscapes. Taken from the web site of the James Joyce Centre in Dublin (https://jamesjoyce.ie/illuminating-the-wake-no-31/).

(Above) Image from web site of Monica and Tyler Aiello’s gallery exhibition titled, “I’ve known Rivers,” which are images based upon the poetry of Langston Hughes (http://www.studioaiello.net/).

*All persons mentioned in this story are fictional (and bear no connectin to actual, historical persons) with the exception of Langston Hughes and James Joyce. All places, also, with the exception of the Wal-Mart parking lot overlooking the Delaware River also are fictional.  

(Below) Youtube Musical Composition by Gary Bartz, based upon Langston Hughes’ poetic lines, “I’ve Known Rivers.”

[teacher-lavin]

Shawn’s Story*

Shawn’s fable unfolds along the banks of the rivers that authors, Langston Hughes and James Joyce traveled. Also, here to be found is the River Delaware as it flows through Philadelphia and environs. Among other themes, this is a tale of incarceration and deportation. Waiting at the story’s edges, readers will notice that we also meet with a lot of homework,  –and a very discerning librarian.

(Above) Image Taken from Salmon Ireland’s web site (Salmonireland.com), is a landscape photograph of the River Foyle.

The Letter

Hi Pops, thanks for your letter. Too bad, the prison blocked a lotta words out. What I got was that you’re getting to go out with work crews to pick up trash on the highways. It must be weird being chained together like that and having guards with shotguns and such watch over you guys  while you’re just basically cleaning the roadside. I really like the part where you said that you all go up to the highway right next to the river and that you always take a minute from sweepin or whatever  to look out over the riverwaves and see the sun reflect on the swelling banks and feel the breeze. So, that was a really good idea where you said if after work some day I walk to the far end of the Wal-Mart parking lot on Delaware Avenue where it comes up on the river that I’ll be looking out over the same Delaware River as you seen earlier, and I’ll be seeing the same waves, and the same currents, and the same mists and breezes playing off the wave- tops, hearin the same sounds and tasting that little bit of sea salt that the river has from its trip out to the ocean. Imma do it. I miss you, Pops. If I go down that parking lot where it looks across to  Camden on the opposite bank on the same day maybe when y’all been out on the highway cleanup crew in your orange prison suits, I’ll be able to catch up with your spirit, at least. And, I’ll say all the stuff you used to listen to me carrying on about. How muad I get at everything and how sad and sorry I feel about other stuff. Remember? I ain’t seen Mom or Dad at all for a long time. But Aunt Helen came down from the convent last week and helped me clean the place. So, we scoured the joint from “stem to stern” just like you always used to say. “FROM STEM TO STERN.” I kept repeating that and then Aunt Helen and me was laughing about the way you used to say it and about how you talk and your Irish accent, “From Stem To Stern,” like a pirate or something. Haha. Don’t get mad. I miss you. Pops. Love You. Shawn.

Saturday Morning: The Library

Shawn:  Did you see a piece of paper with writing on it? … like a letter?

Librarian: (Curtly, not looking up from her desk.) No.

Shawn: I was in here after work last night trynna do my homework, and wrote the letter, and now I can’t find it.

Librarian:  (Still not looking up.) Why don’t you check around the table where you always work.

Shawn:  Where’s the maps of Ireland. They say my grandfather might have to go back there even though he doesn’t want to.

Librarian: (Still looking down. Staccato.) Geography. Under Great Britain.

Shawn: (With an angry edge.) It’s not in Britain.

Librarian: (Looking up.) Yes, It is. Aisle 4, Shelves 10 through 17. Clearly labeled Great Britain including Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Shawn: (Pointing to the green tattoo on his forearm) Just remember, 26 Plus 6 equals ONE.

Librarian: (Loudly, Pointing Finger at Shawn.) Quiet.

Shawn: (Louder.) No!

Franklinville High School

I had already found the letter on the floor in the back of the classroom while grading papers and cleaning the room on Friday evening. That’s when I read the letter and realized that Shawn must have dropped it that day during class. Shawn was new in our school. His body language was terse. He seemed beaten and bent inward. He refused to make eye contact. He never talked in class. When I asked him why he slept on his desk everyday, he said that he worked most nights and that he was exhausted all day. That’s all I knew about Shawn. But then, I looked at the address on his file and recognized that the neighborhood where Shawn lived was near the  block where my grandfather owned a bar many decades ago. Jimmy’s Pub opened at 7 in the morning for guys coming off the night shift at the Stetson factory and for other graveyard workers. And some 7 a.m. drinkers were guys on their way out to jobs they hated in center city offices and, then, there were the guys who had been out all night drinking and wanted one last shot before they did their daily perish. Cousins right off the boat from Ireland lived above the bar. I worked there while I was going to college. It was a hole of a place where I learned the codes of the Belfast streets thousands of miles away, streets that I’d never actually seen. I could imagine Shawn’s grandfather, his aunt and the way that prison must have  shaken them up and spit them out emotional wrecks fractured by fear, frustration and anger, fractured people living fractured lives.

Over the weekend, I read the letter over and over and wondered how Shawn would feel about my seeing his message to his grandfather. I put it in an envelope and wrote a simple note, “Found on Floor of Classroom” and, then, I noticed that I had planned for our class had to read Modern writers like Langston Hughes and James Joyce. So, I decided to begin on Monday with with a meditation. I planned for us to read the Langston Hughes poem that begins, “I’ve Known Rivers.”

Before class, when I gave the envelope to Shawn, he tore it open and sat down immediately in one of the desks at the front, disclosing the letter’s folds and smoothing out the page while he read it, running his fingers along each line as he read. Class started and he looked at me and I smiled at him hoping to silently say, “yes,” with the smile, yes, I read the letter. Shawn hesitated, looked down, then looked up again and smiled back, nodding. Then, I handed out a worksheet asking the entire class to meditate on the lines that Langston Hughes wrote as a young poet, traveling along the Mississippi River in a train headed South:

“I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

I played the music that the jazz musician, Gary Bartz composed to accompany the Hughes poem. I asked just one question beneath the poem’s lines.

“As you read, how do you connect the poet’s rivers to his soul?”

After class:

Shawn:  Mister, thanks for finding the letter.

Me:  I felt lucky to read it, Shawn.

Shawn: I’m not sending it cuz I just learned that my granda is going to the prison’s hospice which means that he’s very sick.

Me: (Pausing, lump in throat.) He must be very proud of you. I think you should send it to him or give it to him when you visit.

Shawn: I ain’t got the time or the money.

Me: Still, he must be proud of you.

Shawn: I don’t know if they’re gonna send him back to Ireland or keep him here cuz he’s so sick. My aunt told me about this hospice thing on Friday night when she visited from the convent in Allentown where she works.

Me: The worst part must be not knowing what’s gong to happen, right?

Shawn: (Crying, as he looked away as if he were seeing the far shore of a river through his tears, and quoting the poem.) And My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Me: It’s quite a poem, Shawn.

Shawn: I’ll think about it at work. It’s really good.

Me: Don’t forget your homework. (Smiling, ironically).

Shawn: I never forget my homework.  (Smiling back, ironically).

Homework

Translate the following passage from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into your own words. Remember that this excerpt is taken from the end of Anna Livia Plurabelle’s section of Joyce’s novel. Hint: The River Liffey is the scene of this passage, all of which occurs not during the day but at night deep in the language of a very long dream about all rivers.

Monday Evening: The Library

Shawn: Do you wanna hear my homework?

Librarian: I’m busy. Don’t you work today?

Shawn: I skipped work to do my homework first then walk up to the Wal-Mart parking lot to be on the river for a minute.

Librarian: (Smiling). Aren’t you very organized, Shawn?

Shawn: This guy from Dublin’s book is all rivers. You wanna hear my translation of his story about rivers?

Librarian: Yes. But quietly.

Shawn: I’ll whisper it. It’s even better that way.

Librarian: You are a very strange young man. Have you been told this?

Shawn:   (whispering)

I can barely hear you with the waters of the river.

The waters chitter. The bats flitter.

Are you not going home alone?

Think of the waters of the River Liffey in Dublin?

Think of the waters of Lough Neagh near Belfast?

I feel as old as that Elm Tree over there.

This is Shawn’s story. This is Seamus’s story.

Good Night, Grand farther, the farther away you go.

Shawn means John.

Seamus means James.

Who were John and James sons or daughters of?

Goodnight, Pops.

Tell me another story about plants and rocks.

Please tell me.

Beside the waters, there hither like the Delaware River.

There thither like the Liffey, the Shannon, the River Erne,

The River Boyne, The River Foyle.

Now, I’m with you beside the rivering waters

The hitherandthithering waters of

Goodnight ……..

Librarian: (Looking up, mouth open in astonishment.) And you wrote that based on the passage in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake?

Shawn: (Nodding. Smiling. Agitated). And now I have to get over to the Wal-Mart parking lot to listen to see the river and tell it what I can hear and telepath it all to my granda who’s up north waiting for the words to echo their way up and back to him.

Librarian: You seem relieved.

Shawn: Of course, it’s sad but I have to say good bye.

(Above) Clinton Cahill’s exhibition “Illuminating the Wake,” which are Cahill’s interpretive drawings on the text of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, synthesizing his encounters with the novel’s dreamscapes. Taken from the web site of the James Joyce Centre in Dublin (https://jamesjoyce.ie/illuminating-the-wake-no-31/).

(Above) Image from web site of Monica and Tyler Aiello’s gallery exhibition titled, “I’ve known Rivers,” which are images based upon the poetry of Langston Hughes (http://www.studioaiello.net/).

*All persons mentioned in this story are fictional (and bear no connectin to actual, historical persons) with the exception of Langston Hughes and James Joyce. All places, also, with the exception of the Wal-Mart parking lot overlooking the Delaware River also are fictional.  

