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Notes of a South Carolina Student and Teacher

Dixie Goswami
Clemson University
Clemson, SC

As a child, I walked six quiet blocks to the elementary school in Rock Hill with my best friend, Jane White. We walked home for lunch, and we were in the same classes for eight years. FDR was elected when I was one year old. Like most South Carolinians, my family voted for him and supported his New Deal policies. We all knew people who lived and worked in the CCC camps. My grandmother worked briefly for the WPA in Columbia—I remember visiting her at the park where she helped with a free all-day child care center, where white children were served three meals a day in a lovely, open facility in the middle of the city. By 1938, South Carolina had fourteen state parks, for whites only, built by CCC labor. At the same time, a huge federal grant built the Dock Street Theatre in Charleston, as well as bridges, roads, and municipal buildings. No museum, however, was built to house the art and artifacts of the Catawba Indians in Rock Hill, which were at this time for the most part in the home of Chief Gilbert Blue, where many artifacts and pieces of art and sculpture were lost to fire.

My father served in World War II, with about 200,000 other South Carolinians, black and white. The 9th Army Division held war maneuvers near Rock Hill. My family's adopted soldiers were Bill Spruill from North Dakota and Linwood Everett from New Jersey, neither of whom had ever eaten grits and biscuits (they liked them both) or been south before. The Navy, the Army, and the Air Force had training camps in South Carolina; convoys moved regularly all over the state. Women went to work in the mills geared to the war industry. Things would never be the same.

In 1945, I entered Rock Hill High School as a freshman. Our class was the first in South Carolina to graduate after attending school for twelve instead of eleven years. I had vague ideas about going to college—probably at Winthrop, which was then a school for women—but I didn't have money for tuition, and I do not recall anyone ever suggesting to me that there were scholarships or loans, although I was fourth in my class and even received a special principal's award from Mr. Godbold. I had wonderful English teachers, including Miss Rebecca Williamson and Miss Eva Mae White. At that time most female teachers were single. They dressed conservatively, and they did not smoke in public. If married, they stayed married—or left the classroom. They lived constricted public lives but had unbounded literary imaginations. We memorized and recited and wrote our own romantic poetry. It didn't matter much to me, going to college, that is, because in 1946 I met Walter Gooch, a veteran attending Rock Hill High School on the GI Bill. Gooch was raised in Thornwell Orphanage. He enlisted in the Navy when he was seventeen, right before the war ended, and was back home, playing football with a bunch of other vets in a year. WWII and the GI Bill changed things forever in South Carolina.

I must have lived in a carefully constructed dream, not to have been aware of the segregated nature of the world I grew up in. Black and white children met at parades, when the black schools' bands took our breath away, but the schools I attended were white, the churches were white, and the neighborhoods were white. Aside from issues of race, even though members of my family worked in textile mills, I was unaware of the violence that occurred when union members struck to improve 55-hour week working conditions and low pay, but I did hear about the new law forbidding child labor in South Carolina and compulsory school attendance. I was aware that Eleanor Roosevelt was responsible for black citizens becoming leaders in New Deal programs. I did not know about the prominence of South Carolina's Mary McLeod Bethune, the great educator, as a member of Roosevelt's "black cabinet." I did not know of Modjeska Simkins or that a state chapter of the NAACP had been founded in 1939. I did not know of the schools for black children established all over the state by black teachers or of the extraordinary black teachers whose legacy is now recognized as a national treasure.

In 1949, Walter Gooch and I were married. He was a rising junior at Presbyterian College, majoring in sports and English. We lived in Vetville, with fifty others like us, mostly young men who would never have dreamed of college before WWII and the GI Bill, and their working wives. When Gooch graduated, we moved back to Rock Hill, where he earned $2,700 a year for coaching and teaching English. I recall that the Presbyterian College campus was entirely white, except for the custodial staff. I worked at Belk's in Clinton and spent many hours at the PC library. I helped Gooch study (he spent more time on sports than Chaucer) and learned a lot myself. Our daughter Candace was born in 1950; Walter Gooch, Jr., in 1951. We had a wonderful family of six very young children at the time of Gooch's death in 1958.

