Although I don’t remember much about 1996, I do remember the Summer Olympics. I didn’t have much interest in Swimming or Track and Field. Rather, I was transfixed by the Women’s Gymnastic Team.
The Magnificent Seven, as they were dubbed, consisted of Kerri Strug, Dominique Dawes, Amanda Borden, Amy Chow, Dominique Moceanu, Jaycie Phelps, and Shannon Miller. I was in awe of their discipline, strength, and endurance. The ability to twist and contort the human body was more than a sport; it seemed like an elite artform, magic powers for only the chosen few.
To an eight-year-old black girl, Dominique Dawes was a revelation. The whole team was an inspiration, but nineteen-year-old Dawes provided a reflection of myself. Black girls could not only do gymnastics, but they could make it to the Olympics. Writer Morgan Jerkins noted on ESPN that Dawes “showed them, as well as the rest of the world, how black women could move and excel in traditionally white spaces, even if they had to take flight to do so.”
Critics hid their racism behind euphemisms. A 1995 LA Times article reported that people worried that Dawes didn’t have the “right look,” that her legs were “bowed,” her knees were too “knobby,” and her “hair was too askew.” In other words, Dawes was too Black.
Naturally, critics hid their racism behind euphemisms. A 1995 LA Times article reported that people worried that Dawes didn’t have the “right look,” that her legs were “bowed,” her knees were too “knobby,” and her “hair was too askew.” In other words, Dawes was too Black. Fortunately, Dawes defied her critics and made Olympic history. She was the first Black woman to win a gold medal.
There have been other gymnasts that have broken barriers since Dawes, namely Gabby Douglas and Simone Biles. Douglas became the first Black woman to win gold in the individual all-around category. Watching her in 2012 brought back memories of the fascination and pride cultivated while watching the 1996 games. Unfortunately, Douglas was not spared from racism and discrimination. In a Vanity Fair profile, her mother, Natalie Douglas, is unflinching about the racially motivated hostility and vitriol that has followed her daughter’s luminous athletic career. She told the magazine that the parents of other gymnasts were unwelcoming and that they “looked at her as a pariah, an alien, a single black bank employee making around $45,000 a year in the midst of affluent white families headed by doctors and lawyers.”
The racism didn’t stop as Douglas dove into her training at Excalibur Gymnastics in Virginia Beach. Douglas said that other gymnasts stole her clothes out of the locker room and made derogatory comments, such as calling her a “slave.” She was teased about her nose. A gym staff member criticized the “flatness” of her nose and advised Douglas to get a nose job.
When [Gabby Douglas] competed at the Olympics in 2012, social media was buzzing not just about her incredible talent, but her hair.
When she competed at the Olympics in 2012, social media was buzzing not just about her incredible talent, but her hair. For Black girls and women, natural hair is more than a sore spot. It’s not “just hair.” If we are as “colorblind” as we are to believe, why is Black hair such a source of derision? Even those who claimed to support her weren’t without strong words of disapproval for Douglas’s seemingly “unstyled” hair. Speaking to The Daily Beast, twenty-two-year-old Latisha Jenkins said, “I love how she’s doing her thing and winning. But I just hate the way her hair looks with all those pins and gel. I wish someone could have helped her make it look better since she’s being seen all over the world. She representing for black women everywhere.”
Assuming that Jenkins is a Black woman, I understand her point about Douglas acting as an official representative. On the other hand, I find it extremely disappointing and frustrating that any time a Black woman is the first in her field and/or the only Black woman in her field, she’s forced to take on the role of spokesperson of her race. Even achieving something as extraordinary as Olympic gold is not enough to cause her athleticism to be judged solely on her skills. Instead, something that should be minor, such as her hair, becomes the basis for how she performs a display of acceptable, complimentary blackness.
As a Black woman who took cheerleading and gymnastics for years, I didn’t find any fault in Douglas’s gelled and pinned ponytail. When you’re flipping your body around the floor and attempting to land difficult tricks, you don’t want to be worrying about your hair. You want all of it out of your face. Making sure that your ponytail is pretty is the last thing on your mind.
