Reading Compreh...

Now, what are we to make of this sputtering debate, in which charges of imperialism are met by equally passionate accusations of vandalism, in which each side hates the other, and yet each seems to have its share of reason? It occurs to me that perhaps what we have here is one of those debates in which the opposing sides, unbeknownst to themselves, share myopia that will turn out to be the most interesting and important feature of the whole discussion, a debate, for instance, like that of the Founding Fathers over the nature of the franchise. Think of all the energy and passion spent debating the question of property qualifications, or direct versus legislative elections, while all long, unmentioned and unimagined, was the fact-to us so central- that women and slaves were never considered for any kind of vote. While everyone is busy fighting over what should be taught in the classroom, something is being overlooked. 

In college, young people continue to be assigned certain books, but far more important are the books they discover for themselves browsing in the library, in bookstores, on the shelves of friends, one book leading to another, back and forth in history and across languages and cultures. After graduation, they continue to read and in the fullness of time produce a new generation of readers. Oh happy land$$!$$ I wish we all lived there. In that country of real readers, voluntary, active, self-determined readers, a debate like the current one over the canon would not be taking place. Or if it did, it would be as a kind of parlor game: What books would you take to a desert island? Everyone would know that the top-ten list was merely a tiny fraction of the books one would read in a lifetime. It would not seem racist or sexist or hopelessly hidebound to put Nathaniel Hawthorne on the list and not Toni Morrison$$.^2$$ It would be more like putting oatmeal and not noodles on the breakfast menu- a choice partly arbitrary, partly a nod to the national past, and partly, dare one says it, a kind of reverse affirmative action: School might frankly be the place where one reads the books that are a little off-putting, that have gone a little cold, that you might overlook because they do not address, in reader-friendly contemporary fashion, the issues most immediately at stake in modern life but that, with a little study, turn out to have a great deal to say. Being on the list wouldn't mean so much. It might even add to a writer's cachet not to be on the list, to be in one way or another too heady, too daring, too exciting to be ground up into institutional folder for teenagers. Generations of high school kids have been turned off to George Eliot$$^3$$ by being forced to read Silas Marner at a tender age. One can imagine a whole new readership for her of grown-ups were left to approach Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda with open minds, at their leisure. $$^1$$Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bront$$\ddot{e}$$, is a nineteenth-century novel, Judy Blume writes contemporary young adult novels. $$^2$$ Hawthorne was a nineteenth-century American writer. Toni Morrison is a contemporary American writer. $$^3$$ George Eliot was the pseudonym of a nineteenth-century female British novelist.

My entry into Black women's history was serendipitous. In the preface to Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, I recount the story of exactly how Shirley Herd(who, in addition to teaching in the local school system, was also president of the Indianapolis chapter of the National Council of Negro Women) successfully provoked me into changing my research and writing focus. Although I dedicate this volume to her and to her best friend, fellow club woman and retired primary school teacher Virtea Downey, I still blush at the fact that I went to graduate school to become a historian in order to contribute to the Black Struggle for social justice and yet met her request to write a history of Black women in Indiana with condescension. I had never even thought about Black women as historical subjects with their own relations to a state's history and I thought her invitation and phone call extraordinarily intrusive. Only later did I concede how straightforward and reasonable had been her request to redress a historical omission. Black women were conspicuous by their absence. None of the social studies texts or state histories that Herd and Downey had used to teach their students made mention of the contributions of Black women. Since historians had left them out, Herd reasoned, only a "real" historian could put them in, and since I was the only tenured$$\ast$$ Black woman historian in the state of Indiana at that time, the task was mine.

Herd rejected my reservations and completely ignored my admonitions that she could not call up a historian and order a book the way you drive up to a fast-food restaurant and order a hamburger. In spite of my assertions of ignorance about the history of Black women in Indiana and my confession of having never studied the subject in any history course or examined any manuscript sources pertaining to their lives, Herd preserved. Black women, as historical subjects and agents, were as invisible to me as they had been to school textbook writers. Undaunted by my response, Herd demanded that I connect(thankfully without perfect symmetry) my biology and autobiography, my race, and gender, my being a Black woman, to my skill as a historian, and write for her and for the local chapter members of the National Council history of Black women in Indiana. I relented and wrote the book When the Truth Is Told: Black Women's Culture and Community in Indiana, $$1875-1950$$, as requested. In the process, I was both humbled and astounded by the array of rich primary source materials Herd, Downey, and the other club women had spent two years collecting. There were diaries, club notes, church souvenir booklets, photographs, club minutes, birth, death, and marriage certificates, letters, and handwritten country and local histories. Collectively this material revealed a universe I never knew existed in spite of having lived with Black women all of my life and being one myself. Or perhaps more accurately, I knew a universe of Black women existed. I simply had not envisioned its historical meaning. $$\ast$$ tenure: a permanent position, often granted to a teacher after a specified number of years of demonstrated competence.

