In which we see Ms. Bradstreet feel right at home (at the supermarket)
The Maria Chronicles, #43 Maria is surprised when, after an early Sunday dinner, she leaves her apartment to go food shopping and finds there's still light outside: Spring is on the horizon. It's enough to take the edge off the drudgery of the task, though the accumulated salt on the side of her Prius reminds her both that winter is not over and that what New Englanders call "mud season" is still to come. Dusk is still lingering when she parks in the lot of the Food Emporium and grabs a cart near the entrance of the supermarket.
It's been at least ten days since she's been here. Maria remembers when she went at least once a week, groaning with the weight of a mini-van's weight worth of groceries (somehow Mark and the kids never seemed to be around to help her put stuff away). Now food shopping is like laundry: a relatively rare, relatively fast event. There you go: an advantage to being old and single. She might even get away with using the express lane on the way out, though she's taken to using the self-checkout machines that were installed recently. Funny how technology makes steady incursions into the interstices of everyday life, and yet some tasks, like buying napkins, never seem to change. Then again, some of her colleagues in the city order their groceries online and have them delivered. So maybe this little ritual will be gone soon, too. She won't miss it.
Maria has made her way to the meat section, and is looking at 90% lean ground beef, when she hears a voice behind her: "Ms. Bradstreet!"
Maria turns around: it's Willie. Maria's stomach sinks. Bad enough to have her private life invaded this way. Even worse to consider that she's wearing faded jeans and an old Harvard sweatshirt. Maria feels like her dignity has been punctured.
But Willie doesn't seem to notice. "Hi!"
"Well hello, Willie," Maria says, trying to sound cheerful. "What brings you here?"
"Well, I'm helping my dad with the weekly food shopping. I always wondered if I would ever see you around town."
"Really? Where do you live, Willie?"
"Over on Hillside," she answers. "Only about a mile away from you."
Maria is as surprised that Willie lives nearby as she is that Willie knows where she lives. If it was anybody else, she'd find this creepy. Instead, it's just a bit deflating. Willie is beaming, but Maria sees that her student is just now realizing that she doesn't quite know what to say or ask. God bless her: She as the decency to realize that questions will not be welcome. And then Maria sees a light bulb go off. Willie leans back and peers down a row just beyond Maria's view. "Dad! I want you to meet Ms. Bradstreet."
Ugh. But Maria can't flee. She's just going to have to see this one through. She steals a look at her watch: 6:13. It's surely dark now.
A surprisingly short man -- Willie is almost as tall as he is -- emerges from the aisle wearing black jeans, a navy hoodie, and moccasins that look like they're actually slippers. Though his reddish hair is thinning, Maria sees that he's younger than she is. This is something she still hasn't made her peace with. Even though her children have finished college, the parents of her students, who typically had their kids later than she did, have been more or less her age for a long time now. But now a gap has begun to widen. One more thing to get depressed about.
"Dad, I want you to meet Ms. Bradstreet."
He extends his hand, and the warmth of his smile gives Maria a shock of recognition: This is where Willie gets it. "Hello Ms. Bradstreet. Tommy Marzetti. Wilhelmina's dad. Real nice to meet ya."
"Pleasure to meet you. And a pleasure to work with your daughter."
"Willie's having the time of her life in your class. Always been a good student, always loved history, but this year has been something special. Many a good dinner table conversation, let me tell you!"
"Well she's been a real spark plug for our class discussions."
"Yeah, well, like I said, she loves history. Just like her old man." He winks at his daughter and resumes addressing Maria. "I was a history major in college. I've taken Willie to Saratoga, Gettysburg, places like that. Over spring break I'm driving her and my wife down to Colonial Williamsburg. She and I went there once before Willie was born and loved it. I want her to have the same experience."
Willie is beaming at her father, and Maria is struck by the depth of their mutual affection. Though very bright, Willie has always struck Maria as socially immature. Most kids would be awkward, if not alienated, in this kind of situation, yet she seems utterly unselfconscious. Maria is moved, in part because she suspects that this man has managed to do something very well to be the recipient of such unstinting love.
He appears to sense Maria's distraction. "Well look, we don't want to hold you up. But I'm very glad to have the chance to thank you for being such a special person. Willie really sees you as a role model. Wouldn't surprise me if she turned out to be a history teacher herself."
"God forbid," Maria says smiling. "Surely she can do better than that."
"Oh I dunno," he says, taking her seriously. "What could be better? Sure beats managing the service department at a Ford dealership. Anyway, have a great evening."
"Bye bye Ms. Bradstreet! See you tomorrow!"
