"How do we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" This plaintive question from Psalm 137 resonated when it showed up in the Episcopal Prayer Book's queue of Psalms last Saturday. I'd just completed my 40th first week of teaching middle school, a week unlike any of the others.
My song as a teacher has always been one I've believed in deeply: that writing is a process for discovering more about yourself, your world, and your beliefs, while reading enlarges your experience.
The foreign land is school during this pandemic. Classes meet half as often, twice as long. Half the kids attend on line a couple days, then on campus a couple days. The ones on campus lug their bookbags past untouched lockers through a quiet hall where always before there was jostling, locker-slamming, gossip, high-fiving and general hubbub. Students meet just four of their classes one day, four the next, all 85-minutes long. That former hub of social interaction, the restroom, is now limited to occupancy by two.
[PHOTO: My lovely dog Brandy often joins morning prayer. The routine has been a comfort during this odd time; now it's an inspiration, too.]
Re-re-re-scheduling the start of school to reflect Georgia's having America's highest per capita spread of the virus, our leadership team wisely gave the students a day off on Friday, giving teachers time to reflect. What did we get right? What do we need now? I was grateful for the time to reflect. By the end of Friday, I'd had a breakthrough.
As my friend Susan observed, "It's like solving a crossword puzzle." Yes! "Across" is pretty easy - the literature we mete out in 20-page reading assignments every two days; language arts to practice; time for applying techniques in writing.
But "down" has been keeping me up at night. How do you keep kids engaged 85 minutes, half of them socially distanced in cloth face coverings (CFCs or "masks"), half projected on the Active Board?
By 3:30 Friday, I'd found a sort of crossword format for planning, and things clicked into place. I can see what the students need to experience in order to grow as readers and writers. Thanks to our leadership team and our technical staff, I have several options for how to connect on-line learners with the face-to-face ones.
On Saturday morning, after weeks of anxiety and waking up at 2 or 3 AM, I felt OK. I turned again to the Book of Common Prayer for the morning routine of prescribed readings and prayers that have been a comfort in stressful times. Not on the list, Psalm 33 kept bubbling up.
Psalm 33 proclaims, "Sing to the Lord a new song." I literally did, noticing in the Hymnal chants for weekday morning prayer that, as a Sunday singer for 40 years, I'd never had occasion to sing. I was delighted to discover expressive plain chant for "The Venite" and "The Third Song of Isaiah." Sight-reading, I sang at the darkness on that Saturday "Arise, shine, for your light has come." Like a crossword puzzle, the music works across and down. Going "down" through verses long and short, the chant is flexible to allow for length and emphasis, verse by verse -- as my new system is flexible to bend with the needs of the class.
Thank God, I'm feeling better about the year ahead than I have done for months. A colleague said on the work day, "We're all first - year teachers again!" So true: as I did in the first couple years of teaching, I've rolled out of bed as early as 3 AM to prepare lessons for the day; I've crashed as early as 8:30 at day's end.
Coincidentally, the same morning, I broke through on an actual crossword puzzle with the theme "Global Menu," where MousSEATTLE intersected CaraMELROSE.
For related stories, see my blogposts
"It's hard to explain," I said. The kind woman on the trail could see that I'd pulled my bike over to stand still and cry.
Hard to explain how a poet I don't know, Eve L. Ewing, reading a poem from her new collection 1919 about a racial incident in Chicago during that year could have such an impact on me now listening to NPR one day in June 2020.
PHOTO: 1919. Poems by Eve L. Ewing. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019. Cover artwork by Brian Dovie Golden, www.briandoviegolden.com
There are so many layers to the work. You had to hear Ewing explain how the killing of seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams touched off three days of race-specific violence in Chicago, late July 1919. Ewing told interviewer Terry Gross on WHYY's Fresh Air how the young man, cooling off in Lake Michigan, drifted to an area claimed by whites, who threw stones at him and at any blacks who came near. No one knows for sure if a rock struck Eugene unconscious, or if, afraid to come ashore, he exhausted his strength. He drowned.
