Without the stories and the songs, I am mute. A white American education will never give them to me but it can—if I am graced, if I do not go blind in the white light of self-consciousness, if I have guides before me and the sense to heed them—it can help me see the stories, growing like a vine out of the cane fields, up out of unmarked graves, around me soul. It can help me search out the very history it did not teach me. (237)
"I mean, there's so much here, it seems almost like a waste to come back and give more. It's good for the minority kids, I'm sure...But there's so much to do outside this...bubble. I wonder if we aren't practically obliged to give it back elsewhere, to people who never got it in the first place..."
"I do give it back elsewhere," I said. I was glad that I felt no anger. I had heard the argument in my mind so many times. Now there was no anger, and I could smile. "But I don't feel that there's anything wrong in giving it here, too. It is like admitting who I am. I came here, and I went away changed. I've been fighting that for a long time, to no purpose. I am a crossover artist, you know, like those jazz musicians who do pop albums too." (232-233)
The faculty that had appeared to my teenaged eyes as a monolith of critical white adulthood now revealed itself as a community of idealists, all trying, each according to his or her ability, to help young people (225).
For the first time that year, I was not ready to leave St. Paul's. I had had all my time, all my chances. I could never do it again, never made it right. I had not loved enough (219).
This time Izzy will jump of her own will when her legs have grown strong enough to absorb the shock; she will not lie on the ground, splayed out alone, crippled by distrust. She will learn how to jump up through life, big, giant steps. She'll fall, and get up again. Up, Izzy, up. Paint, dance, read, sing, skate, write, climb, fly. Remember it all, and come tell us about it. (237-238).
There you have it. Lorene: from working class Yeadon to St. Paul's School, two marriages and a child named Laura, a teacher and trustee of St. Paul's, and finally a writer of a story about a fifteen year old "overserious" (232) girl who leaves the comfort of home for a mysterious place in New Hampshire. She went; she changed. Here she is in 2013 getting an honorary degree from Swarthmore. She's a literature teacher at her alma mater, Penn. She's a professional writer. She's done all right for herself.
I hope you all had a restful break. We'll finish our discussion of the book over the next couple days. I will give you your short paper topic. Maybe we can watch one more movie. And you'll have time to work on your big paper in class before it is due on the last day of the semester.
1. What moment in this last part of the reading stayed with you? Why?
2. So what is this book about? What did you get from it at the end—what was Cary wanting to say in this book about a girl going to prep school (like you are doing)? Quote 2-3 times in your response. Think about this, okay?
3. Your response to this book? Like? Dislike? Why?
See you all tomorrow.
1. When Lorene says, "I had not loved enough. I'd been busy, busy, so busy, preparing for life, while life floated by me," that struck me. I guess as I think about my own graduation, it is a scary thought that even as we all try so hard to do everything (sports, school, social events), we can lose perspective and forget that life is "floating by". It seems like a daunting task to do all of these things to the best of your ability, and maintain such strong relationships.
ReplyDelete2. When Lorene is talking to Bruce, he wonders about alumni working back at St. Paul's. He asks if "we aren't practically obliged to give it back elsewhere, to people who never got it in the first place. Lorene explains that she does give "it" back elsewhere, but she says, "I don't feel that there's anything wrong with giving it here, too". Lorene has moved into a kind of acceptance and understanding. She has always seen the problems with going to prep school: the alienation from her own community, the disparity in opportunity it creates, and many other issues. However, she says, "I came here, and I went away changed". I think she also sees what the school gave her, and she sees that it has made her who she is today. She continues, "I've been fighting that for a long time, to no purpose". Lorene has transitioned from a view of her character being almost poisoned by what she was given at St.Paul's, to her character just being completed, added to, influenced. She still has held onto those parts of herself from before , and she references this when she talks about the decisions she makes for her children ("to live where my kids grow up with black people"). She still has who she was before, but now she just has new lenses to view herself and the world around her. When she talks about Pap's advice, she says " Pap was wrong ", and his stories taught her shame and secrecy. However, she "cannot throw them out". Now she can see their flaws and their importance, and they are still a part of her. She says this education can "help me see to see the stories . . . around my soul. It can help me search out the very history it did not teach me". St. Paul's was flawed, but it gave the ability to see her context in the world in a new light. From this, I take the book as a complete and uncompromising appraisal of what a prep school can give you. Cary leaves me thinking that even with a prep schools flaws, it gives students an amazing basis to think about the world. No matter where you come from, I think this type of education can allow you to see your world more clearly or at least more completely.
3. I really liked this book. It was of course a much less dense book than heart of Darkness, which was nice. Also, it was an extremely impressive memoir. It was impressive how Cary was able to stay in her own mind at any given time. She rarely gave input from her older self, and if she did it had a definite purpose. She was able to dissect her own life and then come out with a definitive statement about it (which seems difficult to achieve).
