The Good Book and the Bad Book
At Austin’s elite St. Andrew's Episcopal School, everything from the architecture to the emphasis on tolerance is designed to reinforce a sense of community. But when an English teacher had her senior class read Brokeback Mountain, a fight between parents over the true meaning of Christian values threatened to tear the close-knit campus apart.
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The crisis in the community had taken on a life of its own. Critics charged that gays on the faculty were pushing a homosexual agenda. Some said classes were segregated according to the parents’ political leanings, while others said conservatives were not welcome at all and that conservative kids speaking in class were stopped mid-sentence by liberal teachers. School supporters said that some critics had openly threatened to destroy Nazro. Parents made claims that sounded like they came straight out of seventh-grade mouths. One parent told me that if critics thought Brokeback was smut, they needed to start watching better porn. In post-school-year e-mails, Mary Ann was still railing about “Mr. Jerks,” “Ms. Porne,” and “The God of Small Dicks.”
The controversy brought national attention, good and bad, to the school. The American Library Association awarded Nazro and Runnells a prize for intellectual freedom. In an online exchange about St. Andrew’s at
VirtueOnline.org, a Web site billing itself as “The Voice of Global Orthodox Anglicanism,” a message board post read: “The day some fairie tries to seduce or touch a member of my family is the day he will Meet His Maker.” The writer suggested that the school’s burning down would be a just end to the controversy.
The end Nazro looked to was the end of the school year. The graduation ceremony was mercifully quiet. The McNair kids had left St. Andrew’s. Rachel apologized to Horne and graduated with distinction as a scholar and an athlete. She was planning to attend Texas A&M University, where she placed out of nearly a full year’s worth of classes, including four English courses. Her younger sisters, meanwhile, were preparing to go to other schools.
At St. Andrew’s, Horne readied the next year’s reading list, with Arundhati Roy but without Annie Proulx. Horne doesn’t generally teach books that have recently been made into big Hollywood movies. It wasn’t removed from the list last year because the curriculum had been set before the film came out.
Nazro took two short trips to Galveston but spent the rest of the summer in her office. Despite the dispute, she said, St. Andrew’s had met its annual fund-raising goal of $500,000. Only 18 students of the upper school’s enrollment of 289 would not be returning the following year, right at the annual attrition rate of 6 percent. Citing exit interviews with parents, she figured the school lost a handful of students as a result of the controversy. She also said 55 eighth-graders would be moving to the upper school, the second highest total ever. Given the furor of the past fourteen months, their parents should know what to expect when they get there.
There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.—the last sentence of Brokeback Mountain
EVERY ONE OF US HAS A FAVORITE TEACHER in our past, and if we’re lucky, we remember a favorite moment with that teacher. Good teachers know the way into our heads, but the best ones do something more. They manage to push past what we think and take up space in the place where we feel. No teacher can do that with every lesson; that’s what makes the moment it happens unforgettable. Nor can any teacher do it with every student. A level of maturity is required of the kid, a measure of desire, the right material, and at least a little openness.
This story should have been about that moment. That’s what Kimberly Horne was hired to do at St. Andrew’s. I talked with her and Nazro one day in Nazro’s office. School was almost out, and Horne was already dressed for summer in flip-flops, a loose skirt and T-shirt, and a thin denim jacket. Her manner was sure but her eyes looked tired.
I knew Horne had been walked through a practice interview, and when I asked her early on about the moral component of the humanities classes, she looked around the room as if she were trying to remember where she’d put the right answer. She ran her shaking hands through her long brown hair. “We want the kids to learn as much as they can about the discipline,” she said finally, “something that will prepare them to do well in the liberal arts format.”
I tried to coax a discussion of the story. Her initial answers were as awkward as my questions. But then Nazro handed her a copy of Brokeback. Horne’s hands stopped shaking.
“So how do you teach it?” I asked.
“Well, the point of the story is language,” she said, glancing at Nazro. “I really try to get the students to realize that. And to prepare them for difficult conversations and situations involving people that are very different from them.”
“But how do you teach it?”