White bodies in gymnastics may be nit-picked and harshly appraised. However, many people regard them as the standard, regulating Black bodies to the undesirable Other.
Douglas’s 2016 teammate, powerhouse Simone Biles, has recently faced the same sort of admiration and backlash as Douglas. Biles is the first female gymnast to win three straight World Championships. In a New Yorker profile, writer Reeves Wiedeman echoed the sentiments of Biles believers, confessing, “I felt as if Isaac Newton had written a different set of laws on her behalf. She flew higher, spun faster, and landed more firmly than anyone else.”
Yet in a sport such as gymnastics, it seems that there is no real way to “transcend” race, to borrow a well-loved phrase from white supremacy apologists and naive fools alike. Last year in Belgium, Biles became “the first woman of color to win an all-around title at world championships.” Most likely motivated by bitterness, jealousy, and racism, an Italian gymnast vented her frustrations to the Italian media. Eighteen-year-old Carlotta Ferlito said, “I told Vanessa [teammate Vanessa Ferrari] that next time we should also paint our skin black, so then we could win too.” It’s not hard to read between the lines. Ferlito’s ignorant remarks remind me of white people who complain that affirmative action is racist against white people. Yet by attacking Biles, Ferlito only exposed her own racism and, by extension, the racism within the sport. White bodies in gymnastics may be nit-picked and harshly appraised. However, many people regard them as the standard, regulating Black bodies to the undesirable Other.
Being exposed to Dominique Dawes at a young age encouraged a subconscious appreciation for the beauty of my body. With enough practice and patience, maybe I could bend gravity to my will.
Whether it’s books or movies or sports, representation matters. Being exposed to Dominique Dawes at a young age encouraged a subconscious appreciation for the beauty of my body. With enough practice and patience, maybe I could bend gravity to my will. Like Dawes, maybe I could grasp such athletic glory, to defy the expectations attached to my short stature and compact build. It’s disheartening to see Douglas and Biles make headlines for instances of racism, but their presence is important, providing a beam of hope and light for all the Black and brown girls watching them take the world by storm.
The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book by Bill Watterson is one of the few books I’ve kept from my childhood.
The book was a compilation of full-color, multi-panel Sunday strips from Watterson’s iconic cartoon, which ran from 1985 to 1995. At one point I had all of the Calvin and Hobbes collections. I don’t know how or where I lost them. My copy of the Lazy Sunday Book is now falling apart.
The strip is about a boy, Calvin, and his stuffed/real tiger, Hobbes. Hobbes is inquisitive, often hungry, more cerebral than his companion, more inclined to inject a note of caution. He’s also very much a cat. Calvin is an intelligent, reckless, and not unfocused boy; but it’s clear that he prefers to keep his attention to his own imaginative world, which puts him at odds with the one his parents live in. Only Calvin sees Hobbes as a real tiger—his parents and most of the people around him see Hobbes as a stuffed animal; the strip plays off the tension between Calvin’s elaborate fantasies and the “real” things happening behind it. When Calvin plays Spaceman Spiff, he soaks his neighbor/classmate/enemy Susie Derkins (who is at first drawn as a huge bug-eyed alien) with a ray gun that turns out to be a water pistol. In another strip, we’re shown a dinosaur chomping through his meal—until Calvin’s mother yells at him to use better table manners; then we see a Tyrannosaurus Rex shamefacedly eating with a fork and knife, knobby elbows tucked in.
I loved Calvin and Hobbes from the day the first black-and-white strip appeared in my childhood local newspaper, The Winnipeg Free Press.
I loved Calvin and Hobbes from the day the first black-and-white strip appeared in my childhood local newspaper, The Winnipeg Free Press. (Wikipedia tells me this day was November 18, 1985.)
My parents subscribed to the Free Press, which had a full-page black-and-white comics spread on weekdays and a color funny paper on Sundays. Along with Calvin and Hobbes, I read Peanuts, Cathy, Bloom County, and many others; I was so devoted to the funnies that when I went away to university, my parents saved great piles of them, and even though I told them they didn’t need to do so, I’d go through those when I came back home, too.
