When Hope Is a Shadow

Driving along Okeechobee Boulevard and watching the sun rise from the ocean, I saw a man standing on a street corner beneath a palm tree and a traffic light. This man was Florida, at least in my mind. I had come to this stretch of white sand between Palm Beach County and Miami where land and ocean comingle in a love/hate relationship the year before to work the school year at Wilkes Honors College as a visiting writer. The area, commonly called South Florida, radiated from inside this pedestrian outward, until the smaller human became the larger neighborhood. Or, if you believe Ezra Pound, and I did until he went crazy, you can’t know one unless you feel its representation in the other. I felt Florida when I drove past this single resident.

A pure white mane, and mane is the best word I can think of, topped his body. The hair had the textured sheen of expensive silk and it framed a peanut butter colored face that included a firmly set square jaw. The skin, damaged by long term exposure to sunlight, resembled a paper bag. It was as if someone or something had wadded it up and then tried to smooth it before gluing it over his skull. The man wore a white tee-shirt not nearly as clean looking as his hair, faded jeans, and the omnipresent pair of flip-flops, those chunks of bald rubber tires that pass for wing tips once you drive south of Jacksonville on I-95. He listed left as if he were the mast on a sailboat taking water over the bow. Red rimmed eyes blinked at me as I waved, but he seemed to take no notice of my gesture.

Like southern Florida, the man stood in a casual state of disarray somewhere between vacation and work, criminal activity and vagrancy, sleep and exhausted attempts at survival. I could see in him the struggle between the swamps and the concrete humanity, the battle between bulldozers and mangroves that generated an economy based on nothing but the construction and landscaping of empty buildings. This war was constant. Once an area of swamp was drained and filled in, a foundation poured and walls set in place, the vegetation attacked relentlessly to take back what always had and always would belong to nature.

Eventually, home owners, vacationers, investment firms, security providers, retirees, and medical corporations, along with the ancillary businesses that serviced them such as high-end restaurants, exclusive boutiques, plastic surgeons, pet spas, surf shops, Mercedes dealers, and Jewish community centers filled the low, white adobe buildings covered with orange tiled roofs.  The builders moved to another swamp and began pouring concrete again, raising more white and orange cenotaphs to architectural sameness. This process, along with tourism, drove the economic engine of South Florida for two hundred years.  By the time I arrived, however, that engine had begun to misfire. Little by little, the ferns, mangroves, and alligators were retaking the sandy ground.

Everywhere I looked between Jupiter and Miami, on PGA Boulevard, on Highway 1, along the Florida Turnpike and between the palm trees of I-95, new buildings remained unoccupied and older ones stood deserted. Small clumps of saw grass and ferns replaced lawn ornaments in gated communities of unsold condos. Armies of Hispanic workers landscaped office complexes constantly, paid minimum wage, or less, by contractors hoping to rent space out before the banks foreclosed. Oh, there was still a lot of money in the hands of a few people here, but for the first time ever, ever, more people were leaving the area than coming to it.

Our capitalist society contains only so many incredibly wealthy citizens. What has always made it function successfully are the bourgeoisie, the middle managers, bank tellers, car salesmen, nurses, schoolteachers, middle-income production workers, and bureaucrats, those people who make things and buy things, those people Carl Marx loved to hate. In this respect, South Florida remains the same as most of the U.S. However, with the influx of penniless refugees, an economy that produces nothing, and a wealthy class concerned only with their wealth, inertia hangs over the Everglades like a thick, tropical fog. The healthy circulation of cash taken in and pumped back out from the middle-class has slowed to a trickle. Those in this neighborhood that provide its foundation are leaking northward, unable to exist in a climate where wages stagnate, and the cost of goods and services rise exponentially.

Of course, as with most judgment calls in my life, I remained oblivious to these facts when accepting work in Palm Beach County. The job was great. In that year, I worked two days a week on campus and spent the rest of my time finishing a new book of poems, swimming, reading, biking, hiking, and smoking expensive cigars at Sabor Havana. I was well paid and living “high on the hog” as my old man used to say. By the time the year had ended, twelve months of sunshine seemed too good to pass up in the autumn of my life. This had to be the place I would retire.

