People and Stories/Gente y Cuentos in Camden

There were eight of us — seven young men in navy jumpsuits and me — around a folding table at the Camden Youth Center, a detention facility for teens in Blackwood, New Jersey. I was there to lead a weekly story discussion group, part of the Trenton-based People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos program.

For more than 30 years, People & Stories has brought the experience of intimate, intense group reading and discussion to people in prisons, halfway houses, drug rehabs, GED programs, libraries, and shelters throughout the country. The idea, based on Paulo Freire’s radical theories of education, is that great literature belongs to everyone and that people with little formal schooling have experiences — for instance, a knowledge of Scripture, a grandparent’s oral tradition, or simply the churn of daily life— that can help them find meaning in a text.

In Blackwood, the boys call me “the Story Lady.” And on that afternoon, I’d just finished reading “Fat” by Raymond Carver. Like all Carver stories, this one left a lot of guesswork between the minimalist lines. Why did the overweight customer in the diner refer to himself as “we”? Why did the waitress, the story’s protagonist, linger over the fat man’s sugar bowl, saying, “I know now I was after something”?

And why, on her first glimpse of the fat man, did she particularly notice his “long, thick, creamy fingers”? I read that line a second time, letting my voice caress the adjectives. “What does that make you think of?” I asked the boys. To me, those words had always evoked a French bakery, poufy éclairs oozing with sweetened cream, an image that shows the fat man’s appeal to the waitress along with his exceptional size — a glimpse of delicious abundance that may, by the evening’s end, change her life.

But Anthony’s response put an end to my Parisian reverie. “Twinkies,” he said. “His fingers sound like Twinkies.” That wasn’t a good thing, he added; maybe the fat man was stuffing himself with so much junk food that he was becoming what he ate.

Immediately I thought of Dan White and his famous “Twinkie defense” for killing San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk in 1979. I pictured a man pale, swollen, and unhealthy. I remembered my own college days, when I tried to assuage loneliness with chocolate chip cookies and succeeded only in making myself sick. And for a moment, I glimpsed a bigger context for Carver’s story: a tale of solitude, self-abnegation, and the desperate desire to be seen.

A change in perspective

Fingers like Twinkies. That was not the first time — only the most recent — that a participant’s response in a People & Stories group has made a story spin on its axis. It happened frequently at the Camden Youth Center, where my life experiences and those of participants were so starkly different.

When we discussed “Looking for Work” by Gary Soto, I thought the boys would identify with the scrappy nine-year-old narrator, who scours his neighborhood for odd jobs in the hope of acquiring “wealth that would save us from ourselves.” The narrator’s family — fatherless, Latino, working-class — is drawn in wry contrast to the prim white families he watches obsessively in Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best.

I figured we’d talk about class and racial prejudice, about families in reality and on TV, about the satisfactions and drudgery of work. But our discussion took an unexpected turn as the group focused on the story’s final line: “I felt suddenly alive as I skipped down the block in search of an overgrown flower bed and the dime that would end the day right.” Why does he feel “suddenly alive,” I asked, and these boys, locked up for the foreseeable future, talked about hope.

At that point in the story, they said, the narrator doesn’t have that dime, but he can look forward to receiving it. Durrell said, “It’s like when I’m in here, and I think about how great it’s going to be to get home . . . but then I get there, and it’s not how I thought it would be.” Sometimes, they said, anticipation is the sweeter bite.

Mirrors and windows

The texts we examine in People & Stories — by writers including Alice Walker, Sherman Alexie, and Junot Díaz — become mirrors, flashing back familiar glimpses of pain, longing, and love. And they are windows, apertures that let us see how life could — maybe, someday — be different.

For the first session at the youth center, I chose “Thank You, M’am,” Langston Hughes’s short, accessible tale of an older woman and the young boy who attempts to steal her purse. The story begins, “She was a large woman with a large purse that had everything in it but a hammer and nails.” I immediately pictured my grandmother, whose pocketbook, when I was a child, was a magical cavern of tissues, plastic rain bonnets, shoehorns, Rolaids, hard butterscotch candies, and softly crumpled dollar bills.

The boys had a different idea. “She might have a gun in there,” Jaime said. “She knows how to take care of herself.” Suddenly, I had a new sense of the story’s power dynamics. “Thank You, M’am” was an encounter between a woman who may appear vulnerable, but is in fact armed for disaster, and a boy whose attempt at opportunistic theft masks his own powerlessness.

Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones — as she later introduces herself to the boy — started to seem a little dangerous, her character more complex than the tough-love mother-figure I’d always imagined. This was a woman who, perhaps, had been on the receiving end of violence. This was a woman who knew too well the risks of walking alone in the city close to midnight.

The boys had words for Roger, too — the “frail and willow-wild” young man who gets no purse, but instead a hot meal and a life lesson from his presumed victim. “He’s a dirtball,” said Joshua. “He probably doesn’t have any parents, or his parents are in jail.”

Some people might describe Joshua and his classmates at the Camden Youth Center as “dirtballs” or something even worse. There was a time when I might have been nervous to sit down with a whole cadre of them, skeptical that kids in lockup had anything to teach me about literature. But when we hear and discuss these texts together, when we listen to one another, something happens. We start to read through other people’s eyes. We catch sight of the story behind the story.

“Okay,” I said, “so he’s a dirtball. But what does Mrs. Jones see when she looks at him?”

Joshua answered, speaking so softly I had to tilt forward to hear him. “The little boy,” he said.