I loved Watterson’s illustrations, which, depending on the bent of Calvin’s imagination, looked like lush watercolors or saturated, eye-popping 1950s superhero comics. He plays with perspective in some panels, and in others he tries styles of art from different periods. And always, the dialog is smart, funny—sometimes heartbreaking.
Maybe at the time, I gave a thought to why such a smart kid had so much trouble at school, why he had no non-tiger friends. Only now do I begin also to think about Calvin’s frustration—all the characters’ frustrations, really.
I didn’t always identify with Calvin. (As a child, I was more of a Susie Derkins.) I enjoyed Calvin—his creativity and his intelligence. But despite that, Watterson never hides how difficult Calvin is. He’s hard on babysitters (and his babysitter is also hard on him). He’s greedy, mischievous. He isn’t a kid who gets As on his report card. Sometimes, he sits at his desk dreaming. Often, he gets in trouble with his teacher, Miss Wormwood.
Maybe at the time, I gave a thought to why such a smart kid had so much trouble at school, why he had no non-tiger friends. Only now do I begin also to think about Calvin’s frustration—all the characters’ frustrations, really.
Calvin’s dad is a enthusiast of the outdoors and cold weather; he bikes to work at his corporate job—and comes homes to chaos and disappointment. In one strip, he goes out early on his boat during vacation. “This is the life! A brisk swim at dawn, a morning out on the boat.” But when he returns with a freshly caught fish, Calvin’s mother sits bleary-eyed at the table and says, “You eat your dead animals. All I want is some coffee.” Calvin complains that there is no TV on this holiday. The dad’s balloon is punctured.
Calvin’s mom is a sharp woman who is clearly not willing to be an acquiescent, smiling spouse. She’s often exasperated by her difficult kid. And Calvin’s neighbor/enemy Susie Derkins is a rule-following, at times anxious perfectionist who has big ambitions. One time, when Calvin does ask Susie to play, she takes over: “OK, we’ll play house now. I’ll be the high-powered executive wife. The tiger here can be my unemployed housekeeping husband…” Calvin immediately regrets inviting Susie, but oblivious, she takes off, saying, “I’m off to Wall Street. Don’t wait up.”
At other times, Susie’s annoyance with Calvin often ironically results in her abandoning decorum and rules as she explodes over his antics.
In all of the human characters in the strip, there is a mismatch between their ideals and what they have right now: the dad would like a more outdoorsy, enthusiastic family; the mom would like a more sedate life; Susie has a clear vision of what she will do in the future and worries about how she can put herself on the right path now. And Calvin—well, the whole strip is really about how in real life a six-year-old is pretty powerless—forced to take baths when adults make them, told to sit in school instead of being allowed to have space adventures.
I find myself more in sympathy with Calvin now.
Childhood can be lonely and frustrating. Kids are stuck in an adult reality learning rules that don’t seem to make sense, conventions that people already seem to know—or assume one should know. I don’t blame Calvin for taking to his own worlds, despite the havoc that he wreaks on the adults and other people in his life. At this point, I probably have more in common with Calvin’s parents than with the kids. But paging through Bill Watterson’s Lazy Sunday Book, I laugh out loud at Calvin and Hobbes’s quips, I marvel at the illustrations, and I find myself remembering and holding onto my enjoyment for just a minute longer—just another minute—before Monday morning comes.
As a child, I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books.
I began them when I started third grade. When people ask about formative books, I think first of this series: of these books that I read when I walked around the house, that I carried to the dinner table, that I pored over during recess, and that I bugged my teacher to put on her curriculum even as the school year was ending. But I put off writing about them for a long time as it seems that I can’t bring myself to re-read them.
I still can’t.
I’m sorry.