The background gave immediate power to the poem "Jump / Rope." The poet began
Little Eugene Gene GeneShe sang the words in the style of ditties that little girls chant when they jump rope together. But she halted, "no, it goes like..." and started over; then she did it again. Each childlike verse comes closer to the harrowing event, closer to what we can imagine of Eugene's own experience:
Sweetest I've seen seen seen
His mama told him him
Them white boys mean mean mean...
Sweet sweet baby
Don't make me let you go
Swallow swallow grab the sky
Swallow swallow dark...
How can I explain that, even writing this now, I'm tearing up? The story was sad enough, but the emotion hit hard when the story was filtered through those sing-song lines. The playfulness of the form gets us into the mind of young Eugene, playing in the water, free of care for the invisible line he had crossed.
Ewing didn't have to explain how the title suggests both the child's game of jump rope and the lynchings by noose, so common for so long. Nor could she have known that her book would come out on a wave of current stories of young black adults killed for nothing: George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rashard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain.
In the moment that Ewing read her poem, I couldn't sort all these threads of meaning and feeling that constricted my throat. To the helpful woman, I just choked out, "It's hard to explain." When she was gone, I ordered the book.
Ewing's 1919, brief and illustrated, appears to be a simple children's book, but the cover depicts a moment of horror, Eugene's face, half submerged, eyes wide open in distress. Ewing enriches her collection with the layering of history texts and photos, of different voices past and present, and a variety of forms. Each layer reinforces the other. Where the historical note seems dry, her poetry pulls us in; where the verse seems obscure to me, the historical record fills in the back story. For most poems, there's an epigraph, usually taken from the report of community leaders in Chicago in the early 1920s, half of them black, half of them white, commissioned to explain why the incident and the riots happened.
The tense prelude and violent aftermath of Eugene's death are central to the collection. Before that, the first part of the book enlarges on the commission's report about the influx of black families escaping the South since the collapse of Reconstruction. A third part, looking across the intervening decades, includes some poems previously published.
Ewing begins each part of the book with a poem called "Exodus," 1, 5, and 10. She's taking off from the commission's observation that the black migrants to Chicago spoke of their leaving the South in Biblical terms from the exodus of God's chosen people out of slavery into the Promised Land. Ewing plays with the Biblical stories and phrases. In Exodus 1, not the mother of Moses but all young black mothers in the South place their babies in baskets to send them up the river to freedom. Exodus 5 brings God into judgement on the Chicago politician Richard Daly, whose biographer called him the American Pharaoh. In 1919, Daly was member of a gang of white boys who terrorized black neighborhoods in the riots. Exodus 10 takes off from the plague of darkness, reassuring to the black community, fearful to the wicked.
For other poems as well, Ewing fits the form to the subject. A former teacher now covered in offal from working in the stockyard remembers fondly in 26 alphabetical lines how he instilled self-respect with literacy for black children in the South. A domestic worker, silently resenting her employer, speaks to us in short journal entries, all lower-case letters. Ewing gives us banter about "how hot is it" under an ominous title from Langston Hughes: or does it explode, expressing the tension rising during the heat wave of July 1919. The story of a barricade that black men set up to protect their neighborhoods is told in a poem shaped like that barricade.
An outstanding poem, "James Crawford Speaks," tells of Eugene from the point of view of a black eye-witness, who fired his gun at policemen that arrived on the scene, who was himself shot and killed. "I saw the whites of [Eugene's] eyes," the voice begins,
before he let go the railroad tieBut what's at home for a black boy in Chicago of this time? The boy is "almost nobody, nowhere, gone home / to nothing. Me, too." The poem is very strong, imagining the gun shot as a statement: We are somebody. Black lives matter.
that kept him almost afloat
almost alive, almost able to walk home...
