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Karen Tucker

Dr. Stephen McElroy

Teaching English as a Guided Study

July 14, 2015

Baboon

a literacy narrative

"My mouth is a motherlode." Gloria Anzaldua

When my sister and I were little, our mother liked to joke about our father's rural

Southern accent and how it used to be so much stronger. "First time I met your dad, he

was so country I couldn't understand a good half of what he was saying." By the time we

came around, she'd successfully ironed out a lot of the kinks in his speech. I suppose this

was my introduction to the idea of authentic voice, and how it can be flattened until at

last it becomes something else altogether. Years later, I still wonder what strange and

mysterious music used to come out of my father's mouth.

My father was born and raised in a little village called Black Ankle, tucked deep in the

Uwharrie Mountains of North Carolina. My mother grew up in nearby Greensboro, the

third-largest city in the state. As a child, she lived in a sprawling, cream-colored

Victorian house, took private singing lessons, and spent her free afternoons hunched

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among the stacks at the downtown library, reading: a habit that was to become the great

love of her life.

My father's childhood, on the other hand, involved trudging back and forth across

a mountain to an unpainted schoolhouse, after which he would slop pigs and shovel

manure and entertain his older brother with the outlandish tales he invented while trying

to distract himself from hard work and poverty. Already my father was developing his

skills as a storyteller, and though it would be several years before he could join the Army

and head overseas, he was already dreaming up ways to escape the family farm.

Something cried out for change, and he was responding. He was learning to speak out of

need.

The firstborn child of this unlikely couple, I can start to make out the spectral beginnings

of my affinity for language in these faded images. There is almost a fairytale quality to

them, as though I'd found them in a yellowing book I'd plucked down from a shelf. Once

upon a time, a reader married a storyteller and gave birth to a writer. The end.

But experience has taught me to be suspicious of such tidy conclusions. Often

their very neatness betrays an omissionor worse, deception.

Something crucial has been left out.

Another scrap of dialogue from my mother: "My family always thought I came down in

the world when I married your father." Looking back, I think she took a measure of pride

in the fact that she wed for love, that she ignored her family's wishes and defied class

distinctions. She has always been a fierce romantic, as I imagine many book lovers are.

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For example, my mother trusts any fool who asks her for a dollar, and she has

gotten into trouble on more than one occasion for believing a stranger's ridiculous sob

story. She loves nothing more than weeping over a melodrama. She still sends me

Valentines. She also believes in ghosts, and calls me up whenever she gets a "sign" from

someone in our family who has passed away. "He's up there's looking after me," she tells

me, unable to conceal her excitement. Of course, she's a sucker for happy endings. She

says we will all meet again in the Afterlife.

Storytellers, on the other hand, can be some of the most desperately unsentimental

folks out there. As a matter of principle, they refuse to indulge in illusions, and perhaps

this is why so many of them are anxious and ill tempered. Mortality is never far from

their mind. Like Scheherazade, it's as though they've found themselves trapped in some

hopeless kingdom, and if they can just tell their story well enough, they might be able to

save their own neck, at least for the moment. There is an element of escape to their art.

In this way, I take after my father.

My chosen field is literary fiction, a genre where we labor in darkness and uncertainty,

groping our way toward a better understanding of what it is to be human. Sometimes it

feels as though I'm attempting to decipher a puzzle dreamed up by a Lunatic. It's an

impossible code I'm trying to crack. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I've made it

my life's work as a novelist to become fluent not only in oral and written literacies, but

also in a third sort of literacyone I find a bit tricky to define. Flannery O'Connor used

to refer to it as Mystery. A favorite writing teacher of mine, Maud Casey, used to advise

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me to "Linger in the Strange." In her poem "Against Certainty," Jane Hirshfield calls this

third literacy "heart-grammar."

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"There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us.

Each time I think 'this,' it answers 'that.

Answers hard, in the heart-grammar's strictness."

Jane Hirshfield

As a child, I enjoyed a fair amount of privilege. Not financially, no, that was always a

humiliating struggle for my family, but I don't ever recall a time growing up when my

oral or written literacy was called into question. My mother taught me to read at a very

early age, and because I loved it as much as she did, I went on to do well in school. My

point of departure as a student was always as someone who liked learning and books and

stories, and though I suffered from laziness and a somewhat mulish attitude, I never

experienced the stigma of academic failure.

For the most part, my teachers encouraged me and it wasn't long before I came to

believe that I would have a great future. In my senior year of high school, I applied to a

theater conservatory in Chicago (at that time, I felt I was destined to write and perform

plays), and after being accepted with a Pell Grant, I went on to take out a staggering

amount of student loans, said goodbye to my friends and family, and headed north to

establish myself, seized with the notion that I would go on to Great Things!

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In this way, I take after my mother.

