Assembly Line link to story

For those who read Amir's essay on Traven's story,http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/02/assembly-line-logic-amir-hussain.html
here is a link to the story itself it you would like to read it.  http://libcom.org/library/assembly-line-b-traven

Falling Down

by Lucy S.

In his classic 1989 book Lives On the Boundary, Mike Rose, a professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education, describes this experience in a Bay Area literacy program he visits:

Sitting in the classroom with Ruby, Alice, and the rest, you think, at times, that you're at a revival meeting. There is so much testifying. Everybody talks and writes about dreams and goals and “doing better for myself.” This is powerful, edifying — but something about it, its insistence perhaps, is a little bit discordant. The exuberance becomes jittery, an almost counter-phobic boosting and supporting. It is no surprise, then, that it alternates with despair. In their hearts, Ruby and her classmates know how tenuous this is, how many times they've failed before. Somebody says something about falling down. Sally says, “I've felt that too. Not falling down on my legs or knees, but falling down within me.” No wonder they sermonize and embrace. It's not just a few bucks more a week that's at stake; literacy, here, is intimately connected with respect, with a sense that they are not beaten, the mastery of print revealing the deepest impulse to survive.

These are people in a community education program to improve basic reading and writing abilities. I can only imagine how hard they have to struggle to not succumb to that sense of sinking defeat, because I still struggle with it, and I am now in my last semester of a master’s program. It is hard to predict what may set it off. It happened to me just now when I emailed some feedback to another graduate student who gave a presentation in our class last week. I had somehow lost the paper telling us how to give feedback on the presentation, so I figured I would just do the best I could, going by the guidelines for the presentations themselves. Mostly, I just wanted to give him some information that might be useful for his specific paper which would be coming out of this presentation. It’s a small class and he’s a very easy-going, funny guy, so I wasn’t worried. Then my professor asked if I could send him a copy, and I thought, “Oh, no….” I was embarrassed to have to send it to him. And I began worrying that I had not assessed enough, had not provided any critical feedback which would tell the student how he might improve. But I hate assessing in that way. Or at least, I hate doing it without much of a relationship with the person. I so much prefer to just talk about their ideas and bring up some related ideas. 

These thoughts took me back to my own presentation of the week before this student’s. I felt like I had really regressed. I had done presentations that were at least better than this last one, but for whatever reason, this one really threw me. I couldn’t understand how to do what he wanted us to do. I kept having anxiety attacks over it, crying, wanting to just tell him I wouldn’t stay in the class after all…  This was such an unreasonable response, and I had wanted so badly to be in that class. In the end, I wrote what I would say, because I figured I could write better than I could do anything else at that point. And then I read it. It was not very good. I think that some of the historical context I brought in was too peripheral. On the other hand, I was profoundly relieved to just have gotten through it without giving up. My deep interest in the content of our readings and discussions that night overrode my focus on my own inadequacy – such a welcome tonic to those feelings of shame and anguish.

But all of these thoughts and experiences can spiral quickly at times into the deeper collapses inside. It is a short step for me from thinking that my feedback was inadequate and my presentation still poor even in my last semester of a master’s program to thinking that I am still just not good enough and thus not suited for this. These activities are what teachers and scholars do, after all. They give talks. They teach in front of groups. They provide critical feedback, and yes, they must assess. Like it or not, they must even grade. How could I grade? I hate grades. And I think about how it was during my first semester back to finally finish my B.A., doing a directed study (independent study) with the professor about whom I wrote the previous essay that I said that my fear has always been that I am “smart, but not smart enough.”  What I meant was that I often think that I am smart enough to love these studies, to feel drawn to keep trying, and to want so badly to just able to be accepted and to be a part of these ‘conversations,’ and yet that I am not smart enough to pull it off beyond a certain level.

Sometimes I do not know who to turn to when I feel this way. Or rather, there are many who I can turn to in a general sense for mutual care, and that helps tremendously, but in terms of these specific efforts, I think people often do not know how to respond. Some people assure me that I’m so smart, that of course I can do it, that I always say these kinds of things and yet I always make it.  Sometimes this helps. It depends on how far down I am.  And I can especially understand this when it comes from people for whom a B.A. sounds like an almost impossible personal accomplishment, because that is how I too felt for a large part of my life. It was only a few years ago that I graduated with a B.A. after so long. I well remember the years when I felt that people with B.A.s had some special inside knowledge. And so to those with little or no college, my fears may seem groundless.

My oldest son’s father was the only boyfriend I ever had who went to college, and when I was about five months pregnant, I remember getting a short letter from him saying that he supposed that after a long time, his “feelings of animosity might dissipate.” (This was in response to me writing to say that maybe after a while, he wouldn’t hate me or at least the baby and maybe they could have some kind of relationship, which was in response to his previous statements about how the idea of having kids repelled him and how he would hate me and the baby. We had broken up shortly before I found out I was pregnant… but that is enough of this diversion…) The point is that I remember in those emotional letter-reading moments having to look up “dissipate,” and feeling this profound sense of inferiority. And I read all the time, even then!  But somehow, I had missed “dissipate.”  

I think that many of us have these formative painful personal histories carved into our psyches, or maybe laid on, layer after layer after layer – yes, I think that may be a better metaphor – and so when we lay new layers of knowledge, accomplishment, acceptance, and affection over the thick mass of inadequacy and pain, those new layers can be pretty thin compared to the acidic mucky layers underneath. For those of us who have had many negative experiences and whose positions remain precarious (emotionally, intellectually, materially), we find ourselves falling and crashing through into despair too easily.

Another possible response is impatience and perhaps annoyance. Understandably, people may think that we all have our difficulties and that there are greater tragedies than someone’s graduate school insecurities. Or they may find it difficult to empathize if they do not have these same difficulties.

My father, although he did not graduate from high school, is in many ways a better thinker than I am (and he knows history far better than I do), but he feels deeply insecure about doing anything even mildly mechanical (or carpentry-related) and about his handwriting. It does not matter how many times I or anyone else has told him that it doesn’t matter, that he should value his intellectual and speaking abilities (yes, he is also a much better speaker than me). He jokes that it all began with Mrs. James, the 2^nd grade teacher who used to grab his hair and hit his head against his desk or the chalkboard because he couldn’t write adequately, saying to him, “You ugly, ugly boy!”  But this really happened. His twin brother and his lifelong friend were in the same class and tell similar stories. My grandfather used to tell my dad and my uncle they were useless when it came to anything mechanical. Again, my dad has relayed in somewhat lighthearted ways that his father used to take the neighbor kid fishing and leave them at home because he thought they were too stupid. (And sometimes bitterness and pain slips in when he says something about this.) My dad is very good at making his past and sometimes present anxieties and miseries funny (and so am I at times – though not as good at it as he is), but when he says that we have no idea how many negative experiences he has had, and that it’s a miracle he’s functional, I realize more and more that he has needed many layers of kindness, acceptance, and a sense of competency to accumulate in order to not fall into deep depression.

