This had been a particularly rough week for the family. Evelyn has struggled for years with many mental issues and demons from her past. A decade ago, her mother died just as a rapprochement had begun to develop between the two after many years of estrangement, a separation that had robbed Evelyn of her birth mother during the critical years of late childhood and adolescence. Evelyn’s maternal grandmother filled the role with reasonable rectitude, in a motif familiar to many African American families in the course of the last three decades. But the absence of her mother had been ever painful. The loss of her mother just as they were getting to know each other again seemed another cruel blow delivered by some hovering oppressive force in a life that had also known two incestuous rapes, one by a maternal uncle, the other by her own father.
The tenth anniversary of her mother’s death had occurred just eight days before my arrival on this Sunday afternoon. The event brought an array of disturbing memories to the fore, and the intervening days had been tumultuous for the family. Evelyn had manifested her deep sorrow and heightened rage by lashing out at Damon, Javon, and Marcel. She skipped her medications numerous times. Her behavior was erratic and largely irrational. The responses her outburst elicited from her sons and Marcel unfortunately matched her own angry verbiage and occasional physical ferocity.
Riding the turbulent waves of a week gone wrong, Evelyn signaled to me that she could not make our 2:00 PM Sunday meeting for the sort of academic session that she and I had been maintaining for several weeks, according to a plan to prepare Evelyn for community college and the pursuit of a degree (first associates, eventually bachelor’s) in business. I had been constantly on the phone with Evelyn, Damon, and Marcel throughout the week, and I had made numerous trips to their apartment to quell some disturbance. I love these people. They trust me. There has been too little love and trust in their lives. My words have moral suasion:
I finally convinced Evelyn to keep our scheduled 2:00 PM academic session.
The power of Shakespeare very well may be the transformative force in a life that badly needs transformation:
I picked Evelyn up at her apartment in East St. Paul at 2:00 PM and drove the fifteen minutes back to New Salem, where I hold my 17 one-on-one and small group academic sessions spread over seven days a week. We settled in for an hour of multi-step algebraic equations and workaday applications. Then we turned to reading.
For three academic years now my students and I have performed one of my compressed versions of classic Shakespearean plays, using the original Elizabethan language of the bard, with each play shortened for presentation in a 30-minute format. Over these three academic years, spanning 2012-2013, 2013-2014, and 2014-2015, we have performed King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth; and we have attended performances of these dramas at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona (Minnesota) and at the Guthrie and Jungle theaters in Minneapolis. At this year’s Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, the students and I will perform my compressed version of Julius Caesar.
Damon, Javon, and Evelyn are all my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative. This is Damon’s seventh year in the program; Javon has officially been my student for two years, following my observation of his entrance into the world and experiences as a pre-kindergartener. For Evelyn, this is her first year of participation, just as our reading of my 12-page version of Julius Caesar is her first ever introduction to the foremost master of the English language.
Evelyn loves the majesty of the language and marveled that, with a few key definitions and explanations by me, she could understand the text entirely. The themes of human fickleness, the treachery of erstwhile friends, and the mixed motives that guide human action resonated for one whose life has known all of these.
Evelyn knew that Damon is playing the part of Brutus, and that little Javon is playing the role of Strato, the military assistant to Brutus who holds the sword upon which he runs fatally when the battle at Philippi is lost to Antony, Octavius, and their lesser partner, Lepidus. Shy and even agoraphobic as she is, Evelyn brimmed with pride when I suggested that she take a small role as one of the citizens whose evanescent loyalties go quickly from Brutus to Antony when the crafty oratory of the latter moves the crowd sympathetically to the cause of striking at Caesar’s assassins.
Evelyn had arrived in my car sullen and very close to clinical despondence. Her mood, though, was transformed by her successes in algebra and, especially, the revelation that she could read Shakespeare with alacrity and could feel the emotional power of these transcendent literary works with such resonance to her own life experience.
This is the power of education.
This is the capacity of knowledge to transform lives.
This is the transcendent ability of K-12 education to elevate the lives of people who have known mainly the darkness of prejudice, abuse, and failure, into the radiance that is acceptance, empathy, and success. When properly taught, the language and themes of Shakespeare reach people of all demographic descriptors, especially those who have felt the tragedy in their own lives that they witness in dramas by the master.
Evelyn knows that she and her family can always depend on my love and my teaching. And part of that is knowing the majesty of Shakespeare, with all of the power of great literature to transform lives often lived behind the restrictive borders of the banal into experiences in this one earthly sojourn that ascend to the Sublime.
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