left out

I think about my father a lot. If you read this blog regularly, you’ve probably noticed that by now. There’s a lot of debate around trigger warnings but I do give them in my classes if I’m about to show a film with potentially traumatizing content. But trigger warnings have limited effectiveness because you don’t know just what might set off a heightened reaction in one of your students. When it comes to my father, it sometimes feels like everything is a trigger. Like the time I was on an elevated train and passed over a junkyard guarded by an old dog with a limp. Suddenly everything was a blur because a stab of heart pain filled my eyes with tears as I thought about how frail my father became as he lost his battle with cancer. Last fall I bought The Contract for my cousin Kodie; he’s a mixed-race teenage boy who excels at sports. He doesn’t play baseball but I thought he might relate to Derek Jeter’s story about the code he had to live by to fulfill his dream of playing for the Yankees. I had a few issues with the terms of the contract and found myself wondering if Jeter is a Republican, but mostly I thought about my own brief time as a Little League player and all the other kids like me who didn’t grow up with two dedicated parents. I don’t have a problem with celebrity authors (Pharrell is the latest to get a book deal); we don’t live in a meritocracy, and if a professional athlete or actor can get kids to read, that’s fine by me. The Contract felt very aspirational to me, rather than inspirational. But we don’t have a lot of novels that show Black middle-class families living in the Midwest, and so that book could be a “window” for many urban kids. I did wonder, however, whether low-income urban kids being raised by working-class single mothers would buy into the idea of a contract: if you do X, Y, and Z, your end result will be Q. I’m all for promoting good sportsmanship (what’s the gender-neutral equivalent?) but much of Jeter’s success comes from his family and home life—having two educated, employed, engaged parents—factors that are out of the control of kids. As I was reading the book I found myself thinking about the moment when I realized I would never be a professional athlete. I played softball for two years and loved it, but tennis was my true passion. I had posters of Martina Navratilova (lefty!) and Boris Becker all over my room but I had no one to drive me to and from tournaments, I was paying for my own equipment and trainer with my part-time retail job, and there was no one cheering for me on the sidelines. At fifteen, I was also way too old. This was long before the Williams sisters broke onto the scene, but I’ve never been as hard on their father/coach as everyone else. When I finally let go of my tennis dreams, I knew that my success in life was entirely up to me; I decided only to pursue things that required no parental participation. Like academics—and creative writing.

Ebony Thomas just posted an excellent article (“Left Out” by Andrew McCutchen) on Facebook that addresses the barriers to success that contribute to the decreasing number of African American baseball players. McCutchen uses his own journey into the big leagues to explain the violation that led Jackie Robinson West, the Little League team from Chicago’s South Side, to be stripped of its national title. He asks, “When you’re a kid from a low-income family who has talent, how do you get recognized?” And this question applies to every arena, not only sports. McCutchen’s answer is external support: “If you’re a poor kid with raw ability, it’s not enough. You need to be blessed with many mentors to step in and help you.”

When I was writing my essay on the future of children’s literature, I really wanted to cite this article on “relatability.” Have we become a society of narcissistic consumers who reject “window” texts in favor of “mirrors” only? Rebecca Mead explains that “to demand that a work be ‘relatable’ expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her.” This laziness isn’t only found in readers but reviewers, as Malindo Lo’s recent blog series reveals. Mead rightly concludes that “to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize—because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy—is our own failure.” So I tried to be conscious of my own issues as I read The Contract, and I hope it is inspiring to kids of all races and classes, from various family configurations. My cousin’s Black father is largely MIA, and his white mother has her hands full with two younger kids. But he does have uncles and aunts who step in and pay for his equipment and training camps. And I hope that will be enough, even as I know that nothing can take the place of an engaged, present parent.

I recently read When I Was the Greatest by Jason Reynolds and was impressed by the family he created for his male protagonist. Ali’s mother is a social worker but to make ends meet, she works a retail job on the side. His father was once incarcerated for shooting a man during a robbery, and now lives out of his car because selling boosted luxury goods doesn’t pay the rent. Ali’s mother warns him against turning out like his father but she doesn’t forbid her kids from seeing him. They all acknowledge and accept his limitations, and in the end, his ability to trade in illegal goods saves the day. As far as I know, my father never broke the law; he was a Christian conservative who voted Republican and got annual Christmas cards from Jim and Tammy Baker. My dad was a good Special Ed. teacher but he wasn’t a perfect parent, and he encouraged me to play sports but rarely showed up for my games. I’m drawn to texts with dysfunctional families and know I’m biased against Stepford-type families, which seem unrealistic to me. But if I didn’t grow up reading about perfect nuclear families, I wouldn’t know that anything else was possible. I remember my shock when my college roommate’s parents called her EVERY night, listened to her talk about her day, and then hung up only after saying, “I love you!” about a dozen times. People actually DO that in real life? My mother still only calls me twice a year, but we started ending our phone conversation with “I love you” because I aspired to have the relationship my roommate had with her mother. Art can compensate for experience by showing us another way of being in the world, which is why we need windows and mirrors—the latter to show us that we’re not alone, and that we can survive the conditions over which we have no control.

Ok, the sun has finally come out so I better hit the park…