NEW
Library Project
Volume 2, Number 1 - Fall 2003
African
Story Hits Familiar Chord for These ‘Survivors’
Daylight/Twilight
class thrives
The sky is still gray when Tanisha Severin,
Oscar Gill, Arthur Rogers and the others file into Adrienne Hill’s
basement classroom at the Bellevue School, a brick building on a
tree-lined street in Trenton. It’s 7:30 a.m., and the students are quiet
as People and Stories coordinator Doretha Riley hands out copies of “The
Home-Coming” by Milly Jafta.
Sharon Diane, a Mercer County Community College
student assisting Riley as part of the “bridge to college” program,
wears a bright yellow button that could speak for everyone there: “I’m
a Survivor,” it says. “Daylight/Twilight High School.”
This program is for students who haven’t
succeeded in regular school settings. Some are teen parents; some struggle
with learning disabilities. At Daylight/Twilight, they take classes in
four-hour sessions that can be juggled around work schedules and family
life.
Riley reads the story, a short, lyrical piece by Namibian writer Jafta, describing the ambivalent home-coming of an older woman who has been away from her village, working for another family, for many years—so long that she describes her own daughter as “a stranger.” At the story’s end, mother and daughter sit together in a moment of contented silence, then head back to the village, with the mother leading the way.
Laurence Louis, whose family is from Haiti, says
people often leave her home country to seek work; sometimes they can’t
see their families for many years.
"Does the woman want to come home?” asks Riley.
“Yes,” answers Louis, “but she doesn’t want to hope too much.”
When the woman first arrives, she watches her
daughter’s straight, proud posture and thinks, “How beautiful is the
unbroken human spirit.” Raheem Henderson suggests that means the
daughter “hasn’t been burdened yet.”
“She hadn’t been beaten down by the trials
and tribulations of life,” adds Oscar Gill. “The situations you go
through, they leave scars on you.”
Riley nudges the students gently through the
story. They talk about awkward and comfortable silences between people,
and what makes the difference. They talk about how powerfully a
smell—Old Spice aftershave, for instance—can trigger memory. And they
spend time on the story’s poignant ending, when the daughter asks her
mother if she needs to rest before the two of them resume their walk.
“The daughter was trying to show by her actions that she still cared
about her mother,” Gill says.
Sharon Diane sees it a
little differently. “This reminds me of my mother and myself. I always
take the first step. I’m not close to my mother. There’s a hurt,
there’s a pain there.”
What would have
happened, Riley asks, if the daughter had acted differently? Despite, or
perhaps because of, her own struggles, Diane answers without hesitation:
“Somebody has to set the pace. Somebody has to show the love.”