1. Lorene’s musings on the prayers of St. Paul’s really stayed with me. She bluntly gets to the heart of the matter, namely, the hypocrisy surrounding their outlook on god. She asks herself, “Who had told them God was pleased with them? (...) Well, what about the rest of the world, whom they asked god not to forget? What about them? What about the dirty, ragged, cramped, stupid, ugly motherfuckers?”(214). Her questions resonate with me. Why do they need wealth for gratitude? Does St. Paul’s really care about the poor, or do they merely profess to do so in the name of Christian charity? She realizes that the privilege of St Paul’s does not stop at fancy cars or jobs or clothes, it even influences how they view their relationship with God. They are fortunate, so God must love them. They have wealth, so they must be more virtuous than those at the bottom.
ReplyDelete2. I would say that the Lorene’s primary goal in writing this autobiography was to examine the responsibility that comes with privilege. Is there such a responsibility? If so, is it greater for students of color and/or those coming from adverse situations? And, if this responsibility does exist, what forms does it come in? Direct action? Or some amorphous feeling of duty to a community? I don’t think she ever comes to a definite conclusion on this matter, but she and Bruce examine it in their conversation at the class reunion. Bruce wonders “if we aren’t practically obliged to give it back elsewhere, to people who never got it in the first place”(232). To this Lorene responds, “I don’t feel that there’s anything wrong in giving it here, too”(232). I think that both of them make a good point about the nature of duty. On one hand, we should extend our influence to those who haven’t had many opportunities, but, on the other hand, we should localize our influence and repay the institution that gave us those opportunities. I think Lorene also hopes to impress upon us several other points: racism did not end with Brown vs. Board of Education, nearly everyone hides feelings of isolation underneath their veneers, and people of color bear the burden of their race more than white people realize.
3. I enjoyed this book, for the most part. I loved the characters and the candidness of the narration, but I found myself frequently frustrated with Lorene. She was just so stuck in her head, so busy hyperanalyzing everything. I appreciated her point of view, but I wish more of the story had centered around actual events and encounters with her fellow students, rather than her stream of metacognition. However, I found that, as someone who initially lived in a very poor neighborhood and now goes to an elite prep school surrounded by wealth, I could relate to Lorene, at least to a certain extent.
Lorene, while describing her time teaching at Saint Paul's, confides in the reader about how she wanted to yell at her kids to “look at what you have here. Buildings, grounds, books, computers, experts, time, youth, strength, ice rinks, forests, radio equipment, observatories. Learn, damn you! Take it in and go out into the world and do something!” (225). This marks a change in attitude to how Lorene feels about Saint Paul's. As a student, it seemed to me as though she spent all her energy focusing on the school, as if the school were her test and her battle, not her preparation. For example, when she and Jimmy talk about “turning the place out,” she says that the white kids “were up against those of us who'd lived a real life in the real world” (57). And when she graduates, she laments not being awarded an honors: “I had come to St. Paul's to fly, and I had failed” (215). Thinking about this change and perspective makes me realize how confused younger Lorene was. She thought that her school, which had given her a scholarship to attend and the best education, was out to test her, confront her, and break her, instead of preparing her for her future.
ReplyDelete“I have never skated on black ice, but perhaps my children will. They'll know it, at least, when it appears: that the earth can stretch smooth and unbroken like grace, and they'll know as they know my voice that they were meant to have their share” (238). Lorene wishes for her children to feel as though they have the right to something that is beautiful, something that she never felt when she went to St. Paul's. As a girl, Lorene is laden with crippling self doubt about her worth and her right to go to St. Paul's. She questions the decision for the school to choose her over her friends: “How was it that I should have this opportunity and they should not?” (35). And even when she graduates, she questions if it was worth having her go: “What had I become that was worthy of so much effort and money?” (215). She feels as though in order to get an education at St. Paul's, she needs to not only make it worth it for herself, but also her family and her community, and arguably her race. I believe Lorene recognizes that being so selfless with her education and life can be detrimental when she talks with Bruce Chan about “giving [their good fortune/education/privilege] back”. She tells Chan that “I don't feel that there's anything wrong in giving it back here, too” (232), acknowledging that she does have the liberty to do what she wants with her education. I believe the message of the book is not to live your life for the benefit of others, but to take what you are given as your own so as to feel confident in yourself.
I liked the book because it felt as though Lorene gave serious consideration and analysis to all of her memories. With each memory, were aren't just given the emotional reaction of Lorene at the time, but also her reaction at the time of writing. The layers Lorene presents are delineable, but at the same time coherent together. But I can't imagine there being much worth in reading this book outside the setting of a private school—the themes are too narrow.
