Example One: Racist!

Maya began by puzzling through ways of expressing her prior knowledge about plantations. She referred to an illustration from a book titled Harriet and the Promise Land by Jacob Lawrence that the class had read the day before, pictured above the transcript here. Maya began to describe the architecture of white supremacy iconic in representations of US slavery. In so doing, she attempted to situate Harriet within the landscape in physical terms (what was behind and surrounding her in the illustration) as well as in social terms (where she worked versus where she lived). In turn 7, Maya landed on the idea that the white house is “donde los blancos viven” (“where whites lived”). In turn 8, Ms. Daniella acknowledged Maya’s response by saying “gracias” (“thank you”) and immediately following that Anais issued an accusation audible to the entire class: “RACIST!” Despite all of the preceding talk ensuing in Spanish, Rosa uttered this word in English.

In a lower tone mimicking a male voice instigating a fight, Rosa leveled an accusation that positioned Maya as the racist speaker and Rosa as the defender of those victims of her speech. On the one hand it may seem that Rosa was defending whiteness, reproducing claims to “reverse racism” in which whites are victims of racism when black and brown speakers critique personal and structural forms of racism in the society (Reyes, 2011, p. 461).1 On the other hand, by emulating a fighting voice through a muffled and more baritone within this particular classroom, Rosa’s utterance has traces or echoes of black and brown males calling out injustice when confronted with racist speech, behavior, and systems. In Rosa’s neighborhood—a densely populated, urban immigrant setting—it is possible that she had heard these cries from males of color before.

Preceding and following her cry of RACIST—which, notably, neither Maya nor Ms. Daniella took up even as other students’ curiosity was peaked in line 10—Rosa made two other important contributions to the discursive landscape. First, both of the times that Maya said the word blanco (white; in line 2 referring to the color of an unnamed object and in line 6 referring to white as skin color), Rosa responded with a loud cough. We can tell that this cough was purposeful and performative because it sounded exactly the same both times, as if she was clearing her throat very loudly or as if she wanted to muffle the word white. In her analysis of Korean-American fifth graders crying racist in after school contexts, Angela Reyes (2011) also found that coughing has semiotic significance when students delivered their accusation of racist embedded within a cough. But Rosa’s cough precedes her utterance RACIST. Here, it serves to mute the word white and signal that skin color should remain unheard and therefore also unspoken. Second: once Rosa issued her accusation and another student repeated it as an interrogative, as if to instigate a confrontation within the fight frame, Rosa began whistling as if to feign innocence, pretending that she hadn’t set off any social and linguistic alarms. In doing so, she concluded the sequence after having first tried to mask Maya’s talk about race, then framing the discussion of race as racist, and finally pretending that the exchange never happened.

After hearing from this first round of students, Ms. Daniella drew the class’ attention to the still photo projected on the SMARTBoard. This was her second pedagogical move—predictable to the students yet contingent on their developing understandings and novel articulations—in which Ms. Daniella extended the discussion by using visual or textual scaffolds to elicit additional interpretations of the key term. Seated in the original semicircle facing a digital reproduction of a black and white photograph taken in a Mississippi cotton field during the first years of the 19^th century, the students offered another round of ideas including: synonyms and translations for plantación, hypotheses about the kinship relations of those pictured, and evidence of hard physical labor being exerted in the cotton field.

Ms. Daniella noticed that Crystal had offered a comment that hadn’t been heard or taken up by her classmates. She turned to Crystal and asked if she wanted to share her commentary with the rest of the class. Some of Crystal’s peers responded by shushing each other to create an opening for Crystal to talk.

Example Two: There Is Nothing Racist

In her response—first muffled privately to Ms. Daniella and then projected for the entire class to hear—Crystal employed a racial lexicon particular to the Dominican Republic and Spanish-speaking Caribbean to denote the darker skin tones of the individuals pictured.2 Colloquially, the terms prieta (in turn 4) and morena (in turn 10) have different valences: the former can have a more negative connotation than the latter, but the significance of each depends on the speaker’s tone, intent, and manner of speaking in context. If we read Crystal’s use of prieta in light of the language that precedes it—a description of black people as hard-working—then we can see that she did not intend the term as a racial epithet but instead as a way of depicting the oppressive conditions that slaves endured in the cotton fields. Here, Crystal underscored the inhumane realities of slavery by using a term that signifies a shared history of racialization in the Caribbean. In response to Crystal’s commentary—made all the more meaningful because of the phenotypes she shared with the individuals pictured—Anais hissed loudly in turn 5 in response to the utterance prieta, as if to signal to Crystal that this term was not acceptable in the classroom.

