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  Charter schools are public institutions financed by public money and sometimes by private money, too. They can hire nonunion teachers, and fire them pretty much at will. Beacon, a magnet, not a charter, was an all-union shop. It belonged to a consortium of thirty schools in New York state whose students were exempt from the Regents exams that other high school students took. In the humanities courses, instead of exams Beacon required, from each student, a stand-and-deliver presentation for a teacher or a panel of teachers—an exposition and defense of a specific topic that was independently researched. The paper was joined to a project of some sort, and the entire effort was called a PBA—a Performance-Based Assessment. As part of the consortium, Beacon gave its teachers considerable freedom to shape their curriculum, and the principal, Ruth Lacey, insisted on that freedom, which was one reason intellectually ambitious teachers wanted to work there. Mr. Leon’s tenth-grade reading list, for instance, was his own, not like other tenth-grade lists. He shaped it; Miss Lacy approved it. “Teachers don’t leave here. It’s a talented staff,” she said to me.

  By the aughts, Beacon was increasingly popular with students and parents. It was a good school, perhaps a rung below New York’s top public high schools, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Hunter, Brooklyn Tech, and a few others, all of which, however, were far less diverse than Beacon. Virtually everyone graduated, and more than 95 percent of the graduates went to college. They rarely went to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford, but they went to respected places—small private colleges and the great state universities and the many campuses of the State University of New York (SUNY) and the City University of New York (CUNY). (I have appended at the end of this book a list of where Mr. Leon’s students in English 10G went to college.)

  * * *

  Silence, absolute silence. They were bent over their tables, writing. It was eight in the morning—awfully early, I thought, to be writing anything, much less writing about literature. (Could I write at that hour? I could not.) Many of the other Beacon kids hadn’t arrived at school yet, so the building was generally quiet. Yet I could hear, from the hallways, a vagrant laugh or curse, the repeated sound of an overstuffed locker being slammed shut (wham! Wham! WHAM!—that sucker was closed); and, from deep within the building, obscure low rumblings, strange knockings and groans. It was mid-September and still very warm, so the noise couldn’t have been a heating system kicking into to life. Air-conditioning, probably. These school buildings had their inner lives and mysteries; they weren’t haunted, exactly, but not every sound you heard was strictly accountable.

  In the second week with English 10G, Sean Leon drew on some remarks by Azar Nafisi, the author of the wonderful book Reading Lolita in Tehran. In the 1980s, Nafisi, a professor of English literature at Tehran University, became disgusted with the constant monitoring of her academic life by the authorities. She retired in 1995, and then asked some of her former graduate students—women in their twenties and older—to come to her apartment, once a week, and discuss literature. The book, written in English and published in 2003, was an account of a flourishing cabal. Away from men, the women talked over their lives; they discussed Nabokov (Lolita, of all things), F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jane Austen, while all around them a reactionary theocratic administration controlled almost everything. Their reading and talking became an act of liberation and self-creation.

  Mr. Leon did not tell his class much about Lolita in Tehran, but he had provided for the students—as part of his printed syllabus—some of Nafisi’s general ideas about literature. Among them:

  A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

  I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.

  In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of life, an essential defiance.

  Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world.

  These sentences could be called the elements of humanist creed, a high-minded roster of literature’s strengths and satisfactions, and therefore, necessarily, an entry point to a better world—at least to a better inner world. If you were women living in a restricted society like Iran, literature was not just an escape from orthodoxy but an opening to yourself. Sean Leon’s students were fifteen, they were not politically oppressed, yet they lived in a highly competitive society that squeezed them hard. He obviously wanted literature, in the long run, to work for them as it had for Nafisi’s women. Right now, Mr. Leon made practical use of her statements.

  The previous summer, as the students were working and playing, they also read—at least they were supposed to read—Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Hosseini’s popular 2003 novel (made into a decent movie in 2007) was devoted to the adventures of a Kabul boy who lives through the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the exodus of Afghans to the United States and elsewhere, and the rise of the Taliban. Since the first day of school, the students had been writing things down about The Kite Runner in their notebooks—the melancholy old speckled white-and-black school notebooks they all used for keeping journals. Mr. Leon had already collected the notebooks. Now he asked them to write a three-paragraph essay in class, applying Nafisi’s general ideas to specific passages in the The Kite Runner.

  I could see the beginning of a strategy. He assumed that fifteen-year-olds hadn’t read much literature. Faced with a complicated book, they would likely flail around in a sea of intuitions and feelings; he wanted to give them something to hold on to—some fixed posts in the shifting sea of impressions. Nafisi’s remarks may have been lofty, but the connections to The Kite Runner had to be very specific—the students needed to nail specific passages, actions, bits of dialogue at crisis points. “The point is,” Mr. Leon said, “to see whether you really read The Kite Runner, and didn’t just do a bullcrap reading of The Kite Runner.”