(Below) Youtube Musical Composition by Gary Bartz, based upon Langston Hughes’ poetic lines, “I’ve Known Rivers.”

[teacher-lavin]

Opium Confessions on a SEPTA  Bus*

At back of a City Bus, In A blur, Emmet Poorboy slumps against a window in  prison browns rolled-up sleeve revealing an Irish flag.

Emmet: Mom. It's Emmet. Listen I'm calling cuz I was in this group at counseling today and we got talking about child abuse and I realized you really abused me when I was a kid.

Trish, the ghost of an out queer former drug dealer, is speaking to Thomas De Quincey, the author of the Opium Confessions (1819). They entered the bus at the 30th Street stop as it heads away from Center City and into the vast array of neighborhoods on the North Side. The ghosts enter and position themselves respectively on seat in front of and behind Emmet as he speaks into his cell phone.

Trish: No! D-bone. The answer is No. I’m tired of being set up.

De Quincey: Can you not consider forgiving him? (Gesturing toward Emmet)

Trish: I told you, No!

Emmet: Ma, remember the times when you slammed my head against the table or beat me up in the hall? It hurt and it made me so angry.

Trish: (droning) He stands over my almost lifeless body and empties the rest of the clip into my head! So , then, he does five and a half years up state, and starts frontin that he’s the victim of the cops who arrested him, the guards, his lawyer, the chaplain, the teacher at the prison school, the whole system. But tell me this, ‘How is he a victim?” When he shot me for money, I kinna felt like the vicitim. And I guess now, he’s trynna guilt his own ma? Tell you what, chump, Imma say a Hail Mary for you. (to DeQunicey) How can you even bring me here?

Emmet: But here's the thing. Here's the reason why I was angry. I knew that you were under a lot of pressure and that Pat was threatening you and that the situation was bad. So, I wasn't really mad at you for beating me.

Trish: I writhed in pain at his feet before he blew the final five holes in my head. D-bone, he not only turned out the lights, he robbed me of one last glance at my junkie mom strapping up  under the el, one last, sweet good bye kiss for Kathy’s cheek, one last breath of Philly air wafting off the Delaware. He stole my life, D. That’s so grimy.

De Quincey: I importune you, Listen, Trish.

Emmet: And I wasn’t mad at Pat for forcing me to do those things. You know what I mean, mom. For god’s sake I was only ten years old.

Trish: (to the thin air, lamenting what she’s hearing) What?

Emmet: What I was mad at you for was your taking the situation out on me. I was mad at you for not dealing with Pat. I didn't deserve that mom, and I knew that you didn't deserve that either.

Trish: (Speechless. Gazing into space, affect: astonished as if something has just occurred to her).

De Q: Do you hear what he is saying?

Trish: How can I not get this?

Emmet: So, now it just doesn't make sense to me. It seems like you've just given up, and I wanted to tell you that, I really believe that you're better than that.

Trish: You know, DeQuincey, I wish I coulda said that to my old lady.

De Q: you still can, Trish.

Emmet: You know how if we meet downtown. You always say you like McDonald's and how we should just eat there? I think we should go someplace better. I think that you're better than that.  Can we do that sometime? Tommy can afford to give you 50 bucks or whatever. You're worth that, ya know.

Trish: (to audience, shaking head in wonder) Ladies and Gentlemen! Emmet Poorboy, Philadelphia’s finest Philosopher.

Emmmet: I actually think that you should get a restraining order against Tommy. Or .... Do something. I want you to take care of yourself. Ya know?

Trish: (again, to the audience) We can assume that Tommy is ma’s latest unforgiving brute.

De Q: (softly.) Trish. What must you be thinking?

Trish: (reflective tone.) Thomas De Quincey, I must be thinking that, when Emmet Poorboy, professional beast, was a ten-year-old abused child that he must have been an innocent, precious, sensitive being. Emmet Patrick Poorboy must have been an angel in his own way.

De Q: (Pleading) How can you not consider forgiving, Trish? For you? For your hell-bent mother? For the Emmet that was once an innocent?

Trish: (Expressing doubt, shaking her head at DeQuincey, looking at audience.) Well, I don’t know about all that.

Emmet: Aright, mom, I'll talk to you later.

Trish: (Speaking to Emmet) Emmet, imma tell you what you just told your mom. (Quoting Emmet’s cell-phone conversation.) I think we should go someplace better. I think that you're better than that.  Can we do that some time? (Pauses. Gazing Ironically at Emmet.) You're worth that, ya know.

De Q: Are you saying you forgive him Trish?

Trish: I forgave him thirty years ago when his mom abandoned him with that creep, Pat. I forgave him twenty minutes ago when you told me to “be silent and hearken to this little lamb’s lament.”

De Q: I honor you as my muse, Trish.

Trish: Save the nostalgic longing for your Sweet Paula whose essence hovers on the mists of the River Thames, D. I gotta bounce.

De Q: is your own mother languishing in a heroin haze somewhere under the el, looking just slightly more like a ghost than you or I?

Trish: (Quoting Emmet, again. Ironic Tone.) You know how if we meet downtown. You always say you like McDonald's and how we should just eat there? I think we should go someplace better. I think that you're better than that.  Can we do that sometime? Tommy can afford to give you 50 bucks or whatever. [Pauses, looks again at audience] You're worth that, ya know.

De Q: This is farewell, Trish.

Trish: Away, to England, D-Bone. (Halts and Kisses Emmet’s forehead.) Emmet, my precious child. I have an errand for both of us .

I have a junkie to find before dawn when she starts looking for another fix.

Imma tell her, (holding a fake cell phone to her face) we gotta find a better place.

(Now Imitating Emmet’s manner.) Ma, I think that you're better than that.  Can we do that sometime? You're worth that, ya know. Aright, mom, I'll talk to you later.

*All of the characters in this play are fictitious and bear no relation to personages, living or dead, with the exception of Thomas DeQuincey who just over two-hundred years ago began his journey back from the delirium of opium addiction. 

[teacher-lavin]

Bon Bon, Jan Savitt, and me*

Photo from Vol Vistu Gaily Star (1939). 

See author’s reading of story in audio file at bottom. Also, Recording of Bon Bon performing “The Masquerade is Over.”

I found an envelope on my desk full of letters that I must have written back in brighter times. This one was on top. 

Dear Bon Bon:

I hope that’s OK, --to call you “Bon Bon.” I met you in 1974, the year just before you passed. You had invited my dad to visit, and he brought me along. I was 19. All I knew was that you were the crooner whose silken voice fronted the Jan Savitt Orchestra in the 1930s when my dad was a trombone player with the band.

Big handshakes when we arrived. I think you had been ill, and you were staying in Philly with your sister or an aunt. Trying to seem grown, I said, “Bon Bon, it’s great to meet you.” But my dad cut me down, saying, “That's Mr. Tunnell, to you, boy. Who do you think you are?” So, I corrected myself, “Sorry, Mr. Tunnell.” And you smiled and said, “Don’t pay that old goat no mind.” And then you candidly asked my dad, “Jack, does he play?” And my dad said, “He’s terrible.”

The room had an audience of three or four of your cousins and a blind lady from the neighborhood. There was also a delicate young woman about my age, a niece. My dad was being very courteous and fun with everybody, except me, of course. He usually reserved his jovial laugh, and decorous, joking manner for people whom he wished to impress. I was easily embarrassed in those days, particularly in “company” with my father. The reason was that my dad’s way of dealing with me was to attack when he sensed my weakness. The worst was when we were with other people.

So then, my father dressed me down again with a rebuke, “Kid, when are you gonna get a lip?” Shaking his head, he lamented loudly that I never practiced. But, Bon Bon, you put your arm around me, and whispered in a tone that  the whole room could hear, “Young fella, your old man ain’t never gonna change. He’s just wound up too tight. I would love to hear you playing or even leading a band somewhere, someday. I know you will.” You were speaking like you could look into my future. Then, you quipped, “You gotta have a sweet-lookin’ trumpet or a trombone, right?” I nodded. That was a lie. And you included my dad in the musing, “Jack, we gonna buy this kid a valve-trombone like that silver-plated horn we bought for you. Remember that, Jack? I told Mr. Savitt to get that one for you! You always made it sing.”

Bob Bon! The airy way you intoned your words was a melody. Your speaking voice rose and fell like a brass choir. Your phrasing, your pauses weren’t just talk, your way of speaking was like Coltrane and Miles trading licks at a jam session.  While speaking, you walked me across the room and introduced me to your niece, and she greeted me with this kind, innocent, bashful, welcoming single syllable and  accompanying gesture, “Hi.” She raised her hand faintly and tapped the air twice delicately. I melted. You prompted me, 

“Well, is it trombone or trumpet? I know Tommy Dorsey here would never let you play the sax." My dad rebutted, “Don’t mix me up with that scoundrel, Dorsey!” For my part, I was way off key at this point and, trying to sound mature and to join in the banter, I overstated my cause, “I play both! I play trombone and trumpet. Man, I’m bad.”

You saved me, halting and gazing at my old man, warning him, “Look out, Jack. He’s coming’ for you.” My dad just shook his head.

