Who Gets to Tell the Story?

Edward P. Jones, Ron DeSantis, and The 1619 Project

Photo by Maximilian Meyer on Unsplash

EDWARD P. JONES’ short story “The First Day,” collected in Lost in the City, begins like this: “On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school.”

This sentence is remarkable for all it gives us. We learn the identities of the key characters, a mother and child, and the setting: a September morning, the first day of school, on what many of us will recognize as the name of a street in Washington, DC. But most critically, we understand who’s telling the story. The narrator is an older version of her younger self. She’s telling us, with benefit of time and wisdom, about a long-ago morning. In fiction we call this a retrospective narrator.

As Christopher Castellani writes about narrators in The Art of Perspective:

“If it’s a given that stories exert power, that they effect change in the world in immeasurable ways, then who tells the story occupies the most powerful position of all. It is the author’s position, of course, but as her proxy, her narrators’ as well. Who tells a story claims responsibility for it.”

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Of late, conservative activists have developed a calculated, coordinated strategy to put K-12 education at the center of political debate. Led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, there is much shouting in states and localities across the country about race and gender in the context of children and public schools.

Whatever one thinks of the substance of these arguments, the strategy is smart. It aims to engage parent-voters already frustrated by difficult pandemic-era logistics such as online learning and in-school masking. It emphasizes often complex issues many adults are wrestling with and declares decisions have been made for them about what their children will be taught. It employs dog-whistling – loaded, if inaccurate, terminology, designed to inflame: words like “woke indoctrination” and “Marxism,” Cold-War-generation-friendly terms that many folks may be hard-pressed to actually define. Much of the rhetoric centers around “critical race theory,” an academic term intentionally selected as “the perfect villain” by a conservative operator.

These political tactics are bearing fruit for their proponents. There is a growing movement to ban books, largely fiction incorporating non-white, non-straight, non-cisgender characters; according to PEN America, 2,500 titles were banned in school districts across America in the 2021-22 school year. The DeSantis administration’s Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop W.O.K.E.) Act, passed in April 2022, sets out a requirement that schools “teach factual information on topics including African American history and the Holocaust instead of subjective indoctrination that pushes collective guilt.”

I’m not sure what that means, exactly, and that’s sort of the point. But what’s clear is that the DeSantis administration has a point of view on what is factual and what is not. In other words, they’ll be the narrators now, please and thank you very much.

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In “The First Day,” our narrator lets us know only one time that she’s an adult looking back, in that first sentence. Here it is again: “On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school.”

In a subtle but important turn, note that the tense changes midway through that first line. When we’re with the adult narrator in the present speaking about the past, she uses past tense. And when she begins to tell us about her first day of school, she switches to present tense, where we remain for the rest of the story. It’s an elegant shift that shows us for this character, the present is the past and the past is the present.

In the story, the child character is observant but, as she says, on this day unashamed of her mother. Her mother spent nearly an hour plaiting her hair, dressed her in new clothes and “black patent-leather miracles,” and dabbed perfume behind her ears. The child’s stomach is full of “milk and oatmeal sweetened with brown sugar.” The action of the story is simple: they walk to the elementary school across from her mother’s church, but are told they’re in the wrong district, at the wrong place. They walk back toward home, to a different school, where the narrator learns for the first time that her mother cannot read. Another mother helps fill out the required forms; she and her daughter are less neat, less well-mannered, and she has no qualms accepting the fifty cents the narrator’s mother offers her as payment.

To get at the root of this story, we must return to the shame. To paraphrase the writer Charles D’Ambrosio, there’s always a reason we look back. We turn to the past because of something in the present. Something is at stake for the person thinking in the present, and as writers that’s where we find the meat of the story, the import, the drama. Charlie said this in the context of the personal essay, but I think it applies to retrospective narrators in fiction, too. Here, we know at some point between the first day of school and the day she tells us this story, the narrator becomes ashamed of her mother. But she renders her mother gently, sympathetically. We sense that maybe right now, at what writers call the “point of telling,” she’s ashamed of her shame.

The important thing is that with retrospective narrators, we’re always getting two stories: the one set in the past, and the one of what’s happening to the narrator in the present. And the latter is critical. It affects almost every part of how the former is told.