What I am saying is that I believe it is mostly a misreading to believe that people who talk about struggles with deep insecurities and related existential pain should just ‘get over it,’ or that they are in some sense just feeling sorry for themselves and wanting others to do the same. People who have been put down and shamed for a large part of their lives do not need to experience yet more shaming and rejection in order to ‘buck up.’ They need kindness, warmth, acceptance, and perhaps some step-by-step specific guidance on how to get better at what they struggle with.

Another danger in talking to people about these things is that we make ourselves more vulnerable by doing so. There is the very real possibility that people may respond by conveying in some way, “Wow, yeah, you really are inadequate.”  Some people are just downright mean, and will kick you when you're down. Others don't mean to be hurtful, but still this message may come through. Not that they would use those words, but if they do not relate to my particular weaknesses, their facial expressions, tone, and verbal responses may say that this seems strange or irritating or stupid to them. Furthermore, in highly competitive places like academia, in which education and other experiences related to it (such as working as a class assistant or tutor) are always made into artificially scarce resources, there can be the danger that admitting to any deficiencies may result in others deciding that they agree: sadly, you ARE incompetent. Any or all of these responses from others in turn may deposit further layers of negative experiences, or may at least make us less likely to trust and be open again.

What makes me angry about this at times is the way that some forms of competency and wisdom are so clearly valued over others. Sometimes I think, I would really like to see some of these people having to take care of a baby – or how about two or three and some toddlers, too – as I did for years – and having to get other things done at the same time, like major work on houses that weren’t livable, or long distance moves, or so many day to day needs.  I have stuck up for people who were being put down just because they weren’t used to babies and didn’t know how to handle them well (this especially still happens to women in some circles because of gendered expectations). But what I see so often is that the abilities we have – those of us who have cared for babies and young kids for years as our work in the world – are devalued. Sometimes we are even looked down on for having done this work. When I encounter people trying to figure out how to care for a baby or interact with a kid, I try to show them (and maybe explain some approaches) without putting them down. (The ways in which caregivers are perceived and treated is another topic which I am writing about.)

What I am getting at in my case is that I have not been giving presentations for years. I have been doing other work, some of which has included caring for my kids and those of others. (And I have been working on homes – mine and those of others – and growing food, and counseling friends, and doing a lot of unpaid or low-paid work). I think that at least some of what I learned actually helps me in these academic studies and might make me a good teacher (if I ever get to teach in a college). If I am not very good at presentations now, it does not mean that I will never be good at them. But we give one presentation in a semester per class. I have read that a person has to do something eleven times to make it a new habit (and this would be over a relatively short period of time). I think what I really need is for someone to slowly teach how to do a presentation, and then to have us actually practice it somehow right there as we are being taught, so that the whole thing could become demystified and have the tension drained out of it. If I ever get to teach, I want to do that for students.

But of course, this itself is a defense I am constructing in my mind against my own criticism and possibly that of others. No one has threatened that I may have to leave the program. I have had a great deal of support. I have done things in these past few years that I did not believe were possible five years ago.

All of this makes me wonder about times when I too may have responded without enough sensitivity and kindness to someone else’s insecurities, difficulties adjusting, or other kinds of hardships and pain. I wonder, when I am around people and I start falling down within myself, what do I look or sound like? Do I look or sound pretty much the same to others? Do I just seem unfriendly or spaced out or self-obsessed?  And what does someone else look or sound or write like when they’re falling down inside that way?  

In that recent presentation of mine, I shared that theorist Frederic Jameson has characterized our contemporary age (postmodernism) as “an information society producing social relations with cordiality but without depth” (Richter 1927). I keep thinking about that phrase: cordiality without depth. This describes so much of U.S. society. I want to resist this, to help create less surface cordiality and instead relationships of far more depth.  But how do we do this? I want to know how to do better, both at handling my own collapses within and at responding to others who are falling down inside – responding with kindness and a willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt, even when I don’t know whether they are falling down.

I find myself wishing we could do some sermonizing and embracing like Ruby and Alice and Sally and the others in the Northern California literacy class did. Mike Rose says that the exuberance seems jittery at times, that it is “an almost counter-phobic boosting and supporting." But the strength of the encouragement and mutual care has to be commensurate with the levels of despair always threatening to bury them.  And I wonder: what happened to those who attained greater levels of literacy and continued their education? Did they have to learn to make do with a lot less of what they created in their literacy class? And if so, why? Why can’t we keep pulling each other back up? Why not cheer each other on? 

I am not sure if it is wrong to compare the struggles in graduate school to the struggles of people in a literacy class.  But it seems to me that maybe we have more to gain from finding commonalities than from insisting that we cannot begin to understand each other's different struggles. And so many of us are in economically precarious circumstances with little hope in sight, despite our efforts. Education is certainly for far more than economic uplift, but in a capitalist society in which it is frighteningly easy for many of us to fall down completely and not only internally, it is hard not to become discouraged that as hard as we try and labor, we cannot count on a basic level of well-being. For all of these reasons, we need to forge solidarity and an ethic of deep care as we hold onto each other and demand better from ourselves and our society.

I do have people who pull me up and cheer me on and give me hope and faith in so many ways. I am fortunate and so deeply thankful – and still, I start to fall down. What about those without anyone to care about the efforts they make in their lives – their labors, their creations, their hopes, and their collapses?   

Works Cited

Richter, David. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2007.

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared. New York: Penguin, 1989. 

Defining Morality

by Lucy S.

This essay was part of my honor’s thesis. I wrote it in fall 2010.  The person about whom I wrote it epitomizes for me what it is to give one’s utmost in care-labor – as a teacher, a learner, a writer, an advocate, and a real friend.

A week into the fall 2009 semester, I emailed a professor I had never met to ask if he would consider overseeing my directed studies, to start immediately.  My son, Justin, newly in his class, said that Dan’s lectures had fully lived up to the rave reviews he'd heard from others.  He told me about Dan's wider conceptions regarding what constitutes literature, which caught my interest.  Already swamped, Dan warned me that he probably could not, but invited me to at least come and talk with him. 