Wilder’s semi-autobiographical children’s novels follow the pioneering Ingalls family as they move from Wisconsin (Little House in the Big Woods) to territory that was in reality an Osage Indian reservation in Kansas (Little House on the Prairie). The family then departs for Walnut Grove, Minnesota (On the Banks of Plum Creek), where they live in a house made of sod, then to De Smet, South Dakota, the setting of By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years. One book, Farmer Boy, follows the childhood adventures of Almanzo, Wilder’s husband, as he tends to livestock, does chores, eats cake, and tries to get along with siblings in upstate New York. The Ingalls family (and the Wilders) sew their own clothes, endure blizzards, illness, and locusts, and still manage to find love, and joy, and adventure with family.
I say that the books are semi-autobiographical because despite the fact that the main character has Wilder’s name and the family travels roughly along the same paths that Wilder’s family did, the novels are very much fiction. Liberties were taken with Wilder’s real life story. And to a certain extent, this is acknowledged. Little House in the Big Woods, after all, opens like this:
Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.
The book has the opening for a fairy tale, with one solid fact thrown in—sixty years. Reception of the series—and certainly my feelings about it when I was young—concentrated on the harsh pioneer life, on details about playing ball with a pig’s bladder or making a doll out of a corn cob. I know I also identified with the setting of the story because I lived in the flat, cold middle of Canada (albeit in a city, in a house with indoor plumbing and heating). I know I also wanted to be resourceful and plucky, like the Ingalls family. I wanted to make my own bread, sew my own clothes, churn butter, and plant things.
(Basically, I wanted to do crafts and ride in horse-drawn buggies—but to have other modern conveniences.)
More recently, however, writers and scholars have turned their attention to the fictive-ness of the books—and to the mythmaking. Some memorable characters, the handsome Cap Garland, for example, are made up. More important, Pa Ingalls’s reasons for dragging his family across large swathes of Kansas and the Dakotas are elided. Pa Ingalls and his family weren’t benign settlers pitting their ingenuity against the dangerous wild; they were invading Native American territories. They had to do it on their own because they weren’t supposed to be there.
Indeed, Caroline’s Fraser’s 2017 book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, looks at the ways that Wilder’s books not only diverged from the realities of her life but made that life into one of the shaping narratives of American identity. The book also examines how Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a follower of Ayn Rand, extensively rewrote her mother’s books, often twisting facts to reflect Obectivist values.
But Fraser’s is only the latest in a series of sources that made me re-examine my feelings about the series. Among those:
Louis Erdrich’s books Birchbark House books, written from the perspective of Native Americans and set at around the same time as Wilder’s books;
Scholar Debbie Reese’s blog, “American Indians in Children’s Literature,” in which she talks about the depiction of Native Americans in the Little House series and in other books. This is just one example.
It was a conversation about Wilder’s books that Dr. Reese shared on Twitter that initially made me question what kinds of books from my childhood I wanted to give to my own child (which I talked about here) and, more important, why exactly I wanted to share them.
Does reading the Little House books lead to a greater understanding of history? Not on their own. Would it lead to my daughter understanding me or my life better?
Would it bring us closer?
If that were true, would this I want this particular story connecting us?
I am at a loss. I don’t know how to reconcile my memories, my newer knowledge, and my feelings about what is best to do right now. I have been told I should talk these issues out with kids, but so far I haven’t mentioned Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series to my daughter. I’m not actively hiding them. But I’ve chosen to put different books in front of her and to have her explore what she likes on her own. In any case, it’s likely that she’ll encounter them without my interference. She’ll be older.
By then, I hope I’ll be better prepared to talk about them.
This summer, I spent some time re-reading Anne of Green Gables, a book that I turned to frequently in my childhood. It was easy to fall into it, but it also made me think of the lessons we learn—the habits we form—when we are young readers.
In Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved classic, middle-aged siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert decide to adopt a boy to help them with their Prince Edward Island farm. But as the result of a miscommunication, instead of a sturdy boy the Cuthberts end up with red-headed Anne Shirley, whose unself-conscious chatter and vivid imagination soon win over shy Matthew and uptight Marilla.
The novel follows Anne as she befriends “kindred spirits,” including her bosom friend the neighbor girl Diana Barry, attends classes at Avonlea village’s one-room schoolhouse (and breaks a slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head for calling her carrots), accidentally puts salt in a cake instead of sugar, dyes her hair green, dreams of dresses with puffed sleeves, and excels when she attends teacher’s college.
