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A Great Society?Author(s): Martha WrightSource: The North American Review, Vol. 252, No. 2 (Mar., 1967), pp. 14-16Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25116564 .

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A Great Sockty?

Martha Wright

Recently, I have become aware of how poor and

underprivileged I was as a child. Now past sixty, it is fortunate that I was kept in ignorance, or other

wise I never would have made it. This unhappy con dition also must have existed among my friends and

relatives, as they seem to have been as impoverished as we were. But with so many of us, our misery was

diffused in the murky smog of our childhood. I suppose, actually, the reasons for our deplorable

conditions could be attributed to our parents. In my case, my father was a drop-out. And with that kind of

father, what can you expect? All I know is that if my mother had known she was marrying a drop-out, all three of us children would probably never have been born. My mother was no drop-out. She graduated from the local female academy and then had to wait around a few years, sponging on my grandfather, I

suppose, until my father picked her up and took her off Grandpa's hands. My father at the age of fifteen had dropped into his father's hardware business, where,

although he didn't make much in wages, he learned

quite a lot about nuts and bolts and harness and buggy whips and people.

With this marital imbalance, only one kind of home life could evolve. It was bound to be lop-sided, mean

ing that if my father didn't lop us on one side, my mother did on the other. Naturally my parents couldn't have known what they should have about marriage and the family, which is too bad because all that anthro

pological stuff is interesting and reveals a lot about

primitive man and primordial tribes, and somehow is

supposed to relate to bringing up children in a modern

society. My parents never deliberately tried to provide us with a happy home; they just wouldn't tolerate its

being unhappy. The result was that we didn't have

any of that sibling jealousy which today explains the friction in some families, and some of the attitudes of children toward their parents. At the time we thought our parents were equally mean to all of us.

I have been thinking about our schools and education in general. As I reflect, schools in my day must have

been lousy, and how we learned anything is now a

MARTHA WRIGHT is an instructor in English at the Univer

sity of Massachusetts.

mystery to me. By today's standards they certainly never would have been accredited. The old brick and tile Webster building, cold and prison-like with high ceilings and hollow echoing halls, where I began school in 1909, had been built in 1865. Across the front en trance was inscribed, "Let None Who Enter Here

Prove Unworthy." To this day I don't know whether that is a quotation or whether some local educator or

village humanist made it up. It did put an onus on us,

having to confront that admonition every day, each time when we lined up to march from the playground to our rooms, the boys and girls in separate wavering and wiggling columns. I didn't realize it then but the school administrators did place an early emphasis on sex. We were segregated even though we didn't know

why. As we stood, hushed, in those serpentine lines, waiting for Miss Hattie Carroll to blow the entrance

whistle, we read that inscription, and it was for us a kind of Ozymandian, "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Another function that this "prove un

worthy" inscription had was for diagraming. By the time you were in the fifth grade and had Miss Olive

Oldaker for your teacher, you had better know how to

diagram that sentence. It had all the ingredients for

parsing, even to the infinitive with the to be under

stood, or at least I think the infinitive is still there.

However, in today's linguistic terminology it may be called a T-V, that is a functioning headword in a group verbal juncture.

That civil war school building had, of course, no

plumbing, and there did not seem to be much inclina tion on the part of the School Board to install it. To

any suggestion that indoor toilet facilities should re

place those lime-laden ones out-of-doors, Mr. Walter

Nugent, who was president of the school board so long I thought he had been born into it, would merely have

snorted, "Nonsense!" Mr. Nugent, being also president of the bank, guarded the taxpayer's money with the zeal of a federal reservist. So we accepted this plumb ing primitivism unquestioningbly. In winter at recess

when we used the white-washed water closet, if we couldn't wait until we got home, the older girls were

co-adjutants for the little ones. The boys needed no

aides, as they were not constricted in their performance by long underwear, held in place by black-ribbed cot ton stockings, and elastic-controlled bloomers, petti

14 The North American Review

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coat, dress, and coat.

