Lost amongst the little people

Someone asked whether I'm on hiatus, and the answer is...maybe. I'm enjoying having a whole mess of small people in the house (but it's a happy mess), changing diapers, living on macaroni and cheese, remembering to carry all kinds of extra stuff every time I leave the house, listening to soothing lullabies even when I need to stay alert (like while driving through the most boring part of the Ohio landscape), stepping over plastic toys everywhere (including the bathtub), coloring, reading books aimed at a toddler's attention span, answering impossible questions, and trying to keep the chaos to a minimum. I've been doing a little bit of course prep while small people are otherwise occupied, but there's not much time or energy left for anything that requires deep thought. Today my primary concern is what to do if the rain spoils our picnic lunch, and who wants to read about that? I'm not really focused on communicating with anyone over the age of six, which makes it hard to think about blogging. So I'm not. Much. If you want to call that a hiatus, go right ahead.

But maybe you'd rather look at photos from our visit to a pollinator habitat!

  

Back to Nickel Academy: asking how and why

In the days since I was so profoundly affected by the twist at the end of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, I've been thinking about how he does it--and, more importantly, why it matters. The Nickel Boys would be an interesting and even important novel without the shift in perspective at the end, but that shift makes it a masterpiece, and it's worth thinking about what Whitehead is up to because it raises questions about how we conceive of justice and the value of human lives.

In some ways The Nickel Boys reminds me of Toni Morrison's Paradise, which opens with "They shoot the white girl first" but then never clearly reveals which of the girls is white. You can comb the book for clues and admire the way Morrison blurs details to make it impossible to identify the white girl, but eventually you have to ask yourself the bigger question: Why do I care? Why am I obsessing over variations of skin color, and doesn't that obsession link me with the more reprehensible characters in the novel?

Similarly, it's easy to examine The Nickel Boys and see how Whitehead achieves his sleight of hand: The fairly conventional third-person narrative lulls readers into accepting what appears to be happening, so it's easy to overlook the subtle clues that all is not as it appears. After I finished the novel, I turned back to the Prologue and found a simple phrase that would have given away the game if I'd noticed it the first time through, but the phrase is so mundane and innocuous that only the most paranoid reader would interrogate its intent. And then Whitehead unfolds the plot and controls perspective so carefully that we just follow along unquestioningly until the twist slams us right between the eyeballs.

And now to the delicate part: I don't want to reveal details of the twist, but in essence, it involves an unexpected death. In a book full of unexpected deaths, what makes this one so shocking? What I keep coming back to is this: The wrong person died.

Think about that for a minute.

To say that the wrong person died implies that someone else would have been the right person--and not only that, but that I am uniquely qualified to judge which of several equally (un)deserving characters should die and which should live. Ouch.

Not only that, but Whitehead has been warning all along that this novel takes place in a context where justice is arbitrary, where there's no clear relationship between actions and consequences, where punishment falls brutally on whoever happens to wander into its path. If we buy into Whitehead's premise, then no death should be unexpected, so the fact that the twist is so shocking suggests that we've been holding on to the conviction that justice will be served in this special case regardless of its arbitrary nature elsewhere. The twist reveals that we've been fools all along: the game is rigged and our hopes for a special dispensation are empty.

And this, I think, is what makes the novel so powerful: We can read about the horrors of Nickel Academy and comfort ourselves with the assurance that life outside Nickel is more just, more tolerant, more fair than life inside, but the twist at the end suggests that there is no inside or outside because Nickel is everywhere. This is what hurts the most: not the death of a character, but the grievous injury to the dream that we can build a just and equitable society.

But that doesn't mean we should stop trying. Sometimes the only blow we can strike against injustice is simply to bear witness, and that's exactly what Whitehead does so powerfully in The Nickel Boys and why it's worth reading despite the pain.

Quoth the redstart

I was sitting by the big picture window listening to the Cleveland Indians game while coloring a picture of a peacock (because that's how I roll) when a movement caught my eye and I looked up to see a small bird sitting on a branch of the potted fig tree out on the porch and peering in at me. Nondescript coloring except for brilliant yellow flashes on the tail--a female American redstart, a bird I've seen about twice in my life and then only in the deep woods, and if its expression could speak it would say, "Take a chill pill, dude."