The encounter lifts Maria's spirits, which remained buoyed for the rest of her trip down the supermarket aisles. Surprisingly for a Sunday night, she finds an open self-serve checkout, and is loading her groceries into the back of her car at 6:38 when she hears her cell phone ring inside her purse. Must be Felicia, she thinks. Her daughter always calls on Sunday night.
But it's not. Maria sees that it's the head of the history department. "Hi Jen," she says. "Hey Maria. I'm having a glass of wine with Karl and Penny at The Black Rose, just around the corner from the school. We were wondering if you could join us. We were thinking about ordering a pot of fondue."
Maria is surprised by the offer. She and Jen have socialized, but she hasn't really gone out with any other faculty members. Pleased to be asked, she's also mindful that it's Sunday night and she now has a car full of groceries.
Jen senses her hesitation. "C'mon, Maria. Don't tell me you're not prepared for class tomorrow. "
Maria smiles. "I'll be there in twenty minutes," she says.
"That's my girl. We're in the back. I'll order you a Pinot Grigio."
Who woulda thunk it, Maria reflects, as she cues up the new Lyle Lovett CD as she waits at a traffic light. It's taken eight months, but for the first time she can imagine this as place as home.
It may well be a universal dilemma for individuals to want the benefits of privilege in a society without the burden of guilt and doubt they engender in oneself, and the skepticism and resentment they engender among others. Whether or not this dilemma is universal, it certainly is widespread in the United States, a nation founded, in part, on the premise that all men are created equal. And nowhere is it more acute than among children of privilege, who almost by definition cannot have earned any benefits they enjoy (any more than children are responsible for the burdens they endure).
But children, no less than adults, are prone to close cognitive dissonances of this type with various strategies of rationalization. Anatomizing them lies at the heart of Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández's The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School.Gaztambide-Fernández spent two years at the fictively named "Weston School" (reminiscent of Phillips Andover Academy or one of its peers), shadowing its students in an anthropologically-minded piece of field research that included focus groups, surveys, interviews with faculty and staff, and sitting in on classes and other school events. Though his research was commissioned by Weston, the book also grew out of Gaztambide-Fernández's doctoral work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While there were inevitably limits on what he could see or say, the book in any case is no unvarnished endorsement. The key concept in Gaztambide-Fernández's analysis, which he unveils in his introduction, is that of a "discourse of distinction" that shapes the students' view of themselves. As he explains, distinction has two meanings here: a presumably neutral denotation of sorting (as in a group of students who stand separate from a general population) as well as a more normative denotation of ranking (as in those who are distinguished by virtue of particular talents of achievements). Both definitions, however, at least imply a sense of hierarchy, and Weston students apply both to themselves.
In terms of the former, Westonians are collectively defined by their membership in the student body. This membership is understood in five dimensions that Gaztambide-Fernández calls "the five E's: exclusion (in terms of admission); engagement (in terms of rigor); excellence (in terms of talent); entitlement (in terms of privilege); and envisioning (in terms of future prospects). At any given time or in any given way, a Weston student will invoke one or more of these categories to understand their presence at the school. What they tend not to do, the author explains, is reference the class, race, or other forms of privilege that are typically prerequisites for their future achievement, whether in the form of parents who have boarding school backgrounds themselves or the financial resources to underwrite their educations. Very often, he notes, the students assert that the choice to attend was largely theirs.
In any case, this is only part of the discourse of distinction. Another axis is the way the students subdivide themselves once their within "the Weston bubble." Here a series of hierarchies define the students' sense of themselves in domains that Gaztambide-Fernández calls "'the three spheres of experience': the sphere of work, the social sphere, and the sphere of intimacy." It's at this point that we enter a relatively familiar sociological landscape of jocks, beautiful people, nerds, and so on, with the partial qualifier that Weston and its ilk tend to offer more status for intellectual achievement than most schools do (though few students are comfortable defining themselves solely on academic terms). Gaztambide-Fernández literally diagrams the spatial relationships, noting that space itself, literal as well as figurative, is crucial to what it means to have an elite education: there's always something, or somewhere, you can go to find the sense of distinction that you crave. There is another dynamic at work here, and that is the way that outside identity politics function as a third axis of experience. Financial aid recipients lack the economic resources of their peers, but seek psychic prestige by virtue of their talents. Students of color are seen, and often see themselves, as enriching the social climate of the school -- it's not so much as they experience diversity as it is that they are diversity. Students who depart from gender norms are tolerated, though not embraced. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, for their part, continue to function as the baseline norm. Students alternately uphold and lament these dynamics of their identities, which have tended to remain relatively stable.
