After the Storm

“I thought I had walked into Students at the Center (SAC) backwards, with a blindfold over my eyes and a false statement of what SAC really was. But then I turned around and slowly realized this is why I was meant to be here.

“The teachers were different: It wasn’t always their input but ours as well. It was their techniques that raised my hands to remove the blindfolds. We sat in a circle. We told stories and discussed real issues that many teachers don’t care about.

“They turned some of my inventions into creations. I love being in class, because it helps make me who I will become. I also learned that reading can be fun. I remember it like it was yesterday, reading the book Coffee Will Make You Black in three days. I was so excited, as if I had written my first book. SAC gives you a chance to enhance the creativity you have or don’t have. I remember when I first did my movie that took weeks and weeks to do. I had accomplished something much more than reading a book in three days or writing a poem. I had written a script that became a movie. I love SAC for what it brought to me. And I love myself for what I brought to it.”
--from an essay by Keva Carr,
2005 graduate of Douglass High, New Orleans

Keva Carr, who’s now a Freshman at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, missed our retreat/reunion in Clemson, South Carolina earlier this month. We had bought her a plane ticket, but a recurring illness put her in the hospital instead of on the plane on Friday, October 7. (Keva’s fine now. She missed our retreat, but she didn’t miss any classes.)

I’ve been thinking about Keva and her writing and want to share a bit of it here—not just because she couldn’t join us on the retreat but mainly because it introduces an important technique we use in SAC work: The Story Circle.

In the first entry in this series, I reflected on the SAC philosophy: “Start with what you know to learn what you need to know. Start with where you’re at to get to where you want to go.” One technique we use to accomplish this in our classes is the story circle, something Keva alludes to in her essay.

A story circle is basically a small group forum in which participants sit in a circle and move around the circle reflecting on a theme or concept that has been chosen for the session. The ground rules direct that the story one tells must be grounded in one's personal experience. At the same time, all participants are encouraged to listen to each person's story without interrupting. We usually agree on a short time limit, generally two to three minutes per story. After the circle has been completed, participants ask questions, summarize lessons learned from the stories, develop visual images and other creative responses to the stories, and engage in other forms of “cross talk.” Although this sounds like a simple process, our experience has demonstrated that the story circle is an effective way for people to get to know one another and to honestly share ideas and emotions. With both young people and adults, our experience has been that the story circle produces individual involvement in the sharing process at a much deeper level than anticipated by the participants when they start the process.

This technique creates classroom conditions in which students can have as much expertise and knowledge as the teacher. Those of us who are teachers participate as equals in the story circle, waiting our turn, observing the time limits, and listening closely along with everyone else. For students who have not had much prior success in traditional educational settings (or who come from families with this history), such conditions are vital to developing academic success.

The oral nature of the story circle is equally important. We have students in our classes who arrive with a range of special education circumstances. We welcome them but not in a shallow, “hello how are you” way. We make sure that they can start with where they’re at, that they can immediately contribute valuable material to our class as they continue to develop literacy in all areas.

The movie Keva describes in her essay is about a teen girl deciding whether to have an abortion or not. Keva’s goal in the movie is to make the range of perspectives and positions on this issue understandable, to flesh them out. Keva and her classmates have talked frequently about the way the story circle process encourages them to move beyond their initial understanding of a topic, refining that understanding as they hear classmates’ stories (and read related material from texts and other sources). Keva’s creation, her movie, comes out of that process.

As I write this entry, Keva has just sent me a few more installments in The Diary of Virginia Banks, the book she started last spring based on her study of Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riots in 1900. She learned about this history by reading Ida Wells’ Mob Rule in New Orleans and William Ivy Hair’s Carnival of Fury. But in this historical context, she is also working out what it means to be an independent woman in a romantic relationship when social and political circumstances interfere with the relationship. In our classes and our story circles, she has learned that her experiences can infuse and inform the way she writes about the history of her city.

Finally, the story circle represents SAC’s concern with placing our work within the history of struggles for human and civil rights and for social justice. You see, we didn’t learn the story circle technique from colleagues or from our education courses. The story circle was developed by the Free Southern Theater (FST), founded in the 1960’s as the cultural arm of the civil rights movement. We are fortunate to have John O’Neal, one of the founders of FST, as a community partner in our school and our classes and to have former FST member and playwright Kalamu ya Salaam as co-director and teacher in SAC. FST developed the story circle because it was dissatisfied with audience feedback sessions after their performances. They wanted a more democratic process that included all voices. They also wanted to emphasize story rather than argument, understanding that stories tend to bring people together, to help them find common ground or at least to understand each other.

