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Volume 7, Number 2 - Spring 2009

P & S Discussions Yield "Aha" Instant for Board Member
talking with Jo Butler
 

For Jo Butler, the “aha” moment came in a discussion of Grace Paley’s short story, “Samuel.” In the story, four African-American boys are horsing around on a subway train; the story details the thoughts of some white women who are watching them. When someone pulls the emergency brake, two of the boys are thrown under the train and killed.

Seated around the table at Bo Robinson Education and Training Center were African-American men and white women. “The discussion broke around racial lines, about whether or not someone had intended for harm to come to those boys. Then one of the [Bo Robinson] inmates very carefully retold the story,” changing the skin color of every character. “It became clear that [the brake-pulling] was closer to murder than it wasn’t. Initially, the white women didn’t want to believe that. But when the story was told the other way, people changed their opinions.”

Butler, currently in her first term on the People & Stories board, initially heard of the program through Friends of the Princeton Public Library, where a Gente y Cuentos group has met for years. Since then, she has participated in two series at Bo Robinson and one at Vessels of Praise in Trenton, a mentoring program for at-risk teenage girls.

“Although each session is a gem in itself, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. You get to know the people you meet with, and it transcends any individual story…I like the founding concept [of the program]—that there’s no right answer, that everyone brings his or her own perspective to literature.”

For Butler, an avid reader who belongs to three different book groups, participating in People & Stories also reawakened an interest in the short-story form. “I think it has made me a more careful reader. It’s made me more likely to pick up short pleasure from texts. “I was reading everything as if I was going to be tested on it. It was hard for me to get back into the idea that you could read for pleasure.”

Butler now works for Wickenden Associates, an educational consulting and search firm. She is chairing the People & Stories spring benefit, a reading by short story writer Amy Hempel. And she continues to read for her triad of book groups—one that always invites the author for a question-and-answer session, one that includes a lecture on the reading, and one, a women’s group, formed to read and discuss works of fiction.

Butler shared some of the People & Stories readings with her daughter, who at the time was teaching Spanish in the Teach for American program. Besides “Samuel,” Butler remembers “Thank You, M’am,” as a particularly moving piece. Not only has it been the first session’s story in each of her three series, “it’s so good and appeals to a wide range of age groups.”

And she remembers the people—the girls at Vessels of Praise who responded with a volatile outburst to one story; the man at Bo Robinson who confided he hadn’t had much experience around white folks. Butler felt astonished at that revelation and shared her reaction with an African-American man sitting near her, who was equally stunned. “Sharing the stories with these different people, you really are reminded of how much you have in common rather than of what divides you.”

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