Toward the end of the book, Gaztambide-Fernández quotes a student who aptly encapsulates the presumed logical result of this complex process: "You may have been like, the world-class pianist at your last school, but it doesn't matter here, because there's probably another one just like it. And so, when you come out of here, you don't have that special something that, like, distinguishes you from the rest. Yet you know that you're special, just because of everything that you do." You got in because you're special, and you're even more special because you got in (and out).
This is, of course, tautological reasoning. And after a while, it gets tiresome, even in what is a short book. Partly that's because these are adolescents talking, some presumably as young as 14 years old. Gaztambide-Fernández does not really take this developmental vector into account, perhaps because many of these students are articulate even when they're naive. But it's also because the author's frame of reference gets a little too narrow. He listens long and hard to the students' necessarily uninformed speculation as to why they were admitted, for example, but does little -- even with the boilerplate explanations that are surely available -- to explore what the people charged with the responsibility of choosing them have to say on the subject.
Moreover, some of the more striking aspects of the book come less from the author's findings than the fact that he finds them so. Noting the various kinds of social inequality that are reproduced in the school, he asserts that "this unequal distribution of distinction [emphasis his ] underscores and perhaps strengthens the status hierarchies in the broader society, pointing to at least one way boarding schools are implicated in the perpetration of social inequality."At least one way? Why would it not be obvious, in institutions that discriminate on the basis of intelligence, wealth, and lineage -- a word we tend not to use but which accurately describes legacy preference -- that there are many ways?
This is not a rhetorical question. Actually, one of the more remarkable aspects of liberal thinking about elite educational institutions is a seemingly widespread assumption that social equality is somehow the goal. But it is not, has never been, nor can such institutions afford -- literally or figuratively -- to ever be, whether or not they're "need blind." It is true that they do offer avenues for advancement for people who could otherwise not attain it through typical channels. But that's less because this is a core mission than because without such hedging the sense of resentment they'd generate would threaten their internal as well as external viability. They want to see themselves, and be seen by others, as creators of opportunity. But they need to be sustainers of a ruling class to maintain their power, partly with limited infusions of outside talent. That talent needs to adopt to the ruling class (even if a healthy ruling class evolves over time), not the other way around. Indeed, successfully grappling with such frictions is part of what defines a talented youth.
Elite students, and the adults who supervise their educations, lose sight of the larger social purpose they serve at their peril, and the peril of the societies over which they preside. Their presence at the Westons of the world is not finally about their "merit" or their comfort. It's about what they will ultimately contribute to the civilization that made them possible: not whether their admission was justified, but whether they will justify their admission. Those who lose sight of this truth will forfeit any legitimacy in their privilege, if not privilege itself, and justly earn the contempt they receive.
In which we see Ms. Bradstreet confronted with honor among thieves
The Maria Chronicles, # 42
It's 7:11 a.m. when Maria steals into the copying room to run off two large sets of primary source documents, one on unionization efforts at the turn of the century and the other on the Progressive movement, for her survey class. This feels like an illicit activity. The school has been making a big push for scanning documents onto course websites, in part to save paper and in part to reduce the traffic in the copy room, which tends to back up during the day, especially when one of the two copiers breaks down, which seems to be daily. But Maria has had bad luck with scanning. She did a ton of work trying to get her whole curriculum done at the end of last summer. But when the files she made were .tifs instead of jpegs (whatever that means) she threw her hands in the air and gave up, resuming her regular copying. Like a lot of history teachers, she uses a lot of documents, and she's a publisher's nightmare in that she interprets the doctrine of fair use as it applies to copyright liberally. She nevertheless feels a sense of guilt as she arrives in the empty room, turns on the copier, and waits for its interminable warm-up. She'd like to get all this done by 7:30, a full hour before classes, which is when she figures the early birds among the faculty will arrive in force.
The second stapled set of unionization docs has just come out of the copier when she hears a voice behind her: "Caught ya." Maria jumps in terror and turns around. It's Cuff Man, Jack Casey. Shit.
"Jack, you scared me," Maria says, hand on her chest, feeling warring impulses between relief and irritation.
"Sorry about that," he replies evenly. "I see we get the worm today." He reaches into the briefcase he now puts on the table in the middle of the room and pulls out a sheaf of papers that look like math worksheets. "Great minds think alike, huh?"
He turns around, his back now to Maria, and turns on the other copier. She would love it if he just stayed in that position, no further communication between them, but she knows that isn't likely. The silence is getting awkward and will only get more so. But what can she say that will not risk entangling her?
