True Grit

In And Still We Rise, the dream is buoyed in large part by two teachers in the gifted magnet, Toni Little and Anita Moultrie, rivals so bitter they communicate only via memos. Little teaches A.P. English to seniors; Moultrie teaches English to juniors. Little is white, single, fiercely intellectual and emotionally mercurial, passionate in her belief that students can best cultivate their own intellect and hurdle over institutional barriers by studying the classics — Hawthorne, Shakespeare, Joyce — and discovering the wealth of themselves therein. Moultrie is black, maternal, upbeat but steel at the core, given to wearing African-inspired garb and doling out life lessons to students she regards as nothing less than her own children, standard-bearers of their people’s future. She teaches some classics but also insists on a number of black authors not in the official curriculum. Both are deeply vested in their students; both rake them over the coals, take them to heart — perhaps too much; both nurture them the best way they know how. Yet the acrimony between these two is palpable, even from Corwin’s cool vantage point, and it is rife with enough racial irony and suspense to keep one reading through to the end, if only to find out whether Little will have a complete nervous breakdown, or whether Mama Moultrie — as she often calls herself — will expand her famous altruism to include her intractable alter ego.

Corwin does so much right that his missteps are ultimately forgivable. In pursuit of truth, he faithfully records the black English that peppers classroom discussions; he describes the tableaux of blond cornrows and gleaming earrings and droopy pants. These are loaded images, which is not Corwin’s fault but something he decides not to mitigate, a bit to the detriment of the book’s great purpose. At other points he is too infatuated with the “palm-tree ghetto,” too enthralled with the Hollywood sign that looms over South-Central like a distant, taunting feudal lord. In fact, the Crenshaw District is the most hospitable corner of what’s come to be known as South-Central; despite the proliferative gangs and other dubious activity, it is hardly a bullet-ridden South Bronx or a fallow Detroit. It takes more than jacarandas blooming over Crenshaw’s dull concrete to convey just how close and how far away the lure of Hollywood and its quick fortunes are to these students. Things are more complicated than that, as Corwin knows; even the roughnecks have shopped at Bloomie’s. Still, Corwin proves what Toni Little sets as her teaching principle and point of discovery each semester, year in and year out: In each of us, there is a little of all of us.