As surely as I am not the first neither will I be the last to observe that many Mississippians, or at least the young ones in the poorer parts of this state, speak not of living in a place but of staying there. I do not know whether the difference is merely dialectical – and no more insightful than whether one says y’all or you guys – or if it reflects a real and substantial difference in one’s understanding of home. I have been asked a few times already where I stay, and where I will stay in the fall, and from what I’ve heard this seems to be no trifling concern of students about their teachers.
Many of them seem also to be markedly curious about one’s kin. I’ve been asked about my kin, and many of the students seem eager to probe when any hint of the subject surfaces in a classroom discussion. And I hear now from several (white) second-year teachers in (segregated schools in) the Delta that the arrival on campus of any white person elicits questions about their relation, “Is he you huuzbehn’?” and, “Is they you kin?” being both frequently cited examples.
One experienced teacher who some years ago was an MTC participant in the Delta mentioned to me the strangeness of realizing that these poor black kids pitied him, a privileged white outsider, for his disconnectedness in the community, for his not having any kin. And they were always trying to connect him, to integrate him into the social world of the Delta, to find his kin. Not to be so integrated, I suppose, is to be in a sort of exile, an unrooted, detached, floating resident; and it is a pitiable state.
Changing the subject, in order to return to it:
Hardly any of my eleventh-grade summer school students read at an eleventh-grade level. Most of them cannot read fluently. We have nevertheless been tied to a standard eleventh-grade literature book, and most of them struggle with it. A student who does not give the least damn about Ben Franklin or Edgar Allen Poe (and why would he?), and for whom reading long passages even of his own dialect would be an exertion, has a hell of a time engaging one of these texts, questioning it, being reflective about it, or, often, even remembering the beginning when he’s reached the end. So I thought to respond to these difficulties by giving them short Biblical passages.
Firstly, the tradition of ancient Hebrew prose, and in particular the reticence of its style, is such that essentially whole and independent narratives that can fit on a single page are common, and that translations exist which are at once lovely and simple. And though their language is plain, the literature is often subtle, complex, and profound. And, best of all!, though I find that most of my students are not Biblically literate, they all seem to come with a deep reverence for the Bible. So I can give them a subtle and complex text, in relatively simple language and that fits on a single page (or at most one page front and back), that they can hold in front of them all at once and read and reread, and they are inclined to care about it.
Tomorrow we will try reading the Binding of Isaac. In another place I might worry about raising eyebrows sensitive to the church-state division, but here my only concern is the potential heresy in the unavoidable questioning of God’s justice. I will try to focus more on the experience of Abraham, though. And if there’s time we might also read, by way of irreligious comparison, the passage from book six of the Iliad in which Andromache pleads with Hektor not to go die at war, to think of the woman and infant that he will leave widow and orphan, and Hektor’s refusal (again a father making a profound decision that concerns the future of his son).
Now, in this reflection on the Israelites I came to think again about the culture of the South, or of Mississippi, or of the Delta. And though it might be that I extrapolated a false rule from the vivid instance of William Faulkner, it occurred to me that the Biblical reverence in the South might seem to include a particular and special fondness for the Hebrew Bible (okay, I’ll say it: the Old Testament). I was just reading Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” and was struck by his several references and allusions to Hebrew books with nary a Greek that I noticed (I think I would expect the opposite of a Christian civil rights activist in an overwhelmingly Christian nation – and I expect that in other writings he must have relied more on the Gospels and Paul), and I was thinking also of Dr. Mullins’s anecdote about the principal and “good ol’ boy” who was so pleased to receive in his school a Jewish teacher since he proclaimed himself a Biblical expert who was especially fond of the Old Testament.
I am not one to begin carelessly identifying causes and effects, but I wonder whether there is not at least some sort of resonance between this culture and the one seen in these particular books, what with the more vengeful God who punishes a people for their wickedness, and with the always held-out hope of eventual triumph over ones oppressors and enemies, with slavery and with exile, with a wandering people who so often stay in a place rather than really living there, and whose tribal culture places so much of their identity and role in their kin – so far as identifying themselves, and somewhat paradoxically even the converts, as the seed of the mythological “high father,” Abraham.
I mean, am I wrong, or does the South really love the Old Testament? (And isn’t the Newer one somewhat more palatable to the liberal softies up North?)