As we can see, in this conversation, Anais’ numerous attempts to silence talk about race occurred not only when whiteness was referenced by her peers but also when different terms for connoting blackness were uttered. Here, Ms. Daniella recognized the impact of Anais’ hissing sound and issued the first of many metapragmatic statements about race that she would make during the Resistencia unit—that there was nothing racist in observing race. Understanding the meaning of Crystal’s contribution as “about race”—as she described the hard work endured by slaves as a result of the unequal power relations between blacks and the invisible white masters invoked in this photo—Ms. Daniella encouraged students to continue deepening the exchange instead of allowing Anais to shut down the conversation. Still, Crystal revised her terminology, shifting from prietas to morenas in turn 10, in response to Anais’ forceful response. Yet again, Anais used para-linguistic cues to communicate her discomfort with the discussion—coughing loudly to drown out Crystal’s talk—at which point Crystal moved away from descriptions of race towards a hypothesis about the kinship relations of the individuals pictured. Ms. Daniella followed along, making connections between this observation about kinship and a previous one, then calling on another student to continue the discussion.

Example Three: Americans, Whites

Anais took a different tack on evading talk about race this time—switching from silencing talk to filling in the silence produced by the very discomfort produced by the subject with national terms instead of racialized ones. Responding to the peer authority that Anais had asserted in establishing metapragmatic norms in the previous examples, Monika ceded to Anais’ reframing in this instance. But Ms. Daniella once again intervened and sanctioned Monika’s use of the term white. Recognizing that this was the term she originally sought to utter, Monika said it and proceeded to describe the violence that whites had the power to inflict on slaves who resisted the conditions of slavery by learning to read.

The children in Ms. Daniella’s class heard Sarny’s narrative as one that cast a light on their own experiences in the United States. We could imagine many possible readings of this young adult novel—ones in which the students find very little identification with the protagonist (imaging hearing comments like: “those families,” “those people,” “that girl”) versus ones in which the students see themselves reflected in some way in the fictional narrative of an enslaved girl (we’ll listen out for these kinds of comments in the following examples: “we also,” “my life is like that too”). Depending on one’s point of view and membership in a racialized group, one could read Sarny’s account as historical (in a distant past), about blackness (as in, about us or about others), and fictional (not real or relevant). However, we will see that the children in Ms. Daniella’s class expressed a nuanced and humanizing relation to this text.

Ms. Daniella continued reading from Chapter Four as Mami confirms Monika’s prediction, describing the physical harm that would come to Nightjohn if he continued teaching Sarny and others to read. In this excerpt, Nightjohn reveals that he had once escaped slavery, making it safely to the North, but that here he was back on the plantation. As Sarny and Mami await his account of why he found himself back on the plantation, the children in Ms. Daniella’s class were also full of anticipation. Ms. Daniella read on as Sarny described Mami’s reaction to Nightjohn’s account:

Ella se quedó esperando a ver qué decía. Y yo también.

—La primera vez que me escapé no tuve problemas. Me fui al norte. Era libre.

Nunca había oído nada igual. Ni siquiera nos dejaban hablar de ser libres. Y aquí estaba él diciendo que había conseguido la libertad yéndose al norte. Y pensé: «¿Pero cómo puede ser verdad?».

—¿Qué te fuiste corriendo y te escapaste?

—Pues sí.

—¿Saliste corriendo hasta que te escapaste del todo?

—Pues sí.

—¿Y volviste?

—Pues sí.

The English version reads:

She waited. I waited.

“First time I ran I got clean away. I went north, all the way. I was free.”

I’d never heard such a thing. We couldn’t even talk about being free. And here was a man said he had been free by running north. I thought, how can that be?

“You ran and got away?” mammy asked.

“I did.”