I did, and he took on yet more work – work for which he was not paid and had every justification to turn down.  Though he never said so, this cut further into his own time to write and publish – a necessity for obtaining a tenure-track position, which he did not have.  Dan met with me, often weekly, for an hour or more.  He met with many other students, also.  He listened to our stories, suggested projects, recommended books, with the same kind of passion which drove his lectures. Frequently, a line of people waited in the hall to talk with him.  Before and after office hours, and on days he didn't even have office hours, Dan talked with us. 

When I used the words 'moral' and 'morality' in academic writing, he circled them, asking me to define them. “What does he mean, define them?” I sometimes ranted to anyone listening in my home.  “Don't the words have accepted meanings?  English professors are so obsessed with words!” 

Although he finds the words sometimes problematic, when Dan teaches Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in American Literature, he calls a point in the story “the moral center of the novel” and “the moral center of American literature.”  When he taught Huck Finn to our class, he told us that he loved the novel and expressed how much it meant to him.  On the day he lectured about this point in the story, he warned us that he's very emotional about it, that at times he has even started to cry when speaking about it to classes. 

I will try to respond now with a definition by working through that “moral center.”  The novel, our teacher's response to it, and his relationship with us are all bound to my conception of morality and a moral education.

In these moments of the story, Huck must choose and act upon his own definition of moral.  Like all corrupt societies, his has appropriated the vocabulary for goodness.  The dominant definitions conveniently benefit those in positions to insist upon their moral scripts. Their norms, rules, and laws enable those who make and uphold those codes to exploit and own human beings.  Justifying this requires a conception of the exploited and owned as 'less than' and 'other.'  Huck's relationship with Jim exposes the lie of this 'inferiority' and the lack of any just foundation for slavery.  Unexposed to abolitionist rhetoric, forced to face these ethical chasms on his own, Huck must feel his way to his morality.  

Finding tbat the king has sold Jim, Huck is bitterly angry and hurt that after all he and Jim “done for them scoundrels … they could have the heart to … make [Jim] a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.”  Though he doesn't realize it, Huck's own moral code is already in force when he links their hearts with their actions in the common expression, “have the heart to...”  Selling Jim 'cheap' emphasizes their hardheartedness.   The king and duke are “scoundrels” because their journeys with others leave them unmoved and unattached.

In contrast, Huck binds to and empathizes with Jim because of their journey together.  Horrified that Jim will be a slave among people with whom he doesn’t even have a relationship, Huck thinks to get word to Jim's former owner to reclaim him, but dismisses the idea, afraid she'll be angry at Jim for running away, and still sell him. Or if not, she'd  take it out on Jim because “everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger.” On one level, Huck swallows his society's logic: a black slave taking his freedom is by definition ungrateful, and to be ungrateful means people “naturally despise” him. But without calling it wrong, Huck bypasses the logic to align himself with Jim: “they'd make Jim feel it all the time, and so he'd feel ornery and disgraced.”  He accepts their code of norms as he would a force of nature, but Huck's feelings remain with Jim's.

The empathy and action arising from that bond clash with his society's code as a determiner of moral action for Huck.  Imagining his humiliation when people back home find out he helped Jim, Huck then feels guilty because he is in that moment thinking of himself instead of Jim in making this decision. 

But because guilt is so enmeshed with his society's moral code, the guilt itself loops him back to that code. Mulling over how white society would see what he's done, Huck starts to accept their evaluation of it as “low-down.” The just “consequences,” it follows, are that he deserves to be found out.  But the emphasis is on the dominant society's assessment of  him rather than his affinity with them.  If someone from home knew he'd “helped a nigger to get his freedom,”says Huck, he'd “be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame.”  The more he dwells on this, “the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling.” 

What he calls his “conscience,” however, is his society's morality. When he starts to internalize their morals, he feels guilt, shame, a grinding on himself, wicked, low-down. But that never means empathizing with them the way he does with Jim.  Huck's emotional response mirrors the nature of the hierarchical code; he doesn't imagine how it feels to be one of those people; he only knows how they make him feel.  Connecting his guilt to the religious doctrines he's been taught, Huck says, “my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman's nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm.” But even here, he is not actually empathizing with this “poor old woman;” he is lecturing himself, calling himself 'wicked,' in the words and tone he knows his society would use on him.

The 'God' watching him is a supernatural magnification of his society's values, terrifying Huck.  He thinks, had he gone to Sunday school, he'd have learned “that people that acts as I'd been acting about the nigger goes to everlasting fire.”  Huck has not objectified and dehumanized Jim as “the nigger” and “a poor old woman's nigger” since they began their journey down river.  But in Huck's head, white society is now inserting itself between him and Jim.  And the salvation that society's morality points to, like its condemnation, centers on the individual.  If Huck continues in relationship with Jim, its code says he will burn forever.  The major elements of his society's morality are conformity, fear, and a selfish focus on individual reward.  Others become objects who either augment or reduce one's own attainment of salvation. Their values are at odds with relationship, empathy, solidarity, and caretaking. 

In his guilt and terror, Huck decides to pray.  He kneels down, but can produce no words.  And then he knows why.

It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him.  Nor from me, neither … my heart warn't right … I  warn't square … I was playing double.  I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all.  I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me, I knowed it was a lie – and He knowed it.  You can't pray a lie – I found that out.

 Who is “Him” and who is “me” from whom Huck can't hide his duplicity?  All along Huck has lied to people in his society when he had to, for his own sake or for Jim's.  But this 'Him' cannot be fooled.  This 'God' is the omniscient manifestation of Huck's society, a society in which the “biggest sin of all” is to love another person more than that society's non-relational code of 'right,' founded upon the lie of the 'inferiority' of some – to love that person enough to break the rules for the good of the person.  Huck's “me” never had to directly 'talk' to society's code before, because the people he lied to couldn't see through to that “me.”  Prayer, however, is direct communication between Huck and the personified reality of that society's morality.  And “me” is Huck's true conscience, his own code of morality, his heart. 

His society's definition of “right” and “clean” has been fighting to invade Huck's own sense of goodness, a goodness which is enacted rather than articulated.  But with the embodiment of his society's morality into 'God' which Huck's “me” would speak to, the two codes are distinct again.  And he knows that to speak to that code directly is to submit to it, because although he senses the wrong in that society, it owns the words for goodness. He doesn't know how to reclaim those words.  But he cannot submit.

Huck's way out is to instead pretend to communicate with a regular person in his society, someone he can lie to, who can't see his “me” and with whom his conscience won't have to speak.  Even before he writes the letter to Miss Watson to tell her where Jim is, he feels “as light as a feather … my troubles all gone.”  It is pretend communication because unless that letter is sent, there is no action; Huck can rest in an in-between place for a short time, where the two moralities do not have to confront each other.

