Home is Where your Heart was Broken

My grandfather’s grandfather fought for the Confederacy. This is important because, in ideological terms, the southern rebellion continues to this day. For generations, the south was solidly Democratic because Lincoln freed the slaves. Now the South is almost as solidly Republican because Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My father was a second generation cotton farmer who later turned to peanuts. My mother was office manager\bookkeeper at a cotton gin that later became a fertilizer plant. Her father owned a machine shop that mostly repaired farm equipment. We were not poor by local standards. I attended segregated public schools for eight years and remained for another year while the segregation academy I attended for my last three years of high school was hastily created. Most of my graduating class did not continue their education. Almost all who did attended the near-by community college. I applied to a small liberal arts college and was accepted.

I learned early to use books as a place to stand to read my lived experience from beyond its own horizon. One thing I learned very quickly was that I was living in a cultural ghetto despised either openly or subtly by almost anyone clever enough to get a book published, and that the main thing I knew from personal experience that the clever people did not was how the people around me could possibly think of themselves as decent and their way of life as a culture worth preserving. I learned that what “they” were writing about “us” was often perfectly true as an observation from the outside but, typically, totally clueless as a description that did justice to life as it was immediately experienced by most of the people around me.

I became deeply suspicious of the absolute privileging of any one cultural frame as “objective” and much inclined to see questions of right and wrong as historically contingent and culturally relative. I enjoy working with students who are considered “culturally disadvantaged” because this attitude allows me to meet them where they are. I try to encourage them to use the books that they are reading to look back into their own experience from beyond the horizon of that experience and to notice especially those points where questions they can ask based on their own life-experience can cause the closure and coherence of the text to unravel. I think of this as encouraging them to read in everything they know from personal experience that had to be left out of the story to make the book's pretense to being all that is worth saying about some important aspect of the human condition plausible, to measure the truth of the text by the standard of what their lives have taught them.

This is what it means to read critically. Reading a book critically makes that book a magical apparatus that allows one to be two places at once, both inside one particular life speaking truth to any outside power on the absolute authority of having lived and in living learned not just to know but to be whatever human possibility that book's version of truth must deny to claim status as the whole truth of everything that ultimately matters in this business of being human and, at the same time, outside looking into that very same life from a place that makes it possible to know and notice things that no one trapped inside that life, knowing only what that one life could teach, could ever know or notice.

I’ve always been both insider and outsider in every culture I inhabit, both native and anthropologist writing reports for readers in some second home who may never be at home in the place I describe. Given my own origin in a cultural ghetto that was not recognized as such by most of the people who lived there, I’m especially aware of this duality of perspective when I work with Afro-American students in the inner city. Any ghetto is both a place of quarantine and a place of sanctuary where the life of a marginalized culture unfolds. Terrible things are routinely written about the inner city by people looking at that life-world from the outside. These things are often true but not at all useful from the perspective of someone trying to live the best life they can where they are and, maybe, eventually, either make that place better or move on to some better place.

I always wanted to move on to some better place and never understood good people, black or white, inner-city or down-home, who saw everything that was wrong from both the inside and the outside and said, “this is my home; I’m not going anywhere.” I’m wondering, for the first time, why I’ve never checked out opportunities at community colleges like the one most of my former high-school class-mates probably never made it through if they even tried. I’ve spent years meeting students where they are hoping to help them see beyond the horizon of what they have known of life so far. But, I’ve never considered that I might be the perfect person to do exactly that in the place where I first discovered the transforming power of reading books as a way of reading the world of immediate experience more deeply than common sense goes.