Stories of Resilience in Childhood

Narratives of Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, John Edgar Wideman and Tobias Wolff

Daniel D. Challener

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367334048
• eBook ISBN: 9781000639049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What helps a child overcome extraordinary obstacles? Why do some children surmount many difficulties and go on to live fulfilling lives while other children who face similar difficulties end up living desperate, sad lives? What helps children beat the odds? What builds resilience in children?

These are critically important questions, yet for too long social scientists, doctors, psychologists and teachers have studied children who failed and tried to figure out what caused the failure. Only relatively recently have they begun to focus on what creates success.

Originally published in 1997, this book is an effort to understand better what contributes to a child's "success" and "resilience". The source of information will be autobiographies of childhoods – autobiographical stories written by adults remembering their difficult childhoods. This is not a research study or case study, rather it is an attempt to read and listen to five stories about resilient children and see what they can tell us about supporting children and building resilience.

I

Resilience, Autobiography, and Children

What helps a child overcome extraordinary obstacles? Why do some children surmount many difficulties and go on to live fulfilling lives while other children who face similar difficulties end up living desperate, sad lives? What helps children beat the odds? What builds resilience in children?

These are critically important questions, yet for too long social scientists, doctors, psychologists, and teachers have studied children who failed and tried to figure out what caused the failure. They identified high school dropouts, for example, and then worked backwards to try to find out what caused the student to leave school. Only relatively recently has much effort been made to understand what creates success—what helps children overcome obstacles and beat the odds.

This book is an effort to understand better what contributes to a child’s “success” and “resilience,” Our source of information will be autobiographies of childhoods—autobiographical stories written by adults remembering their difficult childhoods. This is not a research study with scientifically randomly selected participants who were matched with a control group. Nor is this a series of case studies created from the answers to a rigorous and consistent protocol of questions asked by trained researchers who interviewed a representative sample of resilient children. Rather, this is an attempt to read and listen to five stories about resilient children and see what they tell us about supporting children and building resilience.

I will argue, of course, that these stories offer a depth and breadth uncommon to the articles on child development and building resilience in publications like Journal of Adolescent Research or the Journal of Personality and Social Psychiatry. I believe that as we look at the story that John Wideman tells or that Tobias Wolff tells we can get a new and different vista on “resilience” and childhood. This is not to say that Wideman’s story tells us more than an article in the Journal of Adolescent Research. It is, however, simply to say that Brothers and Keepers can tell us something about childhood and resilience worth thinking about. And, I believe that at the close of this century, with more than one in every five children growing up in poverty and with more than half of these children living with only one parent, we must try to understand and support the forces that help children overcome the many obstacles that they now so commonly face.

I. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF RESILIENT CHILDREN

Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye presents the antithetical realities of childhood in America: for some children it is heaven and for others it is hell. Morrison prefaces each chapter of her novel with excerpts from the classic American reader Fun with Dick and Jane. These passages describe the mythical childhood that American children who grew up in the 1950’s were all supposed to have. A family consists of a mother and a father, a son and a daughter. They live in a small white suburban house that has a nice front lawn and is surrounded by a white picket fence. They are all happy:

Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy … See Mother. Mother is very nice. Mother, will you play with Jane? Mother laughs. Laugh, Mother, laugh. See Father. He is big and strong. Father, will you play with Jane? Father is smiling. Smile, Father, smile. (7)

Morrison juxtaposes this vision of childhood with her own story about the horrific childhood of Pecola Breedlove, the central character of The Bluest Eye. Pecola’s childhood is nothing short of a nightmare. With her parents and her brother, Pecola lives in a tiny one room apartment that is filled with wornout furniture. Her parents fight all the time, often venting their anger by beating Pecola and telling her that she is ugly. At school she is humiliated by her classmates, who wear nicer clothes and get more praise from the teacher. Ultimately, Pecola is raped by her father and the resulting baby dies at birth. Shunned by all in the community, Pecola retreats into silence and, finally, madness. We last see her, alone, picking through garbage at a dump on the edge of town.

Depending on one’s sensibilities, The Bluest Eye is either powerful or hopelessly melodramatic. One is either moved by the pathos of Pecola’s dreadful childhood or scornful of the extremes of Morrison’s plot and prose. Yet, regardless of how one reacts to Morrison’s first novel, there are remarkable similarities between some of the scenes in Morrison’s novel and Maya Angelou’s childhood autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Indeed, if we look at both works side by side, it seems as if Morrison could have based some scenes from her novel on some scenes from Angelou’s childhood.

