Years ago I was moved by Death at an Early Age Jonathan Kozol’s award-winning book chronicling his first year of teaching, and the plight of poor children in the Boston school system. Forty plus years later, I am moved again this time by Deborah Hick’s book The Road Out (Book 3 of 2014) The Road Out chronicles Hicks attempt to give several at risk girls in the Cincinnati school system a road out, through a top quality literature education. For several years Hicks conducts a special literature class for these girls in trying to give them something that they didn’t have hope and dreams, Dreams about where they could go and what they could be, by using the power of the written word. Seven girls Blair, Alicia, Adriana, Jessica, Elizabeth, Mariah,and Shannon. Seven girls growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Cincinnati.Children whose parents and grandparents came from the hills of Appalachia to the industrial centers of Ohio, to chase the American dream only to have that dream crushed.They watched their jobs be shipped out of the country, have the factories close, and their communities turned into ghettos with rampant unemployment, and drug use particularly Oxycontin…
As I read this book, I said damn, children in America should not have to live like this. They shouldn’t have to watch good mothers descend into the black hole created by prescription drug use, and then join the women standing on the street with other who sell their bodies for the drug they crave. Or worse yet, get pulled out of class because their mother was found dead of a drug overdose. And then have to face a school system that does little except teach to the test. I asked myself, knowing the answer, who stole the American Dream? W/hat did we do to get to this point throughout our great land that once was a beacon of hope throughout the world!! This thought has led me to Hedrick Smith’s book appropriately titled Who Stole the American Dream!!
But Hicks stepped into this world determined to give these girls something that she felt she never had growing up a first-rate education and a chance to live their dreams. Through literature she had these young girls, who struggle in their regular classrooms, examining their lives, finding themselves in the pages of many books, and then writing about their lives and dreams. They even produced their own magazine! She had them thinking and dreaming about attending college and creating a better life for themselves. As I read the book I started to think about my reading and education. I tend to read only for the story and rarely think about what deeper message the book may contain. The mysteries and many of the thrillers that I read have a single character be it Dave Robicheaux, Cork O’Connor, Mitch Rapp, or earlier in my reading days a Dirk Pitt battling evil. Is that because I am an only child??? Throughout my lifetime, I have shied away from literature especially classic lit! The result is, I don’t think I’ve ever analyzed literature the way that Hicks had these girls analyzing the books they were reading, looking for connections to their lives in the story, identifying with the heroine. So I was off to the library, first I picked up How to Read Literature Like a Professor. I figured any help I can get on deeper reading is a plus!! Then I picked up Plainsong by Kent Haruf. I had already put Let the Great World Spin on my Kindle. Neither of these books are my typical read, but maybe they can provide some insight into the world around me!!
But back to Hicks and the girls. One of the books that she had the girls read and analyze was Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Several of the girls immediately identified with the book just based on the title!
“I’m a bastard!” said Alicia.
“I’m a bastard” echoed Mariah “I’m bastard. “I’m proud to f…in’ say it, I’m a bastard”
You know my only cousin that is not a bastard,” said Alicia, “Is the baby that Margie is carrying right no, ’cause her and Xavier are married. That’s my only cousin that’s not a bastard.”
Remember these girls are pre-teens and early teens! Anyway, here’s what Allison writes about the book…
“The Road Out is a terrible wonderful read – terrible for the hard painful lives that it shows so closely and wonderful for the sense of hope and purpose that comes through so powerfully”
While Carol Stack the author of All Our Kin and Call to Home writes:
“A wrenching extraordinary tale. The Road Out is not a story of victims but a story of passion and literacy. With authority and vulnerability, Hicks uncovers unexpected insights and offers new ways to bring a love of reading along with hope into the far corners of urban life on the margins”
Both of those quotes sum up my feelings about the book better than I can! So check it Out! In closing the last thing it did was piss me off even more at the politicians who cut taxes for the rich and cut needed services for the poor and children like these girls who are living on the edge through no fault of their own!!
