The Road Out. Deborah Hicks
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lives and feelings. As this chronicle progresses, you will watch as these girls grow up and become young teens. Their dreams of better lives, their struggles, and at times their stumbles back into the streets that claimed so many of their mothers provide an intimate portrait of the grueling journey toward young womanhood faced by the daughters of America’s poor whites. You will see me grapple with a question that haunted me: How can one teacher truly make a difference when everything else is working against her students, and her? And what role can books and literature play in such a worthy cause? Can they open doors for other students, the way they once did for me? Could they help provide, in Blair’s case, a ticket to upward mobility and the things her grandmother wanted for her? This coming-of-age story is the story of one teacher’s struggles to create change and opportunity for girls in the other America.
As our journey is revealed, so are the lives of my other six students. Adriana is one of them, a girl with big dreams. When she was a very young girl, Adriana traveled by Greyhound bus to Las Vegas with her mother. The trip left a strong impression, and Adriana wanted to do things that no one in her family had ever done. She wanted to be a biker, she wanted to see the world, and she wanted to go to college. Over time you will see Adriana contend with the bone-crushing loss of the thing that meant the most to her: her family. Her mother, Kelly, would be sucked into the destructive orbit of a street-drug culture, with the prescription painkiller OxyContin as the first step into an abyss ending in heroin. It is a story that tragically repeats itself across an eight-year journey.
Alicia, our group’s tiniest member, a girl with a baby-doll face, soulful eyes, and a sweet, comic smile, would lose her mother at age ten. Her distant stepcousin, Mariah, who eventually joined our group, had faced a similar trauma at an even younger age in the East Tennessee hamlet where she was born. Adopted by a new family in the city, this troubled past haunted her, even as it drew her back to the sweet mountain land where she felt she belonged. My small class would, over time, become a gathering of sisters, orphans in one sense—victims of the reach of drugs such as OxyContin into the lives of the most vulnerable. This was a new chapter in the history of the resourceful but poor laborers who came to the city from Appalachia. It was also one that I knew could destroy a young girl’s dreams.
You will follow the unexpected twists—the surprises, the disappointments, the moments of epiphany and change—in the lives of girls such as Shannon, Jessica, and Elizabeth. These three students struggled at first with their attachments to books, to education, and to me—the Teacher. Shannon was our group’s self-proclaimed tomboy as a young girl, more interested in basketball than books or school at age nine. She found a voice as a journalist in my class and by the age of eleven was writing moving essays about the challenge of being a girl in such an unforgiving place. But as much as she found herself in an intimate gathering of girls, she lost herself in larger public school classrooms. She would give up on school at sixteen, shortly after losing her baby, who was born at just twenty-three weeks. Shannon’s story of alienation in public school is one that repeats itself across time in individual girls’ lives and in family histories.
Jessica struggled too. She was from the start of my class an academically weaker student. Still, in my special literature and creative writing class she blossomed. One year older than most of my students, Jessica became our outspoken leader and a poet in search of peace and a better world. But the closer Jessica got to adolescence the further she distanced herself from public school. “How do I help her change this?” I asked myself continually as I watched and worried.
The same was true of my concern about Elizabeth, a passionate girl in search of love. The holes in her heart would get too painful to bear when her family was torn apart and she was sent to foster care. She too became part of our sisterhood: a smart girl who struggled to hold on to her fragile connection to education when the world around her was changing so fast she couldn’t understand things.
And Blair, our group’s Stephen King fan? Like all of the girls in my class, and like me, Blair was a girl with big dreams. Grandma Lilly thought her gifted grandbaby might someday become a criminal lawyer, for Blair had a way with words. At age nine, Blair herself saw a lot of possibilities for her future. She could be a singer, or maybe someone who lived on a farm. By the time Blair turned sixteen, she would have fallen in love for the first time and become a poet, with a dream of publishing her first book of poems. This Stephen King fan and aspiring writer would also have dropped out of school.
The journey I undertook is based on the belief, indeed the conviction, that things can and must be different for girls such as Blair Rainey, and all of the girls who share her dreams and her crushing obstacles to opportunity. My own life journey, from a poorly educated girl in a small mountain town to a Harvard-educated writer, teacher, and social advocate is one message of hope. But then so are the stories of seven determined girls who were every bit as gifted and promising as I once was. Each different, but all steadfast in their desire for a better life than the one they had inherited. These daughters and granddaughters of southern Appalachian workers have grit and resolve, but they need much more if they are to succeed in our new unforgiving economy. The stories that follow provide a chronicle of one teacher’s odyssey in poor America, and of the pitfalls and possibilities that arose along a road carved out of simple materials: literature, reading, and stories of childhood dreams.
PART I
Childhood Ghosts
CHAPTER ONE
Ghost Rose Speaks
For Blair Rainey, things began to change in the winter when she was nine years old. This was the time in her life when Blair began to find herself on the pages of her book.
Before then, she had listened and watched as her half sister, a girl in her teens, read aloud. Then things began to come together in a strange new mix: the scary movies Blair loved to watch on television; the book she was starting to read herself; the human drama in her family’s social center, a front-facing bedroom. Blair loved to read there, sitting up in bed. Lying next to her was her Grandma Lilly, a heavyset woman with a bad hip and gray, braided hair pulled back tightly to reveal a weary face. For years, her grandma had struggled to hold things together with the thin trickle of funds from Social Security and child support. Blair had slept next to her grandma since she was an underweight newborn, tiny enough at first to fit in a shoebox. But she was growing up. Now everyone in her family knew that Blair was the smart girl who was going to make it out. On gray afternoons that winter, the world in her grandma’s bedroom moved to its own rhythms. The television set blared drama and talk shows. A small, scrawny terrier danced in circles for attention. Blair’s grandma lay in bed, answering the phone and barking out orders to her grandkids. The bedroom, with its view of the streets outside, smelled of pets and baby pee and musty warmth.
Blair.
From outside, sounds from the streets drifted in. The crazies were out there, including Blair’s mother, a sad and angry ex-addict. “Get your ASS off the sidewalk!” she would scream at some unlucky soul walking by. There was the lady who walked around all the time talking to the billboards. One day she was walking by, and she looked at the chain link fence and said hi to it. Then there was Kooky Old Joe, who had served in World War II. Kooky Joe said that a bomb had gone off right by his ear, and he went around talking to everything too. The streets outside were ugly and crazy and weird, Blair would think to herself, as she sank deeper and deeper into her book.
Blair was born in Lower Price Hill, a neighborhood of just over one thousand on Cincinnati’s west side. Close by were the brown, slow-moving waters of the Ohio River. Her grandmother’s people, migrants from Appalachia, had once crossed the river on their journey north from eastern Kentucky. They were part of one of the largest population shifts in America’s history. Between 1940 and 1970, over three million Appalachian people packed their belongings and left the mountains, hoping to find work and a better future for their children in midwestern cities. They moved into neighborhoods close to old-industry centers, in cities such as Chicago, Dayton, Akron, and Cincinnati. As Janice Sheppard of Williamson, West Virginia, described her journey in the 1950s: “I sold everything we had within two days, made arrangements, and then on the day I decided to