Choosing a Core Text
Submitted by Taylor Stoehr (profile)

Strategy: In Dorchester, we do not read a series of different books but choose rather to focus on a single core text, coming back to it at every session, along with a set of shorter ancillary readings - excerpts from related writings - that highlight the issues unfolding in our primary author. Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of an American Slave serves as our core reading. Not only does the Narrative give us scope to talk about childhood and education, punishment and self-discipline, manliness, prudence, and violence, as problems of basic humanity, but it also deals with these in the context of American slavery and its legacy of racism and injustice - important subjects for a student body primarily African American. And Douglass's story is vigorously told and accessible to men who are out of the habit of reading.

By choosing a core text rather than a series of books from different points of view, we sacrifice range for depth. Douglass is compact enough to be read a few short chapters at a time, allowing the addition each week of secondary texts stapled together in a handout - thirty or forty pages in all. Douglass's life gives us our main themes for discussion, while Malcolm X, Bill Russell, Richard Wright, and others furnish contrasting perspectives that make it easy to pose questions without inviting "book reports" when we begin to ask for writing.

Purpose: We have tried to maintain awareness of historical development and diverse experience without loosening the grip of personal drama in our texts: what does it mean to grow up in a racist society? lose your parents? be denied the ability to read and write? be beaten routinely and coerced into obedience? to live plotting disobedience and secret resistance? be caught in acts punishable by hard labor and chains? to give up in despair? hit bottom and rise again?

That, essentially, is the background of the story Douglass tells, while in the foreground we see him discovering his own powers and claiming his freedom. Because we gradually get to "know" him as a human being, his experience can be absorbed as more than a set of caveats and maxims. In many ways his life was just like Malcolm's or Russell's or Wright's, layered and burdened by the past, often confused and uncertain, full of good and bad, not yet finished. Identifying with his story as it unfolds is a way for our probationers to enter a "safe emergency situation" - re-experiencing at a distance the anxieties of their own lives - for they too struggle in desperate times, their manhood sorely tested, the outcome still uncertain. To consider such challenges in "literature" is one way of experiencing choice and consequence with open eyes and unclenched fists.

Douglass's Narrative can be read as personal history or as an indictment of slavery. It is both at once. Reading the Narrative therefore demonstrates the possibility of standing back from traumatic events in order to comprehend their true significance, as Douglass regularly alternates pages in which he scrutinizes the slaveholding system as a whole with those in which he speaks of his own thoughts and feelings about growing up a slave. This double awareness is the kind of consciousness we are attempting to foster in our probationers, to help them understand and begin to change the world they must live in.

We also consider Douglass's story against a series of similar accounts from a single faraway culture, choosing authors from the high Russian tradition - Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Gorky - more or less contemporaries of Douglass. We pick stories, or excerpts from longer works, that confront the same disturbing and essential life problems found not only in Douglass but also in Malcolm X, Richard Wright, and other prominent black Americans - the experience of punishment and bondage, fortitude and resistance, loss and despair. But it is our core text that keeps it all in focus for us, and that provides the key example, a heroic model of self-determination and civic conscience that our students can admire and emulate.