1. The very last paragraph stayed with me the most. It wasn't surprising; I felt like the last couple chapters had been leading up to it. But its sheer hopefulness was definitely a sharp contrast to her depiction of her day to day life at St. Paul's, where racism, sexism and the northern white establishment seemed to be almost impossible to overcome. It was an optimistic way to end a somewhat pessimistic book.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think that paragraph made an impact on me because it was the first time I really felt like Lorene expanded the focus of the book from solely herself. That's perfectly fine, but it was striking to have our sense of time and space so quickly and vastly expanded. It made the book feel like more than just a memoir, it was a call to...faith?
2. I think this book is about acceptance. Lorene comes to St. Paul's an ambitious black girl ready to turn it out and have it all. However, she simply cannot do it all. Despite her greatest efforts, she fails to meet her academic goals, she has not "loved enough" (219), she has not even met her family's standards to form contacts with the other black kids and try to advance the cause of her community. The second half of the book is partly about her coming to terms with her failure; she realizes "she, too, had something to give to St. Paul's" (195), and that its impossible for her to truly solve racism on her own. She can still do what she can, like when she asserts that she does "give it back elsewhere" (232) after Bruce questions her commitment to "ethnic" issues; she may not be able to change the world "outside the bubble" but she can still "admit" who she is and do what she can at St. Paul's. She can "make the choices every day" to help her kids and "hope she doesn't get burned up by the shame." (233) But ultimately, the shame will always be there, the shame that she hides in her "black cypress tree" and is always simmering just beneath the surface. The "same cliffs" make it "pointless" (230) to strive for truth. This is an irreconcilable paradox; thus Lorene turns away from rationality towards fundamentally irrational faith. She turns to faith as she remembers the black gospel choir of her youth and hopes that one day her children will have a better life than she does. She does whatever she can, but knows that the battle is fundamentally not hers to fight. St. Paul's kept her "inside [her] black skin" (237) and although she knows that it is truly hers, she knows that she will never be able to fly until blackness has "grown strong enough to absorb the shock" (238). The most she can do is tell her children they are worth more than society tells them and hope that one day the will "have their share" (238)
3. Um, I guess so. I still have a ton of trouble accepting Lorene's acceptance that racism is for the most part not her battle to fight. I have trouble with acceptance at all. When I think about acceptance, I think about Pangloss rationalizing death and destruction, about generals in Vietnam mowing people down with rifles for fun, about Marlow upholding the falsehood when he gets back to England, about the gay community not wanting to abstain from sex. But I guess I could also see Vivian finally gaining perspective on her life or Mookie and Sal standing in the street next to the ruins of the pizzeria. So while I think acceptance lets evil happen, I also get that its important to Lorene's sanity. I get that not everyone has to participate in the struggle. Its just hard for me to conceptualize because fighting is all I desire, all I want to do. And I think acceptance is what is going to allow Trump to do whatever he wants, I think it is what allows capitalism to continue to cheat us, or even what lets kids see other kids being teased and let it happen. Its a kind of complacency, a blind hope that everything will somehow get better. It's incredibly confusing and this book didn't really help me come to a conclusion. But it did illuminate me.
ReplyDelete1. A piece of this reading that really stood out for me was the moments after she received the Rector’s Award. Only now as she prepares to leave it does she get the sinking feeling that she MISSED something - something important. She remarks that other students had “done what I had claimed I had come to St. Paul’s to do,” 216, but it doesn’t hit her as hard as her thoughts after receiving the Rector’s Award. Making eye contact with the other student who won the award, she wonders why she didn’t make more friends, and why she didn’t spend more time with the ones she had. Lorene has a crisis: “I had not loved enough. I’d been busy, busy, so busy, preparing for life, while life floated by me,” pg 218. Lorene feels like she was so busy preparing for life that it went by without her noticing - and that is a very frightening feeling. “For the first time that year, I was not ready to leave St. Paul’s. I had had all my time, all my chances. I could never do it again, never make it right. I had not love enough,” 219. She feels that she missed chances to love, and it feels like an irrevocable mistake. What stuck with me in this moment is that she is realizing the importance of people, and of loving people. Lorene is learning something crucial about life, and while the process of learning it is perhaps less than pleasant, she gets to carry this knowledge with her the rest of her life.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete2. Black Ice is about Lorene forming as a person by having her reconcile two different experiences, and gaining the knowledge and the confidence to teach what she learned. She grew up with an acute sense of what it’s like being African American, and the history that that entails. She grew up with a solid sense of self and her community - she also grew up with stories about betrayal and fear - Jump, Izzy! - and St. Paul’s helped her understand it better. “The hard part is to find the words to say it outright: that Pap was wrong. His stories taught me fear and shame and secrecy. […] But I cannot throw them out. I cannot escape into some other history of my own choosing,” 236. Lorene has been betrayed by people - by her teachers who don’t understand, by her boyfriend who attacked her, and by white girls with dumb questions about black boys - but she has learned to love and to trust people. Lorene befriends India, a white girl; she spites her own mistrust of the other girls to ask for help when ricky comes too soon; the girls take care of