As young children we had no organized play, or at least we had no play organized for us; we organized our own. Our activities were, no doubt, misdirected

energies, channeled in diverse courses, meandering through the seasons like the slow moving Paint Creek

which almost encircled our town. We never dared to

whine, "What'll I do?" if we were particularly lethargic or unorganized. We knew what the answer would be without waiting for it to be snapped to our attention: "If you can't find something to do, I'll find it for you." It is amazing how much creativity can be engendered by such a rejoinder

? motivation I think the current word would be ? a confrontation with motivation and an escalation therefrom.

As teen agers we had so little provided for us during our leisure time that I marvel that we all didn't be come delinquents. Our salvation was, I think, that we

were such an immobile lot, our circumference of activ

ity being mostly prescribed by the corporation limits of our town. Our locomotion was principally by walking.

We walked to all of our destinations. We walked sep

arately, meditating in our perigrinations on the vicissi tudes of our existence, or we walked in small, intimate

gang-like groups, as well as large heterogeneous shov

ing, mauling, pushing ones, like those which seemed to coalesce on band concert nights. To a question "Where are you going?" the answer would have been, "Nowhere."

We walked the streets of our town, the main streets, the side streets, the alleys,

? so much so that their en

virons became indelible. It is surprising how a thor

ough knowledge of back yards and back alleys can re veal a lot about life and people. Sometimes there is

much difference between people's front yards and their back yards, such a difference that you may learn more

here about human nature than from either sage or

psychologist. The temptations toward doom, however, which came

our way would today, seem very innocuous and limited, though ornery and wicked they seemed to us. One of our blackest experiments in a satanic framework initial

ly could have made us into addicts, but somehow it was

difficult to become addicts to smoking cornsilks. We all tried smoking, almost irrespective of sex and age.

No one really enjoyed it very much, but it seemed to be a kind of pagan tradition which annually in the fall must be celebrated, a salute to Pluto's demise, I suppose. The wonder that we did not get "hooked" by cornsilks is not as significant as is the wonder that we didn't set

fire to ourselves or to the ice house where for some esoteric reason this ritual was performed. Several times I recall we used the almost empty corn crib, but we abandoned it, as the smoke wafting through the slat construction was too easily detected. The ice house had straw in it, left over from the packing of last

year's ice blocks. The fact that we used newspaper strips to roll the dried, crumbled cornsilks in, or upon occasions coarse toilet paper, did not decrease the fire hazard. Lighted by matches pilfered from the kitchen

range, the packed reefer ignited; we puffed once or

twice, coughed, choked, blinked and dropped the flam

ing cylinder, having it quickly stomped and extin

guished. Aside from the holocaust which we fortunate

ly were spared, our most deleterious connivance was to

make the youngest participant into a Twistian Thief, with pragmatic and Fagan-like persuasion requiring him to sneak into the kitchen and steal the stove matches!

Our principal occupation was reading. It seems to me now that our whole town read. The library, open two afternoons a week, was reigned over by Miss Fran ces Larkin, a high-principled, well-meaning lady, who felt that she had a responsibility in assisting the Lord in shaping our moral development, especially as it could be molded by the kind of books we read. The

word Library was synonymous with Miss Fanny. We said we were "going to Miss Fanny's after school." I

was in third grade before I disassociated Miss Fanny from the library.

"Does she really live there?" I asked, awesome.

"Of course not, silly," was the rejoinder, which im

mediately removed Miss Fanny as a permanent resi dent.

When we "took out" the allotted two library books,

they somehow became our personal possessions. We

frequently had to re-read favorites, as, if we had read the selection quickly, we had to find pleasure in a sec

ond, or even a third reading. Sometimes it seemed a

long time from Tuesday afternoon to Saturday after noon.

"Mama, he's got my Murders in the Rue Morgue/' or "he's got my Les Miserables/' pronounced less

miserable.

"You put that book right down. You aren't old

enough to read it."

