If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy to be quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
-Margaret Atwood

This chapter is an extended meditation on alternative conceptions of student voice. I begin with the version of voice put forward by workshop advocates–voice as individual expression. Workshop advocates emphasize students’ desire to express their unique selves in writing, and how traditional writing instruction frustrates this desire. Then, I examine a second conception–voice as participation–that comes from advocates of critical pedagogy. These advocates, including Paulo Freire (1970, 1985), Henry Giroux (1988, 1991), and Roger Simon (1987), call for critical dialogues among teachers and students. Within these dialogues, student voices would sound and be heard.^[1]

I have learned much about voice and student expression from writing workshop and critical pedagogy advocates. There are serious problems, however, with how they have imagined talk and writing in schools. I propose an alternative conception of student voice, an alternative that affirms the strengths of workshop and critical pedagogy conceptions, as well as responds to their weaknesses. My goal is to conceive of student voice in a way that more adequately recognizes the complexities and conflicts of student expression, so that we might, as educators, better support the flourishing of student voices in schools.

One final note: In her novel Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, Joyce Carol Oates (1990) tells a brief, provocative story about school writ­ing that I will use as a starting point and connective thread for my reflections on student voice.^[2] Among other things, the story reminds us that if all student voices have fared relatively badly in schools, certain student voices have fared worse than others. Let me restate my hope for my alternative conception of voice: that it do justice to the challenges confronting all students who would speak and write in schools, but especially those who find no easy place within the dominant meanings and values of our racist, sexist, and classist society.

Oates’s novel is set in a small town in upstate New York in the 1950s. A young black man, Jinx Fairchild, is one of the main characters. At one point, Jinx writes a 500-word composition for his senior English class, and then receives comments and a grade from his white teacher, Mrs. Dunphy. The assigned topic of the composition is “I Believe” and we learn that Jinx

Spends days on the assignment … writing and rewriting in a ferocity of concentration nearly as singleminded as his concentration on basketball. The effort is exhausting. He has never thought of the words on paper as expressions of the soul, the voice on paper a silent rendering of his own voice.

Unlike Mrs. Dunphy, workshop advocates do not believe in assigned topics because this takes control over the writing away from students, does not allow them the privileges of “real authorship.” For workshop advocates, authors are writers who have control over, have “ownership” of, their writing processes and texts. Real authorship involves “the fullest engagement of the writer in the production of meaningful text under the pressure of her conscious and unconscious intention” (Gilbert, 1989b, p. 15). Students-as-authors, then, have the right to identify, for themselves, topics and purposes for writing that are worthy of their time and effort.

Jinx would make workshop advocates proud. Although Mrs. Dunphy assigned the topic for Jinx’s writing, he obviously deemed the “I Believe” theme worthy, and pursued it through multiple drafts and revisions across a number of days. More important, however, was his realization that “words on paper” could be “expressions of the soul.” Jinx’s struggle to have his voice on paper be “a silent rendering of his own voice” is exactly the struggle, the task, that workshop advocates would have stu­dents take up in writing class.

Workshop approaches emphasize the work of finding your own voice in your writing. Finding your voice involves looking to your own experiences for what it is you have and want to say. There are strong affinities here to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, American Romanticism, a celebration of experience and an individualistic, nonconformist strain. The image is one of burrowing deep into subjectivity, past the “mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition” (Thoreau, 1854/1960, p. 66) to discover your authentic nature, and a voice that expresses who you are.

Workshop advocates assume that students are best able to find their individual voices when they are allowed to pursue their own intentions and topics, rather than those forced on them by the teacher. From this perspective, the “I Believe” theme worked for Jinx because it put him on the terrain of personal experience and belief, allowed him to draw on personal resources he might otherwise not be able to draw upon. In this sense, for workshop advocates every bit of authentic writing, every act of real author­ship in the writing classroom, pursues the “I Believe” theme. And if it weren’t for traditional teaching methods, students would gladly be pur­suing this theme and themselves in print, because they want to.