her when she comes back high; her teacher pays for her trip to visit her sick mother. Lorene is unlearning boundaries about who you can trust and who you can be, and that’s a good thing. But for all its aid, St. Paul’s had its own issues that need to be remedied by the community she grew up in: “St. Paul’s would keep me inside my black skin […] The stories show me the way out. I must tell my daughter that. I must do it so she’ll know,” 237. Each community helps Lorene pinpoint the problems presented by the other, and so both are equally valuable. “A white American education will never give [stories] to me […] but it can help me to see the stories, growing like a vine out of the cane fields, up out of unmarked graves, around my soul. It can help me search out the very history it did not teach me,”pg 237. These experiences gained by Lorene within primarily black and primarily white communities give her a deeper understanding of herself, the world she lives in, and her role in it. Lorene took what she learned and became a teacher, which suits the tone of the book very well. Lorene learned to reconcile her history and her privilege, and to focus on the people in your life. Not only has Lorene gained this knowledge, but she intends to share it, ending the book saying, “[my children] will know as they know my voice that they were meant to have their share,” 238.
ReplyDelete3. I liked it primarily for two reasons: one, it was about a real person, and learning about real people is incredibly satisfying to me, and two, because it had a happy ending. Maybe one day I’ll have a different view on the value of happy endings, but I tend to think of them as a plus. It was also a view into experiences that I’ve never had, and I’m grateful for that. I’m an upper middle class white person who has always gone to the same private school - the experiences Lorene, and many people like her, have had are just not something I have a good understanding of. I’m glad for the new perspective.
1. Two moments. First, I was especially struck by the last two pages, when Lorene reflects on the stories of her childhood. The whole post-script? epilogue? additional chapter? felt very necessary and grounding to me—it wrapped up the whole book so well. The connection to childhood, remembrance of heritage and ancestral stories as a grown adult is a powerful way for Lorene to show her change. I think that she changed at St. Paul’s, but she changed much more in the fifteen years afterwards. She became an adult, and it was refreshing for me to read the ending from an adult perspective, to know that she turned out just fine even though she struggled with deep insecurity as an adolescent. The second moment that stuck with me was the letter from the housekeeper and laundry lady. Lorene was loved, cared for, by a woman whose name she didn’t even know and a housekeeper who is mentioned maybe twice in the entire book. Lorene made an impact on her life: “no one else had given her a change to get to know them” (222). Even as a troubled teen, as a girl who never thought she was good enough, Lorene won an award at graduation and, more importantly, won the love and respect of someone who is so often overlooked. I think that in this moment Lorene managed to see her own privilege: even though she faces racism and does not have the wealth the rest of the St. Paul’s students do, she is a student at the school, graduating and going to an Ivy League university, making a mark on the world. She can carry the love in that letter as a reminder that she did something right.
ReplyDelete2. To me, this book encompasses so much of what life is. However, there are two images from the text that I think represent a fundamental message of the memoir. When Anthony asks Lorene what she found out writing the book, she responds, “Life is like a leaf! […] It’s a whole book of life is like a leaf. That’s what got me though St Paul’s. It was stored up like a present from a willful, ambition-driven girl to the woman she would become.” (234-235). In this book, Lorene grows, at first small and timid, but gradually becomes bigger and brighter green. She is connected to the tree, nourished by her heritage, but the soil and the rain and the sun give her life as well—she is cared for by St. Paul’s, by the world that educates her, and by her family. As she gets older she changes colors from a vibrant green to a rich, rusty, luscious red or orange, signifying her change in perspective. Eventually, she will dry up and shrivel and fall from the tree and become a part of the soil feeding new leaves. So this book is about Lorene’s development into that vibrant green time, her growth into a woman, an intellectual, a writer, a teacher. But this conceit (or extended simile, I guess—“life is like a leaf”) could describe any life. What makes the book unique to Lorene is the black ice. Black ice is treacherous; we cannot see it but we can slip and fall on it. Ice comes up many times in the book, used in different ways, but the root of that image—cold, smooth, slippery, but also sharp and jagged—remains steady. Lorene’s life at St. Paul’s is a dance on black ice. She must survive the stress, the brutal workload, the pressure, the racism, the expectations, and make it look like an effortless dance. She must dance on black ice, sometimes invisible but always there, because of the color of her skin. When she first looks at the icy hill on her visit to St. Paul’s with her parents, she imagines slipping and falling with her mother: “God forbid one of us should slip. We’d both go down, brown behinds right up in the air for Mr. Price and all the white people to see, my father grabbing for both of us with some wild, involuntary cry from ancient Japan, my mother screaming, and everybody rushing to help us, their solicitude, the shrieks of hysterical laughter once they were out of earshot.” (29). She feels out of place, starkly different from the rest of the students. She envisions the catastrophe that would succeed her fall. At the end, she has a hopeful outlook: “I have never skated on black ice, but perhaps my children will. They’ll know it, at least, when it appears: that the earth can stretch smooth and unbroken like race, and they’ll know as they know my voice that they were meant to have their share.” (238). She may not have been able to skate smoothly across the ice, but she hopes that her children will; she has confidence that they will be able to see it and to know that they deserve equality.
