Jane Lucas

This morning I attended a meeting that brought together some of the VCU faculty, staff, and administrators who will lead discussions of The Other Wes Moore—VCU’s 2011 Summer Reading Program selection–during Welcome Week, August 21 – 28. Each of us will meet with a group of first-year students and their Resident Assistant  to discuss Moore’s book, which chronicles the lives of two young men from Baltimore, born within a year of each other and bearing the same name, one of whom, the author, became Johns Hopkins‘ first African-American Rhodes Scholar; the other of whom will spend the rest of his life as an inmate at the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. In his introduction, Moore writes: “The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his ” (xi). Several of the meeting’s attendees referred to those lines, including the woman sitting next to me, who turned to me before we began and asked: “Do you think it’s true?” I didn’t have time to respond–much less formulate a response–before the meeting began in earnest.

Though I haven’t finalized my plans for the discussion that I will lead on August 24, I know that I will ask the students to consider those lines from the introduction, the “moments of decision” (xi), when they could have chosen different paths, and the impact of mentors in their lives.

In Chapter Seven, Wes Moore recounts how his mother “sensing [his] apathy toward reading” (130), bought the teenage Wes a copy of Mitch Albom’s The Fab Five: “I was riveted by that book. The characters jumped off the page, and I felt myself as engulfed in their destiny as I was in my own. I finished The Fab Five in two days. The book itself wasn’t what was important–in retrospect I can see that it was a great read but hardly a great work of literature–but my mother used it as a hook into a deeper lesson: that the written word isn’t necessarily a chore but can be a window into new worlds” (130-131).

I hope that The Other Wes Moore will serve as a hook to deeper lessons as well.

In today’s story reporting Philip Levine’s appointment as Poet Laureate, NPR excerpted a 2005 interview in which Levine said that the Detroit of his youth “was probably half-Southern. And every Sunday morning you could turn on these guys [preachers on the radio]—both white and black—and they would belt out language like I never heard. I loved it.”

Along with the announcement of our new Poet Laureate from half-Southern Detroit, today brought the release of the film adaption of Kathryn Stockett’s best-seller The Help. Between thoughts of a half-Southern Detroit, I tried to imagine what I will say to students in my Southern Literature class when they ask why Stockett’s novel, or an excerpt from it, isn’t on the syllabus. I agree with Janet Maslin’s assertion that “[i]t’s a story that purports to value the maids’ lives while subordinating them to Skeeter and her writing ambitions.”

But the cultural impact of the novel, and now the film as well, tells me that  The Help needs to be part of our classroom conversation, even though it won’t be on the syllabus. In David Edelstein’s  review of the film on Fresh Air  today, he observed that “[s]ome of Stockett’s critics have gone so far as to say she actually romanticizes domestic servitude by depicting black nannies’ genuine love for the white children in their care. They also say the novel is full of stock characters that reinforce classic African-American stereotypes like the ‘sassy’ maid and the shiftless, abusive husband.”

And what is Edelstein’s take on it all? He said: “My view of this controversy is easily stated:  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.’”

I don’t know either, but I do know that The Help will be part of our classroom conversation—perhaps along with half-Southern Detroit.