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17 Befriending Girls as an Educational Life-Practice Susan Laird University of Oklahoma A Fictional Case In Sapphire’s contemporary African-American bildungsroman, Push, Miz Blue Rain befriends its 16-year-old girl-hero, abused by her mother and expelled from school because she is pregnant by her father a second time.1 Illiterate after many years’ schooling in Harlem, Precious Jones becomes a student in Miz Rain’s basic literacy class of six girls. There, besides reading and writing, she learns to live her life as an affectionate, proud, responsible single mother, able to resist abuse and to develop mature loving relationships with others who can help her sustain both herself and her baby. Miz Rain listens and responds to each girl’s most painful feelings and oppressive needs. In return, Precious listens and responds to Miz Rain with shock upon discovering this teacher who so generously befriended her is lesbian, but feels a new compassion that challenges Precious to unlearn her own heterosexism. Rather than fixing Precious’s problems , Miz Rain befriends her students by making her class an intimate circle of mutually devoted friends who help one another find the many resources they need for learning to love themselves and diverse others and to survive their many difficulties, such as domestic violence, homelessness, racism, rape, and HIV. Sapphire likewise indirectly befriends girl readers overwhelmed by such problems themselves, for her novel offers them rare recognition and makes transformative life strategies and circumstances imaginable not only for such girls, but also for adults who care about them. So, too, do I aim to befriend girls with this attempt to conceptualize for educators what it might mean to “befriend girls.” A Concept of Befriending Girls Befriending girls can be for any thoughtful adult, as it is for Miz Rain and for Sapphire, an educational “life-practice.”2 I have read other narratives of it within both qualitative inquiries on girlhood and culturally diverse women’s fictions about/for girls, and I have 293 294 / Susan Laird witnessed it in my friends’ and colleagues’ lives. This deliberate practice on the part of Black women and white adults of both sexes in my own extended family, rural neighborhood , 4-H, Girl Scouts, and schools also educated (and miseducated) me as a lonely, bashful, clumsy, cross-eyed, curious, middle-class, white girl, and I have engaged in it myself as both a public high school English teacher and an adult Girl Scout. Although those who have made a habit of this practice with educative intent are likely to have done so thoughtfully, I have yet to find a name for it, much less a theoretically elaborated concept of it. Yet many contemporary girls’ writings evidence some clear consciousness of its potential value. Thus I have named it befriending girls and embark now upon theorizing it, so that this educational life-practice might become more widely acknowledged , valued, taught, learned, understood, undertaken, and critiqued—also much more aggressively financed. Befriending girls can be an individual or collective practice, a private or public practice, or both simultaneously. It can be a professional practice, as in Miz Rain’s case. It can be simultaneously professional and nonprofessional when it occurs within recreational organizations such as 4-H and Girl Scouts. It can be entirely nonprofessional as well, as exemplified within the African-American cultural context theorized by bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, of “revolutionary parenting” by “Organized, resilient, women-centered networks” of “bloodmothers and othermothers” and “other nonparents ” that “challenge prevailing property relations.”3 Befriending girls may also become a life-practice for men who respect such networks as it does for fictional street character Uncle John in Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo. Uncle John gives Indigo a “new talkin’ friend,” a violin, to comfort and express her grief at menarche, when her mother forces her to give up her dolls, “friends” whom she has artfully made for herself .4 Thus distinct from seeking or holding onto friendship for oneself, befriending here refers instead to giving friendship—a gift offered as neither reward nor bribe, but as “a companion to transformation, . . . the actual agent of change, the bearer of new life” any girl may accept or leave.5 Grades, credits, rankings, and diplomas saturate schooling with a market-economy notion of commodity exchange, whereas Lewis Hyde might call befriending girls as an educational life-practice a “gift labor” of developing girls’ communities through “the give-and-take that ensures the livelihood of...

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