Naturally, he puts off praying. In this space before prayer, Huck is free again, on the raft, where lies are unnecessary, where he's not forced to face the shores of his society's moral codes.  He thinks “how near I come to being lost and going to hell,” and we as readers know how near he is to being lost, how he's resting right on the edge of it.

 

Then he begins to remember Jim in his totality. Sitting there with the paper laid down, recalling their trip down river, Huck envisions Jim before him day and night, talking, singing, laughing.  He thinks of all Jim has done for him, the extra watches so Huck could sleep, “how good he always was.” Huck remembers how glad Jim was to see Huck when he thought Huck was lost; how, when Huck lied to save him, Jim was “so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now.” 

The Greeks called this philia (“brotherly love” or “fellowship”), and Aristotle described it as “character-friendship” and “intimate friendship.”  The most important philia in Aristotelian terms is 'friendship of the good,' a friendship that forms because “one distinctly recognizes the moral goodness of the similar life and similar activities of another person” (Cooper 345-354). 

Jim has called Huck his “best friend.”  In his re-creation of their journey, Huck has called Jim “good,” a seemingly simple naming act which naturally flows from reliving their relationship, but which nonetheless inherently contradicts what his society calls “good.”  A slaveholder might say his slave is “good,” in the way someone says a piece of equipment is “good,” meaning she/he/it serves the purpose well.  But Huck calls Jim “good” as a friend and a person, an equal. 

Then he sees the letter and holds it, “trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things.” That pretend communication allowed Huck to step back from the confrontation between the immoral society and his conscience, to drift again in that liminal space, the psyche's river.  And so the letter itself became, for that little while, a kind of raft.  But now that means of temporary escape from the confrontation of moralities has metamorphosed into the material focal point itself of the confrontation.  What he does with the paper in his hand decides the course of the rest of Jim's life as well as his own. Those written words mirror the lie of the written documents which claim ownership of some human beings by other human beings. Huck must face up to the power of words themselves as action, both the written words in his letter, and the words he will use to respond to the choice before him.

The only words needed are those which affirm his relationship with Jim and reject his society's appropriation of his conscience. “All right, then, I'll go to hell,” he says, needing no elaborate arguments to disprove that society's code.  Its morality is hollow at its core, resting only upon administered punishments and rewards not rooted in relationship, on what is best for each person, but only in a system which makes salvation itself a limited resource with some winning and others, like Jim, losing. Purporting to be objective, it indeed turns people into objects and commodities. This morality collapses in on itself, having nothing inherently good to support it – only authoritarian hierarchy, not love.  Selfishness is its only motivator.  Unlike theirs, Huck's morality is subjective, rooted in relationship; it not only develops through philia, but philia is that morality.

Convinced that throwing in his lot with Jim means he is bound for an eternity in hell, he nonetheless essentially says, “Do with me what you will,” and chooses relationship. When Huck faces the pinnacle of that hierarchical morality, taking the punishment instead of the reward, the code has no further claim on him, which is why the decision is, as he knows, “forever.”

Huck then tears up the letter, rejecting the fiction it supports, and is in “whole hog,” ready to do whatever he can to help Jim escape.  After that, there are no more rafts, no time on the river for Huck and Jim, because the in-between space is gone. Huck is back in society, back on shore, ready to act.  (Twain, Norton Anthology of American Literature 244-247).

***

We recognize morality in those moments when someone must choose between good and bad, and act on that choice.  The most dramatic demonstrations of this morality are in acts of 'rescuing' in which the would-be rescuers put themselves at risk in the attempt to save another.  And the moral actions many of us most honor and love are those which oppose the dominant immoral group or society surrounding the rescuers.  Huck's choice exemplifies this.

Fundamental questions arise from these moral acts.  How do rescuers know to do the right thing when the message from those around them is that their rescuing is wrong?  Do we believe in any conceptions of 'rightness' beyond the contextual ethics of our own societies?  Or, to relate this back to Huck, is Huck's choice in any sense universally right, or is it only right in our opinion, and wrong in the opinion of, for example, the legal system in his time?  

If rescuers can identify 'right' as 'right' (a huge 'if'), what makes the difference between those who act and those who don't?  Are these moral acts merely acts of self-sacrifice, or can they also involve individuals acting to save themselves? 

How do we apply these lessons or conceptions in our own times?  Can we characterize our society now as predominantly moral or immoral, or is there no way to answer such a question?   Is it possible to teach and learn in ways which cultivate our abilities to recognize and resist an immoral society?  And can we go further, consciously creating a moral society, so that doing the right thing would not have to mean acting in opposition?  How do we create a society conducive to caring for others, particularly the vulnerable and previously oppressed?

             

One way into these questions is through the lens of someone we could call the antithesis of Huck: Nazi leader Adolph Eichmann.  Mark Twain described Huck's choice this way: “a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat” (Hutchinson 128).  Attempting to act on conscience without heart seems close to what Eichmann did.  In a post-trial statement before his execution, Eichmann claimed he had “never been a Jew-hater, and he had never willed the murder of human beings.  His guilt came from his obedience, and obedience is praised as a virtue” (Arendt 247).  During the trial, Eichmann thought that his complete conformity would absolve him, proving his lack of corruption.   “No exceptions – this was the proof that he had always acted against his 'inclinations,' whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his 'duty'”(137).  Was it, in fact, fair to hold him accountable in these circumstances?  Hannah Arendt points out:

What we have demanded in these trials … is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around them. (294).

But of course, had Eichmann chosen not to arrange for the extermination of millions of people, he would not have been at odds with “the unanimous opinion of all those around him,” and he knew this. He would not have been at odds with the opinions of the millions being killed. Taking a stand against the horrendous treatment of some by many others does not require a person to stand alone; it requires him to stand with those being categorized as 'less than' and 'other.' 

And although I think I understand what Twain was getting at in positioning heart and conscience against one another, I believe that there is no conscience apart from heart.  Consider the etymology of conscience: “innermost thoughts, desires, intentions, feelings … knowledge within oneself, sense of right, a moral sense.”  The question comes down to who and what we love and do not love.