In 1960, Dr. Marshall W. Brown, president of PC, found me working at a shift job and having a tough time. On some impulse that I cannot account for, he invited me to come to PC, work in the library, and attend college with a combined loan and scholarship. I did not take any entrance examination. We moved back to Clinton, and I recall that I was the only "nontraditional" student on campus. I tried to get one of the old Vetville houses--they were $25 a month--but was denied because I was a single parent. No spouse, no house. At that time, day care as we know it did not exist. Morning church schools and women who kept children in their homes and most importantly--my grandmother and mother--made it possible for me to go to school and raise a family....just barely. My college job paid $.50 an hour, but I could bring the kids to the library at night when I was the only person on duty. A couple of math and science professors were not happy with my presence, but Alan King and John Stevenson and others taught me that I could think and read and learn. The New Criticism was really new to me—stimulating and exciting. Sound and Sense and Brooks and Warren were our primers; modern poets were our thrilling texts. We wrote a theme a week, studied grammar and the history of the language, not including the brilliant research of Turner on Gullah, and British history. At this point, I cannot recall having been assigned any works by black writers except for Phyllis Wheatley. I could not have survived academically without my buddies, who baby-sat and studied with me for tests: Linda Traynham, now a teacher in SC; Walter Wells, now editor for the International Herald Tribute; Mike Jarrett, director of DHEC at the time of his death a few years ago, and a few others. These young people saw to it that I joined the literacy club, as Mike Rose describes it in Lives on the Boundary. They made all the difference.

I began teaching in South Carolina on an emergency certificate in 1962 at Joanna Elementary School, about seven miles from Clinton. I taught for three hours a day—math and English—to sixth and seventh graders, most of whose families worked at the local textile mill, and took my own courses at PC after lunch. I began teaching under the supervision of the kindest and most capable principal—Mr. Shealy—a fine mathematician who assigned me a classroom next to his office, left the door open at all times, and came to my rescue often when I could not solve a math problem. I can recall my students vividly: Roger, Liz, Althea, Jackie, Butch. There were thirty-six of them in each class, carefully lined up in rows: slicked up, pretty well convinced that school was not what they needed, but also bright and full of energy and knowledge and understanding. No writing workshops. No reading groups. No peer editing. But in my memory at least, we did have fun with the vocabulary tests and diagramming sentences (our favorite exercise), and we learned a lot from each other. I came to know their stories, and they came to know mine—and some of them were pretty rough stories. I don't know if any of these children took advantage of something big that was happening in South Carolina education: Greenville TEC opened in 1962, the first of the new technical education centers established under the leadership of Governor Fritz Hollings. Tom Barton, a young former Clemson Tiger was president of Greenville TEC then—and now. His assistant, Donald Garrison, is now president of TriCounty Technical College. What a momentous time!

By the time I graduated from PC, I knew I wanted to go to graduate school, however impractical and impossible it seemed. My first choice was UNC-Chapel Hill, where Hugh Holman, a Presbyterian College graduate himself, was dean of graduate studies in the humanities. I packed all six (growing) kids into our old station wagon, headed for Chapel Hill, and an interview with Dr. Holman. I'd been admitted, but I needed college housing—they had cheap apartments for married students—a loan, and a teaching assistantship. Dr. Holman was kind but firm: No spouse, no house. No teaching assistantship for someone with a family, especially not for a single woman. At least not for me. If I managed on my own for a year, they would consider financial aid and a teaching assistantship the second year. I was devastated . . . and absolutely passive. It never occurred to me to march over to the housing office and ask some SERIOUS questions. Instead I got a job teaching eleventh and twelfth grade in Greenville . . . and I was there with my stunned and silent class when we heard the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination—listening to the principal tell us what was happening over the loudspeaker, being dismissed, and going home.

Walter Wells, my old Presbyterian College friend, thought I shouldn't give up the idea of graduate school, and we decided to try Clemson, strictly because it was nearby. We packed up the kids, drove 30 miles to campus, found an empty house on college property near the mechanical engineering building, and went directly to the graduate school, then located in Tillman Hall. Dean Hugh McCauley gave me a job on the spot in his office (I could type fast) and arranged for me to rent the empty house for $45 a month: no spouse required. Later, I was admitted to the master's program in English and moved to Clemson, where I would stay until 1969.

