Other People's Words

The Cycle of Low Literacy

Victoria Purcell-Gates

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780674252899
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

If asked to identify which children rank lowest in relation to national educational norms, have higher school dropout and absence rates, and more commonly experience learning problems, few of us would know the answer: white, urban Appalachian children. These are the children and grandchildren of Appalachian families who migrated to northern cities in the 1950s to look for work. They make up this largely "invisible" urban group, a minority that represents a significant portion of the urban poor. Literacy researchers have rarely studied urban Appalachians, yet, as Victoria Purcell-Gates demonstrates in Other People's Words, their often severe literacy problems provide a unique perspective on literacy and the relationship between print and culture.A compelling case study details the author's work with one such family. The parents, who attended school off and on through the seventh grade, are unable to use public transportation, shop easily, or understand the homework their elementary-school-age son brings home because neither of them can read. But the family is not so much illiterate as low literate—the world they inhabit is an oral one, their heritage one where print had no inherent use and no inherent meaning. They have as much to learn about the culture of literacy as about written language itself.Purcell-Gates shows how access to literacy has been blocked by a confluence of factors: negative cultural stereotypes, cultural and linguistic elitism, and pedagogical obtuseness. She calls for the recruitment and training of "proactive" teachers who can assess and encourage children's progress and outlines specific intervention strategies.

1

Nonliterate in an American City

This is the story of Jenny and Donny, a mother and son who are trying to learn to read and write. They live in a midwestern city in the United States of America. The city is relatively prosperous, and so are many of its residents. A major state university is situated there.

This city is not known for its crime rate or for its poor schools. In fact, it rather prides itself on its “home-town” flavor; it is commonly said that it is a great place to raise children with traditional American values. The majority of its residents were born there, grew up in one of its many neighborhoods, and intend to live and work, raise their children, and die there. Over the years, the population has spread outward to create suburban neighborhoods and townships, but never at the cost seen in other big cities. The city, itself, still includes prosperous and professional families as well as working class ones. During the year, traditional “festivals” bring the suburban residents into the city center to celebrate with their city-dwelling neighbors. People from outlying rural areas and smaller towns regularly trek into the city to shop in its many “upscale” department stores or to sample one of the many cultural activities sponsored by the city: the opera, the symphony, the theater, and the ballet.

Jenny and Donny, however, have never been to an opera or a ballet. Nor have they ever shopped in one of the upscale stores. They never travel the mile of city blocks from their home to the downtown area where these establishments can be found. There are many reasons for this, but one is that no one in the family can read well enough to use the bus line that could take them there. They could drive one of their several cars, but no one in the family can read well enough to read the street signs or store names. They can, and do, use familiar landmarks to travel by car to some locations in the city—the welfare office, the grocery store, and the veterinarian’s. Mainly, they drive out of town whenever they can, along interstates, with their numbered exits, and familiar backroads.

There is, of course, an urban poor population in this city as in all cities. It is largely made up of two ethnic minorities—African Americans and urban Appalachians, blacks and whites. Jenny and Donny are urban Appalachian. They and Big Donny and Timmy live in the central city, for the most part segregated from their African American peers. They do not live in the worst of the ghettos, a twelve-square-block nest of grinding poverty, crime, sickness, and despair. Rather, they live at the bottom of the hill upon which the university reigns, just across the interstate that separates them from densely populated Camp Fairwell, the urban Appalachian ghetto in which Jenny grew up and where her brother and other relatives still live. Camp Fairwell is close enough for her to walk—under the overpass and she’s there in twenty minutes—to use the phone when hers is cut off and the family’s cars are inoperable.

Donny attends one of the city schools, just as his mother and father did before him. The school is integrated, with both African American and urban Appalachian children. He had attended one year of Head Start, at another location, and then one year of first grade. Kindergarten is not required in this city, although most children do attend. Donny did not, however, because Jenny did not know about it. Because she cannot read, she has to rely on friends to tell her about things like this, and no one told her about kindergarten.

At the beginning of his second-grade year, Donny could not read or write anything but his first name and, occasionally when prompted, the word the. When asked to read a nearly memorized text, he runs his finger under whole lines of print while “reading” one or two words. He is still unsure about one-third of the letters in the alphabet, reverses his b’s and d’s, and has such an aversion to reading that he will cover his eyes and exclaim, “No, no! No words for me!”

Aside from this, he is a bright, mischievous, artistically talented young boy. Polite and deferential, he is filled with ideas and his eyes gleam with humor. He loves to make things and can utilize any material—paper, string, wood, glue, glitter—in his spontaneous creations. He also loves stories, both oral ones and those read to him from books. He adores his father, loves his mother, and is careful to take care of his brother Timmy, as a big brother must. He speaks with a soft Appalachian drawl and draws upon this lively dialect to enhance his many recollections and stories.