And in New Orleans right now, we need unity informed by deep dialogue and careful listening as much as the freedom fighters of the 1960’s needed it. In terms of SAC, the stories we have told and written with each other over the years have kept us close and focused during this time of separation. Keva will be with us in New Orleans for our “homecoming” on Saturday, November 12. She’ll participate in some story circles and share some new writings. Rodneka, who would have been a senior at Douglass this year, will bloom a slow smile of recognition and delight as she hears herself in Keva’s writing, as she remembers a book or essay they both read in class and that now echoes through Keva’s new essay. At that moment, we’ll all be closer to getting back home.

FINAL NOTE

For those of us who don’t know each other already, who haven’t spent time together but share a city, coming together, learning together, and smiling together will not come as easily. But working toward that is still important. In that regard, I want to thank Thomas Lambert and Earl Luetzelschwab, a student and teacher at Franklin High School in New Orleans, for their responses to my previous entry. I appreciate their willingness to share their views. I also hope that one day soon we can come together in New Orleans in a different setting, one that’s more like a story circle and allows us to understand each other and find common ground. We at SAC respect everyone’s right to pursue an education in the best way they know how and encourage that.

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Fourteen students, graduates, teachers, and community partners traveled to Clemson University from seven states for a working retreat for the Students at the Center (SAC) program last weekend. You can probably guess at the familiar reunion details: hugs, jokes, inquiries about classmates and family members, discussions of future plans, and lots of writing.

As always, the students had plenty to teach the adults in attendance. Damien, sporting the dress shirt and tie required for his new job and asking us to call him Mr. Theodore now, helped us see how to temper anger with humor in his memo to public officials. Christopher, who loves the history of New Orleans and its public schools, laughed heartily, like someone missing home bad, at every writer’s references to our city. And Rodneka showed the grit and heart of a lower 9th ward resident: “Our job’s a little bit harder now, but we’re still going to do it.”

What’s sticking in my mind most, a couple days after everyone’s left the reunion, are writings by Ashley Jones and Maria Hernandez. Ashley just graduated from Clark Atlanta and is entering her eighth year with SAC, now as a staff member. Maria would have been a senior at Douglass High School.

You can tell how Ashley feels about Maria and other Douglass SAC students in this excerpt from one of her essays.

"Before I thought about the place I used to get my chicken sandwiches from on Freret St. or Ms. Sadie, the ice berg lady right off of LaSalle St. in the 3rd ward, I saw Maria, and Rodneka, Earlnika, Keva, Daniel. I thought about Douglass High School and the gloomy hallways that always made me feel that I was in a scary movie or something. I wondered what would be next for them, no longer having SAC. I thought about the schools they may be forced to go to. Those cold, stiff rooms where the real world never becomes part of the lesson plan. . . .

"Revisiting the halls of Douglas in my mind, I never knew how much these kids meant to me, and although I have always been grateful to SAC, I finally realize the saving grace it has been. So many times I’ve walked Douglass’ dusky halls and felt that I had just entered the walls of an abandoned ship stacked high with forgotten treasure. I size up the bounty of pliable, young bodies and make note of the brilliance exuberating from their eyes and their hair and their mouths and I think, 'Why hasn’t anyone claimed this treasure, this fountain of youth, this elixir of life?!'”

There’s a running joke between Ashley, who graduated from McDonogh 35 one of the many public schools in New Orleans with selective admissions, and Damien, who graduated from his neighborhood school, Douglass. Damien hates 35 but loves Ashley. He says her alma mater is her one flaw. When Ashley finished reading her essay, she flashed a big grin at Damien and the rest of us. “You can’t complain now, Damien. See, I thought about Douglass first, not 35.”

Maria’s essay is rawer, more chilling. She describes her six days in the Superdome, not knowing if her father’s dead or alive—all the harrowing details the news reports help you imagine. But at the end of her essay, she makes one of her patented gut shots:

"This uncertainty that’s straggling me is also undermining Douglass, the school my friends were fighting to make better. When we gathered for a weekend reunion on October 8th and 9th, we learned that all the New Orleans Public Schools would become charter schools this year. And worse than that, the only public high schools open on the east bank of the city, where probably over 80% of the population and all of my friends live, would have no public high schools other than those that have selective admission criteria. How can these decision makers open two high schools on the east bank, but none for common folk like me, who either can’t get into or don’t want to get into selective admission high schools.