Things were happening in South Carolina. The Penn Center at St. Helena was a retreat for Martin Luther King, Jr., and was probably the only place in South Carolina where black and white citizens met regularly to work for civil rights. The Textile Manufacturing Association had spoken up about desegregation at the Watermelon Festival in Hampton: "The desegregation issue cannot be hidden behind the door. Violence will stop economic growth in South Carolina!" After his inauguration, Governor Russell invited black and white citizens to a barbecue at the State House. On January 28, 1963, the day after Russell's inauguration, Harvey Gantt began his graduate studies at Clemson. The first black students entered the public schools in Charleston, Columbia, and Greenville. Church colleges such as Presbyterian College began to admit black students voluntarily. Still, there were bitter words and actions: Private academies were created almost overnight, and in 1965 the South Carolina Independent School Association was formed. A race riot took place in Orangeburg in 1968, with three young people being killed and many wounded. State troopers were tried and found not guilty. In 1970, the federal courts ordered the total integration of the public schools. Greenville County was the first school district to integrate completely, beginning in February 1970. The leadership of the South Carolina NAACP was largely responsible for restraint and the lack of widespread violence. I. D. Newman led hundreds of marches all over the state. A Methodist minister, he was elected to the state Senate in 1986, the first black state senator since 1887.

In the meantime, I taught Freshman English at Clemson until 1966, and then at Greenville TEC as a Clemson instructor. We had a Freshman Composition Exam then: two parts, including a spelling test of 100 words. Students had to spell 80 words correctly to pass into sophomore English; the grammar test was taken largely from the Harbrace College Handbook, which was the basic text for all sections. Versions of the Handbook were the basic high school English texts throughout the nation. The heart of the freshman composition program at Clemson was literature: four canonical novels from British literature were assigned the first semester, and the second semester was an "Introduction to Poetry, Drama, and the Short Story." A theme a week. Very few if any options for revising. Group work was mostly considered plagiarism. The Penalty Sheet applied: Two fragments and you're out. Many students thrived under this system which seems so repressive now and was repressive then. I think they—we—loved having a chance to read great works together, even under circumstances of great constraint. I know that course evaluations were positive and that most of our students made the decision to major in English in the middle of their second-semester freshman course.

I listened to Cleanth Brooks and Eudora Welty and James Dickey when they visited Clemson, studied under Louis Henry, Albert Holt, Mark Steadman, and other great and generous teachers (all male), but I was unaware of the work going on in language and learning that would affect me profoundly—personally and professionally. James Britton and Nancy Martin in England were conducting research. Britton was preparing Language and Learning. Janet Emig was publishing The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders and writing seminal essays on writing as a mode of learning; Don Graves was a graduate student at SUNY - Albany, figuring out how to approach his case studies of the composing processes of second graders; Mina Shaugnessy was at work on Errors and Expectations; Ken Macrorie was writing UpTaught, Ann Berthoff was writing Forming/Thinking/Writing, and the young James Moffett was composing Teaching the Universe of Discourse and "Integrity in the Teaching of Writing." Teachers and researchers were beginning to question the thesis-statement-outline-theme approach that appeared to be dramatically different from the recursive composing processes of published writers—and the rest of us. James Gray was forming the Bay Area Writing Project from which the National Writing Project would evolve. I never dreamed that these scholars would become my mentors and colleagues. This talk is dedicated to the memory of James Moffett, who died of cancer in December 1996; deep spirituality and respect for all informed his work and his life.

In 1968, I began my own experiment in multicultural living when I married Bhuvenesh Goswami, a textile physicist from India teaching at Clemson. This was not an easy thing to do in Judge Clement Haynesworth's district: I was white and Bhuvenesh was colored. I don't know that laws against such marriages were still on the books—maybe they weren't—but we had a bit of trouble getting a marriage license. We moved to New Jersey in 1969, which was as difficult and strange as moving to the moon for us. Vietnam, civil rights, urban violence—the next decade or so was turbulent and transformative. By the time we moved back to Clemson from Boston in 1984 (G. W. Koon hired me), we—and our classrooms—had changed dramatically. Patsy Candal of Georgetown was helping to make the South Carolina Writing and Humanities project visible throughout the state and nation. The Freshman Penalty Sheet had disappeared from the Clemson English Department, along with the Grammar Exam. So had literature from the freshman curriculum. Ron Lunsford, co-director of one of the state's ten writing projects, headed up freshman English; writing process ruled.