We were in the nice room at the front of your folks’ house where visitors came. When my mom and dad had been together, we had had a room like that. Drinks appeared. There was a lot of laughing. Once I started to feel the beer, I was OK. That’s how I met you. You were more than generous. You were a magnanimous presence. Well, the story continues. My dad and I left your family high and late that pallid summer afternoon. It was the seventies in Philly. The car radio played Temple University’s Jazz Station low, and against a background of static another friend of my dad, Hank Mobley, was wafting a Brazilian-styled Bossa melody from the car’s speakers. We were somewhere in Southwest Philadelphia. As we drove away, we were euphoric on so many memories you and my father shared. Skying on that feeling of friendship, --free associating like a long piano solo. We were inebriated by the luxury of having been together partying with good people. For the moment, I was drunk. And so I felt almost safe. Dad was telling me stories about you guys. I  knew that you were the star of Philly’s  Jan Savitt Orchestra. As my father wheeled his rusting Cadillac homeward, he told me that you were Catholic and that, while playing a gig in Pittsburgh where the band had to stay in a hotel, he met you early one Sunday morning walking to mass at a nearby Catholic church. He reminisced over the steering wheel, “It was a big band. Fifty people or more on the road.  But that singled Bon Bon and me out. We were the only two practicing Catholics. After that, we prayed together when the band was on the road on weekends.” It wasn’t just the whiskey talking, it was affection. From my dad, that was different. His voice went falsetto high and even broke a couple of times. He said you had “credibility” with Jan Savitt and that the bandleader followed your advice about musical arrangements, style and orchestra personnel. After you and my dad had gone to church  together, you must have commended his trombone playing to Savitt. So, the conductor began calling him up during performances from the back of the bandstand to the mike. Once up front, my dad said that he would crochet vamps and runs on the trombone behind “Bon Bon’s magical manner of lyricizing.” His horn had to echo your singing. The trombone had to blend, dipping in and out of your trademark sound. My dad concluded, “That was a great opportunity. Bon Bon opened the door for me.”

So, after leaving hotels in Reading and Scranton, Pennsylvania and Atlantic City and Cape May, New Jersey to seek out Sunday morning masses, doors started opening for my dad. I guess no matter how much hell you guys were raising through Saturday nights, you both went regularly together to communion the next morning. You had a bond. I learned that you knew lots of people in Pittsburgh, too. Through you, my dad met Art Blakey, Sonny Stitt and Ahmad Jamal all playing in the Hill District. “Bon Bon brought me to the party,” my dad remembered.

That suave evening on the way home, I also learned that Jan Savitt was real committed to launching an integrated orchestra back in the 1930s. As if teaching, my dad historicized, “Savitt was Jewish and he had seen too much hate. He wanted music to be a language that everybody could hear and speak and understand.” I was young, but I got that.

My dad remembered that, in some bands, white players were paid higher, belonged to separate musicians’ unions than black players and, “There were places we played where we had to enter through separate doors because the owners were racist idiots. It was humiliating to everybody. You see. You’ve got a friend who is including you in his life. You’ve got a friend who’s sharing his family and  connections with you. You’ve got a friend who is taking care of you. Then, you see him being excluded from the money and the respect he deserves, and there’s nothing you can do about it.  His family and friends always made space for me, --always were good to others. I was never cut out. No matter how hard he worked, Bon Bon was exploited, disrespected and insulted. He always showed courage. He always showed humanity.”  

The way home, punctuated by neighborhoods and stop lights and crosstown expressways, went quiet. Finally, my dad asked me, “So, what do you think?” Feeling unprepared, I said, “I don’t know,” Then, he reprimanded, “Well you’d better figure it the hell out, kid. You’d better figure things out or you’re going be stuck out in the cold.” 

We were back to being bitter. My dad by invective. Me by clenched silences. The stress of being with my dad made me sweat so much that I felt feverish. The hot summer evening suddenly seemed cold. So much had happened, I couldn’t make sense of  the currents sweeping through my shaking body. I got out of the car finally and my dad didn’t say “Bye,” he just said, “Figure it out!” That was over half-a-century ago, but since that time whenever I wanted to cheer my father up, I would mention your name. Especially at the end of his fight with cancer. As he’d lay listless in the aftermath of treatments, all I had to do was mention you if I wanted to see him pause and smile. Bon Bon! However briefly,  you brought me and my dad together. You made us whole. Yes. Your voice called friends and families and lovers to life’s weird party. Then, you sang, and those people felt the love. Audiences that came to hear you saw Black people and Jewish people and Irish Catholics and Protestants and Muslims all performing together back in the 1930s. You were a healer.

My dad was cruel, and I’ve had to deal with that. But he did love you. And the best gift he gave to me was the way he adored jazz musicians for their talents and their friendship.

He told me, “You can learn to love Jazz. It’s African music. It’s beautiful. Jazz is like being part of a big family. Ella and Dizzy and the Duke and the Count. They’re all connected. But you can never know what Black people in this country experience. You can never know the bigotry they have to face. You can’t know that from the inside.”

I got that as a kid. The only time I had ever seen the old man cry was near dinnertime on the day in July 1971 when Louis Armstrong died. I was just home from my job at a shoe factory in Norristown and was nursing a beer on my dad’s couch when the evening news suddenly reported that the Great Satchmo had passed. His face went wet with tears. “That man never played a bad note,” was all he could say, over and over, like a mantra.

Bon Bon! What I learned was that music --even the crooked notes like what I played on my student model trumpet at weddings and dances and other weekend gigs-- still had power over people.

So, no matter how angry I felt about my dad’s abuses to my mom or his bitter way with me, I have to thank you for caring. Even for that skinny, frightened teenager I was. You made me want to play bell tones and to share my sound. I wanted to soar on that silver valve-trombone that you and Jan Savitt bought for my dad.  That was a goal, right?  Well, even though my learning curve has been a spiritual mudslide, I feel your charm in moments of reverie like today writing this letter. I listen to you croon “The Masquerade is Over,” and I hear your voice honor love. I learned that, --at least. No matter whatever else has happened.

When the weather breaks, I’m going to be tracking down where you’re buried. I’m quite sure that must be somewhere in Pennsylvania. My dad once said that he would have loved to visit with a wreath from the two of us, --to remember you. I just want you to know all these years later that your voice is still heard, Mr. Tunnell.          

With Affection,

Johnny

* All of the persons named in this story are completely fabricated and fictitious and bear no connection to actual persons living or deceased, --except for Jan Savitt, George “Bon Bon” Tunnell, Ella Fitgerald, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, Ahmad Jamal, Art Blakey, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. 

[teacher-lavin]

Suspended Lives, Inspired Art

If you see Dulce N. Ramirez’s piñata image (photo fragment above), you may never return to who you were before you saw it. You will know your humanity in a new way.

Her art will change you. As will all nine of the journeys recounted in the innovative, genre-busting exhibition now on display at Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens (1020 South Street) until October 18th.  

To prepare for the courage with which these Latinx geniuses have reclaimed the piñata form to restore human warmth to the coldness and horror of their lives crossing borders, you should listen to their recorded accounts (in Spanish and English) posted online by Puentes de Salud, their sposnoring organization:

http://www.puentesdesalud.org/vidas-suspendidas/

There, as in the exhibit, you will know Dulce’s encounter with grief and loss. She tells her story with eloquence and candor, --with the same freshness that she has imbued in clay tones intimated in her sculpture. 

Yes. When you see her papier-mâché images in three dimensions, when you stand before her work, you will know the kindness and wisdom with which Dulce’s delicate craft has told her story. You will note the attention she has paid to hands, and to the bent abnegating posture of a parent turning away from the child embodied there. 

Dulce’s artwork brings back the humanity placed at risk by her brutal encounter with systems in the United States. Those systems consistently abandoned her. Thus, we find a unique form of grace, profoundly embedded in the trauma that she has called up from early experiences of abuse and at other formative moments of her childhood. 

Dulce has chosen creative action over the stultifying silence.  

This project was founded and coordinated by Nora Hiriart Litz, director for Art and Culture at Puentes de Salud. She is both artist and teacher. Given the dynamic spaces that she has collaborated in creating with these nine exhibitors, one needs also to stand in awe of  Nora Hiriart Litz’s sensitivity for dialogue. Her conversations with the artists have inspired their conversations with the images that they have crafted for us, in turn, to meet and to know at a profound level. Because ..... There in these images, we meet ourselves, our opportunities to embrace our humanity,   --instead of turning away.

Puentes de Salud (Bridges of Health) is an organization that promotes the health and wellness of Philadelphia’s rapidly growing Latinx immigrant community through advocacy for health care, innovative educational programs, and community building.

Dulce N. tells the story. Hers is a tale of creation. Her commitment as an inspired artist is to bring to her own child the openness, attentive love and kind reception that was denied to her as a child, as an adolescent and as a young adult. Hers is a choice that blesses all who see the installation with the same life force that one encounters at our Rodin Museum or in the creation myths of Mexico’s  Popul Vuh. 

I was Dulce’s English teacher at Kensington High School in the years immediately following her arrival in Philadelphia from Mexico. So, I witnessed her longing as a student to grow intellectually. I saw her searching for places and occasions to realize her abilities as an artist. And now, I can write about her as a talented leader and, most importantly, as an ethical and gentle force in family and community. Her journey to reach this moment has been a long and tortuous path. Her determination to pursue these accomplishments has, as long as I have known her, been based in a commitment to give the world empathy wherever it has given her grief. We owe Dulce Ramirez and her fellow artists as well as their teacher, Nora Hiriart Litz, a vote of gratitude for showing us the meaning of our humanity, the meaning of community.

[teacher-lavin]

Shawn’s Story*

Shawn’s fable unfolds along the banks of the rivers that authors, Langston Hughes and James Joyce traveled. Also, here to be found is the River Delaware as it flows through Philadelphia and environs. Among other themes, this is a tale of incarceration and deportation. Waiting at the story’s edges, readers will notice that we also meet with a lot of homework,  –and a very discerning librarian.

(Above) Image Taken from Salmon Ireland’s web site (Salmonireland.com), is a landscape photograph of the River Foyle.

