Here is how Dena Sloan, in the RTD of August 15, 2005,
describes
the sequence of events: "On Friday afternoon, a local pastor called.
The Public Work of Rhetoric_nodrm
Because commonplace reasoning largely determines which things get identified, these questions do not merely elicit description.
They provoke--or I used them to provoke--an evaluation of the scene, as we can see in Jennifer Tillery's essay about Church Hill.
She said it is a "good place to live," though maybe "a little too quiet for me" because "where I live no one ever comes outside.
" In fact, her "neighborhood isn't bad because shootings don't happen there as much as they do in other places.
Yes, there are some shootings, but there aren't a lot.
When I hear a shooting I don't get scared or anything, I just hope that no one tries to run into my house and hide, especially if my family and I are home.
"
I told Jennifer during a conference that what she described sounded stress- ful. She just looked at me, blankly. I explained that knowing someone might run into my house during a shooting would stress me out. How could I feel safe? She listened patiently then turned to her screen and started typing: "I know that this sounds stressful, but to me it isn't because I don't worry myself about things like shootings. I know that I am going to die some day. " Now it was my turn to look blank. I had expected that the rhetorical power of the teens' writings would be rooted in the cross-cultural dialogue that the com- munity organizing framework foregrounded. But I had no idea how that power would feel. I grew up without gunplay in an upper-middle class suburb of Connecticut. If I had fatalistic ideas at fourteen, they were not rooted in expe- rience, but in moody rock music.
I was surprised by students' determination to articulate their values in this assignment, even when their own evidence seemed to contradict their claims. Sha'keilia Allen, for example, admitted that some might see her community as "dirty, violent, noisy, and boring," and while all this is true (except the noise) she nonetheless insisted that she liked her community. It is true, she conceded, that "some of the kids in my neighborhood make trash" but it's not like the trash collectors never come. In that same spirit, she warded off what some might mistake as a problem with public safety.
There are some weird people who live where I live. There is a man who spies on the ladies and girls. But this doesn't make me afraid to go outside and have fun, because he is in this thing that looks like a wheel- chair but it's not really a wheelchair. I know that he can't get me because his house has steps and, in order for him to get away from his house, one of his family members would have to bring him out on a ramp. But if he does try to get off his porch, then I will run right home.
When I first read this scene, I could not help but wonder what was really happening--or may have already happened--to girls in that neighborhood. I was concerned. But then I reread it and imagined it visually: an athletic- looking fourteen-year-old girl outrunning a man in a wheelchair that is not a wheelchair. That is when I noticed the placemaking. I was unprepared in so
many ways: I had forgotten, quite frankly, what fourteen-year-olds like to do to each other, for sport. And I had no idea how race fit in with all of the other topics of teasing. Iman Clayton complained that "the boys at my school call me names such as ugly, black and crispy. I would like to say that this doesn't hurt me but it really does. " She then interpreted the boys' conduct and mod- eled an alternative. "In anything I do, I will love myself and continue to tell myself that I am beautiful in spite of what some mean boys may tell me. Some boys will probably always expect me to be lighter, but that I cannot change. I just expect myself to be a nice person and to get far in life. One of the things that makes me a nice person is that I care what people say and do, but in a good way. "
By modeling "a good way" of caring about color, Iman transformed the private experience of racism into a public disposition. I see this as the differ- ence between what Crowley and Hawhee have called the modern concern with personality--an amalgam of private perceptions or feelings--and the ancient concern with ethos or character, knowable only through the repeated actions or habits of public life. Iman has created new terms for being "accepted, even by people who are the same color as me" and, as Warner might say, in doing this made a world, poetically, one that I believe many would want to inhabit.
Trevon Blakely did something similar in the revision of a passage where he characterized his community as a violent place and later admitted to having "an anger problem. " When I asked about this "anger problem"--if it meant that he, too, was violent--he shot me a quick squint and asked why I thought that. I explained how "violence" and "anger" seemed similar, then asked if he agreed. His revision--a new opening sentence--addressed the confusion head on: "Although I do get angry, I am not violent like others in the neighbor- hood. " Violent people, he went on to explain, shoot off guns on the Fourth of July and not just "to celebrate. " They are "downright mean and cruel. " Their public disposition, to be clear, is indefensible. Trevon's "anger problem," by contrast, was about having to babysit his siblings when he would rather do his own thing. The bulk of his essay was about making good grades, lik- ing basketball "more than anything in the world except life and the Lord," and acting "like a smart person and not someone who doesn't care about life and goes around being a fake thug or whatever you want to call it. " In this revision, Trevon not only distinguished what Crowley and Hawhee would call his habitual practices of caring and learning from those of the violent people and the "fake thugs," but he also invited his readers to understand that there is more to his community than violence.
