The enchantment of a piece of writing delivered by the human voice may come on little cat feet, so to speak, slipping in so softly that we hardly notice its arrival. It can also dash forward and strike with a blow, as it did one night in 1917 to the future novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston had enrolled in a night high-school English class taught by a man named Dwight O. W. Holmes.
In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston wrote, “There is no more dynamic teacher anywhere under any skin. He is not a pretty man, but he has the face of a scholar, not dry and set like, but fire flashes from his deep-set eyes. His high-bridged, but sort of bent nose over his thin-lipped mouth—well, the whole thing reminds you of some Roman like Cicero, Caesar or Virgil in tan skin.”
One fateful evening, this teacher opened a volume of English poetry and began to read to the class:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery . . .
Hurston was transfixed. “Listening to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan for the first time, I saw all that the poet had meant for me to see with him, and infinite cosmic things besides. I was not of the work-a-day world for days after Mr. Holmes’s voice had ceased. This was my world, I said to myself, and I shall be in it, and surrounded by it, if it is the last thing I do on God’s green dirt-ball.”
What happened to Hurston that night was a kind of intellectual and aesthetic liberation: the sound of her teacher reading Coleridge was so thrilling, so arresting, that it cut her loose from the life she might have had and freed her to find her destiny as a writer.
At other times in history, and in other places, reading aloud has been the means of more literal liberation. The human voice is just a sound in the air, and yet it has built bridges from ignorance to knowledge, and from bondage to freedom. In the American South before the Civil War, for instance, it was illegal in some states to teach enslaved people to read and write. There were no laws against listening, though, which is how the future abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass got his first taste of what words could do. He was about twelve at the time, and as he later wrote, “the frequent hearing of my mistress reading the Bible aloud awakened my curiosity in respect to this mystery of reading, and roused in me the desire to learn.”
The woman began to teach Douglass the letters of the alphabet, but her husband soon put a stop to it. After that, Douglass recalled, her attitude toward him changed. “Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me,” he wrote. “Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamb-like disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness.” At one point, Douglass’s mistress became so enraged at the sight of him holding a newspaper that she yanked it from his hand. “She was an apt woman,” Douglass observed dryly, “and a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other.”
Like Douglass, the future missionary and preacher Thomas Johnson paid close attention to readings of the New Testament at night. Johnson would ask to hear certain passages repeated, so that he could fix the words in his mind, and then he would compare what he’d heard with what he saw printed in a stolen Bible that he kept hidden away. Reading aloud became, for these determined men, a secret staircase that led to the open air of intellectual escape.
When a cell door slammed on Yevgenia Ginzburg, a Communist Party official caught in the purges of Stalin’s Great Terror, she was left with one source of consolation: “Poetry, at least, they could not take away from me!” she declares in her memoir, Journey into the Whirlwind. The prisoner prowled her cell, racking her memory to recite aloud the literature she’d read. “They had taken my dress, my shoes, my stockings, and my comb . . . but this was not in their power to take away, it was and remained mine.”
A few years later, eight hundred miles to the west, retelling literature from memory came to the rescue for Helen Fagin, a young prisoner of the Warsaw ghetto. “Being caught reading anything forbidden by the Nazis meant, at best, hard labor; at worst, death,” she writes in an essay for the collection A Velocity of Being.
I conducted a clandestine school offering Jewish children a chance at the essential education denied them by their captors. But I soon came to feel that teaching these young sensitive souls Latin and mathematics was cheating them of something far more essential—what they needed wasn’t dry information but hope, the kind that comes from being transported into a dream-world of possibility.
One day, as if guessing my thoughts, one girl beseeched me: “Could you tell us a book, please?”
Fagin had spent the previous night devouring a contraband copy of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, so her own dream-world was still “illuminated” by the story.
As I “told” them the book, they shared the loves and trials of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, of Ashley and Melanie Wilkes. For that magical hour, we had escaped into a world not of murder but of manners and hospitality. All the children’s faces had grown animated with new vitality.
- Lit Hub
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