Maria rarely seen Jack since she accidentally bumped into him in a hallway in early January, only about a week after they'd gone on their sole formal date. At the time, she'd been convinced -- incorrectly, as it turned out -- that he'd slept with her boss and friend, Jen Abruzzi. There'd been a few times she's seen him in subsequent weeks, but surprisingly few, and they were occasions when she'd been able to change direction or pretend not to see him. Thankfully, he never insisted on greeting her. Now, though, she guesses her luck has finally run out.
"So how's it been going, Maria?" He's talking loudly, above the din of her machine, which will soon be supplemented with his own.
"Fine, I guess," she replies. "You know, routine."
He feeds papers into the sorter and presses the print button. "Well, that's good, I guess."
Now the noise gives Maria cover. But she's also feeling guilty -- first it was over using the copier, now it's Jack. Why is she being so cool toward him? Does she really need to be? All right, she thinks. He's not for me. But why am I so goddamn severe?
Her first set is done, and it's time to feed the Progressive docs. Jack's set is done, too, so there's a sudden silence. Maria pauses before the print button and says, "So I haven't seen you around much lately." Then she hits it.
"No," he says above the din. "Actually, I've been downtown these last few weeks. I have a few friends in the mayor's office who are working on charter schools."
"Sounds interesting." Maria considers this an exit strategy, and yet she is, despite herself, a bit intrigued.
Jack is now voluble despite the noise. "You know those KIP schools? Knowledge is Power?"
"Vaguely."
"Yeah, well, it's not a bad program. But very conservative. Lots of skill and drill. Unfortunately, a lot of people think of that as rigor. I myself think of it more like rigor mortis. Anyway, I'm working with a group of people who are trying to develop more progressive approaches. The Obama administration's 'Race to the Top' program is still very No Child Left Behind oriented, but we think we can develop some alternatives that might command some attention. Like that Ted Sizer stuff we'd discussed. You know Grant Wiggins? His stuff on authentic assessment?"
"I know a bit about it," Maria replies. "But it sounds like you're much more immersed than I am. Are you actually working for this city?"
Jack chuckles. "No, not formally. I don't really have the qualifications." (You can say that again, Maria thinks, having investigated Jack's record as a shady Wall Street speculator who probably belongs in jail.) "But I do have some managerial and administrative experience that can help. Which I'm eager to do."
"I guess that explains why you haven't been around as much lately."
"Well, yeah, that and the fact that the principal doesn't much like me and has told the chair of the math department as much." He smiles again. Does he know she knows his story now? There's something both roguish and self-effacing about him at the same time. "Doesn't really matter," he continues. "I've enjoyed working here, and really like the kids. But I think it's served its purpose and I probably won't be coming much longer anyway."
Maria is unexpectedly disappointed to hear this. It appears Jack's foray into substitute teaching was not so much a dilettantish exercise as it was part of a broader plan to launch an (apparently philanthropic) career in education reform. She can't quite decide what to make of this guy.
Jack turns back to the copier and pulls a stack of collated sets from the tray on the right end of it. "Well, that about does it for me," he says cheerfully. "The word is mum, Maria. I won't report you to the copier police."
"I suppose that's what you'd call honor among thieves," she says wryly.
"You got it," he replies, and the combination of his smile and the twinkle in his eye unnerves her. And then, as suddenly as he appeared, Jack Casey is gone.
Check out Sam Baker's Texas trilogy: All American Music
The following piece is running this week on the home page of the History News Network. I'm one of those blue-state, Honda-driving, latte liberals who doesn't think Texas should have been admitted into the Union in 1845: the whole project was a pro-slavery naked power grab. (Of course, every state in the Union is the result of a naked power grab, but the case of Texas appears more egregious than most.) If Governor Rick Perry or one the current candidates for his job wants the state to secede, my first impulse is: Be My Guest. This opinion might have something to do with the fact that other than a frantic 20-minute layover at Dallas-Fort Worth airport on the way to LAX four years ago, I've never actually set foot in Texas. But when the better angels of my nature prevail, I remember that for every George W. Bush Texas has produced (er, make that inherited) there's also been a Molly Ivins or Robert Benton. Actually, much of the imagined Texas I've admired from afar has come from music. For many years now, I've been a big Lyle Lovett fan. His latest album, Natural Forces, has been a staple of my automotive listening for the past few months. Lovett is a wonderful musician and songwriter, two talents that are greatly augmented by an alternatively mordant and bawdy wit. The latter in particular prevails on the new record. "Farmer Brown/Chicken Reel" is a hilarious celebration of onanism ("The moral of this sordid tale/Is you just can't stop the U.S. Male"), while "Pantry" takes Lovett's longtime obsession with food and turns it into an extended metaphor for sexual fidelity.
