Daily Excerpt: Blest Atheist (Mahlou) - Defiance, Part 2 (of three parts)
Today's book excerpt comes from Blest Atheist by Elizabeth Mahlou.
Defiance, part 2
My childhood contained two compartments: home and not-home. Not-home was a special place that I kept carefully separated to prevent the excesses of home from tainting it. Not-home was the place where I received validation, especially from teachers who encouraged me in many ways. Several of my elementary school teachers used me as a reading group teacher. Others encouraged my propensity for writing poetry and mysteries. Still others brought me whole libraries of books from their homes which I would inhale the way I had inhaled all the books in our small school library. My French teacher in high school encouraged me to write French poetry for our bilingual school journal. As even more validation, I won awards for public speaking, drama competitions, spelling bees, and other competitions that my teachers encouraged me to try.
I also won the city’s history-writing award. Years earlier, someone had left a fund for a monetary award to be given annually to the eighth-grade student who wrote the best essay on the history of the city. The Hannah Dustin Award was named after a New England heroine, a colonist and mother of thirteen, living in Haverhill, Massachusetts, Dad’s birthplace. When her twelfth child was six days old, Hannah was captured by Abenaki Indians who killed the baby by slamming it against a tree. Rather than seeking a means to slip away undetected, when the opportunity came, Hannah Dustin defiantly took on the Indians with the help of other captives and won, freeing all the captives. About her captivity, a genealogic work, The Dustin/ Duston Family, cites her as saying, “I Desire to be thankful that I was born in a Land of Light & Baptized when I was young and had a good education by my Father, tho’ I took but little notice of it in the time of it—I am Thankful for my Captivity, ‘twas the Comfortablest time that ever I had. In my Affliction God made his Word Comfort able to me.” That part of Hannah I could not then understand. About Hannah and the escape on Contocook Island, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote: “Taken hostage, she fought back with deadly force.” That part of Hannah I could always understand. 19 elizabeth mahlou For the competition, I wrote an essay on the evolution of the city’s library. That essay was nearly disqualified. When the jury read my essay, they claimed it had been plagiarized because “no eighth-grader writes like this.”
No eighth-grader wrote like that because no eighth-grader read like I did. Reading “promiscuously” had become my downfall. Even at that age, my writing was influenced by the likes of Joyce, Faulkner, Thoreau, and Dickens. These authors and many others gave me a psychologically-stabilizing broader picture of the human condition. Promiscuous reading I inherited from Dad, who, in spite of his poverty level income, always found a way to bring books into our house. In fact, he built a library for us and stocked it with most of the great works of literature. Dad, the eighth-grade dropout, was an intellectual at heart, and he raised an intellectual: me. Our home library, the public library, the school library, and the philosophical discussions with Dad in the car on our 26-mile roundtrip to and from high school developed my intellectual interests. Those were the good times with Dad: when Ma was out of the picture, when he and I were alone. These were “not-home” times for me, as well, and resulted in a more trusting relationship with Dad than would have developed had these times not occurred and which never did occur for my younger siblings. They rode the bus to elementary school. If my parents wanted me to attend high school (many of my classmates did not), they had to provide the transportation to a city or town that had one. So, my eighth-grade year (which was the first year of high school in our farming community), I spent many hours in exciting, one-on-one, intellectual discussion with Dad, hours in which I would feel validated by him, just as I felt validated by my teachers, especially when involved in intellectual endeavors. Dad would sometimes take positions with which he did not agree and require me to do the same to make me develop my debating skills. Obviously, then, I did not think like an eighth grader, either.
Mr. Corwin, my eighth-grade social studies teacher, thankfully leapt to my defense. He brought the jury samples of my writing on essay questions on his social studies tests. I received the award. To this day, I remember how I learned about the award. As I was walking through the hall on the day the winner was announced, I felt a tug on my ponytail. I turned around to see that it was Mr. Corwin trying to get my attention. He told me what had happened and then gave me some words of advice that have stood me in good stead over time: “Young lady, always remember to ‘dumb down’ your writing for grown-ups.”
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