Anne is a daydreamer, but intelligent and hard working. Throughout, Anne learns and matures, but the book also charts her progress from mistrusted stranger in town—an orphan—to being a member of the community of Avonlea.
Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908, was Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery’s debut. It met with instant success, and Montgomery went on to write nineteen more novels, including five more in the Anne series, a few books that focus on Anne’s friends and children, and the Emily books.
In many ways, Anne of Green Gables is about the commonplace—village life and growing up. But it is also about the power of imagination and storytelling. Anne’s parents die when she is a baby and she is taken in by a Mrs. Thomas, who, according to Anne, is “poor and ha[s] a drunken husband.” Young Anne helps raise the Thomases’ four children, and when the husband dies after falling under a train, she goes to Mrs. Hammond, who has eight children. Of Mrs. Hammond’s family, Anne says, “I’m sure I could never have lived there if I hadn’t had an imagination.”
Anne takes refuge from the real danger of her early life in stories, and it is through making stories that she gains friends in Avonlea. After an absence from school, for instance, Montgomery writes:
Anne was welcomed back to school with open arms. Her imagination had been sorely missed in games, her voice in the singing and her dramatic ability in the perusal aloud of books at dinner time.
(By the way, one of the pleasures of re-reading Anne of Green Gables comes from appreciating the things that the girls do to entertain themselves in the early 1900s.)
But there is clearly tension between the everyday and the imaginative. Marilla constantly disapproves of Anne’s “heathenish” thoughts, and when Anne and Diana dream up a Haunted Wood including a ghostly child who lays its cold fingers on people, both Marilla and Diana’s mother object.
Indeed, what Montgomery calls a sign of Anne’s maturity involves favoring more realistic literature—a movement encouraged and endorsed by Anne’s beloved teacher, Miss Stacy. Anne tells Marilla:
She found me reading a book one day called The Lurid Mystery of the Haunted Hall. It was one Ruby Gillis had lent me, and, oh, Marilla, it was so fascinating and creepy. It just curdled the blood in my veins. But Miss Stacy said it was a very silly, unwholesome book, and she asked me not to read any more of it or any like it.
As for her own writing, Anne says, “[Miss Stacy] won’t let us write anything but what might happen in Avonlea in our own lives, and she criticizes it very sharply and makes us criticize our own, too.”
Anne is told again and again to turn her imagination to less sensational channels: to favor realism over the gothic or fanciful—that there is a moral superiority to the more realistic even when it comes to imaginative play.
Within these classic, realistic novels about young women by Western, Christian women writers, the idea that realism is somehow fitter—somehow morally and aesthetically superior—is a refrain.
I read Anne when I was maybe in fourth or fifth grade, and distracted by the other delights of the book, I didn’t give a lot of thought to Miss Stacy’s edicts on literature.
But I probably absorbed them, because they were aimed at me—at young women readers. Later in life, Miss Stacy’s message was reinforced by similar sentiments in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. In Alcott’s classic, it is Professor Bhaer who is horrified by the “blood and thunder” tales that Jo March writes, causing her to change the direction of her work. And in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (a book that I love and on which I wrote my undergraduate thesis), Henry Tilney lectures avid novel-reader Catherine Morland after she imagines his father (and her holiday host) to be guilty of all manner of gothic horrors.
Within these classic, realistic novels about young women by Western, Christian women writers, the idea that realism is somehow fitter—somehow morally and aesthetically superior—is a refrain. And sure, part of this is to defend the work that these women are already doing; it is in the lady novelist’s interests to claim that her own works can be harmless—even beneficial to her readers. Fiction is, after all, a “pack of lies,” and creating a world inside a book is tantamount to challenging God. And accepting money for these labors sure doesn’t help the woman writer’s cause.
Realism, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to build a world—it seems less like an untruth. Realism, then, looks to the unschooled eye more genteel, less subversive, less deceptive, more ladylike, more socially acceptable.