A few months ago, an old friend and adoptive Texan sent me a set of three CDs described by the Austin American-Statesman as the "Mercy Trilogy" by native son Sam Baker: Mercy (2004), Pretty World (2007) and the recently released Cotton (2009). The first thing that struck me about these records is their gorgeous packaging, designed by the multi-talented Baker himself, which single-handedly challenges the otherwise hard to beat logic of mp3 downloads. It's taken me a while to digest the actual music on these disks, a project that as of this writing is incomplete. But I've heard enough at this point to say that Baker is the most impressive musician I've encountered in a decade.
Why? First of all, Baker, a writer in the tradition of John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, and Steve Earle, has extraordinary gifts as a storyteller. He's one of these people who can narrate a life in three minutes. A great example in this regard is his song "Iron," from Mercy, in which the point of view shifts between a hard-working alcoholic father and his enabling companion, who explains to a friend that the father of her babies really a sweet man when he isn't drunk. This struggling couple is riveting in its own right before a car accident swivels the song in another direction and brings it to an emotionally satisfying conclusion.
Baker's narrative gifts extend in other directions as well. He's adept at evoking settings that include Reno ("Slots," from Pretty World) to the Texas Hill Country (the title track of Cotton) to, surprisingly enough, Boston ("Snow," also from Cotton). And he's a master of characterization, perhaps nowhere more so than when his narrators are less than completely reliable, like that of "Who's Gonna Be Your Man?" (Cotton).
Actually, Baker didn't write "Who's Gonna Be Your Man," which is one of a number of traditional songs that pepper his records. Yet he nevertheless delivers a performance there and elsewhere because of the way he uses his voice -- which I'll be charitable and call distinctive in a Bob Dylan kind of way -- to great effect. Sometimes its brusqueness becomes a form of dramatic authority, as it does on "Cotton"; at other times the almost awkward urgency with which he sings gives the music an unexpected poignancy, apparent in the sense of recovered purity at the heart of "Pretty World." Baker's voice is tastefully framed by his rootsy band, which plays with understated proficiency. The production values on all three albums is first-rate.
But the quality that sets Baker apart from his musical peers, and leads me to write about him here, is his truly marvelous feel for American musical history. The key to his accomplishment on these records is his strikingly postmodern capacity to breathe new life into that tradition by deploying it in new contexts. Cotton begins with a simply gorgeous rendition of "Dixie" (sung by Baker's sister, Chris Baker-Davies) that complicates this racist song with the beauty and longing that has always characterized the minstrel tradition from which it sprang. He follows it with the title track, in which the flip side of cotton country is depicted in all its harshness and yet in a song that expresses a kind of tough beauty of its own. In other cases, Baker will take snatches of classics like "Jacob's Ladder" or "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and deploy them in ways that may seem funny or even incongruous and yet upon reflection make a lot of sense. (In this regard, Baker is a little like Lovett.)
Perhaps the most stunning example of creative musical sampling is the way Baker uses Stephen Foster's classic "Hard Times Come Again No More" in "Odessa," from Pretty World. The song begins with a couple verses of "Hard Times" by Baker-Davies, before segueing into a story about a spoiled brat from oil country ("the dark crude flowed/the wild oat scattered") whose arrogance has disastrous consequences for a young woman who gets in the way of his indulgences. The point of the juxtaposition would seem to be an implicit comment about class conflict, until the the two melodies converge into counterpoint, which suddenly augments the meaning of Foster's song in a way that simultaneously demonstrates Baker's artistry as well as demonstrates, yet again, the seemingly bottomless resonance of "Hard Times." It's breathtaking, really; I gasped aloud the first time I heard it.
I would not describe Sam Baker as an unknown artist; he's clearly got a local following, and his website shows him to be touring abroad as well as generating a small critical buzz. Given the technological innovations in sound recording of recent decades, it's probably never been easier to get into the recording industry than it is now -- and, for that very reason, it's probably never been harder to break through to a national audience than it is now. Moreover, in his mid-fifties, Baker is no spring chicken in what is decisively a young person's business. (Actually, his career was delayed by life-threatening injuries sustained when the train he was riding in Peru was attacked by terrorists in 1996, a subject he references in "Steel," from Mercy). But there are few artists in popular music who deserve attention more than he does. Here's hoping that a few more of us will pay heed, and homage, to what Texas can do.