It's true that I've been a little stressed out, what with the rapidly diminishing summer break, the impending onslaught of grandchildren, and the recent death of one of my husband's indomitable aunts. (If your garage band is called The Indomitable Aunts, what's your theme song?) So lately I've been trying to relax a little more intentionally (hence the coloring book), but it's not easy. You know you're in trouble when "relax" becomes an urgent item on your to-do list.

This evening I thought I'd take a relaxing saunter up our hill to see if the milkweed is attracting butterflies, and sure enough it is. I didn't see any of the big, showy butterflies that make for such dramatic photos, but plenty of tiny butterflies were drinking deeply of the butterfly weed, sometimes three or four orange-and-black butterflies on a single burst of orange blossoms. They were so drunk on nectar that they didn't seem to mind my snap-snap-snapping of photos, and I was so drunk on beauty that I didn't even notice that I'd accidentally changed an important setting on my camera until I came back and found that I'd taken photos of all those gorgeous colors in black and white. 

Did I turn right around to go back up the hill and try again? No I did not, mostly because I'd already changed out of my poison-ivy-laden tramping clothes and I didn't want to change clothes again. At first I wanted to kick myself, because what's the point of photos that don't show all that brilliant color? But the point, of course, was not to get more butterfly photos but to get outside my overcrowded brain and wade into beauty. Which I did, color or no color.

So I guess I can cross "relax" off my to-do list for today, but I'll try to relax twice as hard tomorrow. 

 

The Nickel Boys: a story we all need to read (and read again)

When he first arrives at Nickel Academy, a reform school for boys in northern Florida, Elwood Curtis has a serious problem: he doesn't know what kind of story he's just stepped into. Colson Whitehead's novel The Nickel Boys brilliantly dramatizes how such a misunderstanding can be dangerous--or even fatal.

Growing up in Tallahassee in the early 1960s, Elwood is enamored of the Civil Rights rhetoric he reads about in newspapers and hears on a recording of speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and he comes to believe he inhabits a world in which justice eventually prevails. He yearns to be a part of the movement to promote racial justice, but while attempting to get to a local technical college to pursue his dream, he accepts a ride in a car that he doesn't know is stolen and gets sentenced instead to Nickel Academy.

Based closely on the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, Nickel at first appears to be "the nicest-looking property Elwood had ever seen--a real school, a good one, not the forbidding reformatory he'd conjured the last few weeks." However, appearances are deceiving, as Elwood quickly learns: boys are beaten, sexually abused, or even murdered for arbitrary reasons, and the school's administrators sell the black students' food and supplies to local merchants in the nearby white community of Eleanor. The first time he is taken to The White House to be beaten, Elwood counts the strokes other boys receive and tries to discern a system to the beatings, but he can find no clear connection between the severity of the crime and its punishment: "Maybe there was no system at all to the violence and no one, not the keepers or the kept, knew what happened or why."

Elwood ends up in The White House, the small shed used for severe beatings of boys, because of his confusion about what kind of story he inhabits. Seeing a smaller boy being bullied, he tries to step in and help, pulling what his friend Turner calls a "Lone Ranger" move. Even as he is in the Academy's clinic recovering from his brutal beating, Elwood takes comfort in what he's learned from comic books: "Horror comics, he'd noticed, delivered two kinds of punishment--completely undeserved, and sinister justice for the wicked. He placed his current misfortune in the former category and waited to turn the page."

When no one at Nickel is inclined to turn the page, Elwood decides that the only way to achieve justice is to make the outside world aware of the horrors of Nickel. He will write his own story, get it into the hands of state authorities, and bring Nickel Academy to its knees.

Anyone familiar with the history of the Dozier School for Boys realizes just how difficult this task can be. The school stayed in business for 111 years and many boys gave testimony to the systematic neglect, abuse, and corruption that occurred there, but it was only after the school was sold for development that dozens of unmarked graves were discovered, including those of boys who were apparently beaten to death or shot. As Whitehead's narrator muses in the Prologue, "Plenty of boys had talked of the secret graveyard before, but as it had ever been with Nickel, no one believed them until someone else said it." 

It was the discovery of the secret graveyard that inspired Whitehead to write The Nickel Boys, a novel deeply immersed in reality but still suffused with wonders. Particularly compelling is a tour-de-force chapter detailing the annual boxing match between white and black students, reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal" but also echoing Whitehead's own concerns in his 2001 novel John Henry Days, which portrays the battle between man and machine as a spectacle designed to distract oppressed workers from the real injustices surrounding them. John Henry may "win" the battle against the machine, but if death is the prize, who wants to win? 

