Crossing Swords
Berman, Marshall
LAST WINTER, Dissent published a symposium called "Where Will Critical CulI ture Come From?" Our thinking was organized around an image coined by Jules Feiffer in a 1998 cartoon. He portrayed...
...But these kids could teach us all grace under pressure...
...A girl tells of an aunt who taught her what Nietzsche taught some of us: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger...
...It drew students from a very large, heterogeneous district and offered both academic and vocational courses...
...MARSHALL BERMAN teaches at the City Uniyer - sity of New York...
...They will have to overcome...
...MANY STUDENTS leave when the closing is announced, but the Crossing Swords kids stick around for the last picture show...
...Coming of age in combat zones, they have learned to see and speak and analyze with a clarity that great war writers like Ernest Hemingway or Isaac Babel would admire...
...A century later, I found myself looking for a place that inhabited a similar state of nonbeing—and so close to my home—on the same subway map...
...In the 1890s, Alfred Jarry located his classic play, King Ubu, in "Poland, or Nowhere...
...Hale had many strikes against it...
...Did it have to be this way...
...In the late twentieth century, that people became more inclusive, but also more fragmented...
...In our symposium, seven other people and I criticized the world, the left, each other, and ourselves, and said some more and some less arresting things...
...Some kids learn a rough street wisdom...
...He portrayed a man who criticizes New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani's policy of erecting barriers on midtown street corners, supposedly to prevent jaywalking...
...They may be the last to leave, but they refuse to turn out the light...
...Of course, they will have to outgrow their heartbreak...
...Hale sounds like the girl's brother who got killed because he was "in the wrong place at the wrong time...
...Here is one place where "critical culture" has plenty of room to grow...
...The last pages bleed...
...In education, this has meant ever-expanding "school choice" and a proliferation of schools customized to fit consumer desires.' In a world like this, big comprehensive schools like Hale face a structural disadvantage...
...Where they live, the "urban miracle" of the late 1990s never arrived...
...Is anybody even trying...
...This structural transformation requires both great leadership and great luck, and many good schools, like many good stores, have gone down...
...These kids are victims of tragedy, but also its survivors...
...Maybe their teachers can help if they cross first...
...Here is a girl in the tenth grade: "My cousin was intentionally killed because he was caught up in the wrong crowd and wanted to be down...
...Our panel was drawn from too few ZIP codes and too narrow an age spectrum...
...Of course, this isn't only their problem...
...Winthrop Holder, a social studies teacher at Sarah J. Hale High School, in downtown Brooklyn, sent Dissent a copy of his school's student magazine, Crossing Swords...
...They become drug addicts, have nervous breakdowns, and sometimes come back to life...
...If it doesn't work for us, we come out as candidates for fundamentalist cults, as addicts of drugs legal and illegal, or just plain old respectable social conformist living dead...
...but they also know how easily this self-defense can self-destruct...
...These kids are intensely aware of sex as a human fact, but embarrassed and perplexed by its complexities...
...Maybe the younger ones will be able to thrive in the Brooklyn Heights School of the Arts, a new minischool that will soon be created out of Sarah J. Hale's rib...
...Sarah J. Hale drew students from several noncontiguous neighborhoods: Red Hook (where the Brooklyn Navy Yard used to be), Bedford-Stuyvesant, Sunset Park, and Williamsburg...
...But as we read on from year to year, we see how the institution that brings them together crumbles under their feet...
...You can feel the sorrow...
...In Crossing Swords' last pages, tragic shadows close in...
...Racial profiling is an everyday routine, so cops may be as dangerous as crooks...
...It is the setting for Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the classic story of a poor girl from an immigrant family, surrounded by sorrow, yearning to grow like a tree...
...They dream of success and distinction...
...We are swept up by inner forces that feel like too much...
...Sarah J. Hale was a shelter from the storm, and the storm ate it up...
...THE KIDS turn to their school as well, yearning to connect their inner lives with a civic institution...
...They want their parents, elders, friends, neighbors, to see through stereotypes and recognize them for themselves...
...Afterward, MAGAZINES the Board of Education brings in security guards, and life feels less desperate from day to day, but it also feels as if the authorities have come to see Hale in a purely custodial way...
...lie is at work on a book about Times Square...
...Ripeness is all...
...at the same time, they aren't quite sure who those selves are...
...Still, I thought, even nowhere I should be able to find something...
...Edited by Winthrop Holder et al., Volume 7, No...
...In the end a policeman appears and arrests him...
...Gangs from the streets move into the school (gang wannabes are even scarier), take over hallways, bathrooms, stairs...
...Indeed, some of them are us...
...They lose many of their students (especially those who are designated as the best students) to more flexible units: to "minischools," to "magnet schools," to "alternative schools" that are smaller, more narrowly targeted and intellectually focused...
...Feiffer's cop's response became an instant classic: "For jaytalking...
...If high school works for us, we develop a critical culture there: we learn to think about our lives, to see what the world is like, to distinguish between what is expensive and what is real, to imagine a real place for ourselves...
...The trouble here is not just lack of safety—students and teachers at Hale are used to lack of safety...
...Less than we like to think...
...When kids complain, the board announces that the school will close in June 2000...
...But in Hale's world, sex seems to lead directly to pregnancy, then to girls bringing up babies alone and feeling their lives are over before they start...
...Crossing Swords shows us how hard life can be out there, but also that you can come through a school of hard knocks with grace and dignity...
