National Healing: Race, State, and the Teaching of Composition

Learning New Ways #1

Lea rning New Ways #1 It’s an early New Orleans Sunday morning. I sit at my usual table in a Marigny coffee shop as a circle of neighbors forms at a table near the front window. They laugh as they talk over each other. One says, “He lives in a different world—that’s what I told him.” We are all living in different worlds, and we are all here together. As Jelly Roll Morton once said, “We had all nations in New Orleans.” Despite Jelly Roll’s propensity for exaggeration, New Orleans had, and still has, people from around the world. And in New Orleans, the people have blended together, kept apart, and through it all—the floods and homicides, the singing and parades—created cultural expressions unique and vital enough to fire a land’s imagination for alternatives. Those of us in this coffee shop, day after day, are connected through conversations about politics, observations about life, and laughter. But, it is New Orleans. An intoxicated man staggers past the window this morning. I have not lived his life, nor the life of the man, “Mr. Okra,” selling vegetables from his black pickup truck, covered with the names of fruits and vegetables painted in a rainbow of colors, music blaring from speakers and filling the street, even at this early hour, with funk or his voice, “We got grapes! We got bananas! We got broccoli!” And I have not lived the lives of these other coffee drinkers, nor, despite our connection, the life of the homeless man I met late one night in Jackson Square. He had been a student in the tiny high school where I had once taught in the central tier of New York State. Although I had left high school teaching before he made it to the ninth grade, where I would certainly have had him in class, I knew his grandparents who had raised him. In that rural school district, a teacher knew most families. And now he was here, homeless in New Orleans, in moments angry, in moments in tears, and, by his own description, crazy and broken-hearted. Nor have I lived my college students’ lives back in Pennsylvania. But I have lived, and I have put together some insights into the meaning and teaching of writing. Two men sit at the table next to me. They are talking about returning to school, to Delgado Community College here in NOLA, and about 4   national healing their hope. At times, their voices seem tentative, even shaky. But always they speak without pretense in their assessments of themselves, their lives, and their abilities. They talk about their “track records,” their “relapses,” their desires, and their commitments. One of them says, “We are used to this,” as he makes a gesture of shooting up. “Now we have to learn a new way. We have to learn that things take time.” After a pause, the other one says, “There is a beauty in people who have lived.” Sitting at my table, I think—is that it? Is it beauty? Is that what living the hard stuff of life inspires in people? Certainly, there is beauty in making the decision to survive, and dignity. And these two men have each other with whom to share this truth; there is a beauty in that friendship, too. So, yes, maybe it is beauty. The days pass. People come and go. At another table on another day, a man and a woman plan a city tour about the history of African American experience in New Orleans. The tour will be for high school students. It will encourage them to learn about the meaning of standing up for one’s self and for others. When they take a work break, I ask them about their project and they ask about me. The students in our college classrooms sometimes write texts about pain and beauty, because they, too, are trying to make a full accounting of having been here in the passing days. And sometimes they write about standing up to wrongs, how to address them, and how to find better ways of living. Our students are trying to learn new ways, even in their every days. Sitting at my table, I think about my life. My job as a compositionist is to encourage writers who are engaged in the human project of examining their lives. My goal is to help them use writing to explore the possibility of better...