There is a subtlety in these students' essays, publicly addressed, but very much rooted in particular places and experiences. We see Iman, Sha'Keila, Trevon, and Jennifer in the midst of that life, constructing their characters aes- thetically and rhetorically, in ways that readers can judge. From the vantage
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point of character, it is harder to generalize on the issues. For every student who complained that there was too much pressure in school to fight, as one girl put it, "over stupid things like a pencil or a boy," there was another tes- tifying that some students "help other students by tutoring and staying back after school to teach them new things. " The facts were always open to coun- terfacts. Darrius Bolling wrote that "some of the teachers can be your best friends because of the way they act by just being themselves and not trying to imitate or act like someone they aren't. " But "one day," Trevon confided, "my teacher gave us a test on material that we never even learned. Sometimes she gives us stuff that she doesn't even know. " One girl wrote against the idea that "young ladies" should not compete in sports, get sweaty, or "do the more 'manly' steps in Step Dancing. " But another seemed to affirm that sort of tra- ditional gendered role, dreaming about opening a hair and nail salon so that she could "make people feel happy and to help them to stop thinking nega- tive about themselves. "
If all this seems like making the worst case look better, as the usual case against sophistry goes, it also meant honoring Protagoras's dictum that the human is the measure of all things. The task, after all, was not to get it right-- to generalize the state of inner-city school teaching, the cleanliness and safety in the neighborhoods, the real causes of racism or gender stereotypes--but to crack the hard shell of commonplace reasoning as it actually functioned in each rhetor's world. Honoring individuals this way has an obvious humanistic value, but it also adds value to public inquiry itself. The day we talked about achieve- ment, for example, I began by asking questions about a news clipping they had read about the problems with Richmond public schools. I asked them if they knew what a truant was. They did. I then asked them if they knew what the truancy rate was at the high school that they would be attending in the next year or so. It was just over 60 percent. I would like to say that that quieted them down. But it didn't, at least not until I read aloud Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "We Real Cool. " I asked if the kids in that poem were actually cool for skipping school, as Brooks slyly suggests in the first few lines. "It depends," they told me. What they wrote that day elaborated why. They did not talk about standardized tests or tracking. What they were following was far less complicated, but more profound: school was cool when people were nice to each other.
Their statements about their futures were also narrated along these lines, as a contest between people who help and those who do not. There are some people, Jennifer Tillery wrote, who "tell me I can't--and I will not--make it because I will not try hard enough. " She told her readers, however, "people like this I call haters," and they are "probably" the ones who "won't make it in life" because "they are so focused on my life instead of their own. " Jennifer wanted to make it as a doctor, "to help little children like me," because "three or four years ago" she got bitten by a stray dog, and even though she had to
have "four or five needles inside the dog bite" and she "started screaming and couldn't breathe," the doctor was really nice. And so while she admitted it seemed like a "bad experience," it actually was enabling. Denise Alert's desire to have her own hair and nail salon could also be traced back to a desire to contribute something positive to her community. She explained simply that she liked to "make people feel happy and to help them to stop thinking nega- tive about themselves. " When she described herself and her friends walking through the park encountering "mean people who talk about others" and who "might not like you," it is plain to see that her goal is to get rid of that nega- tivity.
Positive human relationships were the heart of it. A jock confessed what he learned from his coach, after he and his friends were laughing at a boy who could not catch the ball. "You never tease a fellow player. He's a part of your team! " Another jock confessed that while he likes to "show off in football to boost up" his self-esteem and confidence, it hurts him to hear people say, "You suck. " He realized that he does not have the self-esteem he thought he had, and moreover, that the true source of his confidence was not in sports, but in "becoming a scientist. " What he wrote about was that moment when he knew: looking through the microscope with one eye and, with the other, at a career in chemistry or gerontology. "In this writing," he confessed, "I am taking off the mask. " Like the girls who untangled themselves from gender expectations--LaVarsha Griffin wrote with some resignation, "People always expect me to clean up"--DeJohn separated himself from the masculinity he felt compelled to perform.
Publicity Effect
I had high hopes that these essays might stoke these stases in public dis- course, and so by the end of the summer, Malinoski and I created a book of the teens' writings that they chose to call Two Sides of a One Track Mind. This fit their sense of humor and, from my point of view, their dissoi logoi. Many months later, the book was published and distributed to the teens and their parents at an awards ceremony put together by Councilwoman McQuinn. Before that ceremony, which was in the fall, McQuinn released a few of the students' essays to the RTD as a press release about the workshop. And that created a middle space of some size and capacity.
Shebony Carrington Dear Friend,
I don't know where you live or what you do, but I do know this: you don't want to live where I live. You don't want to see what I see every day. I live in Fairfield Court and I am going to tell you how I feel about it.
It's true the houses are very nice looking. They just put new ovens in, and a while back they put in new refrigerators. But the place still isn't
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? "Where I'm From to Where I'm Going. " Front page, Richmond Times Dispatch, August 12, 2005, reprintedby permission of the Richmond Times-Dispatch
right. Some of the houses are dirty, and they are only cleaned when it's time for inspection. After that, they go back to being dirty houses again. The people in my neighborhood don't take pride in how it looks.
Some people feel comfortable sitting on their porches, but now they can't because of the shooting and the crazy people around the neighbor- hood. No matter what happens, there are always people arguing. There are people that walk around the neighborhood looking stupid. In other words there are people who drink too much liquor and beer and walk around bent over, smelling like alcohol. That's not a good sight.
In my neighborhood there are some streets that are clean, but there are some streets that are nasty looking. The area that I live in is clean because there is always someone picking up the trash. On other streets there are just people who throw trash on the ground. There are some people that just sit around and drink and leave their beer bottles/cans on the ground. Another problem is the drug dealers. They sell drugs and urinate in front of the children. They just don't care what they do, so they're just going to do it.
I don't think that the negative things in my neighborhood are going to stop me from being what I want to be in life. I see the negative things in my neighborhood but I'm not involved in them. I feel that being on the outside of the situation looking inside makes me want to help peo- ple. I feel really bad because of the people that are being hurt and bruised from getting beat up. Just because I'm in the neighborhood around these
things, it doesn't mean that anything is going to stop me from accom- plishing my goal of being a doctor. When I grow up I want to become a General Practitioner. That is a doctor you go to for everyday needs like if you have a cold or if you are sick. I want to become a General Practitioner because I like to help other people. Darren Thomas, the preacher from the Temple of Judah told me, "To be somebody you have to help some- body. " So I'm going to be that person to help somebody.