Unfortunately, the small pension and smaller royalty payments I had coming would need to be supplemented for three or four years by income from a job, just until I reached the age where my social security kicked in. As I mentioned earlier, middle income jobs were becoming scarce and the only specialized training I could boast of was teaching. There were no university jobs open within driving range, but for some reason the area was full of high school positions in almost every subject.  I had never taught at that level, but the warm Florida sun infused me with confidence. How hard could it be? Not only that, Palm Beach County had something referred to as Title I schools. I had no idea what that meant, but by the time the recruiter stopped adding on the bonuses I would receive for working at a school with this distinction, my salary would be above any I ever made teaching at a university.

I discovered very quickly the contrast between high school and college students as well as the meaning of Title 1. The difference between a classroom full of sixteen-year-olds forced by law to learn American literature and one full of twenty-year-olds paying for their education by choice can be illustrated this way, standing in the middle of a pack of junk yard dogs holding a cat or leading a herd of sheep to water. You guess which is which. Of course, this illustration works only in ordinary situations where high school students speak the same language as the teacher, where they can read and write at grade appropriate levels, where they have homes to go to, meals to eat, clothes to wear, and have avoided jail for most of their lives. The place I was assigned to renders my comparison completely inadequate.

The Everglades is a subtropical wetland shaped by water and fire, hurricanes and drought, alligators and orchids, saw grass and sloughs, water moccasins and flamingos, pine trees and manatees, Seminole Indians and Dominican immigrants, panthers and rabbits. It is a neighborhood unlike any I had ever visited in my life and I have traveled the world from opium dens in Saigon to pool halls and back alleys in Mexico and Bosnia. The difference lies in the level of alertness you bring to the environment. The Everglades sucks you into an unearthly calm one minute and then, when you least expect it, explodes in blood-thirsty carnage the next. This can be true of the people who inhabit the fringes of dry land around Lake Okeechobee as well.

More than any other socio/economic factor, human life is dominated in the small communities built on this river of grass by poverty. It seeps in around the windowsills of the adobe houses and dented trailers. It permeates the clothing and furnishings. It is fried into the cheap, starchy food that nourishes many school children only once a day. In turn, the economic deprivation nurtures hopelessness. The employment inertia stifles educational motivation. One industry provides most of the employment and then only seasonally. In an average family of four whose average income is less than eighteen thousand dollars a year, well below the poverty line, children often end up working school days during harvest season in the cane fields run by U.S. Sugar to help with household expenses. Most of them realize this as a prophecy of their future. Even if they were to graduate high school, the distance between this job and a lifelong career is measured by the number of city blocks from the fields to the nearest fast food restaurant. Their earning capacity won’t change much with education.

If both parents live at home, which is unusual, the probability exists that one may not speak English. On the other hand, it is not unusual to find at least one person living there who is HIV positive, not because of lifestyle, but rather because of life conditions in the countries they immigrated from. Many of my students lived with grandparents or answered to an aunt or uncle rather than a parent. Some had no home and bounced between relatives until landing in a jail cell or foster home within the social system. These facts didn’t come to me by way of research. I learned them through observation.

What I also learned in my brief stint as a high school teacher in a public Title I school has to do with hope. It can’t be taught. Hope can be given, shared, passed on, bestowed, conferred, bequeathed, and imparted, but not taught. The quality must exist somewhere within the fabric of community life, within the neighborhood, so that it retains a tangible feeling, a physical presence. No one can write hope on the board, allude metaphorically to its existence, or convert it from abstract concept in the classroom to reality in the world outside. For me, this was an important lesson.