For Bakhtin, these diverse languages of heteroglossia^[6] express particular stances or positions on the world; they represent “forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values” (pp. 291, 292).

Critical pedagogues would have us pay attention not only to the plu­rality Bakhtin evokes with his notion of heteroglossia, but also asymme­tries of power across this diversity (note Bakhtin’s “top to bottom”)–asym­metries that enable powerful groups to define their own particular “ways with words” (Heath, 1983) as the valued ways in society. As Giroux (1991) notes,

What meanings are considered the most important, what experiences are deemed the most legitimate, and what forms of writing and reading matter, are largely determined by those groups who control the economic and cul­tural apparatuses of a given society. (p. 93)

Dominant groups determine dominant meanings, but not without a struggle, and never once and for all. In fact, the larger educational and political project of critical pedagogy is exactly to empower students to engage in this struggle over meaning–in solidarity with the wretched of the earth; in the name of social justice, equality, and democratic com­munity; and in preparation for and as part of transformative social action.

We are ready to characterize voice in critical pedagogy. I develop this characterization through a series of contrasts between voice in critical peda­gogy and voice in writing workshop approaches.

For workshop advocates, voice signals the unique expression of the unique individual. Voice serves to distinguish individual writers from other writers. For advocates of critical pedagogy, voice signals participation, an active part in the social production of meaning. Voice points to the “dis­cursive means whereby teachers and students attempt to make themselves present and to define themselves as active authors of their own world” (Simon, 1987, p. 377). If the workshop sense of voice is evoked with the con­trast, “my words versus someone else’s words,” then the contrast to voice within critical pedagogy is silence, where silence points to oppressive con­ditions that keep certain people from speaking and being heard. Rather than emphasize the attempt to distinguish yourself from others, voice, here, em­phasizes inserting yourself and your texts into public spheres.

Another way to contrast writing workshop and critical pedagogy ver­sions of voice, then, is in their relations to liberty and popular sovereignty. The workshop commitment to voice is concerned primarily–perhaps ex­clusively–with liberty, especially freedom of thought and expression. A commitment to liberty is certainly part of critical pedagogy, since students need to be free to express themselves in the classroom in order to participate in the moral and political project envisioned by its advocates. But in the main, voice in critical pedagogy is linked to the goal of popular sover­eignty, to making power “accountable … to those affected by its exercise” (Bowles & Gintis, 1987, p. 4). Critical pedagogy wants students to be ac­tive participants in the construction of their worlds, rather than trapped in the meanings, subjectivities, and forms of authority determined by pow­erful others.

Voice also serves different functions within the pedagogical schemes of writing workshop approaches and critical pedagogy. For workshop advocates, voice is the goal, the desired endpoint, for any given piece of student writing. It is a criteria with which to judge the success of the writ­ing and instruction–without that stamp of individuality, without the “im­print of ourselves on our writing” (Graves, 1983, p. 227), the text and teach­ing have failed. Within critical pedagogy, however, voice is less a goal or endpoint in itself, and more a necessary precondition for the collective work to be done. Voice is a starting point in critical pedagogy, in at least two ways.^[7]

First, advocates of critical pedagogy assert that the affirmation of stu­dents’ own experiences, languages, and stories is crucial. For these advo­cates, traditional pedagogies belittle and alienate students by not respect­ing and working with the ways that they make sense of themselves and their worlds. Giroux and McLaren (1986) write that “student experience is the stuff of culture, agency, and identity formation and must be given pre­eminence in an emancipatory curriculum” (p. 234). To not affirm and re­spect student voices is both morally wrong, because it disparages who stu­dents are and what they know, and strategically a mistake, because students will resist becoming active partners in teaching and learning. Thus, stu­dent voice is a starting point in the sense that this moral and political project cannot be a truly participatory project without it.