  As they wrote, I scanned the bent heads. The boys wore T-shirts, or sweatshirts over T-shirts; a few wore shorts, the rest jeans or khakis. They all had simple cuts—nothing street-trendy. Two of the girls had long silky burnished hair falling in soft curtains, which they brushed back from their faces every few minutes. The rest gathered their tangle at the back of their necks with rubber bands or scrunchies; a few had earrings or some sort of band at their wrists. In all, the students dressed plainly, without the Day-Glo, tie-dyed madness and vaguely anarchic defiance of the sixties and seventies, the style and attitude of the eighties. A few of the girls had tattoos at their ankles, but—no doubt about it—the age of flamboyance was long over. Plainness was the style. Dress wasn’t a big issue for them, at least not in tenth grade. Perhaps they adopted a somber way of facing the world because they knew, even then, that getting a good job would not be an easy affair. Self-expression was a less pressing matter than just staying in school, getting into college, getting ahead, moving on. How, I wondered, would literature fit into these perfectly sensible ambitions?

  Sitting by the side of the room, I picked up a student essay lying on the table. It was from 10A, Mr. Leon’s other tenth-grade section.

  “Themes are big part of The Kite Runner. In all great works of literature, themes are brought up.” I summoned my courage and continued reading: “The Kite Runner is a great example of this, bringing up the themes of truth/realization, friendship, and manhood, which is brought up a lot in Azar Nafisi’s five quotes.”

  A pang of despair. They were fifteen, they lived in a hyper-media
age, and they were not, I was sure, easy with literature or with writing. Still, these sentences were a misfortune, a way of turning the devices Sean Leon had given them into lame tautology. He had brought on this kind of gibberish, and he would have to clear it out of their heads. He had his work cut out for him. They all did, the English teachers of America.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BEACON, OCTOBER: FAULKNER AND HAWTHORNE

  “A Rose for Emily”

  The Neighborhood, the School

  Ruth Lacey

  “The Minister’s Black Veil”

  Social Conformity and Sin

  Baby Doll

  The Scarlet Letter

  A Hard Read

  A few days later, section 10G was working on the first readings of the year, the stories “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and “The Minister’s Black Veil” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” was published in 1930, the year after The Sound and the Fury and the same year as As I Lay Dying. Unlike the two great novels, it has always been considered “easy” Faulkner—accessible, straightforward, readily anthologized. A ghost tale of sorts, the story looks back, in shifting planes of time, at the life of Emily Grierson, a genteel southern woman who dies in the 1920s. By then, her fine old house from the 1870s was overwhelmed by garages and cotton gins. A spinster, an emblem of faded aristocracy, she had lived with her father when she was young; all we know about the father is that he repelled her suitors. When he died, Miss Emily lived with the corpse until the town took it away. Soon after, she allowed a northerner doing work in town to pay court to her. They were seen together a lot, but he was a swashbuckling type, not a marrying man, and, at a certain point, he disappeared without a trace. After that, Miss Emily became haughty, indifferent to everyone, a tax cheat. Accompanied only by a silent Negro servant, she lived in virtual isolation.

  The story is written in the first person plural—a catty, malicious “we,” apparently made up of crass townspeople, who wonder at and enjoy Miss Emily’s oddities and miseries for decades. “When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray.” At the end, the busybodies get their comeuppance: after the old lady dies, a group of women from the town enter her bedroom and find, lying in Miss Emily’s bed, the emaciated corpse of her old beau. “The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him.” A thread of Miss Emily’s iron-gray hair lies beside it on a pillow. A ghastly image, laced with morbid and hostile irony. The entire story, with its heroine living among floating dust in her odiferous house, carries suggestions of the sinister, the inadmissable, all of it rendered by Faulkner in quiet, rather dry prose that occasionally rises to eloquence.

  Miss Emily was both a murderer and a necrophiliac, dislikable in many ways—an arrogant presence seen only at the windows. Yet the students found her sympathetic. As Sean Leon culled their initial responses, they said she was a victim—a victim of rigid social conventions. Saul Ramirez, a Latino boy, silent, intense, his face almost masklike, looked up and said, “It’s a story about abandonment,” and others agreed, noting that Emily had been betrayed first by her father, who chased away her suitors, and then by the northerner who wouldn’t marry her. “It’s not her fault she turned to necrophilia,” someone said, which I thought at first was a joke, but apparently was meant as a sympathetic remark. No one protested. The students, it seemed, had a rather broad idea of sex. Jordan Richardson, a girl with a frank, appraising stare and strong shoulders (I later found out she was a rower), raised her hand: “I think that her relationship with her father was sexual, and she didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.”