What might be in my way from accomplishing this goal is my nega- tive attitude toward some situations. What I mean is that someone may come across the wrong way by getting smart with me or getting frustrated with me and I might not know what to do or say to them. Then, I might get an attitude with them. However that's not stopping me from being me. What I mean is that there are some people that expect me to be a young lady and not to play sports. They would rather see young ladies dress up and wear heels and also keep their hair and nails done. But me, I just want to be comfortable for myself. It doesn't matter how I look as long as I'm clean and comfortable. I am going to be me no matter what.
Media General, the owner of the newspaper, later told me that over 9,000 people read the essay online and that it got more hits than any other story in the entire history of the paper online. The editors had also created a blog where roughly 100 people wrote comments, nearly all of them positive. Read- ers responded well to this strong voice emanating from public housing. Of the ninety-six recorded comments, roughly one-third (twenty-four comments) addressed Shebony's placemaking directly. "You go, girl! " one of them wrote. "Don't let your present dictate your future! " Readers liked the idea of some- body beating the odds of doing well even in public housing. An even greater number of the readers (thirty-seven comments) liked Shebony's Christian sense of how to do it. Some did this simply by telling readers "this child is blessed" or by closing their note, "God's speed. " Others offered advice to the writer-- "I would like to say to Ms. Carrington, 'Trust God. ' He will be there for you as long as you have faith and trust in Him. " Readers carefully noted that Shebony had already taken good advice and praised the advice givers: "I also attend Temple of Judah," wrote one, "and its good to know that you took what the minister said and ran with it. "
The Christian discourse of redemption through service, along with the defiant appropriation of American bootstraps, warranted the otherwise harsh juxtaposition between herself and the "stupid people" who "just don't care" about the greater good of the community. Shebony does not choose to rise while her community slides, but to make her success her community's suc- cess. Ultimately, it is not the drug dealers or drunks that she worries about, then, but the people who spark an attitude in her: "There are some people that expect me to be a young lady and not to play sports. They would rather see young ladies dress up and wear heels and also keep their hair and nails done. "
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Her own expectation, to be "clean and comfortable" and "to be me no mat- ter what," suggested a contemporary alternative that concretized as it gener- alized. Who doesn't want to be clean and comfortable? Who doesn't want to steer clear of unreasonable gender expectations? Who doesn't want to help somebody? Who doesn't want "to be me"? Hart-Davidson, Zappen, and Hal- loran, in their work with young African American teen writers in Troy, New York, noted a similar resistance to "traditional gender roles. " But they also saw them temper self-confidence "about themselves and their futures" with "contemporary social and family values," including those found in "the mass media. "28 In this rhetorical performance, however, just as it was in many of the others I discussed in the preceding section, Shebony cut through those commonplaces.
Not everyone was so sanguine about the power of self-determination and faith overcoming structural barriers. The remaining third of the commenta- tors shifted the ground away from Shebony and her situation to the difficult environment of Fairfield Court. One characterized "this young lady" as "just one example of what our City youth experience day to day. "
I hope that the city council members catch this article and Mayor Wilder. She is asking for some help. She may not have said help me, but she painted a picture of a young girl who does not want to be caught up in what she sees in her neighborhood. I too, as a youth in Richmond said that I would not involve myself in those negative things, but because I did not have stable parent figures in my life I lost that hope, because
I felt like nobody else cared. I care young lady. Peace and Blessings! ! !
In telling her story of getting involved in "negative things" and then regret- ting it, this commentator made a confession while also inventing a broader argument about teens in need of community guides ("stable parent figures"). Closing the note with "I care," the reader symbolically became that guide. This was part of a larger effort to make a middle space online, but to go beyond it, as we can see in the following comment.
I have four children who live in Northside. They did not grow up there, but chose to live there. What they have encountered to their dis- may is the attitude of city officials that if you live in Northside you have to expect trouble. The result of this attitude is there is no follow up on solving crime here. If young people such as the author of the letter pub- lished today wish to have opportunities in life, the problems on their street should take the same priority as in any other part of the city.
These accusations of civic neglect contrast rather loudly to the prior analy- ses that were premised on Christianity and American opportunity. What stands in the way of opportunity here are "city officials" who shrug their shoulders at crime and tell you to "expect trouble. "
Most readers, however, did not waste time debating who was really to blame. They offered to introduce Shebony to medical work through their jobs or their connections, recommended inspiring books, or more mysteriously offered to send gifts. Others generalized the need to help teens like Shebony, counseling readers that "any little thing will help, whether it is volunteering at the schools or giving small donations for school supplies. " Then, in what seemed like a conscious response to the title of Shebony's essay, one com- mentator exclaimed, "We may not live where she lives or have her experi- ences thus far in her young life but we can help change her environment. I for one will seek her out to help her stay on track to achieve her goals. There are some more out there. Who else will help? " A week later, Rob Rhoden, the pastor at Commonwealth Chapel, answered that call. 29 He invited Shebony to his church to read her essay aloud.
Here is how Dena Sloan, in the RTD of August 15, 2005, describes the sequence of events: "On Friday afternoon, a local pastor called. Less than forty-eight hours later, Shebony was standing in a church she had never attended, Commonwealth Chapel in the Fan District, facing a crowd of about 150 strangers and reading her essay. . . . The church's pastor, a man Shebony had met just a few hours before, told her that people she doesn't know are setting up a fund for her education. The tall, thin girl seemed at once stunned and pleased at the whirlwind of developments. Wear- ing a soft, green jacket and skirt, and with her short hair in a tight ponytail, she greeted well-wishers after morning services yesterday. 'It's a very good thing,' she said quietly. "
At the time of this writing, Pastor Rhoden's congregation has raised $10,000. 30 The "whirlwind of developments" continued when Habitat for Hu- manity called to see if Shebony's family might qualify for a home. 31 Months later, Shebony won first prize at the banquet honoring the writers, which was organized by Councilwoman McQuinn and Ernestine Scott. That night she went home with a laptop.
