Restoring the Balance After Violence

by | CounterSpeak, Society/Culture

Restoring the Balance After Violence

This article is drawn from my research on memorials we create in response to violence and sudden death. I wrote it in 1999, but never published it. I initially posted it online after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. that shook the world, in the hope that it would be of some help. But clearly, violence is still a major problem in the U.S. Mass shootings at schools, theaters, churches, concerts; no place is off limits. And inner city violence and police killings of African Americans continue unabated.

These spontaneous memorials, or shrines, spring up out of pain, fear and grief. They’re an outcry. Yet, as a society, we’ve not listened. Now that massive protests are demanding justice and removal of weapons of war from our streets, I’m once again making this research available, in the hope that it will contribute somehow to quelling the violence and healing wounds.

Like all first time visitors to the Oklahoma City bombing site, I didn’t know what to expect. More than three years after the terrorist blast, I stood on the corner of 5th and Robinson looking down the sloping street to the spot where the bomb-loaded rental truck exploded half a block away. Evidence of disaster surrounded me. Boarded up windows, vacant lots, twisted metal and collapsing roofs. Scrawled in black spray paint on the side of the gutted Journal-Record Building was the message “Team 5, 4-19-95, We search for truth, We seek justice. The courts require it. The victims cry for it. And God demands it!” On the next corner, at 5th and Harvey, is a statue of Jesus weeping, his back turned toward the violence.

This section of 5th Street, now closed to vehicle traffic, is what people come to see. The fence protecting the remains of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building has become a shrine, a spontaneous memorial, a place of pilgrimage for people from every state, from many nations, and for families of the victims.

Some people bring mementos to leave on the fence. Others, not expecting to be moved by the scene, are touched by it but are unprepared to contribute. Still, they want to give something of themselves, so they leave whatever is available. Pens, caps, neckties, belts, business cards, sunglasses, jewelry, scarfs, and hair barrettes. These spontaneous gifts are threaded into the wire mesh filled with keychains, license plates, shoulder patches, stuffed animals, baby shoes, pacifiers, bells, candles, rocks, dream catchers, medicine bags, crosses, angels, religious pamphlets, ribbons, dolls, toy trucks, beads, flags, pinwheels, coffee mugs, T-shirts, banners, flowers, poems and notes. Lots of poems and notes.

Cards, wreaths, and photos mark birthdays and anniversaries that passed without the honoree. One poem and photo told the story of Kathy Silovsky, known as “Scout.” She survived the blast when her coworkers did not, then killed herself three years later. The hard hat left by a nurse EMT questions, “‘Why couldn’t I do more. I’m so sorry.” Another poem addresses the curious, ending with the wish that the writer too were one of the curious rather than one who lost loved ones in the bombing.

 

I first saw the site during the summer heat wave of 1998. Whether I was there at 9 a.m., 1 p.m., or 7 p.m., I was never alone. The sidewalks were always filled with curious, solemn, and tearful faces. Child faces, elderly faces, middle aged and young adult faces. White, and brown, and black faces. Male and female faces. They stood in the smothering heat, wiping perspiration, reading the messages and looking at the mementos and photos. They whispered. They gestured. Seldom were voices raised. When a woman shouting to her mother suddenly shattered the silence, it ripped through my body, making me cringe and sealing the reality that on April 19, 1995 at 9:02 a.m., 168 people died where I was standing.

The OKC fence is America’s most elaborate and dramatic spontaneous memorial. And no wonder. Besides killing 168 of us, this mass violence violated many of our most treasured cultural values and expectations. Timothy McVeigh’s and Terry Nichols’ terrorist attack aimed a blow at the heart of our nation, at our democratic process of political and social change. Their attack occurred at a time and place where our culture tells us we will be safe. Their bomb did not explode at some international event in our nation’s capitol where risk is anticipated and security heightened. It happened on a normal Wednesday morning in a small Midwestern city where we should be able to go to work, file for social security, leave our children at a day care center, and not worry about whether we will all return home for dinner in the evening. The victims were people we can identify with in some way. They were employees, parents or children, ordinary people like most of us, people that are not supposed to be at risk for murder. And the perpetrators were not outsiders, not a foreign enemy or Middle Eastern terrorists, as we surmised. They were our own.

