When Barack Obama’s rise to power is recorded in future textbooks, his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address, where he told his riveting story, will be a pivotal moment in that history. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”
The power of “The American Story” came home to me while I read my George Mason University students’ personal narratives. The story each tells is a testament to the possibilities in our society, and as American as tomorrow’s Thanksgiving feast. For me these students’ words were as riveting as any keynote address.
Almost by definition, their presence in my advanced composition class makes these narratives success stories. Even the young woman whose story begins in middle school, on the day she was removed from her home and placed in foster care, ends her narrative in gratitude to her foster parents for making her current enrollment in college possible.
Some of their stories are throwbacks to a past we all yearn for. Kate’s childhood was pure Norman Rockwell: “I grew up in my yard, surrounded on all four sides by fields for the neighbor’s cows and one for our horses. There were no houses within sight, and no passing cars on the gravel road.”
She revels in memories of pleasures that returned season after season. “In the summer I ran around barefoot, ignoring the thistle thorns and the mud, the worms squishing beneath my toes. I stomped on rotten peaches and hard little apples that had fallen to the ground in our backyard.”
Kate “now shuffle(s) each day between the strip mall where I work, the university, and my apartment complex.” Part of the American story is that we often leave the country for work opportunities and/or an education, making sacrifices some never quite reconcile with the gains provided by life in the big city.
The most dramatic of the narratives are the ones that go back generations, like Aaron’s. He writes of his grandmother, one of sixteen children born into a family of Alabama sharecroppers. They all had to work as children, so the siblings would swap chores in order to attend school, 4 miles by foot away from home. She never let her children or grandchildren forget what a privilege it is to get an education.
At 88, Aaron’s grandmother continues to value learning. Aaron writes that “she shares a stake in my success, along with those generations before her…and in May, when I receive my diploma from this collegiate journey, I hope to look into the crowd and see her face full of pride.”
As I read narratives of students expressing gratitude for a chance to immigrate to the United States, and others whose parents or grandparents have supported them through illness and all manner of other difficulties, I feel honored to have given them an opportunity to record their stories.
On the day before Thanksgiving, I am thankful that students have stories to tell, and that my classroom is one place where that happens.
What Kids Are Reading
This weekly column will look at lists of books kids are reading in various categories, including grade level, book genre, data from libraries, and data from booksellers. Information on the books below came from the list of Amazon.com childrens’ books and are listed in descending order of popularity.
Books on American Stories
1. The American Story: 100 True Tales from American History by Jennifer Armstrong and Roger Roth
2. Kids Make History: A New Look at America’s Story by Susan Buckley, Elspeth Leacock, and Randy Jones
3. Native American Stories (Myths and Legends) by Michael J. Caduto and Joseph Bruchac
4. Jefferson’s Children: The Story of One American Family by Shannon Lanier and Jane Feldman
5. An Illustrated Treasury of African American Read-Aloud Stories by Susan Kantor, Christian Clayton, Jan Spivey Gilchrist, and Christy Hale
6. Native American Animal Stories by Joseph Bruchac
7. Barack Obama: An American Story by Roberta Edwards and Ken Call
8. Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans by Edward Eggleston
9. Salaam: A Muslim American Boy’s Story by Tricia Brown and Ken Cardwell
10. Rattlesnake Mesa: Stories from a Native American Childhood by EdNah New Rider Weber