Ewing reminds us of another teenage black boy from Chicago who died violently at the hands of white men, only the poem is gentle and sweet, a vision of what might have been had the boy lived to become an elder in the community. We know the photo of Emmett Till at 14, grinning under his porkpie hat, taken in the year of his gruesome murder. We know the photo of his bludgeoned face in his open casket. Ewing's poem begins, "I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store," a gentle old man grinning under his porkpie hat. The poem is a benediction.
Telling a friend about that poem, I cried again. Hard to explain.There are so many layers.
The author of Bored and Brilliant distinguishes between the mind that wanders because you're bored with some tedious activity, and the mind that's "bored" because you crave the next "hit" or "like." In one, your mind is free to make up stories about what you might do, what author Manoush Zomorodi calls "autobiographical planning"; in the other, you are tethered to a device that allows others to pull your chain. One kind of boredom is creative; the other kind comes from an appetite ramped up by software engineers to draw our attention back to their products.
The tyranny of messaging isn't new. The Islamic poet Rumi lamented 800 years ago, "I have lived too long where I may be reached." Zomorodi, drawing on experts and on listener responses to her Bored and Brilliant podcasts from NPR, reports references to the phenomenon of boredom as far back as ancient Rome, though Charles Dickens first coined the English word in Bleak House (1853). Others referred to it as "nausea" (Sartre), "idleness" (Kierkegaard), "tamed longing without any particular object" (Schopenhauer), and "the noonday demon" that gave rise to sin according to early church fathers (Zomorodi 16).
In one eye-opening experiment, subjects found more "out of the box" solutions to a problem after 20 minutes of reading aloud a list of phone numbers. The "executive" brain, occupied in executing this tedious task, left the rest of the mind free to daydream.
That's what made heaven out of summer afternoons of hot, sticky, smelly, repetitive work in my dad's chemical company. Tightening lids on hundreds of soap bottles, pressure washing dozens of 55-gallon drums, bleaching the bleachers at South Decatur High School -- I was rapt in my own imagination, writing scripts, imagining alternative futures for myself, replaying scenes from my life with different outcomes.
[Photo: West Chemicals in Atlanta, where Huff Road meets Ellsworth Industrial Blvd, 1972, site of many years' productive teenage boredom for me.]
Prodded by long-distance runner Peter Sagal, host of NPR's comedy show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, I've unplugged while I'm out on my bike. Before I ever had a smart phone, I wrote plays, songs, comedy sketches, and curriculum for my students during my long rides. That all stopped during the years when I tuned into news, Pandora, and Peter Sagal. Now I use the phone only to record the ideas that have come to me while my body has been engaged in cycling.
Here's another reason to appreciate the Episcopal Church. With experience, we come to know the responses, collects, creeds, and prayers by heart. You can tune in; but much of the time, a line in Scripture or the sermon sends your imagination off on a tangent -- something to write about, or a solution to a classroom problem, or remembrance of someone you need to visit. Suddenly you're bulleting ideas in the bulletin and you miss the cue to stand for the hymn. When the closing prayer sends you out into the world to love and serve the Lord, you're ready!
For this teacher of Middle School English and Drama, the key takeaways are
If our children are constantly engaged with bits and bytes of information, what is happening to their ability to imagine, concentrate deeply, reflect on past experiences, decide how to apply those lessons to future goals, and figure out what they want for themselves, their relationships, and life (5)?That looks to me like a lot of what my kids should be writing about, one way or another, all year. Another assertion by Zomorodi mirrors our school's mission statement: "We crave reflective time; we seek balance; we want a life full of joy and curiosity" (11).
Zomorodi, Manoush. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. New York: Picador, 2017.
Update: 08/16/2020. On the last weekend before school, I got in 31 miles to Stone Mountain - my usual route minus the mountain itself, which was preoccupied with confrontations between CSA militiamen and BLM activists, and 31 miles on the Silver Comet Trail at 16.7 m.p.h. Not the best time of the summer, but tied for second best. Weight 143.