No doubt, Pecola Breedlove and Maya Angelou have much in common. Poor, Black, and female, both girls suffer through many of the same indignities. Both girls are abandoned by their parents, humiliated by white children and white adults, and made to feel as if they are inferior to white children. In the face of such desperate situations, both girls dream of being different, of looking like the white children who are praised in their towns. Pecola dreams of having blue eyes and blond hair. She believes that if she looks like the American dream child she will be treated accordingly and her problems will disappear:

It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different … If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say, “Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes.…

Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year, she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that happen would take a long, long time. (40)

In much the same way, Maya Angelou dreams the same dream of looking like the idealized blond haired, blue eyed white child her community seems to love. In fact, Angelou begins I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by recounting one of her many versions of this dream:

As I’d watched Momma put ruffles on the hem and cute little tucks around the waist [of a new dress], I knew that once I put it on I’d look like a movie star … I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody’s dream of what was right with the world …

Wouldn’t they be surprised when one day I woke out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn’t let me straighten? My light-blue eyes were going to hypnotize them, after all the things they said about “my daddy must of been a Chinaman” … because my eyes were so small and squinty. Then they would understand why I had never picked up a Southern accent, or spoke the common slang, and why I had to be forced to eat pigs” tails and snouts. Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil. (1–2)

While the girls share similar dreams, they also share the same nightmare. Both girls are raped. Pecola is raped by her father; Maya Angelou is raped by her mother’s frustrated lover. In the aftermath, both girls come to believe that they somehow deserved to be raped. Full of shame and self-hatred, both girls retreat into silence and depression.

Despite similarities of race, gender, and experience, Pecola Breedlove and Maya Angelou ultimately end up in very different places. Whereas Pecola Breedlove’s childhood ends in tragedy, Maya Angelou’s childhood ends in triumph and hope. Whereas The Bluest Eye culminates with Pecola’s total isolation from her family and society, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ends with Maya’s successful reunion with her family and clear demonstrations of her autonomy and competence.

Why the antithetical endings? What is it that enables some children like Maya Angelou to overcome the odds while other children like Pecola Breedlove do not? More specifically, what can autobiographies about childhood tell us about the resilience of children who face multiple challenges? What can we learn about the characteristics and forces that allow children like Maya Angelou to emerge victorious from difficult childhoods? Are there similar supports that help resilient children like Maya Angelou and Richard Rodriguez, Tobias Wolff and Maxine Kingston? Is there one type of support that all resilient children must have? Is there one obstacle that is insurmountable? In sum, what is it that help builds resilience?

In the pages that follow, I examine five autobiographies of children who grew up in the United States. Like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, each of these autobiographies is about a child who faced considerable hardship yet ultimately prospered and became an autonomous and competent adult. In my title and throughout the pages that follow, I refer to these children as “resilient” children. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “resilient” as “the ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune; buoyancy.” This is something of what I have in mind, but so too is the definition Emmy Werner uses in Vulnerable but Invincible, her path-breaking longitudinal study of disadvantaged children from the Hawaiian island of Kauai. In this study, Werner defines resilience as “the capacity to cope effectively with the internal stresses of their vulnerabilities … and external stresses” (4). Werner goes on to develop a precise process for determining which of her subjects are “resilient” children; they have faced at least four of ten predictive factors that Werner defines carefully and by age eighteen each has demonstrated certain specific positive traits, as measured by interviews and psychological tests.

In deciding which autobiographies qualified as the autobiography of a resilient child, I used a much less rigidly quantifiable process than did Dr. Werner. I defined resilience in broader, simpler, more personal terms; for me a resilient child was one who faced considerable challenges—more than those of an average child—yet ultimately was able, as an adult, to function as an independent, caring individual. Using this broad definition, I found a plethora of autobiographies of resilient children to choose from.

To narrow down my choices, I made several decisions. First, I decided that I wanted to examine diverse childhoods and thereby give myself the opportunity to think about many different issues and many different experiences. Consequently, I chose five autobiographies that recounted childhoods that were fundamentally different from each other. Not coincidentally, four of these five works are written by non- white writers. In part, this reflects my aim to examine diverse childhoods, for being African-American, Mexican-American, or Chinese-American usually insures, for better and for worse, that your childhood will be different from that of many other children. This over-representation of minority children also reflects the harsh reality that in the United States, Black, Asian, and Hispanic children too frequently have the “opportunity” to be resilient because their minority status forces them to face a daunting list of obstacles that large numbers of white children never face.