Thus, for Eichmann, “the personal element undoubtedly involved was not fanaticism, it was his genuine 'boundless and immoderate admiration for Hitler'” (Arendt 149). Even when Germany was clearly losing the war and Himmler tried to save himself by halting the murders at last, Eichmann  circumvented Himmler's orders to act in accord with “the categorical imperative in the Third Reich, … 'Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action, would approve it'” (145, 137).  For Eichmann hating Jews was not necessary in order to participate in killing millions of them.   He only needed to conceive of them as meaningless.  Eichmann's “Him” – that is, his 'God,' the omniscient manifestation of his society's moral code – was Hitler.  And unlike Huck, Eichmann loved his 'God' and therefore submitted.  He loved the bureaucratic order of the Third Reich, and  he loved his position within it.  No serious battle needed to be fought between conformity, conscience, and heart; all were in alignment. 

In her study of Eichmann, Arendt noted his inability “to think from the standpoint of somebody else” (49).  Yet, on some level he did attempt to think from someone else's standpoint – Hitler's.  What he lacked might more accurately be identified as the inability to feel from someone else's standpoint. His devotion to the Führer was not based on a close relationship with Hitler, the man. Rather, he worshiped Hitler the symbol, the apex of a hierarchical system of cold bureaucracy which objectified living beings.  Thus even what Eichmann loved was an object.  In his analysis of modern necrophilous societies, Erich Fromm says, “The world of life has become a world of 'no-life'; persons have become 'non-persons,' a world of death” (389).

Is Huck's choice universally good?  Southern white society would not have considered his decision 'good.'  But to conclude that his choice is only good in his and our opinion makes the meaning of the whole story collapse.  It implies that Huck merely exercised his preference, that there was nothing inherently good about his choice.  From there, we risk descending into the amoralism of the king and the duke, an 'every man for himself' philosophy, according to which the point in life is to get what you can for you (and yours, to the extent that others do something for your well-being as objects).  But Huck's loyalty to Jim was nothing like the king's and duke's selfishness; he believed he was dooming himself in order to save Jim.  On some level, we know that we do not consider Huck's choice 'good' just because we 'like' it.  Yet we must ask, how is it possible to believe in any form of universal morality while acknowledging the clear evidence that moral codes are not universal?

The answer must be that his and our subjectivities themselves are what make Huck's choice good and moral.  Jim's and Huck's care for one another, their relationship, is what is good; and our emotional response to them and their loyalty is what is good.  What is good is loving what is good.  The logic seems circular, but there is no way out of the circle.  For those of us who believe Huck's choice was good, we believe it because we feel it is good.  We cannot reduce its goodness to self-interest; it was not in Huck's interest to burn in hell forever after he died, which was the consequence he genuinely believed came with his choice.  Yet neither was this a kind of abject sacrifice on behalf of Jim.  Huck's choice was an affirmation of life and growth, the life and growth which are bound to our relationships with one another.  Objects are dead, but subjects are alive.  Fromm argues that humans do not simply have different, equally valid ways of being in the world.   Analyzing past and more recent human civilizations, he concludes that biophilia is:

a biologically normal impulse, while necrophilia is understood as a psychopathological phenomenon.  The latter necessarily emerges as the result of stunted growth, of psychical 'crippledness.'  It is the outcome of unlived life, of the failure to arrive at a certain stage beyond narcissism and indifference ...  Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being.  Necrophilia grows as the development of biophilia is stunted.  Man is biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia but psychologically he has the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution.   (406-407)

Fromm defines biophilia as:

the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group.  The biophilous person prefers to construct rather than to retain. He wants to be more rather than to have more.  He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new rather than to find confirmation of the old.  He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty.  He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations.  He wants to mold and to influence by love, reason, and example; not by force, by cutting things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things.  (406)

If biophilia is “normal,” healthy, and thus inherently 'better' than necrophilia with its reduction of living beings into dead objects, then acts of solidarity and rescuing are fundamentally moral.  And deep empathy drives these acts.  Study after study links “empathic distress” to helping behavior, notes psychologist Martin Hoffman (29-32).  This empathy goes beyond feeling briefly sad about another's suffering, or what Jonathan Kozol calls “inert concern” which replaces action, allowing people to feel good about their 'sadness' for others while doing nothing (Kozol 202).

In The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Germany, psychologists Pearl and Samuel Oliner point out:

What distinguished rescuers was not their lack of concern with self, external approval, or achievement, but rather their capacity for extensive relationships – their stronger sense of attachment to others and their feeling of responsibility for the welfare of others.  (249).

We do not suddenly become moral in the dramatic moment of choice, the act of rescuing. Instead, this “extensive capacity for relationships” is a continual possibility within people, nurtured and sustained by caring for others and experiencing their care for us.  This form of empathy demands action. It requires the taking of rights – rights to live and grow, as so many marginalized, exploited people and their allies have done.

  A moral education fosters these kinds of deep attachments bound to a love for goodness, a commitment to caretaking, and the strength to do what it takes to act.  That education teaches us to do what it takes to save ourselves with others, particularly those most oppressed.  And because we are still in an immoral society, in which, for example, those who could prevent it let 17,000 children die of starvation every single day ^[1](among so many atrocities), a moral education must oppose the status quo.  Whether resistance takes place in or out of institutions, it must oppose the purpose of this society's institutions when they work to turn out people who can be trusted to perpetuate the same unjust system, who maintain as much privilege as they can on the backs and misery of so many.

We have the right to create space away from the oppression, as Huck and Jim did on the raft.  We need this space in order to find our way to a morality of life and relationship, so we won't be asphyxiated by the hierarchical, objectified code.  Relationships which transgress the roles and divisions meted out to us are themselves both the raft and the journey, sustaining us and transforming us.

In societies dominated by callousness and cruelty toward those seen as 'other' and 'less than,' relationships with those deemed 'other' and 'less than' are oppositional. Likewise, relationships which undermine hierarchies are inherently oppositional.   And if they are relationships of genuine philia, they will move us to act. 

When we realize we cannot escape, whether we are cornered or choose to struggle, we have the right to fight back on our terms, not those of the system's. Someone once argued with me that a person refusing to go to war 'must' submit to the prison time.  These are matters of strategy, not principle.  Huck and Jim were not obligated to go to court or lobby the legislature to do away with slavery in an unjust system, structured in opposition to their interests.  Opposed to the U.S. war against Mexico as well as slavery, Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience, if an injustice “is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.  Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine” (234).  Huck broke human law and even what his society told him was God's law – broke these laws for the sake of relationship, in order  to act as a rescuer. 

           

Dan is gone from this university.  The positions of many deeply committed, caring, beloved professors are precarious. These are people who transformed my life, and the lives of many others. But as I said earlier, we lack democratic rights in our institutions.  Too many of our professors can be swept away by the austerity plans of bureaucrats.

