Coming Ashore

by Catherine Gildiner

  I was confused. How could they not read a poem, but then be able to read it when put to music? I realized that day that performance was something they liked, and could do, and that they learned far more with this auditory approach. It was the motivation they needed for their reading.

  As time went on, I realized they also liked to have a say in things, and I had them vote on the best poem of the day. In order to nominate a poem and place it on the board, you had to have good reason for why it was superior and then we would vote for the best of the day, best of the week and best of the month. The kids called it “Pimp My Poem.”

  Every day on the Gestetner, I would run off purple copies of poetry by both black and white authors. I had each student start a poetry notebook that they were to decorate in Sara’s art class. When Sara’s father heard of the lack of resources at Thomas Paine High School, he offered to pay for the poetry notebooks. He used a phrase I’d never heard before when I thanked him on the phone; he said, “Not to worry. I can write them off.” I bought beautiful notebooks with unlined pages. Each had a lovely red ribbon bookmark. Then I bought gold stick-on lettering and personalized each one.

  The kids were not used to school supplies; they were all silent for once and just spent time looking at them. One kid ­complained, “Hey, I got a dud. Mine’s blank.” When I told them that the notebook was for their poems and to record their favourites, they were delighted. I announced in our poetry unit that we would learn how others wrote poems, then write our own and bind the whole project together. We’d also perform the poems in front of the school. I arranged with the principal to do an assembly. He said he usually had to bring in outside speakers for assembly because counting on the students had led to “scheduling issues” and “disappointments.” However, if I really felt I could bring this “poetry party” to fruition, he would pencil in the date.

  I had Sara on board, and she had her art class work on the set design using old wood she found backstage in the ­auditorium. With some supervision and encouragement, the natural builders emerged and the sets were constructed and painted. She even found footlights locked under the floorboards. One of her boys had that lock picked before the janitor could get there with a screwdriver. The lights were covered in dust and cobwebs but they worked.

  Once in a while, one of the kids would put me down, but I always had a worse put-down for the offender. I tried to make my rejoinders amusing, but my comebacks could sting. It was an unorthodox form of discipline, but it was all I had in my juvenile armoury — and it worked. If you, as the teacher, showed any vulnerability, you were toast. I think I finally made some in-roads with some of them because I really worked hard and listened to them. I actually found them and their learning styles interesting, and I think they sensed that. I got the toughest boy, Tyrone, on my side and the rest fell into line like dominoes. That is, all except the five pillars of salt. I always thought I was hard to ignore, but they managed it. They burned me off their frozen psyches as though I were an unsightly wart. I tried everything from talking to them one-on-one to calling their mothers or grandmothers, but they never thawed.

  Something I never would have figured out on my own, but began to understand through their daily voting process, was that their love of poetry was colour-blind. With all the talk of black power and black literature having a voice, these kids paid no ­attention to whether a poem was written by a black or white poet. If it rang true and used language imaginatively, they liked it. They had amazing bullshit barometers. They had seen a lot and knew emotional truth when they heard it. Their all-time favorite poem, which they used to introduce their show, was “Richard Cory,” written by Edward Arlington Robinson in 1897.

  Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

  We people on the pavement looked at him:

  He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

  Clean favored, and imperially slim.

  And he was always quietly arrayed,

  And he was always human when he talked;

  But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

  “Good-morning” and he glittered when he walked.

  And he was rich — yes, richer than a king —

  And admirably schooled in every grace:

  In fine, we thought that he was everything

  To make us wish that we were in his place.

  So on we worked, and waited for the light,

  And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

  And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

  Went home and put a bullet through his head.

  When the class heard this poem, they stopped in their tracks. It didn’t mean that much to me. I had just included it randomly, but they loved it, exclaiming as though they were at a corner church revival meeting. One student said, “That poet lived a life.” We had our longest continuous discussion about that poem. I think I won them over that day because I could learn from them and they realized they had something to teach me. I said, “There is a reason why this poem struck a chord with everyone in here, and this class is not over until I learn what it is.”

  Tex, a quiet tiny boy who the nurse told me suffered from ­sickle cell anemia, spoke for the first time: “They is the poor people who is watching Richard Cory — the guys on the street. They got nothing. They be cursing for a piece of bread. They watch this guy strut his stuff — he ain’t mean or nothing, he just rich — got it all. Then he blows hisself away.” With that, Tex imitated blowing a hole in his head. Finally they’d found a poem from their point of view. As Alphonse, a boy who made lots of money at poker in homeroom, said, “Don’t be thinking them Richard Cory dudes got the world by the tail. That envy can eat you up — and it ain’t even true.”

  Later at our show in assembly, Alphonse walked across the stage in a bright green pimp suit, which he said was just “hangin’ ’round his house.” A “heavy lid” was donated by Smalls-all, another short, delicate boy who limped. Someone else brought in his brother’s fancy walking stick and diamond-studded cuff links. The class stood behind a semi-transparent screen in silhouette and ­recited “Richard Cory” as Alphonse strutted across the stage, greeting imaginary people left and right, and then pulled out a gun (a prop not hard to come by; they were locked away in every supply cupboard) and pretended to shoot himself in the head. The kids in the audience went wild. It had struck a nerve. As Smalls-all explained to me, everyone has seen a drug dealer get rich, then get on the stuff themselves and blow their own brains out in one way or another. (The Richard Cory performance wasn’t the only memorable part of what would turn out to be a truly shocking assembly for those in front of and behind the proscenium.)