William Andrews has argued, convincingly, that the minority writer’s sense of being marginalized is a powerful impetus to write autobiography and thus be heard. This, Andrews contends, helps to explain the wealth of autobiographies written by African-American authors (195–210). Certainly, this may explain why I found such a disproportionate number of autobiographies of resilient minority children to choose from. However, I hope that the over-representation of stories about children of color does not mislead any reader about the demographics of children who face extraordinary challenges. In fact, in the United States, a majority of children facing the most commonly cited characteristics of disadvantage are white. According to the Children’s Defense Fund, almost two thirds of all poor children in America are white. White children make up more than half of the population of children who live in one parent homes, drop out of school, give birth to children while in their teens, and get arrested for violent crimes.

Another criterion I used in choosing autobiographies was publication date: I wanted to examine as contemporary a collection as possible. Consequently, each of the autobiographies in this study was published after 1970. With the single exception of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, each tells the story of a child who grew up in the latter half of the 20th century. For the most part, this decision reflects not only my area of literary interest, but also my professional training and experience. Over the last decade I have had the opportunity to teach and work with children labeled as “disadvantaged” in New York City, Trenton, New Jersey, and Providence, Rhode Island. In the late 1980’s, through the generosity of The Ford Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, I conducted three years of research on “at-risk” children (and, thus, I know first hand how much research was done working backwards, from children who “failed”). And most recently, through the generosity of several Rhode Island foundations and corporations, I have had the opportunity to study Providence’s public schools and their impact on children. Working with these five autobiographies provided me a fruitful opportunity to draw from and expand on my understanding of the lives of contemporary American children.

Having mentioned recent publication and diversity of experience as criteria for my choices of autobiographies, I must acknowledge that the most important criteria for selecting these five autobiographies was personal taste. Quite simply, these five autobiographies are, in my opinion, the most interesting and most powerful of the more than fifty autobiographies of twentieth century American children that I considered. Why I favored these autobiographies often depended on the experiences described—some autobiographies just seem more interesting to me, just as some lives are more interesting than others. But in selecting autobiographies, the voices that told the autobiographies were often very important in my selection process. A compelling and fascinating voice tells each of these autobiographies, one that not only intrigued me but also helped me to think in other ways about the childhood of the storyteller.

Having acknowledged how important “voice” was in my selection process, I should warn my reader that in each succeeding chapter I look at the voice that tells the story and then briefly discuss that voice and how it tells its tale. I do so advisedly. The general status of stylistics—as a critical method—has been challenged by recent theoretical critiques. Long gone are the days when critics could blithely assert that form compels meaning and that the frequent use of non-finite progressives reveals the one true meaning of an autobiography. Yet, my goal in attempting brief discussions of voice is to provide another way of talking about these works, another way of describing what I hear in these autobiographies. George Dillon is right, I think, when he argues

One engages in formal analysis to specify and articulate one’s own response and perhaps to share it with others … Under this model, we can hope the results will be interesting, striking, or suggestive, enhancing our sense of how the parts can be orchestrated and bringing to notice things we had not seen before. If that’s the game, then it is not a question of it being too easy or hard to play, and the proper response to a successful piece of stylistic analysis would be “I see” and not “You’ve proved your point.” (75)

Certainly, what I highlight in my brief discussion of voice reveals my own interpretation of the work and my own biases and background as Talbot Taylor, in Linguistic Theory and Structural Stylistics, argues it must (107). As more than one of my readers has pointed out, my interpretations reveal a lot about me and how I understand childhood and children.

Although I will discuss the qualities of the voices of these autobiographies, ultimately I will spend more time discussing a fascinating commonality in all of them: each autobiography recounts, at considerable length, how each child struggled to escape being silenced. These autobiographies document how these children, in one way or another, struggled to “speak,” to use words in order to establish an identity that was acceptable to themselves and break away from an identity that others had tried to impose on them.

To be sure, these struggles differ dramatically. In The Woman Warrior, Max...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Stories of Resilience in Childhood
• 1. Resilience, Autobiography, and Children
• 2. When A Whole Village Raises a Child: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• 3. Desperate to be The All-American Boy: This Boy’s Life
• 4. Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts: The Woman Warrior
• 5. The Education and Mis-education of “Rich-heard Road-ree-guess”: Hunger of Memory
• 6. Big Brother, Little Brother: Brothers and Keepers
• 7. Resilience or Silence
• 8. Selected Bibliography
• 9. Index