God, and the Word Was God. So

¶ … God, and the Word was God. So reads the first verse of the book of John, just two in a handful of bible verses I was made to memorize and recite before I was able to read. These verses and the ones preceding and following them were read to me nightly -- and often in the mornings as well -- by my mother, grandmother and grandfather in our home in the small Southern Baptist community of Perry, Georgia. In addition to the bible, I was read bible stories in books with colorful illustrations meant to engage children. The illustrations helped me to associate meaning with the words on the page, while the words themselves struck me as just another way of painting a picture. When I was asked to recite the verses or stories read to me, remembering the picture the words described often helped me to remember the requested words; or, if there had been no picture provided to illustrate the words, I began to construct my own internal pictures to help me remember the words. In any case, the descriptive power of words was impressed upon me at an early age, as was the respect of words as a primary means of communication.

While the verses and stories had a certain formality to them I later came to recognize as English grammar, the everyday speech in my house was far from formal. Though all three of my caretakers were avid readers and adequate writers, only one -- my grandfather -- was college educated. Add to this the fact of our location in the South, were slang words and phrases are often used as linguistic shortcuts to expressing one's meaning, and the result was proverbial smorgasbord of "aints," "fiddle-faddles," "do-hickeys" and "bullhonkies." Imagine my surprise when I entered kindergarten and learned that "aint" was not actually a word, that my teacher had no idea what a "do-hickey" was, and that "fiddle-faddle" and "bullhonky" were bordering obscenities.

Nonetheless, my own early struggles with communication in the classroom were nothing compared to the struggles of my African-American peers. Later termed "Ebonics," these children had words and ways of saying them that intrigued, confused, and often delighted me. Not only were words and phrases like "sup," "brurva," "dis," "axe" and "sku me" unfamiliar to me, they were often said loudly and with dramatic hand gestures or facial expressions. Not that this was necessarily true of all my African-American peers; there were a few students of color who seemed as baffled by this strange language as I was. Nonetheless, the fact that there was a significant divide in language and its uses was apparent to me long before I began to question the reasons for the divide.

In Ways with words: language, life, and work in communities and classrooms, author Shirley Brice describes the communicative divide between the residents of Roadville and the neighboring town of Trackton, South Carolina in the early 1960s. As the mandatory desegregation of public schools and the community's textile mills required blacks and whites to work and attend school together for the first time,

Communication was a central concern of black and white teachers, parents, and mill personnel who felt the need to know more about how others communicated; why questions were sometimes not answered, and habitual ways of talking and listening did not always seem to work. (Brice, 1983)

Such was the case in my own community, in which black and white students had starkly contrasting ways of communicating and, as a result, often struggled to understand and to be understood.

As I've said, I had a far easier time of it in school than many others, due in part to my early experiences with formal grammar in the form of written bible verses. Nonetheless, the pressure to perform well in school was felt by me every bit as much as anyone; perhaps even more so, given the respect my mother and grandparents instilled in me for reading and writing. It was perhaps this pressure that lead to cheat on a spelling test in the first grade -- the first and only time I have ever cheated in an academic setting. Fearful that I would not be able to spell all ten words correctly once the test began, I decided to copy the words down on my dress during the preliminary study time. Apparently, however, I could have employed more stealth my copying operation. After thoroughly humiliating me by having me stand before the class and display my written-on dress for all to see, the teacher marched me down to principal's office where my mother was called and I was sent home in shame. As punishment, my mother grounded me from all extracurricular activities for two weeks and demanded that I copy each of the ten words ten times, which proved rather difficult for all the crying.

The real kicker, however, came the following week when I learned that my teacher planned to have me repeat the entire first grade, believing me to be illiterate. Far from illiterate -- a word I was stunned to hear applied to me -- I had already discovered and begun to enjoy my mother's private collection of romance novels and, as a result, was reading at a level far beyond the majority of my peers. As my mother had caught me at this and knew as well as I did that I was perhaps a bit too literate for my own good, she sought to have me prove my abilities to the teaching staff. In order to be sure that I was truly reading, as opposed to simply reciting a memorized passage, my teachers consented to have me read a document I had never seen or heard before; the Declaration of Independence.