Taught

MARIE JEAN LEDERMAN

Damn, I THINK, as the cab moves leisure-
ly uptown; it’s going to be six bucks to
get to City. To drag from one meeting to
the next—I didn’t need a Ph.D. in Eng-
lish to live like this. I try to use my
learned devices to mentally erase the
meeting I’ve just left at Baruch. As usual,
my mind refuses to become a soothing
blank. And what's it all for? To become
an Associate Professor, stupid. And not
even for the money. I detest the politics
and the time spent preparing memos and
reports which nobody has the time or
interest to read. And I’m not interested
in most of the paper which flies across
my desk either. And the meetings. So
what am I doing here? Kidding myself.
The promotion matters. Teaching isn’t
enough. Promotions are there and other
people are getting them. Enough reason.

My head begins to tighten; the spots
over each eye converge slightly. Another
headache. I'll be in Harlem after dark,
and I’m not sure where the subway is.
Even though I live on the edge of Bed-
ford-Stuyvesant, there I’m not afraid.
That's home, which makes me like every-
body else—petrified of foreign turf.

I'd like to get to a bathroom. That be-
comes a matter of logistics between
meetings. Three hours to meet and at
least another hour to get home. And
when I do I won't be able to look at my
students’ papers. For which I’m theoreti-
cally getting paid.

$4.55. Not a bad guess, close to six
bucks with the tip. I wonder what City
College looked like when my father
went to college? In later years it became,
for him, a golden place, where he lis-
tened to Morris Raphael Cohen lecture,

a place where an immigrant tailor’s son
could begin to become a doctor.

The Harris Building today looks like
the old elementary school I went to so
long ago in Brooklyn; the walls are the
same green, the stairways are surrounded
by grating. Only the corridors and stair-
ways are wider. Classes are in session,
and students sit on the floor in the
corridors waiting for the next period to
begin. Overcrowded and _paint-peeled
this building, but these children of immi-
grants wait for their chance too.

I find the bathroom, three flights above
the floor where we are to meet. Plaster
is sprinkled liberally on the floor, along
with toilet paper and crumpled tissues.
Graffiti, not especially creative, are on
the walls and, a touch of the twentieth
century, an automatic hand dryer. For
which I’ve now no time. I wipe my hands
on my last bit of Kleenex, mechanically
wipe on more lipstick, run my fingers
through my hair. In moments I'm trans-
formed, ready to be charming, profes-
sional, and only a couple of minutes late.
What crap.

I go downstairs and enter the Writing
Center. We'll probably not, in any case,
be able to duplicate it at Baruch, not
without more political hassles than I'm
capable of getting into. Pity—it’s proba-
bly the best way to cope with remedia-
tion in writing. I almost bump into her
as I walk to the desk to find out where
I'm supposed to be meeting.

“Dr. Lederman—what are you doing
here?” And there she is, brown and smil-
ing and, an overused word, radiant. I do
not expect to meet anyone I know, and
in my confusion I don’t remember her

Reprinted from College Composition and Communication, October, 1973
Copyright © 1973 by the National Council of Teachers of English


252 COLLEGE COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION

name. But I do remember, suddenly
flooding my memory, a paper she once
wrote after our Freshman English class
visited “Harlem on my Mind” at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“I'm supposed to be at a meeting to
look at the Writing Center. How are
you? How have you been? Do you see
any of the other SEEK kids?”

“Oh, I see Ruby and Laura all the
time. And do you remember Olga Alver-
ez”

“Do you ever see David Jones? I know
that he came here after the SEEK Cen-
ter.”

“He was here, but he got into some
kind of trouble, came back to school
with a scar on his face. He had problems
with his wife and, you know, sort of
vanished. Louis Morales is still here
and),.°.°

“When are you graduating?”

“In June, so are Ruby and Laura.
We've gone to summer school for three
summers, but we're graduating on time.”

I am finally speechless. Three years
have passed since I taught them Fresh-
man English at the University Center
SEEK. It was an experimental first year;
then they transferred to City College and
I went on to teach at Baruch. I thought
of them, of course, many times. But I
have not seen them and, despite the
thoughts, never called them. Ruby,
Laura and Dolores (of course, she is
Dolores)—they were so worried, my
triumvirate, that our Center was “easier”
than City College would be. I told them
that if they got an “A” from me they
could get “A” from anybody.