This truth does not exist from lack of trying. The school I was sent to is staffed with many honest, dedicated, and hard-working professionals, at least people who begin their careers that way. This is another element of hope, its antithesis is contagious over time and immersion. The youngest (i.e. by way of exposure) brought fresh ideas and seemingly endless reserves of energy to administrative positions and to the classroom. In fact, this particular school had raised its rating level from a “D” school to a “C” school based on current FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) standards. The improvement seemed largely due to the efforts of a new principal and new faculty from the previous year, along with efforts from the mid-range troopers, those in the system between five and ten years. Some had lost drive and creativity but gained experience in survival techniques and had acquired a level of respect among the student body because of that. This grudgingly given teenaged deference allowed for some modest achievement in the Advanced Placement classes and a hint of civility in other classes.

These two stages of professional development keep the school functioning at a very basic level and allow for the appearance of improvement so long as transfusions of fresh staff continue at regular intervals. The tertiary phase of teaching at this particular Title I school, and I suspect it’s similar in southern Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia where poverty and racism remain entrenched, belonged to those professionals who had developed what we called in Vietnam the “thousand yard stare.”

After dealing with trauma for so long, the only way to maintain some sanity and functioning ability in a combat zone is to ignore on the inside the combat on the outside. Your mind simply numbs to the chaos as if it had been injected with a huge dose of Novocain. A film glazes over your eye until you witness the outside world through something like what ophthalmologists might call a traumatic cataract. Only, a physical injury hasn’t caused the problem. The violence you see every day needs emotional diffusing for your survival. A film blurs any specific or personal details. However, unlike a physical cataract this one is psychogenetic. You gaze beyond the present to avoid looking into unchanging despair. Your reasoning remains somewhat functional, protected by the “thousand-yard stare.”

I saw that resignation in the eyes of the long-term educators every day. I sensed it in the slow, shuffling gait between classes, the wrinkled shirts, food-stained ties, the inability to raise their heads at the lunch table, and the same clichéd jokes passed on regularly with a sort of dull chuckle.

I’m very much aware of hyperbole and melodrama. This last paragraph smacks of both. Consequently, let me say that good things do happen in this environment. Everglades high schools produce excellent football players. I saw a former student make a tackle for the Florida Gators just last week. A few students achieve academically and go on to a community college or university. One out of every ten that begins college finishes it. Some exhibit self-discipline and responsibility and find solid jobs outside the Glades.

Usually, these exceptions to the rule are raised by a demanding parent or traditionally minded grandparents, people who respect the value of education. In these homes, teenagers flourish. They are forced to do their homework. Their pre-school and post-school activities are closely monitored, and they are disciplined for breeches of civility in the classroom and in the neighborhood. The ones that get over an initial resentment of this authority at home expect and respond to it from caring teachers who make the effort to reach out in the classroom. We hear often that these few make the difficulties, danger, emotional burn-out, and low pay everyone who works at a Title I school suffers from worthwhile. Maybe that worn cliché had some credibility once. Maybe. However, the present cost-benefit ratio seems so disparate to me as to render the idea that teachers might save or inspire one student out of hundreds absurd, especially as motivation for new teachers.

For example, here’s what I found in this neighborhood during my first two weeks teaching five sections of American literature to juniors in high school ranging in age from 16-19. Of the approximately one hundred students, fewer than fifteen read at a grade appropriate level. In a practical sense, the vast majority had difficulty reading elementary level texts out loud. Many had no concept of what purpose a subject or a verb served in a sentence. In some cases, students couldn’t identify which was which. One of my students didn’t speak enough English to be comprehensible. This would have been understandable had he just arrived in the country or had been assigned an interpreter who communicated for him. Neither was the case. This student passed the first two years of high school taking final exams barely being able to read the language in which the test was written. A dubious miracle of sorts, I suppose, but it made teaching him The Glass Menagerie impossible for me. Yet, I was expected to have him ready for the upcoming FCAT test that would help determine the school’s future operating budget.

Our classroom had served as a chemistry lab fourteen years before my arrival. The janitor unlocked it and I scrubbed the lab tables and desks for several days to remove caked-on chemicals of undetermined origin. The gas jets were turned off, thank goodness. But, the shower stall for hazardous spills worked fine. I discovered this when a student pulled the chain and flooded the corner. Overhead, a sewage pipe leaked. I was given a bucket to catch the drippings from who knows where and a promise that the maintenance department would patch the hole within 24 hours because of the health risks. As far as I know, the bucket is still there.     