In contemporary American culture, death is just not supposed to happen in public, nor while we’re taking care of routine, daily tasks. People who are minding their own business, who are not elderly and not leading a risky lifestyle are not expected to die. And we are supposed to be able to tell the good guys from the bad guys. There’s supposed to be some way that we can identify people who might hurt us and people who won’t, but the killers don’t usually look like monsters. They look like, and often are, our own children, our own parents, our own spouse.

These cultural violations produce uncertainty about the continuance of our society and the extent to which we possess even the most fundamental shared values. They can also produce personal insecurity. When we feel that we are unsafe in our homes and schools, on our jobs, during daylight hours, while we’re engaging in ordinary daily tasks, the questioning and the feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, and grief can be too wrenching for words. We need to act, to do something to overcome the helplessness and counteract the message violence sends, the message that individual lives are not valuable.

Spontaneous memorials give people a way to respond immediately, urgently, to this need. Unlike funerals, which few of us would ever consider attending without having known the deceased or a family member, anyone can participate in these memorial rites. No one is automatically included or excluded. Individuals create a role for themselves and define themselves as mourners by contributing to the shrine in some way. The mementos they decide to leave, if any, and the number of times they visit is self-determined.

At the Oklahoma City bombing site fence, some of the families of the victims leave their mementos right alongside those left by people who never personally knew any of the victims. But this is often NOT the case. In the last decade, we’ve seen these shrines as part of the televised news coverage of school shootings, the BATF-Branch Davidians shootout in Texas, the Polly Klaas abduction and murder from her home in California, and the intentional drowning of the young Smith boys by their mother in South Carolina. Wherever there is high profile violence, usually murder, there are spontaneous memorials. But these memorials also spring up in places the national press never sees. On sidewalks, at storefronts, in parks and parking lots all across the nation. Wherever someone was murdered and a local community felt the loss, there are spontaneous memorials.

***

 

When Americans are murdered, their death takes on a cultural significance that is otherwise absent and the family, to some degree, loses the ability to deal with their loved one’s death in private. Spontaneous memorials, though they may be intended to show support for the family, primarily address the social threats of violence. These memorials can be very painful reminders for the victim’s family. When people began leaving flowers and mementos in the California woods where 12-year-old Polly Klaas’ body was found, her father originally felt it was gruesome, certainly not something to partake in or from which to draw comfort. When private mourning is the way to grieve a loss, and the individual is an ordinary person not generally known to the public, then the public’s sudden interest raises suspicions about motivations.

Spontaneous memorials can draw people whose interests are only tangentially related to the victim’s death or the social issues that death represents. These memorials can attract people who are trying to resolve grief over their own personal losses. Their residual grief makes it easy for them to identify with the losses of others and, since grief is only resolved by repeated opportunities to experience it and thereby diminish its power, those for whom adequate opportunities have been unavailable find an opportunity in spontaneous memorials to foster their own healing.

Spontaneous memorials, so open, unregulated and new, do not have defined norms for expression or behavior nor do we all share the same interpretation of what these shrines represent. Some feelings, like anger and the desire for revenge, are a usual part of grieving but are not ordinarily expressed in traditional funeral rites or memorials. But anger is frequently and openly expressed during social and political protests. At spontaneous memorials it is common to see notes and symbols that express a range of emotions, including anger. People are angry at the police, the killers, the parents of young killers, and laws and social policies that they feel were inadequate safeguards that contributed to the death. With very high profile violence like the OKC bombing, these memorials even attract a few people who consider the forum appropriate for expressing political or religious views, even when they’re unrelated to the tragedy.

***

When violence strikes in the suburbs, in small towns, and in rural America it grabs the media spotlight. It’s rare to hear about inner city violence in the national news. Not because there is none, but because it’s old hat. Mainstream America has come to expect that inner city Americans may die violently. That’s life in the concrete jungle with its gangs and drugs and weapons and its schools that don’t educate. But the effect of violence on inner city Americans is equally devastating and the ritual response just as compelling. Even more so perhaps because of the need to counter America’s neglect and vilification.