The Letter

Hi Pops, thanks for your letter. Too bad, the prison blocked a lotta words out. What I got was that you’re getting to go out with work crews to pick up trash on the highways. It must be weird being chained together like that and having guards with shotguns and such watch over you guys  while you’re just basically cleaning the roadside. I really like the part where you said that you all go up to the highway right next to the river and that you always take a minute from sweepin or whatever  to look out over the riverwaves and see the sun reflect on the swelling banks and feel the breeze. So, that was a really good idea where you said if after work some day I walk to the far end of the Wal-Mart parking lot on Delaware Avenue where it comes up on the river that I’ll be looking out over the same Delaware River as you seen earlier, and I’ll be seeing the same waves, and the same currents, and the same mists and breezes playing off the wave- tops, hearin the same sounds and tasting that little bit of sea salt that the river has from its trip out to the ocean. Imma do it. I miss you, Pops. If I go down that parking lot where it looks across to  Camden on the opposite bank on the same day maybe when y’all been out on the highway cleanup crew in your orange prison suits, I’ll be able to catch up with your spirit, at least. And, I’ll say all the stuff you used to listen to me carrying on about. How muad I get at everything and how sad and sorry I feel about other stuff. Remember? I ain’t seen Mom or Dad at all for a long time. But Aunt Helen came down from the convent last week and helped me clean the place. So, we scoured the joint from “stem to stern” just like you always used to say. “FROM STEM TO STERN.” I kept repeating that and then Aunt Helen and me was laughing about the way you used to say it and about how you talk and your Irish accent, “From Stem To Stern,” like a pirate or something. Haha. Don’t get mad. I miss you. Pops. Love You. Shawn.

Saturday Morning: The Library

Shawn:  Did you see a piece of paper with writing on it? … like a letter?

Librarian: (Curtly, not looking up from her desk.) No.

Shawn: I was in here after work last night trynna do my homework, and wrote the letter, and now I can’t find it.

Librarian:  (Still not looking up.) Why don’t you check around the table where you always work.

Shawn:  Where’s the maps of Ireland. They say my grandfather might have to go back there even though he doesn’t want to.

Librarian: (Still looking down. Staccato.) Geography. Under Great Britain.

Shawn: (With an angry edge.) It’s not in Britain.

Librarian: (Looking up.) Yes, It is. Aisle 4, Shelves 10 through 17. Clearly labeled Great Britain including Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Shawn: (Pointing to the green tattoo on his forearm) Just remember, 26 Plus 6 equals ONE.

Librarian: (Loudly, Pointing Finger at Shawn.) Quiet.

Shawn: (Louder.) No!

Franklinville High School

I had already found the letter on the floor in the back of the classroom while grading papers and cleaning the room on Friday evening. That’s when I read the letter and realized that Shawn must have dropped it that day during class. Shawn was new in our school. His body language was terse. He seemed beaten and bent inward. He refused to make eye contact. He never talked in class. When I asked him why he slept on his desk everyday, he said that he worked most nights and that he was exhausted all day. That’s all I knew about Shawn. But then, I looked at the address on his file and recognized that the neighborhood where Shawn lived was near the  block where my grandfather owned a bar many decades ago. Jimmy’s Pub opened at 7 in the morning for guys coming off the night shift at the Stetson factory and for other graveyard workers. And some 7 a.m. drinkers were guys on their way out to jobs they hated in center city offices and, then, there were the guys who had been out all night drinking and wanted one last shot before they did their daily perish. Cousins right off the boat from Ireland lived above the bar. I worked there while I was going to college. It was a hole of a place where I learned the codes of the Belfast streets thousands of miles away, streets that I’d never actually seen. I could imagine Shawn’s grandfather, his aunt and the way that prison must have  shaken them up and spit them out emotional wrecks fractured by fear, frustration and anger, fractured people living fractured lives.

Over the weekend, I read the letter over and over and wondered how Shawn would feel about my seeing his message to his grandfather. I put it in an envelope and wrote a simple note, “Found on Floor of Classroom” and, then, I noticed that I had planned for our class had to read Modern writers like Langston Hughes and James Joyce. So, I decided to begin on Monday with with a meditation. I planned for us to read the Langston Hughes poem that begins, “I’ve Known Rivers.”

Before class, when I gave the envelope to Shawn, he tore it open and sat down immediately in one of the desks at the front, disclosing the letter’s folds and smoothing out the page while he read it, running his fingers along each line as he read. Class started and he looked at me and I smiled at him hoping to silently say, “yes,” with the smile, yes, I read the letter. Shawn hesitated, looked down, then looked up again and smiled back, nodding. Then, I handed out a worksheet asking the entire class to meditate on the lines that Langston Hughes wrote as a young poet, traveling along the Mississippi River in a train headed South:

“I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

I played the music that the jazz musician, Gary Bartz composed to accompany the Hughes poem. I asked just one question beneath the poem’s lines.

“As you read, how do you connect the poet’s rivers to his soul?”

After class:

Shawn:  Mister, thanks for finding the letter.

Me:  I felt lucky to read it, Shawn.

Shawn: I’m not sending it cuz I just learned that my granda is going to the prison’s hospice which means that he’s very sick.

Me: (Pausing, lump in throat.) He must be very proud of you. I think you should send it to him or give it to him when you visit.

Shawn: I ain’t got the time or the money.

Me: Still, he must be proud of you.

Shawn: I don’t know if they’re gonna send him back to Ireland or keep him here cuz he’s so sick. My aunt told me about this hospice thing on Friday night when she visited from the convent in Allentown where she works.

Me: The worst part must be not knowing what’s gong to happen, right?

Shawn: (Crying, as he looked away as if he were seeing the far shore of a river through his tears, and quoting the poem.) And My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Me: It’s quite a poem, Shawn.

Shawn: I’ll think about it at work. It’s really good.

Me: Don’t forget your homework. (Smiling, ironically).

Shawn: I never forget my homework.  (Smiling back, ironically).

Homework

Translate the following passage from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into your own words. Remember that this excerpt is taken from the end of Anna Livia Plurabelle’s section of Joyce’s novel. Hint: The River Liffey is the scene of this passage, all of which occurs not during the day but at night deep in the language of a very long dream about all rivers.

Monday Evening: The Library

Shawn: Do you wanna hear my homework?

Librarian: I’m busy. Don’t you work today?

Shawn: I skipped work to do my homework first then walk up to the Wal-Mart parking lot to be on the river for a minute.

Librarian: (Smiling). Aren’t you very organized, Shawn?

Shawn: This guy from Dublin’s book is all rivers. You wanna hear my translation of his story about rivers?

Librarian: Yes. But quietly.

Shawn: I’ll whisper it. It’s even better that way.

Librarian: You are a very strange young man. Have you been told this?

Shawn:   (whispering)

I can barely hear you with the waters of the river.

The waters chitter. The bats flitter.

Are you not going home alone?

Think of the waters of the River Liffey in Dublin?

Think of the waters of Lough Neagh near Belfast?

I feel as old as that Elm Tree over there.

This is Shawn’s story. This is Seamus’s story.

Good Night, Grand farther, the farther away you go.

Shawn means John.

Seamus means James.

Who were John and James sons or daughters of?

Goodnight, Pops.

Tell me another story about plants and rocks.

Please tell me.

Beside the waters, there hither like the Delaware River.

There thither like the Liffey, the Shannon, the River Erne,

The River Boyne, The River Foyle.

Now, I’m with you beside the rivering waters

The hitherandthithering waters of

Goodnight ……..

Librarian: (Looking up, mouth open in astonishment.) And you wrote that based on the passage in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake?

Shawn: (Nodding. Smiling. Agitated). And now I have to get over to the Wal-Mart parking lot to listen to see the river and tell it what I can hear and telepath it all to my granda who’s up north waiting for the words to echo their way up and back to him.

Librarian: You seem relieved.

Shawn: Of course, it’s sad but I have to say good bye.

(Above) Clinton Cahill’s exhibition “Illuminating the Wake,” which are Cahill’s interpretive drawings on the text of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, synthesizing his encounters with the novel’s dreamscapes. Taken from the web site of the James Joyce Centre in Dublin (https://jamesjoyce.ie/illuminating-the-wake-no-31/).

(Above) Image from web site of Monica and Tyler Aiello’s gallery exhibition titled, “I’ve known Rivers,” which are images based upon the poetry of Langston Hughes (http://www.studioaiello.net/).

*All persons mentioned in this story are fictional (and bear no connectin to actual, historical persons) with the exception of Langston Hughes and James Joyce. All places, also, with the exception of the Wal-Mart parking lot overlooking the Delaware River also are fictional.  

(Below) Youtube Musical Composition by Gary Bartz, based upon Langston Hughes’ poetic lines, “I’ve Known Rivers.”

[teacher-lavin]

Wilner’s Epiphany

Edwidge Danticat (below) is author of The Farming of the Bones, a narrative whose traumatic events resolve in a woman endowing her people’s lives with meaning by knowing and saying their names after they have gone and the stories that their names inspire. 

Edwidge Danticat’s books create safe spaces for students to share their trauma. 

Wilner’s Dream*

The dream repeats. Every time, Wilner wakes up, his soul trembling. Angry. Frightened. Disoriented. It’s always Friday night. He’s 12-years-old again. He’s with his grandmother. She’s signing to him. He’s signing back. She has her cheque from her job cleaning offices in center city. They’re in the line for the teller at the bank. Grandmother gestures and tries to say the words in Kreyol. She makes sounds that she cannot hear. Wilner is signing back that he has the list of stuff they have to buy at the market and that he knows there’s not much time to do the shopping and to return home to prepare the meal. Then, Wilner hears the man in line behind them complaining aloud, “I wish these damn deaf people would stop their damn grunting like damn animals. They’re a disgrace.” Wilner feels it like he’s been punched hard in the stomach. He turns to the man and retorts loudly and clearly, “Mister, why would you even say that!” The man’s eyes stare blankly, then his face flushes pink, and he goes defensive. Fingerpointing back, he hollers, “Son, I wasn’t talking to you.” 