So we grudgingly relinquished the book, planning, of course, to sign it out on our next library trip, hoping that Miss Fanny, too, would not restrict it to that inter

minably distant future when we would be "old enough." Somehow it seemed we would never reach that far, far

away ninth circle from which we could climb into the

Empyrean of unlimited choice, "Was it for this I said

my prayers . . ."

Our library was for over fifty years a big sprawling unfriendly-looking room in the second floor of the town hall. The wide wooden interior steps leading to it must have been over an unused part of the fire station which

adjoined the rear of the town hall. Somewhere in the back were the stables which housed the nervous, sleek, prancing horses that responded to the clamour of the fire bell. Seldom were we ever treated to the excite

ment of being in the vicinity of the "fire house" and the library simultaneously when the fire bells rang. But those wide steps provided, however, a degree of excite

ment as when we were grown-up enough we could descend them in great leaping, noisy bounds, making a terrible hollow clatter; then swirling, having touched base at the bottom, we could return to the top, and de scend again before Miss Fanny appeared outside the big library door, shushing us and inevitably saying, "Now I don't want to have to tell your parents." Telling our

parents would have been catastrophic. When we were

March, 1967 75

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denied privileges, they somehow remained denied, as our parents were neither phlegmatic nor notional; their

judgments were not only substantial but also perma nent.

Our reading jags sometimes were carried on propiti ously in a remote and/or a secret place. If the book at hand were particularly good, one might well want to be out of ear shot of the back porch. From here a

projected request was usually, "Come right up here, I need you." But if one were well-established at some dis

tance, he could truthfully deny having heard the clarion and emerge long afterward with his book as evidence.

"My land, where've you been? Didn't you hear me

calling you?" "Nome. I was reading down in the garden, under the

maiden blush." "Under the maiden blush! Well you couldn't get

much farther away if you tried." For all the time we spent under the maiden blush, no

Newton-like apple ever fell before us or on us, con

tributing to our superior wisdom, or challenging us in the great maze of philosophic dreams.

Not many of the children who grew up in our town had professional careers. There were no scholarships, and, except for a few families, there was little money for higher education. Most of the young people, ex

cept the most stupid and indolent, graduated from high school. Some of the ambitious girls became teachers, in many instances after only a few weeks in a summer

session at a near-by normal school. And they became

good teachers, as they were imitators of their own older

good teachers. The many boys who did not go to col

lege all seem to have expected to participate in some

on-the-spot training, a job corps apprenticeship it would be called today, without either being paid or expecting to be paid for it. In their apprenticeships they learned how to be someone, and how to be good, and, presum

ably, happy at what they were "being," reflecting, for the most part, the basic ingredients of Plato's social

justice, although few would ever have realized that they were enjoying man's right to have that which is right

fully his, as declared so long ago by the philosopher. Nor would they have realized that they were seeking "to identify" themselves and find out "who they really

were." They could jolly well, and proudly, have told

you who they were. And if, perchance, they didn't

know, they didn't blame their parents for not filling them in.

Perhaps we were only wanderers in that state of bliss called happiness, defined by Jonathan Swift as being a

fool among knaves. If it wasn't a great society, there were those who loved it.

Il 1 There aren't any stalactites

Sucking the cave of his universe.

The sun which fed him Shriveled into a cinder.

One dart and then another Wobbles toward yellow, red and blue Circles on cork.

He commits his mind To corridors of white sheets.

2 The jury is safe inside their ark Of polished mahogany.

Bells tell the air About burdens formed in towers.

No one questions the casket As it is covered with rock.

A leaf which happened to drift there Is part of the planet.

3 Each door has a number.

He isn't sleep-dreaming About the locks.

A night attendant checks in.

4 It was some time

(Perhaps here, or years ago) When he couldn't make his lips feel.

The tasting. The hum through fields. The milk which never flowed.

5 On the other wall of the gap Where he sees himself,

Cows are dodging shrapnel Dropped on rice.

There is never the stoic teapot Left on a fire.

ni

16 The North American Review

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