In Memoriam M.L.K.

On the first day of each virgin class year, I have my students read a portion of the thirteenth chapter of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It’s a fairly challenging excerpt in which Steinbeck bemoans the destruction of the individual at the hands of the collective mass. He tells of his fear of the future—a future where mass method becomes our way of thinking until we “have substituted the idea collective for the idea God.” It’s a frighteningly accurate prophecy that Steinbeck sets forth, but maybe it's just because humanity has been constantly moving in that direction since we were mere dust and ribs. Or maybe it’s just the tired strains of an artist championing the individual. Or maybe it’s the defiant decree of the punk-rock rebellion screaming “Damn the Man!” Whatever the reason, it’s a pathos that sixteen-year-olds can get behind. They understand, almost innately, the inundation of the mass upon their individuality. After all, at sixteen what have you got besides yourself? So we talk about this threat to their individuality and try to come up with some strategies to defend against it. For a while the discussion seems hopeless. I mean, what can any one of us do to escape the oncoming tidal wave of the mass and prevent our single voice from being swallowed up and drowned out?

Prior to reading the Steinbeck passage and planning our strategies for survival, I have the students write their name on a note card. As class progresses I have them add other various personal information that is fun for me to know—things like favorite color, extracurricular interests, and post-high school aspirations. When they are writing their names on their cards, I tell them it’s the most important thing they will do all day. Because they’ve only known me for about five minutes at this point, they don’t know whether or not to take that statement seriously, and most snicker a bit. But I am serious, gravely serious, deathly serious. I ask them why writing their name might be a matter of utmost importance, and at first, they’re stumped. So we talk about what a name means and what it does, and eventually they begin giving the answers I want: our name represents who we are and what we’re about, it connects us to our forebears, and it distinguishes us from one another. They begin to see a little of what I mean when I say that names are important. I, of course, take this opportunity to tell them that names in literature are doubly important. At this time I also impart to them the single most important piece of advice I give them all year: “If you don’t do anything else this entire year, don’t forget your name!”

Again they snicker. Because at this point they haven’t discovered the full impact of this advice. It’s not until after we've read and discussed Steinbeck, until after we've recognized our wretched condition and have gotten to the point where we have to save our damn-ready souls, and I ask, “Okay, so what do we do to escape the oncoming tidal wave of the mass and prevent our single voice from being swallowed up and drowned out?” And then I wait for it. And eventually the synapses fire and one of them remembers the silly bit of advice, and he or she says, “I know how to save my wretched and damn-ready soul. I remember my name.” I smile in gratitude and say, “Yes.”

This isn’t about the first day of school, however. It merely serves as a preface for what comes next. (And you’ll have to excuse any heavy-handed sentimentality that follows. It’s sometimes difficult to write with detached objectivity.) Nearly seven months have passed since that first innocent day, and things have changed, although I suppose they’ve basically stayed the same. Students have been crammed full of nearly seven months-worth of information they likely mostly will never use, except for when they take the state’s standardized test, which they’re doing now while I’m writing this instead of actively monitoring. We’ve had a successful athletic year: The football team won the state championship; other students have done well in the various arenas of academia. They’ve played video games and read books, made music and made love; they’ve gotten drunk, gotten high, gotten free; some have found God, some have lost Him; some have gotten smarter, others think they have; they’ve made good decisions and they’ve made bad decisions—in short, they’ve been teenagers.

And three nights ago we lost one of them in an automobile accident. Her name was Megan. (At least that’s what we’ll call her here.) She was driving home from work after having picked up some Easter candy for her family. The truck coming the opposite direction veered into her lane, the driver having temporarily lost control for some reason that will remain unknown, and Megan never had a chance to react. A head-on impact. She was tall and thin, she had straight blonde hair, and she was a good kid. She was quiet, a wallflower type, except when she was with her several close friends.

I had her in one of those classes that never seems to shut up. The last class of the day, when I’m getting tired and they’re just getting started. Megan was a remote oasis in a desert of noise. At times when I was particularly annoyed or frustrated with the unceasing drone of mindless prattle, Megan and I could exchange the furtive smirk of our shared empathy. Because of her demure nature, Megan advanced relatively unnoticed through her social stratum. Many students didn’t even recognize her name when we heard the news Monday morning. Our culture has a way of attributing value to people in accordance with how much noise they produce. But I’m reminded of a line from Whitman’s “Great are the Myths” that advises us to “forget not that Silence is also expression.” If this is the case, then Megan expressed more than most.

On the last test we took, about a week ago now, Megan forgot to put her name on her scantron portion of the test. It’s always a little frustrating when students forget to put their names on assignments, but exceedingly more frustrating on scantrons, especially when two or more forget. It’s virtually impossible to distinguish one student’s bubbles from the next. So when I noticed Megan’s nameless scantron, I was slightly annoyed, and when I showed it to her the next day, I can’t deny that there wasn’t a certain tinge of disgust in my voice. It may be that nameless assignments and tests bother me on a metaphorical level. Part of me sees it as reckless disregard for my first-day advice. Of course, I never miss the opportunity to remind students of this, so in my best pseudo-patronizing teacher voice, I asked Megan if she still remembered her name. She flashed me her sheepish grin and nodded yes. And after writing her name on her scantron, she shuffled out of the classroom. That was the last time I saw her; three days later she was gone.

I’m not sure I know what I believe happens after we die. Tunnels and lights and St. Peter at the gate and all that. Do we play harps and sing and ride on clouds? Do we scrape the caked and crackling earth-dust from between our toes and belly buttons? Do we return to Eden? Do we become what we'd always hoped for? Do we finally incarnate the individuality we strove so hard to attain? Or do we melt into each other like drops into some transcendent pool of the over-soul? If we could talk to Megan, she could tell us. But she’s busy conquering space and time. I only hope that during her journey from here to there, while the pall and shroud were stretched and the cosmos blurred in her rear-view mirror, while the steel and stone yielded to blood and bone, while her mother was pulling in the slack of her umbilical cord and her father peered ahead into the listless night, I hope she didn’t forget who she was and what she was about. I hope she didn’t forget her name. If she did, I will remember it for her.