In some of our largest cities, inner city memorial walls commemorate the dead, most of whom died too young. Painted on sides of buildings and playground walls near where the victim died, lived or regularly met with friends, these bright, vivid, pulsating murals exude a vitality that shouts the intent to survive. They include images of favorite candies, clothes, or sports, hypodermic needles, crucifixes, handguns, roses, cartoon characters, and portraits and names of people who were intentionally gunned down, those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, those who overdosed, and those who may have been drug dealers, robbers, or killers themselves.

Survivors sometimes write their own names on the walls to show that they visited. In these memorials, the boundaries between the living and the dead, and between perpetrators and victims are blurred, all caught up in the culture of poverty and violence that is so pervasive that even children approach artists about painting memorials for them.

Memorial walls are usually commissioned by family or friends of the deceased but sometimes the neighborhood takes up a collection to memorialize one of their own. Some artists have created memorials to commemorate their family members and remind young people about the dangers of their world. In one, a hip hop dressed grim reaper crouches forward in his unlaced tennis shoes and throws the dice. The inscription warns of the invisible killer, AIDS. In another, below a poem about the danger of crack, a serpent rises from the water and tempts a naked young woman.

The boundaries between the living and the dead, and between perpetrators and victims are blurred, all caught up in the culture of poverty and violence.

These memorials are intended to be permanent and accepted by the community, so artists try to get permission from property owners or the city before they paint. Still, inner city memorial walls don’t last forever. Sometimes the walls are painted over by new owners of the buildings, by city cleanup crews, or by police when the memorials charge police brutality, or they’re destroyed when buildings are torn down. Weather fades and chips the paint. And rival gangs occasionally deface the walls, trying to obliterate even the memory of the deceased. But in general the walls are places protected by the community. They are places where block parties honor and celebrate the deceased’s life, where mourners go to leave birthday cards, light candles or say prayers. They are places for organizations to discuss alternatives to violence, for police to monitor gang activity, and for personal pilgrimages that renew hope.

***

Inner City Memorial Walls

Restoration Keeps Mural’s Message Visible in Inner-City Neighborhood
Baptist Press, August 16, 2001

Photos of inner-city memorial walls

On Walls, Memories of the Slain are Kept
New York Times, 1994

Death at an Early Age and the Urban Scene: The Case for Memorial Murals and Community Healing,
book by Melvin Delgado, 2003

R.I.P.: New York Spraycan Memorials
by Martha Cooper and Joseph Sciorra, 1994

American society is so large, complex and multifaceted and so successful at minimizing our risk of death that most deaths can be adequately handled privately, among family and friends, because they do not affect a larger community or possess broad social ramifications. But for some Americans, a funeral and a marker in a cemetery are not enough to mark a violent death. Even though the victims are private individuals, not public figures, the nature of the death, the feelings it evokes and the meanings it carries, requires that the death be recognized and commemorated in public space, usually at the site of death.

In the U.S., we’re supposed to get over death quickly. But our ability to do that is complicated when death is unexpected, unjust, and public. If a convenience store clerk is murdered, there’s a flurry of official activity and passersby look on. But after the police tape is gone, and the streets are cleaned, there’s no sign of tragedy, no reminders that human life was lost or community damage done. In a matter of hours, the scene can suggest that life there is normal, routine.

But life is not routine for people who knew the victim or those who share a strong sense of vulnerability or outrage surrounding the death. When they see the site, they know that something important happened there that can’t just be swept away, ignored, or treated as if it never existed. For them the site is no longer ordinary. The spilling of human blood, the disruption of community bonds, and the fragility of human life lingers at that spot and it must be acknowledged and soothed before the ground can again be used for ordinary purposes. Returning the ground too quickly to everyday, secular uses, can feel like a sacrilege.

Most of us believe that in death everyone deserves respect, as does death itself. Violence has violated this basic element of the human spirit and that wound must be healed. Returning the site to ordinary use without first marking it, noting its significance, discounts the wound and shows that individuals are insignificant and death is routine. Marking the site lends gravity and weight to the loss and gives a nod to our respect for death, rather than allowing the person and the tragedy to disappear like smoke.

For people who feel the personal and social threats of violence but are not a part of the immediate community, like people who do not live in or around OKC, visiting the site can establish a tangible connection to the tragedy that gives concreteness and realness to an emotional connection. Some people may be sufficiently saddened or outraged after hearing about the death and feel the need to do something about it but have nowhere to go, or nothing to do, yet the feelings remain. In addition, others around them may not share or understand their intense concern.

