Once again it amazes me, how utterly opposite your background and life story are from my own. How on earth did the likes of you ever find common ground with the likes of me?
By age five when I entered first grade I already knew how to read because I had made everyone in my family tell me what words on road signs and cereal boxes said, what they meant, why on earth this spelling thing made so little sense (they had no clue). I had not been in school more than a few weeks before my first teacher had put me in service tutoring the other kids on reading and comprehension, which of course did me no end of harm on the playground and the school bus....
And this was the irony which shaped my life more than any amount of 'proper learnin' ever did: you see, when one grows up among the lowest-ranking sector of an emergent white-suburban (southern) middle class, and all anyone's roots around oneself spelled was 'white trash', to learn things properly and to examine meanings of things was trained in as 'puttin' on airs', as exceeding one's heaven-assigned place in life.
Because one is, after all, not one of the 'coloreds', which means that one's position of rank in the hierarchy of things had already been established, and one ought to thank God one had been born white; and above all, one must never become like one of them libburls, folks from up north who think they know things because they'd read some books, when everyone knows them univers-tees is turnin' out a pack of communist agitators, etc, etc.
Seriously. I'm probably making it sound more sane than it actually was. You were never exactly wrong about the south, the south just changed, a lot, since way back then. When I was growing up, the south was why Oscar Peterson and them were moving to Copenhagen and Paris, so they could play a gig and talk to pretty girls afterward without being strung up for it.
There was a cold war on around the world, and there had not stopped being a race war on across the USA, since many generations before.
One went to church and sang 'count your blessings, name them one by one', and then one went to all-white schools (post-Civil Rights Act: southern schools were in no hurry to accommodate this Thurgood Marshall and this Doctor King, who of course were also Red agitators), and learned to watch one's ass by never, ever allowing anyone to think one thinks oneself to be smart, or headed anywhere worth striving for if this was not fittin' for properly brought-up white trash, or interested in anything which would stamp oneself as too Red. Doing what one was told was regarded as the highest achievement worth aiming for, and if this made one some money, well, count your blessings son, and don't let it go to your head. And never, EVER, make anyone think you are fighting for your rights, like them Reds do.
And this was only the beginning of my own odyssey of learning. It got even more confusing than this, believe me. But by the time I didn't finish high school, because I'd done all the work of educating myself all along and wasn't about to give any institution the credit for it, my concept of ambition had been shaped mostly by having learned to want nothing to do with this adulthood thing, because it too had so failed to impress me, in any way, as a thing worth striving for.
Nobody had ever articulated to me what it was I could ever do with being 'smart', nobody had ever shown me any path toward 'success' of any kind, nobody had ever demonstrated to me that this filthy business (see, I spelled it right the first time) of making money was anything but a sleazy hustle at others' expense. So I set my mind to drop out of society, and make my own way, doing life my own way, as best I could manage.
I guess I've managed all right. But one could hardly call how, good management.
Once again it amazes me, how utterly opposite your background and life story are from my own. How on earth did the likes of you ever find common ground with the likes of me?
By age five when I entered first grade I already knew how to read because I had made everyone in my family tell me what words on road signs and cereal boxes said, what they meant, why on earth this spelling thing made so little sense (they had no clue). I had not been in school more than a few weeks before my first teacher had put me in service tutoring the other kids on reading and comprehension, which of course did me no end of harm on the playground and the school bus....
And this was the irony which shaped my life more than any amount of 'proper learnin' ever did: you see, when one grows up among the lowest-ranking sector of an emergent white-suburban (southern) middle class, and all anyone's roots around oneself spelled was 'white trash', to learn things properly and to examine meanings of things was trained in as 'puttin' on airs', as exceeding one's heaven-assigned place in life.
Because one is, after all, not one of the 'coloreds', which means that one's position of rank in the hierarchy of things had already been established, and one ought to thank God one had been born white; and above all, one must never become like one of them libburls, folks from up north who think they know things because they'd read some books, when everyone knows them univers-tees is turnin' out a pack of communist agitators, etc, etc.
Seriously. I'm probably making it sound more sane than it actually was. You were never exactly wrong about the south, the south just changed, a lot, since way back then. When I was growing up, the south was why Oscar Peterson and them were moving to Copenhagen and Paris, so they could play a gig and talk to pretty girls afterward without being strung up for it.
There was a cold war on around the world, and there had not stopped being a race war on across the USA, since many generations before.
One went to church and sang 'count your blessings, name them one by one', and then one went to all-white schools (post-Civil Rights Act: southern schools were in no hurry to accommodate this Thurgood Marshall and this Doctor King, who of course were also Red agitators), and learned to watch one's ass by never, ever allowing anyone to think one thinks oneself to be smart, or headed anywhere worth striving for if this was not fittin' for properly brought-up white trash, or interested in anything which would stamp oneself as too Red. Doing what one was told was regarded as the highest achievement worth aiming for, and if this made one some money, well, count your blessings son, and don't let it go to your head. And never, EVER, make anyone think you are fighting for your rights, like them Reds do.
And this was only the beginning of my own odyssey of learning. It got even more confusing than this, believe me. But by the time I didn't finish high school, because I'd done all the work of educating myself all along and wasn't about to give any institution the credit for it, my concept of ambition had been shaped mostly by having learned to want nothing to do with this adulthood thing, because it too had so failed to impress me, in any way, as a thing worth striving for.
Nobody had ever articulated to me what it was I could ever do with being 'smart', nobody had ever shown me any path toward 'success' of any kind, nobody had ever demonstrated to me that this filthy business (see, I spelled it right the first time) of making money was anything but a sleazy hustle at others' expense. So I set my mind to drop out of society, and make my own way, doing life my own way, as best I could manage.
I guess I've managed all right. But one could hardly call how, good management.
Never did learn that one.