ReplyDelete3. I loved this book. It resonated with me—I feel a connection to Lorene. Her mind feels like mine, constantly busy worrying about the next thing, burdened with the pressure of high expectations. I also really enjoyed the writing, the flow of language and imagery.
1. The part that stuck with me was when Lorene was talking about Izzy and how she was able to jump and absorb the shock on her own. This was Lorene speaking through her past about how she'd grown as a person. She's able to be there for herself now and to not have to depend on other people (or more specifically men) because she's a stronger individual. Lorene has gained a sense of love for herself that she uses to exert on other people and her society. She's able to see the bigger picture and conceptualize her surroundings. She talks about how Izzy was able to make big jumps and I think this was a representation of her recognizing what she was capable of once she began to love herself and detach herself from this dependency she had on other people. Now she's able to do her own thing and be herself.
ReplyDelete2. I think this book is about Lorene learning about her limitations and how this in turn affects how she combats racism. Lorene obviously combats with self-acceptance as we see during her graduation where she says, "I had come to St. Paul to fly, and I had failed" (215). Even after she's awarded the Rector's Award she goes on to talk about all the things in life she hadn't achieved and how she'd let life pass her by. We witness Lorene's internal battle with understanding her limits and knowing how far to push herself. Though, through this struggle we're able to see her finally come to her own conclusions and to acknowledge what she can and can't do. I think this recognition is evident with her decision to become a teacher, specifically a teacher at St. Paul. When Bruce asks why she chose to become a teacher at St. Paul, which he describes as a "bubble" (232), she tells him, "I don't feel that there's anything wrong in giving it here, too. It is like admitting who I am. I came here, and I went away changed. I've been fighting that for a long time, to no purpose" (233). Here it's apparent that Lorene has come to terms with who she is and what her mission is. She recognizes what she's capable of and where and how she can exert her knowledge on her community.
3. I think I liked this book. It was just weird reading it and relating to it so much because I felt like everyone was reading about my life. I thought she really embodied the mind of a teenager and captured what she was feeling at that time. Her descriptions of what happened, I thought, were really vivid and I think she painted a really interesting picture of what her life was at that point. I also liked how she began and ended the book with her describing her life in the present.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete1. The part that stuck out to me was when Lorene was talking to her family going to the church service for the graduating class and having contacts for life. Lorene however was not having it. She was convinced that her peers and the “few friends” she made were “going back to their own lives after graduation” (211). I figured that Lorene at this point in the story changed her views of the people at St. Paul's and St. Paul's itself. She even expressed her content for the St. Paul's community on the very next page saying that the school had impossible expectations of it’s students and posted that one genius that fulfilled those expectations up on the wall “so the rest of us could not claim it was not impossible” (212).
ReplyDelete2. I think this book is definitely a coming of age story with the added struggles of being black in 1970/80s America. Lorene had some rough times at St. Paul's, but as I wrote in the previous blog, I believe it helped her grow into someone she didn't necessarily think she wanted to be. In the end, I think she liked the way she turned out. In terms of being the very best at everything, she came to terms with the fact that she couldn't do it all. And not only that, she realized she wasn't alone in feeling like an underachiever because “none of us made it…but we thought we were supposed to” (212). Needless to say this revelation would've been better around page 100 but she got there eventually. In terms of race and its impact on her life especially at St. Paul's, she found her way to “turn it out”. While not as dramatic as she imagined it would be when she first came to St. Paul's, I think she made an impact on the school. Towards the end of the book we see her really find her voice in order to call out discrimination/racism as she was ready to do when Archibald Cox made the “our kind of people” comment. She was “a big woman on campus” (208).