Going to the site provides a physical anchor for their emotion that validates their feelings while simultaneously allowing them to take some action, even if the action is only to add their voice to opposing an injustice. For others, going to the site is like looking for metaphorical clues, like trying to get inside the incomprehensible, trying to grasp its reality and understand. Still others believe that the soul leaves the body the moment it dies, and since the death happened suddenly, there was no time for last rites, so paying homage at the place of death is crucial to fulfilling religious and social obligations.

These memorials are often fiercely protected by the community. When I visited a spontaneous memorial in Houston, I noticed a neighbor looking out of the window. One man walking along the sidewalk began to slowly stroll and another driving by pulled into the parking lot and sat for a few minutes until I guess he decided I was OK. In OKC, the Memorial Foundation archivist had to be given an official badge because she was repeatedly questioned by people who saw her remove objects from the fence. On the rare occasions when someone defaces an inner city memorial wall, artists quickly restore it, determined not to allow the deceased’s memory to be erased.

These memorials in public space can also cause controversy when they’re placed on disputed property or when they impinge on others’ grief. If some place mementoes on a street corner or county easement, but neighbors are upset because the shrine is in daily view from their windows, how do the differing needs get resolved? What if the shrine, visible from home, is an unwanted reminder of one’s own child’s death? What is the right thing for all involved to do?

For some people, a memorial at the site of a loved one’s death can be unbearable. They feel that by associating the site with their deceased loved one, the accident or murder will dominate their memories, and they don’t want that, don’t want the trauma and tragedy to overshadow their living memories of the person they love. But they may not always feel that way. Grieving is a complex emotional, physical, intellectual, spiritual and social process that everyone does at their own pace and in their own way. The coping strategies we use, the things we see and do to restore hope, balance, and engagement in life are not the same the day after the death as they are in six months or five years. Nor will the activities or objects that help one person heal necessarily help another person in the same way.

Trying to create a memorial that will help the community as a whole to heal but that also respects the fact that individuals grieve differently and at different rates is a delicate act. In OKC, groundbreaking for a permanent memorial to replace the fence is about to begin but some of the victims’ family members don’t want to see the fence go. For more than three years it has been the site where they have mourned their loved ones and received support from people around the world.

Once an object is imbued with sacred or deep human significance, it cannot simply be discarded without people feeling betrayed.

On a now vacant lot across 5th Street from the fence is the Survivor Tree. It lost all of its leaves in the explosion but bloomed the following year. Survivors of the blast gravitate to the Survivor Tree while families of the deceased prefer the fence. On the night Timothy McVeigh was convicted, families and survivors came together in a memorial service at the Survivor Tree and, for awhile, it seemed that the division was bridged. But families soon returned to the fence. So OKC Memorial Foundation officials are considering whether to alter the permanent memorial’s design to include some portion of the fence. (Update Note: Part of the fence is included in the formal memorial. A ceremony was held to transfer the fence from its original location.)

Once an object is imbued with sacred or deep human significance, it cannot simply be discarded without people feeling betrayed. When inner city memorial walls are completed, usually there’s a block party with food, music, and dancing. This celebration honors the deceased, brings people together to affirm life, makes the wall part of the community and invests it with personal and collective meaning. This ritual can be compared to constructing a building to be used as a church. Once the building is consecrated, it takes on extraordinary significance. It is no longer just any building; it is a special, sacred building that deserves reverence and respect. If for some reason the building will no longer be used as a church, it must be de-consecrated. Spontaneous and roadside memorials and inner city memorial walls possess all of the shades of meaning and emotion that their contributors have placed on them. Dismantling them or disposing of the objects may require a final ceremonial gesture that validates their destruction.

For most of us, these memorials are not neutral objects in our landscape. They affect us to one degree or another. They stimulate reverence, disgust, sorrow, regret, sympathy, anxiety, curiosity, empathy, and fear. Numerous enough to notice, they’re still infrequent enough to startle. That momentary twinge they cause, that brief recognition of death in our daily life, intrudes on our ability to keep death at bay, to keep it private and controlled. The world refuses to stop for the death of a taxi driver, or a teacher, or a student, or for any of us. But an inner city memorial wall or a sidewalk covered with flowers, flags, candles and notes forces us to notice, makes us pause, if only for an instant.

