1998-English 102
First Place
WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU
By Karen Estep
Why should college students read the stories that are assigned in English courses? Other than to satisfy the professor, what is the purpose of reading these difficult writings of people we don't know or care about? Many of these students find themselves asking, "What is this writer talking about?" Confused, some quickly give up trying to understand the story and make reading something just to get through, diminishing both their understanding and their grade. Knowing what these writers are trying to explain makes their stories much easier to read. Throughout history, we humans have tried to understand why we do the things we do. To aid in our understanding, many storytellers throughout literary history have written fictional and non-fictional stories about human nature to help others, as well as themselves understand. Human nature is what the writers of Our Time, Theft, and Music of the Swamp, three excerpts from the anthology Ways of Reading edited by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, often read in English courses, are trying to explore. My personal story, Chinese Food Can Save Your Life, written for my English composition course is also an example of this exploration. The human nature in these stories is to blame other people, places, or situations for failures and general unhappiness. Most readers can probably relate to this since at one point or another, they have thought that, if they just had some extra money, a better job, a different lover, a new home, or a better childhood, they could be happier. To assign the blame to other people and things is easier than to point the finger at ourselves. Although a few things individuals are not responsible for do exist, such as ethnicity and hereditary characteristics, most of the things good or bad that happen to us are a result of choices we have made. In these stories, this human compulsion to obsess for what we (supposedly) don't have destroys any possibility of obtaining the particular possession.
In Theft a chapter from Joyce Carol Oates' novel Marya: A Life, the main character Marya blames dependency for her unhappiness. Early in Marya's life she decided that dependence on other people and involvement in relationships resulted in her limited freedom. Somehow her parents, whom she depended on and trusted, disappeared from her life. Because of their "betrayal," she was sent to live in her relative's home where she was powerless, had few possessions since the family was very poor, and had limited freedom. Here she was unhappily a foreign member of a family group, and had no individual freedom to do what she pleased. "She could stay up all night if she wished, she could skip breakfast if she wished, she could fall into bed after her morning classes and sleep a heavy drugged sleep for much of the afternoon; and no one knew or cared" (Oates 473).
In college she is able to live as a separate entity, able to control more parts of her life, but she still holds onto the belief, from her childhood experiences, that dependency will kill her individuality. "She had had to submit to the routine schedule of Wilma's household: going to bed when she wasn't sleepy, getting up when the others did, eating meals with them, living her life as if it were nothing more than an extension of theirs " (Oates 473). To keep her newfound freedoms, she decided to live a very disciplined life. Friends were a waste of time. Like her parents, they wouldn't last forever. "Though she was tirelessly active in most aspects of her life, she'd always been quite passive when it came to friendship. She hadn't time, she told herself: she hadn't the energy for something so…ephemeral" (Oates 482). Imogene's friendship threatened her scholastic status since she was taking away from Marya's precious study time. Also, Marya feared becoming too dependent on Imogene's friendship. She felt that she might reach a point where her individuality and prized aloneness would be lost, and she would become a possession of Imogene. She began to feel obligated to act a certain way for Imogene because of all the attention Imogene had created for her. Imogene gave Marya her expensive camel hair coat but Marya felt humiliated taking it.
As Imogene began to invade more and more of Marya's life, Marya began to push her away. "To counteract Imogene Skillman's importance in her life, Marya made it a point to be friendly-if not, precisely, to become friends-with a number of Maynard House girls"(Oates 483). She saw that wealth and expensive possessions demonstrated the power people like Imogene had. Imogene's charity made Marya feel weak. She thought that with her studies she could obtain the wealth that will give her power, allowing her to be independent from the influence of other people, which threatened her freedom. Her obsession to insure her liberty actually caused her to lose it. She was so busy struggling for control over people, maintaining her grades, and working in the library to financially survive, she had little time to do the things she was now free to do. She was missing her life trying to live for the future. Since she had no time for friends, lovers, or fun, Marya ended up limiting her personal life instead of liberating it.
A similar issue in Lewis Nordan's book Music of the Swamp is about being unable to control one's own destiny. The main character Sugar recalls how his father seemed trapped in his life on the swamp. When his father Gilbert gets liquored up, he listens to his record of Bessie Smith, who voices his belief that he is imprisoned by the swampy delta. "The Delta was bad, bad, she was saying, and it was magic, it hypnotized you, you couldn't resist it even if you tried, and now it was calling her back. 'I hear those breezes awhispering' she complained 'I hear those breezes a-whispering come on back to me'" (Nordan 445). As he listens, Bessie Smith tells Gilbert how he is doomed by the Delta, and that the only way anyone can leave is to die. To him, Bessie Smith was evidence of this, since she died in an automobile accident in the Mississippi Delta a long time ago. Sugar understands her message too as he listens along with his drunken daddy and his friend Sweet. Sugar hears her tell Sweet, " You are trapped Sweet Austin, we all are." and " Your trouble is geography. You better learn to like it"(Nordan 446).