There was no false notion that equity and social justice had come to the schools and communities of South Carolina, but there was a growing sense of community among us, genuine respect for different traditions and voices, and a realization that as teachers of language arts we were key players in our students' academic—and imaginative—lives. We still made the bottom of every list published about problems in education, health, and quality of life. But in 1984, Governor Richard Riley, now the U. S. Secretary of Education, urged a broad program of reform in the public schools, and the Education Improvement Act passed into law; South Carolina received positive national attention. By 1984, twenty-seven women served in the legislature; Juanita Goggins of Rock Hill was the first black woman to serve in the South Carolina Senate. Jesse Jackson, a native of Greenville, became a serious candidate for president in 1984.

Richard Riley said in 1984, "An old South Carolina is dying. A new South Carolina is struggling to be born. We will not build the new South Carolina with bricks and mortar. We will build it with minds. The power of knowledge and skills is our hope for survival in this new age."

My double life as teacher of technical and business writing at Clemson and as a teacher of writing at Bread Loaf had begun. My dear colleagues at Clemson and Bread Loaf demonstrated in their lives and writings that "teaching is another word for learning." I became increasingly aware of my students as great sources of wisdom and insights, if I listened, observed, and learned to see.

I want to mention several South Carolina English teachers—perhaps some are present today—who must represent all of you whose knowledge and skills are our hope for survival in this new age in South Carolina.

Doris Ezell was born in Rock Hill and grew up there and in McConnells on her family's homestead. The birth of a daughter Tina, when she was 15, and a stroke did not slow Doris down: She has a bachelor's and a master's degree from Winthrop and has traveled to China and Indonesia as a Fulbright-Hays Scholar. She's studied at Oxford and is an accomplished poet. Visiting her at Chester Middle School is a rare and inspiring experience. She speaks personally, directly, and poetically to her students—and to her colleagues—to me. The intensity of her belief in their imagination is part of all the work they do together. She and her daughters have made history in South Carolina. Doris represents the many, many South Carolina teachers who are writers and scholars, whose professional growth is intimately connected with their lives in the classroom.

Doris Blough is an effective teacher (now retired), researcher, and activist. Her letters and essays on actual teaching conditions, on policies that promote—or not—students' learning, on "new approaches" embody the ways that many South Carolina teachers act as critical friends to policy-makers and bureaucrats. I remember visiting her classroom in York County where a decade ago she conducted a first-rate study on the math journals of middle-school students, to find out if claims for writing across the curriculum matched the reality of the practice in her own classroom. Doris represents hundreds of South Carolina teachers who are activists informed by experience and their own systematic research.

Janet Atkins has taught for many years in Hampton County, where she was a student herself. She is passionately devoted to literature, especially medievalists. One of my most unforgettable experiences happened in her classroom on a day when she and 25 or so students were reading The Canterbury Tales: REALLY reading it, laughing, commenting, wondering. I have observed Janet's transformation over the past few years from what she describes as a good traditional teacher to a teacher whose students are engaged daily in inquiry-based learning. Janet's use of computer conferences for teaching the humanities has informed teachers across the nation. I love to check my e-mail and find a message from Janet like the one she sent me last week: "I wish you could have been here today to see my students at work and to read what they've written."

Doug Wood taught for several years at a middle school in Columbia before he left for graduate study at Harvard—I hope he'll return to South Carolina soon. Doug was born and raised in South Carolina, educated at Wofford. A singer and an artist, Doug is an African-American man whose students led the way in project-based learning that took them from Dataw Island and the study of sustainable communities to a year-long exchange with students in Japan and finally a trip to Japan. Before he left Richland District 2, Doug had been recognized by the U. S. Department of Education for his innovative work with technology, but his greatest achievement was engaging his students in studies that brought them (and Doug) to school at 7:00 a.m. and kept them there until late. I figured that, like most of you, Doug put in at LEAST a sixty-hour week. Like many of you, he is available to his colleagues as well as his students; like you, he considers himself a life-long learner.