Not all of these whirlwinds blew favorably, though. Lindsay Kastner, in a follow-up piece for the RTD, wrote that "in her own neighborhood response has been positive and negative. . . . Some people told her the essay brought tears to their eyes. But Shebony said neighborhood drug dealers also had something to say to her. . . . 'Some said you been talking about Fairfield, you been snitchin. '"32 Though Shebony did not name any names or even partic- ular places, the snitch reaction indicated that she had provocatively chal- lenged rhetorical decorum in her community, that her placemaking toward mainstream values like hard work, sobriety, and a respect for the law had threatened their move away from it. The RTD columnist Michael Paul Williams praised Shebony on these grounds for her "precocious courage . . . to break the code of silence" and dismissed the snitch reaction as something emanat- ing from a "confused code of ethics" condoning irresponsible behavior, ille- gal activity, exploitation, and violence. 33
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172 David J. Coogan
In "Where I've Been, Where I'm Going," Shebony Carrington spoke out against her placement in the city, constructing a scene in which her charac- ter could exit. And that is just what she did. She left Fairfield Court rhetori- cally. Then, with the publication of her essay and the invitation from Pastor Rhoden, she left it physically. She did not do this because I had taught her how to uncover the truth, as I saw it. She did it because I had asked her to ori- ent herself to a reading public.
In these feel-good, Oprah moments, where we can easily see the link be- tween rhetorical cause and material effect, it may be tempting to confuse the sophistic framework that I have been elaborating here with the Angels Net- work. And while I am certainly proud to have been a part of a process that landed the girl a med-school scholarship (and later landed another student whose essay got into the paper a dance scholarship),34 I hope I have also shown that sophists, in their capacity as teachers, writers and community guides, do not use rhetoric to target change. They make middle spaces for placemaking and poetic world making. Then they get out of the way.
Notes
1. Nolan, "Statements. "
2. Nolan, "After Rape. "
3. Nolan, "Statements. "
4. Nolan, "Teens Charged. " 5. Cooper, "Four Teenagers. " 6. Nolan, "After Rape. "
7. For further information on Councilwoman McQuinn and her district, see http:// www. ci. richmond. va. us/citizen/city_gov/district7/accomplishments. aspx.
8. For further information on ACORN, see http://www. richmondneighborhoods. org/.
9. Walters, "City Plans. "
10. Coogan, "Counter Publics"; Coogan, "Community Literacy"; Coogan, "Service
Learning. "
11. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists, 42.
12. Ibid. , 40-42.
13. Crowley and Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics, 109.
14. Cushman, "Rhetorician. "
15. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists, 2.
16. McKerrow, "Critical Rhetoric. "
17. See the essay by Candace Rai in this volume for an extended critique of inclusiv-
ity in citywide forums.
18. Mathieu, Tactics of Hope.
19. See Crowley and Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics, chapters 3 and 4, for more on the
rhetorical technique of conjecture.
20. Goldblatt, "Alinksy's Reveille," 283.
21. McKnight, "Redefining Community," 117. 22. Marback, "Speaking of the City," 146.
23. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 122. 24. Ibid. , 114.
25. Ibid. , 87.
26. Ibid. , 68.
27. Hart-Davidson, Zappen, and Halloran, "On the
Formation," 135-37.
28. Ibid. , 135-36.
29. For more information on this church, see http://www. comchap. com/started. php.
30. Walters, "City Plans. "
31. Kastner, "Essayist. "
32. Kastner, "Youths' Essays Honored. "
33. Williams, "'Snitch' Shirts. "
34. MacDonald, who won second prize at the banquet and who also had his essay
published in the RTD, received a $360 scholarship for ballet lessons. According to Lind- say Kastner of the RTD, "Diontey's mother, Wanda McDonald Cooper, said she would not have been able to pay for his lessons. " Kastner, "Teen. "
Works Cited
Coogan, David. "Community Literacy as Civic Dialogue. " Community Literacy Journal 1 (2006): 95-108.
------. "Counter Publics in Public Housing: Reframing the Politics of Service Learning. " College English 67 (2005): 461-82.
------. "Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhetoric" College Composition and Communication 57 (2006): 667-93.
Cooper, Alan. "Four Teenagers Sentenced in Rape on Probation at Time of Crime, They Get Roughly 30 Years Behind Bars. " Richmond Times Dispatch, July 20, 2005.
Crowley, Sharon, and Debra Hawhee. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. 3rd ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.
Cushman, Ellen. "The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change. " College Composition and Communication 47 (1996): 7-28.
Goldblatt, Eli. "Alinksy's Reveille: A Community Organizing Model for Neighborhood- Based Literacy Projects. " College English 67 (2005): 274-95.
Hart-Davidson, William, James P. Zappen, and S. Michael Halloran. "On the Formation of Democratic Citizens. " In The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill, 125-40. New York: SUNY Press, 2005.
Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.
Kastner, Lindsay. "Essay: Where I'm From, Where I'm Going. " Richmond Times Dispatch, August 12, 2005.
------. "Essayist, 15, Grateful for Encouragement: Her Education Is Getting a Boost; Her Family May Qualify for Habitat. " Richmond Times Dispatch, August 27, 2005.
------. "Teen Steps Toward Goals: Art Center in Richmond Fosters Student's Love of Dance, Hopes for College. " Richmond Times Dispatch, January 9, 2006.
------. "Youths' Essays Honored: What Began as a Workshop in Summer Has Led to a Book Showcasing Their Work, Voices. " Richmond Times Dispatch, October 30, 2005. Marback, Richard. "Speaking of the City and Literacies of Place Making in Composition
Studies. " In City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices, edited by Bruce McComiskey and
Cynthia Ryan, 141-55. New York: SUNY Press, 2003.
