6 posts tagged “mississippi”

All of these photos were taken today, on my ride to Rosedale, Skene, and other locales around Bolivar County, Miss. Today's roadkill count:

• 2 armadillos
• 2 possums
• 5 baby possums
• 1 raccoon
• 1 turtle
• 1 or 2 dozen assorted mice, snakes, etc.

I [heart] Mississippi.

My mental health has been the defining issue of my Mississippi Teacher Corps experience. I first began this effort by recapitulating my feelings about the Teacher Corps program, because the prospect of writing retrospectively about my own two years in Mississippi seemed so dauntingly difficult. Truth be told, there is so little to feel proud of. I have not been my best in any way, and I have underachieved as a teacher. I myself have not been a teacher fit for my ideal school, and at times it has rocked my self-belief to the very core.

My story has been a simple failure to thrive. At times I blame Mississippi, as a place I find so narrow and unappealing in many ways. Perhaps in a more nurturing and stimulating environment, I would have done better. Other times I dig in and refuse to grant power to this place for my troubles. There is a significant part of me that believes there is true love and acceptance to be found in and for any place, whatever its beauties and imperfections, and I also recognize that despite my love for the novelty of traveling and moving, I am in fact exceedingly slow to adapt socially and otherwise to a new environment for the long haul. It is entirely possible I would have been just as miserable in New York City for these past two years.

One belief has persisted and grown in me throughout it all: If I could only be happier, I would be a better teacher. My lasting depression and general lack of energy, my listlessness, my isolation and loneliness have affected my professional output profoundly. There was so little of me to give. The result caused me to look upon myself with contempt and dissatisfaction, only further contributing to my depression.

The original causes of my depression are both easy to identify and difficult to describe. The most obvious cause has been simple loneliness and isolation. Personal relationships have not gone so lucky as they did in Peace Corps, which has been the deciding factor why this experience has been considerably less happy than that one. But retrospection and the wisdom of a trusted friend has provided me with the lenses to see clearly how even that relationship in Peace Corps was a product of circumstance, which necessarily crumbled when the circumstances changed and we returned.

As much as anything, my isolation has been caused by my own shyness, my impossibly high standards, my lack of social initiative, and my slowness to adapt, all familiar enough to me. Still there has been a profound change going on within me for the last year or so that speaks volumes to my depression. It is humbling yet so, so true. The thing is, I spent my whole life, for as long as I can remember, cherishing a quaint, appealing notion of a soul-mate future spouse, the ideal partner who would complete me and fulfill my every remaining need. The dream comforted me through every social disappointment; I just knew there must be someone out there who would truly get me! Despite my antagonism toward religion, I am capable of tremendous faith, and perhaps what in some people would have been a heavenly bent, for me was a fervent belief in a future, earthly happiness to be found in my ideal match. But the expected time of the Second Coming came and went. There was Great Disappointment. And then, only relatively recently did I begin to look critically at the belief of my childhood. Looking at it now, it seems a bit obvious how unrealistic my dream was, not to mention the detrimental effect such high expectations had on my actual relationships, but for so long, the faith was so strong in me that I was oblivious to all sense about it. It was everything. In my hidden, subjective experience of life, nothing mattered more.

I sometimes take comfort in the proposition, recently speculated here or there, that happiness is a U-shaped graph and our middle years are usually the most unhappy, as our youthful expectations clash with adult disappointments. Certainly I consider this latest, internal change one of my most important steps to true maturity and independence. I no longer expect any other individual, real or imagined, to complete me. I now believe I can find happiness no matter what comes to pass in my personal relationships, even regardless of marriage or fatherhood. I guess I am the all-or-nothing sort of person, but what once seemed so indispensable now seems impossible to anticipate or rely upon. I am open to anything.

The point is, this change has not come to me without cost. It has been a tremendous grieving process for me to give up on my childhood dream, held dearly for longer than I can remember. While it lacks some of the sensory power of real memories, the dream lived with me longer and influenced me more than any real person, and so the process of grief has been nearly as strong as that following an actual death. I am sadder for the change, but ultimately stronger and I think better off.

A final, subtler reason is also responsible for my depression. It is less excusable, but happened in combination so as to work its insidious contribution. It was my attitude. Somewhere along the way, I surrendered my locus of control. I allowed the experience to define me, rather than the other way around. I shut down. I simply absorbed the misery, and I did not pursue the things I could have done to make myself more happy. I did not seek out anything.