Second, voice is a starting point in that it provides resources, mate­rial, with which the classroom community can work. Student voices make available a multiplicity of texts that can be examined, learned from, and criticized. Critical pedagogy’s emphasis on voice, then, is very much in the spirit of Dewey’s (1899/1980) call for a transformed recitation. In the tra­ditional recitation, individual students answered teacher questions for the purpose of displaying what they had memorized from the textbook in a competition for teacher rewards. Dewey imagined a different sort of recitation, one where the recitation

Becomes the social clearing-house, where experiences and ideas are exchanged and subjected to criticism, where misconceptions are corrected, and new lines of thought and inquiry are set up. (1899/1980, p. 34)

Workshop advocates sometimes recognize the wealth of material made available by student voices, but their responses to this wealth diverge, again in instructive ways, from those of critical pedagogues. Witness Donald Murray (1985):

I read their papers and share their surprise in their own diversity with them, and I know that I will never burn out, that I will never lose my excitement at my own and students’ explorations of our world with the writing process. (p. 248)

I find two aspects of Murray’s comments striking. First, how private this is, in ways reminiscent of Jinx’s conversation with Mrs. Dunphy. There is no sense of student papers somehow contributing to a collective project–the projects here are private ones, pursued by individual students, supported by the teacher. In another piece, Murray (1979) writes of his work as “this strange, exposed kind of teaching, one on one” (p. 14). The exposure of this teaching is, of course, the exposure of authentic selves in the writing and response. The wealth of student voices is, here, a private wealth, accumu­lated by individual students and teachers in private transactions.

Second, there is no hint in Murray’s comments that teachers will ever have to take up a critical position vis-à-vis the meanings of student papers. Above, he talks of surprise and excitement. At other times Murray (1985) points to pursuing, with students, “professional discussion between writers about what works and what needs work” (p. 140). Never is there mention of the need for teachers to question or criticize students’ intentions and meanings.

Pam Gilbert’s (1989a, 1989b, 1994) work helps us understand this lack of criticism. She argues that the notion of personal voice ties student-written text and student tightly together. One consequence of this merging of text and student is that student texts “are seen to be so closely aligned to the individual child and that child’s original making of meaning that they are ‘beyond criticism'” (1989a, p. 198). In other words, any criticism of the meanings students make with their texts can be interpreted as a dispar­agement of or attack on the person of the student.

Gilbert also points to some of the trouble that this notion of personal voice gets us into. For what if the authentic student voice is, say, a sexist one, as in an example Gilbert (1989a) provides from a Year 5 writing work­shop in Australia? Gilbert tells of the collaborative effort of four nine-year­ old boys who wrote themselves into their own fictional story of war and destruction. They made themselves heros, of course. They also wrote seven girls from the class into their tale. Six of these girls were given stereo­typical roles in the story–“having ‘affairs,’ holding hands with boys, getting married, saying ‘I love you'”–before becoming victims of war, dis­posed of in “reasonably ugly ways” (p. 200). The one girl to escape the textual fate of stereotype and death happened to be the biggest girl in the class. In the story, she jumps on top of the enemy and scares them off for a while. She also gets called “Super Blubber.” As Gilbert notes:

No need to kill off this female: her size and aggression have effectively excluded her anyway (what worse fate for a girl than to be called Super Blubber?). (p. 200)

Are we, with Murray, to marvel at this exploration of the world by these young boys, and help them make it work even more effectively?

Critical pedagogy’s conception of voice leads us into no such trap. Individual students’ voices are assumed to arise from a social self, shaped and created in social contexts of great diversity. Student voices are formed within an oppressive society that privileges the meanings, values, and sto­ries of some over others. These voices–like the voices of teachers, curricu­lum developers, novelists, scientists–are assumed to be necessarily par­tial, to express a particular position on the world that will make possible certain understandings and constrain others. Consequently, critical peda­gogues say over and over again that student voices must be not only affirmed, but also questioned:

Developing a pedagogy that takes the notion of student voice seriously means developing a critically affirmative language that works both with and on the experiences that students bring to the classroom. This means taking seriously and confirming the language forms, modes of reasoning, dispositions, and histories that give students an active voice in defining the world; it also means working on the experiences of such students in order for them to examine both their strengths and weaknesses. (Giroux, 1991, p. 104)

Critical educators may certainly marvel at the diversity of experiences, languages, and stories that are called forth with the elicitation and affir­mation of student voice in the classroom. But there is also work to be done­–a critical testing of these voices for what they can teach us, and how they can and cannot contribute to the creation of a better world. For Murray and other workshop advocates, the sounding of the voices of heteroglossia in the classroom is already a better world. Maybe so. For advocates of criti­cal pedagogy, this heteroglossia may, unfortunately, sound too much like the already existing world, and be in need of criticism and revision.