Mathieu, Paula. Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. Portsmouth,
N. H. : Boynton/Cook, 2005.
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McKerrow, Raymie. "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis. " In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, edited by John L. Lucaites, Celeste M. Condit, and Sally Caudill, 441-63. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.
McKnight, John. "Redefining Community. " In Writing and Community Action, edited by Thomas Deans, 116-22. New York: Longman, 2003.
McQuinn, Delores. "Teen Center Mission. " In East End Teen Center: "Bojangles Block" in Historic Church Hill. Richmond, Va. : East End Teen Center, 2004.
Nolan, Jim. "After Rape, a Long Healing Process: 4 Teens Will Be Sentenced Tomorrow in an Attack That Shocked the Community. " Richmond Times Dispatch, July 18, 2005. ------. "Statements Piece Together Rape. " Richmond Times Dispatch, November 13, 2004. ------.
I told Jennifer during a conference that what she described sounded stress- ful. She just looked at me, blankly. I explained that knowing someone might run into my house during a shooting would stress me out. How could I feel safe? She listened patiently then turned to her screen and started typing: "I know that this sounds stressful, but to me it isn't because I don't worry myself about things like shootings. I know that I am going to die some day. " Now it was my turn to look blank. I had expected that the rhetorical power of the teens' writings would be rooted in the cross-cultural dialogue that the com- munity organizing framework foregrounded. But I had no idea how that power would feel. I grew up without gunplay in an upper-middle class suburb of Connecticut. If I had fatalistic ideas at fourteen, they were not rooted in expe- rience, but in moody rock music.
I was surprised by students' determination to articulate their values in this assignment, even when their own evidence seemed to contradict their claims. Sha'keilia Allen, for example, admitted that some might see her community as "dirty, violent, noisy, and boring," and while all this is true (except the noise) she nonetheless insisted that she liked her community. It is true, she conceded, that "some of the kids in my neighborhood make trash" but it's not like the trash collectors never come. In that same spirit, she warded off what some might mistake as a problem with public safety.
There are some weird people who live where I live. There is a man who spies on the ladies and girls. But this doesn't make me afraid to go outside and have fun, because he is in this thing that looks like a wheel- chair but it's not really a wheelchair. I know that he can't get me because his house has steps and, in order for him to get away from his house, one of his family members would have to bring him out on a ramp. But if he does try to get off his porch, then I will run right home.
When I first read this scene, I could not help but wonder what was really happening--or may have already happened--to girls in that neighborhood. I was concerned. But then I reread it and imagined it visually: an athletic- looking fourteen-year-old girl outrunning a man in a wheelchair that is not a wheelchair. That is when I noticed the placemaking. I was unprepared in so
many ways: I had forgotten, quite frankly, what fourteen-year-olds like to do to each other, for sport. And I had no idea how race fit in with all of the other topics of teasing. Iman Clayton complained that "the boys at my school call me names such as ugly, black and crispy. I would like to say that this doesn't hurt me but it really does. " She then interpreted the boys' conduct and mod- eled an alternative. "In anything I do, I will love myself and continue to tell myself that I am beautiful in spite of what some mean boys may tell me. Some boys will probably always expect me to be lighter, but that I cannot change. I just expect myself to be a nice person and to get far in life. One of the things that makes me a nice person is that I care what people say and do, but in a good way. "
By modeling "a good way" of caring about color, Iman transformed the private experience of racism into a public disposition. I see this as the differ- ence between what Crowley and Hawhee have called the modern concern with personality--an amalgam of private perceptions or feelings--and the ancient concern with ethos or character, knowable only through the repeated actions or habits of public life. Iman has created new terms for being "accepted, even by people who are the same color as me" and, as Warner might say, in doing this made a world, poetically, one that I believe many would want to inhabit.
Trevon Blakely did something similar in the revision of a passage where he characterized his community as a violent place and later admitted to having "an anger problem. " When I asked about this "anger problem"--if it meant that he, too, was violent--he shot me a quick squint and asked why I thought that. I explained how "violence" and "anger" seemed similar, then asked if he agreed. His revision--a new opening sentence--addressed the confusion head on: "Although I do get angry, I am not violent like others in the neighbor- hood. " Violent people, he went on to explain, shoot off guns on the Fourth of July and not just "to celebrate. " They are "downright mean and cruel. " Their public disposition, to be clear, is indefensible. Trevon's "anger problem," by contrast, was about having to babysit his siblings when he would rather do his own thing. The bulk of his essay was about making good grades, lik- ing basketball "more than anything in the world except life and the Lord," and acting "like a smart person and not someone who doesn't care about life and goes around being a fake thug or whatever you want to call it. " In this revision, Trevon not only distinguished what Crowley and Hawhee would call his habitual practices of caring and learning from those of the violent people and the "fake thugs," but he also invited his readers to understand that there is more to his community than violence.