Sugar blamed Gilbert's many failures on mental demons and a curse of bad luck. "Naughty demons accompanied my father wherever he went. All misery did not seem to be of his own making. In his home, the telephone often rang with no one on the line. Hoses broke on the Maytag. Pipes froze in the spring. Pets came down with diseases they had been inoculated against" (Nordan 458). This was one of Sugar's many attempts to deny his father's responsibility by rationalizing and linking his father's problems with uncontrollable forces. His father seemed cursed by the way he had grown up with an abusive father and an insane mother, and never learned how to love himself or show his family how much he loved them. When he wanted to share his feelings the most, the liquor and the "swamp demons" in his head kept him mute. Gilbert allowed alcohol and bad luck to take the blame for his misfortune. He looked for external solutions to the problems in his marriage. He read in a magazine that his relationship needed a symbolic metaphor to rekindle his marriage, and struggled in search of this metaphor on their family vacation to the Gulf of Mexico. Even when the metaphor idea failed, he still looked for something else to blame: "Maybe if we just lived near the beach"(Nordan 455).
Gilbert allowed himself to believe that he was doomed to live and die on the muddy delta, and he eventually fulfilled his obligation and died drunk "under a blanket of fish" (Nordan 465). Like his father, Sugar believes he has no control over his life, and he is doomed to follow in his daddy's footsteps. He believes in this excuse, and Sugar later in life becomes an alcoholic and hurts his family "in the same way my father hurt me, and the same way his father hurt him. I tore my children up as fine as cat hair" (Nordan 465). Sugar later realized that he had choices, and his father was trying to teach him this lesson long ago, even though Gilbert himself couldn't believe it. The lesson was in the image of the cowboy Bob Steele, who both Sugar and his father drank to become:
Bob Steele is not tall, is not handsome, has no bullwhip, or sidekick, no distinguishing features…without even a white hat or an interesting horse, Bob Steele is pure gold. He is the believable, unromantizied version of what every man on earth wants to be…He is alone, he is pure hope, and complete. (Nordan 466)
Sugar discovers that he always had been Bob Steele. He had been destroying the man he already was by searching for "pure gold" in alcohol. Drinking made him just as unable to love others as his father. His father also said to him while watching that western, "…ask the right question. Ask the same question over and over. Ask the only question there is…What's going on here?" (Nordan 466). Nordan writes this story to tell readers that they are not doomed to become their fathers, and all they have to do to take back control of their life is to ask,"'What's going on here" (Nordan 466). The answer would tell him to stop relying on other things to be happy and in control, and that there was hope for him. He didn't have to be the victim of geography and his past. He had the power to resist the fictional Delta curse of destructiveness and feel love after all.
John Edgar Wideman's biography about his brother Robby Our Time can also be seen as a story about accepting responsibility. There were many things throughout the story that could have been blamed for Robby's robbery and murder conviction. One excuse could have been that Robby seemed to be born under a black cloud. He was born on December 29 which seemed a foreshadowing of his whole life for two reasons. First, his birthday, the most important day for a young boy, was associated with tragedy, because both of his grandfathers died on December 28, his grandmother on December 29, and his sister lost a baby early one January. The close of the year, which contained his birthday, was often a time of mourning, instead of his rightful time of joy and attention. His birthday celebration was also upstaged by Christmas. "No matter how many presents you receive on December 29, they seem a trickle after the Christmas flood. Almost like not having a birthday. Or worse, like sharing it with your brothers and sister instead of having the private oasis of your very own special day" (Wideman 679).
Robbie felt robbed of his individuality almost from birth. Robby's birthday symbolized how he felt he was not given the same opportunity of individuality the rest of his brothers had, and why he was so driven to make himself noticed. Another excuse for Robby's troubles was growing up in Shadyside. With the exception of a few other families, his was the only black family in the neighborhood. While they lived in Shadyside, the adults in his family wouldn't allow him to leave the white neighborhood, and, because he was cut off from the black community, he was extremely curious about them. He thought of black as the "forbidden fruit." He wanted to know what he was being kept from, and he couldn't understand why his mother and the other adults were keeping him away from it. Robby thought, "Black was a mystery and in my mind I decided I'd find out what it was all about. Didn't care if it killed me, I was going to find out" (Wideman 673).