It should be obvious that I find much about critical pedagogues’ treat­ment of voice attractive and persuasive. I value their assumption of a so­cial self developing in multicultural contexts. I affirm, in general, the critical democratic project they are pursuing. Within this perspective, voice is conceived of in terms of participation in the construction and reconstruc­tion of the world and the ways in which we make sense of it. Advocates of critical pedagogy avoid an uncritical stance in relation to student meaning­-making, while at the same time asserting the worth and importance of stu­dent voice to an emancipatory educational project.

But writing workshop and critical pedagogy versions of voice also share important similarities (Giroux, 1987). Both would have student voice flourish in the classroom. Both seek to humanize teaching and learning in schools through the acceptance and affirmation of student voice. Both en­courage the active exploration by students of their worlds, rather than passive submission in the face of teacher control and knowledge.

Unfortunately, critical pedagogy and writing workshop conceptions of voice also share at least one serious weakness: neither has come to grips with what conflict among voices–conflict generated among students, be­tween teachers and students, and within individual students–means for the actual production of speech and writing within classrooms.

Voice and Classroom Conflict

Workshop advocates’ characterization of writing as a personal, in­dividual activity does not quite jibe with their prescriptions for how work­shops should be set up and run. On the one hand, the guiding image to which students and teachers should aspire is the solitary author in pur­suit of personal meaning in private writing projects. On the other hand, workshop advocates would organize writing classes as very sociable places to write and learn–supportive writing conferences with peers and the teacher, collaborative writing projects, regular opportunities to receive response and affirmation from the class during sharing time, and class­room libraries housing student-written work make for workshop settings that are rich with possibilities for social interaction. Indeed, Courtney Cazden (1994) thinks that workshops may be considered “one of the best examples of ‘cooperative learning,’ so widely advocated for today’s schools” (p. vii).

In other words, workshop rhetoric champions the solitary writer even as its actual classroom practices throw the student writer into multiple, shifting relations with peers and the teacher. Workshop advocates finesse this incongruity by emphasizing individual student choice and initiative­–the student writer is portrayed as being in control, as the one who deter­mines when and how to interact with others. Nancie Atwell (1987), for example, writes that “within the structure of a writing workshop, students decide who can give the kind of help they need as they need it” (p. 41). In this way, workshop advocates can assume both that real writing is intensely individual and that student writers need help from others.

Of course, these others are always eager to help, and give the help the writer wants and needs. Within advocates’ stories about workshops, then, there is little room or cause for consideration of social conflict. And there’s the rub. For actual workshops are not so conflict-free. Certainly, easy ac­cess to peers and teachers within workshops provides student writers with opportunities for social interactions that can support and inspire. But these social interactions are also openings for conflict and risk, opportunities for peer and teacher audiences to push back on student voice in negative ways. While there truly are important differences between workshops and Phil Jackson’s (1968) traditional classroom, his “crowds, praise, and power” remains an apt description of workshop life.

At first glance, it seems silly to assert that advocates of critical peda­gogy are, like workshop advocates, blind to conflict. For they are not. The cultural politics perspective these theorists bring to their work on voice assumes conflict across and within the border lines of social groups in so­ciety; assumes struggles over identity, meaning, and authority. Further­more, critical pedagogues know that asymmetries of power give dominant groups the advantage in these struggles and that certain groups–women, people of color, the poor and working class, gays and lesbians–find them­selves in continuing conflict with the dominant meanings and values of society.