Perhaps in the context of this world's tragedies and atrocities, these losses seem unimportant.  But when we diminish our own pain because it is less than that of others, we do nothing for those who suffer even more.  We enter instead into a kind of contest in which we compete for degrees of misery so that we might allow ourselves the right to feel what we feel.  Or we withdraw from the struggle into private despair. And too many of those emerging from these institutions will then continue to be of the ilk that environmental scientist David Orr has described – those highly educated people with power, decimating life on the planet, inflicting ever more horrific miseries onto those who already suffer most. 

If our teaching and learning and relationships in these institutions ever mattered at all, then they are worth fighting for, both to stem the erosion that is occurring, and to extend what is best in this education to all who are kept out.  To do that, we must stop these uppermost layers of administrators who have set themselves over us, who insist by their actions that they are the only 'real' citizens. We must stop them from inserting themselves between the people for whom these institutions actually exist.

           

Here is what I believe Dan did for us.  He named what Huck for so long could not name. He named Huck's relationship with Jim and thus his choice as good and moral.  He showed us what the novel, and this crucial center in particular, meant to him.  He showed us that he loved it.  And that is how we learn to love what is good, by seeing someone else passionately advocate for good.  Students waited for Dan week in and week out because they loved him.  And he loved his students.  We knew he was on our side, that in his way, he would do what he could to 'save' us, to keep us growing as thinkers, to move us to value rather than degrade ourselves.  And he made us want to do the same for others.  Like all of the best teachers, Dan has that “extensive capacity for relationships,” which is so bound to the love for life – biophilia – which moves us all to be continual rescuers of one another.

Earlier this semester, at a time I felt particularly low, Dan responded by email to my questions about writing and worsening self-doubt.  He shared quotes from Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a passage I had never read by the poet Randall Jarrell, which begins: “Art matters not merely because it is the most important occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.” The passage, excerpted from Jarrell's “The Obscurity of the Poet,” articulates beautifully and precisely why art is crucial to our education; what complex, otherwise unobtainable truths we learn through art; and why those truths “by their very nature, demand to be shared,” so that “bread and justice, education and art, will be accessible to everybody.”  Dan urged me to keep writing, to trust what the process would yield, not so that I might compete against others, but to participate as part of “the collective we, the democratic we.”  The last lines in this excerpt from Jarrell's work offer a resolution to the tension between an exclusionary artistic aestheticism and the healthy striving to do our best work, as well as a recognition of the “Excellence” of others:

Goethe said : the only way in which we can come to terms with the great superiority of another person is love.  But we can also come to terms with superiority, with true Excellence, by denying that such as Excellence can exist; and in doing so, we help to destroy it and ourselves. (22,23)

Teachers like Dan make us want to be worth their time and effort.   And as we strive to be worthy, we simultaneously learn and remember to value ourselves.  In relationship with them and kindred learners, we write our hearts out, trying to contribute words of value, not for the sake of a grade, but to express some part of what is “life itself,” of what is truly moral.

***

About this essay:
I knew that I would write about Jim and Huck Finn for my honor’s thesis. During my time in that American literature class of Dan’s, I was not willing to attempt it. I could not bear to do it shoddily, to trample over what was so exquisitely meaningful. I wanted so badly to do justice to that story and what it meant to him, to our class because of the way that he brought us into relationship with the story and himself, to my kids to whom I had read it while in that class, and to me. And still, reading this essay now, I want the words to be more perfect and the ideas to be much fuller.  Writing can be so painful because of these inadequacies, yet it remains so necessary and worthy to try.  

I have been writing in some of these essays about the contradictions of art.  The Randall Jarrell passage is another fundamental part of that conversation. Since I have more room here than I did in my honor’s thesis, I will end by including that passage which Dan emailed me one day in September 2010, a day I had sprained my ankle yet again and limped into the university library to find his message which included this:

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself. From Christ to Freud we have believed that, if we know the truth, the truth will set us free: art is indispensable because so much of this truth can be learned through works of art and through works of art alone – for which of us could have learned for himself what Proust and Chekhov, Hardy and Yeats and Rilke, Shakespeare and Homer learned for us?  And in what other way could they have made us see the truths which they themselves saw, those differing and contradictory truths which seem nevertheless, to the mind which contains them, in some sense a single truth?  

And all these things, by their nature, demand to be shared; if we are satisfied to know these things ourselves, and to look with superiority or indifference at those who do not have that knowledge, we have made a refusal that corrupts us as surely as anything can.  If while most of our people (the descendants of those who, ordinarily, listened to Grimm’s Tales and the ballads and the Bible; who, exceptionally, listened to Aeschylus and Shakespeare) listen not to simple or naïve art, but to an elaborate and sophisticated substitute for art, an immediate and infallible synthetic as effective and terrifying as advertisements or the speeches of Hitler – if, knowing all this, we say: Art has always been a matter of a few, we are using a truism to hide a disaster.  One of the oldest, deepest, and most nearly conclusive attractions of democracy is manifested in our feeling that through it not only material but also spiritual goods can be shared: that in a democracy bread and justice, education and art, will be accessible to everybody.  

If a democracy should offer its citizens a show of education, a sham art, a literacy more dangerous than their old illiteracy, then we should have to say that it is not a democracy at all, but one more variant of those “People’s Democracies” which share with any true democracy little more than the name.  Goethe said: the only way in which we can come to terms with the great superiority of another person is love.  But we can also come to terms with superiority, with true Excellence, by denying that such a thing as Excellence can exist; and, in doing so, we help to destroy it and ourselves.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah.  Eichmann In Jerusalem.  New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Print.

Fromm, Erich.  The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York, Owl Books, 1973.  Print.

Hoffman, Martin. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice.  New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.

Hutchinson, Stuart.  Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Print.

Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age.  “The Obscurity of the Poet.”

Kozol, Jonathan. The Night Is Dark and I Am Far From Home.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. Print

Oliner, Samuel and Pearl.  The Altruistic Personality, Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Germany: What Led Ordinary Men and Women to Risk Their Lives on Behalf of Others?  New York: The Free Press, 1988. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David.  “Civil Disobedience.” Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings: A Norton Critical Edition.  Ed. Rossi, William.  New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Print. 

Twain, Mark. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”  The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Volume C, Seventh Edition.  Ed. Reidhead, Julia.  New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Print. 

---

Best News In Years

by Lucy S.

This will be quick and straightforward. I will write more about  it later. I just got some of the best news in my life. My aunt Dolores called me and then she put my cousin Johnny on the phone, which confused me. Johnny…. Does she have her phone in the prison?  He’s in prison… He said, “Lucy?” I said, “Johnny?!” He said, “I’m out!”  And he started to give me all the details of how it happened.