 

For more information, see our groundbreaking article
Spontaneous Memorialization: Violent Death and Emerging Mourning Ritual in Omega: Journal of Death & Dying, October 1997.

Tree Friends

by | Personal, Reflections & Stories

Tree Friends

When I was about 7 or 8 years old, occasionally my dad would decide it was time to cut down a pear tree that had grown up in the fence row. “It’s messing up the fence and producing spotty fruit,” he’d say. “I’m gonna cut ‘er down.”

Then I’d throw a fit, arguing that you can’t just cut down a perfectly good tree because of where it lives. It didn’t bother me that it didn’t produce edible fruit, or any fruit at all. And the fence didn’t appear to me to be suffering. Besides, you can always move a fence.

Ultimately my dad relented and the tree was safe until the next time it annoyed him.

Eventually we moved away and most of the farm was sold, turned into a subdivision with streets, houses and no fences. But at times I wondered about that fruit tree.

As an adult, my affinity for plants is the way others feel about their pets. I can’t say I have the greenest of thumbs, but I feel a protectiveness and companionship. My living space isn’t complete without plants. When we move, I rent a vehicle specifically to move my plants. Even though I don’t have that many of them, I want them to be comfortable and to survive.

So it was out of character, in preparing for a cross-country move, when I thought about leaving a plant behind. It had lost all but one of its leaves and was nothing more than twigs on a quarter-round trunk-like stalk. “I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t throw it away and no one would want it,” I told my partner. “If it’s still bare when we leave, maybe I’ll just set it in the vacant lot beside our house. Then it’s on its own.”

Within a week, buds popped up on its twigs. By the time we were ready to go, it had sprouted three leaves, all on the same side of its trunk. “I guess it wants to go with us,” I said, amazed at its effort to show it was alive.

A few months ago I visited my hometown after decades away. Driving by the farmhouse I was born in, on the edge of the subdivision that used to be our farm, I thought about the fruit tree I’d fought to save as a kid. Then I noticed, about where I remembered it should be, an old tree and a single fence post. Surely not, I thought.

I turned into the drive, got out of my car, walked to the tree and felt an elated sense of anticipation and discovery. I looked under it, around it, touched its crispy, tattered leaves. Took one and examined its lightly serrated edges. It’s an old tree, for sure. Split and speckled. And an old fencepost, pocked and shredded. Could it really be?

Returning home, I checked the web. Pear trees in the wild can live more than 50 years. That meant, it could be my childhood tree! I was ecstatic. The tree I’d defended was still alive, anchored in land I once loved.

But then, as I so often do, I questioned. Is it even a pear tree? I’m not sure how to tell. Maybe it’s a different tree planted later in the same spot, I reasoned. But why would someone plant a new tree in a fence row? And if that was the case, why leave the fence post but take away the fence?

I couldn’t just let the questions go unanswered, so I shared the tree’s picture with the Missouri Native Plant Society to find out what kind of tree it is. Probably a plum tree, they think. Well, what to make of that? Maybe I’m misremembering the fruit. According to my research, it’s uncommon, but some plum trees are known to live 30 years in the wild. That timespan, though, wouldn’t be long enough to make it my tree.

So I don’t know if it’s my tree. But does a “yes it is” or “no it’s not” really matter? Facts are important. But sometimes they’re not the takeaway from an experience. When our house plant quickly sprouted leaves, I simply accepted my immediate sense that it wanted to go with us. I didn’t second-guess my interpretation. Nor did I struggle to explain its sudden growth spurt. Through multiple moves, I’ve watched, with pleasure, its continued leafing. It now sits on our porch, content and full. My immediate sense of the old plum-pear tree felt like embracing a long lost friend, one I’d helped to survive. Perhaps that’s the takeaway. Whether my tree lived only 5 more years and was replaced, or lived 50 more and still exists, it was a visceral reminder that, like friends, plants and people can connect, the life force of each enlivening the other.

Today, as I’ve been worrying about the facts, my brother sent a photo. That old tree is blooming, and it’s a cherry tree. Black cherry trees can live up to 250 years.