The heavily armed bank security guard struts up to the man. Wilner’s grandmother, feeling confused, is signing questions about the guard and the man to Wilner. The security guard asks the man if Wilner is making trouble, and the man is pointing his stubby finger alternatively at Wilner and at his Grandmother and telling the guard that “he’s a rude boy” and that his grandmother is “incompetent and shouldn’t be allowed to wander around like this.” The man’s body is heavy and wheezes and gasps for breath whenever he says something. He acts like a drowning victim abruptly swallowing the air. The man pauses and gasps after every insult, after every threat a deep breath, and after every charge to the security guard, he gulps. 

That’s when the dream goes fever-pitch. That’s when Wilner sees red in his sleep. He always wakes up perspiring profusely and scared that he’s been thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and arrested. Dragged away by the police. He always wakes up frightened that his grandmother is lost somewhere, crying, moaning and distracted to the point of delirium and not able to understand where she is or what has happened. Wilner feels the terror that comes  with anger, fear and confusion. He’s awake now. He blinks. He is not in prison. Did he hurt the man? Pause. No. Grandmother passed two years ago. Wilner feels his face.No bruises. He’s in his room. Sigh. Relief. Finally, a moment’s calm. 

Wilner’s Epiphany

In the hallway on my way to class.

Wilner:    Mister, I have made a discovery.

Me:    Wilner, I can’t be late? Are you OK?

Wilner:  No. I have made a discovery.

Me:   Can you tell me before class tomorrow?

Wilner:  But no. This is very important.

 Class bell rings.

Me:  (Resigned to being late, again.) My goodness, what have you discovered?

Wilner: (Making fun of my way of speaking.) My goodness, it’s Alexander Graham Bell. He wasn’t trying to invent the telephone. He was trying to invent a hearing aid. (He Smiles.)

I congratulate Wilner on his discovery and run to class. Later, Wilner comes by and explains to me that he originally wanted to write an essay for our class on the history and origins of his cell phone. I didn’t know much about Wilner. I did remember that he had wanted to write about the technology of his cell phone. I also knew that he had a habit of speaking very carefully, as if each statement were a kind of mindfully conceived thesis. When Wilner began researching by reading online about Alexander Graham Bell, to whom the invention of the telephone is attributed, Wilner learned that Bell had been an advocate for the hearing impaired. Bell had been experimenting with tiny electric speakers to amplify sound within the ear. When Wilner realized that Bell was impassioned to improve the lives of deaf people because members of Bell’s family struggled with hearing problems, Wilner felt that the fates were speaking to him. Wilner explained that his own grandmother and his sister both had experienced hearing problems. 

Wilner: Mister, I learned something that I had not planned to learn.

Me: Wlll you change your topic to Bell’s invention of hearing aids?

Wilner: But no. I want to write about how when a person plans to learn one thing, he can end up learning other, unexpected things. 

Me: Wil, I’ve noticed that you speak several languages. How many languages do you speak?

Wilner: (Counting on his fingers.) Kreyol from Haiti and home. French from school in Haiti. Spanish from when we lived in the Dominical Republic. English from here. Sign language all my life. 

Me: How did you do it? How did you learn so many languages?

Wilner: I had to. (Reflecting.) To survive.

Me: Did Bell need to invent a telephone or a hearing aid? Was there a necessity that drove him to invent?

Wilner: (With respectful frustration.) If you’re saying that “Necessity is the mother of invention,” that would be a gross cliche. I’m saying the opposite. No one can control what they will learn. What we learn in life, we very frequently do not intend to learn. 

Me: (speechless.)

The Farming of the Bones

That year, Edwidge Danticat’s novel, The Farming of the Bones, came right after our AP Class’s reading of James Joyce’s Dubliners. Wilner seldom spoke in class. Usually, he would wait until the last moment of a conversation to add a confouding question. For example, one day, we had discussed the pathetic qualities of Maria, a character in Joyce’s story, “Clay,” and we had reached the point of examining Maria’s sadness when Wilner entered the discussion to say, “So, the story makes us sad that the old woman’s family betrayed her. I agree. But hasn’t Maria also betrayed her family and us the readers, too? Maria wasn’t the victim you want her to be. She chose to go to her relatives’ party. She chose to work in the laundry where she worked, and she chose to sing the song that  made everybody feel sorry for her. For me, she is courageous. She is not a victim. I don’t feel sorry for her. I believe that the author wants the readers to recognize how brave Maria is and how weak-minded people who feel sorry for other people can be. Maria knows that she is deaf and that she misses things. It’s not a fact that you or her family are keeping from her.” Usually, after Wilner’s question or comment, the room would go hush for a while. 

On the day that we finished reading The farming of the Bones, a group of students walked into the classroom complaining.  

David:  Lavin, I’m so mad about tis book. I stayed up late last night to finish it.

Me:   Why are you mad?

Vicki:  He’s mad because of what Amabelle did?

Ines: (Shaking the book in her hand unhappily.) It was a big disappointment. 

We began class before the bell rang that day. Students were conflicted by their feelings for the character, Amabelle, whose life story unifies the novel. She is a Haitian servant in the home of a wealthy Dominican soldier’s family. The story is set against the historical events surrounding the 1937 massacre of Haitians by the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo’s military. The majority of our class expressed anger with the book because the conclusion surprised them. Their collective condemnation of the Danticat’s novel went as far as Antonio saying, “Lavin, this whole novel was a waste of time because what happened last night or what didn’t happen.” Then, Wilner spoke.

Wilner:  (Addressing the entire class.) You know I’m just thinking that I never told anybody in class that I am from Haiti. Like so many of you, I lived in the Dominican Republic, too. So, I know those jokes about Haitians. You might have noticed that I didn’t laugh at them. Last night, you learned something about Amabelle, something that you didn’t expect to learn. Sometimes, you will be thrilled by learning what you didn’t expect. Sometimes, you will be horrified. I was not surprised by how Amabelle’s story ended in last night’s reading. Amabelle lost so much. The River ate her parents and other people in the book. The Dominican Police probably killed her lover, Sebastien. For me, the point was not that she lost those people, the point was that she loved them. Amabelle said all of their names and wanted to remember their lives. For me, Amabelle became all of those people, the people of Haiti who lived and died at that time. For me, they were all very beautiful because Amabelle loved them and tried to take them with her in her broken heart.

Class: (Speechless.)

In the classes after that day, it wasn’t unusual for Eva or Pedro to say, when the conversation reached a lull, “Wil. Tell us, what do you think? One such day, I had asked students to write about a dream that recurs in their lives and how they make sense of it. Several students turned to Wilner, at one point and asked him to read his dream account aloud to the class. Wilner had written about his dream in the third person. When he read from his dream journal, there was silence in the room.

Wilner: . . . . . . He always wakes up perspiring profusely and scared that he’s been thrown to the ground, handcuffed and arrested. Dragged away by the police. He always wakes up frightened that his grandmother is lost somewhere, crying, moaning and distracted to the point of delirium and not able to understand where she is or what has happened. Wilner feels the terror that comes  with anger, fear and confusion. He’s awake now. He blinks. He is not in prison. Did he hurt the man? Pause. No. Grandmother passed two years ago. Wilner feels his face.No bruises. He’s in his room. Sigh. Relief. Finally, a moment’s calm. 

Class: (Silent.)

Kyle:  Wil. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Your story is everyone’s story. (More Silence.)

Kyle: (Looking surprised.) 

Kyle, then, began clapping and the whole class joined in applauding, loud enough that the principal wondered from his office what ever can be going on in there. 

* All of the personages in this story are fictional fabrications with the exception of Edwidge Danticat whose novels and characters continually teach us lessons that we had not planned to learn.

[teacher-lavin]

Wilner’s Epiphany

Edwidge Danticat (below) is author of The Farming of the Bones, a narrative whose traumatic events resolve in a woman endowing her people’s lives with meaning by knowing and saying their names after they have gone.

Danticat’s books create settings for students to share their experiences with trauma.

Wilner’s Dream*

The dream repeats. Every time, Wilner wakes up, his soul trembling. Angry. Frightened. Disoriented. It’s always a Friday night. He’s 12-years-old, again. He’s with his grandmother. She’s signing to him. He’s signing back. She has her cheque from her job cleaning offices in center city. They’re in the line for the teller at the bank. Grandmother gestures and tries to say words in Kreyol. She makes sounds. Wilner is signing back that he has the list of stuff for the market and that he knows there’s not much time to buy the food. 

Then, Wilner hears the man in line behind them complaining aloud, “I wish these damn deaf people would stop their damn grunting like damn animals. They’re a disgrace.” Wilner feels it like he’s been punched hard in the stomach. He turns and retorts loudly and clearly, “Mister, why would you even say that!” The man goes blank, then his facial skin flushes pink, and he goes defensive. Fingerpointing back, he hollers, “Son, I wasn’t talking to you.” 

The heavily armed bank security guard walks over. Wilner’s grandmother is becoming confused. The security officer is asking the man if Wilner is making trouble, and the man is pointing a stubby finger at both Wilner and his grandmother and telling the guard that “he’s a rude boy” and that his grandmother is “incompetent and shouldn’t be allowed to wander around like this.” The man’s body is very heavy and wheezes and gasps for breath whenever he’s said something. He acts like he’s a drowning victim. He pauses to drink in air after every insult, after every threat a deep breath, and after every charge to the security guard, he gulps. 

That’s where the dream goes feverish. Wilner sees red in his sleep. He always wakes up perspiring profusely and scared that he’s been thrown onto the ground, handcuffed and arrested. Dragged away to the police station. He always wakes up frightened that his grandmother is lost somewhere crying, moaning and distracted to the point of delirium and not able to understand where she is or what is happening to her. Wilner feels the terror that comes with anger, fear and confusion. He’s awake now. Is he hurt? Did he hurt the man? What year is it? Grandmother passed two years ago. OK. He’s in his room, not a prison. Sigh. Relief. Finally, a moment’s calm.   

