The kind of assessment that does my heart good

I wish I'd had an assessment-themed Buzzword Bingo card today during the final Zoom session for my Colson Whitehead class because I kept hearing terms like critical thinking and synthesis and transfer of skills to other classes--from my students.

I didn't prompt them to use those terms--they came up with them on their own. Usually in upper-level literature classes, I require students to write a low-stakes essay at the end of the semester reflecting on what they've learned and how the course has affected them as students, but the one concession I made to the new demands of online learning was to cancel that essay and replace it with a final Zoom discussion covering the same ground. 

We had fun talking about Whitehead's significance as a novelist--how each new novel felt like the most original and important one until we got to the next one, how his early playfulness morphed into powerful prose that made students want to go out and change the world. Students talked about the demands Whitehead made on their attention, challenging them to fill in gaps and examine their own assumptions and expectations, and how their explorations of historical and cultural contexts enriched their understanding.

Several students said they were initially nervous about being in such a small class, scared to step out and speculate during class discussions, but they said the books opened up so many different avenues for discussion that they grew comfortable taking opportunities to direct the class to new insights. And best of all, they showed how the skills they'd honed in my class helped them excel in other classes as well, giving them confidence to speak up in discussions and examine texts with a more discerning eye.

Of course today's class discussion isn't going to produce any official data or written documents that could enrich an assessment portfolio, but it did my heart good to hear my students talking so passionately about their learning experiences. Sometimes we don't need data to prove that good work has been done here.  

Quiet Storm leads the way

It's not easy for students in the midst of a deadly global pandemic to immerse themselves in a novel about a deadly global pandemic, but I wrote the syllabus without being aware that the Coronavirus was coming and so here we are discussing Colson Whitehead's Zone One while sheltering in place, and even though we live in fear of an ordinary virus rather than the zombie apocalypse, my students have no problem finding parallels between their own situations and those of Whitehead's characters. 

Ten years ago Whitehead made some pretty accurate predictions about disparate responses to the pandemic both rational and irrational, raising questions about whether a global health threat would do more to unite or divide frightened people and suggesting that nothing--not chaos, not zombies, not desperate bandits wielding automatic weapons--can prevent the spread of PR, for he who controls the narrative controls the world.

It's a bleak world in Whitehead's novel but it's not without its moments of light. Today we reached my favorite part: the passage describing how the character who calls herself Quiet Storm creates art, order, and meaning out of scattered debris. Charged with using heavy equipment to clear wrecked vehicles from a stretch of I-95, she arranges cars and trucks in an order visible only from the air, where the wrecked cars form an "alphabet" arranged in a "grammar" that creates both beauty and ambiguous meaning:

Ten sport-utility vehicles arranged one-eighth of a mile apart east-west were the fins of an eel slipping through silty depths, or the fletching of an arrow aimed at--what? Tomorrow? What readers?

Asked to interpret the Quiet Storm's message, our intrepid protagonist responds, "We don't know how to read it yet. All we can do right now is pay witness."

And this, I think, is where we are right now. We don't know how the story ends or when we'll back to normal or even what new normal will arise from the detritus, but while we wait, we can make a mark in the chaos, rearrange the wreck of our lives, and aim an arrow toward a future reader who will stand befuddled and wonder what it all meant.  
  

Closing the book on an open text

"Tell us your theory," my students demanded, but I wouldn't do it--not until they told me their own. We've been reading Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days and they, like many readers, were frustrated by the ambiguity of the ending: Does J. Sutter live or die, stay at the festival and get shot or go back to New York with Pamela and start writing a different type of story? Is he supposed to be a twenty-first century John Henry or is all that historical stuff a big red herring? And why doesn't Whitehead offer any easy answers?

My students had to come up with answers for an essay due today, drawing their own conclusions about J. Sutter's fate based upon evidence from within the text. Last Friday they asked me to tell them my own interpretation but I refused, promising instead that I would reveal my conclusions after they'd written their papers and shared their ideas with the class. 

So that's what we did today: each student explained the conclusions they had drawn about J. Sutter's fate, and, unsurprisingly, no two students agreed entirely. The remarkable thing was that each of these competing interpretations was entirely defensible based on the evidence provided within the novel. We chewed on that for a while before they asked me to give them my theory.

I read them a piece of the article I published about the novel eight years ago, an extremely obscure publication that I knew they wouldn't be able to locate locally without breaking into my office, and we talked a little bit about how Whitehead invites readers to fill the gaps in the narrative by adding their own verses to the John Henry legend. But then I suggested an alternative explanation: maybe J. Sutter is just a human version of Schrodinger's cat. As long as he's trapped inside the box--the book--he exists simultaneously in all possible states, both alive and dead and every other possibility. When we open the box and try to take him out of his context, we either doom him to instant death or breathe new life into his body. Why not leave him in the box and let him experience pure possibility?

Here's what impresses me about this class: They can read a book that offers no obvious resolution, write an essay that requires them to draw their own conclusions, and then engage in discussion that challenges all their expectations about literature, life, and the possibility of interpretation, and then they can come back and do it all over again on Wednesday and Friday and again next Monday. And if that doesn't make my job worth doing, nothing else will.

 

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.

Just laying the line

We've reached my favorite part of the African-American Literature syllabus--Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days--and this morning we considered what an ordinary working person has to do to become a mythic hero. Why, for instance, isn't anyone writing a song about Dr. Hogue, the mythic English professor?

