Robert Coles - Handing One Another Along: Literature and Social Reflection

ALSO BY ROBERT COLES

Teaching Stories: An Anthology on the Power of Learning and Literature

Bruce Springsteens America

Lives of Moral Leadership

The Moral Intelligence of Children

Children of Crisis I: A Study of Courage and Fear

Still Hungry in America

The Image Is You

Uprooted Children

Teachers and the Children of Poverty

Wages of Neglect (with Maria Piers)

Drugs and Youth (with Joseph Brenner and Dermont Meagher)

Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work

The Middle Americans (with Jon Erikson)

The Geography of Faith (with Daniel Berrigan)

Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers (volume II of Children of Crisis)

The South Goes North (volume III of Children of Crisis)

Farewell to the South

Twelve to Sixteen: Early Adolescence (with Jerome Kagan)

A Spectacle unto the World: The Catholic Worker Movement (with Jon Erikson)

The Old Ones of New Mexico (with Alex Harris)

The Buses Roll (with Carol Baldwin)

The Darkness and the Light (with Doris Ulmann)

Irony in the Minds Life: Essays on Novels by James Agee, Elizabeth Bowen, and George Eliot

William Carlos Williams: The Knack of Survival in America

The Minds Fate: Ways of Seeing Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis

Eskimos, Chicanos, Indians (volume IV of Children of Crisis)

Privileged Ones: The Well-off and the Rich in America (volume V of Children of Crisis)

A Festering Sweetness (poems)

The Last and First Eskimos (with Alex Harris)

Women of Crisis I: Lives of Struggle and Hope (with Jane Coles)

Walker Percy: An American Search

Flannery OConnors South Women of Crisis II: Lives of Work and Dreams (with Jane Coles)

Dorothea Lange

The Doctor Stories of William Carlos Williams (editor)

Agee (with Ross Spears)

The Moral Life of Children

The Political Life of Children

Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage

Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion

In the Streets (with Helen Levitt)

Times of Surrender: Selected Essays

Harvard Diary: Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular

That Red Wheelbarrow: Selected Literary Essays

The Child in Our Times: Studies in the Development of Resiliency (edited with Timothy Dugan)

Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis

Rumors of Separate Worlds (poems)

The Spiritual Life of Children

The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination

Their Eyes Meeting the World: The Drawings and Paintings of Children (with Margaret Sartor)

The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism

Doing Documentary Work

The Secular Mind

When They Were Young

FOR CHILDREN

Dead End School

The Grass Pipe

Saving Face

Riding Free

Headsparks

To our many Literature of Social Reflection
(Gen. Ed. 105) students, teachers
with much gratitude, appreciation, thankfulness
for all the stories shared

PART I.

The literary and journalistic documentary tradition of social observationthe call to venture outside of what we know and attend the stories of others.

Featured: James Agee, George Orwell, and William Carlos Williams

ONE:

TWO:

THREE:

FOUR:

PART II.

Meeting so-called ordinary American working-class men and women: courage, challenge, kindness, and complexity in everyday living.

Featured: The Old Ones of New Mexico, Raymond Carver, Edward Hopper, Tillie Olsen, and Ruby Bridges

SIX:

SEVEN:

EIGHT:

NINE:

TEN:

ELEVEN:

PART III.

Ways of seeing race and identityencounters through the eyes of another.

Featured: Ralph Ellison, Flannery OConnor

TWELVE:

THIRTEEN:

FOURTEEN:

PART IV.

Intellectuals and the religious searchfinding meaning in the life given to us.

Featured: Dorothy Day, Ignazio Silone, Elie Wiesel, John Cheever, Walker Percy, Zora Neale Hurston, and a Potato Chip Truck

FIFTEEN:

SIXTEEN:

SEVENTEEN:

EIGHTEEN:

PART V.

Finding simple clarity amidst moral, psychological, and social complexity.

Featured: Paul Gauguin, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot

TWENTY:

I f I could have a sound track running for you as you read this book, you would be listening to Billie Holiday. In fact, when I taught the Harvard University course upon which this book is based, a course aimed at reflecting on life and moral courage, and how we might develop character and moral courage in our own lives, I began each class with one of her songs. Right now you might be hearing Black and Blue or Body and Soul or Them There Eyes. She was another narrator of sorts, for us, as we talk about life, literature, and art, about how we reflect upon and understand the stories around us. Billie would be singing her bloody heart out, her voice soothing, searching, telling, confessing, bringing to life all the pain and love and loss that a gifted singer can render, causing us to become more aware of our own yearnings, and the yearnings of others. Billie would join the other people, the writers, poets, photographers, and artists whose works help inspire us and are examined in the pages ahead, individuals who help us think about personal character, people who have struggled hard to reconcile scholarly, literary, artistic interests and pursuits with moral concerns, with the enduring questions of where do we come from, what are we, and where are we going. These and other questions are directly and artistically renderedfor example, by Paul Gauguin in his painting Do venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? O Allons-nous?, a work we will visit toward the end of this book. With written and visual stories as our guides, we embark on a journey, exploring the world through social reflection and observation of a particular kind. The idea is to venture outside of our own immediate experiences, to wonder about and wander with others in search of an understanding that will enable us to hand one another along.

With Billie Holiday providing the ambient accompaniment, we join James Agee in Alabama and George Orwell in the Midlands of England. We meet Dr. William Carlos Williams, a physician from Rutherford, New Jersey, who every day made house calls to his patients, carrying his black bag up tenement stairs. In the evening, stethoscope put aside and typewriter picked up, Williams composed poems and stories and worked on novels, trying to give us a sense of what it meant to be with particular Americans, as he knew them in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

While Billie sings of longing, we meet the writer Raymond Carver, whose family moved from Arkansas to the West Coast, working in factories and in the fields. We meet the people who populate his poems and short stories: blue-collar workers, waitresses, motel workers, people who are washed out, or who are drying out. Yet for all their pain, their marginality and vulnerability, the redemptive epiphanies in Carvers stories are not unlike the epiphanies all of us have, or hope to have, as we come to terms with the deep beauty and deep disruptions of life.