Wilner’s Epiphany

In the hallway on my way to class. 

Wilner:     Mister, I have made a discovery.

Me:          Wilner, I can’t be late. Are you OK?

Wilner:     No. I have made a discovery.

Me:         Can you tell me in class, tomorrow?

Wilner:    But no. This is very important.

Class Bell Rings.

Me:       (Resigned to being late, again.) My goodness, what have you                               discovered?

Wilner:     (Making fun of my way of speaking.) My goodness, it’s Alexander                        Graham Bell. He wasn’t trying to invent a telephone. He was trying to                  invent a hearing aid. (Wilner is smiling.)

I congratulate Wilner on his discovery. I run to class. Later, Wilner comes by and explains to me that originally he wanted to write an essay for our class on the history and origins of his cell phone. I didn’t know much about Wilner. I did know that he wanted to write about the technology of his phone. I also knew that he had a habit of speaking very carefully, as if each statement were a kind of mindfully conceived thesis. When Wilner began researching by reading online about Alexander Graham Bell, to whom the discovery of the telephone is attributed, Wilner learned that Bell had been an advocate for the deaf. Bell had been experimenting with electric speakers to amplify sound within the ear. When Wilner realized that Bell’s life in a family of deaf persons was what had motivated Bell, Wilner felt that the fates were speaking to him. Wilner explained to me that his grandmother had been deaf and that his sister was hearing impaired. 

Wilner:    Mister, I learned something that I had not planned to learn.

Me:         Will you change your topic to Bell’s invention of hearing aids.

Wilner:    But no. I want to write about how when a person plans to learn one                     thing, he can end up learning other things.

Me:         Wilner. I’ve noticed that you speak several languages. How many                         languages do you speak?

Wilner:    (Counting on his fingers.) Kreyol from Haiti and home. French from                       school in Haiti. Spanish from when we lived in the Dominican                               Republic. English from here. Sign Language my whole life.

Me:         How did you do it? How did you learn so many languages?

Wilner:    I had to. (Reflecting.) To survive.

Me:         Did Bell need to invent a telephone or was there a need for a hearing                    aid at that time in history?

Wilner:    (With respectful frustration.) If you’re saying that “Necessity is the                       mother of all invention,” that would be a cliche. I’m not saying that.                     I’m  saying the opposite. No one can control what they will                                   learn. What we learn without intending or trying; what we didn’t mean                 to learn. That will be the topic of my essay. 

Me:         (speechless.) 

The Farming of the Bones

That year, Edwidge Danticat’s novel, The Farming of the Bones, came right after James Joyce’s Dubliners in our AP Course. Wilner spoke seldom in class. Usually he would wait until the last moment of a conversation to add a confounding question. We had discussed the pathetic qualities of Maria, a character in James Joyce’s story, “Clay,” and we had reached a point of examining Maria’s sadness when Wilner entered the class’s conversation, “So, the story makes us sad that the old woman’s family betrayed her. I agree. But hasn’t she also betrayed her family and us, the readers, too? Maria made decisions. She chose to go to her relatives’ party. She chose the job where she worked, and she chose to sing the song that made everyone feel sorry for her. For me, she is courageous, not a victim. I don’t feel sorry for her. I believe that the author wants us to recognize how brave she is and how weak-minded people who feel sympathy for others can be. Maria is brave, not a victim who asks for pity. She knows that she’s deaf and misses things. It’s not a fact that her family or you are keeping from her.” Usually after Wilner’s question or comment, the room would go hush for a while. 

On the day that we finished reading The Farming of the Bones, a group of students walked into the classroom complaining before class started.

David: Lavin, I’m so mad about this book. I stayed up late last night to finish it. 

Me:     Why are you mad?

Vicki:   He’s mad because of what she did.

Me:     What who did?

Ines:    Amabelle, the woman in the book. The character. (Shaking the book as               she spoke with frustration).

We began class before the bell rang that day. Students felt conflicted by their  feelings for the character, Amabelle whose life story unifies the novel.  She is a Haitian servant in the home of a wealthy Dominican soldier’s family. The story is set against the historical events surrounding the 1937 massacre of Haitians by the Dominican Dictator, Rafael Trujillo’s military. The sweeping majority of our class expressed anger with the book because the conclusion surprised them. The collective condemnation of the book went as far as  Antonio saying, “Lavin, this whole book was a waste of time because of what happened last night, or what didn’t happen.” Then, Wilner spoke. 

Wilner:   (Addressing the entire class.) You know I’m just thinking that I never                    told anybody in class that I am from Haiti. Like so many of you, I lived                  in the Dominican Republic, too. So, I now the jokes about Haitians.                      You  might notice I never laughed at them. Last night, you learned                      something about Amabelle, something that you did’t expect to learn.                  Sometimes, you will be thrilled by learning what you didn’t expect.                      Sometimes, you will be horrified. I was not surprised by how                                Amabelle’s story ended in last night’s reading. Amabelle is very                            beautiful. She a very rich life, regardless of her poverty, savoring her                    life. She loved the parents that she lost. She loved her lover,                                Sebastien.   That was all very brave. She became the people from                        Haiti that she remembered after the massacre. Amabelle is all of those                people for me. 

Class:    (Speechless)  

In the classes after that discussion, it wasn’t unusual for Eva or Martin to say, when the discussion reached a lull, “Wil, tell us, what do you think?” One such day, I had asked students to write about a dream that recurs in their lives and how they make sense of it. Several students turned to Wilner, at one point and asked him to read his dream account aloud. Wilner had written about his dream in the third person. When he read from his dream journal, there was silence in the room:

. . . . . . . . .  He always wakes up perspiring profusely and scared that he’s been thrown onto the ground, handcuffed and arrested. Dragged away to the police station. He always wakes up frightened that his grandmother is lost somewhere crying, moaning and distracted to the point of delirium and not able to understand where she is or what is happening to her. He feels the terror that comes with anger, trembling and confusion. He’s awake now. Is he hurt? Did he hurt the man? What year is it? Grandmother passed two years ago. OK. He’s in his room, not a prison. Sigh. Relief. Finally, a moment’s calm.  

Kyle:      Wil. Thank you. Thank you. (Silence.)

Kyle, then, began clapping and the whole class applauded, loud enough that the principal wondered what ever can be happening in there. 

* All of the characters in this story are fictional fabrications with the exception of Edwidge Danticat whose novels and characters continually teach us lessons that we had not planned to learn. 

[teacher-lavin]

“Puerto Rican Obituary” Revisited: The James Joyce Files (Part Four)

A Short Fiction

Pedro Pietri (1944-2004), depicted above in Photograph from Poetry Foundation. 

Florentina Delgado rarely smiled.*  

Doctors had just told her that Caridad, her infant daughter, might need to have an operation. Florentina was, even at the age of 18 years, serious and driven by complex questions.  For each problem, she created a folder in a distinct color, labeled it, and filled it with pertinent documents and her notes. Tina’s notes made the Socratic Method seem idle-minded. She would position a prolific multitude of questions, her hand-written array of queries, in columns. She left many of the questions unanswered to move quickly to new questions. So that, when new questions occurred to her, she could add to the multi-variegated inquiry, she always carried the entire color-coded, rainbow of labeled folders in her book bag. There were that many problems when I met her. Tina and Cari, numerous folders neatly arranged, were facing a complicated spectrum of hard outcomes, and they were facing it all alone. 

AN OFFICE IN THE HOSPITAL

Tina: So, you’re telling me that I have to make the decision. And, that, if the operation goes bad, it will be my fault, my bad decision.  That’s what this document you want me to sign says?

Dr. Smith: Yes. It’s your responsibility.

Tina: Is that because you don’t want to take the blame if Caridad is disfigured or dies?

Dr. Smith: It’s just the law.

Tina: OK, Doctor. You have these medical students at all Cari’s appointments, and you told me that’s part of your other job, teaching medicine. And, there’s another paper here I need to sign to give X-Rays and info about Cari’s operation to the medical school for your teaching.

Dr. Smith: Yes.

Tina: I want Caridad to be paid for the info that comes from her case and pictures of her. And, I want you to sign a paper saying that the hospital will agree on a price, and I want you to sign a paper saying that you asked me, a high school student, with no training except the  A.P. Biology course that I took last year, to decide if you do this complicated operation on Cari. And I want someone to translate at these meetings where you ask me to sign papers like this. 

Dr. Smith: But your English is perfect.

Tina: I don’t understand all of the terms, and I heard a couple of your medical students speaking Spanish the last time you were examining Cari. Can you tell them to help instead of talking about stuff that has nothing to do with Cari?

Dr. Smith: I’m not sure.

Tina: About What?

Dr. Smith: Well . . . 

Tina: If you’re not sure, how can I make these decisions on my own? When do I have to tell you if I’ll sign these permissions for the operation? And when can you sign the paper I’m giving you? 

Against these odds, Tina’s voice was gentle. She spoke to the doctor with the same tranquility that her voice had when she spoke to Caridad or the principal of our school or to me. To “teach” Florentina, I had to study her method.

Compare James Joyce with another author.

The A.P. English exam has an essay section with open-ended questions, and, to prepare Tina and her classmates for the essay challenge that year, I gave them the very general assignment to “Compare James Joyce with another author.” Tina created a folder. Without hesitation, she labeled the folder: “Puerto Rican Obituary: Regained” and placed this quotation from James Joyce’s novel, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, as an epigraph at the top of her first page:

“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

----James Joyce

In Tina’s analysis, she paralleled Puerto Rican poet, Pedro Pietri with James Joyce’s concept of history as nightmare and focused her conclusions upon a single word, “race.” 

