I sit in front of the class watching the children hew knowledge from the quarry of my words.
The opening scene of the novel portrays Doreen, the antagonist and narrator, firmly situated within her bailiwick: living the childhood dream of becoming a teacher. She moves forward from this opening metaphorical imagery to pursue, relentlessly like a shark, the concept of teaching as something much more profound than mere rote memorization. Imagery like stories resembling lava spewing from an erupting volcano representing the life experience keys the reader immediately to the idea that teaching is viewed as something noble here. This is not to be the story of a teacher complaining about student inattentive or career malaise. At least, not at first.
“I let you win of course, and you are so poor you need to win sometimes.”
It is really amazing how many kids who grow up in extraordinary poverty never realize they are poor until someone—often another child moved to meanness—informs them. Such is the case with Doreen. This dawning of reality is brought about by a young classmate of Doreen’s and is told as a memory recollected by the adult she grew into. The context is that the two had been playing a game and Doreen had made the apparent social faux pas of actually winning. The beaten girl, shamed and humiliated, is moved to use the only tool at her disposal. The recognition of the economic circumstances of her family is impossible to ignore, deny, or change. Everything literally changes in that instant for the young girl whose only offense was the indecency of beating the child of a family only slightly better off than Doreen. But within the strata of economic success as the marker of worth, slight variations mean everything.
Before I had time to look and see where Martin had gone, I was grazed into my place in the kitchen while the man of the house was run from the home to bars and those other places…
Fill in the blank at the ellipse here because it really doesn’t matter what the specifics of those “other places” constitute. The specificity changes according to society. For some, the line will track from home to bars to places of work while for others it will be places of leisure and pleasure. The point is patriarchal domination and gendered expectation. A woman’s place is in the kitchen is a phrase that must surely be known in any spot on earth shared by a man, a woman and kitchen. The key point here is neither the kitchen as the natural place for women nor the abundance of places that are the natural place for women to be forbidden entry, but rather the imagery which Doreen uses to describe her movement into a circumstance of submission. She is “grazed” into her “place” as if she were nothing of more substance than a cow or a sheep.
