Coming Ashore by Catherine Gildiner

Author:Catherine Gildiner
Language: ara, eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2014-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

five pillars of salt

While we try to teach our children all about life,

our children teach us what life is all about.

— Angela Schwindt

After the first week of teaching, Sara got in the car after a long day, slammed the door and declared that it was hopeless trying to teach with no supplies. While rummaging around in the teacher’s supply cupboard for some art materials, all she found were piles of confiscated weapons ranging from nunchuks to Saturday Night Specials. In a back corner under the eaves, she found a big pile of mouldy, tattered copies of the novel Of Mice and Men. She brought one home to show me and said as she held it up, “This is a fossil left over from the early days when they had a curriculum.” She handed me the faded blue 1948 edition with two old-­fashioned-looking, bow-legged cowboys on the cover. Sara added, “Now, tell me what ghetto youth are going to relate to cowboys in spurs? I’m not even black and I don’t give a shit.”

I knew how powerful that book had been for me when we’d been assigned it in grade school. I’d read it aloud to Roy, who couldn’t read. He and I both loved every page of it. In the book, the two main characters, George and Lennie, are itinerant ranch hands who yearn for the American Dream of having a ranch of their own someday. Steinbeck knew how to portray the glory and dignity of America’s disenfranchised. Crooks, the black stablehand who ­nobly suffered loneliness rather than plead to belong to the group of white cowboys, had the same veneer of pride that covered despair, deprivation and loneliness that I saw in the classroom. I thought teaching the book could be perfect if handled well.

The following Monday, I handed out the novel to each student. I thought they would all laugh, but instead they opened the books, ignoring their deplorable condition, and acted as though I’d given them something interesting. I found that most of them stumbled over the descriptions but did far better on the dialogue. When they took turns performing the character of Crooks, they were spot on. I realized from the class discussion that they knew personality types and they really understood motivation. They saw the innocent beauty of the mildly mentally handicapped Lennie, who experienced no racial prejudice. The students saw Lennie as outside of the black and white dichotomy and immediately related to him. They were touched when Lennie unknowingly suffocates the pet mouse he keeps in his pocket, then accidentally kills a woman because he doesn’t know his own strength. Nearly everyone had a Lennie, a special needs child whom everyone tolerated in their neighbourhood. We had our first real discussion about character development, foreshadowing and what makes a human responsible for a crime.

The students who were not on drugs or who hadn’t permanently frozen from the inside out with freezer-burn rage, which amounted to about half of the class, enjoyed reading aloud if it was dialogue — they liked dramatic performance.

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