I learned so much from reading Tina’s essay that I asked her to make a presentation to our entire class of its essential question, which surfaced on her final page, “What, ultimately, is the connection between art and race?” Tina explained that as writers, Joyce and Pietri, show communities whose conscience has the potential to come to life. Art is the inspiration. In art, there is hope. 

Tina’s essay presentation was a performance in three questions:

Wouldn’t James Joyce’s portrait be pointless if his young man didn’t leave home to find out who he really was, not an Irish person but a human searching for meaning?

Isn’t Pedro Pietri painting a portrait of people who work their whole lives without the opportunity to wake up and realize the dream of their race, their human dignity, that has completely been robbed of them?

If your race is not Irish or Puerto Rican or Black, but if your race is your humanity, what does it take to wake society up to realize that humanity?

Thus, she read aloud, Pietri’s portrayal of the nightmare experienced by Puerto Rican people persistently present in the racism implicit in the American Dream for them as a dream betrayed:

These dreams

These empty dreams

from the make-believe bedrooms

their parents left them

are the after-effects

of television programs

about the ideal

white american family .....  --”Puerto Rican Obituary,” Pedro Pietri

Tina concluded her presentation with two more questions that resonate today: Isn’t  Pedro Pietri’s ironic gesture of bringing his audience to life in an obituary a message to wake up the human race to our equality? and Isn’t Pedro Pietri’s choice to read the poem in English at rallies in New York in the 1960s really purposed with awakening basic human dignity for all of us? 

(Above) Excerpts from documentary on the life of Pedro Pietri produced in 1976 by Pacifica Radio Station, including scenes of Pietri reading “Puerto Rican Obituary” at rallies.

Tina’s classmates cheered and applauded when she finished presenting her essay.  And, today I remember Tina’s valor as a student and feel that Pedro Pietri’s words remain alive. I should mention that Tina worked three jobs while attending high school. Fatigue was her way of life. It was all born in her love of Caridad. She worked, and her life became a space for reflection of Pietri’s lines:

They worked

They were always on time

They were never late

They never spoke back

when they were insulted

They worked

They never took days off

that were not on the calendar

They never went on strike

without permission

They worked

ten days a week

and were only paid for five

They worked

They worked

They worked

and they died

They died broke

They died owing

They died never knowing

what the front entrance

of the first national city bank looks like

Juan

Miguel

Milagros

Olga

Manuel

All died yesterday today

and will die again tomorrow  --”Puerto Rican Obituary” Pedro Pietri

Epilogue

By coincidence, I noticed a Facebook post last week by Florentina with a cool photo of  her and Caridad (now looking all grown, maybe five years old) and both of them all packed and ready to board an airplane for Puerto Rico. They were both smiling. When Tina did smile, it was like the curtain had been drawn back on a Renaissance painting. Tina was taking Cari to participate in demonstrations provoking the Governor’s renunciation. When I saw the post, I  remembered Tina’s presentation, and I felt that, somehow Pedro Pierti’s poetic spirit was traveling with Tina and Caridad, regaining the humanity which is the deeper race connecting us all. Imagine Pedro Pietri knowing how is obituary poem had been revisited and Phoenix-like become a new source of life and hope. 

*(All the names are fictitious and the characters whose stories they tell, except Pedro Pietri and James Joyce).

[teacher-lavin]

The Addict’s Last Needle, Jameses Baldwin & Joyce (Part Three)

One night, a fellow teacher called me to say that his father had died of a heroin overdose. My heart sank. About a month later, cleaning out his dad’s apartment, he found the needle that he believed his father had used to shoot up the last time. 

As a child, my friend witnessed police raids on his father’s meth lab and his dad’s incarceration and absence over long stretches. We had talked about his feelings of loss and isolation, therefore, he and I, together, have recognized the kind of rage children of addicts carry around as students. The signs of withdrawal in a child are discernible to the adult who has been through it.

When my friend found his father’s last needle, he had to make decisions. He chose to talk to students about it, about how broken his heart was. The children of addicts, as students, need not silence but conversations guided by thoughtfulness and caring. He told me, after a couple of weeks, “I think they’re opening up. It’s been therapeutic for me, too” 

Then, my friend got a call late one night. His niece, a woman in her twenties, a poet, had overdosed and died in the same way as his dad, shooting up. And, he, upon reflection, decided to ask students how we break these fatal cycles. At first, the answer was a consensus, “Well, addicts abandoned their kids. They chose drugs over their children and shunted their loved ones. Isn’t that what their children should do? forget them? Shouldn’t we, in turn, abandon them?” The questions was a good one. It moved a discussion about cycles, history, profoundly felt emotions, the arts, the Blues, images from novels, and, of course, our authors, James Joyce and James Baldwin.

This is how you respond when you get life-altering, bad news: physical displays between of hearing and un-hearing the news, between rejection and acceptance, repeating in search of some kind of peace. It’s you, spiraling out of control. You’re going in narrative circles!

James Joyce’s novel, Finnegans Wake goes in circles, in part, to celebrate Giambattista Vico’s rising, circular gyres that test the connections between the reader and the history of which she or he or they may become a part. 

There’s a version of that narrative spinning in philosophy. It is the historical dialectic spinning at the premise of Giambattista Vico’s concept of history which, of course, takes the shape of a vortex formed between past and present, between what is told and what is understood. 

It is also a structure James Joyce and Baldwin and composer John Coltrane used to negotiate horrible events. High school students are usually willing to experiment with ideas. Thus, we can invite students to a conversation between cones, whirlpools and helices that float vertically between our lowest moments in life and our highest moments.

Jazz composer, John Coltrane’s treatment of “The Blues” illustrates a similar vortex, it’s a cone or a spinning gyre, repeating and hovering above jazz performer and her audience, between what is told and what is heard, between what is heard and what is, finally, accepted. 

It’s bad news, but it’s good news. It’s the Blues set into a harmonic continuum like a fugue. 

Imagine, Coltrane blowing his composition, “Spiral,” whose title announces how the tones descend, lower and lower, with each chorus, transforming the melody in each lament, but also rising and releasing the players and the audience from the sad, dissonant chords and transcending the sense of fall and loss as Coltrane’s saxophone solo soars. It’s trauma as art. And, its potential is healing. 

James Joyce’s Ulysses described this spiral, not as a jazz chorus, but as a “downwardtending lutulent reality.” The phrase occurs in the chapter of the novel devoted to imagining language as a musical fugue in which, like jazz spirals, a harmonic figure repeats and blends. A fugue is a melodic spiral. 

John Coltrane (depicted above) playing a soprano saxophone has become, perhaps, the composer of the 20th Century most associated with Cross-Cultural notions of transcendence, liberation and musical innovation. 

In the blues and in the Joyce novel, a whirlpool’s core spins and repeats and performs the miseries, the disgust, the desperation felt in rage and horror as the author is freed, expelling the raw hurt in a passage of lavishly written prose (of the novel) or on a horn, drum or bass figure played at a riff’s nanosecond velocity (in a jazz presentation). 

Both to his experiences reading and to his pallet as an aficionado of fine wines and food as well as his taste for music, James Baldwin asserted a sense of self by reflecting upon the emotional registers that tragic events realized in his spirit. 

A jazz musician acts out pathos on the stage in tandem with other musicians. The audience joins the creative scene.

Hell is exorcised. 

In communities where trauma is pervasive in the air with, for example, families fighting addiction and poverty, the narratives that we share in the curriculum possess rich openings for expression of hurt, contradictions, loss, confusion and the questions that come with late night phone calls bearing sadness.

So, the meaning emerges in this reflection on the connections between expelling trauma and seeking resonances wherever they arise to echo the patterns of significance found in Baldwin’s referencing Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

In James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the loss of faith signifies annihilation for protagonists. Both John Grimes and Stephen Dedalus struggle to believe and both reject the systems of belief that produced them through the didactic teachings of their church experiences. As they reject, they doubt, and, living with those doubts becomes the basis of discovering their imaginations and their identities as artists. 

For high school students who experience violence and disorientation and trauma, I believe that texts confronting readers with uncertainties go profoundly to the core of their search for stability in life. 

Especially when, as in my colleague’s sharing his encounter with emotional paralysis at finding the last needle his addicted father used, there is an equalizing effect between teacher and students. 

Texts that acquaint teachers and students mutually with the abyss of unknowns underlying their doubts also provide, like John Coltrane’s Spiral and Vico’s Gyres, a conically rising opportunity to reflect and to heal through the questions we can ask, through the trusting interrogation of what we can know, spinning together toward whatever horizons collectively can be envisioned. 

Elizabeth Dutro’s essay, “Writing Wounded” offers a social context for trauma in schools and emphasizes that:

“Trauma is destabilizing, at least in part, because challenging circumstances function differently for some of us than others when we carry them into public spaces--they function differently for teachers than for students, and how these experiences function for students is related to power, positioning and social positioning” (Elizabeth Dutro, “Writing Wounded: Trauma, Testimony and Critical Witness in Literacy Classrooms” English Education).  

Jazz is a conversation where everyone has a say. Horns, drums, piano, audience. That may be a model for the classroom’s potential democracy, and the existential epiphanies in Joyce and Baldwin’s writings may bring teachers and students to equalizing unknowns celebrated at that party in a different knod of classroom. Joyce’s young character “Eveline” waits in terror to emigrate or not to emigrate; Baldwin’s young musician, Rufus in the novel, Another Country, seeks a  place, however fatal, to which to escape racist America. The writings leave us with questions that resonate fugue-like in the music of John Coltrane whose own struggle with addiction resolved in a deepening spirituality. In a DNA whose double helix connects all in the cause of understanding our humanity, that struggle for enlightenment can join students and teachers and colleagues in imagining.