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There is an anecdote about me that goes like this: In the second grade, I went to the school library and checked out two different biographies of Betsy Ross. I told the librarian I wanted to know if there were any contradictions.

That old urge to understand different ways of seeing tugged at me as I dug into The 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones. The project of The 1619 Project, which began as long-form journalism and evolved into a book, is to reexamine the dominant narratives of American history and think about contradictions, oversimplifications, omissions. Essentially it is looking at history from a different point of view, specifically one that keeps its eyes on the institution of slavery, its evolution and aftermath. Why? Because it means something that slavery predates nearly every other American institution, and it means something more that the way we have come to teach and understand history minimizes this fact.

In a TED Talk with 32 million views, the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about the danger of a single story. When a people are shown as “one thing, as only one thing, over and over again,” she says, “that is what they become.” “Power,” then, “is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”

American history is vast and our school years short, our attention spans shorter. We’re trained for multiple-choice tests, fill-in-the-blank answers. Who was George Washington? The father of our country, we recite. Thomas Jefferson? The author of the Declaration of Independence. Abraham Lincoln? The Great Emancipator. It is not that these assertions are necessarily false. But the roles and legacies of these actors and others like them are much more complicated than what can be communicated in a sound bite. History is not Jeopardy.

We are always retrospective narrators when it comes to history. Our read on things can carry accumulated knowledge and wisdom that helps us see things anew. This is the gift of time. It was new to me, for example, that 1619 is a reference to the year white people in Jamestown first purchased enslaved Africans – a year before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth. As Hannah-Jones writes in the book’s preface, “While history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened.”

The narrator of “The First Day” might have told us any story about her mother. She could have told of the moment she was first ashamed or the moment she is in now, whatever that might be, that prompted her to tell a story at all. And Jones, as the writer, could have told us the story from any point of view – the mother’s, the teacher’s, the neighbors’. Any of those stories would look different from the six pages we have despite retaining the essential facts of the day – a mother walks her child to school and cannot fill out the forms to enroll her.

We’ve talked a lot about the first sentence of “The First Day.” But the final sentence is also noteworthy:

“And even when the teacher turns me toward the classrooms and I hear what must be the singing and talking of all the children in the world, I can still hear my mother’s footsteps above it all.”

There it is: the past, echoing into the present.

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DeSantis’ Stop W.O.K.E. Act – being imitated in other jurisdictions – officially banned The 1619 Project in Florida’s public schools. “Instruction may not utilize material from the 1619 Project and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence,” says one of the bill’s amendments. In the latest skirmish, DeSantis and other political leaders have tried to position a new high school Advanced Placement course in African American Studies as progressive indoctrination. In response, the College Board edited its curriculum, removing or curtailing material that had been criticized.  

That the act of putting our modern eyes on history and seeing new angles is so controversial begs the question: What exactly is happening to us in the present?

Over the next few weeks, Literary Citizen will be thinking about the craft element of point of view as fiction writers do. We will dissect how perspective relates to American history and why it matters – in literature, history, and politics – who’s telling the story. We’ll look at fiction that re-imagines well-documented historical narratives and fiction that creates narratives where there are none. We’ll consider how our perspectives can evolve – what happens to us as readers, and Americans, when we receive new information.

If I found any contradictions in those two Betsy Ross books, they were minor, unmemorable. I was interested in the Betsy Ross story because she was a woman, and I was a girl, and women were sparse in the founding stories I’d been taught. (Around that time I also named a cat after Abigail Adams.) What’s interesting to me now is that what I thought were biographies were works of historical fiction. Betsy Ross may have designed or sewed the first flag or maybe she didn’t; her family members testified decades later that she often told this story, but that isn’t the same as first-hand accounts or official documentation. What’s even more interesting is that the apocryphal Betsy Ross story – a woman sewing a flag – was one of the few female narratives from the era to be elevated to a Midwestern school library in the 1980s. How did that happen? Where might we look for deeper nuance to our contemporary understanding of that time and our own? And if we were taught the Betsy Ross story as fact, what other knowledge might we do well to reexamine?

Castellani, again, on point of view: “Tell yourself a story for long enough, and it comes to define you. You settle into it. There’s a comfort in the single story, one as potent as the danger.”