At Nickel, the boxing match "served as a kind of mollifying spell, to tide them through the daily humiliations," but the idealistic Elwood soon learns that the fight was "rigged and rotten..., another gear in the machine that kept black folks down." The black student champion, Griff, wins the fight, but like John Henry, he falls victim to a system that exacts a brutal cost for his success. 

Indeed, it is this arbitrary relationship between actions and consequences that grinds Elwood down and diminishes his trust in the ultimate power of justice. Like Dozier, Nickel Academy cannot continue to exist without the complicity of the upstanding citizens of Florida, both inside and outside the halls of power. Nickel needs no barbed wire or fences as long as the larger community turns a blind eye to the brutality that keeps boys confined there, even after their release: "That's what the school did  to a boy. It didn't stop when you got out. Bend you all kinds of ways until you were unfit for straight life, good and twisted by the time you left."

To the end Elwood tries to maintain his fragile hold on the belief that if only the right people knew the truth, they would put and end to the suffering of the Nickel Boys, and underlying the novel is the state's attempt to piece together decayed fragments to produce a coherent narrative. I have heard several people describe the final twist as devastating, and I concur: I can't remember the last time a novel reamed me out the way this one did. 

Sometimes all it takes is a small shift in perspective to change everything, the kind of shift Elwood experienced during eye exams, when looking through lenses of different strength produces vastly different results. "Elwood never ceased to marvel how you could walk around and get used to seeing only a fraction of the world. Not knowing you only saw a sliver of the real thing," writes Whitehead. The Nickel Boys invites us to shift perspective and then shift again, to see a sliver of the world we may find distressing but to emerge in the end with clearer vision of just what sort of story we inhabit.

Whack-a-mole at home plate and other varieties of pest control

Dear pest control service salesperson: Do you know what kind of pest control I'd like? The kind that deters pest control service salespersons from ringing the doorbell loudly in the middle of the grandkids' afternoon nap. Can you help me out here?

They're all extra-sleepy today because last night we took our annual family trek to Progressive Field to watch a Cleveland Indians baseball game, which this time featured the Indians clobbering the Kansas City Royals. We all enjoyed one memorable play that my daughter described as "the catcher playing Whack-a-Mole," and she's a former catcher so she would know. 

Conditions were not marvelous for a fun game, thanks to a massive heat wave that made the stadium feel like a blast furnace at first. We sat up in the nosebleeds above first base and played Pass the Grandkids when they got antsy, and we all drank plenty of water, so a good time was had by all.

My son rode his bike in that heat this morning to raise money for cancer research. (Still not too late to donate!) I had intended to go cheer him across the finish line this morning, but apparently I picked up some nasty stomach virus somewhere so instead I've spent most of the day so far either shivering beneath a pile of blankets or running to the bathroom, which is why I was available to answer the door when the pest control service salesperson rang. It would be horribly cruel to hope she picks up my virus, so I won't, but I'm tempted.

A different kind of summer adventure

"Little kids are fun to have around," he said, "But then they get old."

I'd just been explaining that we're preparing to host two of our grandkids at our house for a week or two, and my friend responded that he would never volunteer to do such a thing. Kids! They spill sticky things, drop toys all over the floor, yell and cry and jump all over the furniture, and they need to be fed and bathed and changed and soothed, sometimes all at the same time.

But then they get old. And they move out, leaving behind plastic bins full of Legos, puzzles, Matchbox cars, and doll clothes. And the house gets quiet, clean, and calm. 

I'll be the first to admit that I like a quiet, clean, calm house, and I'll appreciate it even more after spending more than a week with two kids under the age of 6 underfoot, but I'm excited all the same. I never had much help with my kids when they were little; we lived too far from family and rarely had money for babysitters, and so my husband and I went months at a time without spending more than a few hours away from the kids. It makes me happy to know that I can heFun lp my daughter and son-in-law have a little more together time.

But the kids! They're so fun and creative, so full of laughter and energy. I've been getting the house ready and making plans for adventures, and even though I know I'll have some frustrating moments, I also know that help will not be far away. Fortunately, this is all happening before fall classes start up, because I doubt that I'll get much work done while surrounded by little imps.