[teacher-lavin]

A Nicely Polished Mirror

The film, The Choice,  begins with several seconds of complete darkness and opens on the hallway outside Kensington High School, Room 204. In March 2012, Saint Joseph’s University’s Philadelphia Youth Solutions Project worked with film producer, Deron Albright and Kensington International Business High School to guide students in the production of a micro-film reflecting their identity, their insight and their hope. The film was used by students to promote discussion about violence and to advocate for intervention in violent situations.

The film “A Choice” came to be just as our class had reached the point of reflecting about a series of short stories and essays that posed the question, 

“Do our observations of our community match the way the world sees us?” 

“Is what we see in the mirror, what others see?” 

I invited Saint Joseph’s University’s sociologist, Maria Kefalas to visit class. She liked our question rooted in readings of Realism. Dr. Kefalas had just completed a book, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage (University of California Press, 2011). Her research had involved her in conducting interviews with more that 100 single mothers in the neighborhood around our school. She also recognized the quotation from James Joyce that we had copied and hung up as a poster on the wall, Realism: “a nicely polished looking glass.” Thank You, James Joyce. 

So, Maria Kefalas asked the group, 

“How do you think people in other parts of Philadelphia perceive Kensington?” 

“How are you perceived?” 

“Violent” was the answer. 

Then, the sociologist went to work. In that instant, she enlisted the students in the class in creating a sociological model of a fight. A full narrative took shape within fifteen minutes. We had created a huge diagram on giant yellow post-its. 

Maria Kefalas’ next questions were, 

“Could you re-enact a fight in a short film the next time I visit if I bring a film crew and a professional producer?” 

Enthusiasm grew in the following weeks. 

Then, one day for about six hours, filming of fight scenarios with our students as actors and directors transpired outside my classroom, right across the hall from the In School Suspension Room where the school had been sending students with a history of fighting. One of the students in suspension asked me what we were doing and I told, him, “Don’t worry. It’s only a movie,” and we both broke down into stitches of remorseless laughter. 

When the filming ended, the university people went away. Then, one day unannounced, they returned and showed about 15 minutes of raw footage of students on screen depicting brawls of various kinds. Our James Joyce poster still haunted us at the space on the wall at the front of the classroom. Reminding us of our readings in modern fiction, it still said simply, 

Realism: “a nicely polished looking glass” Thank You, James Joyce. 

Pointing to the poster, Deron Albright asked the class, 

“When you look at the raw footage here, is that what you see? a finely polished mirror image of who you are?” 

The pause was awkward. Adrian shook his head. Tabatha said, “But that’s not who we are, and that’s not how we want to be perceived.” The class decided to use the rest of the hour for a free writing exercise based on Deron Albright’s question. The question became a crucial ethical decision about “The Choices” we have when we see a finely polished reflection of ourselves. 

Once we shared students’ free writing with Maria Kefalas, she met with us and we decided to use excerpts from the students’ writing in the mirror of the raw film to create a voiceover for a cinematic treatment of the events leading up to a fight. That’s how the film “The Choice” developed.

Once instigated, that moment would be transformed from an impending hurtful act signifying a community without a heart to a figure in the finely polished looking glass deconstructing violence and stating the humanizing choices we have to walk away from violence, or to prevent the steps from repeating and to imagine other ways of being, of living in peace.

I love the final image that shows the whole group of everyone who chose to participate in the film. Because that group of students collectively performed such an adept rendition of the reality that they wanted to envision, I would like to invite students, parents, friends to write comments here remembering them, updating us on what they are doing and celebrating their accomplishment back in 2012 with Dr. Kefalas, videographer, Mike Gallagher and Producer, Deron Albright (also a Saint Joseph’s University Fine Arts Professor). Let’s make a list as the final part of this blog entry.

[teacher-lavin]

Waking from History’s Nightmare: Baldwin & Joyce (Part Two)

The Threat

Two weeks after school ended for summer, I had told a group of much younger teachers, “The students I teach have saved me much more than I ever saved any of them.” The next evening, the phone rang late. Muffled crying, then: “Lavin, I don’t know what to do. My mom is threatening to kill me and then to commit suicide. What should I do?” It was Candela (name changed here, another short story with a moral....). Overwhelmed, I told her to call her older sister and ask her to meet us at Burger King. 

James Baldwin’s views of teaching and James Joyce’s deep encounter with language play both pertain to the tale. 

First Baldwin:

“The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions,” 

Baldwin delivered this claim in his Talk given in a  New York City library to a group of majority white educators (October 1963). He roots his discourse within the mind and heart of the student, particularly the African American student, wishing teachers to know the student’s psyche as:  her or their or his or The child’s internal struggle. Therefore, Baldwin poses the questions as if within an imaginary stream of consciousness resonating within in the student’s mind. He  postulates further,

“. . . [the student will] say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his identity” -- James Baldwin, Talk To Teachers (1963).

Baldwin assumed, I decided, that the child’s coming to terms with big questions is a process whose uncertainties demand companions, and that accompanying a child or a young adult who is asking these big existential questions is the teacher’s role. 

Rewind Three Months Earlier: The Library Excursion

“Candela” told me about three months earlier that she was taking the bus to the Jesuit university on the other side of town after school. She was seventeen that year. Her mother signed a permission slip. Our high school had no library. Candela had complex questions about our readings: James Joyce’s fiction, James Baldwin’s essays, Gloria Anzaldua and Frantz Fanon’s writings and Adrienne Rich’s A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. I wanted her to experience a library as she restlessly interrogated how and what she would write.  

For that purpose, I had met Candela’s mom just the week before Candela’s library escapade at the end of her shift from midnight to 7:30 a.m. cleaning the elementary school two blocks away. Mrs. Cartagena (name changed), a small fiercely determined Cuban woman told me that she “was losing touch with her daughter” (my translation). She cried. She was exhausted.  I stayed until her tears allayed, and she said she hoped the library would broaden her daughter’s horizons.

Because I’d taught for decades at night as an adjunct professor in the Jesuit English department, I knew lots of librarians there and phoned ahead to set up Candela’s visit. The  University’s library is a weird mix: extensive collection of James Joyce criticism and Irish history, and a wonderful offering of contemporary poets from across the panoply of world cultures and languages. It goes deep.   

The morning after her visit to “Hawk Hill” (local term for the Jesuit tower looming  almost ivory over West Philadelphia), Candela had more questions than before her trip across town. “So, what is Poverty Awareness Week?” There were signs around campus advertising a week of awareness devoted to homelessness and world hunger. “I was in heaven with the books, taking them off the shelves, reading, then finding more and more and more?” She added excitedly, “Your friend, the librarian, showed me a book by Edwidge Danticat, signed by the author. Imagine that: Danticat actually must have held it in her hands. I felt like I went around the world, no lie, Mister.” 

Then, Candela paused and said, “Hey, if they really want Poverty Awareness, why don’t we just invite them over here?” She laughed an ironic laugh. 

The Threat, 

--Fast Forward Three Months, Burger King 

We met about thirty minutes after Candela’s tearful, frightened call, the three of us, Candela, her older sister (fictional name, Marisela) who had left her home twenty blocks away and her own three children with a neighbor (her husband was working nights) and me. We  replayed through tears their mother’s threats and her delirium. Marisela said that we must call 911, report the incident and the troubling words kill and suicide and that their mom would be detained, by the police and placed on meds. After about ten days she would be released. This had happened before. Marisela would sign the papers. 

Candela said that would be brutal, heartless and inhumane. Marisela countered that  there was no alternative. Then, Candela said that she couldn’t bear thinking of her mom confined in that cold, clinical environment where no one would understand her. Marisela said that there would be Spanish-speaking nurses and assistants.  Candela dissented, “But translation has to have nuance. It has to have sensitivity to the words and their meanings. It has to be dialogic.” Marisela looked perplexed. Candela explained, “I learned this all from James Joyce. Nobody gets mom’s meanings the way that I do.” Candela’s point came literally from our class. And, then, she cried and quoted her favorite line from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, “Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome?” And she added in her own words, “That’s so much more than Good Bye.” Candela  said that she needed to make sure her mom understood everything that had happened before she brokedown and everything that would follow from that point. Anything less, would be “a violation of the sadness of her story and of the sadness of her life.” Again, Marisela looked perplexed. A very shaky pause ensued, “Spontaneously, Marisela hugged Candela and repeated over and over, “Candy, I’m so proud of you, baby.” Together, they decided to call 911 and to be there with their mom and to accompany her and to do the translation whenever and wherever possible, in person, the two of them. 

If Baldwin’s distillation of the point of education brings teachers into a dynamic relation with the profoundly personal context within which students take risks and grow intellectually, his statement of the “paradox” of education, later in his essay, poses another problem of which we need to be aware. His terms inform the occasion, 

“The Paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated  ....  The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it -- at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change” - James Baldwin, Talk To Teachers (1963).

So much of what we do as students and teachers and family members and neighbors and co-workers is caught within the paradox that James Baldwin articulates as an admonition to “examine and try to change” society’s forms wherever our perceptions pose poignant questions and uncertainties. Candela and her sister, Marisela, revealed Baldwin’s wisdom to me as well as an assurance that bringing students literature in all of its complexity is crucial to acquainting them with complexity  so that they can distinguish what they want to believe and how they want to live. 

Candela came away with deep convictions about nuance and dialogic sensitivity to meaning. That’s where she felt and honored profound responsibilities to her mother. Isn’t that when words are most crucial, when we discern how they create meanings and, thus, relationships? It’s no surprise that Candela continued growing and  became an extraordinary leader in her community. That will be another story.

Our work, however, as students and teachers, is to keep that conversation alive with the integrity we learn from Baldwin responding  that “Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them” James Baldwin, A Stranger in the Village, 1955.