Simple Things

by | Personal, Reflections & Stories

Simple Things

An odd thing happened the morning we all learned, what for many of us was, the unthinkable results of our presidential election. Interspersed with the anger, fear, and emotional chaos of a world that suddenly seems on the precipice of catastrophe, sparks, like fire flies on a Midwest summer night, appeared unexpected—blinking and disappearing, yet soothing and sublime.

During these few weeks…

  • In my tiny town, on the edge of San Francisco Bay, the shortest Main Street in America turns into Ark Row, named because its buildings were once houseboats. Draped by massive trees that raise the sidewalk and bend around buildings, the narrow street curves, offering little space for cars. A woman stepped off the curb to get into her parked car, then noticed on the windshield a pie pan sized leaf, blazing green and unblemished. She picked it up, glancing down, then up, furtively, just as I walked by. I smiled, she returned the smile. I said “a gift for you.”  I was thinking about taking it home, she said. And she did.

 

  • Sitting with my morning coffee, facing the living room window, the sun streaming in backlit the steam rising from my coffee cup—a swirling white ring spinning along its rim, volcano-like as it rose and dispersed, twisting wisps, a lazy cyclone, billowing, tapering, fading away.

 

  • On December 21st, we listened to Windham Hill’s Winter Solstice Concert, acoustic guitar, piano, cello. At moments, I melted into the music, enfolded in beauty free of words, relaxed into a sense of being without edges, on the longest night of the year—the dividing line, when light will begin again.

 

  • It’s migration season and the air is so filled with birds that part of the bay is off limits to give them safe harbor. At times, hundreds fly so low, they seem to be skittering—running on water. Seals and sea lions break the surface, from a distance–the head of a dog, back undulating like an eel. I watch in reverie when suddenly, a porpoise bursts straight up, fully out of the water, arches and dives beneath the waves. My body tingles with delight. Then anticipation, of another leap.

 

  • The softness of my wife’s hand, silky, warm down; and my own, coarser—pressing the skin between my index finger and thumb. It doesn’t spring back immediately, like it used to—but it feels right.

 

Such simple things. They feed us, and bring light to the darkness. They’re there all the time, but at least for me, they stand out most clearly against the night.

Out of Class

by | CounterSpeak, Personal

Out of Class

I work at a community college, but rarely interact with students. I count them, analyze their enrollment patterns, their graduation rates and grade point averages. I keep track of the types of degrees awarded, the demographic composition of the student body, and the classes students complete so administrators can make decisions about running the college.

What I do is called institutional research. So when I answered my phone one day, the student voice surprised me. Her words sent me back decades.

“I need financial aid to go to college but my mom won’t sign the papers,” she said. “I’m 18, what can I do?”

I know that story. I never expected to hear it from anyone else though. I thought I was the only person in the U.S. whose parents refused to help their children go to college. With all the politicking and pushing today for everyone to go to college, and the cultural belief in family support and pride in each other’s success, it’s easy to feel like an alien when you have to go it alone.

It must be your own fault, too. Presidents Clinton to Bush to Obama, through one plan or another, have intended to make college accessible to every kid who graduates from high school. So hey, all you got to do is make it through 12 years. Then, the world is your oyster as you head off to college and take your rightful place in making each generation more successful than the last. In recent years, we’ve recognized that foster kids might need extra help, but otherwise, of course we’ve all got parents who push us, prod us, and support us on to that great equalizer, college.

Every scholarly study on the benefits of higher education relates college degrees to earning power. Without a college degree, you make very little money, say the studies. Without a college degree, you can’t hope to reap the fruits of America’s orchard. Go to college. Get a degree. Maybe even two. Without it, you’re zero. You’ll amount to nothing in America. You’ll be broke and miserable and wind up on the street sleeping under cardboard. Begging for scraps from the educated. Who, by the way, will step over you on their way to a seaside restaurant. It’s your own damn fault, they’ll say. Should have gone to college.

And whether your culture values higher education or not, mainstream culture does, and that’s what counts.

For me though, money wasn’t the motivator. Every study of employee motivation tells us that, yes, money is appreciated, we can always use more of it, but money alone won’t make us happy with our job, won’t make us want to improve the widget-making process or streamline the paperwork. The paycheck boost looks good, for a couple of months, but then we start wondering how long it’ll take to get the next one.