"Because she didn't die with a red pen in her hand" is the obvious answer, but that doesn't mean I don't deserve a folk song. I work my brain at least as hard as John Henry worked his body, so where's my statue? Where's my legend? Where's my postage stamp? Who will write the song about the thesis-driving woman drilling holes into mountains of prose to let the train of truth steam on through?

"It's only heroic if you die doing it," said a student, and that's one of the central paradoxes of Whitehead's novel. His main character, J., recalls seeing a filmstrip on the John Henry myth back in elementary school and wishes he could have asked his teacher a question: "Mrs. Goodwin, why did he have to die in the end? Mrs. Goodwin, if he beat the steam engine, why did he have to die? Did he win or lose?"

I ask myself sometimes whether I'm winning or losing. I drill right through one mountain of papers and another rises up to take its place, so it's hard to see whether I'm getting any closer to the light at the end of the tunnel. If the entire mountain collapses and buries me, will anyone even notice?

Days like today, though, I've shoved the mountain aside to spend some time discussing fascinating literature with students eager to play with ideas. It may not be the stuff of myth, but all the same, it feels like winning.
 

Lost (and found) in a good book

Wide awake at 5 a.m. ready to lecture on narrative conventions and rhetorical templates--yes, I am a literature nerd. African-American Lit class starts on Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days today so I get to talk about a topic rarely touched in an upper-level literature class: the importance of page numbers. This issue arises very early when I teach Whitehead's novel. "Turn to page 9," I will say, and the students will fumble with the text before finding page 11 and turning back two pages.

And it's not just page 9: John Henry Days has no numbers on even-numbered pages, on the title page for each new section (or its reverse side), or on the first page of a new chapter--and there are many chapters. Fewer than half of the pages in the book have numbers on them, and the right combination of conditions results in stretches of three or four pages without a number. 

Readers tend to take page numbers for granted: we don't really notice them most of the time, but when we need one and it's not there, we get annoyed. How do we know where we are without page numbers? Why would a publisher resist such a simple convention as the page number? What other conventions might this book violate--and why?

And suddenly we find that the lostness caused by the dearth of page numbers is at one with the ethos of the piece. Look at the pronouns--notice how many chapters start with an ambiguous pronoun, sending us on a search for antecedents and inspiring us to make connections across the unnumbered white spaces between chapters.  Look at all the types of narrative templates on display--the perp walk, the press release, the Who-What-Where-Why-When-How news story lede--and note how the facts resist convention and the template deforms the truth. Notice how Whitehead makes us notice the book as a faulty and incomplete vessel--starting with the absence of page numbers.

John Henry Days defies expectations, crumbles conventions, tampers with templates, and launches us on a narratological thrill ride only a literature nerd can love, and I know some of my students will resist the opportunity but today I intend to tell them: Fasten your seatbelts--it's going to be a wild ride.

A Chiropodist in Pangea

I've just finished Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days, which drills ever deeper into the mountain of history until it bursts out into sunlight on the other side, and I don't want to give away the wonders of the book but I have to share a delicious moment of satire--Whitehead's description of a party celebrating the release of a new book: "They had gathered in a club called Glasnost to partake of the spread, the panoply of bite-sized widgets laid out by the publisher of Godfrey Frank's A Chiropodist in Pangea, a fifteen-hundred-page grimoire of mysterious content that would debut in a few days on the New York Times best-seller list. There was some question as to whether it would be categorized as fiction or nonfiction. Someone had to read it first."

Among those who have not read it, a variety of theories about the book are bruited about: is it about a "lecherous haberdasher who's really the head of Conde Nast" or "a history of the twentieth century as seen through a bunion"? And what of its author? Godfrey Frank "quoted French theorists who liked to inflate helpless nouns with rhetorical gases until they burst into italics" and wrote hip scholarly articles about a pop band called Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions: "He situated them in a lineage of the Dionysian going back centuries, he located their Thanatotic flourishes as a necessary guise in the final days of a self-conscious century." In the end he becomes one with the band, performing a song about the death of Roland Barthes.

What does this have to do with John Henry? Everything. But you'll have to read the book to find out why.

Unveiling John Henry

Alphonse Miggs sits in the Social Room of the Millhouse Inn, he sits on his hands at a table of eight, with seven folks he doesn't know. At the start of the evening his knuckles brushed against a lump in his jacket pocket. He withdrew a mothball and, supremely embarrassed, thrust it back where it came. He wasn't sure if anyone noticed his mark of shame. For the rest of the night he felt cursed with invisible pockets and all at the dinner can see his shame, the great pearl of napthalene clinging to his person, smell the fumes of social incompetence emanating from it.

Invisible pockets! Fumes of social incompetence! Apparently Alphonse Miggs has been raiding the closets of my nightmares. Miggs appears in Colson Whitehead's second novel, John Henry Days, which I am just now getting around to reading although it was published five years ago. I loved The Intuitionist and I've put Apex Hides the Hurt on my Christmas wish list, hoping that Whitehead can live up to the promise of his first book.

His second book, John Henry Days, is delightful, certainly more coherent than reviews led me to expect. Its quirky cast of journalists on a junket includes one J. Sutter, described as an "inveigler of invites and slayer of crudites, this drink ticket fondler and slim tipper, open bar opportunist, master of vouchers, queue-jumping wrangler of receipts." Sutter ventures into West Virginia for the unveiling of a new postage stamp commemorating John Henry, and there he encounters the aforementioned Alphonse Miggs, who at the moment seems to be on the verge of going postal, but I'm only 80 pages in so what do I know?

Well, I do know one thing: wherever Alphonse Miggs gets his clothes, I'm not shopping there.