3. I liked the book perhaps at first because it was an easy read after Heart of Darkness, but it gained my attention and respect on its on merit as it went on. I felt like I could relate to parts of Lorene's story which is always a good thing when reading a book. What was amazing to me was the few sentences I found to be EXACTLY what I felt/thought at some point in my life.
1. I think the moment that most struck me was when Lorene received the Rector’s Award. I liked how there was a little bit of suspense (which I think isn’t usually employed a lot in memoirs, but maybe that’s not the correct device I’m identifying) as shown when she received her diploma without honors and then received the Rector’s Award directly after. I loved the line about the “greedy girl within. Starved for some special notice, she stood inside my skin jumping up and down” (216). I just liked the accuracy of that image. I liked how Lorene got part of what she wanted – recognition, an acknowledgment of her hard work at St. Paul’s – and then immediately rejected the Rector’s Award when she realized she didn’t achieve the “more prestigious”. Perhaps this is too judgmental of me, but I feel like Lorene’s dissatisfaction with the award she received is a contradiction to her statement “I had not loved enough” (218). There she was, accepting the medal with Tom Painchaud and lamenting about her neglect to ‘stop and smell the roses’ (as I interpreted it), and the next minute she is still expressing some sort of dissatisfaction with herself, which is, I believe, what caused her to “not love enough”.
ReplyDelete2. I think this is a story about acceptance. Lorene must come to terms with who she is and her place in the world around her, and how her education fits into her life. I think Lorene’s conversation with Bruce near the end really represents her acceptance of herself and her academic opportunities: “I don’t feel that there’s anything wrong in giving it here, too. It is like admitting who I am. I came here, and I went away changed. I’ve been fighting that for a long time, to no purpose” (233). I was really impressed with Lorene when I read this, I think because it is what I least expected of the student who first stepped onto St. Paul’s campus, the student who expected to “turn it out”. I was happy that it felt like she was giving back to herself, like she finally forgave herself for the education she had always been guilty of: “Now there was no anger, and I could smile” (232). I think this statement shows that Lorene let go of her anger at St. Paul’s. She let go of all of her assumptions that everybody wanted to tear her down, to see her fail and that they didn’t want to help her. She realizes that teachers and the community she had at St. Paul’s did, indeed, want to help her: “The faculty that had appeared to my teenaged eyes as a monolith of critical white adulthood now revealed itself as a community of idealists, all trying, each according to his or her ability, to help young people” (225). She sees the value of a St. Paul’s education, which is why she wants to contribute to other students’ experiences at the school. I also think that Lorene learns about making connections with other people in her time at St. Paul’s (as, I think, many high schoolers do during high school). She, along with the other students of St. Paul’s, are struggling together to achieve “The School ideal of a perfect being, bright of mind, sound of body, and pure of spirit. None of us made it, I said, that was the con, but we thought we were supposed to […] they put his name on a plaque on the wall so that the rest of us could not claim it was impossible” (212). Attending the type of school where everybody believes that this perfect being is a standard creates competition and true friendship: “Once you’ve been ids together, why it’s like being in the army” (211). But Lorene was also able identify her real relationships with the people at St. Paul, not just the “contacts” (211) that she can take advantage of later in life.
ReplyDelete3. I liked the book, overall. Sometimes I got aggravated, like Emma, with Lorene and how narrow her focus was, but that’s more of a complaint about the character, not the memoir as a whole. I really loved the writing. Stories about people’s lives, especially this one, about somebody at a prep school, generally intrigue me because I like comparing other people’s experiences to my own (although Lorene’s and my situations are very different). I think Lorene portrayed herself in a way that was compelling to the reader: I know I wanted to find out how she would change, how she would learn from her experience at St. Paul’s and how she would eventually accept herself.
1. One of the moments that stayed with me was when Lorene was talking Bruce Chan about her decision to return to St. Paul’s as a member of the faculty. Bruce questions the worth of her decision based on the fact that St. Paul’s is already a place of tremendous resources and Lorene’s efforts to help people would be felt more with people who had never gotten the opportunity to go someplace like St. Paul’s to begin with. Lorene is unphased by Bruce’s words. She is confident that her choice to return to St. Paul’s was a good one even when it might not have been the decision that would create the most positive change in the world. This reflects a major change in Lorene’s thinking since she was a student at St. Paul’s; it seems that she is no longer as sensitive to the external pressures put on her by people who expect her to use her St. Paul’s education to advance the position of the underprivileged in American society.