Just before he entered high school, Robby's family moved into the black neighborhood of Homewood. Now he could find out what was really in those streets. As the youngest of his siblings, Robby needed to find, or prove, he was his own person. He wanted to make his mark in the world, but for him, school was not a place to do this. In his mind, his brothers and his sister already had used that option up, because they had all been successful in school, and he would just be repeating what had already been done before. "Wasn't nothing I could do in school or sports that youns hadn't done already. People said, here comes another Wideman. He's gon be a good student like his brothers and sister" (Wideman 673). He felt that the streets were the only place he could blaze a new trail and stand out among his already successful siblings. Just before the move to Homewood, in the black neighborhood of Garfield, he finally found what had been hidden from him his whole life. This was his first taste of the street and he felt like he belonged there. He resented his family from keeping him away from it. Robby thought, "Seemed like they just didn't want me to have no fun. That's when I decided I'd go on about my own business. Do it my way. Cause I wasn't getting no slack at home" (Wideman 674). This becomes a major turning point in Robby's life. He decided to rebel from what was expected and taught to him.
The death of Robby's friend Garth was the last excuse Robby needed to fault Society for his hard life. Garth symbolized how truly helpless the people of Homewood were in the white man's world. Garth died because the establishment didn't care about him, to them he was insignificant. Robby could identify with this sense of mediocrity. He decided that nothing is given to him, not even his own birthday, and so he will have to take what he deserves. While dying Garth had said, "You're a good man. Don't ever forget Rob. You're the best" (Wideman 654). Robbie wanted to be the best so that he would never be ignored again. He wanted to do it for Garth who died because of the indifference of the world. Garth became his reason to become a supergangster and to make it to the top, so that Garth's death wouldn't have been in vain. He thought, "It's our time now. We can't let Garth down. Let's drink this last one for him and promise we'll do what he said we could. We'll be the best" (Wideman 658).
Although these three events in his life were each critical moments for Robby, Wideman doesn't use these events to justify his brother's actions, but to explain why Robby was getting into trouble in the streets, when his brothers and sisters were getting good grades in school. After Robby's conviction and endless time to play his life over in his head, he realized that his own personal choices, and his blind determination to be a superstar is what ruined his life. "But nobody could tell me nothing then. Hardhead. You know. Got to find out for myself. Nobody could tell me nothing" (Wideman 689). He put himself behind bars and broke his mother's heart on his own. John tells this story to help himself and the reader understand what drove his brother to do the things he did, but it was Robby who was responsible for the choices he made. Robbie, tired of being controlled by circumstances, tried to take control of the streets by selling dope, but instead found that the dope controlled him. Although society seemed determined to trap and destroy Robbie as it did Garth, Robbie willingly fell into the trap set for him. No one has to fall into this trap, the Wideman story tells us. No one has to fall into any trap that is set by blaming others for the mistakes we make, is what each writer's story tells us, including my own.
In my story Chinese Food Can Change Your Life, I realized that it wasn't my neighborhood that was boring but myself. The reason why I couldn't find excitement in the world anymore is because I let the excitement leave me. I allowed people to influence me to believe that real adventure didn't take place in my head, and I had to go out and search for it. For a long time I thought I was looking in the wrong town, hanging with the wrong people, or was just too sober. I've been to six different countries, I have met many different people, and have done my fair share of drinking. Life was still boring. Lately I have realized that's because I have become boring. Like many people do during their adolescence, I gave up my awesome childhood skills of self-entertainment in search of the phantom world I had heard about, read about, or seen on television. Now that I know that I am to blame I hope I'm not too lazy to find my former self, my Barbara Steele. I have played my earlier life over in my mind, and have asked "the only question there is." For me I hope it's not too late.
Reading about this human nature in the stories of other people, helps us to better understand ourselves. Like other readers it took me a while to realize what these writers were trying to tell me. I realized that these stories were not just about other people, but also about myself. I understand myself a bit better because of these compositions. They helped me to realize that, like the characters in these stories, I had been guilty of blaming others, and now I can deal with this destructive habit. This is what I got out of reading these stories, and I believe other students can too. Grades are a minor part of college, and pleasing our professors is certainly insignificant. We are here to grow, change, and learn about ourselves. Learning through other people's writings and experiences are the most inexpensive lessons we can learn.
Works Cited
Bartholomae, David, and Anthony Petrosky, eds. Ways of Reading. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.
Nordan, Lewis, Music of the Swamp. Bartholomae and Petrosky 436-467.
Oates, Joyce Carol, Theft. Bartholomae and Petrosky 470-507.
Wideman, John Edgar, Our Time. Bartholomae and Petrosky 650-689.
(Karen Estep, originally from Los Angeles, has lived in Savannah for a year and a half. Before coming to Armstrong, she was a cook the United States Marine Corps and then transferred into the Army to visit Germany. Now enjoying civilian life, she spends her time dabbling in claymations, hoping for California waves, rebuilding her Jet Ski, and pursuing and art degree.)