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My writing compatriots, armed with laptops, notebooks spewing with personal poems, essays and literary memorabilia, undaunted by the assignment, are abuzz with rich memories for stories, childhood books, memorable teachers, music, poetry, literacy light bulbs, and so on. We have read, analyzed and digested "memorabilia": Russell Baker, Toni Morrison, Annie Dillard, Lewis Thomas, and Eudora Welty. We crafted our memories into texts with Dr. Naff gently cautioning: "Something as simple as a paragraph takes time to sculpt."
My writing group, three bright and worldly women with diverse and fascinating experiences, have helped with gentle prodding, nudging to dust off my childhood memories. They have tried in earnest to turn on my spigot. All that pours out is angst!
I think I am stymied because I grew up, academically speaking, with few literacy experiences. My family was poor, though that fact didn't bother me until I grew old enough to notice. I first became aware of our poverty in the sixth grade when Miss Ella Footman wrote on the blackboard: "Write about your summer vacation." This was a popular first day writing assignment in all of my classes from then on. However, the assignment posed a problem for me; my summer vacations were work, not recreation! I hoed weeds, picked bell peppers, helped my mother and aunts put up vegetables, and barned tobacco. School was a vacation for me; I couldn't wait for it to start each year.
At this stage of my life, I had not read Annie Dillard. She was still in sixth grade, anyway. But later, as a pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she would encourage other writers to "decide on two crucial points as a writer": what to put in and what to leave out. I had enough sense to know (before Dillard) that what Mrs. Footman wanted in our essays was fun, adventure, and anecdotes about summer camps, museums, the beach, and swimming pools. My rural playground had not produced such exciting "fodder for text." I was faced with a serious dilemma. Should I write the truth? Should I write fiction? I wrote fiction. I was ashamed to write the truth.
The truth is that I came from a home void of books. Growing up in a farming community left little time for leisure. As a matter of fact, in a home where idleness was considered the Devil's workshop, sitting still long enough to read a book, one of my favorite pastimes, was frowned upon. My mother, who had an eighth grade education, usually read only on Sunday mornings when she rose early to read over her Sunday School lessons from The Baptist Women's Quarterly. There was not a lack of reading material in our home; we had Home Life, The Progressive Farmer, The Farmer's Almanac, The Sears and Roebuck Catalogue, and, of course, the Bible. I also enjoyed reading books checked out from the county bookmobile.
The literary void in our home, however, was filled with spoken words. Meaning was constructed through rich oral language. My mother and her sisters were wonderful, good people who happened to be illiterate. At the end of the eighth grade, each had to go to work in the cotton mill, stunting their formal literacy. However, "literary events" happened wherever women gather to work, hovering over quilting frames, sitting under shade trees shelling peas or shucking corn, standing in front of a searing cast iron pot stirring boiling lard. I remember as a girl hearing the words exchanged between my aunts and my mother and sensing that words are power and give us a venue to find our inner voices. These oral exchanges whetted my appetite for female intellectual conversation.
Church was also a place where I learned the power of words. My mother faithfully attended church every Sunday, morning and night. I learned about God and religion at Harmony Baptist Church. Harmony was misnamed, however, for there was plenty of hell and brimstone espoused within its four walls. Visiting preachers held fiery revivals, conjuring up, at least in my mind, a God of fear, not a God of love. One night during a revival service, I felt the Holy Spirit. Sweaty palms and white knuckles riveted me to the pew and during the last stanza of "Just As I Am," I walked down to the altar with a knot of other sinners and considered myself saved. The preacher's words, dancing to the melodious cadence and modulation, strung together in sentences that painted streets of gold and pits of Hell, motivated me; that night I became a believer.
I began reading biography and considering how people formed their beliefs. I read A Man Called Peter, admiring Peter Marshall's faith and love for the church. I was drawn to books about Abraham Lincoln, especially Love Is Eternal. Years later when I married, I had the same inscription engraved on my husband's wedding band, "love is eternal." Likewise, Steinbeck's characters in The Grapes of Wrath became real; I could relate to the Joad family and their strong work ethic and family bond which paralleled my own rural heritage. Reading Sister Carrie took me into factories in Chicago where crude jokes and abysmal working conditions overshadowed illusions of big city life, my own as well as Carrie Meeber's. Then I joined women's book clubs and read Kingston's The Woman Warrior, May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, and Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens. We met once a month to discuss biographies and memoirs by and about women, and to get our blood pressure up with rousing arguments about literary style or character of life choices. We met because we loved to talk about books; we met because we loved to talk with one another.
Later, becoming a teacher, I did not ask my students to write about their summer vacations. Instead, I tried to help them discover their "writerly" lives. I invited them to form their own book clubs and discuss literature. Of course, the women of my mother's generation, wonderful, good women who happened to be illiterate, didn't join book clubs. Instead, they discovered themselves as women around quilting frames and under shade trees, fingers snapping, stitching to the hum of gossip, using colloquialisms and telling stories carefully crafted with words that influenced the way I would use words to learn about women's lives, women's choices, and women's literature. In turn, these early influences changed the way I read, the way I looked at the world, the way I lived.
First, the richness of spoken words at home and in church replaced books. Then, words richly woven into texts that connect me with unmet people, untraveled places, and unknown possibilities enhanced my palette for stories far beyond "Write about your summer vacation." I emerged a sophisticated reader and writer. I grew to understand the difference between becoming literate and "learned." Miss Footman back in sixth grade had not created a fraud after all!