“How are you doing?”

“Oh, fine. I’m married and we just
moved to Mount Vernon.”

“What does your husband do?”

“He’s an accountant. You know, I’ve
gotten a few “C’s” but mostly there’ve
been “A’s” and “B's.” I’ve got a 3.7 aver-
age. Ruby is on the Dean’s List. She got
married about six months ago; Laura is

getting married in the Spring.

“Not to the men they were engaged to
then? Which one was going out with
that handsome policeman?”

“Laura. No, Soecve been several in
between!”

She keeps looking, surreptitiously, at
my left hand. I laugh. Yes, I’ve married
again.”

“How is re son? Does he still play
chess? You know, whenever I look at the
chess column in the newspaper I think of
him.”

What a memory from Freshman Eng-
lish-my son for whom I had no baby-
sitter one day. “Yes, he’s still playing
chess. He's in the sixth grade now.” We
go on, leaping from one shared memory
to another, trying to fill in nearly three
years.

“Do you remember Julio Lopez?”

I know, before she says it, what she
is going to tell me. He was a man, not a
boy, when he was in my class, an angry
volatile man with a wife and a six-year-
old daughter. Before that he had spent
some time in jail.

“He's in jail for shooting a judge. Can
you imagine—”

I can imagine, I think, and though I
know, with the professional judgment
born in these past years, that I had ex-
pected something like that, I do not like
the knowing, the confirmation. He had
been a talented writer. Completely un-
disciplined, not able to spell or punctu-
ate correctly, but he could write. We
read Down These Mean Streets, and he
said, “That’s shit. Any of us could write
better than that.”

“Go home and show me,” I had said.
And he did. We published his essay in
the school magazine at the end of the
year. With punctuation and normal
spelling it moved, beautiful and shock-
ing. He was always in trouble with one
or another of the teachers. He was inso-
lent, they said, late, defiant. He cut
classes. He wore a black sombrero and

TAUGHT 253

tightly fitting pants. Costumes and masks
were important symbols to us then.
Somehow, we got along, although he was
touchy about my criticism of his writ-
ing. I was critical; that’s what I was
there for.

One day, late in the afternoon, we
were going around in the usual circles in
conference. Finally, I looked up from
his paper and said, “I’m white and Jew-
ish, and you perceive me as an au-
thority figure, don’t you?”

“No, he answered, “I perceive you as
an intelligent and beautiful woman.” I
looked up, but he was serious. It was no
con and no pitch. I laughed and accused
him of acting the part of the stereotyped

-Latin. But he began to accept some of

my suggestions about his writing. He
told me why he resented Jews, of his
mother’s life in the garment district, of
the trouble with the unions. I am Jewish,
but he told me things that came out of
his life experiences. I argued with him
about his acceptance of pean ie and
told him that I resented his holding me
the “exception.”

And now I know that he is in jail. His
life was predictable; it could, I guess,
have been predicted at many points even
before I met him. As Dolores talked
about him, I realized that he had, in the
intervening years, become a kind of
metaphor for me of what ghetto life can
do. There was, in him, something beauti-
ful which had been perverted. My hus-
band would argue with me and say
that each individual is responsible for his
fate. Legally, Julio is accepting responsi-
bility for what he did. Morally, all of us
whose life touched his are also somehow
responsible. The theory of individual
guilt is a comforting one, but I think it’s
at least partly a lie.

I look again at Dolores, so chattery
and so beautiful. I know that she and
Ruby and Laura have also become meta-
phors for me. Once, when someone at a
college faculty meeting quoted from the

Jensen report, I thought how irrelevant
statistics are. At once, images of a few of
my best Black students had passed
through my mind. In their Freshman
year these three girls had worked, slaved,
hung on every word, argued, laughed,
learned. They earned their “A’s.”

“Dolores,” I ask suddenly, “what was
your average in high school?” It had
nothing to do with what we were talk-
ing about, but suddenly it was important
to know.

She laughs, “I guess around 75.”

I think of a debate that my white,
lower- and middle-class Seniors at Ba-
ruch had on Open Admissions. How
dreadful some thought it was that stu-
dents with averages in the seventies were
admitted to college. They debated
whether or not Open Admissions and
special programs like SEEK were work-
ing. I had said that we needed to re-
define “working.”