Occasionally, I saw big grey blurs scuttling up and down the walls and around the table tops. Curious, I inquired and was told that they were just “good ole southern rats.” The reason they were so huge resided in the fact that they loved sugar cane and ate it frequently as it was available everywhere. It seems no practical way to remove them exists. We learned to ignore the rustle and rattle of their little feet during class time. It was more difficult for me when alone.

Not that it mattered much, but textbooks were rare. All five of my sections, over a hundred teenagers, shared twenty-five outdated books and some of the pages were even in them.

Along with the Spanish speaking students in these sections, some others had recently been incarcerated for assault, drug dealing, and theft, among other felonies and reported to class wearing ankle bracelets from the Sheriff’s department. I was privileged to witness a SWAT team in full gear from that same place in action during the second week of school as they broke up a gang fight. Of course, several of my students were absent the next day because bail had yet to be posted.

Among the football players in my classes an attitude of privilege existed—and this was the most normal aspect—that pre-empted any attempt at classroom civility. They talked and sent text messages, listened to smart phones acquired from who knows where, and threw various projectiles at smaller, intimidated students. All the reasoning, even threatening, I did fell on deaf ears because of my impotence. Like many politicians and evangelical preachers, these kids felt above the law, and the myth of their immortality gave them a need to live up to it. Also, I had rules that, unlike student rules, were strictly enforceable. Lay a hand on a kid, get fired by the school and sued by the parents. To take away their electronic toys required laying hands on the students who simply refused to give the stuff to me and dared me to try and take it away. Ironically, these same students having expensive cell phones would go home to empty cupboards. Of course, I could use the intercom system and call for help. The administration would send me someone called a vice-principal who served primarily as an enforcer. He would remove the student to his office, threaten to call parents or guardians, and send the student back where the whole series of actions began all over.

Added to the situations in my classroom that I’ve already mentioned were several students with serious emotional problems. These difficulties ran the gamut from autism to anger management and were well beyond my meager capabilities and nonexistent training. Some schools provided special classes with qualified teachers and counselors for Downs Syndrome and other clinical problems. Indeed, these even existed here. But they were overcrowded and understaffed already. Evidently, a student who might spend an entire class talking to himself or one who might argue constantly or rock in her chair or draw weird designs all over exposed skin or who couldn’t speak the language didn’t meet the criteria for special attention with the county school district. So, funds weren’t allotted for enough staff to work with these borderline dysfunctional poor, but rather directed to a whiter shade of schools in Palm Beach gated communities where people like Tiger Woods, Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, and Anne Coulter sheltered in mansions.

I am no social worker, psychologist, priest, or police officer. At best, I’m a person with considerable knowledge of literature and the English language and a pretty good communicator when I have an audience with whom communication is possible. In other words, I can teach the teachable fairly well. In this feral environment an ability to teach was useless for all practical purposes. The chaos that reigned enveloped all who were present, including the students who had a desire to learn and better themselves. In many circumstances, they were drawn into the madness simply to survive.

For me, the idea that life is often absurd and that hope is hidden in the shadow of this context, does not mean living a life of despair. I like the approach to absurdity that Camus makes in The Rebel. The Everglades forced me to admit to myself that in some circumstances human plans and projects for many people seem futile and in vain. But, for a person who can develop the attitude of Sisyphus and keep rolling the rock uphill, hope must exist in the daily struggle. Camus was right all along. The existential revolt all humans are capable of—to affirm the absurdity of life and continue living it—is what gives us the rebel attitude, the outlaw outlook. For me, it isn’t a matter of merely suffering the fate of all living things, or to quote Bob Dylan, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” Knowing and accepting this reality has given me the opportunity to rise above it and experience the sheer animal joy of revolting against it. Sadly, for the brief time I spent in South Florida, I learned that it was a lesson that cannot be shared. Like a shadow, hopelessness belongs to each individual and must be stepped out of to reach the sunlight.