Apparently that prop 36 that the voters passed last year by almost 70 percent to 30 percent, saying that the Three Strikes law, in effect since 1994, had to be changed, that the third strike couldn't be for a nonviolent or petty crime – well, it actually did something. It actually did something. A lawyer had him fill out some paperwork last year and he didn't think much more of it. The lawyer said he had a big stack of paperwork to make his way through.  Time passed.

Suddenly, my aunt Dolores got the word that he might be getting out. And he got the word. He said he was scared to get his hopes up. She drove over to her sister Rosie’s on the allotted morning at 5 am, sat out with her drinking some coffee, then headed over to the prison and waited until she could talk to someone at the gate at 7:30. They checked the roster. Yep, he was listed. Come back at 8:30, they said. Then somebody did something and they were all on lockdown. She waited out there with the other people waiting for their loved ones to come out. A lot of those people waiting were mothers, she said.

At one in the afternoon, Johnny came walking out of that prison after 17 years.

Since then, it’s been a crazy whirlwind. Everyone’s been having barbecues, taking him out to eat, buying him clothes… He said everything looks so different.

I just can’t stop laughing and crying and smiling. I ran through the house shouting out the glorious great news to my kids! I can’t wait to get out to California to see him and celebrate, to sit somewhere and drink coffee and just talk for hours. 

I’m so glad my aunt Dolores got to have her son come home. Oh, did they both deserve this.

And Islands

 by Lucy S.

I have another friend who was right in our midst, as William was. The similarity is only that she too was here with us, in a different home, in a different state, and we could not keep her from being torn away in ways that were against her wishes.

She is my friend. She became a part of us. We shared so many stories. We passionately debated, laughed, cried, ate together, confessed some of our fears and anguishes and hopes to one another. But she too was made less safe and less free for lack of the right documents. She was let in for a time, and then the time was up. And there are rules and laws imposed on those who never chose them, authored and enacted in so many ways by people who use words like responsibility and human rights so cynically.  

There were those last goodbyes at the airport, the hugs, my laughter through tears as I saw from afar security make her take off all of the bangles going up both of her arms. She was wearing as many of her material goods as she could, trying to not leave too much behind.

In August, she wrote:  

Today is Aid El-Fitr. It is the first day of Shawwal in the islamic calendar. This day marks the end of the month-long fast of Ramadhan and the start of a feast that lasts about three days. It is the equivalent of Christmas for Christians. Today, we meet or call our family members and friends and we wish them a good year. I know that you are not Muslim, but I would like to seize the opportunity of this occasion to wish you happiness and success throughout your life …. On the Aid, I always call the people I like and I could not stop myself from contacting you, although you are not Muslim (and this is a Muslim celebration). My mum says hi and happy Aid too!!!!

She said she had written also to the professors she loved and felt such gratitude for. I was still trying to write a statement of purpose to apply to PhD programs, and I instead wrote this, caught up in the moment of joy and of missing my friend:

I write on Aid-el-Fitr, the first day of Shawwal on the Islamic calendar. Today the fasting of Ramadan ends and three days of feasting begin. It is a day to greet family and friends. My good friend emailed to wish a happy Aid to me, her non-Muslim friend, and my family. An additional, particular reason to celebrate is the joyous news that she can continue her studies!  I rushed through the house to tell my kids, mysteriously announcing that I would now know someone in [the place she would go for her new studies]. This time a year ago, her specific fate could not concern me because I did not know her. But two semesters of classes together followed by the two months that she lived with us bound her to us. Her sense of humor is like mine; we laugh at absurdities as we fly freely between the personal, the political, and the artistic in conversations that always go on far longer than we say they will. 

She and her mother tell me to visit and venture out to the island where her grandparents live. She has described a man and woman in their 80s who grow olives, press their oil, make their bread, pick wild rosemary, catch fish, and make wine for themselves. Yes, some Muslims drink wine, she tells us. Cultures and the individuals who are part of them are always more nuanced and gloriously varied than any stereotypes and summations of them.

She is immersed in her new studies now, but her situation is precarious and the situation of some of those she loves is also precarious. When I talked with her by Skype recently, she kept running her hands over her forehead and hair in a state of such pain and anxiety because of her continual worry.

Herbert Marcuse has written: "... and there are only islands of good where one can find refuge for a brief time" (The Aesthetic Dimension 47). But some bask so much longer on these islands while others are denied the briefest respite or are hurled back out into waters made corrosive by those who wall themselves in and wall others out. 

Just William

by Lucy S.

I asked him if his real name was William or if he’d changed to the English version of his original name. He said no, that had always been his name, even as a child in El Salvador. I don’t know why, after all the struggles, all the notes taken, the calls made, I somehow can’t remember or find his last name anymore. Maybe it is in one of my spiral notebooks stacked on the high shelf.

I am almost positive that he said the city that he came from was San Miguel, more to the south. Why was I not more careful; why did I not keep better notes? How could I forget? He lived with his grandmother in her small place after his mother headed north to the U.S. when he was a month old. That would have been around 1980, when the death squads were on the rampage. Did she leave for that reason? Or did she need to go somewhere to make enough to send money home to her mother and baby?  Some of these questions I asked after we had talked enough.  He often did not have the answers.

It was just the two of them, William and his grandmother. They slept in the same bed. They had little money. Sometimes, he told us, she would all of a sudden say, that’s it, we’re taking the bus out to the beach.  They would ride out there and stay for a couple of days, sleeping on the beach. He laughed remembering this and said with a far off look that his grandmother was funny. When he was eleven, his mother paid a coyote to bring him north to be with her. His grandmother kept crying and crying when she said goodbye to him.

He said that when he saw his mother, he didn’t feel anything in particular for her because she was a stranger. By then, she had married and had two daughters, both U.S. citizens. She enrolled him in school somewhere in East L.A.  The story was that at some point, she obtained legal residency for herself but not for William. I used to wonder why she did not “bother” to get his. How ignorant and self-righteous I sometimes have been in my advocacy, as if I knew her reasons or what the truth really was. A version of a story gets repeated a few times and pretty soon, it has worn grooves in our minds.

When he was sixteen, he and some friends stole a car parked on the street one night. And here, I always want to add, “William was so passive and afraid; it wasn’t his idea; he was just with them and went along with it.”  This may be true. But I also know that I am always trying to retrospectively protect him, always trying to keep people from judging him harshly. This crime landed him in the California Youth Authority detention system for three years.