There is a subtlety in these students' essays, publicly addressed, but very much rooted in particular places and experiences. We see Iman, Sha'Keila, Trevon, and Jennifer in the midst of that life, constructing their characters aes- thetically and rhetorically, in ways that readers can judge. From the vantage
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point of character, it is harder to generalize on the issues. For every student who complained that there was too much pressure in school to fight, as one girl put it, "over stupid things like a pencil or a boy," there was another tes- tifying that some students "help other students by tutoring and staying back after school to teach them new things. " The facts were always open to coun- terfacts. Darrius Bolling wrote that "some of the teachers can be your best friends because of the way they act by just being themselves and not trying to imitate or act like someone they aren't. " But "one day," Trevon confided, "my teacher gave us a test on material that we never even learned. Sometimes she gives us stuff that she doesn't even know. " One girl wrote against the idea that "young ladies" should not compete in sports, get sweaty, or "do the more 'manly' steps in Step Dancing. " But another seemed to affirm that sort of tra- ditional gendered role, dreaming about opening a hair and nail salon so that she could "make people feel happy and to help them to stop thinking nega- tive about themselves. "
If all this seems like making the worst case look better, as the usual case against sophistry goes, it also meant honoring Protagoras's dictum that the human is the measure of all things. The task, after all, was not to get it right-- to generalize the state of inner-city school teaching, the cleanliness and safety in the neighborhoods, the real causes of racism or gender stereotypes--but to crack the hard shell of commonplace reasoning as it actually functioned in each rhetor's world. Honoring individuals this way has an obvious humanistic value, but it also adds value to public inquiry itself. The day we talked about achieve- ment, for example, I began by asking questions about a news clipping they had read about the problems with Richmond public schools. I asked them if they knew what a truant was. They did. I then asked them if they knew what the truancy rate was at the high school that they would be attending in the next year or so. It was just over 60 percent. I would like to say that that quieted them down. But it didn't, at least not until I read aloud Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "We Real Cool. " I asked if the kids in that poem were actually cool for skipping school, as Brooks slyly suggests in the first few lines. "It depends," they told me. What they wrote that day elaborated why. They did not talk about standardized tests or tracking. What they were following was far less complicated, but more profound: school was cool when people were nice to each other.
Their statements about their futures were also narrated along these lines, as a contest between people who help and those who do not. There are some people, Jennifer Tillery wrote, who "tell me I can't--and I will not--make it because I will not try hard enough. " She told her readers, however, "people like this I call haters," and they are "probably" the ones who "won't make it in life" because "they are so focused on my life instead of their own. " Jennifer wanted to make it as a doctor, "to help little children like me," because "three or four years ago" she got bitten by a stray dog, and even though she had to
have "four or five needles inside the dog bite" and she "started screaming and couldn't breathe," the doctor was really nice. And so while she admitted it seemed like a "bad experience," it actually was enabling. Denise Alert's desire to have her own hair and nail salon could also be traced back to a desire to contribute something positive to her community. She explained simply that she liked to "make people feel happy and to help them to stop thinking nega- tive about themselves. " When she described herself and her friends walking through the park encountering "mean people who talk about others" and who "might not like you," it is plain to see that her goal is to get rid of that nega- tivity.
Positive human relationships were the heart of it. A jock confessed what he learned from his coach, after he and his friends were laughing at a boy who could not catch the ball. "You never tease a fellow player. He's a part of your team! " Another jock confessed that while he likes to "show off in football to boost up" his self-esteem and confidence, it hurts him to hear people say, "You suck. " He realized that he does not have the self-esteem he thought he had, and moreover, that the true source of his confidence was not in sports, but in "becoming a scientist. " What he wrote about was that moment when he knew: looking through the microscope with one eye and, with the other, at a career in chemistry or gerontology. "In this writing," he confessed, "I am taking off the mask. " Like the girls who untangled themselves from gender expectations--LaVarsha Griffin wrote with some resignation, "People always expect me to clean up"--DeJohn separated himself from the masculinity he felt compelled to perform.
Publicity Effect
I had high hopes that these essays might stoke these stases in public dis- course, and so by the end of the summer, Malinoski and I created a book of the teens' writings that they chose to call Two Sides of a One Track Mind. This fit their sense of humor and, from my point of view, their dissoi logoi. Many months later, the book was published and distributed to the teens and their parents at an awards ceremony put together by Councilwoman McQuinn. Before that ceremony, which was in the fall, McQuinn released a few of the students' essays to the RTD as a press release about the workshop. And that created a middle space of some size and capacity.
Shebony Carrington Dear Friend,
I don't know where you live or what you do, but I do know this: you don't want to live where I live. You don't want to see what I see every day. I live in Fairfield Court and I am going to tell you how I feel about it.
It's true the houses are very nice looking. They just put new ovens in, and a while back they put in new refrigerators. But the place still isn't
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? "Where I'm From to Where I'm Going. " Front page, Richmond Times Dispatch, August 12, 2005, reprintedby permission of the Richmond Times-Dispatch
right. Some of the houses are dirty, and they are only cleaned when it's time for inspection. After that, they go back to being dirty houses again. The people in my neighborhood don't take pride in how it looks.
Some people feel comfortable sitting on their porches, but now they can't because of the shooting and the crazy people around the neighbor- hood. No matter what happens, there are always people arguing. There are people that walk around the neighborhood looking stupid. In other words there are people who drink too much liquor and beer and walk around bent over, smelling like alcohol. That's not a good sight.
In my neighborhood there are some streets that are clean, but there are some streets that are nasty looking. The area that I live in is clean because there is always someone picking up the trash. On other streets there are just people who throw trash on the ground. There are some people that just sit around and drink and leave their beer bottles/cans on the ground. Another problem is the drug dealers. They sell drugs and urinate in front of the children. They just don't care what they do, so they're just going to do it.
I don't think that the negative things in my neighborhood are going to stop me from being what I want to be in life. I see the negative things in my neighborhood but I'm not involved in them. I feel that being on the outside of the situation looking inside makes me want to help peo- ple. I feel really bad because of the people that are being hurt and bruised from getting beat up. Just because I'm in the neighborhood around these
things, it doesn't mean that anything is going to stop me from accom- plishing my goal of being a doctor. When I grow up I want to become a General Practitioner. That is a doctor you go to for everyday needs like if you have a cold or if you are sick. I want to become a General Practitioner because I like to help other people. Darren Thomas, the preacher from the Temple of Judah told me, "To be somebody you have to help some- body. " So I'm going to be that person to help somebody.