  Their second all-time favourite was “The Raven” by Edgar ­Allan Poe. They admired this poem because, as one of the students said, “You can only read that poem one way, man. Your voice gots to sound midnight dreary.”

  When I asked him why he stumbled over prose and not poetry, he said, “First you got the beat, then you got the words. It don’t work the other way around.” I learned there are ways to teach reading and one should begin with rhythmic poetry — I wasn’t accessing half of what these kids could do. These kids were rapping in a pre-rap era.

  >> <<

  I had become used to my life in the strange Alcazar Hotel. Despite the name, no one ever used the Alcazar as a hotel. It was more of a residence. We were the only two who lived there and ­approximated normalcy, so you can imagine what the other residents were like. They seemed to cluster somewhere between shifty and bewildered, emerging mostly at night to slink along the wall of the hallway to the ancient elevator. Sara was right when she said it was a whole hotel of Tennessee Williams characters who had been counting on the kindness of strangers for far too long. Some of the women ­sauntered down the central circular staircase slowly as though they were Loretta Young greeting their guests while the camera panned. They never acted as though they were descending
along a threadbare ­carpet to an empty lobby that smelled of cat urine.

  On the first night in January when we’d arrived at the Alcazar, there was a knock at the door. “Oh God, it’s Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone,” Sara said and then made me answer the door. Peering into the dark hallway, I saw a man of uncertain racial ­origin. He had a white freckled face but a large red Afro that rose up straight on his head as though he were a frightened Raggedy Andy. He was very tall and high waisted, with long, stick-like legs. He wore a faded Hawaiian shirt and high-waisted pants held up by suspenders. He said his name was Merlyn. He came in, glided along the wall and sat in the chair closest to the door. He had a bag of take-out food with him and said he lived next door and that we must be hungry after our journey. He shared two ham sandwiches on Wonder Bread among the three of us. Merlyn said that it was “pitiful to watch the news alone.” Every night after that for the entire duration of our stay, Merlyn came over at exactly 7:00 and we all watched Walter Cronkite together. He sat near the door and hopped up the second the news was over. He had a ham radio set in his apartment and often knew the news before Walter, or so he said. There was something odd about him, but we couldn’t exactly put our finger on what it was.

  Our other almost daily visitor was Bob, the policeman from the school parking lot. Heeding Sara’s unsubtle hints, he showed up the first weekend after we’d arrived. He and Sara had, as she said, “gotten it on.” When I asked if she was in love with Bob, she said, “What else are you going to do in Cleveland?” Since Bob hailed from southern Ohio, he had an Appalachian twang. Sara called him “Hayseed Bob,” which was eventually shortened to Hay, a name he seemed to take to. Sara and Hay had sex in the walk-in closet on a more than regular basis. Once I found Hay’s badge in my underwear pile. I didn’t care if they had sex, but I could never use the closet at night. Whatever I put on in the morning was my outfit until the next morning.

  Hay and Sara were completely different types but got on remark­ably well. I only saw one altercation. Once after Hay put bacon grease on his white toast and was about to take a bite, Sara said, “Hey, Hay, I can’t get it on with a man who uses bacon grease as a condiment.” Hay didn’t hesitate, just threw the bacon grease in the garbage and asked me where the butter was.

  Once I was in the convenience store with Sara and Hay, and Hay spotted Merlyn in the meat aisle. Hay tapped my arm, ­pointed to Merlyn and put his finger up to his mouth, indicating that neither of us should make a sound. Merlyn was feeling his way along the meat counter with a white cane. He was blind. He had gone through elaborate measures to make us think he was sighted. He said his car was up on blocks when we asked him to drive for take-out. After Merlyn left the convenience store, Hay asked the owner of the store if he knew anything about Merlyn. The man said that he only knew he lived at the Alcazar with the other blind people. He said the hotel had been almost empty so the Society for the Blind rented most of the place. It was for people who were just beginning to go blind through macular degeneration. They lived at the Alcazar, in varying degrees of blindness, and went to a blind school to learn how to cope with their new disability. The clerk asked, “You ever seen them big keys they carry?” He added, “You girls must be the only people paying rent over there.”

  Every night Sara and I ate dinner at the Brown Derby Restaurant on our way home from school. If Hay wasn’t on duty, he met us there. He told us that his mother never once ate in a restaurant in her entire life. Sara asked if she had a mental disability; Hay said she didn’t want other people touching her food. She also thought Coca-Cola wasn’t good for people. Both Sara and I said we had never in our lives met anyone who hadn’t eaten in a restaurant or didn’t “believe” in Coke. Sara often remarked with wondrous glee that we could have joined the Peace Corps and gone to “deepest darkest Africa” and not met anyone as exotic as Hay.

