Busting out of stereotypes

At the long-gone Ardmore Junior High School, the chorus room was a mausoleum of battered upright pianos and out-of-tune autoharps. We sat in folding chairs that grated dissonantly against the floor as Mr. Hawthorne instructed us in the major and minor scales.

“Do…re…mi…” I tried to nudge my voice up the ladder of notes. I thought of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, how she distilled singing to its Dick-and-Jane basics. “Mi, a name I call myself,” I sang out. The girl next to me winced.

Each spring, Mr. Hawthorne invited seventh graders to audition for the chorus. My friends could all sing, some of them with theatrical flair. I wanted to sing with them, a member of the club of black skirts, white blouses, and trips to district chorus competitions on a bus humid with adolescent hormones. I imagined lending alto harmony to “One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall” all the way to Delaware and back.

Saved by singing?

The afternoon of the audition, I wiped perspiring hands on my midi-skirt and waited for my turn. It was the fashion nadir of my adolescence, an era of thick, wire-rimmed glasses, mouth aglint with orthodontia, and wavy hair that refused to be wrestled into a sleek Karen Carpenter-esque mane.

I thought singing could save me. Who would care how I looked if I could strum guitar to an angsty rendition of “Both Sides Now” or hiss the sultry chorus to “Steam Heat” in The Pajama Game? On car trips, I sang my way through an ebullient Broadway repertoire, all the songs I’d memorized from my parents’ cast albums: No, No, Nanette; Annie Get Your Gun; and Fiddler on the Roof.

I have no memory of what Mr. Hawthorne asked me to sing. Thanks to years of piano lessons, I could read the wilted sheet music, but that didn’t mean I could match the marks on the page with anything in my vocal register. He sounded middle C on the piano. I warbled my way through the opening measures.

I hadn’t even reached the chorus when he placed a firm hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You can’t sing.”

And I didn’t. For 20 years.

The road not taken

Oh, I kept bleating away in the shower and on road trips, buoyed by the fact that my parents couldn’t carry a tune in a Chevrolet. But in any public setting, even when friends chorused “Happy Birthday” over someone’s frosted cake, I kept quiet, fearful that my voice would curdle the mix.

Meanwhile, I immersed myself in words: school paper, literary journal, summer internships at magazines. By college, my path was set: I breezed past the notices for singing-group tryouts and showed up, notebook in hand, for the newspaper’s freshman orientation.

And I never looked back. Except on some lonely Saturday nights, when I’d play Simon and Garfunkel records in my room and mumble-sing along: Hello, darkness my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again.

Letting words define us

The refrain of years: I was 25; I was 33; I was a mother, crooning lullabies to a baby who rewarded my efforts with a gummy grin. I hadn’t thought about Mr. Hawthorne in a long time. But I felt his firm grip on my shoulder when I showed up to teach poetry to fourth graders and heard the teacher say, loudly, “Well, I guess you can see they gave me the worst class.”

I heard his grim prophecy — “You can’t sing” — when I led short story discussions with at-risk teens; one of them remembered his father saying, “You’ll never amount to nothing.” And I felt the limiting echo of those decades-old words when an adult student in a memoir workshop recalled her mother’s admonishment: “Don’t get any ideas.”

The student smiled slyly. “But I did,” she said.

We all carry self-fulfilling stories, tapestries of what we’ve been told, where we’ve triumphed and where we’ve gone wrong. The stories can boost us — the coach who coaxed us to run the distance; the English teacher who praised our poem — but just as easily they can halt us mid-step. They shut us up. They keep us on the tame side of creativity, of daring. To violate them is the hardest kind of trespass: surmounting the stereotypes we hold about ourselves.

I’m certain that if I conjure an image of Mr. Hawthorne, knuckled hands on the old piano keys, brow bent in critique, my voice will wobble even further off the mark than usual.

Stereotype threat

In fact, there’s a term for this; psychologists call it “stereotype threat.” It explains why, in research studies, black students score worse on exams when reminded beforehand of their race. The same is true of female students who are told, before a test of spatial skills, that boys have a genetic edge at solving such problems.

Performance, it turns out, doesn’t unfold in a vacuum. It’s social — shaped by beliefs, expectations, circumstances, and mood. “Even alone in an exam room, we hear a chorus of voices appraising, evaluating, passing judgment,” Annie Murphy Paul, author of the forthcoming Brilliant: The New Science of Smart, wrote in the New York Times.

And suppose we’re talking about something higher-stakes than singing or spatial challenges? Suppose we’re gauging a person’s propensity for violence? Or her likelihood of attending college? Or his fitness as a parent?

The stories we tell about each other and ourselves — a ribbon of chatter so deep it’s nearly inaudible — drive every interaction. And we’ve seen too many times in recent days — in Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York — how stories (for instance, the one the white police officer carries as he confronts the black teenager) can be corrosive. Even lethal.

Changing course

Pause for a moment, and consider where you were counseled not to tread. What words stopped you in your tracks? Maybe they’re not true. Same for the stories you hold about other people, beliefs that, if not dissected and challenged, can freeze us all in our limited places.

Start somewhere. Pick up the drawing pencil (straight lines are overrated). Put on the music; feel that bachata in your bones. Turn up the radio — Sam Smith, Aretha Franklin, Pavarotti, whatever your pleasure — and sing out. That unzipped sensation? That crackling sound? Just old stories falling to the floor.