Look Up

Andrea was a pleasant young woman, but guarded. She never spoke about herself. She was not self-disclosing. That’s why I was surprised when she told me the story of her brother’s accident.

We were discussing a possible paper on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s narrative technique in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Andrea was particularly interested in Stowe’s use of irony. There was nothing subtle about it, she said. It was designed to bypass the mind and deliver a taser charge straight to the heart. St. Clare’s death, for instance. On the very day he decided to free his slaves, the very day that would have sent Tom back to his cabin, back to his wife and children, his family made whole once again, St. Clare is killed in a street mugging, and Tom, Christ-like Tom, winds up marooned in the moral chaos of Simon Legree’s plantation where, sacrificing himself so that others may live, he is beaten and mortally wounded and lies dying just as the son of his original master arrives to purchase his freedom.

As we talked, Andrea’s mood changed. It darkened. I could see it. Her face tightened, rinsed itself of expression. Her eyes turned inward. She was replaying a memory. And perhaps because we have been discussing untimely tragedies, deaths undeserved and senseless, she uncurtained her past and told me about the freak accident that killed her older brother six years ago.

Her brother was downtown, walking past a storefront, when a block of stone fell from the masonry high above the store’s sign, struck him squarely on the top of his head, and killed him instantly. Someone suggested rainwater entering hairline cracks, over the years, creating pressure, fissuring the mortar. But that moment, just that moment, with her brother walking by below. No one could explain that. No one tried. Andrea paused for several moments, and then her eyes turned outward again, looked directly at me. She said, “I mean, your life has a momentum, and things are good, and then this, this thing happens, and it tilts it all out of whack.’

Teacher and student are words in reciprocal relation. They represent separate subject positions, hierarchical but mutually entailed. One requires the other to be meaningful. But it seemed to me that Andrea’s revelation, so atypical, so unexpected, deepened that arm’s length entailment into something else, took it to a place beyond social performance, beyond the quarantine of image and role, a place where another self emerges and asks to be recognized. In the space of her telling, Andrea’s world opened to me and intervened in mine. Another life, previously private, sealed, became palpable, shareable, wrote itself in mine, wrote its being sheared by the profound tragedy of the unaccountable, the incomprehensibly arbitrary. I responded in the only way I could think equal to Andrea’s vulnerability, her risk.

“How can you not be changed when such a thing happens,” I said.

“Yeah, I was; am” Andrea said.

“It shakes one’s faith. It’s like a test of faith,” I said.

“It is,” Andrea said. “And I failed. At least for a while. Still am failing, really. I was cynical and I didn’t like being. I’m back, though, going through the motions so maybe the feeling comes back. And when I walk, I look up.”