I speak of the past two years in sweeping terms that do no justice to the many aspects of my experience. But this is not the time for entertaining anecdotes; I am telling the most pertinent truth. My experience has been tainted in every way by my depression, a tendency that existed in me beforehand but reached severe proportions during the past twelve months. But the experience to me is not over. I have been getting better and better. While my structured relationship with the Mississippi Teacher Corps program is about to end, my relationship with teaching in Mississippi is not. I expect to do better next year. For the first time in at least a year, I am starting to feel energy and optimism in my daily life, even at school.

Depression is like quicksand and gravity: The deeper you are down in it, the stronger its pull on you, and it tends to compound upon itself. The last few months have been a long, slow process for me to climb out of the deep hole I was in back in October and November, and I still have some ways to go before I reach ideal mental health. But I am proud of the progress I have made, as well as the way I have pulled through without bringing utter disaster upon myself or my school. I am particularly proud of the “C” I accomplished in research writing (and in the end probably deserved a better grade, despite missing every deadline but the most important one) even as I battled through one of my deepest-ever periods of depression.

I have made a lot of progress lately on the issue of adjusting my attitude and reasserting control over my experience of living in Mississippi, particularly on the corporeal level. I recently saw a physician about the shoulder that was bothering me. He prescribed a steroid, along with regular icing and exercises to calm down and rehabilitate my rotator cuff. It seems to be working. Regular use of the inversion table recently purchased, along with a more dedicated approach to daily stretching and exercises, have allowed me to take better control of my chronic back pain, despite a severe flare-up following my spring break hiking trip. I now feel optimistic that, while I have a troublesome back that will bother me for the rest of my life, I can take control of it, instead of the other way around. It just requires dedication. Also I recently discovered the wonders of the nonadictive, nonprescription sleeping pill. What a revelation! Sleeplessness has always been a problem for me, but for whatever reason I never really took it seriously enough to consider pills. Now I find them almost indispensible. Not only do they help me fall asleep, but the sleep that I do achieve is far more restful and less interupted. That discovery alone has improved my energy levels considerably.

Finally, I bought myself a new bicycle to replace the one that was vandalized so long ago and finally broke clean through the frame while I was touring in Britain last summer. I am happy with my new bike and rediscovering the joy of the open road along with the considerable mental health benefits of exercise and fresh air. It has been too long. Until last week, I had never left sight of this town under my own power!

I have an old REI water bottle that says, among other things, “Bikes are freedom.” There is a lot of truth to that. Drivers and lawn-mowers wave to me. The sun shines, and a stiff breeze blows the earthy smells of soil, rain, and pollen across the flats. Country roads appear, disappear, and reappear, turn from pavement to gravel and back again. Wildlife preserves and bayous turn up where you never expected them. Dogs bark and chase. Turtles hop into ditches, and birds sing. The black folks sitting at store fronts in Mound Bayou shout a hearty “Mornin’!” as I glide past. And all seems so much better with the world. I am making my peace with Mississippi. Slowly but surely.

It has been so hard to write anything lately. To paraphrase another Teacher Corps friend, it takes hope to write. So true. But it takes a precise, certain kind of hope, to me, like a belief in the meaning of your own words. There have been plenty of things to write, but not much belief.

My students are racist, I can say that. For some reason this fact has not bothered me much until now. For example, my colleagues can say anything they want to the students, and the students just shut up and sit down. But of course, if I say anything remotely harsh to a student, they react like they are going to get me fired or something. I am 100% sure the main difference is the color of my skin.

The other day, I offered bonus points to the first person who could name the best soccer player in the world currently, with justification. The point was to get them curious about the outside world and encourage them to research something they know nothing about. It seemed like a good idea at the time, perhaps something that could become a weekly routine. Except no one has taken me up on the offer yet. The question just provoked some ignorant talk like, “Who that Brazilian guy?” Trouble is, Ronaldinho (who I’m pretty sure they’ve only heard of because he has dark skin and kinky hair) has had some injuries lately and not played particularly well for a year or two. It is like suggesting Dwayne Wade for MVP of the NBA. And then someone asked if David Beckham is black. “He the whitest man in the world!” another classmate scoffed. These kids would not know David Beckham from the man on the moon, and all they care about is his skin color! That really irritates me. I feel like lecturing my Algebra II class about their racism, but I cannot think of a way to talk about it and be heard. Maybe I will ask them to write about it tomorrow. Perhaps something like, “You are reading a resume. Do you care what color the person’s skin is? Should you care?”