Money isn’t enough of a motivator to get through 12 years of working toward a four-year degree. That’s how long it took me, working a full-time job and supporting myself, to earn a Bachelor’s degree. College for me was about learning, about understanding the world around me, and before me. It was about how the world might be different in the future than it is today. It was about how I might change the world. Before I started the first grade, I was a reader. Every week, my mom gave me carte blanche at our small town’s public library. Into the big kid’s section I’d go. No baby books for me. And when, in the third grade, I found the adult section, the librarian had a heart to heart with my mother. My mother won. So did I.

My parents were blue collar small business people in the rural Mid-West. College wasn’t necessary to make a good living then. You just needed to work hard.

To my dad, that meant physical labor. Thinking was NOT work. Writing, drawing, playing music, that was NOT work. If you didn’t sweat. If your muscles didn’t bulge and pop and occasionally get bruised, then you weren’t working. You were lazy, loafing, living off the labor of others.

Even so, as long as my mom was around, I assumed I’d go to college. My teachers encouraged it. I should be a teacher, or a nurse, they said. Ugh, I thought. A scientist maybe. An artist maybe. Or an explorer. I had a couple of distant cousins, my parents’ age, who had college degrees, so college wasn’t completely unheard of. Even though these cousins lived in big cities, far away from us, and we never saw them. One of them was crazy, my dad said. College made him that way. The other one, who’d grown up in the city, had no common sense. He thought he could live on the land. Grow his own food. Build his own house powered by the sun. Provide for himself. College made him stupid, my dad said.

When my mom left us, my parents divorced, and it was the end of my college dreams. My dad had the money. He had custody of my brother, sister and me. And he hated college. Besides making people crazy and stupid, it turned them into smart alecky, know-it-alls. At 13, I was that already.

The next several years were a rough ride for all of us. Living on my own at 17 and working the graveyard shift in a nursing home, I finished high school.

I was a writer. Interested in journalism, my work was the backbone of our high school newspaper and literary magazine, and the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism was considering offering me a scholarship, as were local businesses and organizations. “Take my name off the scholarship list,” I told our high school counselor. I couldn’t see it working. Four years was eternity. And the idea of moving into a tiny dorm room with 18-year-old women who were just out of high school and living away from home for the first time, whose concerns would be different than mine, seemed unbearably isolating.

Before the summer was over, I realized my mistake. I couldn’t live without going to college. But how?

Off I went to the financial aid office at the local university asking the same question the young woman asked me on the phone. The financial aid officers needed my dad’s income information and signature. I knew he wouldn’t give it, but I asked. He didn’t. There was little the university could do. The minuscule scholarships still available weren’t even enough to pay for books. I had to work for another year then file an income tax return to prove financial independence, so I could get loans.

By that time, my old Chevy died, so I had to borrow a few hundred dollars to buy another used car. At minimum wage, paychecks didn’t always cover the rent, and I fell behind. I was living on 19 cent boxes of macaroni and cheese from the thrift store. Debts were accumulating from everywhere. It was gonna be a long haul.

*****

I mentioned the student’s phone call to our Dean of Student Development Services. “I hear that a lot from our students,” she said. “Some parents think their job’s done when their kid turns 18. They’re on their own. They don’t seem to care if their child does better than they did.”

Some parents don’t want their children to do better. That’s a fact that our cultural myths and rhetoric about family hides.

A professor, whose son entered his father’s field and was beginning to win awards and garner attention, told me that he was proud but jealous. He wanted his son to do well, but not surpass his own achievements. In the case of a working class family, sending a child to college may, as it did for my dad, counter their own values. A college education is not considered “better.” For other working class parents, there’s the fear of losing their children if they send them to college. What will they learn? Who will they be when they finish their degree? Will they still be part of the family? Will they want to come home? Working class culture, is not educated professional culture.

*****

For working class people, colleges are remote, even when they live nearby. So the first semester I went to enroll at the university, my younger sister went with me. She didn’t know any more about what we were doing than I did, but she was at least a familiar face, in an otherwise foreign environment. Besides, if she decided to go to college in a few years, she’d have a bit of experience to make it less daunting. We met my advisor in a big hall where other students were doing the same thing at tables scattered around the room. My sister and I sat down across the card table from her but she told my sister to go sit in a row of chairs by the wall until we were finished. I wonder if she would have shooed away a parent who was accompanying their child.