Conflict penetrates deep into the discourse of critical pedagogy. Un­fortunately, it does not penetrate to the level of face-to-face (or in your face) interactions in the classroom. Somehow, the sweaty, painful struggles over meaning that characterize life in society are left at the classroom door of critical pedagogues. Within, the sharing and questioning of student voices leads, it seems, to cool conflicts of interpretation, rather than heated con­frontations between actual people who, in expressing themselves, find themselves at odds.^[8] And while advocates of critical pedagogy recognize asymmetries of power across classroom participants (specifically, teacher and student), they have, as Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989) notes, “made no systematic examination of the barriers that this imbalance throws up to the kind of student expression and dialogue they prescribe” (p. 309).

In the end, neither workshop nor critical pedagogy advocates embed student voice in the immediate social context of the classroom, and conse­quently they ignore important problems and issues attending the speech and writing of students there. Writing workshop advocates embed voice in the inner context of the author’s intentions, desires, dreams, experiences; when the social context of the workshop is considered at all, it is only as a friendly one that supports individual students’ expression. Critical peda­gogues embed voice in politics and history writ large, rather than within the local meanings, values, and relations–the micropolitics and microhistories­–of particular classrooms.

Peers loom large within classrooms that forego tight control of student bodies and talk. As discussed in chapter 1, individual students do not per­ceive and experience these peers as an undifferentiated and uniformly supportive whole. Instead, they confront multiple peer audiences that they judge to be more or less supportive, more or less hostile, to their attempts at expression. In other words, children, especially unpopular children, feel there are serious risks involved in writing for and speaking in front of peers–risks to their sense of self, to what they value and care about, to their social standing in relations with others. Children’s responses to these risks include seeking out certain classmates as audiences and avoiding others. Some choose not to insert themselves and their texts into public spaces–spaces created exactly to allow all students’ voices to sound and be heard within the classroom community.

If conflict and risk attend peer relations in classrooms, they also at­tend relations between teacher and student. Students and teachers confront each other in a social context and institution not necessarily conducive to free and open talk and writing. Gilbert (1994) reminds us that “a number of different and incompatible discourses mesh at the site of the classroom because schools are about–among other things–selection and sorting, discipline and punishment, knowledge and control” (p. 264). Workshop advocates and critical pedagogues recognize this to the extent that their stories and criticisms of traditional pedagogy are concerned, in varying ways, with student voice taking a beating in its struggle with powerful teacher and curriculum voices. That complexities and conflicts continue to trouble student and teacher communication even after the teacher re­jects traditional practices and embraces alternative, progressive ones–this is not recognized, does not influence their theorizations of student voice. Workshop and critical pedagogy advocates seem to forget that teacher­-student interaction is truly a complicated business.

It’s a complicated business that is passed over too quickly in critical pedagogues’ calls for the questioning of student voice in the classroom. Anita and Ms. Meyer’s story, in chapter 2, suggests that teachers can inad­vertently confound student expression just in trying to affirm and support students’ explorations of meaningful content. What risks for student ex­pression, then, accompany the questioning–no, let’s use the term Giroux (1986) sometimes uses–the interrogation of student voice by the teacher?

In their work on women’s development of voice, self, and mind, Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule (1986) argue that a “doubting” model of education may be “peculiarly inappropriate” for women, if not inappropriate for men as well. They write:

On the whole, women found the experience of being doubted debilitating rather than energizing. … Because so many women are already consumed with self-doubt, doubts imposed from outside seem at best redundant and at worst destructive, confirming the women’s own sense of themselves as inadequate knowers. (p. 228)

I should note that Belenky and her coauthors are not arguing for an un­critical stance in relation to the world or the way the world is represented in the voices of students, teachers, and books–they would have teachers and students examine critically their worlds together. They also do not explicitly name critical pedagogy as a doubting model of education. In fact, they draw on Freire (1970) in their critique of traditional schooling, and also explicitly link their alternative vision of pedagogy–what they call “connected teaching”–to Freire’s notion of a “problem-posing education.”