ReplyDelete2. I think the book is about learning how to function or even thrive in a society where there is an immense gap in privilege. Lorene is constantly aware of the immense privilege her rich white classmates have. She feels offended that they are not entirely aware that most other people in the world do not have anything close to the amount of privilege they have. “It was always so simple for people here, I thought. So simple. Just take care of things, that’s what they did, and then wondered why the rest of the world was in such a funk.” (189) Lorene resents their privilege, she is mad that the odds are stacked in their favor and that they cannot possibly understand what she is going through. At the same time, Lorene also doesn’t feel like people who are not so privileged like her family can understand what she is going through either. She finds herself feeling bad about the privilege she has herself, and she feels that she has “joined the establishment” (180). She is caught between two extremes in the spectrum of privilege so she feels very alone. However, she begins to make sense of the privilege gap in her school when she enters 6th form and becomes a member of the student council. After winning the election to become vice president she says, “I needed to find a way to live in this place for the moment and get the good of it. I had tried to hold myself apart, and the aloneless proved more terrible than what I had tried to escape.” (182) This is a huge realization for Lorene. She discovers that it is better to see past the difference in privilege between her and her classmates so she can function at St. Paul’s. She takes this a step further when she decides that she should have loved more during her time at St. Paul’s on graduation day. Lorene’s journey tells us that we should not resent others or ourselves for having privilege but learn to love everything and everyone regardless of how their privilege differs from our own.
3. I liked reading this book, but it seemed slightly pessimistic to me. Not saying that I don’t enjoy pessimistic books or anything. I liked Lorene’s extensive analysis of everything that happened to her as a St. Paul’s student, and I liked how her perspective of the adult that is writing this, came through in the work. I thought the book was pessimistic because despite her pure and powerful intentions to significantly change St. Paul’s out, she got nowhere close to doing that. It seemed like her experience at the school forced her to accept that the system was forever going to be stacked against her and her race.
1) There is one part towards the very end that seems minor and goes by very fast but is very important to me. “It had been his wife, Ann, who had asked my next-door neighbor whether she knew any black girls of high-school age who might want to apply to St. Paul’s School.” At the beginning of the book, and in some parts in the middle, Lorene can't help but constantly wonder why she made it into St. Paul’s, and not some other star student. She never knew if she deserved the opportunity she got when she applied to the school. She ponders about how “others, smarter or more worthy, might, at that very moment, be giving up hope of getting what we had.” She never knew why she was able to get in, and it bothered her for so long. But now, as an adult writing this book, she knows why she got in – because they happened to ask her next door neighbor about black girls. Even with this knowledge, Lorene simply glosses over this fact in the end of the book, spending no more than a sentence on it. She's finally moved on from that doubt and is recognizing the benefits of her time at St. Paul's. That passage speaks to her overall growth and maturity since she's left the school. That's why that part stood out to me, even though it was so short.
ReplyDelete2) The ending of the book really felt like a cluster of life lessons that Lorene learned while writing this book, but I think they can all be wrapped up into a core theme (the core theme is really similar to what I’m talking about in my final paper and this last chapter gave me a lot of material for my paper). Also, I think the theme, just like a lot of the things Lorene goes through throughout the book, extends far past just being at a prep school. Of course, St. Paul's is Lorene’s medium to express these lessons because that's where her most important experiences came from, but the lesson the reader is supposed to take can be applied to any life, prep school or not. Lorene in the end is essentially saying that everyone has a life to live. No matter what cards you are dealt, everyone has a hand to play. Everyone’s experiences are just as Lorene describes hers: “I did not ask for them, but I was given them…” Whether you are a black girl at a prep school, a wealthy white male at a boarding school, or a talented guy who didn't get the chance to go, you have a story, and it's your job “to tell to retell and change and pass” that story along. The stories you are given are not supposed to define you. They do no bind you, they “show [you] the way out.” They lead you into life, the unknown, into “the darkness” so you can “stand naked and unafraid in the night.” Lorene took her time at St. Paul's, the story she was given by Ann when she talked to her neighbor, and made it what she wanted it to be. She returned to St. Paul's. She wrote a book about it. Both helped black students going through the same things she did. By taking her stories and using them, she “touches other souls in the night,” other people in life.
In life, your hand isn't in competition with someone else's, so whether your cards give a royal flush or pair of two’s, you're still a winner. You just have the play the cards. You just can't fold. (Disclaimer - I'm still working on this idea but I thought I'd put it here)
3) I definitely liked the book, more than liked actually. It's my favorite book of the semester and one of my favorite of all time now. This semester has actually brought a lot of my favorite books. I loved Candide and Wit as well. Though Mira talked earlier about how books being “relatable” isn't everything, Black Ice was very relatable and that's a big reason I like the book so much. I also love the language of the book, especially towards the end. Lorene, even though she's an adult now, really captures her adolescent thoughts well. The language is very “human.” Some of her thoughts are incomplete and her ideas toward the end are vague in some ways, but I think most if not all humans suffer from this. It helps remind me that there's a real person behind the book writing a real story, which adds to the relatability. I appreciate it even more next to the complex, superhuman writing in Heart of Darkness.
