Touching Everybody with Kind Fingers: Reaching Students with Literature

by Edna Thomas

If language is supposed to be about communication, what is it we are doing when books fail to communicate with our students? I learned about how teachers can reach students with literature through my own experiences as a learner; and those lessons, which I want to share with you, were reinforced by my own experiences as a teacher.

I was born and raised in the South, in a small town named Maysville, in Kentucky. One mile across the river, the Ohio River, was the sought-after free state of Ohio; one step closer to Canaan, the promised land. Many of my ancestors emancipated themselves by narrowly escaping the hands of their masters, crossing that wide river by rowboat in the dark of night, while others jumped across on patches of ice breaking in a spring thaw. These stories were passed down from generation to generation by the elders, who wanted to keep our family stories alive. These stories were not just legends; Virginia Hamilton's story "Carrying the Runaways" (in The People Could Fly) was about my ancestor, Arnold Gragston, who rowed freedom seekers from Kentucky to Ripley, Ohio.

But we didn't have books that housed these stories. Our stories were told on the front porches on summer nights, at Sunday school, through spirituals, through school plays, and at family reunions. The opportunity to open a book that contained stories and pictures that mirrored me in a positive manner never happened. Of course, there were the stereotypical books that featured negative images, such as Topsy, but never was I exposed to a book that captured the versatile complexity of black lives. However, our black teachers at John G. Fee (the only school for black children) helped to fill the void created by our words that were not in print by telling us the stories of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes, to name a few; and their lives were examples both of us and for us to aspire to. All these people and more played a role in the dramatic presentation and the poetic masterpiece, the artistic creation that is my life.

By the time I reached eighth grade, integration was complete throughout middle and high school. I went from the "Queen of Showboat" to janitor. My interest in education waned. My grades dropped. I no longer participated in activities that once were my passion.

Enter Miss Abigail. No one took her seriously. She was round, plump; her white hair was wiry and always in an unruly mass; she always wore navy blue or black button-down belted dresses, high-top laced shoes. Miss Abigail always chattered about her friend Jesse James. How could this little old white woman, raised above the ranks of the "oppressor" by her conscience, be the saving grace of a little black girl and change the curriculum for her in a critical way? It happened.

One day she began a new phase in my life. What she gave me was totally unexpected, yet not new; complex, yet not intimidating; and it offered the hope of adventure. It was an introduction to black literature and poetry that was in print. In books. Literature and poetry where the storyline and characters were black and of excellence―for example, the works of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemps. Little did I know the kind of journey I was about to embark upon under the auspices of this capable mentor.

My desire to study and read about black authors grew insatiably. I entered and won superior ratings in state poetry and storytelling contests. I crowded the works of these black authors into every blank space of my life. I read stories by black authors to people who may or may not have been listening. I found that sense of pride that I once had. My African American roots had been shown once more to me as the beauty they should always reveal to the world. As my husband shared, "I was black before black was cool."

It was only natural that as I matured, I carried with me this love for black literature and poetry and the desire to share it with others. Becoming a teacher was the perfect choice of a career. Through this love for literature, I have been able to help hard-to-reach students find themselves through these books. Let me relate a couple of stories.

Let's call the first student Joy. Joy didn't read. Joy didn't want to read. Her background is Muslim. I achieved real insight into Joy's nature the night of our school's open house. She hurried her mother into our classroom. On the walls there were pictures of African American novelists and poets, quotations from famous African American artists, and drawings created by the students themselves depicting a story they had read that made an impression on them. Joy felt comfortable and ready to learn. She introduced me to her mother as her black history teacher, and not her reading teacher.

Capitalizing on the confidence I had won, I gave Joy the book Song of the Trees by Mildred Taylor. It is an easy-to-read novel with a high interest level. She absorbed it quickly. From then on, she kept asking me for more books. Her mother complimented me on being the first person to provide her daughter with a wealth of admirable African American literature. In other classes, Joy began to do well. Her teachers were impressed with the change and remarked that Joy is doing well because her teacher is doing well.

The second story is of the hard case we will call Joey. Joey is a white male who made a life out of crime. He talked nonstop, was a frequent flyer to the principal's office, and was involved in many fights. He had his own area in the discipline room. He gave himself the title of "Mac Daddy." He was "tuff," so he thought. He was my only white student in this Title I Reading class. Joey had the ability to read and comprehend but was too busy to bother. Somewhere along the line, I began introducing the same books to Joey as I had to my African American students. I have always believed all students deserve the benefit of reading good African American literature. Voraciously, Joey began to read one book after the other. He enjoyed the films, pictures, videos, and field trips with which I enhanced the materials of the reading curriculum.

My view of the learning process is that it should be one based on intricate connections. The world that students will live in is not fragmented. It has the texture of a tapestry where all have a part. I challenged Joey and my African American students with the book Nightjohn by a Caucasian author, Gary Paulsen. Nightjohn is about the period of bondage prior to the Civil War. Nightjohn, an enslaved African, had the desire to give the gift of the freedom of knowledge to his black sisters and brothers. His desire was for them to acquire the tools by which the atrocities of slavery could be recorded for mankind, in order to heighten the awareness of every individual born afterward to the horror that occurs when people attempt to legislate other people into suppression.

Students took to the story―they consumed it. It spoke to them, and they wanted to listen, wanted to respond, the way I wanted to keep on reading after Miss Abigail introduced black literature into my life.

What have I learned? Life is complex. A white woman taught me to read black literature. I have, in turn, taught many students of all walks of life and ethnic backgrounds to read high-quality literature. Primarily, I have learned to find authors that have a message that demands to be understood by my students.