Friday
The next six years after our return from Yugoslavia are a bit of a blur, but having just read a cache of e-mails that Julia printed out at the time, I now understand why: our lives were unbelievably busy, what with having three boys heavily involved in sports (which meant constant chauffeuring) and Julia serving as assistant to the Dean of the Faculty, then returning to middle school teaching for a short stint, and then living in College Park during the week to work towards a PhD at the University of Maryland. We did three years of family counseling; I ran a faculty writing group in the summer to help others and myself with their/my research; we both enrolled in some intensive leadership training courses; and I served on our church’s vestry.
Then there were the two Slovenian students, followed by two Ethiopian refugee-students and an older returning student, who lived with us for a while (in our four bedroom ranch house with one bathroom); turmoil at the college over an African American professor claiming that the president had made a racist remark; and our family moving three times. All this while I was continuing to develop my courses and incorporating into them elements of “collaborative learning” to spur more engagement.
There were emails from those years because I was emailing Julia daily when I was single-parenting and she was in College Park. From my current vantage point of retirement, our life at that time seems utterly insane. Yet (such is the perversity of workaholism and perfectionism) we were actually proud of ourselves for taking on so much. (There’s a reason why Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its critique of the pride of perfectionism, is among my favorite works.)
The literature I was teaching and the books that the kids were reading provided a kind of anchor during this tumultuous time. Reading through the emails, I note one where 13-year-old Justin can’t tear himself away from Wrinkle in Time while (in notes to Julia) 11-year-old Darien tells of how he is immersed in Huckleberry Finn (“Right now Jim and Huck have just left the feuding families of the Shepherdsons and I can’t remember the name of other family”), and nine-year-old Toby reports that he is working his way through the Narnia series (“I am reading the Silver Chair and Jill and Eustace have just met Puddleglum. I like Trumpkin too, he’s very simple since he has become almost deaf”). I also see that I was reading them E. Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods and recall, with this book and others with multiple-person groups, asking the boys which character they liked the best. (The question can lead to good discussions and reveal, in an indirect way, your children’s anxieties and concerns. This works well also with movies like Stand by Me and League of Their Own.)
At the college, meanwhile, my Restoration and 18th Century British Literature class had morphed from “Rakes and Bawds” into “Couples Comedy,” the change brought about by the film genre classes that I was also teaching. In Couples Comedy I started with the very bawdy and very witty poems of John Wilmot, moved on to William Wycherley’s Country Wife and Aphra Behn’s The Rover (both of which feature characters based on the dissolute Wilmot), and then dove into Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock, poems by Lady Wortley Montagu, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, and Fanny Burney’s Evelina. I finished up with Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
In the course we looked at Thomas Hobbes’s and the Earl of Shaftesbury’s conflicting theories of comedy (comedy as aggressive and predatory, comedy as sympathetic and communal) and traced the evolution from the harsh comedy of the Restoration to the more sentimental comedy of the 18th century. Austen provided us with a nice summation since she balances biting satire with Romantic sentiment in her novel.
I’ve mentioned how I was drawn to study the 18th century because of Tom Jones, and the novel certainly has the hallmarks of a romantic comedy. I loved Fielding’s wit and his open-hearted approach to life, although in later years I came to realize that Fielding is using comedy as a defense against the rising middle class, who are threatening his entitled gentry way of life. If I have always loved comedy, preferring Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest to the tragedies (although I love them as well), it’s in part because I am drawn to their vision of community, which they invariably assert in the end. My own privileged life has assured me that, whatever turmoil we face, all will turn out well.
As much as I loved teaching 18th century literature, however, my Minority Literature courses probably did more immediate good since we were able to address hot button issues of race. St. Mary’s College of Maryland, like all Maryland college and universities at the time, was under a court order to dramatically increase its minority population after our long history of segregation, and the result was both exciting and tumultuous. But even though angry words were sometimes voiced in my class, literature provided us with a relatively safe space to explore the issues that were on all our minds.
I also applied collaborative teaching methods to the course and see myself reporting on one such experience in my e-mails at the time: “I just had a wonderful class on Song of Solomon, using dramatic reenactment. Talk about people moving into their roles! Quanda was Ruth (the mother), Eric Macon, Howard Milkman, Jenelle Hagar, Angela Pilate, and Robert Guitar. The book certainly comes alive from the effort and we all had a great time.”
I’ve mentioned in a past installment of this memoir of my great good fortune to have had African American poet Lucille Clifton as a colleague during these years. I taught her collection Quilting every year in Introduction to Literature and had many rich conversations with her. I also saw her call bullshit on the Black faculty member accusing the president of racism (which served to defuse the issue), even as she also alerted me to certain blindnesses I myself held. I wrote in that past post about her “note to self,” in which she catches me (yes, the occasion of the poem was about something I had said in a panel discussion) trying to frame race issues in ways that let me off the hook, but I want to look at another passage from the poem. In it, she gets at what she offered St. Mary’s College, as well as commenting on her own ambiguous status. She is talking about how she has had to comfort our Black students when faculty like me could not see that they were suffering:
as if i have not reached
across our history to touch,
to soothe on more than one
occasion
and will again,
although the merely human
is denied me still
and i am now no longer beast
but saint
Yes, in some ways we treated Lucille as a saint, which she could experience as a burden. Still, she was wonderful to have as a colleague and a friend.
From our house south of the campus, we had moved half an hour north because we thought that Julia would have a career in Washington. However, we found a community close to the college filled with our kids’ friends and decided that living there made more sense. We had to wait two years before occupancy and so spent that year living in our church’s rectory (vacant at the time) and then another year as we traveled to Slovenia for a second Fulbright. More on that next week.