"I’ve lost my home, my friends, and my school. I’m always on the verge of tears. But the worst part of it all is that the public officials—both elected and hired—who are supposedly looking out for my education, have failed me even worse than the ones who abandoned me in the Superdome. My family and friends have food and water and the kindness of strangers. But we still don’t have control of our lives, and we’re still being abandoned—even worse than at the Dome—by local, state, and federal officials who are supposed to be looking out for us."

Randy Newman, in his song about the 1927 floods in New Orleans when the business leaders of the city decided to break the levees and flood poorer parts of Louisiana in order to save their city, sang “They’re trying to wash us away.” Maria and Ashley and all of us are living that in terms of our public schools.

That washing away hits me really hard. You see, my alma mater, Benjamin Franklin High School, the top-ranked school in the state and the only majority white public high school in a city that before Katrina was about 70% black, just announced that it will be a charter school operating separately from the school district. Those of us who graduated from there haven’t heard from Maria or thought like Ashley. We didn’t think about Maria and her peers first. We didn’t work to open schools for them. We took care of our own, abandoning the most poor and oppressed in our city to a fate crueler than those long days without food, air, water, and security in the Dome.

Part of going back to New Orleans for me will be coming to grips with my alma mater. I’ll start looking now for fellow graduates who want to start a new alumni association, one that supports neighborhood public schools with no selective admissions requirements, one that takes up the moral mandate that our New Orleans ancestor Homer Plessy and his colleagues laid down for us over 100 years ago: no more separate and unequal institutions in our society.

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“Start with what you know to learn what you don’t know.
Start with where you’re at to get to where you want to go.”

That’s the motto we work by in Students at the Center (SAC), the school/community-based writing program a few students and I started in the late 1990’s.

I must confess, however, that I often drop the motto’s second line. Maybe my 20 years as a classroom teacher has numbed me to the idea of going anywhere. Certainly the way New Orleans figures so prominently in SAC writing for community projects has a lot to do with it. When Katrina hit, we were about to finish The Long Ride, a book of student writings about struggles for civil rights and social/racial/economic justice in New Orleans. Our students were touring a play they had written about the connections between the community organizing that propelled the Plessy vs. Ferguson case in the 1890’s and their own community organizing around education quality and rights. I wasn’t just teaching in my birthplace; New Orleans was what I was teaching.

So on Monday, August 29, when Katrina came calling, I knew where I was at and wasn’t giving much thought to where I wanted to go. I knew if we were hit really badly and the waters rose, I may be holed up in the sturdy old American Can Company (now an apartment complex where my girlfriend’s father was living) for a week or so.

Of course, that projection was way too optimistic. By the end of the storm week, after boating through toxic slime lake water, squinting to see my block from an evacuation helicopter, sleeping on a discarded cardboard box on I-10 and Causeway, and freezing toward Texas on a bus blasting its air conditioner in the middle of the night to keep the driver awake and the germs at bay, I had to start thinking about where I wanted to go.

Now it’s four weeks after Katrina. I’m living, temporarily, with friends in Clemson, South Carolina. This week, ten SAC students and recent graduates will gather here, hosted by the university, to do some writing, some healing, some video-making, and some sharing and
reconnecting. For me it’ll be some early steps in getting back to New Orleans, the place I want to go but can’t really get to right now.

In the next weeks and months, I hope this blog will help in finding my way back to New Orleans. I hope to hear from other teachers who have had to learn what it means to live as part of a diaspora, and to learn to teach from that place. Along the way, I’ll share some of my students’ writings, making it public and talking about it, exploring the shadows of what we used to do in class each day. We’ll think about writing as healing and community building. We’ll look into when and why these goals should be central rather than peripheral to the classroom. And we’ll think long and hard about what my colleague, SAC co-director Kalamu ya Salaam, wrote last week about New Orleans now being more the people who carry our city’s spirit, not the place itself.

We’ll explore in this post-Katrina world, with my hometown now a ghost town, what it means to start with what you know… to start with where you’re at. . .

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