It’s Anne! But with dark hair and violet eyes! And, as it turns out, psychic visions.
But it is also interesting how drawn both Anne and her author, Lucy Maud Montgomery, are to the “fascinating and creepy”—which itself hints to the reading habits that Montgomery formed as a young reader. Montgomery’s most famous books after Anne, the Emily series, contain light supernatural elements. (For that matter, Louisa May Alcott also wrote sensational stories under her pen name A. M. Barnard.)The title of the first Emily book likely intentionally follows the naming scheme of the Anne books: Emily of New Moon. Like Anne, Emily is also an orphan raised by dour, older people. It’s Anne! But with dark hair and violet eyes! And, as it turns out, psychic visions.
For young me, reading about Emily after Anne—to read a similar narrative about a similar character by the same author only to have the book veer into the supernatural made me uneasy. And that was both because, well, ghosts and seances and any hint of the unknown, and also because it put my relationship with Montgomery’s “wholesome,” realistic books on unstable ground.
I wonder what would happen if women weren’t told so often what to write; if they weren’t faulted for imagining the fantastic and the supernatural.
But it didn’t disturb enough for me to stop reading the rest of the trilogy or Montgomery’s other (sometimes disturbing) books. Because even though I was unsettled by Emily, I found it fascinating. The capacity was in me to enjoy these books—and in Montgomery to pen them.
I wonder what would happen if women weren’t told so often what to write; if they weren’t faulted for imagining the fantastic and the supernatural.
Now, I think about what would have happened to my outlook—to my reading habits—had I read Emily before Anne, if my expectations for Montgomery’s work had been different. Would it have made me more open to reading more frightening, more sensational, more “thrilling” books? Or maybe I am seduced by the idea of another me who is somehow braver because she can enjoy things that frighten her; a me who enjoys fewer limits on her reading on her imagination who lets her mind go farther, if even in a small way.
Look, it’s been another long year, and my temptation this month is to quote blocks of funny passages from Gordon Korman’s 1981 comic middle-grade novel, I Want to Go Home, and just leave them here without analyzing my childhood or my feeelings.
Humor can be a balm, an escape—all that delightful, uplifting crap. But what I realized on picking up I Want to Go Home again was that my own humor also became a channel for anger. Whether that served me well remains to be seen.
I read I Want to Go Home many, many times starting in either fourth or fifth grade. In the story, Rudy Miller is sent to Camp Algonkian on orders of his school’s guidance department in order to learn to socialize better.
He runs up against enthusiastic campers, hearty counselors, a dizzying array of athletic activities, and a clueless camp director who begins all of his speeches by hailing back to his grandfather Elias Warden, founder of Algonkian.
Rudy is disgusted by all of his pink-lunged, wholesome, outdoorsy fellows. He refers to Algonkian as Alcatraz and his counselors as clones. His only friend is geeky, sensitive Mike Webster, who shares his dislike of camp, enthusiasm, and outdoor activities. Together, they hatch various schemes to escape the island, including:
Building a dam to flood the island;
Taking off in a boat;
Attempting to escape during a baseball game on the mainland;
Fleeing during a dance at a girls’ camp
What puzzles his counselors is the fact that Rudy is really, really good at all the things he disdains. He’s a fabulous soccer player. He trounces a counselor at chess and earns the chance to be camp director for a day. He outruns the competition at a track meet—and keeps sprinting off the field in an attempt to escape.
Rudy excels at everything and likes nothing. And this confuses his fellow campers and counselors, for whom being good at something means that they should damn well like it.
Gordon Korman was Rudy Miller to my fourth- or fifth-grade eyes.
At this point, Korman has now published nearly a hundred novels for children. But when I first started reading his books, he was young—not that much older than me, it seemed. He’d written his first novel, This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, at age thirteen and sent it in to Scholastic, where it became the first in a string of hits. Macdonald Hall spawned a series starring Bruno and Boots, a pair of jokesters given to pulling stunts at their Canadian private school. (The current prime minister of Canada, who is also not that much older than me, named This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall as his favorite Canadian book. This article on Korman’s career is great, by the way.) Korman kept putting out funny, outrageous novels seemingly effortlessly, each featuring more elaborate plots and schemes than the last. He published five books before he graduated from high school.
