I Hear America Reading

by Jim Burke

..I heard America singing...each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else... singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.'

-Walt Whitman, "I Hear America Singing"

Asking only that people tell me what role books have played in their lives, I found that they told me about what it means to be human. It was early December, a Saturday afternoon. Huddled in my study, walled in by papers and books, I sat seething. I had read one too many students journals that day, many of them slandering books, saying they didn't matter, that they were stupid, boring, pointless.

I suppose I felt at least frustrated by the knowledge that my own bookshelves were crowed with books I know individual students would love but which the curriculum offers no opportunity to include. So I did what I most often do when I get angry: I wrote. On this particular occasion, I wrote only a short note which I ended up sending off to the San Francisco Chronicle and a few other papers. Here is the entire letter:

This simple act of literary activism was so whimsical that on the following Tuesday morning, when a woman called me at school and began talking about the piece in the Chronicle, I thought she was referring to column I recently wrote and was expecting to appear. No, she said, she was responding to the letter to the editor that appeared that mining. I honestly had to ask her to read it to me to clarify what it was she was talking about. Three words into the letter, I recognized it and apologized for my obtuseness.

Since early December my students and I received over two hundred letters. To say they are mere letters limits them, somehow strips them of their magnificence and their humanity, for these are all epistles, letters written by patient, informed hands. Often the letters begin by thanking me for giving them the chance to write about the books that have changed them, saved them, accompanied them throughout their life.

The sheer volume of letters and their average length of at least two pages (some are as many as six typed pages), prohibits me from including whole letters or even many excerpts. Let me then describe some of the people and letters to you.

Spoon Jackson, who currently lives in a cell at San Quentin prison, wrote us a beautiful five-page (typed) letter in which he described the feeling of coming alive only when he began to read while in prison; he began to write poetry. His writing teacher took some of his poems to a local elementary school and shared them with a fourth-grade class. The students all wrote him poems, beautiful poems that made him take off his sunglasses and show his smile for the first time in years. We all nearly wept as he described being called to the warden's office, where they took away his letters from these children and the poems they wrote him, leaving him to "choose sadness" for now and escape from the cement world through his books.

Michael Cleary, describing himself as "an itinerant house painter, semi-professional musician, an erstwhile bartender, some-time student, perspiring youngish writer [sic], and a full-time and very avid reader," told us that books enriched his life but did not insure intelligence as evidenced by his divorces, his overweight condition, and his inability to hold a job for long. He argued for several pages, in moving detail, that Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion was The Great American Novel."

One day two letters arrived together: one from a member of the California State Bar (it was interesting to note the number of lawyers who wrote) and the other from a man incarcerated at San Bruno County Jail. The lawyer---as did the others---told us that, more than anything, books helped him to understand the men he succeeded in putting in such places as San Bruno County Jail, a place which the author of the other letter was able to escape through books available to him. A woman wrote to me from the couch where, as a little girl, her Irish immigrant father read to her into the night and she now read to her children. A man who realized he did not know his younger sister---he left home when she was 12---wanted to let her know who he was and find out who she was: they began sending each other those books they loved most and through the books came to understand and truly know each other. A woman whose father was dying from a disease she did not understand found strength by reading about the disease; the knowledge routed the fear and helped her to help her father understand what he was experiencing. So it was with a woman who found, in her mid-forties, that she had breast cancer.

They all spoke lovingly about libraries: going to them every Saturday morning with their fathers to fill their arms with books they read all week, finding in the library of their small town the knowledge that there were other worlds, other people than those of their own town.

We heard from a seventeen-year-old woman who had just dropped out to devote her time to being a witch and a poet. And just yesterday we heard from a woman teaching in China---she wins the award for being the most distant correspondent---who told us about her Chinese students choosing their American names from amongst those authors they had read---Mark (Twain), Jane (Eyre), and Diana (the goddess of hunting).

We learned through the chorus of voices that came to us in our classroom that ours is a diverse, fascinating country full of people we would ever have otherwise met. Into our class every day came people my curriculum could never have allows: lawyers, poets, novelists, bookstore owners, retired military men, murderers, fourth graders (who wrote in crayon), immigrants from various countries who learned about this new country and remembered their old country through books, teachers, older adults, teenagers, college students, and so many more.

One man, who had never known his father, embarked on a journey later in life to find out who his father was; when he came to a small headstone in a small cemetery in the northeast, he realized this unknown man had never been his father, that his real father had been all the authors he had read again and again, these men---Twain, Thoreau, Crane---who taught him about the world and gave him the gift of their ideas.

Over and over, people reiterated in one way or another what this man said: I have never known loneliness because I read. I have rarely known fear can be conquered by knowledge about that which scares us. I have known many dear people whose lives have gone no further than the pages of a favorite book; these people have remained some of my most cherished and steady friends through a life of changing and moving to new and unfamiliar places.

It is important to acknowledge the few discordant voices, those few whose letters came as indictments against English teachers. These few letters reminded me of something Pauline Kael, the former New Yorker film critic, allegedly said to a group of teachers who wanted to begin including film in the school curriculum: If you are going to do to movies what English teachers have done to books, I would rather you stop right now and go home. Their point is perhaps most important of all: books contain magic, they are sacred to us---I have sophomores who have read Catcher in the Rye five or six times; Michael Cleary returns to Sometimes a Great Notion as often as possible, finding in it new insight each time. It is an important voice to listen to: if students leave school disliking reading, analyzing books down to their last literary idiom, we fail.

This correspondence activism will all be worthwhile, however, only if my students truly heard these voices, if the voice of at least one person somehow got into each student's head. Throughout the past few months, I often found myself wondering what the goal of "teaching English" is supposed to be. If, as so many said, they left school not liking English, nor having read the books they were assigned, but read voraciously on their own, then it seems we must be honest and ask ourselves not only what role should books play in the lives of our students and our society but what role should school be playing in the literary lives of our students.

During the period in which we received these letters, I happened to hear an interview with a woman from some Eastern block country. During the Communist era, most books were banned, but this woman spoke of underground societies that existed merely to pass along books. Danger accompanied these books--books we can go to any bookseller and buy whenever we want---and this danger made them exciting, important. each book she read contained magic and power, "strong presentiments in unhardened youth," as Shakespeare said of gifts given to seduce the young daughter in A Midsummer Night's Dream. How much more enticing that being caught with that book might result in being arrested, even shot! She spoke passionately of staying up all night one time to read One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest because she could only get it for that one night.

If, in the future, the Bookpeople do find themselves meeting in secret places, in "safe houses" to read each other stories people no longer tell each other, I almost welcome the danger of it. For perhaps then, when reading is forbidden, when laws exist to prevent people from reading a certain book, will all my students eagerly seek them out. When I see some student in that grim future sitting in class in the morning red-eyed, nodding off---only then will I feel as though my students had learned and realized what all those people who wrote us already know.