4 An Impromptu Theater: A Local Public That Turns Its Back on Formal Institutions

      In Heath’s Ways with Words, the local public is a street theater where impromptu performances teach children socially appropriate uses of language and reinforce the social hierarchy of a tightly knit community. The image of an impromptu theater organizes Heath’s analysis of community life in 1970s Trackton, an African American neighborhood in the Piedmont Carolinas. On the local public stage, the “way with words” that mattered were not the practices associated with schooling. Instead, performances entertained Trackton’s residents with competitive verbal play even as they prepared children to survive in a world that adults knew to be unpredictable and unfair.

Distinctive Features: Dramatic and Spontaneous

      In Trackton, the local public was a dramatic performance, one that burst spontaneously onto an improvised stage.

      Dramatic. On Trackton’s plaza, “actors” in both the “permanent cast” and “chorus” performed “roles” complete with “cues” and “lines.” They made their “entrances and exits” within “scenes” as performances played out across “sets.” In addition to the leading roles, the responsive “chorus” and the interactive “audience” intensified the drama of each performance (Heath 72, 79).

      Spontaneous. Trackton’s public performances ignited whenever conditions were right. Consider, for instance, conditions that sparked the ritualized performance in which wage earners returned home on payday with treats to distribute among expectant children. Specific conditions—the scheduled paycheck, the willingness of working residents to cash their checks and stop for groceries on the way home, the preparation of those who awaited their return, the anticipation that intensified as each minute passed—each of these conditions was required in order for a particular performance of “the distribution routine” to burst forth on stage (Heath 97). As this example shows, time (in this case, payday) and place (the plaza or porch) were necessary, but insufficient, for creating the local public. Also vital were the community’s actors, prepared and willing to perform various roles—leading roles, yes, but also that of a discerning, responsive audience and chorus. Trackton’s local public came into being in the moment that these necessary conditions were met.

      Heath directs us to look outdoors for such performances. Beyond that, performances could have cropped up in several alternative locations, the plaza being the most central but not the only candidate for a public stage. And several performances could have ignited simultaneously, or a particularly dramatic show may have sparked subsequent performances elsewhere. After the burst of creative energy, each stage returned to its original state, whether a porch, yard, or plaza. In this context, spontaneity suggests fluidity and synergy. This is not to say that schemas and repertoires weren’t involved, for they structured these performances just as they do the impromptu performances in nightclubs and subway stations (Bennett 106). Rather, the impromptu street theater brings to mind the creative flash of joint story telling and competitive verbal play that ignite as people go about their day-to-day lives.

The Impromptu Theater in Context: Location, Power, and the Integrity of Community Life

      In Trackton, the plaza was a “public area” (Heath 79) and its discourse—from story telling to yo-mama insults to hand-clapping playsongs—“public performances” (81). The descriptor public distinguishes Trackton’s literacy events from those of the neighboring white community where language learning was the private endeavor of individual households. But Trackton’s location, its circuits of power, and its integrity as a community distinct from nearby public institutions also qualified Trackton as a distinct local public.

      Location. Trackton’s geographic location helped to create a local public distinct from the public institutions in the nearby town of Gateway. Given the “good stone’s throw” that measured the road running between Trackton and Gateway, location separated and distinguished Trackton from town (Heath 47). At the center of the neighborhood, Trackton’s plaza invited residents to turn their attention to one another and away from the demands in town. The plaza’s public performances were not about preparing children for life outside the neighborhood where as adults they would likely go to look for work but rather about asserting their places in the social hierarchy of the neighborhood.

      Location also distinguished Trackton’s local public discourse from the discourses of the institutions in town. Because of the political and economic history behind its geographic borders, Trackton’s location separated residents from the town’s political processes, decision-making, policies, and procedures (Heath 62). Thus, location signaled differences in how residents used words at home and in town. For instance, the problem-solving orientation of the town’s banks, housing office, and real estate firms would have stipulated that upon learning that her house had been condemned, Aunt Bertha would have immediately gone to town to start searching for another house and financing its purchase. But performances on Trackton’s public stage were compelling in their own right, providing Aunt Bertha with the ready option to spend her time, instead, in the company of her neighbors, leaving “everyday challenges of current life” to sort themselves out (66).

      Power. The politics of Trackton were different from the politics of the town’s public institutions where power plays and contests referred to election campaigns and where it took appointments and paperwork to infiltrate the bureaucracy associated with state and federal social programs. Though Trackton’s politics also involved status, control, rewards and penalties, the dynamics were not institutional but informal. On Trackton’s public stage, performances were challenges, and challenges measured youngsters’ abilities to “outwit, outtalk, or outact their aggressors” (Heath 84).

      Public performances reinforced power relations among residents in Trackton, relations stratified by age and gender. For instance, it was the prerogative of the preschool boys to perform on stage; girls practiced their roles on its periphery (Heath 95). Public performances continued to grant boys power as they grew older by extending public roles to them. A young man’s social status was tied to his ability to assert his own identity and to position others in relation to it—as a teenager named Darret did when he told a toddler named Teegie, “‘You gonna be all right, boy, you be just like me’” (80). Expectations for girls’ performances were more limited and limiting, endorsing a certain kind of “girl talk” as a requisite for becoming “good ‘mamas’” (98).

      Integrity of Community Life. Trackton’s impromptu theater recognized and preserved the internal integrity of community life distinct from the nearby town and its public institutions. Rather than drawing attention to the gap between Trackton residents’ home discourse and the demands of public institutions, the theater underscored the integrity of the habits, preferences, and practices that defined social life in Trackton and made the plaza its center stage. In a community where the ability to struggle, to make do, and to survive was judged more valuable than traipsing into town to fill out forms for some ambiguous bureaucratic process, public performances affirmed the integrity of the community itself as well as the identities, roles, and social positions of residents within it. Public performances permitted the residents of Trackton to assert themselves as a “closed community” (Heath 63), distinguishing themselves from the sometimes “snobbish ways” of the neighboring African American townspeople