I've had a lot of adventures this year, from hiking in the Adirondacks to visiting Manhattan for the first time to wandering in our local woods, and this will just be a different sort of adventure. I'm glad it's happening while they're young, because you know what happens with little kids: they get old, and then who will bring so much laughter into my house?

 

Lolling among the lilies

There's nothing quite like Lilyfest: a walk in the woods, a stroll through the garden, a concert, a craft show, a fest. We went early enough to avoid the weekend crowd and enjoyed slightly cooler temperatures than we'd expected plus the occasional cool breeze, and we dallied among gorgeous lilies and other blossoms, not to mention a wide variety of crafts and strawberry ice cream that actually tastes like strawberries. If there's a better way to spend a mild summer morning, I'd like to hear about it. 

This planter is the root ball of a tree, inverted.

Finding the Wayfinder's way

It's not uncommon to find a visitor looking puzzled in front of the big campus map near my building, so I do what I always do: approach with a smile and ask if I can help him find anything. He says no, he's not lost--in fact, he's a Wayfinding Consultant studying the ways people find their way around our campus, and he asks me what I think of the map.

As it happens, I've complained about our campus maps for ages, both on Faculty Council and directly into the President's ear. I'm frequently in a position to help visitors understand the map, which presents a bird's-eye view of buildings generally encountered at street level; the map further disorients visitors by presenting brick buildings as purple, yellow, or blue blocks. Nothing on our campus looks remotely like a big purple rectangle, so it's easy to see why visitors might get confused.

This problem is so obvious that our Wayfinder doesn't even bother to write it down, but he does write down the other complaint I offer: visitors come into my building, Thomas Hall, thinking that it's Andrews Hall, three buildings down the mall. Why? Because the sign posted on Thomas Hall gives the full name of the person for whom it is named: Andrew U. Thomas. If you're looking for Andrews Hall and you see a sign saying Andrew, you could be forgiven for thinking you've found the right place.

"Interesting," says the Wayfinding Consultant, scribbling in his notebook. I wonder what it takes to become a Wayfinding Consultant and how much we're paying for that expertise? And I wonder whether he'll be able to convince the Powers That Be to take action to remedy problems we've endured for ages? My occasional complaints accomplish exactly nothing, but if a highly paid Wayfinding Consultant identifies the same problems, someone with the power to act is bound to listen. 

Oh, to be a Wayfinding Consultant!
He walks around following maps
and interpreting signs. His resultant
report will reveal all the gaps

in our signage, suggesting improvements
and shining a light in the dark
so that visitors' campus-wide movements
will lead straightaway toward the mark.

But our signage, I fear, is so faulty--
if the Wayfinder randomly roams
and gets lost, then whose will the call be 
to find the Wayfinder's way home?

A contender for a prize nobody wants

If there's a prize for banging one's head against a brick wall, I'm definitely a contender today. Here I am on Writing Wednesday sitting in a conference room in the library with seven of my colleagues all busily tapping the keyboards of their laptops to make progress on their important summer writing projects while I'm frantically scrambling to find the notes I took on an important book two weeks ago.

I need those notes! Last month a journal sent me a very favorable response to an article I'd submitted, offering no stylistic suggestions at all (!) except for a request that I change the title (which I LOVE, but whatever), but they demanded that I respond to three specific scholars' work. Now I had already read two of those scholars and dismissed them as not terribly relevant to my argument, but, again, whatever: if that's what it takes to get this article published, I'll respond. I hadn't read the third scholar but quickly ordered the book through interlibrary loan, read it, and took extensive notes. 

Which I now can't find. Anywhere. I either filed the notes under a ridiculous name in a folder unrelated to my current project or else I failed to save the document at all, which would be pretty unusual for me. Obsessive organization is my middle name, so losing something makes me feel like a doddering old biddy.

I was all set to make all the necessary revisions to that article this morning until I realized that I could not locate those notes. I tried--searched through every file related to this project and many unrelated files as well--until I realized that it was hopeless. The notes are not there and I can't revise the article without them, so excuse me while I bang my head against the wall.

Finally I turned away from writing and decided to do some more mindless and soothing tasks, like fiddling around with fall syllabi, updating office hours, dates, page numbers, and other essential details. At least I'm making progress on something. Copy the new date, paste in the left-hand column; copy the new page numbers, paste in the right-hand column. Any idiot could do this job--and on a day like today, that's exactly what I feel like.