Last Sunday, I set upon a quest to travel the breadth of the state in search of the quintessential South, and I found it, just where I thought it was. Mississippi Hwy 8 passes east-west through Cleveland. Far to the east, near where it intersects the Natchez Trace, this particular road reveals a particularly good slide show of the what makes the South, the South. This is the land where semi-trucks, old bulldozers, and worn-out school buses go to die, while others stand guard, brightly glinting, over the memory.

The lighting was terrible for the most part, being extremely bright and from a low angle, but for some shots it particularly accentuated the glint of metal, glass, and water contrasted with dull brown grass or rust. There were indeed people along the way worthy of my quest, but one -- a scruffy, mulleted white man of about 40 shopping for a tombstone for his recently departed mother -- declined to be photographed, and the other -- a grandmotherly black woman in purple dress and matching hat chatting after church in a parking lot, I was too shy to photograph and it only occurred to me afterwards how simple it would have been to ask her permission. A large man in a big white pick-up truck pulled off at the derelict cotton gin to see what I was doing. "Just taking pop shots?" he asked. "Yeah, is that alright?" I asked. "Sure," he said, remarking out loud how broken-down the old gin had become. "Y'all have a nice trip," he wished me, and drove off. 

This morning, it snowed. It came down in big, fat, fluffy flakes, a sort of melancholy whitewash to remind us that God loves poetry. If there is one. No, mostly, it just reminds me that this is not Mississippi.

The Africans

This afternoon, I stepped into the principals office at Walla Walla High School. The entire building was immaculate. It looked brand-new and sparkling. Nothing like the dingy, decrepit feeling so common in the Mississippi Delta. It was 4:30 in the afternoon and dark already, but the office was still open. The principal and his office staff were still there. (That would never happen in the Delta.) An entirely not-lazy-looking secretary greeted me with a wireless phone piece attached to her ear. Inside, a flat-panel monitor hung above the principals desk, displaying a four-way split between various survailance camera views of the gymnasium and other facilities. It felt a little bit like the contrast described by David Lamb in his seminal (if dated) book, The Africans, regarding the border between Mozambique and South Africa. The border is still a lot like he described, by the way, although they no longer, to my knowledge, add two "whites" cars to the train when they reach the South African border. I mean, they were all so professional, and you could look all around you and see no evidence of neglect anywhere! This is not Mississippi at all.

I called a bunch of parents today, in regard to my third block Transition to Algebra class, to let them know their children are failing. (Good for me!) Told the students they must be at my review session, starting today after school, in order to retake the test they failed a couple weeks ago. (A number of those most likely to turn it around and manage a passing grade in the end did come, and we had a good session.) Counselor came to speak to the class, as per request of me and the special ed teachers, to "give them blessings" or whatever you call it. She asked me to leave, so she could "talk like black folks," so I sat in the hall for at least twenty minutes waiting for her to finish. After she finally left, no sooner had I resumed my example, explaining all about domain, range, and intercepts, when a workman comes into my room without knocking, proceeds to whip out a power grinder and literally saw, without fanfare or warning of any kind, through the metal hinges of a window, throwing sparks all over the back of the classroom and causing a near stampeed, as some of my students were sitting no more than four or five feet away at the time! It was insane. I went over to this man to have a stern word or two. He was apparently an inmate worker, judging by the green- and white-striped pyjama pants one of his coworkers wore. Leave it to Mississippi to think inmates roaming around a school, unsupervised for all intents and purposes, with power tools, is a good idea! Needless to say, the utter disregard, no only for my instruction, but for the safety of my students, really infuriated me. Well, infuriated me in the sense that I told him we need to have some "communication," then tried my best to finish the lesson amidst the power tools, shouting workmen, broken glass, and me telling the students to move their desks as far away as possible from the windows. It was one of the more classic Delta teaching moments I will never forget. Wish I had my camera.