Reeducation: The Group School, 1971-74; 1976-79 (memoir)
by Mark Pawlak, TGS staff member
Reeducation: The Group School, 1971-74; 1976-79
I was just 23 when I started volunteering at The Group School. After graduating from MIT (BS Physics, 1970), I’d spent a year teaching in a “free” school in Santa Barbara. Now I was back in Cambridge for good. My TGS students ranged in age from 14 to 19. All of them had grown up fast, so I seldom felt that there was much of an age gap between us. Mentor and close friend to many, I came to think of them as my younger brothers and sisters; and I began to spend a lot of time in their company, hanging out with them on the neighborhood streets of North Cambridge and in the courtyards of the Jefferson Park housing development where many lived, just a few blocks from my apartment on Rindge Avenue.
Jefferson Park's complex of red brick buildings surrounding paved courtyards, was eerily reminiscent of the Langfield projects where I had grown up in Buffalo. Memories of my childhood came flooding back to me. I began to identify with these student/friends, realizing how much we had in common. These new friendships, combined with my immersion in American labor history as taught at the school and with Depression era proletarian literature though my association with West End, a small leftist literary press, led me to reexamine my life and background, resulting in an appreciation of my own roots and industrial Buffalo blue collar background.
So a few years out of college, while immersed in the community of TGS, after a great deal of reflection about how I had gotten to where I was in my life then, I came to realize a couple of things: first, that I had grown up working class; second, that my blue collar, Polish-American cultural heritage had effectively been educated out of me. This critique of the upward mobility enabled by post-war educational opportunity wasn't unique to me, or particular to my ethnic background. It was shared by many of my contemporaries working at that time as community and labor organizers, as housing, healthcare and welfare advocates, as inner-city teachers and social workers.
Through my TGS work, my association with West End Press, and, teaching poetry in the schools of industrial Worcester, Massachusetts a few years later, I acquired a circle of adult friends from backgrounds that paralleled my own. First in their families to attend college like me, they too had grown up working class, in eastern or mid-western industrial cities, and although not Polish, but of French-Canadian, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Latvian extraction, they had experienced and now felt much the same loss as I did. This became the consuming topic of our talk when we gathered in barrooms, cafés and around dinner tables.
We concluded that our parents and teachers had colluded to inoculate us with the values, aspirations and prejudices of 1950s middle class America. We were taught subliminally that our future success required substituting for the ethnic breads of our childhoods the tasteless, bleached-white Wonder Bread, with its air holes of uniform size and distribution. To “get ahead,” to become “successful,” we learned to shed the trappings of our blue collar, ethnic culture and substitute book-learning for street-smarts. Getting a college education, something unavailable to our Depression era parents, was de rigueur.
This self-awareness about my background wasn’t an all-at-once flash of insight but gradual, occurring over several years. My students’ lives and their families’ struggles, the red brick projects and surrounding North Cambridge blue collar neighborhood were all resonant of Buffalo. The childhood experiences, the memories and feelings they evoked, became material for the poems of I began writing at the time. The Buffalo Sequence, my first poetry collection (West End Press, 1974; Copper Canyon Press, 1977) was, in essence, my way to recapture, through the act of writing poetry, what my formal education had suppressed. The poems were the product of my reeducation.
The Buffalo Sequence begins with me standing, my feet firmly planted in the courtyard of the Jefferson Park housing development in Cambridge, while seeing in my mind's eye images of my childhood friends in the Langfield projects of Buffalo. The juxtaposition of images from different periods of my life, the then present with the past, strikes me now as surreal but, at the time, it was what I daily experienced.
From The Buffalo Sequence
.i.
never again Joey the cross-eyed
who in the church parking lot with magnifying glass
sentenced a regiment of ants to the fires of hell.
never again.
and the nuns hurrying from the church to the school,
they churned up the air so
that behind them it congealed in a long wave of funeral cloth.
—the way they threw us against the walls, those holy women,
till we learned to be good: never again, never again.
never again Stephanie who hit the longest ball,
so quick on her feet
she beat the rest of us to teen age;
who had to get married at fifteen, —think of it,
and her father such a good man,
sweeping all night to keep the school clean of sins. no, never again.
Michael freckle faced
smaller than me but tougher;
he knew to keep his distance when i was mad...
upon entering whose house was a lancing odor
of eight children, the week’s garbage,
and the parents are never home.
never again to go into battle behind him
against other courtyard gangs
garbage can lids for shields, wooden arrows and swords
sharpened on the mortar of our brick fortress.
and Billy, first friend, who said the robin was only sleeping
and we should cover it with dirt to keep it warm.
never again, who grew up to be known throughout the projects
for a bully.
and Willie
his little brother stood forever in the doorway,
not entering, not leaving;
only his big bellybutton protruding from the house.
Willie visited by mail eight years later, and never again,
his black face torn from a newspaper
—BREAKS RECORD IN HUNDRED YARD DASH—
whose eyes were coals singeing the paper
like in the picture of a black GI KILLED IN VIETNAM,
or a YOUTH FOUND BREAKING AND ENTERING SHOT BY
POLICE.
Willie never again Willie.
...and here, as it was in Buffalo,
everyone is waiting for the brick of oblivion to descend.
meanwhile, as it was in Buffalo, living is carried on:
seen from the neighboring height of a 20-floor construction,
people, no bigger than rats, hurry between their slumped hovels
where the air is a stench.
ten years ago and ten years after and
never again, never again.
...meanwhile,
the one slow to the race, who knew however,
every shortcut from mental anguish,
across shrinking eternity, from one street corner to the other
—Hey! has returned. —quieter, has come to make a home.
the learned one has come with his never agains pocketed,
with a lesson plan in his left hand, —the humbler to speak with;
and has plunked down his trunk full of books
on the exact spot
where ten years ago and ten years after
are shouldering for the same place and time.
right now,
he is keeping vigil with the violent carrots
over a loaf of good ethnic bread.
he finds here, that all the fractions of his soul
come to exactly 1.
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