My entry into Black women's history was serendipitous. In the preface to Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, I recount the story of exactly how Shirley Herd(who, in addition to teaching in the local school system, was also president of the Indianapolis chapter of the National Council of Negro Women) successfully provoked me into changing my research and writing focus. Although I dedicate this volume to her and to her best friend, fellow club woman and retired primary school teacher Virtea Downey, I still blush at the fact that I went to graduate school to become a historian in order to contribute to the Black Struggle for social justice and yet met her request to write a history of Black women in Indiana with condescension. I had never even thought about Black women as historical subjects with their own relations to a state's history and I thought her invitation and phone call extraordinarily intrusive. Only later did I concede how straightforward and reasonable had been her request to redress a historical omission. Black women were conspicuous by their absence. None of the social studies texts or state histories that Herd and Downey had used to teach their students made mention of the contributions of Black women. Since historians had left them out, Herd reasoned, only a "real" historian could put them in, and since I was the only tenured$$\ast$$ Black woman historian in the state of Indiana at that time, the task was mine.

Herd rejected my reservations and completely ignored my admonitions that she could not call up a historian and order a book the way you drive up to a fast-food restaurant and order a hamburger. In spite of my assertions of ignorance about the history of Black women in Indiana and my confession of having never studied the subject in any history course or examined any manuscript sources pertaining to their lives, Herd preserved. Black women, as historical subjects and agents, were as invisible to me as they had been to school textbook writers. Undaunted by my response, Herd demanded that I connect(thankfully without perfect symmetry) my biology and autobiography, my race, and gender, my being a Black woman, to my skill as a historian, and write for her and for the local chapter members of the National Council history of Black women in Indiana. I relented and wrote the book When the Truth Is Told: Black Women's Culture and Community in Indiana, $$1875-1950$$, as requested. In the process, I was both humbled and astounded by the array of rich primary source materials Herd, Downey, and the other club women had spent two years collecting. There were diaries, club notes, church souvenir booklets, photographs, club minutes, birth, death, and marriage certificates, letters, and handwritten country and local histories. Collectively this material revealed a universe I never knew existed in spite of having lived with Black women all of my life and being one myself. Or perhaps more accurately, I knew a universe of Black women existed. I simply had not envisioned its historical meaning. $$\ast$$ tenure: a permanent position, often granted to a teacher after a specified number of years of demonstrated competence.

My entry into Black women's history was serendipitous. In the preface to Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, I recount the story of exactly how Shirley Herd(who, in addition to teaching in the local school system, was also president of the Indianapolis chapter of the National Council of Negro Women) successfully provoked me into changing my research and writing focus. Although I dedicate this volume to her and to her best friend, fellow club woman and retired primary school teacher Virtea Downey, I still blush at the fact that I went to graduate school to become a historian in order to contribute to the Black Struggle for social justice and yet met her request to write a history of Black women in Indiana with condescension. I had never even thought about Black women as historical subjects with their own relations to a state's history and I thought her invitation and phone call extraordinarily intrusive. Only later did I concede how straightforward and reasonable had been her request to redress a historical omission. Black women were conspicuous by their absence. None of the social studies texts or state histories that Herd and Downey had used to teach their students made mention of the contributions of Black women. Since historians had left them out, Herd reasoned, only a "real" historian could put them in, and since I was the only tenured$$\ast$$ Black woman historian in the state of Indiana at that time, the task was mine.