“You ran until you were clean away?”

“I did.”

“And you came back?”

“I did.”

The next word in the book is why?, but instead of immediately reading on, Ms. Daniella posed the same question to the class. The children’s responses to why Nightjohn would make the trip from North to South, returning after making the arduous journey, precisely echoed the language I had heard family members use in the focal girls’ homes to describe the trip that parents, adults, and even some children had made from their Latin American countries of origin to the United States. The children offered ideas, once again clustered around themes. Many of them connected north-south and return migration to the personal connections lost and sought through relocation: por su familia, para estar con toda su familia, porque conocer amigos, busca un lugar de ir, convivir. Others made connections to the economics of migration, suggesting that Nightjohn returned south: por el dinero, como no puede comer, va ser mas dificil. And a couple of children puzzled through ways of describing the experience of surveillance through contributions like para que no lo ataquen, va ser dificil su vida / como que se canso de seguir corriendo, corriendo, corriendo. Only one child suggested that it was crazy for Nightjohn to return to slavery, literally calling him loco (crazy). Strikingly, the remaining children considered his decision reasonable and quickly furnished justifications linked to kinship and friendship, money, and risk.

Once the children began expressing other connections to the novel, they continued to do so throughout this day and into the ones that followed. Sometimes the class employed a metapragmatic framing device they had learned from years of participating in a popular literacy program called the Teachers College Reading Workshop throughout the course of elementary school.3 Through this pedagogy, the students were socialized to state that they wanted to make a connection to text or talk they encountered in the class, and we can hear the students seeing themselves in Sarny. For other students, their affiliating response was so visceral they just called it out. Let’s listen in to one last stretch of reading and meaning making from the Nightjohn read-aloud. Here, Ms. Daniella continued reading from the part of the story where Sarny describes living in the barracks—describing in detail the suffering endured and expressed by slaves as they returned to their overcrowded sleeping quarters after toiling in the cotton fields.

Example Four: I Have a Connection

If reading in English, Ms. Daniella would have said:

It’s never quiet in the quarters. During the day the young ones run and scrabble and fight or cry and there’s always a gaggle of them. At night everybody be sleeping. But not quiet. But they’s some of them to cry. New workers who are just old enough to be working in the fields cry sometimes in their sleep.

Ms. Daniella continued reading as Sarny described the slaves’ physical pain:

Anais, who had previously taken the lead in establishing classroom norms for conversation—from the metapragmatics of talking about race to the available lexicon for describing characters in the novel in national or racialized terms—now shirked the classroom norms of raising her hand before speaking. As she listened to Ms. Daniella describe the painful hands of the slaves, she likened it to her father’s hands in turn 3, a manual laborer working in difficult conditions with few workers’ rights and next to no health care as an undocumented construction worker. Ms. Daniella continued reading, as Sarny went on to describe the sound of older slaves crying at night in the barracks. Eric, concerned, asked in turn 5 whether the children felt this pain too and Ms. Daniella affirmed, yes. The reading continued as Sarny turned to describe the sleeping arrangements in the barracks.

In English:

Some snore. Others just breathe loud. It’s a long building and dark except for the light coming in the door and the small windows, but it’s never quiet. Not even at night.

Listening to Ms. Daniella read Sarny’s description of the audible snoring in the barracks, following the audible sounds of the old and young crying, Eric interrupted the reading. Using the framing device “I have a connection,” he paused and waited for Ms. Daniella to ratify his turn.

Eric revisited the class’ earlier discussion of kinship here, revealing for us a spiraling curriculum that the children themselves created throughout this read-aloud sequence. The guiding trope of family had been on the children’s mind since the first day of the sequence—recall Example Two where Crystal had made a connection to William’s hypothesis that the plantation photo depicted a family. Here, that spiraling theme connected both Anais and Eric to Sarny’s narrative (as it had for other children on other days, when Arlene and Crystal both evoked their families living in rural parts of the Dominican Republic). Ending the exchange in the hopes of reading more before the class period ended amidst a flurry of bids for more and more turns—Ms. Daniella!, Ms. Daniella!—Ms. Daniella acknowledged ya sé que tienen conexiones (I know that you have connections) and continued reading.