  We always sat at the booth in the back and on this particular occasion there was a paper covered with tiny, pencilled writing and folded into my napkin ring. It was a nine-stanza poem, which I read aloud to our table. It was so powerful that we were stunned into silence.

  I knew right away that Maurice from my class had written it, since he was a bus boy at the restaurant. He had two jobs because, as he said, he had two babies “round the block.” (Whatever that meant.) He rarely spoke in class and usually slept in the back row.

  As he pushed his dish cart by our table, we all gave him a thumb’s up; he nodded his head in his white paper cap, smiled and drove on by.

  The next morning, I told the class that I’d chosen the person who would read their poem as the grand finale at our upcoming assembly. I had the boys near the windows pull down the blinds and I asked Tyrone to shine the high-powered light on an empty chair. Then I told the class that I found the poem on my dinner plate and asked the poet to come up and read it. Maurice looked horrified that I’d singled him out, but he reluctantly ambled to the front of the room and mumbled that his poem was in the same style or beat as “The Raven.” It was called “Forevermore” and it was from the point of view of the American eagle who cast shadows as he flew over Hough. He said he got the idea for the bird from “The Raven.” When the kids heard the first stanza, they ­began hitting their desks in approval. Then Maurice’s voice ­became more sonorous, and he began rocking as he read. When Maurice was finished, he got a standing ovation from everyone in the class — except for the five pillars of salt. Maurice tipped his pork pie felt hat, like the one Thelonius Monk wore, and let others slap his hand as he bounced in ghetto gait to his seat. The clapping was so loud the mice came in to ask me if it was a rumble. I said, “No. It’s just enthusiasm over our poetry unit.”

  Maurice’s poem was similar in sentiment to Allen Ginsberg’s lament in his famous long poem “Howl.” While Maurice’s poem read, “Who ate lead paint to get high, drank thunderbird wine to make filthy laneways into Heaven’s alley,” Ginsberg had written, “Who ate fire in paint hotel or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley.” I told the class that Ginsberg was a man who had won some of the greatest honours in American poetry. We all read sections of “Howl” aloud and the kids nodded and made sounds of assent. Both Maurice’s and Ginsberg’s poems were chockablock with ­ghetto images that were neighbourhood mainstays for my students:

  I saw the best mind of my generation destroyed by ­madness, starving hysterical naked,

  dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

  angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly ­connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

  who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

  I was so sure of our success in the poetry assembly that, in true McClure grandiose fashion, I invited the whole school: from the janitors to all the mice, the police from the parking lot, the principal, our supervisory teachers, Professor Narly, the superintendent of schools and even the mayor of Cleveland! I had also sent home invitations to all of the parents, designed by Sara’s art class, and I think the kids actually asked some of them to come.

  I reserved ten rows for parents and relatives. While I was cordoning off the seats an hour before the performance, the old janitor told me that I would just look “pitiful” when no parents showed up. He reserved one row in the back, and we had five grandmothers, one mother, and no fathers; not even one row was fully occupied with parents.

  As the curtain went up, there was a gasp from the audience as they took in the set — a kind of junk palace in an alleyway, all painted in silver that shone in the moonlight. The lighting man from Sara’s class had done an almost professional job. Broken wine bottles were made into a window, which, lit from behind, looked like a church with a stained glass window.

  The show was marvellous and you could hear a pin drop in the audience. No one skipped the assembly because word had
gotten out that it was not a public speaker but the “homeboys.” Even the mice crept in from the halls and parked their bats at the door.

  Tex introduced Maurice’s poem as “an elegy for the living.” (I was pleased to see how Tex had utilized the word elegy from our poems.) Sara had the kids do special masks in red so they looked like wolves. The students stood behind a gauze curtain so the audience would see only shadows and a moon with a papier-mâché silhouette of the American bald eagle. Maurice read aloud while those behind the scrim howled at the moon.

  For our last number, the five pillars of salt had to do something; they worked so hard at not participating in the work or in the assembly that Tyrone and Maurice just shook their heads. Tyrone said, “Man, we got face out there.” Finally they agreed to read “The Raven.” Yvonne was to read and the other four were to sing, “Nevermore” in the background and snap their fingers. I agreed.

  The five stood together, and Yvonne, their spokesperson, waddled to the mike and said they were going to do a poem by Allen Ginsberg, “one our teacher Miss McClure read in class.” I assumed they’d decided to change their routine at the last minute. Two of the girls played backup and the other three read. They had clearly chosen parts that we had not read in class.

  I have to say they read them with masterful intonation and expression to fully appreciate Ginsberg’s meaning. (Only the highlights follow — believe me, it was worse.)

  Pillar of salt #1: “Who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists and screamed with joy”

  Pillar of salt #2: “Who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love”

  Pillar of salt #3: “Who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemetery scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may …”

  On it went. They chose every homoerotic and graphic scene. It was 1970 when gay meant happy and the word homophobia had not entered common parlance. There were grandmothers in the audience who stomped up the aisles and flooded out the doors. The graphic homoeroticism continued to spew from the stage ­until the audience started booing and yelling.