  Things had come to a strange pass. We had taken up perverse love before having even a minimal discussion of ordinary romantic relationships. Mr. Leon paused for an instant, then said, “I’ve taught this story for six years, and I’ve never had a student who saw that relationship with the father as sexual. It’s a contentious reading. Are there grounds for this interpretation?” A few of the other girls offered mild agreement with Jordan, but Mr. Leon, acknowledging their agreement, quickly moved on to firmer ground.

  Mr. Leon had earlier asked them to work up presentations on such things as setting and character, and now, John Gruen—a large, blond boy with a rather bluff macho manner, an athlete who grabbed girls in the corridor and lifted them off their feet (sometimes they protested; sometimes not)—stood up at a whiteboard in front of the room, and, with a slight smile on his face, called on people to talk about the town, its changing culture, the South. Mr. Leon, meanwhile, sat down in John’s empty chair. He raised his hand a few times and made comments, steering the conversation gently one way or another as John spoke, at the end of which Justin, a large, shapeless boy with an acned face and a mop of hair, suddenly looked up and said, “If the story had been told from Emily’s point of view, it would have been a very different story.” This was a shrewd literary remark—the first, I thought, of the year. Understanding point of view and how it affects the meaning of a story—how it is the story in some cases—escaped many readers, for whom a story, more often than not, was simply told.

  Mr. Leon concluded by giving the class a little talk about “southern gothic,” the genre of writing associated with Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and many others. “They believed that literature could reveal some of the dark side of who we are, especially those like Emily pushed to the margins.”

  Many of them nodded. From Star Wars they knew about “the dark side” well enough; they knew it was part of what any human being might become. And many American teenagers love violent horror films—the thrill, the dizziness, the near nausea, and then the release from the spell. Mr. Leon now pushed us forward to Hawthorne’s bizarre and difficult tale “The Minister’s Black Veil,” a kind of intellectual horror story.

  * * *

  Amsterdam Avenue behind Lincoln Center was a stony and blank part of the West Side, a stolid institutional passageway between the bounding theater and commercial districts to the south and the comfortable upper-middle class neighborhood—the Upper West Side—to the north. On Amsterdam, moving north from 57th Street, you faced Roosevelt Hospital; John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which was part of the City University of New York; a variety of enormous apartment buildings set well back from the street, fortresses against the unwelcome; the rear of the Metropolitan Opera, where large sets and props were constantly being unloaded out of trucks; the gloomy-looking public housing development, Amsterdam Houses, across from the Met; a variety of public schools with bluff cement facades. The streets were created by proud cultural and institutional plans, by greed and benevolence, all of which worked together to produce an extraordinary architectural deadness—a rare case of a New York Nowhere.

  Beacon was located not on Amsterdam itself but down 61st Street, west of the avenue. The block sloped to West End Avenue, with its big, expensive apartment complexes along the Hudson River. Walking rapidly downhill (momentum wasn’t hard to sustain), you could stride right past the school without realizing it was a school. The building was almost comically ordinary—dim and yellowish, a low-rise commercial structure that for much of its life had been a warehouse. An American flag flew over the entranceway, a square aperture cut into the building; at some point, the aperture must have been a loading dock. Entering the door, you were immediately plunged into school; there was no more than a minimal lobby, and kids streamed and swirled past the entranceway. Between classes, they were all over each other in the narrow corridors, hugging and gossiping and singing bits of songs. Beacon had good basketball, soccer, and track teams, but it did not have a football team, which meant, among other things, that strapping young men did not barrel down the hallways and set the social tone of the school as mini-celebrities. Even without football players the noise level was challenging, though far from unpleasant—easier to take, certainly, than the racke
t in a crowded New York restaurant. The stairway going to the upper floors, however, was a problem, so badly clogged that you couldn’t stop for a second to talk—you had to keep moving, and when you reached your floor, you spilled into a hard-flowing river of students and teachers.

  The farcical gym had a low ceiling crisscrossed with structural beams that made the ceiling still lower. There was small, square, mirrored dance studio, a tiny recording studio, and several other places within classrooms for music. The arts room ran long and deep. Computers in rows filled three large rooms, one on each of the main floors. The kids from poorer families—or maybe kids who had two working parents—stayed late at school and did their homework on a computer until they got kicked out. The library was good—stocked with recent fiction and public affairs books, and students often hung out there between classes. Where else could they go? In good weather, they could walk up 61st Street to Amsterdam and stand at the dead corner of the housing complex. At lunchtime, the wealthier kids wandered down Amsterdam for a slice of pizza, which they ate on a stone ledge across from the school. Everyone else crowded into the lunchroom, outfitted with long tables and benches, green walls, and fluorescent light. That was about it for social space. The neighborhood was an alien place, the school cramped and uncomfortable, but, as far as I could see, everyone wanted to be there.