The Road Out. Deborah Hicks
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people just threw their trash on the ground. The gutters were filled with it, which Blair found disgusting. As a ten-year-old girl, Blair saw her neighborhood in shades of gray. The streets were dirty, crazy, and weird, she thought.
As a matter of fact, sometimes Blair felt crazy herself. And at night when things got quiet, she could hear Rose talking in a terrible, sweet voice.
“Rose only speaks to me,” Blair said. Her small eyes seemed focused on some secret place, not visible to me. She was starting to speak in a high-pitched child voice, like Ghost Rose herself.
“What does Rose say to you?” I asked Blair.
“I want out,” was Blair’s sweetly uttered reply.
This was the summer when it began to dawn on me that Blair’s ghost stories and horror novels were about more than things that go bump in the night. For Blair the stories were just as much about her place in a world that was frightening and troubling and beautiful. It was a world of sharp contrasts. The strength and resilience of female voices were present within and around all of my students. So was the backbone of extended family, the very center of life for girls in an Appalachian community.
But Blair and my other students also faced bone-crushing loss: their childhoods had been stolen from them. For the landscape in which they were coming of age was a haunted one. It was depressing, uncertain, sometimes fear-provoking. People fought on the streets, dealers worked their corners, the unemployed were listless and ashamed, the air was foul with pollutants that would never be tolerated by the more privileged. Inside their homes, girls had the warmth of family love, but even this couldn’t shield them from harm. The earlier southern migrants had been poor at the start of their journeys to the city, but now, with the loss of jobs and a street-drug problem—the abuse of painkillers—the community’s poverty was starting to spin out of control. The street’s worst effects were tearing at the fabric of intimate family. Everywhere my girls turned they found reminders of the demons they had to stare down just to make it to the other side of adolescence.
In their improbable way, I was learning, the horror stories offered hope. Hapless heroines could outwit sinister spirits and crazies. Even the heroine of Rose Madder could find the inner strength to defeat the horrifying monster that Norman had become. Spirits such as Blair’s Ghost Rose could speak out in angry voices, letting others know how trapped and alone they felt. I too was trying to create hope around the only form of transcendence I knew: an education rich in literature and reading.
All around me were the mantras about education for the poor. I was supposed to be getting the girls workforce ready, skilled enough at reading so they could at least finish high school. What the pundits and policymakers would have seen, if for a moment they could have peered at Blair as she talked about books, was a young girl with more than her share of reading skills. She was looking for something deeper in literature, maybe a small place for herself beyond the graying walls of a public school classroom. The road ahead for her would be a long and difficult one; that much I knew from my experience. But I was determined to help Blair find her own way.
It would not be the last time we heard about Ghost Rose. Nor was Rose the only ghost to make an appearance in my summer class. As the weeks wore on, I would learn that other girls were living haunted childhoods. There was Alicia’s Ghost Howard—now he was a crazy one! Always up to no good. And there was the ghost of little Bobby in The House on Cherry Street paperbacks, Elizabeth’s favorite literary ghost. A floodgate of stories had opened, and out the ghosts poured.
There is a tradition of storytelling among people of Appalachian heritage, and the culture is no stranger to dark tales or gore. But something different was going on, I suspected, something to do with the way in which these brave, resourceful girls—daughters and granddaughters of mountain soil—were coping with an urban neighborhood that had begun to turn into a ghetto, a ghost of itself. I couldn’t have known at the time, for my students kept their secrets guarded at first, but the shadows of drug abuse, starting with painkillers but ending for some with heroin, were creeping even into their intimate families. Blair’s mother was lost; she had done little more in the way of parenting than give birth to Blair. Alicia’s mother was starting to slip, too, and experiment with weekend thrill rides. Adriana’s mother would sometimes come home glassy-eyed from being high. We were becoming a sisterhood of girls with stolen childhoods. I wasn’t conscious of these events at first, but one thing I did know: Blair had found a type of fiction that was speaking more powerfully as a teaching tool than any I could bring to her.
That night, in bed again with my copy of Rose Madder, I stayed up past midnight with my heart pounding, unable to stop reading the story.
CHAPTER TWO
Elizabeth Discovers Her Paperback
Even before our class began on a warm morning later that same week in June, our two floor fans were already working furiously. The sun’s rays had begun to warm my ground-floor classroom past the comfort level. From the second floor came wafts of something that smelled toxic. The floors upstairs were being stripped, and it was of no consequence that the odors might be disturbing, or even unhealthy, for the children and teachers working on the floor below. An incident that generated anger and mistrust throughout the neighborhood crept into my thoughts. In the 1980s, several children had had to be carried out of the school on stretchers because of toxic fumes from a nearby paint shop. I wondered for a moment if the fumes we had to live with on this summer morning were safe for the girls, and for me. But I didn’t have much time to linger on my latest source of anxiety. The girls would be coming in soon.
I pushed back my worries and looked around, admiring the handiwork of my teaching preparations. One thing I had quickly discovered was that compared to the increasingly regimented curriculum that teachers were compelled to offer during the year, summer school was like a tabula rasa. For four glorious hours each day, a resourceful teacher could offer the reading curriculum that she felt her students needed, not the prepackaged schemes marketed to desperate school districts as the latest fix for poorly performing students. All that spring and into the early weeks of summer, I had embarked on a hunt for the perfect summer reading for a class of girls, and not just any girls. Several of my students were still getting their feet on the ground as readers. Jessica and Alicia read haltingly, and either of them could give up easily if a book seemed too hard or too long. The landscape of the girls’ lives made things different, too. How many novels for young readers feature young heroines who are poor and white, and who face anything close to the obstacles faced by my students? Today as I looked again at the bookshelves, I was sure I had finally found the book that would pull my students into its beautifully written story about a girl’s life.
The novel was written by a woman with Appalachian roots and was set in West Virginia. Ellie Farley, the young heroine of Cynthia Rylant’s A Blue-Eyed Daisy, is a pretty girl with long fair hair, blue eyes, and rotting teeth. At home, there are her four older sisters, ensconced in their teenage worlds. There is her hard-drinking father, Okey, out of work after a mining accident, and her stressed-out mother, who has shut the door on her feelings of rage and disappointment. Okey sometimes loses it in a bout of drinking. At those times, Ellie hides and cringes, while her mother absorbs Okey’s verbal rantings and occasional punches. Most of the time, however, Ellie struggles for connection, even with her damaged father. The novel chronicles “some year,” as Ellie inches closer toward her twelfth birthday.1
I felt a sense of anticipation that any book-loving teacher would recognize. For months, I had worked day and night to plan for our special summer class. For over a year, we had met after school each week, building trust and the ability to listen to one another. Now the day was ours and—even with the drippy Ohio heat and the fumes coming from upstairs—I was ready.
I straightened an old family quilt I used that summer as a cozy cushion for our meeting circle. Sometimes we sat right on the carpeted floor because the girls were so small—and so was our group. I couldn’t get Jessica out of bed to come to my summer class every morning, so often we ended up with four students who had attended my Monday afterschool class that spring—Adriana, Alicia, Blair, and Shannon—and one who hadn’t, Elizabeth. This was Elizabeth’s first time in an intensive summer class devoted so strongly to reading and talking about literature, and she