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Volume 5, Number 1 - Fall 2006
Crosssing
Borders Participants Learn from One Another
by Anndee
Hochman
Tim Cresson has a degree in computer science. Tyrone Robbins needs a bus pass. Millie Harford was director of a pre-school. Marquese Stanley dropped out of 11th grade.
But on a summer morning, they come together—residents of Trenton and Princeton, African-American and white, college graduates and adults struggling to get their GEDs—in a room where literature becomes a bridge spanning all those differences.
Crossing Borders with Literature, a new People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos program sponsored by the Princeton Area Community Foundation, aims to bring together urban and suburban participants. Today, ten people gather at Mercer Street Friends, a Trenton agency that provides job counseling, ABE/GED classes and other services.
On a sheet of chart paper on the wall, in pink marker, is a definition of empathy: “the ability for one person to understand the emotions, needs and desires of another.”
People & Stories executive director Patricia Andres introduces “The Shawl,” by Native American writer Louise Erdrich. It is a haunting piece, a tale of family trauma and personal pain transmitted through two generations. The language is rich, the chronology complicated. It’s not always easy to tell who is narrating.
As Andres reads, Harford and Cresson follow the text like diligent graduate students, jotting notes in the margins. Gregory pushes his glasses up on his nose and holds the paper close. Nathaniel Cobb, who teaches the ABE/GED class, nods and occasionally chuckles.
“I think the mother threw her,” he says as soon as the reading is over, referring to the story’s conundrum: Did the mother—a “changeable” woman who had a baby with a lover, then fled to be with that lover, taking her older daughter and the baby but abandoning her younger son—sacrifice her daughter to a pack of hungry wolves? Erdrich leaves the question open, but Cobb is sure.
“The early part of the story depicted the mother as being…not evil, but inconsiderate of everybody except the man across the lake (her lover),” he explains.
Andres prompts the group to look closely at the opening descriptions of all the characters: the unpredictable mother, her “capable daughter of nine” and “yearning boy of five.”
“What is a ‘yearning boy’?” she asks. “Searching for attention…still growing,” offers Tiffany Leven, who works as receptionist at Mercer Street Friends. “Yearning for understanding and love,” adds Harford.
The story, split into two sections by a space in the text, chronicles two generations. The group puzzles over a shift in narration: the “yearning boy,” left behind by his mother in the first part, grows up to be an alcoholic, abusive father. It is his oldest son who narrates the story’s conclusion. Harford claps one hand over her mouth as she realizes the connection.
The group discusses the link between the boy’s childhood trauma and his adult behavior. Does the pain of abandonment excuse, or explain, his abuse of alcohol and his violence toward his children?
“In my community, people say, ‘Well, the way I grew up, there were no more options. The only way I could get money was to take it,’” Cobb says.
Can retelling a painful story help one move past it? “I believe in that,” says Harford. “If people bury their sadness, it’s not helpful.” Group members mention traumatic family stories—a mother’s suicide, the death of a beloved uncle from cancer, the struggles of immigrants—that continue to shadow subsequent generations. And what of the family tales—like the suggestion that the mother in “the Shawl” sacrificed her daughter—that may or may not be accurate?
“If you tell a story long enough, you come to believe it’s true,” says Cobb.
At the end of Erdrich’s tale, the young boy—nephew of the “capable girl” described at the story’s start—offers his father a retelling of that painful incident. Perhaps his sister wasn’t tossed to the wolves; maybe, just maybe, she sacrificed herself: “Don’t you think she lifted her shawl and flew?”
“I don’t think no little kid would have done that,” says Stanley. But even hearing the possibility “would be a relief” to the father, says Cobb. “Someone not directly affected can see the story in different ways.
“When you look at these
stories,” he continues, “they’re very similar to the lives we all lead.
What matters is not so much your story, but the outcome: How do you
react to it?”
Two Who met at the table where stories are a bridge
Marquese Stanley can’t remember the name of his art teacher, but he remembers feeling successful in her class. “I’m good at drawing,” he says.
That art class is his sole positive memory from years of schooling in both Trenton and Las Vegas. Stanley, now 19, dropped out of Trenton Central High School in 11th grade.
Since then, he’s worked in a school cafeteria: serving food, stocking the freezer, mopping floors. “But I want to get better jobs,” he says, and that’s what prompted him to join the ABE/GED class at Mercer Street Friends.
“I thought [Crossing Borders] was going to be boring,” he says. But “Abalone Abalone Abalone,” the tale of an old man who collects shells and a younger man who comes to love them as well, spoke to Stanley. “That boy had somebody he wanted to be modeled after.”
Across the table, Millie Harford also found a personal connection to “Abalone”; the next time the group met, she brought an abalone shell, a long-ago gift from her stepmother. “It was very shiny and beautiful,” Harford says. “Someone said, ‘I’d never put out a cigarette in that!’”
Harford, 77, describes herself as an avid, though “poky,” reader who belongs to a book group and worked on her college literary magazine. Yet she remembers standing baffled in a Baltimore library as a child, unsure which way to turn and too timid to ask the librarian for help.
Crossing Borders challenged some of her assumptions about the group’s urban participants. For instance, she thought that people living on general assistance would be unlikely to own pets—that is, until one Trenton woman talked animatedly about her dog. “That was a common ground I had assumed might not be possible. We each brought to the table our own experience. We enriched each other.”