What might be in my way from accomplishing this goal is my nega- tive attitude toward some situations. What I mean is that someone may come across the wrong way by getting smart with me or getting frustrated with me and I might not know what to do or say to them. Then, I might get an attitude with them. However that's not stopping me from being me. What I mean is that there are some people that expect me to be a young lady and not to play sports. They would rather see young ladies dress up and wear heels and also keep their hair and nails done. But me, I just want to be comfortable for myself. It doesn't matter how I look as long as I'm clean and comfortable. I am going to be me no matter what.
Media General, the owner of the newspaper, later told me that over 9,000 people read the essay online and that it got more hits than any other story in the entire history of the paper online. The editors had also created a blog where roughly 100 people wrote comments, nearly all of them positive. Read- ers responded well to this strong voice emanating from public housing. Of the ninety-six recorded comments, roughly one-third (twenty-four comments) addressed Shebony's placemaking directly. "You go, girl! " one of them wrote. "Don't let your present dictate your future! " Readers liked the idea of some- body beating the odds of doing well even in public housing. An even greater number of the readers (thirty-seven comments) liked Shebony's Christian sense of how to do it. Some did this simply by telling readers "this child is blessed" or by closing their note, "God's speed. " Others offered advice to the writer-- "I would like to say to Ms. Carrington, 'Trust God. ' He will be there for you as long as you have faith and trust in Him. " Readers carefully noted that Shebony had already taken good advice and praised the advice givers: "I also attend Temple of Judah," wrote one, "and its good to know that you took what the minister said and ran with it. "
The Christian discourse of redemption through service, along with the defiant appropriation of American bootstraps, warranted the otherwise harsh juxtaposition between herself and the "stupid people" who "just don't care" about the greater good of the community. Shebony does not choose to rise while her community slides, but to make her success her community's suc- cess. Ultimately, it is not the drug dealers or drunks that she worries about, then, but the people who spark an attitude in her: "There are some people that expect me to be a young lady and not to play sports. They would rather see young ladies dress up and wear heels and also keep their hair and nails done. "
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Her own expectation, to be "clean and comfortable" and "to be me no mat- ter what," suggested a contemporary alternative that concretized as it gener- alized. Who doesn't want to be clean and comfortable? Who doesn't want to steer clear of unreasonable gender expectations? Who doesn't want to help somebody? Who doesn't want "to be me"? Hart-Davidson, Zappen, and Hal- loran, in their work with young African American teen writers in Troy, New York, noted a similar resistance to "traditional gender roles. " But they also saw them temper self-confidence "about themselves and their futures" with "contemporary social and family values," including those found in "the mass media. "28 In this rhetorical performance, however, just as it was in many of the others I discussed in the preceding section, Shebony cut through those commonplaces.
Not everyone was so sanguine about the power of self-determination and faith overcoming structural barriers. The remaining third of the commenta- tors shifted the ground away from Shebony and her situation to the difficult environment of Fairfield Court. One characterized "this young lady" as "just one example of what our City youth experience day to day. "
I hope that the city council members catch this article and Mayor Wilder. She is asking for some help. She may not have said help me, but she painted a picture of a young girl who does not want to be caught up in what she sees in her neighborhood. I too, as a youth in Richmond said that I would not involve myself in those negative things, but because I did not have stable parent figures in my life I lost that hope, because
I felt like nobody else cared. I care young lady. Peace and Blessings! ! !
In telling her story of getting involved in "negative things" and then regret- ting it, this commentator made a confession while also inventing a broader argument about teens in need of community guides ("stable parent figures"). Closing the note with "I care," the reader symbolically became that guide. This was part of a larger effort to make a middle space online, but to go beyond it, as we can see in the following comment.
I have four children who live in Northside. They did not grow up there, but chose to live there. What they have encountered to their dis- may is the attitude of city officials that if you live in Northside you have to expect trouble. The result of this attitude is there is no follow up on solving crime here. If young people such as the author of the letter pub- lished today wish to have opportunities in life, the problems on their street should take the same priority as in any other part of the city.
These accusations of civic neglect contrast rather loudly to the prior analy- ses that were premised on Christianity and American opportunity. What stands in the way of opportunity here are "city officials" who shrug their shoulders at crime and tell you to "expect trouble. "
Most readers, however, did not waste time debating who was really to blame. They offered to introduce Shebony to medical work through their jobs or their connections, recommended inspiring books, or more mysteriously offered to send gifts. Others generalized the need to help teens like Shebony, counseling readers that "any little thing will help, whether it is volunteering at the schools or giving small donations for school supplies. " Then, in what seemed like a conscious response to the title of Shebony's essay, one com- mentator exclaimed, "We may not live where she lives or have her experi- ences thus far in her young life but we can help change her environment. I for one will seek her out to help her stay on track to achieve her goals. There are some more out there. Who else will help? " A week later, Rob Rhoden, the pastor at Commonwealth Chapel, answered that call. 29 He invited Shebony to his church to read her essay aloud.
Here is how Dena Sloan, in the RTD of August 15, 2005, describes the sequence of events: "On Friday afternoon, a local pastor called. Less than forty-eight hours later, Shebony was standing in a church she had never attended, Commonwealth Chapel in the Fan District, facing a crowd of about 150 strangers and reading her essay. . . . The church's pastor, a man Shebony had met just a few hours before, told her that people she doesn't know are setting up a fund for her education. The tall, thin girl seemed at once stunned and pleased at the whirlwind of developments. Wear- ing a soft, green jacket and skirt, and with her short hair in a tight ponytail, she greeted well-wishers after morning services yesterday. 'It's a very good thing,' she said quietly. "
At the time of this writing, Pastor Rhoden's congregation has raised $10,000. 30 The "whirlwind of developments" continued when Habitat for Hu- manity called to see if Shebony's family might qualify for a home. 31 Months later, Shebony won first prize at the banquet honoring the writers, which was organized by Councilwoman McQuinn and Ernestine Scott. That night she went home with a laptop.