Jenny dropped out of school in the seventh grade—as did Big Donny, after repeating it three times. She reports that neither she nor Big Donny “can read a lick.” About half of their friends, relatives, and neighbors are also unable to read, according to her. She wants to learn to read well enough to be able to help Donny with his school work. She knows he cannot read any words and is angry that the school passed him on to second grade. She is frustrated that he brings home homework which he cannot do and with which she cannot help him. The five spelling words Donny’s teacher sends home each week with a different activity each day (“arrange alphabetically,” “put each word in a sentence,” and so on) are beyond her. The list contains words like bug and sun. Not only can she not read the spelling words; she cannot read the directions from the teacher—“arrange alphabetically”—and Donny seems unable to help. Although she has “plainly told” the teacher that neither she nor Big Donny can read, the school continues to send written work home and to penalize Donny for not doing it or for doing it incorrectly. Eventually Jenny found her way up the hill to the university where I work.

“They ain’t gonna do my kid like they done me and his dad!” she protested. “They know he can’t read, but they’re just gonna pass him on. That don’t do no good; I know!”

Thus I first met Jenny in my office at the university. Long straight brownish blond hair hung lankly to her shoulders, and her faded blue eyes looked straight at me with determination. Jenny told me that while Big Donny preferred to accept his nonliteracy, she wanted to learn to read and had begun attending a neighborhood-based adult education center. She wanted to be able to read children’s books to her kids. She also wanted to be able to shop in new places without asking friends to come along to read labels and signs for her.

“It’s hard not knowin’ how to read. Some people think it’s easy . . . just sit down and do it. But it ain’t.”

Jenny was particularly concerned about the effect of her nonliteracy on Donny’s ability to learn to read and write in school. This drove her to find her way to the university-based Literacy Center, which I directed, to seek help. She knew that the Center only served children in grades 1–12, but she asked if there was any way she could “sit alongside” her son as we taught him. I suggested the following arrangement; I would work with Donny and her personally (graduate students were the primary teachers in the Center). In return, I asked her permission to record our work together so that I might study how she and her son learned to read and write. She agreed, and we began our two-year association.

Although I had devoted over twenty years to helping children and adults who have experienced problems learning to read and write, I had never before encountered a totally nonliterate family. Indeed all of my training, experience, and research led me to question Jenny’s assertion that neither she nor Big Donny could read a lick. I suspected that they could read something, even if it was not school related. If it did turn out, though, that Donny and Timmy were growing up in a nonliterate home, the implications of this for their own learning were immense. How could this happen in the United States today? What were and are the schools doing with their Jennys and Donnys? What can we learn from this case?

2

Jenny and Donny’s World

Jenny and her family are members of a low-status minority group that makes up a significant proportion of poor urban dwellers throughout the Midwest and scattered cities elsewhere.¹ The members of this group are known as “urban Appalachians,” a name that reflects their common heritage and history: people from the Appalachian mountain regions who have migrated to the cities in search of work and a better life for their children.

Urban Appalachians: The “Invisible Minority”

Urban Appalachians have been called the “invisible minority,” a term that reflects both the general lack of knowledge about them outside of the cities in which they reside and the fact that they are overwhelmingly white and thus are not recognized as a minority in a political climate that equates “minority” with “people of color.” Two scholars who study urban Appalachians, Phillip Obermiller and Michael Maloney, write that they are “invisible because their culture is not recognized and minority because when it is recognized, it is not accepted by individuals and institutions in the urban mainstream.”²

That urban Appalachians qualify as an ethnic group or as a cultural entity is not universally agreed upon, even among scholars.³ There is clear consensus, however, that they constitute a recognizable group set apart by culture and values that they brought with them to the cities and retained through kin networks and separate neighborhoods. Obermiller and Maloney provide a descriptive synthesis of urban Appalachians:

. . . this group is predominantly white, mostly Baptist or Pentecostal, and heavily blue-collar. They are for the most part of Scots-Irish or Anglo-Saxon heritage, speak with a distinct accent, and enjoy country and western, bluegrass, and “old time” gospel music. . . . Appalachian neighborhoods [are] replete with “hillbilly” bars and restaurants, Pentecostal and Baptist churches, and people speaking with mountaineer accents. Other typical lifestyle features of blue-collar Appalachian neighborhoods include pickup trucks equipped with hunting rifles, campers, body shops, and shade-tree mechanics working on their vehicles.⁴