Her eyes narrowed and her shoulders rose as she drew a deep breath, and then, exhaling, she dropped her shoulders, dipped her head, and opened the book. “We start at the first paragraph of the story, the one in italics,” she said, “and we talk about realism.” She looked up. “The kids should know what that is by the end of their senior years, how realistic language will show—what’s the word—the seedier side of things. I use the example of All in the Family. It was the first TV show to have a toilet flushing in the background. That’s because people actually do that. But it was scandalous to put it on TV back then.” She lowered her head and looked back at the book.
“So we talk about the language, the incredible detail, the powerful verbs. I try to point out something that struck me and ask the students to point out what they saw. I particularly like this sentence.” She started to read. “‘The wind booms down the curved length of the trailer and under its roaring passage he can hear the scratching of fine gravel and sand.’ I ask, ‘Can you hear the sound of metal and sand? What word in the sentence grabbed you? What detail?’”
She held the book in her lap and looked up again. “We talk about the difference between abstraction and specifics. Abstractions are easy, they’re not very powerful, they can be quite empty. You can talk about courage, love, patriotism, hate, good, evil; all those things mean different things to different people. But once you talk about patriotism as a flag-draped coffin … there’s a difference there.”
She was no longer looking at Nazro. “We talk about every writer’s challenge: getting the reader to finish the story.” She gestured with the book, indicating that that challenge persists even when the reading is assigned. “A writer does that by making you care about the characters and what’s going to happen. So here we are at St. Andrew’s. We’re not Wyoming sheepherders. How does Proulx get us to invest in these guys?
“All I can show is what worked for me.” She reopened the book. “First is the description of them. ‘They’re inured to the stoic life.’ What sticks out is the hardships they’ve lived through. They’re ‘high school dropout country boys with no prospects … ’ The other line I love is about Ennis. ‘He had wanted to be a sophomore, he felt the word carried a kind of distinction.’ That’s laughable to a high school senior.”
She flipped further. “They get to know each other through talking and that makes them real. ‘They were respectful of each other’s opinions, each glad to have a companion where none had been expected.’ Their lives are detailed in a way that suggests they haven’t been able to talk to anyone before. They’re incredibly lonely people. So I say to the kids, ‘We’ve all been lonely, maybe not to this extent, but that’s the power of good writing. These guys are real.’”
“How does the gay part come up?” I asked.
“I don’t go straight to that. And it comes up differently each year. But we talk about what it means in the world of the story. What happens as a result of their intimacy? How does Proulx write about it? Is it romantic? Because it’s not. It’s awkward.”
“What do the kids say when it happens?”
“They’re shocked. And what I try to do is show them where you see it coming. Like when the older Ennis wakes up dreaming of Jack at the beginning of the story.”
“And the word ‘cock’?”
“I ask, ‘What’s a dirty word? Is it gratuitous? Is Proulx trying to titillate?’ The students know the difference. No kid has ever said that this language is meant to excite. Yes, it makes us uncomfortable, so how do we talk about that? How do we confront situations where the language is hard to say? What are our choices? To be silent? To leave it at giggling?”
“And if there’s a moral to the story then that compensates for the discomfort,” I said.
“I never go into a moral because that’s what the kids always want, that little soundbite to tie to a book and then move on. I try to tell them the easy answer is not always available.
“We talk about the themes. To me the most powerful line in Brokeback is the last one: ‘If you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.’ If you have to fix something, then something is broken. So what is it? I read it to mean that Jack and Ennis are broken. But why? Are they broken because of who they are? Or are they broken because of the world they live in? I ask if the students have ever been in a situation in which they couldn’t fix something. Usually they say no. But what if you were? What would that do to your life?
“I’m not trying to get the kids to grow up in one day,” she said, closing the book. “But Brokeback is a model for them.” She held out the book in front of her and nodded at it. “Someone in this book is presumably hit upside the head with a tire iron and killed. I don’t worry that any of my students are going to grow up and hit anyone with a tire iron. But I think we can break each other in smaller ways. So if we live in a broken world, what part do we play in it?”
Horne threw out the question and let it sit in the middle of the room. Soon enough the talk moved to the McNairs and the Bowlings and prudence and bumper stickers. But when the interview ended, her broken-world question was the thing that lingered.
My Library