Not all of these whirlwinds blew favorably, though. Lindsay Kastner, in a follow-up piece for the RTD, wrote that "in her own neighborhood response has been positive and negative. . . . Some people told her the essay brought tears to their eyes. But Shebony said neighborhood drug dealers also had something to say to her. . . . 'Some said you been talking about Fairfield, you been snitchin. '"32 Though Shebony did not name any names or even partic- ular places, the snitch reaction indicated that she had provocatively chal- lenged rhetorical decorum in her community, that her placemaking toward mainstream values like hard work, sobriety, and a respect for the law had threatened their move away from it. The RTD columnist Michael Paul Williams praised Shebony on these grounds for her "precocious courage . . . to break the code of silence" and dismissed the snitch reaction as something emanat- ing from a "confused code of ethics" condoning irresponsible behavior, ille- gal activity, exploitation, and violence. 33
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172 David J. Coogan
In "Where I've Been, Where I'm Going," Shebony Carrington spoke out against her placement in the city, constructing a scene in which her charac- ter could exit. And that is just what she did. She left Fairfield Court rhetori- cally. Then, with the publication of her essay and the invitation from Pastor Rhoden, she left it physically. She did not do this because I had taught her how to uncover the truth, as I saw it. She did it because I had asked her to ori- ent herself to a reading public.
In these feel-good, Oprah moments, where we can easily see the link be- tween rhetorical cause and material effect, it may be tempting to confuse the sophistic framework that I have been elaborating here with the Angels Net- work. And while I am certainly proud to have been a part of a process that landed the girl a med-school scholarship (and later landed another student whose essay got into the paper a dance scholarship),34 I hope I have also shown that sophists, in their capacity as teachers, writers and community guides, do not use rhetoric to target change. They make middle spaces for placemaking and poetic world making. Then they get out of the way.
Notes
1. Nolan, "Statements. "
2. Nolan, "After Rape. "
3. Nolan, "Statements. "
4. Nolan, "Teens Charged. " 5. Cooper, "Four Teenagers. " 6. Nolan, "After Rape. "
7. For further information on Councilwoman McQuinn and her district, see http:// www. ci. richmond. va. us/citizen/city_gov/district7/accomplishments. aspx.
8. For further information on ACORN, see http://www. richmondneighborhoods. org/.
9. Walters, "City Plans. "
10. Coogan, "Counter Publics"; Coogan, "Community Literacy"; Coogan, "Service
Learning. "
11. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists, 42.
12. Ibid. , 40-42.
13. Crowley and Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics, 109.
14. Cushman, "Rhetorician. "
15. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists, 2.
16. McKerrow, "Critical Rhetoric. "
17. See the essay by Candace Rai in this volume for an extended critique of inclusiv-
ity in citywide forums.
18. Mathieu, Tactics of Hope.
19. See Crowley and Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics, chapters 3 and 4, for more on the
rhetorical technique of conjecture.
20. Goldblatt, "Alinksy's Reveille," 283.
21. McKnight, "Redefining Community," 117. 22. Marback, "Speaking of the City," 146.
23. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 122. 24. Ibid. , 114.
25. Ibid. , 87.
26. Ibid. , 68.
27. Hart-Davidson, Zappen, and Halloran, "On the
Formation," 135-37.
28. Ibid. , 135-36.
29. For more information on this church, see http://www. comchap. com/started. php.
30. Walters, "City Plans. "
31. Kastner, "Essayist. "
32. Kastner, "Youths' Essays Honored. "
33. Williams, "'Snitch' Shirts. "
34. MacDonald, who won second prize at the banquet and who also had his essay
published in the RTD, received a $360 scholarship for ballet lessons. According to Lind- say Kastner of the RTD, "Diontey's mother, Wanda McDonald Cooper, said she would not have been able to pay for his lessons. " Kastner, "Teen. "
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------. "Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhetoric" College Composition and Communication 57 (2006): 667-93.
Cooper, Alan. "Four Teenagers Sentenced in Rape on Probation at Time of Crime, They Get Roughly 30 Years Behind Bars. " Richmond Times Dispatch, July 20, 2005.
Crowley, Sharon, and Debra Hawhee. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. 3rd ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.
Cushman, Ellen. "The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change. " College Composition and Communication 47 (1996): 7-28.
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Hart-Davidson, William, James P. Zappen, and S. Michael Halloran. "On the Formation of Democratic Citizens. " In The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill, 125-40. New York: SUNY Press, 2005.
Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.
Kastner, Lindsay. "Essay: Where I'm From, Where I'm Going. " Richmond Times Dispatch, August 12, 2005.
------. "Essayist, 15, Grateful for Encouragement: Her Education Is Getting a Boost; Her Family May Qualify for Habitat. " Richmond Times Dispatch, August 27, 2005.
------. "Teen Steps Toward Goals: Art Center in Richmond Fosters Student's Love of Dance, Hopes for College. " Richmond Times Dispatch, January 9, 2006.
------. "Youths' Essays Honored: What Began as a Workshop in Summer Has Led to a Book Showcasing Their Work, Voices. " Richmond Times Dispatch, October 30, 2005. Marback, Richard. "Speaking of the City and Literacies of Place Making in Composition
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McKerrow, Raymie. "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis. " In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, edited by John L. Lucaites, Celeste M. Condit, and Sally Caudill, 441-63. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.
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