Ginny DuBose's parents told her always that if she was to achieve anything in this world, she would have to have a good education. She remembers her teachers—and how they influenced, by their example, her decision to become a teacher herself—she has taught English for twenty-eight years in South Carolina. She knows the system. As a teacher in rural South Carolina, she believes that her greatest challenge these days is to prepare her students to know and respect their own heritage and community while at the same time learning to respect and understand others. She is one of the country's great innovators when it comes to technology, having created and taught courses that put her students in intense academic study and challenging social exchanges with students in five other states and South Africa. She and her students have been recognized nationally for their achievements. My greatest wish for South Carolina education is that teachers like Ginny—like members of the South Carolina Council of Teachers of English—be recognized in their own state and district and that ways be found to use them as the important resources that they are. When I see what is spent for outside consultants, especially on technology matters, I want to divert 90% of it to teachers like Ginny who could provide staff development that counts for SC teachers.

Lanie Youngman teaches second grade students at the St. James/Santee Elementary School in McClellanville. Year after year her students engage in literacy and community service work—with the focus on the natural history and resources of their Low Country community. This year Lanie and her students won the South Carolina ETV NatureScene Award for their "Young Naturalist's Guide to Living Things of the LowCountry." To me, Lanie represents South Carolina teachers whose students' work is of the highest quality, judged by the students, their parents, and members of the larger community. This work is frequently outside the mandated curriculum, and although it meets the highest standards of student performance in language arts, it is not aligned with tests, making it difficult to carry on at the very schools where students need most to be engaged in this kind of work. But I speak for parents and citizens of South Carolina when I thank Lanie and all of you who do this work, for you give us irrefutable proof that students whose test scores are low nevertheless are creative, skilled, intelligent users of language and other symbol systems. You give us a way of looking critically, with students at the center and our own research and observations as our guide, at assessments, frameworks, standards, and even test scores. You suggest that we will survive in a new age only if we view students as resources to be developed rather than as problems to be solved.

Other South Carolina teachers and scholars who have influenced my own learning and teaching include Elspeth Stuckey, whose book The Violence of Literacy is a passionate argument favoring humanity over literacy, if it comes to a choice, and asking the question: In the face of inequity, school failure, poverty, WHAT TO DO? As teachers, WHAT TO DO? Elspeth highlights the work of teachers such as Septima Poinsette Clark, a South Carolina woman who set up citizenship schools all over the South to teach illiterate black women to read the Constitution of the United States so they could vote.

I must also mention the work of Shirley Brice Heath, whose ten-year study of language and schooling in communities in the Piedmont, conducted while she was teaching at Winthrop, changed the way we look at language and engendered a decade of research and change: Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms is, after all, a South Carolina study. I hope that someday SCCTE will sponsor a program that recognizes and honors the scholarship and advocacy of South Carolina teachers over the past 100 years: an important extraordinary history of accomplishment as well as local and widespread influence.

I'll close by giving my deepest thanks to my children and grandchildren, all studying and working in South Carolina, for educating, supporting, tolerating, and inspiring me. Special thanks to Carol Collins, director of Writing and Performing Across Communities, who is my mentor and colleague. I must thank too my co-workers, who are members of my extended family, Chris and Carolyn Benson.

I cannot overstate the importance of this organization, along with the National Writing Project, the Writing Improvement Network, the South Carolina Arts Commission's Literacy Arts Program, and other literacy and literature programs, in creating a climate for successful, compassionate teaching and learning in South Carolina.

Thank you all. You are treasures. The power of your knowledge and skills is our hope for survival in this new age.

A native of South Carolina, Dixie Goswami is a Senior Scholar at the Strom Thurmond Institute, Clemson University. She also coordinates the Bread Loaf Rural Teacher Network, funded by the DeWitt Wallace Readers' Digest Fund, in South Carolina and seven other states.