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By Root 318 0

quasi-political beliefs, however, she had not thought this through. She was afraid to, and this was one of the major failings in her character. If she thought this through, for example, she would have to think of what becomes of poor whites when (if) they become rich (and how could she waste her time teaching incipient rich, white people?) and what becomes of blacks when they become middle class; she was already contemptuous of the black middle class. In fact, for its boringly slavish imitation of the white middle class, which she considered mediocre in its tiniest manifestations, she hated it. And yet, technically, she was now a part of this class.

If she began questioning these things, she would have to question her own place in society and how she was going to be a success at whatever she did (she had few doubts about her capabilities and none about her energy) but at the same time avoid becoming bourgeois. She enjoyed so many bourgeois pleasures, and yet she loathed the thought of settling for them. Just as jazz was her favorite music because it held the middle class in abeyance, Steppenwolf was the novel that, since college, had most enduringly reflected her mind.

“Can the women go back to learning the way they did before the funding?” asked Anastasia.

“One day they might,” said Irene. “I don’t know. A funny thing happened to them, and to me, around the funding from government. At first it lifted our spirits, made us believe someone up there in D.C. cared about the lives of these women, the deliberate impoverishment of their particular past. And the women settled down to learn in that belief. As amazingly as the funding began, though, it ended. We had just had time to get used to more than we had before when suddenly there was nothing at all. We had ‘progressed’ to a new level only to find ourselves stranded. To go back to the old way would feel like defeat.”

As Irene talked, she thought of one of the women in her class who particularly moved her, and who resisted learning to read because everything she was required to read was so painful. Irene had had to coax her back to class after the first day. On the first day, the woman, whose name was Fania, had expressed a strong desire to learn to read. She was a stout, walnut-colored woman who wore her hair in braids that crossed at the back of her neck and, in her ears, small gold loops. Her embarrassment at not knowing how to read was so acute that, in admitting it, she kept her eyes tightly shut, and in the course of making a very short statement of her condition, she undid both braids and managed to get the earrings tangled in her hair.

Like so much that is deeply tragic, this sight was also comic. Realizing how she must appear to the class, and to Irene, Fania had blushed darkly and offered a short puzzled laugh at herself. It was a look and a laugh that Irene never forgot.

Irene had had much success teaching reading by using the newspapers. She found nonreaders related quickly to news about what was going on in their midst, and that often too they recognized certain words—like names of towns, stores, and so on—with which they were already familiar. Each time they “read” a word they already knew, they were encouraged.

For Fania, Irene had chosen a rather innocuous item about the increasing mechanization of farm labor, which was the kind of work most of her students knew well. She thought the words “fertilizer distributor,” “automatic weeder,” “cotton picker” and the like would be easy. They were long words, true, but words used every day by the women, as they passed by plantations where this new machinery was already in operation.

Irene read quickly over the short news item, to rob it of any surprise. Surprises in any form, she had discovered, inhibited these would-be readers.

“‘Way, Georgia: Sources at the Department of Agriculture predict that in less than ten years, farming as our state has known it for generations will no longer exist. Widespread use of fertilizer distributors, automatic weeders and cotton pickers will virtually wipe out the need for human