Young Gordon Korman seemed to have pulled off an elaborate con — except his scheme was to get the adults to give him adulation and money for writing books in which he thumbed his nose at them. He was, like Rudy Miller, the kid who’d managed to outsmart the grown-ups again and again.
I was a very “good” child when I first read I Want to Go Home. I seemed sunny and undemanding. I won prizes at the science fair. I played piano. I didn’t talk back. My parents were also Christian and fairly conservative. At times I was desperate to appear “good” in every form that that word takes: an all-encompassing good that included purity of the soul, competence, and just general prodigiousness.
At other times, my act felt like utter and complete bullshit. I maintained a front out of fear: that I wasn’t actually very bright; that people would find out that I didn’t actually like or respect most of the adults with whom I acted so obsequious. And although I didn’t articulate it at the time, I was also convinced that I lived on the thin edge of the wedge. We don’t use the term “visible minority” as often anymore. But sometimes I feel like it’s an apt descriptor of how I felt. I was in the minority, and I was very visible. My acceptance into most spheres seemed to depend on being perceived as helpful or smart. If I wasn’t white, then by gum, I had to be indispensable, untouchably perfect—both.
But of course, the problem with keeping up the veneer was that it made me really fucking angry.
“You’re different. For instance, your counselors treat you like a prisoner. How come?”
“I am a prisoner,” said Rudy. “We all are, only some of us notice it more than others.”
Now I see that I was—and still am to a certain extent—preoccupied with the gap between my feelings about who I am and my successful performance of goodness and competence. I also see that I still have an equal, forceful desire to sabotage all of that. To rebel, yes, or to escape the narrow and impossible role in which I cast myself.
Nice to see that I’ve matured since fourth grade.
At one point, the extremely competent Rudy Miller says:
“Of course, my parents already have a spot reserved for my future Olympic medals. Maybe I’ll get them a moose head to fill the empty space.”
“You’re so good at everything,” said Mike, his voice filled with awe, “and you still hate sports.”
“With a passion,” agreed Rudy emotionlessly.
The gap between parental expectation and my own desires was something I identified with strongly. But what was interesting about I Want to Go Home was—is—that it stated baldly and often that you didn’t have to enjoy something you seemed good at. You didn’t even have to feign liking it.
In fact, the book presented a third option: you could be good and trapped, you could be angry—you could also be funny.
When Rudy becomes camp director for the day, his wit becomes immediately apparent to the rest of the campers:
“Your attention, please. This is your camp director speaking.” There was an enormous cheer from all the campers, as well as stamping of feet and banging on plates. “Tonight,” Rudy went on after the rumpus had died down, “the counselors’ tag championships will take place.”
[…]
“After that, the counselors will entertain by singing the ‘Anvil Chorus,” from Il Trovatore by Giuseppe Verdi.”
Rudy makes the counselors run around obstacle courses and play tag in the mud; he puts them through what the campers do and makes no bones about his wish to upend the status quo. He tells everyone he dislikes baseball, running, soccer, crafts. He openly plans to escape. If he doesn’t actually get away, he at least gets away with saying everything on his mind.
Because at least he’s funny.
That’s what I concluded, too—for better or for worse. I read the book and laughed—and I tried to be funny. In trying I often said terrible, vicious things. Sometimes my jokes weren’t productive—they often aren’t useful for Rudy, either. Humor was as much a defense mechanism as it was offensive. I could take vengeance through a cutting remark. I could be angry. But it could also be a way of being honest, of allowing me to say exactly what I felt to almost anyone at any time.
My default is still to make fun when I’m feeling riled. I’ve been doing it a lot, lately.
I maintained my image as a good kid through junior high and high school. Of course, I never tried to steal a boat or run away. But I spoke many of the best and worst things I could think of out loud. Sometimes I think I got away with a lot—sometimes too little.
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