The advisor then tried to convince me to register for basic English, Math and Science courses. I had other plans. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get through college in four years, so I wanted to take courses that interested me and that might help me earn more than minimum wage before I finished college. She didn’t get it. There were specified courses for freshmen, she explained. There were course sequences. There were prerequisites. I insisted. She insisted. After multiple volleys, I ended up taking an English course and a History course, to satisfy the university, and Journalism courses, to satisfy me.

I don’t know how much this experience affected my sister’s view of higher education. We never commented on it, working class people don’t mention humiliations. She never finished high school. Neither did my brother, whose artistic talents shine even without nurturing. He uses them in building. Construction or carpentry, now that’s something a working class man does. He doesn’t draw or paint on a canvas. Reading and writing books, that’s not what a working class woman does. She gets married, has babies, works on the farm, in a factory or as a waitress, hairdresser or clerk in a retail store or fast food restaurant. She doesn’t travel around the world, go to museums and film festivals, or live independently in the city.

*****

I didn’t notice the social class differences much while working on my undergraduate degree. I hit the campus for class, then left for my full-time job, so I didn’t know other students or professors. Whatever happened on campus, short of its closing down, was irrelevant to me.

In graduate school, however, three years after I finished my bachelor’s degree, social class distinctions were obvious, even pointed at times.

Attending full-time on an assistantship, I spent every day with my peers and professors. In this program, there was a not-so-subtle distinction between students who were doctoral material and those who intended to end their education with a Masters. As a student deemed doctoral worthy, I was expected to attend professional conferences and present my work. The problem was, I was actually trying to live off of my assistantship, with no supplemental money flowing in from home. Pointing out my lack of funds made some of my friends and professors uncomfortable. How could I be there, looking like them, doing credible scholarly work, yet not have the same financial resources and family support. They weren’t privileged, after all. Just middle class. Must be that I was scared, or resisting. I just didn’t want to do the things that would bolster my career. When I declined acceptance into a Ph.D. program, one professor told me, dismissively, that I could do it if it was important enough to me. I just wasn’t willing to sacrifice.

*****

That summer, I went to my dad’s house for dinner. It was the first time we’d seen each other in 20 years. His stepson, who I remember at about age 9 chopping up the plants in my room, and generally being annoying, immediately told a story about spinning his truck’s wheels to fling gravel onto the fancy car of some “city slickers” who were driving on a country road.

What do you say to each other after 20 years’ and two college degrees worth of separation?

Relying on the presence of food and neighbors, my dad was clearly hoping for a smooth visit. The questions were superficial, intended to be non-confrontational, but even these bland queries couldn’t avoid the class differences. “What kind of car do you drive,” he asked. When I told him a Honda, his wife laughed and hit me on the shoulder. “So aren’t you gonna talk about people who drive those foreign cars, the way you usually do?” “Nah,” my dad said, trying to get along, “that’s the kind of car professors drive.”

None of my first cousins or aunts and uncles went to college, and sometimes, in each other’s company, it’s as if they don’t know who they’re talking to. I’m a stranger that they’re supposed to know, but aren’t quite sure they do. Sometimes I’m not sure myself, about how much I’ve really changed. I’m not a professor. I told my dad before, in explaining my job, that I don’t teach. But educated people are foreign, unknown entities. There are few books in my dad’s house, and that’s what educated people do, don’t they? Write books.

Their world feels foreign to me too, but in some ways it always did. Which was part of why I knew I had to go to college. Sometimes it’s difficult to separate the class distinctions from the jagged edges my family’s divorce and disruption caused. My brother and I talk, tentatively, cautiously. But eventually there’s a place where our souls connect, a place where we know and remember each other. It’s a place where life is what it is, regardless of class and distance and pain. I tell him about the trip I’m taking to Europe in the fall. He tells me, standing on the front porch of his cabin he built himself from scrap wood, that he’ll never have the money to travel, but he’d like to. I’ll never have the money to buy a house, I say. I got started too late. We’d both like to do it all. But we have to choose.

That year, finally, I paid off my student loans. But another young woman was just starting the trek.