ReplyDelete1. The moment that stayed with me the most was during Lorene’s graduation and she’s having that sort of epiphany about these last two years and how she says “I had not loved enough. I’d been busy, busy, so busy, preparing for life, while life floated by me, quiet and swift as a regatta” (218). I suppose what struck me about this was how I’d said something similar to my mom the day before I read it. This prep school life we lead is very literally intended to prepare us for the rest of our lives and shape us into the human beings be have the potential to become, but at times, it does feel as though all it does is fill our days with distractions. That’s not to say that all the work we do is useless, but I’d argue that some of it is, and perhaps even the useless work is valuable in that it teaches us that not everything in life is fun or interesting, but as of my viewpoint right now I think I’d learn a lot more about what kind of persona I am and what sort of things I’m capable of by traveling and experiencing the world rather than sitting still in a hard, plastic chair, waiting to sop up what little knowledge of teachers I deem useful. Although Paideia may claim to be above the rest of the world with its sofas and student-teacher relations, it is still an institution, and there are times, such as now, when I wonder if this is the type of education I want, or need rather. I spend one month every year with my dear friend Ceci in the north of Spain, and I grow so much there. I learn from people rather than textbooks, and it works just so much better. I learn through experience. Now, that’s not to say that I don’t love a few of my classes here, because I do—sincerely—but I have taken too many waste-of-my-time-and-money ones to say that this place is flawless, and I’ve spent too much time experiencing another way of learning to say that it’s the best it could possibly be. Lorene seems to reach the same temporary conclusion I did, and in that was, she became far more relatable to be than she had been in the past.
ReplyDelete2. I suppose Lorene is saying more than one thing here, as there are a few pretty distinct parts of herself that are growing and changing during her time at this prep school: the female in her that knows this school wasn’t built for her, the black, scholarship kid who now the world is betting against her, and the seventeen-year-old who’s just now understanding how big the world is and trying to find her place in it. I think she’s saying something about each, but the one that resonates with me the most is her as the teenager just trying to figure it all out, and of course her figuring it out must include elements of her race, gender, and class, but it is my belief that her youth is what makes this story reachable for me. This “greedy girl” (216), this “spoiled child” (218), “she was prideful, funny, ashamed, anxious, cocky, and scared” (228) and all she wants to do is find her place, make her mark, grow up. This is a story about a child being thrust out into the open, a rather posh, secluded open, but open nonetheless, and learning what she must become and what she must leave behind in order to survive. This is a coming of age story, and a rather relatable one at that, but essentially, it’s about a girl learning to live up to the expectations of a demanding institute so as to learn what she can expect of herself, what she is capable of.
3. I like this book because, I suppose, I see a lot of myself in her. She’s a stressed out prep school girl struggling to live up to her own expectations, and that sums me up quite exactly, but I think what drew me in the most was her response to failure. It crushed her, but she was able to put the pieces together again become something more, something better. I have yet to rise as she has done, but if she can, I can.
1. Lorene says, "I had not loved enough. I'd been busy, so busy, preparing for life, while life floated by me, quiet and swift as a regatta" (218). This is a prep school, as is Paideia. There's a sense that right now we have to work hard and stress out so that we can be successful and happy later in life. This is both a recognition from her that she worked too hard and should have been more laid back, and an exhortation to herself to do more. She not only wishes that she had gotten high honors in everything, but wishes she had done that and also fully loved her life. This moment shows that upon graduating, Lorene hasn't really learned. At the same time, I understand where she's coming from. There's a ton of pressure in high school to perform well, and that your grades decide the course of your life. Simultaneously, you're told that these are the best years of your life and you have to go out and enjoy them.
ReplyDelete2. This is a book about the importance of a variety of perspectives, and what a surprise you might get from a new one. Cary writes about how she felt as a student. She first felt like an outsider, but over time, discovered that she could provide something for the school, she was a "sojourner bearing gifts," and not just there for the ride (195). This realization shows her increased understanding of St. Paul's as a community of different, and sometimes conflicting, voices. Later she returned to St. Paul's and was given another perspective. she writes that "The faculty that had appeared to my teenaged eyes as a monolith of critical white adulthood now revealed itself as a community of idealists, all trying, each according to his or her ability, to help young people" (225). Given a new point of view, Cary sees the variation, and importance of those differences, in what had before seemed an unwelcoming block of people.
3. Over all, this was a pretty darn good book. Cary captures her emotions as a teen well, and doesn't intersperse that with obviously adult reflections. However, she does recognize changes and speak to us with more recent memories. This combination of teenage worries and stress and her perspective as a teacher blend to make an interesting memoir.