The Road Out. Deborah Hicks
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garner such intimate material, how I could know what a girl might be thinking or feeling at a given moment. The length of time I taught the same girls in our small class, four years, was one resource that allowed me to go deep, and most importantly, to garner the trust that allowed these girls to reveal their inner thoughts, feelings, dreams, and anxieties. Coupled with time were other tools. I pored over thousands of pages of detailed written notes, transcriptions from recordings of all our classes, and interview materials in order to recreate the scenes depicted in this memoir. Each moment of this narrative in which a reader is able to peer into the inward thoughts of my students is tied to an outward exchange during our classes, to my interviews, or to a girl’s written journal.
This does not of course mean that the experiences recounted are without the overlay of my own way of seeing and understanding things. Though this book portrays eight lives, including my own, there is just one narrator. I hope that one day the girls portrayed in this book will write their own memoirs, and in so doing fill in the spaces where I could not see or hear with enough clarity to tell the complete story of another’s life. And yet, I have not pulled back from the challenge of recounting my students’ inner childhood worlds. I have portrayed their worlds more seamlessly than a purely sociological study would, with the intent of helping to bring readers inside the hidden lives of poor whites. This is not done merely for literary effect. I believe that more just actions and social policies, including our response to the crisis of education for the poor, can only come from deeper understandings of these still mysterious lives. It is my dream that readers of this chronicle will be moved to a different kind of thought and action, not by means of a new assortment of facts and statistics but through the intimacy of a story.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
February 2012
INTRODUCTION
A Teacher on a Mission
When I was a young girl growing up in a sleepy Appalachian paper mill town, I had a lot of dreams for a girl with limited opportunity. Probably the biggest of all my dreams was just to get away from where I was. I spent most of my girlhood in a perpetual state of roaming. The road in front of the wood-frame house we rented in my early years was paved but it soon turned to dirt, as it wound out of town and toward the hills and “hollers” nearby. At home were my parents and one brother, only ten years old but already trouble. He was a gangly, miserable kid who was as disturbed as he was smart; possibly he suffered some neurological damage from his difficult entry into the world, a city doctor would later surmise. My father donned his workman’s clothes and packed his lunch pail, happy to get out of the house. My mother took Valium and Darvon and slept off her anxiety and depression. Off I would go, a plucky five-year-old in search of a little girl’s dreams in the unlikely landscape of working-class Appalachia.
The dirt and gravel toughened my feet, but in my head I was more a princess than a scrawny little blonde girl with dirt between her toes. I could walk to the local general store down the road, where old men sat on benches outside, their cheeks bulging with tobacco. I could wander in the other direction to visit Mrs. White, a sweet older church lady who played piano and sang hymns in her scratchy country voice. But even a curious, enterprising young girl could go only so far. Often my journeys ended at a pasture next to our house, where I played with a small baby doll and some dimestore plastic animals: my kingdom. The days passed in this uneventful way until two things happened that changed my life forever. I discovered the world of books, and I began a twelve-year journey through some of America’s poorest and worst public schools. It was an inauspicious start, but I can look back now and see my beginnings as a teacher.
Most people would agree that if there is a single ticket out of poverty and up the ladder of social mobility, it surely must be public school. Those of us who have struggled to climb that ladder would argue more than anyone that school was our hope. For me, school was probably more like my salvation. I went to school to find a place for my curious mind and shrunken heart to grow and flourish. But to succeed in school and beyond, an ill-prepared girl from an impoverished background needs some good luck: a teacher who spots her gifts and becomes her guide to the wider world, a good school that offers her a scholarship and a shot at success, one family member—perhaps an aunt or cousin—who has been a trailblazer and wants to help. As a typical girl of my background, I had none of these things.
My early childhood education was pretty much like that of any rural working-class girl in the 1960s. My mother had ordered some Little Golden Books from a mail-order source and stuck these on the same bookshelf that housed Reader’s Digest magazines, a collection of Bible stories, and a few older, worn novels from her Arkansas childhood: Little Women and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Men in my childhood didn’t read and women did house chores, so it fell upon me to make sense of this odd reading curriculum. Always a child in search of adventure where I could find it, I took the thin Little Golden Books and found an inviting niche on the bank that separated our backyard from the pasture next door, its unruly grass rising to my knees. There I could hear an occasional car making its way up the narrow two-lane road leading past the general store toward the laundromat and single-wide trailers set on the hill. I could smell the sweet honeysuckle, and hear an occasional voice echoing.
I dreamed, as I read from the Little Golden Books, of worlds I would visit someday and adventures I would have. I would travel to Holland, with its pretty windmills and dikes; I would don wooden shoes like the brave little Dutch boy who held back the flooding waters of the sea with his finger. I would go off to Africa and sit among the animals like Jane Goodall—the lady I had seen on our small black-and-white RCA. Only I would study the lives of tigers. I would sit quietly and become their friend, just as Goodall had scooted up next to chimpanzees in the jungles of Tanzania. At night I would sleep in a large white tent staked into the rich African soil.
Then I went off to our local public school, and my dreams were put on hold for over a decade. I came out trained in rote skills but was completely unprepared for the kind of thinking, reading, and writing you need to do in a good college. So my journey from a naïve, poorly educated rural girl to a woman with an advanced degree from Harvard was full of detours that drained and derailed me.
At seventeen I went to a local college on a scholarship. I recall the six months I dropped out of that college to work in a warehouse. I needed money and a car, so I put my educational future on hold while I assembled and packed up boxes, like a contemporary version of the city factory girls trying to work their way out of poverty in the early 1900s. No longer a young woman with a promising educational future, I was there to fill mail-order boxes with items ranging from travel sewing kits to sex toys. Oddly, the experience felt more normal and ordinary than any college class. Part of me even enjoyed my time taping together boxes in my place on the packing line, because this was the kind of thing I had been educated to do: work hard and follow orders. Still, as soon as I had the money I needed, I went back to college and fumbled my way through a higher-education system I barely understood.
After college, I packed up and flew to France with some pocket money and a one-way ticket, not completely sure what I would do over there. I picked grapes (les vendanges in French) and did a stint as a nanny and house maid, my best attempt at the study-abroad experience. I came back to live in the big city of Washington, finding an office job at Georgetown University so I could take free classes in language studies and teaching. A professor spotted my work, and my life changed again: I earned a graduate fellowship. At last, two years later, I landed at Harvard University to finish advanced study in the subject that was closest to my heart: education.
Out I came with my student loan debt and my books and theories about teaching. I had become a specialist in childhood literacy education and had learned how to conduct research. But the rebellious part of me sought out a curriculum of a different sort than a university could offer. I read novels and dreamed about how I would change the world. I drank strong coffee and even scribbled out a few poems and stories. Then, one day, I found myself in Cincinnati for a teaching post in the education department of a local university. It wasn’t long before I discovered a neighborhood that made me feel I had entered a time machine and traveled back to my childhood.
The neighborhood was only minutes by car from downtown Cincinnati—nestled at the foot of one of Cincinnati’s famous hills—but the drive felt like one into a rural West Virginia