For years I tried to learn something of my father’s family, whose hyphenated French-Canadian/Franco-American/Native-American/New England history was buried in darkness. There were faint gleams here and there, fragments of stories.
The most impenetrable blackness hid my great-grandmother who died around 1925. All my father remembered was that she had a sour disposition and a mysterious trunk that was always locked. Beyond that, nothing: no photograph, no diary, no letters nor postcards, no favorite recipes, no handkerchief with an initial embroidered in the corner. Not even her name was fixed; on her children’s birth certificates it rolled like mercury through variant forms and spellings. No one knew where she had been born, or where she was buried. When she died she disappeared utterly. There was no calling her back. It amazed me that a life that extended into the 20th Century could leave so faint a trace.
One morning this spring I was notified by telephone that my first novel had received the P.E.N.-Faulkner Award. I was still walking on air when, the next day, the mail brought a photocopy of a document dated 1913. The document concerned my grandmother, then 18 years old, and her mother, the elusive woman with the locked trunk; it was the legal form giving parental permission for the minor daughter to marry. The mother’s name was on the appropriate line-but in the town clerk’s hand. To one side was a crooked, unsure X and above and below it the town clerk had written “her/mark.” X, her mark.
Until that moment it had never occurred to me that my great-grandmother had been illiterate. All at once I understood the grayed blur of her life, the crazy spellings of her name, for if you are illiterate, what do you know of spelling, even your own name? The only trace this woman left of her passage through life, save for progeny, was that labored X.
The juxtaposition of the literary award and my relative’s illiteracy awakened me to the strange half-life that the millions of people in this country who cannot read are condemned to live.
In the late 20th Century, if you are an adult who cannot read or write, you are a lump of animate clay pushed from one incomprehensible situation to another. Books are as dumb as rocks, newspapers accusingly opaque; you have to satisfy the natural human hunger for stories with television, bar jokes and radio songs; your job, if you have one, is from the bottom rack and that’s as much as you dare expect; you cannot read the home-care instructions the doctor writes out after your operation, nor can you read a vision chart; you can’t pass a driver’s test or puzzle out a note from your child’s teacher; you cannot read bedtime stories to your children; since you cannot read a ballot and cannot make sense of the issues in local or national politics, you don’t vote; you are the anxious nuisance traveler who keeps buttonholing other passengers about departure times because you cannot read the schedule; you go to restaurants that feature photographs of food, point and say, “Guess I’ll have that.”
You sweat blood over application forms-employment, credit, mortgage and loan, licenses, leases, building permits-and have to take along the spouse or work mate to fill in the answers. You’re easy to push around because you don’t know what rights you have.
Illiteracy marks you. And you know it. You are acutely, hotly ashamed and embarrassed, and the shame comes out sometimes as a hatred of books and education and smart-ass college types. You hide your dirty secret as long as you can. It may be for a lifetime. It was for my great-grandmother.
The Department of Education’s major study of adult literacy in the United States released Sept. 8, and the similar report, released a week later, “Reading Report Card for the Nation and the States” that tested 140,000 students in 41 states, shoved some depressingly bleak facts in our faces. Half of adult Americans and roughly 30 percent of students are unable to stumble through the simplest sentences and arithmetic. They are-ugly label-functionally illiterate.
Liberal helpings of blame for this rampant American illiteracy are being heaped on the usual plates: lousy teachers and a push-’em-through-school attitude; crowded schools and wild, disruptive students; barrel-scrape federal funding; numbingly bureaucratic state education departments; lack of community support; reactionary legislators; know-nothing governors; uncaring parents who let their children watch television until their brains rot. The beam of media light rarely falls on the local programs and individuals who sit on the other side of the kitchen table showing nervous and defensive people the way into words, sentences, books and enlightenment.
There are hundreds of adult education and literacy programs in the United States, some fostered by corporations and employers, some by church or religious groups, by service organizations, non-profit groups, community colleges. Many are funded to some extent by federal and state money, most depend on financing from private and community sources as well as proceeds from bake sales, author readings, raffles and dances. Although the literacy problem is national in scope, the majority of programs teaching people how to read are small, unconnected, grassroots, each with its own agenda, teaching methods and selection of materials.
Most adult literacy programs start their students out with a private teacher in a one-on-one learning experience, often in the privacy of the student’s kitchen (sometimes with all the shades pulled down) until there is enough confidence to join other new readers in this, the most heady and empowering of human skills. Yet hundreds of thousands of people who cannot read never know that such programs exist.
My own rural state of Vermont, with an estimated 16,000 illiterate adults, is strapped for cash and recently cut funding to Adult Basic Education by $100,000. On economic grounds-the common excuse-it chose not to participate in the federal Department of Education’s literacy studies, the only uninvolved New England state. Yet the state has private, non-profit adult education organizations of quality and value. Staff members, hundreds of volunteers, business people and employers, rural communities, museums, local libraries, civic and service organizations, private individuals, writers, artists, bookstore owners are involved in the work of literacy, which extends from the first private, sweaty hours to discussion groups and classes, to attendance at public literary events and involvement in the intellectual life of the community.
The Central Vermont group (there are others) has 250 volunteers; 81 percent of its $710,000 1994 budget will go for direct services to 1,000 new readers. The state and federal governments provide 76 percent of the budget, town tax dollars add another 3 percent and the rest is raised from individual and corporate sources.
But contrast this small rural state’s situation with that of Washington, D.C. In Washington, according to the non-profit, all-volunteer Washington Literacy Council, in existence for 30 years, there are 76,000 functionally illiterate adults. There are 400 volunteer tutors teaching adult new readers, and a waiting list of 45 students.
The shocker comes with the budget. The Washington Literacy Council functions-somehow-on an annual budget of $50,000. Viveca Teuber, the executive director, had her own moment of truth with the fact of illiteracy. “I used to live on Capitol Hill, behind the Library of Congress,” she said. “One day in a drug store a lady came up to me and asked me to read her a card-she wanted to buy a card for her husband. She said she’d forgotten her glasses. It didn’t occur to me that she couldn’t read. Then, a few weeks later, in a grocery store, a gentleman asked me to read the back of a medicine bottle. I thought, `Why me?’ ” A few weeks later she became a volunteer at the Washington Literacy Council and began teaching people to read.
I wish my great-grandmother had had the chance to learn.
