Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long
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public discourse had an edgy quality to it. Even though public performances were largely entertaining—the “hostility, disrespect, and aggressive behavior” only “feigned” (Heath 81)—the tension is palpable in Heath’s descriptions. The edginess is most evident in the ritualized insults and accusations characterizing boy talk but was also true of girls’ fussing, reprimanding those who violated various social codes. Verbal competition tested youngsters’ discursive adaptability and flexibility. “[M]eanings of a particular word, phrase, or set of actions [. . .] are often neither literal or predictable” (84). Thus, public performances tested the performer’s ability to respond spontaneously to subtle and changing contextual cues, intensifying the competitive edge of verbal play (79).
Residents used verbal play to assert their place in Trackton’s social hierarchy. Given its premise of winners and losers, competition gave children the chance to practice responding to the nuances of a challenger’s assertions. Indirection and competition were part of a tradition designed to initiate children into an unstable and unpredictable world where one’s survival was often based on the ability to improvise. Conversely, to violate the codes of discourse was to risk a public shaming that struck to the core of a person’s identity, a threat that ran throughout not only childhood but also adulthood. Thus, the tenor of the discourse maintained rules that reinforced residents’ social standings.
Performative Literacies
Three distinct oral practices characterized Trackton’s public stage performances: boys’ public-stage challenges, in all their variations; two kinds of girl talk, fussing and playsongs; and story telling, especially among elderly matriarchs.
• Boys’ Public-Stage Challenges.1 These “put-downs” combined aggressive words and gestures to provoke other boys to respond with retorts of their own (Heath 80). Challenges could take the forms of teasing, defying, bossing, begging, arguing, babying, scolding, boasting, insulting and ridiculing (85). Used to gauge quickness and intelligence, challenges were embedded within other rituals—for instance, determining how treats were allocated within the distribution routine.
• Girl Talk. Girls accessed the public stage primarily through their participation within two practices: fussing games and playsongs. Through fussing games, girls berated someone of lower social status for violating an aspect of the social code—say, not showing due care when slinging a baby across one’s hip. Playsongs used rhythm and rhyme to structure and to sequence patterned games, including handclap games and jump-rope playsongs.
• Matriarchs’ Story Telling. Story telling involved ritualized narratives marked by repetition and a “lilting chant-like quality” (Heath 65). Recounted primarily by the elderly, these stories reinforced a shared sense of pride in past accomplishments and acceptance of life circumstances, including stories of the living and working conditions that elderly residents had encountered growing up further south. Stories emphasized “the fact that there were some good things back then in spite of the hardships” (65). Miss Bee’s story of her childhood featured a wood cabin, cracks in floorboards, and chickens visible between these cracks.
Trackton’s residents used these literacies both to call into being and to access their local public.
Rhetorical Invention: Practice, Modeling, and Feedback
Given the emphasis on repeated practice, modeling, and feedback, Trackton children’s inventive processes parallel other descriptions of children’s language learning (e.g., Halliday 24), but embedded in the rich description of a specific, rural African-American community.
Repeated practice. Public life provided Trackton’s boys with repeated opportunities to practice countering verbal insults and accusations. In a similar vein, older siblings noted the value of repeated practice when they attempted to compensate for the infrequent invitations issued to their younger sisters to participate in public discourse. Girls were “not excluded from this scene, [. . .] but they [were] rarely given parts to play and almost never full-stage performance opportunities” (Heath 79). However, because they were disconnected from the promise of an audience’s “rewarding response” (86), “these sessions rarely last[ed] longer than a few minutes, since the younger child quickly los[t] interest” (96). As the older siblings knew, practice makes a difference. Without it, girls “ha[d] a much smaller store of experiences from which to draw” (96). Those boys judged to be best at public discourse were given the most opportunities to continue to practice and, thus, to hone—even as they demonstrated—their performative prowess. Consequently, those who practiced most also became most adept at handling their public roles.
Modeling. Children learned their roles by watching other Trackton players perform theirs. Sometimes, the modeling was made quite explicit, with an older sibling, for instance, cuing the learner to mimic the modeled behavior, as in the prompt “‘[S]ay––, say it like I do’” (Heath 96). But more often, boys learned the art of the counterchallenge by watching their challengers’ moves and tactics.
Feedback. How did young actors on Trackton’s public stage assess the adequacy of their own performances? Through feedback, often in the forms of laughter, applause and verbal praise but also packaged as “food, affection, and gifts” (Heath 82). In countering public-stage challenges, some combination of “a verbal and nonverbal put-down” typically elicited enthusiastic responses from audiences (80). But feedback wasn’t consistent. Instead, adults used indirection and inconsistency as tools for developing children’s inventional capacities, especially their ability to discern judgments from subtle contextual cues.
Through invention, children discovered not only what to say but how to handle the kinesis of the entire performance (Heath 81). Catching a child in the throes of invention—in this case, thinking on his feet—was often the very point of a challenger instigating a public performance. Practice and learning “t[ook] place on stage” (86), rather than offstage in preparation for a performance as strategies for rhetorical planning typically suggest. Performances tested whether young performers had the wherewithal to assess and to respond instantaneously to an audience’s multiple demands.
Implications
1. Local publics are simultaneously discursive as well as physical spaces.
A local public need not have some pre-existent status as a physical entity—as in the case of a New England town hall that holds regularly scheduled town meetings. As the distribution routine demonstrates, local publics burst into being virtually anywhere in Trackton—as along as the necessary conditions were met. Yet Trackton’s location also constrained and configured what went on there. Location separated Trackton from town, not only geographically but also ideologically, privileging residents’ own priorities and values.
2. With integrity of its own, a local public can be a welcome alternative to public institutional spaces that people find hostile and alienating.
Heath illustrates one way that a local public supports a community’s integrity; Scott Lyons’s New Ghost Dance, another. On Trackton’s public stage, integrity meant that performers like Darret—rather than, say, the institutions in Gateway—set the terms for public discourse. This measure of integrity is also central to Lyons’s analysis of the rhetorical sovereignty of Native Americans for whom the ultimate hostile public institution was the boarding school that stripped native children of their culture, language, and practices and often humiliated and brutally punished them for refusing to fulfill their teachers’ demands.
But Lyons replaces a closed community’s hierarchical public performance with that of the intercultural New Ghost Dance. The difference means that the New Ghost Dance sets “at least some” of the terms of debate (Lyons 462). That is, rather than reinforcing rigid borders, the New Ghost Dance allows issues that bubble up in local publics to find their way into more formal arenas. The benefit of this apparent compromise rests in its outcomes. Consider, for instance, the Supreme Court’s upholding of native people’s “right to hunt and fish on ceded land” and the federal Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s “disrecognition of the Washington Redskins trademark” (466). Crediting the victories’ local origins, Lyons writes: “Both initiatives arose from the grassroots, each in their own way fought over questions of land and identity, and the ultimate