So quiet you can hear a frog knocking

I was sitting on the sofa reading in a very quiet house last night when I heard a tap on the window six inches away and found a frog looking in. It sat on the windowsill watching calmly for about ten minutes before hopping away. Must be a fan of Jane Austen.
 
And speaking of wildlife, I had to slam on the brakes and swerve into the other lane yesterday to avoid hitting two fawns that had wandered onto the highway. This wasn't a narrow country road but a four-lane divided highway with cars zipping past at 65 miles per hour. I missed the fawns, and my maneuver must have alerted the car behind me because it stopped short and put on its hazard lights while the two fawns just stood there, like deer in the headlights (except there were no headlights at midday). I hope they eventually made it to safety, but truly, there's such a thing as being too innocent.

The grandkids are still pretty innocent of the hazards of the woods, so we kept a good eye out for poison ivy on a short hike at Lake Katharine the other evening. They are so eager to explore that I hate to curb their enthusiasm, but we're all happier when they hold our hands and stay on the path. They liked the lake and the waterfall but weren't particularly pleased with the mosquitoes.

Our wild weekend with the grandkids was hot and sticky but full of fun and laughter (and sweet corn and ice cream, among other treats). They did a good job of cleaning up before they left but nevertheless I keep finding things that pleasantly remind me of their presence: dolls in my bedroom, squirty toys in the tub, Pegasus on the hearth. Funny how much more intense the quiet feels after such a noisy weekend. So quiet you could hear a frog knocking....

The camera was in the car, so I did my best with my phone.

That's one way to cool down.

My daughter took this shot, and the ones below.

Indian pipes!

I love taking the family into the woods, even when it's hot and buggy.

 

Six impossible things before breakfast (and seven more after)

When seven-and-a-half-year-old Alice told the White Queen that "one can't believe impossible things," the Queen said that believing the impossible requires practice--"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

And here we are again, before breakfast, waiting for the grandkids to wake up and start inviting us to believe in impossible scenarios. For instance, my grandson wants me to believe that he can lift any rock, no matter how big, and toss it into the creek, and my granddaughter wants me to believe that it's perfectly reasonable to wear rollerblades while riding a horse. It looks incredibly uncomfortable to me, but the doll doesn't seem to be bothered and the horse isn't talking.

It could, though. Part of the delight of having small children in the house is knowing that at any moment, anything could happen: the horse could fly or sing or play hopscotch, and the heaviest rock could become a ship tossing on stormy seas. Even the littlest one invites others to engage in her imaginary worlds: though possessing few discernible words, she knows how to ask for a horsey ride on my knees or a game of peek-a-boo.

I love to see their creative energy at work, and I love the way they challenge us to dwell in their imaginary worlds. You never know what might happen in there, but it's a colorful place and full of fun, and spending time there always makes me smile. So why not believe the impossible? If six impossible things aren't enough, let's aim for seven.

She knows how to ham it up for the camera.

Grampa's teaching them to skip rocks.

I knew there was a reason to hold on to those American Girl dolls.

Hummingbird moths love my bottlebrush buckeye.

"I can do it myself!"

 

Don't shrug at the shrub (or chew its bark)

Inside Higher Ed has a kind of amazing story today about some professors at Miami University who wanted to grow a replacement for a rare plant that was dying in their conservatory and so they propagated seedlings and then gave the extra seedlings away to students, as is their usual practice, except in this case it caused a problem because the plant, a rare African shrub named iboga, produces root bark that can be processed into a psychoactive substance.

The DEA got involved and things got complicated, and now some profs may be out of a job. I'm not qualified to comment on the merits of the case, but I was tickled to find that the three men most intimately involved with the plant are named Gladish, Cinnamon, and Grubb. Ahem:

A biology prof (name of Gladish)
could grow anything--not just radish
but rarest iboga
(not as calming as yoga)
with results that have left him most saddish.

His friend, Cinnamon, studies bark
that Gabonians chew, and then--hark!
Psychedelic illusions
overwhelm and confuse 'em.
(With results that could be rather stark.)

Mr. Grubb grubs around in the soil
keeping things running smoothly. His foil:
an African shrub,
which has left Mr. Grubb
out of work. How his temper must boil!

Now when Cinnamon, Gladish, and Grubb
propagated that African shrub
and gave away seedlings,
who knew they'd be needing
attorneys? (The iboga just shrugs.)