All three of these girls would never
have been admitted to City College on
their high school averages. All three had
“made it” in every sense of the word.
Dolores wants to go on to graduate
school. She’s thinking of going into social
work. I hope, someday, that they'll de-
cide that they want to teach. What dif-
ference has SEEK made in their lives?
Is it only the statistics that are impor-
tant? Despite those students who over-
cut, collect stipends and then eventually
drop out, there are my three beautiful
young women. And how many more?
They will marry professional men and
bring back to their society everything
that they potentially were and have been
able to become. How to measure this?
How to tell this to my Baruch Seniors?

I look at her, and I would like to keep
on talking. But I am already a half hour
late for my meeting. She tells me that her
phone has not been installed yet, but she
takes my home and school numbers
down.

“Please call me,” I tell her. “I want to


254 COLLEGE COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION

see the three of you.” I want to see them;
I have a class that I’d like them to meet.
And they are suddenly very important
to me.

But they don’t exist for me merely as
illustrations of what “culturally de-
prived” students can achieve in college.
It goes much, much deeper. My memory
leaps back.

Towards the middle of the year at the
SEEK Center some militant students and
militant young faculty got together and
began what tured out to be a revolu-
tion. It was the year for that, remember?
Throughout the semester there were
large, angry group meetings. Classes
were cancelled and teachers met with
students in large groups. I went to most
of the meetings, not because I supported
the idea of a rebellion; I was even then
too cynical to think that this was a viable
solution for us. I felt that I had an obli-
gation to attend those meetings for
which my classes had been cancelled. At
one of these meetings, a particularly an-
gry session, students distributed a long
list of accusations against various teach-
ers and academic practices at the Cen-
ter. My Freshman English class was
singled out because I had organized it
around “ethnic” literature, including
Irish and Jewish as well as Black and
Hispanic literature. However, since the
makeup of the SEEK student body was
neither Irish nor Jewish I was accused
of teaching something “irrelevant.”

Ruby got up at this meeting and, as a
student in that class, denied the charge.
She mentioned that we had done thin|
other than those indicated by my book-
list. We had gone to see museum shows
and films. We did read Black and His-
panic literature. She was magnificent. It
was not easy for someone Black, at that
moment and in that emotional climate,
to defend a white teacher. But the young
Black woman stood up and said what she
wanted to say.

Hours later, after the meeting at the

Writing Center ends, I leave the Harris
Building. I find the subway station and,
on the train going home, I think again
about the three of them. I wonder if the
men they've chosen will make them hap-
py: I hope they've chosen wisely and are,
besides, lucky. I am suddenly protective.
I would do anything I could to insure
them productive, good, safe lives.

But they are Black women; if, in the
next years, after they work and save
money and try to move to my brother-in-
law's block in a New Jersey town, their
real estate agent will be accused of
block-busting. I prefer, for the time, not
to think about that. Now, at this moment,
they seem to hold worlds in their hands.
Such fragile worlds—yet, in a small way,
I helped make them able to reach for
them.

The rivalries of my college, the lure
of promotions, the endless meetings of
my life all merge and, for a moment,
finally fade. The only reality is in their
lives, in my classrooms. The only thing
that I do that is worth doing happens
there, if it happens at all. And when it
happens, I may never even know it.

I think of images from my own past.
My father, dead these four years, who
would have been so proud to see me en-
ter the Harris Building of his magical
City College, as a colleague from another
part of City University—who would have
been so proud to see me talking to a
former student in the corridors of the
buildings he walked.

I think of the few English teachers
whose anecdotes I sometimes remember,
whose comments about a character in a
story or poem sometimes leap, inadver-
tently, from my mouth as I face a class
of my own. A few of them gave me
something that I have treasured. I
should write to tell them that one of
their students went on to get a doctorate
in English and is now teaching in col-
lege . .. now having some small influence
on the lives of some of the generation

TAUGHT 255

after her. What continuity, what rele-
vance, what joy there is, lies in this.
And I feel, for a few moments, as the
subway door opens, spilling me out with
the crowd at my station, a willingness to

go upstairs and read my students’ pa-
pers, a wild kind of exaltation.

Bernard M. Baruch College
C.U.N.Y.

SS