...The writers in Crossing Swords tell their stories and their hopes...
...When kids complain, the Board says it's "nothing personal," just a matter of numbers (always bad, getting worse...
...Go to the movies in 2000 and you are sure to see 106 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 beautiful young people take off their clothes and make love, without ever saying a word to each other about birth control, protected from pregnancy (and sexually transmitted diseases) by some magical process...
...RFADING these kids' magazine, I felt for them...
...I got on the phone to Brooklyn and spoke to Hale graduates, teachers, adDISSENT / Fall 2000 n 105 MAGAZINES ministrators, education professors—one led me to another—in search of their lost world...
...Readers of Dissent can recognize these advisers—they could be us...
...The kids choose life by turning to each other in ways that young people do everywhere...
...These are very different neighborhoods, but they have two big things in common: nearly all their people belong to ethnic minorities and nearly all are poor...
...When kids appeal to school officials, they are told what Ring Lardner's father told him" 'Shut up,' he explained...
...Dissent, Summer 2000, pp.19 - 24...
...Still, our shared desire for "critical culture" was right...
...No one is killed or badly hurt, but no one is arrested for what everyone knows is a crime...
...The trouble is the school's metamorphosis from an alternative to the streets into an extension of the streets...
...Death has taught her too much too soon...
...They sound a lot like the soulful suburban kids in one of the 1990s' best television series, My SoCalled Life...
...We struck a chord in Brooklyn right away...
...Holder modestly hoped we could see "its (possible) place in creating a more critical and human culture...
...Their patriotism is sweetly normal: it is as if they are responding to the Beach Boys' call of forty years ago, "Be True To Your School...
...he asks...
...That was a real modern tragedy...
...Many of the older ones have made it to college, and maybe they will thrive on what they have been through...
...For instance, many know people who carry guns for self-defense...
...Alas, their collectivity had just disappeared: on the very last pages, it was revealed that the Board of Education was going to close the school at the end of June 2000...
...1, Special Twelfth Anniversary Edition, Summer/Fall 1999, 222pp...
...The ambiguities and nuances of this situation are explored by Amy Gutmann, "What Does 'School Choice' Mean...
...Actually, these have been poor minority neighborhoods for some time...
...No alarm rings, which is itself alarming...
...Has our culture progressed since Freud a century ago...
...Even where institutions crumble, human memory and imagination can keep the light flickering...
...Williamsburg was one when my mother grew up there eighty years ago...
...Meanwhile, in political economy, the deal shifted toward "flexible accumulation" (words Bill Clinton pronounces like the name of God) and "niche marketing...
...That's what the girl's aunt and Nietzsche meant...
...There is a suspicious fire...
...For a time, Hale seems to give many of them just what they need...
...For several decades, they translated the New Deal into everyday life and created America's first really democratic people, the people who fought and beat the Nazis...
...It is sad to see them pressed up against the wall...
...Meanwhile, one boy remarks bitterly, "most of the 'fathers' take off like airplanes...
...Everybody is sad, but nobody is surprised, or even indignant...
...It was the blind leading the blind," one recent graduate says...
...A boy says "I decided to stay for a purpose . . . . Our school will close with the same banners it opened with: Hale Pride...
...We don't know much about this girl, but we know she has lost her innocence early...
...What for...
...Drug gangs with big guns still rule...
...And this is where "critical and human culture" can come from...
...And their faculty advisers, so imaginative and resourceful in creating a lively magazine, turn out to be as much in the dark as they are about why things are going from bad to worse...
...They have grown up too fast for real...
...The lack of sexual honesty and awareness in our culture today hurts kids from even our most privileged schools, but those kids have better resources to protect them when magic doesn't work...
...Where they have survived, in New York and all over America, it has been by breaking themselves down into smaller, specialized units that resemble their competitors—just as many big old department stores have stayed alive by metamorphosing into bazaars with numerous specialized boutiques...
...We know light needs solid institutions to sustain it...
...They were among the noblest products of the Popular Front imagination...
...They come across as smart, nice young American girls and boys...
...I thought our questions were better than our answers...
...In June 1999, the board announces that the school will close in June 2000...
...Within the educational system, it was classified as a "zoned comprehensive" school...
...I wanted to discover their collective story...
...They fall in love, lament young love's betrayals, hope they can love again...
...Hale gets four principals in two years, and two are bounced out on the spot...
...But anyone who has heard their voices will believe they can overcome...
...They blend into gangs and then try to break away from them...
...They want America to change in large ways, but there is no movement for change with which they identify...
...My brother, on the other hand, was an innocent victim, in the wrong place at the wrong time...
...DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 107...
...It comes at a time of life when nothing happens and existence feels pretty vacant, then ZAP...
...It's worth noticing that schools like this have a great tradition behind them...
...It is acting as any normal corporation would, closing down a division that is running at a loss...
...Kids who can cross swords can cross the street...
...There are no leaders, no principal or assistant principal who can stand up to them...
...Remember high school...
...Hale's kids know more than they want to know about some things...
...And the teachers, too, in their written introductions, glow with patriotic pride...
...In the light of what I heard, the kids' radiant normality seemed miraculous...
...More and more students drift away...
...All through the 1990s, he said, this magazine was kept alive by "The Society for Social Analysis," a group of dedicated students and teachers at Hale...
...And our image of "jaytalking"—discourse and dialogue outside the designated lines—had a resonance that I was sure would strike more chords out there as time went by...
Vol. 47 • September 2000 • No. 4