Herd rejected my reservations and completely ignored my admonitions that she could not call up a historian and order a book the way you drive up to a fast-food restaurant and order a hamburger. In spite of my assertions of ignorance about the history of Black women in Indiana and my confession of having never studied the subject in any history course or examined any manuscript sources pertaining to their lives, Herd preserved. Black women, as historical subjects and agents, were as invisible to me as they had been to school textbook writers. Undaunted by my response, Herd demanded that I connect(thankfully without perfect symmetry) my biology and autobiography, my race, and gender, my being a Black woman, to my skill as a historian, and write for her and for the local chapter members of the National Council history of Black women in Indiana. I relented and wrote the book When the Truth Is Told: Black Women's Culture and Community in Indiana, $$1875-1950$$, as requested. In the process, I was both humbled and astounded by the array of rich primary source materials Herd, Downey, and the other club women had spent two years collecting. There were diaries, club notes, church souvenir booklets, photographs, club minutes, birth, death, and marriage certificates, letters, and handwritten country and local histories. Collectively this material revealed a universe I never knew existed in spite of having lived with Black women all of my life and being one myself. Or perhaps more accurately, I knew a universe of Black women existed. I simply had not envisioned its historical meaning. $$\ast$$ tenure: a permanent position, often granted to a teacher after a specified number of years of demonstrated competence.

Inside, we sat on wonderfully comfortable seats that were tilted back so that you lay in a sort of a hammock, attention directed to the bowl of the ceiling, which soon turned dark blue, with a faint rim of light around the edge. There was some splendid, commanding music. The adults all around were shushing the children, trying to make them stop cracking their potato chip bags. Then a man's voice, an eloquent professional voice, began to speak slowly, out of the walls. The voice reminded me a little of the way radio announcers used to introduce a piece of classical music or describe the progress of the Royal Family to Westminster Abbey on one of their royal occasions. There was a faint echo-chamber effect. The dark ceiling was filled with stars. They came out not all at once but one after another, the way stars really do come out at night, though more quickly. The Milky Way galaxy appeared, was moving closer; stars swam into brilliance and kept on going, disappearing beyond the edges of the sky-screen or behind my head. While the flow of light continued, the voice presented stunning facts. From a few light-years away, it announced, the sun appears as a bright star, and the planets are not visible.
From a few dozen light-years away, the Sun is not visible, either, to the naked eye. And that distance-a few dozen light-years-is only about a thousandth part of the distance from the Sun to the center of our galaxy, one galaxy, which itself contains about two hundred billion stars. And is, in turn, one of the millions, perhaps billions, of galaxies. Innumerable repetitions, innumerable variations. All this rolled past my head, too, like balls of lightning. Now realism was abandoned, for familiar artifice. A model of the solar system was spinning away in its elegant style. A bright bug took off from the Earth, heading for Jupiter. I set my dodging and shrinking mind sternly to recording facts. The mass of Jupiter two and a half times that of all the other planets put together. The Great Red Spot. The thirteen moons. Past Jupiter, a glance at the eccentric orbit of Pluto, the icy rings of Saturn. Back to Earth and moving into hot and dazzling Venus. Atmospheric pressure ninety times ours. 23129Moonless Mercury rotating three times while circling the Sun twice; an odd arrangement, not as satisfying as what they used to tell us -that it rotated once as it circled the Sun.57553 No perpetual  darkness after all. Why did they give out such confident information, only to announce later that it was quite wrong? Finally, the picture already familiar from magazines: the red soil of Mars, the blooming pink sky. When the show was over I sat in my seat while children clambered over me, making no comments on anything they had just seen or heard. They were pestering their keepers for eatables and further entertainments. An effort had been made to get their attention, to take it away from canned drinks and potato chips and fix it on various knowns and unkowns and 92598, and it seemed to have failed. A good thing, too, I thought. Children have natural immunity, most of them, and it shouldn't be tampered with. As for the adults who would deplore it, the ones who promoted this show, weren't they immune themselves to the extent that they could put in the echo-chamber effects, the music, the solemnity, simulating the awe that they supposed they ought to feel? Awe- what was that supposed to be? A fit of the shivers when you looked out the window? Once you knew what it was, you wouldn't be courting it.

My entry into Black women's history was serendipitous. In the preface to Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, I recount the story of exactly how Shirley Herd(who, in addition to teaching in the local school system, was also president of the Indianapolis chapter of the National Council of Negro Women) successfully provoked me into changing my research and writing focus. Although I dedicate this volume to her and to her best friend, fellow club woman and retired primary school teacher Virtea Downey, I still blush at the fact that I went to graduate school to become a historian in order to contribute to the Black Struggle for social justice and yet met her request to write a history of Black women in Indiana with condescension. I had never even thought about Black women as historical subjects with their own relations to a state's history and I thought her invitation and phone call extraordinarily intrusive. Only later did I concede how straightforward and reasonable had been her request to redress a historical omission. Black women were conspicuous by their absence. None of the social studies texts or state histories that Herd and Downey had used to teach their students made mention of the contributions of Black women. Since historians had left them out, Herd reasoned, only a "real" historian could put them in, and since I was the only tenured$$\ast$$ Black woman historian in the state of Indiana at that time, the task was mine.

