The Road Out. Deborah Hicks
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a haven for southern white migrants from Appalachia in the postwar decades. Here, I thought to myself. Here is where I want to teach.
This is how I met a young girl named Blair Rainey.1
I volunteered to teach reading in the local neighborhood elementary school, in the classroom of a second-grade teacher with a warm manner and a soft Kentucky accent. It was there I first spotted a tiny girl who looked even younger than her eight years. She looked sickly, more like a child from a coal-mining county in eastern Kentucky in the 1960s than a child growing up in a prosperous city at the turn of the new millennium. Her skin was pale and ashen. But her eyes expressed something else: toughness, spirit, and, most of all, precociousness. She had the same fiercely intelligent eyes as her grandmother, Grandma Lilly, brown with the mixed Cherokee heritage of their rural ancestors.
When Blair was born, too soon and with drugs in her system, she was so tiny that she fit into a shoebox. She shook at first from the effects of crack cocaine in her tiny body, until the drug worked its way out of her. Then Grandma Lilly, who had already determined that Blair was going to be her special baby and claimed child custody, put infant Blair in a crib. She was still so small that one morning she rolled over and fell out between the bars. From that day, Blair slept in Grandma Lilly’s bed. She began to grow up and walk and use language. Soon afterward, she started to speak and sit by her grandma’s side in bed, and, as Grandma Lilly read books to her, it became apparent that Blair was no ordinary girl. This one was special, and she was going to be the one who made it out.
Now I was determined to be the teacher who made a difference in Blair’s life. I wanted her to have what I never had: a first-rate public school education and a real shot at her grandmother’s dreams for her. The next fall I decided to create my own after-school reading class for Blair and the other girls in her third-grade classroom. I located a classroom in Blair’s elementary school that we could use once a week and during the summer. It was on the first floor of a three-story school building, with a large row of windows that peered out onto the school’s blacktop playground, and beyond that, to one of the neighborhood’s small side streets. During school hours, it was used for counseling and remedial tutoring. But for two hours each week and during the summer it became ours—a room of our own. The room at first looked sad. The gray carpet was frayed and soiled in spots. The walls that had once been white were yellowing, the corner paint peeling. To make the room feel like a place where girls would want to gather, I brought in wicker armchairs and a loveseat I bought on sale. I plumped colorful pillows on the makeshift furniture and began creating a library with books about girls’ lives.
Every Monday after school during the regular school year, and every day during summer school, my students met to read and talk about books and to write stories of their own. The girls in my reading class moved into fourth grade, and still we continued to meet. In summer of 2002, our second summer together, with drippy Ohio Valley heat descending upon the neighborhood like a moistened blanket, Blair and I drew together our two armchairs and talked about fiction.
“Doesn’t it keep you up at night when you read your book?” I asked.
“No,” said Blair quickly.
Just weeks before she turned ten, Blair had recorded her preferences in a journal she kept for my class: “Blair Rainey lives in Cincinnati. Blair likes to color and draw pictures of many things. Blair’s favorite food is pizza and her favorite drink is Mountain Dew. Blair likes to go swimming in the summer time and get her dog off of the chain. Blair’s favorite color is blue. She has blue folders, a blue swimming pool and blue teddy bears. Blair’s favorite book is Rose Madder by Stephen King and she is reading it at home.”
During that year I made the amazing discovery that Blair, a fragile-looking girl and barely ten years old, was a Stephen King fan. The heroine of her favorite book was a young woman named Rose. Rose’s husband, Norman, is a monstrous ex-cop who, in one bloody and gruesome scene, beats her until she loses her unborn baby. Fleeing her husband, Rose escapes to a new city, but Norman uses his old skills as a cop to track her down.
“I wanted my name to be Rose,” said Blair, clutching a blue Beanie Baby. Her small torso and spindly limbs barely filled the armchair.
“Does your grandma ever read Stephen King with you?” I asked curiously.
“Yeah, but my grandma don’t like him. She thinks his writing is terrible and his stories are horrible.” Grandma Lilly preferred old books, like Black Beauty and The Little House on the Prairie.
“What is it about Stephen King’s books that you really enjoy?” I asked.
“The parts when scary things happen,” said Blair. “And I like to read long books.” Rose Madder was 420 pages long.
This story of one precocious young girl, her Stephen King book, and a hopelessly idealistic teacher helps to shed light on a big dilemma. How can education open doors for girls such as Blair, the daughter of poor whites, and a girl with dreams as big as any girl in America? Her small but important life story is part of a larger American narrative. She is the young heir to a labor history, a slice of our national life that is disappearing. The courageous southern migrants who fled Appalachian poverty had come to midwestern cities in search of manufacturing jobs and a better future for their children. Now young Blair had inherited a forgotten landscape, tormented by job loss and a growing street-drug problem. Dropout rates were high too, reflecting an intergenerational history—the earlier workers in Blair’s neighborhood could find jobs without a high school diploma—but also a sense of detachment from school. What Blair most needed was a first-rate education that would allow her to create a new kind of future, leading her away from the streets and their torments and toward the life her Grandma Lilly envisioned for her. But when I set out to become an educational agent of hope and change for Blair, I discovered that the single thing that could have made the biggest difference in her life—public education—was itself part of the problem. In spite of the intentions of individuals at Blair’s school, who were as hardworking as they were big-hearted, she was caught up in the same two-tiered system of schooling I had lived through. It’s like John Dawson, an Appalachian migrant who moved to inner-city Chicago in the 1950s, remarked: “A poor kid don’t get the same teachin’ that a rich kid gets.”2
Educational reformers who talk about making a difference in the lives of poor students often cite the need to teach basic skills that will one day translate into jobs. But mixed in with the facts of economic disadvantage are clichés about poor and working-class students: we lack basic skills, we don’t have aspirations, maybe our parents or caretakers don’t care as much. Yet here I was, a teacher confronting a girl who in many ways was more like me as a young girl. She was a precocious reader, but one without a sliver of the opportunity that her more privileged peers received. Her love of Stephen King books was puzzling and even troubling for me, but it also spoke to her gift. This was no remedial reader. How many girls her age could handle a 420-page novel?
Now I have always been a dreamer, so I set out to do something that was as naïve as it was promising. I wanted to offer Blair and the other girls who joined my class something different, a class that went far beyond the teaching of basic skills. Part of me was always a traditionalist. Like any serious English teacher, I knew that it didn’t do my students any favors to ignore problems of reading fluency or writing mechanics. But I decided to focus on one of the oldest teaching tools—literature, stories—and create the kind of class that girls in elite schools in America might have: a class for the gifted. I turned to fiction, and especially to stories about girls with few resources but plenty of grit and intelligence. My students would read works of literature and use these as a basis for talking and writing about their own complex lives. We would read our way into a real education, and out of the hopelessness that Blair felt even as a young girl.
The stories that follow chronicle this odyssey, from its beginnings when Blair and her classmates were only eight and nine years old, through the years of middle girlhood and then into those of early adolescence. You will watch me as I struggle to gain a real understanding of my students’ lives—and of their strange love of horror. For it turned out that Blair was not the only fan of Stephen King’s gruesome stories. As I puzzled over the thought of girls so young reading horror fiction, I