125 Sitting In The Dark: The
Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Sitting In The Dark
At 213 Second Street we lived over
the printing office Granddad owned, the Zimmer
Printing Company. "Since
1898," his swinging sign read. It was located only a block and
streetcars was the Pennsylvania
Railroad right of way and tracks which followed the river
down to Pittsburgh. Our second floor
bay window hung over the town's main intersection
where trolleys from Charleroi and
Donora passed constantly, clanging and hissing, all lit
up in the dark night.
An incredible vision, these things,
orange metal animals with people in their stomachs,
throwing illuminated reflections in
color onto the ceiling of our living room by an optical
process I often thought to have
explained to me, but never did. Bright sparks flew from
their wheels and fell from the air
around the overhead power lines, burning sharp holes in
dark places. From our perch, we
could also see long freight trains roaring along the river,
sending an orchestra of clanks and
whistle shrieks into the sky. We could watch great
paddle-wheel steamers plying the
river in both directions, filling the air with columns of
white steam.
From early till late, Grandmother
Mossie sat rocking. She sat at the window facing the
river, quietly observing this
mechanical show of riverboat, train, and streetcar — four tiers
of movement if you count the stream
of auto traffic, five if you include the pedestrians,
our neighbors, flowing north and
south on Main far into the night hours. She seldom
ventured to the street from our
apartment after her great disgrace of fifteen years earlier,
when lack of money forced her to
move abruptly one day from a large home with marble
fireplaces. (She never spoke to my
grandfather, not a word, after that, though they ate two
meals a day at the same small
table.) The telephone supplied sufficient new data about
neighbors, enough so she could chart
the transit of the civilization she had once known
face to face.
Sitting with Moss in the darkness
was always magic. Keeping track of the mechanisms
out there, each with its own
personality, rolling and gliding this way or that on
mysterious errands, watching
grandmother smoke Chesterfield after Chesterfield with
which she would write glowing words
in the air for me to read, beginning with my name,
"Jackie." Seen that way,
words became exciting. I couldn't get enough of them. Imagine
the two of us sitting there year
after year, never holding a recognizable conversation yet
never tiring of each other's
company. Sometimes Moss would ask me to find numbers in
the inspired graphics of an
eccentric comic strip, "Toonerville Trolley," so she could
gamble two cents with the barber
across the street who ran numbers in the intervals
between clipping his customers'
hair.
Although we really didn't hold
conversation in any customary fashion, Moss would
comment out loud on a wide range of
matters, often making allusions beyond my ken.
Was she speaking to herself? I would
react or not. Sometimes I asked a question. After a
smoke-filled interval, she might
answer. Sometimes she would teach me nonsense riddles
like "A titimus, a tatimus, it
took two 't's to tie two 't's to two small trees, How many 't's
are in all that?" Or tongue
twisters like "rubber baby buggy bumpers" or "she sells sea
shells by the sea shore," which
I was supposed to say ten times in a row as fast as I could.
Sometimes these were verses that
would sound ugly to modern ears, as in "God made a
nigger, He made him in the night;
God made a nigger but forgot to make him white." Yet
I have good reason to believe Moss
never actually met or spoke with a black person in
her entire life or harbored any
ill-will toward one. It was just a word game, its only
significance word play. Put that in
your pipe and smoke it.
On the subject of race, we all
learned to sing about black people, officially, in third grade:
"Darktown Strutters Ball,"
"Old Black Joe," and others. No discussion of race preceded
or followed; they were just songs.
Before you conclude my memories are daft and that
Mon City must be a bigoted place,
you need to know its tiny population contained the
broadest diversity of ethnic groups
living together in harmony. Ninety years earlier it had
been a regular stop on the
Underground Railroad. The barn of the Anawalt house was
used for that purpose all through
the 1850s.
If Vico's notion in The New Science
is correct, we encounter the world in ways first
implicit in ourselves. There can be
no filling of blank slates in education, no pouring of
wisdom into empty children. If Vico
is correct, the Monongahela I bring dripping to you
from the bottom of my river memory
is a private city, revealing the interior of my own
mind. Whether you believe that the
Fall is real or only a metaphor for the feeling we get
when by losing our way home we find
ourselves cut off from the creative source, who I
am and why I taught the way I did is
long ago and far away in that town, those people,
that green river, not in any course
of scientific pedagogy.
I Hung Around A Lot In Monongahela
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