During the mid-twentieth century, following the failure of family farms and the closing of the coal mines, migration from rural mountain areas into metropolitan ones was heavy and carried significant implications both for the southern regions left behind and for the cities that received the newcomers. Many of the Appalachian migrants acquired jobs that permitted them to improve the economic well-being of their children and to move into working-class or middle-class neighborhoods and out of the central city cores. Small towns that surround the metropolitan core cities also became heavily populated by migrants from Appalachia.⁵ Many of the men took jobs in tire factories, automobile plants, or as construction workers. Some Appalachian women became teachers, nurses, and social workers. Others took jobs in food processing or toy assembly plants.⁶

A portion of the migrants, though, never succeeded in assimilating into urban or suburban society. They live a marginal existence, eking out a living with nonskilled labor and yearning to return to their mountain homes. Jenny and her family are members of this group. It is this subgroup of the Appalachian migrant population on which I will focus and refer to as urban Appalachian.⁷

Jenny’s family left their farm in eastern Kentucky when she was three years old. They moved to the city to get medical treatment for one of her older brothers, who suffered from a liver ailment.

“My dad had to sell the farm and his land and stuff to my Uncle Bob in order to move up here to take Robert to these hospitals,” she recalls.

Once in the city, they moved in with relatives until they could find a place of their own. Her brother died of his illness within two years, but it was too late to move back.

Appalachian migrants usually move into voluntarily segregated neighborhoods in the cities. The predominant social organization system of this population is the family-kinship relation. Thus when individual family units migrate, the initial destinations are usually the homes of kin in specific city neighborhoods. Large family networks can be found within single neighborhoods, and everyday life usually involves relatives in and out of each other’s homes.⁸ These neighborhoods are for the most part complete, with churches, food and clothing stores, drug stores, bars, and restaurants.

Jenny and her two remaining brothers and two sisters grew up in one of these urban Appalachian “ghettos” (her term), one of several that exist in this city. Here they were surrounded by relatives and friends, all of whom lived in comparable poverty. Jenny remembers those years fondly, where life consisted of tightly knit groups of children playing among the abandoned and run-down buildings during the week and, if money was available, returning to their mountain homes on the weekends.

Life was hard, though, and often unpleasant. Cultural alienation, poverty, and breakdowns in familial and societal networks have contributed to the ills of urban Appalachian families. Obermiller describes the social conditions:

Urban Appalachians in poverty have high rates of coronary heart disease, diabetes, and work-related disabilities. Their children suffer from lack of perinatal care, poor nutrition, and the effects of urban pollution. Sexually transmitted diseases affect many Appalachian teenagers. Among all generations of urban Appalachians, injuries related to work are common as are illnesses due to stress and diet such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.⁹

Jenny describes her dad as a “drunk” and her mom as someone who worked during the day and drank at night and on the weekends.

“After we moved up here, then Mommy got to workin’, and when Daddy was workin’ at [a factory], got some kind of steel or somethin’ in his eye. He couldn’t see that good so he got fired or quit from there or somethin’. Then he worked somewhere else and quit. Then he was workin’ with his brothers, you know, tree work and paintin’ an’ stuff.”

Her father worked sporadically in this manner until he died of a heart attack in his fifties. Jenny’s mother worked in a store and sold beauty products on the side. A heavy smoker, she died the year after I worked with Jenny of pneumonia, a recurrent illness. Jenny also contracts pneumonia regularly and is “laid up” by it at least twice a year. Each occurrence is more severe and lasts longer. She knows she should quit smoking, but so far she cannot go more than two or three days without a cigarette.

Harsh tragedy stalked Jenny’s family as it so often seems to afflict other urban Appalachians. Soon after we met, one of Big Donny’s brothers, visiting back in the mountains, died in a trailer fire when a gasoline container burst into flames. One of Jenny’s sisters was shot in the head by her husband and suffers periodic physical and mental after-effects. Jenny’s sister-in-law, distraught over the death of her husband in the trailer fire, turned to alcohol and increasingly ignored her three children. They were soon wandering the streets during school hours, dirty and hungry. Jenny took them in and cared for them when she could, but put her foot down and refused to have them in her house when they all became infested with head lice and their mother refused to treat it. The oldest of these children became pregnant at fourteen and appealed to Jenny to intercede with her mother so that she could be seen at the local health clinic.

Goin’ Down Home

The urban Appalachian’s enduring tie to “down home” was illustrated for me soon after I met Jenny and Donny. Urban Appalachian migrants to the cities and their descendants frequently return home for visits and occasional resettlement. Return visits reflect not only nostalg...