Sometime during those years, he and Rose began corresponding. (Her name is longer and more unique than that, but I will call her Rose here, and sometimes she used that name as a shorter form of her full name.) He was a friend of her cousin who was in there, too. After the CYA released him, he ended up in the Mojave Desert town of Lancaster instead of with his mom, who was by then divorced. His now ex-step-father lived out there by then. And Rose was there.

Later, they lived together with her mother, father, brothers, and sister for a little while. But that was the year that my cousin (Rose’s mom) left her husband for her boyfriend. They all scattered. My cousin, her boyfriend, and two of the kids had nowhere to live. Sometimes they slept in their car. Rose and William likewise had nowhere to live and no car. They finally ended up at the cheap motel on Sierra Highway, but at almost $40 a night with taxes and fees, it was not cheap, night after night.

I was afraid they’d soon be out on the street. Getting together the money each day from Rose’s grandma or, rarely, me (calling it in), or occasionally her dad, left them and me and others on edge.  I went to see them in that dark room that smelled wet and moldy from the swamp cooler. I remember being irritated that Rose had her two Chihuahuas with her – Romeo and Juliet. They weren’t supposed to have them in there, and their frequent high-pitched barks were bound to be heard soon. And they were mean little dogs, always trying to bite me.

Rose called me her tía.  For years, we had been aunt and niece, in part because her mother was an only child, but most of all because she had lived with us before and we had become close. But her story will come later.

The dog-couple parted when I brought Rose and William to live with me. Juliet was borne away with us, and Romeo was left a bachelor with someone else. We lived three hours’ drive from Lancaster, out in a semi-desert, hilly rural area that was a half hour drive to towns with stores and other services. Rose was already an alcoholic (sometimes an aggressive one), so this distance from any stores made it so much easier for me to have them there with us. My oldest, Justin, was seventeen when they moved in. Jonathan and Kevin were thirteen. Sean was nine; Ryan was four. The three older kids shared a bedroom, and the two younger kids shared a sort of bedroom – a walk-through den, really, but it worked. William and Rose slept on the pullout sleeper of the sofa. Matt and I were separated yet again – separated in the same house, as always, because nothing else was economically possible. We moved back into the same room to give them the living room.

On good days, they would sit on a couple of chairs they’d place under the huge pine tree just before it got dark.  They’d talk quietly and laugh and each smoke a cigarette or two. I liked to see them out there through the window when I stood at the sink. Sometimes the kids and I went out when it got darker and played basketball using the driveway light. Rose and William would cheer us on or make jokes. Sean spoke with a certain formality and almost a British accent for some reason, and Rose would always say things to him like, “Hey, my bloody mate!” with her own donned matching accent.

On other good days, they’d make salsa from the tomatoes and jalapeños we grew. Or we would play Pounce, a fast-moving card game, with them, and we would catch William cheating. Or William would help Matt with the patio footings we had to redo because we found out that the posts holding up the cover hadn’t been supported properly, so the concrete had to be cut with a special saw and new footings had to be dug and poured, one by one. Or we’d watch a movie together. Or we’d just talk.  One time he swore to the kids that he'd seen a mermaid at the beach back in El Salvador. Just a popped up head in the water and then the flash of the tail on the mermaid's way back down into the sea. Their lack of belief frustrated him.

On bad days, I’d be on the phone for hours trying to sort through the system to see how we might resolve William’s immigration situation. He said his mother had his birth certificate and wouldn’t give it to him. I don’t even know if this was true.  But documents in El Salvador were in general not easy to get when William was born. At some point, we found out that a letter had been sent out to an address where his mother no longer lived, instructing William to appear in court to determine his immigration status. He had missed the date.  Attorneys said this was not good.

On other bad days, William and Rose argued. I usually didn’t know what started the arguments, but I would catch pieces. Sometimes she said he was jealous and hell no, she wasn't going to be controlled by him.  He so often ended up locked in the bathroom, crying hard. She’d knock on the door. Sometimes she’d get mad and say things like, “Why do you have to act like a fucken little baby?” At times I tried to talk with them about their problems, but it embarrassed William, and Rose preferred to talk with me by herself. I always wished I had more wisdom. Sometimes he would say, “Then I’ll just leave,” and she’d say, “Go ahead. What are you waiting for?” And a bit later, she’d say again, “I thought you said you were leaving.” One time I discovered that he’d gone walking off at night. Matt took his truck to look for him, driving through so many dirt roads until he found him.  We kept telling them that he could never do that again, that there were packs of dogs out there at night and that he could get so lost.

They were living with us on 9/11.

Finally they moved back to Lancaster. Rose’s mom and her boyfriend had managed to rent an apartment. They would be back in a town, no longer isolated. And the kids and I were leaving on a long driving trip soon, and I didn’t know how I could leave them out there with no vehicles. I drove them back to Lancaster. Rose gave me her favorite movie, “Girl, Interrupted,” as a memento and a thanks. Her mom soon wanted them out and they ended up with her dad in a room he was renting in someone’s house. One night, they were drinking and ended up in an argument. Rose said there was no reason why he couldn’t at least use a fake social security number and try to get some work. He thought she was talking to a guy on the phone. He walked off into the night.

Later, we found out that William had opened an unlocked car door in an apartment complex parking lot and taken a broken Game Boy. He was looking in another car when a police car pulled up.  The police officer asked William if he’d been in any other cars, and William said yes, the one he’d taken the portable video game system from. He said he had wanted to bring something back for his girlfriend.

County jail would have released him early, but immigration moved him right into their facilities. There were more consultations with immigration attorneys, but they said nothing could be done. He sent a card to Rose’s grandma’s address – the only one he knew – thanking us all and saying that the time he had lived with us had been the happiest in his life. Writing this now, I am thinking that his grandmother deserved that more than us. They sent him back to El Salvador, where his grandmother was by that time dead, and where he didn’t know anyone except more distant relatives.

During this time, we moved to the Midwest. Rose called me late one night to say she’d run into William’s sister at a store and that the sister had said, “Did you hear about William?”  Rose said no. He’d been shot in the head and killed.

What I struggle to come to terms with is that even as he was with us, right in our midst, it was as if a torrential river tore him away, a river that did not soak us or threaten us directly at all. We walk on dry land through some parted Red Sea of life and he was somehow with us - but not really? Not fully?  He did not have documents granting him safe passage as he moved through his days. He lacked papers that allowed him a “right” to be in the safe corridor with us. We could hold his hand, but we could not save him from the force that ripped him apart. And yet he was with us; he was flesh and blood as we were; he ate with us; he talked and laughed and cried. What were these documents compared to his living reality in our midst?

Why were we dry and safe – why were we in when he was out? What did we do to deserve this inclusion and what did he do to deserve that exclusion?