Honesty

Class Friday was Dreadfully Dull. I asked my students to read excerpts from papers they were turning in that day on Their Eyes Were Watching God. One student after another regurgitated points we had made all week about Janie's quest for independence and love, about how her hair represented her freedom, or about the porch's important role in the African American community. But no one had anything to say, positive or negative, about the other students' writings. We were going through the motions of a class, a group of isolated individuals sitting together but not really connecting.

Then C. volunteered to read from his paper. He launched into a description of his early childhood as an Asian student in a predominately white community in the mid west. He talked about the favoritism he received from some teachers because he was the only minority in the class; he described the rock thrown through his family's window because they were "other." And he compared himself to the least likable character in the novel we had read, a black woman who hates her race and wishes she were white. C. described how he sometimes wishes he weren't Asian, and how he sometimes hates a white majority that leads him into that moment of self-denial.

He put it all out there, his anger, his confusion, his desire to be different, and his darkest feelings about himself society and God. But it was all in the context of a novel we read in class, from a student who seldom contributes and who is not the strongest academic student in the room.

When he stopped speaking, there was nervous laughter followed by authentic applause. The previously disengaged students were riveted. They had been shocked out of their reveries by C's honesty. And while C. read, we were all tied together by his scathing, brutally honest connection to a troubling character in a novel. What a powerful moment, one of those electric days in a classroom.