The Road Out. Deborah Hicks

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

      BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon

      University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

      University of California Press

      Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

      University of California Press, Ltd.

      London, England

      © 2013 by Deborah Hicks

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Hicks, Deborah.

      The road out : a teacher’s odyssey in poor America / Deborah Hicks.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-520-26649-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

      eISBN 978-0-520-95371-0

      1. Poor [low income?] girls—Education—Ohio—Cincinnati. 2. Poor whites—Education—Ohio—Cincinnati. 3. Poor girls—Books and reading—Ohio—Cincinnati. 4. Poor girls—Ohio—Cincinnati—Anecdotes. Hicks, Deborah—Anecdotes. I. Title.

      LC4093.C56H532013

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Book, a fiber that contains 30% postconsumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

      I want to be lifted up

      By some great white bird unknown to the police,

      And soar for a thousand miles and be carefully hidden

      Modest and golden as one last corn grain,

      Stored with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives

      Of the unnamed poor.

      James Wright, “The Minneapolis Poem,”

      Shall We Gather at the River

      CONTENTS

      List of Illustrations

      Author’s Note

      Introduction: A Teacher on a Mission

      PART I. CHILDHOOD GHOSTS

      1. Ghost Rose Speaks

      2. Elizabeth Discovers Her Paperback

      3. We’re Sisters!

      PART II. MY LIFE AS A GIRL

      4. Girl Talk

      5. A Magazine Is Born

      6. Mrs. Bush Visits (But Not Our Class)

      7. A Saturday at the Bookstore

      8. Jessica Finds Jesus, and Elizabeth Finds Love

      9. Blair Discovers a Voice

      PART III. LEAVINGS

      10. At Sixteen

      11. Girlhood Interrupted

      12. I Deserve a Better Life

      13. The Road Out

      Epilogue

      Notes

      ILLUSTRATIONS

       Blair

       Ghost Rose

       Elizabeth

       Alicia

       Industrial landscape

       Alicia

       Adriana

       Shannon

       Jessica

       Mariah

       Jessica

      AUTHOR’S NOTE

      The stories recounted in this memoir are drawn from my work as a teacher between 2001 and 2004, and my subsequent visits and interviews with my former students between 2005 and 2008. Scenes from my childhood in a small mountain town fill in the layers of a narrative that begins with my experiences as a working-class girl and follows my journey as a teacher for other girls who lacked opportunity or access. Though I grew up in small-town Appalachia and my students were coming of age in an urban ghetto, we were connected through a twist of history. Their elders were largely migrants from Appalachia who, in the postwar decades, had left family farms and coal mines in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia to seek a better future for their children in the city.

      The basic facts of this chronicle are this: I grew up in Appalachian North Carolina, the daughter of working-class parents. My childhood was tainted not just by economic distress but by the things that often go with such distress. My parents could never escape the traumas of their dirt-poor childhoods, and I left through the only escape hatch available to a working-class girl: education. Later in life, I found myself in Cincinnati for a university job and decided to teach part time in an elementary school in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. I first worked as a volunteer in a second- and then third-grade classroom, teaching reading and writing. It was in these classrooms that I met the girls who would later become my students. I decided to form a unique class, just for girls, and we met each week during the school year and daily over the summer. Our curriculum was simple: literature and story, including these young girls’ own life stories.

      I have chosen to recount my journey in a way that portrays my students and my teaching work from the inside. In so doing, I have adapted the tools of a novelist to the task of reporting on my experiences as an educator. Readers are drawn into the inner worlds of my students, not only in my classes, but also in their homes and on the streets. Discerning