So perhaps you can imagine the ugly shock I received when, instead of being

regarded as a promising artist who had just arrived on the scene, I was instead viewed by

my new classmates as a rather dull-witted creature that had nevertheless managed to find

its way out of the zoo.

"Say something," a redhead with giant hoop earrings and a dramatic purple scarf

slung around her neck begged me. "Your accent's hilarious!"

Another voice chimed in, this one belonging to a tall, yellow-haired male with a

tan so perfect it might well have been sprayed on, and featuring the distinct accent I

would later come to recognize as Californianeven though most Californians will

proudly insist that they have no accent at all. "I can hardly understand you," he said,

peering down at me in triumph.

As long as I live, I'll never forget the shame I suffered that morning.

By the end of the fall semester, I'd successfully flattened out my hillbilly speech.

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"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."Joan Didion

After two decades of living far away from my family, I moved back to North Carolina

not so long ago. I still consider myself a Southerner, but I cannot tell you how many

times a stranger has asked me in that dear, familiar accent of my youth: "So now tell me,

where are you from?"

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I am your people, I want to say. Don't you recognize me? I am one of you. But of

course, I'm not one of them anymore, not really.

Sometimes I wonder what strange music used to come out of my mouth.

I dropped out of college after two years, something I've only recently grown comfortable

admitting. Likely I wouldn't even confess it now, had I not been accepted to graduate

school. Financial struggles were a significant part of my reasons for leaving, but my

enduring sense of being an outsider played no small role. I'd learned to disguise my

background with a new accent, yes, but still I felt like an unwanted beast in this glossy

new culture. At the same time, I knew full well that I didn't want to move back to my

hometown. But where should I go? Maybe I really did belong in the zoo.

Instead, I ended up waiting tables and doing theater in Los Angelesa clich that

would make most editors lunge for their favorite red felt tip. Tennessee Williams won my

heart, naturally, though other favorite playwrights included Arthur Miller, William Inge,

and Jean Giraudoux. I also began to develop friendships with fellow lonely beasts I

encounteredscreenwriters, poets, actors, musiciansand it wasn't long before we came

to serve as each other's surrogate family. For the first time since I'd left the South, I

couldn't call myself unhappy.

I was cheerfully working on a cycle of Greek tragedies when one night, I received

an unexpected phone call from my mother. "Your father's gone," she said, in a voice that

sounded terrifyingly distant. It came out that he'd died a few hours earlier in the VA

hospital after complaining the day before of fatigue. The last time I'd seen him, I realized

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with a sickening shock, had been two years prior. All at once, I was a player in my own

private catastrophe.

I flew home to the funeral and found myself plunged back in that sad Southern

landscape. When I returned to California, having completed those awful rituals of burial

and mourning, I discovered that theater, no matter how tragic, no longer did the trick. I

needed a stronger medicine. Within six months of that dreadful phone call, I began to

write my own stories.

Years later, it occurs to me that perhaps my fiction is an attempt to reconnect with the life

I once turned my back on. Though I don't always set my novels in the ghost-riddled

terrain of my childhood, you can generally count on the fact that at some point in the

narrative, a Southern character will take it upon himself to emerge. I've come to believe

that it's my attempt to resurrect that former part of myself, to revive a dead language

not to mention those who have passed on before me. Maybe, in writing at least, an

afterlife really does exist.

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"I understand that this is a course called "How the Writer Writes,"

and that each week you are exposed to a different writer who holds

forth on the subject. The only parallel I can think of to this is having

the zoo come to you, one animal at a time; and I suspect that what

you hear one week from the giraffe is contradicted the next week by

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the baboon." Flannery O'Connor

It appears this is the point in the narrative where the baboon steps forward.

Of all the advice I've been given over the years, the phrase "Linger in the Strange," has

influenced me most profoundly. Not because it contains the key to the kingdom, but

because while it speaks to me in some private and essential manner, I also sense that it

holds a more universal secret, one that might take an entire lifetime of reading and

writing to uncover, if it can be uncovered at all.

As a future teacher myself, I aim to encourage my students to linger in the

strange. To linger in mystery. To consider the questions as deeply as possible, to try to

live in the process, and not focus on product. To exist within this impossible riddle. This

is not so easy, I know.

And yet I believe that it is a worthy endeavor, one worth pursuing. A strange and

elusive music surrounds us, I've come to discover. Having lost music once, I value it

more than ever now. I hope to encourage my students to listen for those sly, cryptic

melodies that thrum in the background, to explore their own voices. I look forward to

hearing them join the chorus.

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Works Cited

1. Anzalda, Gloria. Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera. San Francisco:

Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987. Print. 2. Hirshfield, Jane. "Against Certainty." Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent

Poets. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2012. Print. 3. Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. Print.

4. Mystery and Manners: Flannery O'Connor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

1969. Print.