Herd rejected my reservations and completely ignored my admonitions that she could not call up a historian and order a book the way you drive up to a fast-food restaurant and order a hamburger. In spite of my assertions of ignorance about the history of Black women in Indiana and my confession of having never studied the subject in any history course or examined any manuscript sources pertaining to their lives, Herd preserved. Black women, as historical subjects and agents, were as invisible to me as they had been to school textbook writers. Undaunted by my response, Herd demanded that I connect(thankfully without perfect symmetry) my biology and autobiography, my race, and gender, my being a Black woman, to my skill as a historian, and write for her and for the local chapter members of the National Council history of Black women in Indiana. I relented and wrote the book When the Truth Is Told: Black Women's Culture and Community in Indiana, $$1875-1950$$, as requested. In the process, I was both humbled and astounded by the array of rich primary source materials Herd, Downey, and the other club women had spent two years collecting. There were diaries, club notes, church souvenir booklets, photographs, club minutes, birth, death, and marriage certificates, letters, and handwritten country and local histories. Collectively this material revealed a universe I never knew existed in spite of having lived with Black women all of my life and being one myself. Or perhaps more accurately, I knew a universe of Black women existed. I simply had not envisioned its historical meaning. $$\ast$$ tenure: a permanent position, often granted to a teacher after a specified number of years of demonstrated competence.

Inside, we sat on wonderfully comfortable seats that were tilted back so that you lay in a sort of a hammock, attention directed to the bowl of the ceiling, which soon turned dark blue, with a faint rim of light around the edge. There was some splendid, commanding music. The adults all around were shushing the children, trying to make them stop cracking their potato chip bags. Then a man's voice, an eloquent professional voice, began to speak slowly, out of the walls. The voice reminded me a little of the way radio announcers used to introduce a piece of classical music or describe the progress of the Royal Family to Westminster Abbey on one of their royal occasions. There was a faint echo-chamber effect. The dark ceiling was filled with stars. They came out not all at once but one after another, the way stars really do come out at night, though more quickly. The Milky Way galaxy appeared, was moving closer; stars swam into brilliance and kept on going, disappearing beyond the edges of the sky-screen or behind my head. While the flow of light continued, the voice presented stunning facts. From a few light-years away, it announced, the sun appears as a bright star, and the planets are not visible.
From a few dozen light-years away, the Sun is not visible, either, to the naked eye. And that distance-a few dozen light-years-is only about a thousandth part of the distance from the Sun to the center of our galaxy, one galaxy, which itself contains about two hundred billion stars. And is, in turn, one of the millions, perhaps billions, of galaxies. Innumerable repetitions, innumerable variations. All this rolled past my head, too, like balls of lightning. Now realism was abandoned, for familiar artifice. A model of the solar system was spinning away in its elegant style. A bright bug took off from the Earth, heading for Jupiter. I set my dodging and shrinking mind sternly to recording facts. The mass of Jupiter two and a half times that of all the other planets put together. The Great Red Spot. The thirteen moons. Past Jupiter, a glance at the eccentric orbit of Pluto, the icy rings of Saturn. Back to Earth and moving into hot and dazzling Venus. Atmospheric pressure ninety times ours. 23129Moonless Mercury rotating three times while circling the Sun twice; an odd arrangement, not as satisfying as what they used to tell us -that it rotated once as it circled the Sun.57553 No perpetual  darkness after all. Why did they give out such confident information, only to announce later that it was quite wrong? Finally, the picture already familiar from magazines: the red soil of Mars, the blooming pink sky. When the show was over I sat in my seat while children clambered over me, making no comments on anything they had just seen or heard. They were pestering their keepers for eatables and further entertainments. An effort had been made to get their attention, to take it away from canned drinks and potato chips and fix it on various knowns and unkowns and 92598, and it seemed to have failed. A good thing, too, I thought. Children have natural immunity, most of them, and it shouldn't be tampered with. As for the adults who would deplore it, the ones who promoted this show, weren't they immune themselves to the extent that they could put in the echo-chamber effects, the music, the solemnity, simulating the awe that they supposed they ought to feel? Awe- what was that supposed to be? A fit of the shivers when you looked out the window? Once you knew what it was, you wouldn't be courting it.