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 25 april 5, 1997 I was witness to the moral energy a painter or photographer can stir in children. A s a volunteer teacher of elementary school children, I have for manyyearsbroughttoclasstransparenciestoshowtheboysand girls the work of great artists, illustrators, and photographers. AlthoughmyprimaryfunctionhasbeentoteachEnglishtochildrenfrom hard-pressedfamilies,Ihavelearnedthatsometimesapictureprojectedon a screen can do wonders for the imagination, can prompt both reflection and conversation—after which the children almost invariably write more spirited, forceful compositions. I had an especially satisfactory time one morning with Winslow Homer’s work, two segments of which I brought to the attention of the class: his school pictures, done in the early 1870s (Country School, The Noon Recess, Snap the Whip) and his efforts to render African American life in the South in the late 1870s (The Cotton Pickers, Sunday Morning in Virginia, A Visit from the Old Mistress). ThesecitychildrenweresurprisinglyinterestedintheAmericaofyore that Homer presents: the one-room school, the unblemished, inviting rurallandscape,theevidentoutdoorfunenjoyedatrecessbythechildren. But from nine- and ten-year-olds I heard some interesting questions: 26  “Thereareonlyafewkidsaround,”onegirlpointedout,adding:“Theyall look alike, so what will they hear from each other that they don’t already know?” Much poignant and ironic discussion on that score in this class, which had no white students. Several children remarked on the teacher in The Noon Recess. She seems “sad,” the children thought, “alone” or, at a minimum, lost in her own thoughts (“She’s thinking about something that might be worrying her”). A boy near the teacher is intent on reading, while outside his classmates frolic; and the children in my class wonder whether the youngster oughtn’t to put aside his book, try to draw out “that lady, because she looks like she needs company.” I’m much interested in that line of conversation , because it enables us, by indirection, to talk about moral and psychologicalauthority—thenecessarybarriersbetweenadultsandyoung people, but also the desirability of trust and candor. “You should respect the teacher, and if she wants to have her thoughts, then you should let her be;butmaybeakid,everyonceinawhile,canhelpoutagrown-up,ifshe’s got herself some trouble, by lending an ear”—a girl’s tenderly reflective summation that gives us pause and settles the matter, at least temporarily. Soon enough we’d be taking up the question of power and deference in another way—through Homer’s confrontation between former slaves andtheironetimemistress.Everyoneintheclassstaredatthepicturelong and hard. None of them had ever been asked to approach that subject through contemplation of a picture, even though they’d been studying American history and knew well that the Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863, was a mere beginning in the struggle of African American people to obtain a host of rights and privileges others had all along been able to take for granted. The children are eager to put themselves emotionally in the shoes of both the dignified, well-dressed “old mistress”  27 and the blacks of all ages before her, a grandmother sitting, two women standing, one with a child in her arms. They wonder how those recently freed Americans felt toward this onetime owner of theirs—and I hear in the surmises of the boys and girls that mix of awe and anxiety, deference and defiance, fear and fury that the powerful have inspired among the weak in many places and times. Homer, of course, was a brilliantly original artist and had no need of words; he simply placed two worlds side by side and left the contemplation to us, his viewers. But it is to his credit that such a scene is ours to absorb, ponder—as the children realize: “Cool, that he went south and looked around!” (I had given the class some biographical information about the painter’s documentary expeditions during the middle 1870s.) Moreover, I was more than a little surprised by the willingness of my school children, either African American or Latino in background, to speculate, with no little exertion of charity, about the “mistress,” her sense of things, the emotions of her heart as she stood there, face to face, as it were, with history, hers and our nation’s. “She must have felt bad. She came to see them, didn’t she? Maybe she had to—she couldn’t sleep at night, remembering . . .” Others picked up after the boy who spoke those words abruptly stopped—told us of the “horrible things” that “mistress” probably had in mind in the middle of the night and reminded us of the long hours of work done by slaves so that their...

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