The literacy level of my students, as I was repeatedly warned, is low. Some of them can hardly read, in fact. I teach one class of honors students (and it was only on the morning of the first day of school that I learned I would teach this class), and in so many ways they are wonderful; but even they, who are able to read, overwhelmingly do not. I had all of my students fill out a questionnaire on the first day, and one of the questions asked the title of their favorite book. I plan to post some statistics gathered from those forms later; for now I will say that hardly anybody answered that question.

We have Prentice Hall Literature textbooks, which contain a diverse assortment of short texts and excerpts from longer texts, and, in the back, the complete text of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. We just got copies in my classroom, and we haven’t started using them yet. I am hopeful though I am afraid that most of the texts in the book will be beyond the capabilities of many of my students.

But my honors class! From the moment I learned that I would have an honors class I was determined, absolutely determined, to have them read books, actual books — novels and poetry that are not subject to the indignity of presentation as units in a textbook. I inherited a classroom with twenty-some copies of Paradise Lost, apparently never touched. It is an exciting thing to inherit, and I don’t know why they were purchased if not to be read. I worry that even the honors students will have such a difficult time with it that they will hate it, so though I am excited to have the book I want to wait until the second semester and gauge ability before issuing copies.

I believed that I needed to find out what books we have available to us, and to choose from among them the book with which we will start. I believed that most high schools had some sort of book room, filled with student copies of the typical high school fare. I learned that we don’t have such a room at North Panola, that we have a cabinet in the library. It was not an encouraging development, but I went to the library to see the cabinet.

First, the cabinet is filled with junk: plastic bags and fabric and styrofoam and gauze and bulletin-board border and so on. The books are piled on top of and behind each other so that it takes some time to unload enough of the shelves to see what they hold. And almost every book there is there in between six and twelve copies.

What the hell do you do with ten copies of The Catcher in the Rye? So far are we from having enough copies of a book to issue to every sophomore, we hardly have any books in sufficient numbers to issue one to every member of one class period. I guess they just don’t ordinarily read books here.

Now, one of my internal conflicts has been between literature whose subject more immediately grabs particular students and literature that is somewhat less immediately accessible to them but which is deep enough and rich enough and subtle enough to warrant exposure despite the inherent challenges. Where is the balance between Milton and Shakespeare on the one hand and J.D. Salinger and Langston Hughes on the other? My students all know a bit about Langston Hughes. What little experience they have of Shakespeare is recalled as unpleasant.

Surely these kids who do not read need to be seduced to reading, and such seduction is far harder to effect with those allegedly dead white men. But I am nagged by a sense that for all the goodness of many 20th century writers, a Homer or a Shakespeare is such a rare and extraordinary appearance, and what a shame to educate so shallowly within the limits of one century. The conflict is eased somewhat by the reality of illiteracy here, and by the resultant awareness that my choices are sharply limited with most of my students. But, again, the honors class! How do I seduce them to the side of literature without doing them the injustice of entirely avoiding that vast and great literature incidentally produced by the dead white male?

I decided that we ought to start with Ralph Ellison‘s Invisible Man. Ellison is an African-American writer from the last hundred years writing about African-Americans in the last hundred years. So maybe there’s fertile soil for literary seduction. And it’s also, by my judgment, a richer and subtler and more challenging book than most on the typical high school canon. And our book cabinet has nineteen hardly touched copies. Unfortunately I have twenty-one honors students, and my own copy is probably lost in California somewhere. So I call the Sardis Public Library. It’s a public library in a black-majority town; surely they’ll have half a dozen copies of Ellison. But it turns out they have one copy. Happily, they can get one more from the Batesville library, ten miles south. So my students are taken care of. I still need one for myself.

I learn that there is a bookstore in Batesville. Apart from the adjacent Christian bookstore, it’s the only bookstore in Panola County. It’s in a small strip mall along with clothing outlets and craft stores, like one would find anywhere in suburban America. It looks very clean and sterile, like a large chain. Surely they have a copy or two. But no. They seem never to have heard of it. So I drive to the next nearest bookstore (actually among the finest bookstores I’ve ever visited, Square Books), which is all the way back in Oxford. Of course they have it there, in that great town. They have it in abundance.

I live in the United States of America, in a part with a black majority, and I need to drive seventy miles round-trip to buy the nearest single copy of Ellison.

(As an aside: it costs almost $30 to fill the tank on my Ford Escort.)