Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School,1970

It was a long time ago

ItWasaLongTimeAgo It was a long time ago. I have almost forgotten my dream. But it was there then, In front of me, Bright like a sun— My dream. —from “As I Grew Older” by Langston Hughes Sanco Pansy’s Cottage and the Louisa County Public Library, 2001 I left Louisa that June, and I didn’t return for thirty-one years. In the intervening time, I went to graduate school and became a professor of English. I divorced and remarried (twice), acquired stepchildren, had a daughter, and raised a family. After studying and teaching at a number of universities, I joined the faculty of the University of Iowa and settled in Iowa City. I did not stay in touch with any of my students in Louisa. But whenever I moved, I carried with me a simple cardboard box, the letters LOUISA printed boldly across the top in black magic marker. Sealed inside were the notes, drawings, and mementos my students had given me, samples of their schoolwork and projects, photographs I had taken of them, all my lesson plans, and a journal I had kept that spring. In each new house I occupied—the rustic log cabin in North Carolina; the nineteenth-century farmhouse on a hill in upstate New York; the efficiency apartment near the Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park, Chicago; the redwood contemporary in Oklahoma; and the cozy 1920s cottage and the roomy, sunlit house in the woods in Iowa—I stored the box in some out-of-the-way place and forgot it. In all that time I opened it only once, when an African . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 It Was a Long Time Ago American colleague at the University of Oklahoma asked me to give a guest lecture about my experience teaching in a segregated school to her psychology class. Occasionally, during a class discussion or at a party, I would tell a story about my experience at Morton Elementary School, but otherwise I boxed and shelved my memories, too. The Louisa box might have remained sealed and forgotten on the shelf in my Iowa City basement had I not learned, shortly before my fiftieth birthday, that a rare malignant tumor was growing in the salivary gland at the base of my tongue. Up until the moment my otolaryngologist, looking up from the scope she had threaded so delicately through my nose and down my throat, gave me the bad news, I thought I knew exactly what the next chapter of my life would entail. The script was already written: I had just begun an academic book on Renaissance comedy; I was expected to become the next departmental chair; I had courses to teach and graduate and honors students’ theses to direct; and I had committed myself to deliver papers, give lectures, read manuscripts, evaluate tenure files, and serve on a range of university committees. But after a twelve-hour surgical procedure in which a tumor the size of a Ping-Pong ball was removed from my tongue, a few days of being unable to speak at all, two weeks recovering in the hospital, six weeks of radiation therapy that burnt the skin of my neck and face and made my mouth painfully sore, and three months of subsisting only on liquids delivered through a stomach tube, I no longer had any idea how my future would unfold. I didn’t even know if I had a future. The story I had to tell about Louisa suddenly seemed more important , more compelling, and more urgent to me than any of my scholarly projects or professional commitments. I’d always assumed I would tell it someday. Now, perhaps in response to the sense of powerlessness I had felt by being, even if temporarily, without a voice, the frustration of being hungry in the midst of abundant food, and the indignity of being perceived by strangers as incompetent or strange, I knew that day had arrived. My motivation was not just personal. As the twentieth century was drawing to a close, many of the issues I had grappled with in 1970 were resurfacing in new forms. A major Harvard University study announced that the nation’s public schools were becoming increasingly re-segregated. The federal courts rescinded a number of high-profile, well-established school desegre- It Was a Long Time Ago 177 gation plans that had been put in place in the early 1970s. Scholars began sounding the alarm about an achievement gap between white and black...