Still, I take their doubts about doubting as words of caution for criti­cal educators intent on interrogating student voice in the classroom. One of the reasons that I am not surprised that Belenky et al. refer approvingly to Freire is that he takes pains to explore and name the sorts of teacher qualities and educational conditions that can lessen the risks for students of sharing and exposing their meanings and values to others. But the risks remain. Simply supporting student voice in classrooms may be hard enough to accomplish. Advocates of critical pedagogy ask teachers to sup­port and question student expression. Rather than pushing classroom par­ticipants’ thought and action forward to increasingly critical evaluations of their world, such questioning could encourage students to not speak their minds, or to look for the correct thing to say to please the teacher. At times, critical pedagogues seem overconfident that student voice will flour­ish in the face of questioning.

When we left Mrs. Dunphy and Jinx above, neither Jinx nor Mrs. Dunphy were flourishing. Jinx had endured criticisms of his RUN-ON SEN­TENCES and doubts that the “I” of his “I Believe” essay was really himself. Mrs. Dunphy was feeling uneasy, even annoyed with “this tall hooded­-eyed Negro boy standing there so unnaturally still.” She and Jinx were entangled in those “different and incompatible discourses” Gilbert (1994) warned us about, and Mrs. Dunphy is now a little worried that she has pushed too hard on Jinx. It’s time for some repair work on their relation­ship as teacher and student, so she points to a way that Jinx’s work can be redeemed and that he can receive the reward that she is sure he wants, and is hers to bestow.

Attend. She doesn’t understand the inadequacy of the repair work she proposes, doesn’t understand the distance between Jinx and herself, the conflict masked in the polite voice Jinx uses at school:

He’s about to turn away so Mrs. Dunphy says, relenting, “If you rewrite it, making corrections, I might raise the grade. I might make an exception, this time.”

Jinx mumbles, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Will you, then?”

“Ma’am?”

“Rewrite it, make corrections? Hand it back in again, by Monday?”

Jinx slips the composition in his notebook. His heart is beating hard and steady, keeping him cool, Iceman style. He’s thinking that once there’s blood on your hands, blood cries out for blood, doesn’t it? This white bitch on her fat girdled ass, looking up at him with a fond-familiar smile, as if she has the right.

He says, “Yes, ma’ am, thank you, ma’ am, I sure will.”

And he does. And the grade is raised to B+.

I confess that the first time I read through this vignette about Jinx and Mrs. Dunphy, the last sentence–“And the grade is raised to B+”–almost made me whoop out loud with angry satisfaction. For it seems that Jinx wins in his struggle with Mrs. Dunphy over his paper. Not only does he get the B+, but we also get to see him tell off Mrs. Dunphy, even if only inside his head. Jinx doesn’t give in to Mrs. Dunphy and her definition of the situation, and he doesn’t let her win by acquiescing to the initial grade she gave him.

But upon reflection, we also know that revising must have cost him, that the decision and labor to change his paper to please Mrs. Dunphy–Mrs. Dunphy with the “fond-familiar smile” that she has no right to share with him–could not have been easy. In the rewriting of his paper, Jinx had to choose among conflicting meanings and desires, had to orient himself among the voices of teacher and student, male and female, black and white, among the voices of Iceman and Verlyn (the agent of his mother’s hopes). We can almost hear Jinx’s teeth grinding as he “fixes” his RUN-ON SENTENCES and makes the voice of the paper conform to the voice Mrs. Dunphy knows is Jinx.

This inner dialogue and struggle, then, is the third kind of conflict (along with conflict among peers and between teacher and student) that workshop and critical pedagogy advocates have not confronted in their writing on student voice. Workshop advocates recognize that the writer faces difficulties in capturing complex experiences in words, difficulties in finding outer words to express inner meanings. But their conceptions of self and writing make it difficult to address the inner conflicts that attend having to use others’ words, when those others are different from, opposed to, and more powerful than you. Bakhtin (1981) noted that

Not all words for just anyone submit easily to this appropriation, to this sei­zure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly re­sist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appro­priated them and who now speaks them … it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. (p. 294)

Stephan Daedalus, the young Irish protagonist of James Joyce’s (1916 / 1976) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, expressed it this way, in his inner reflections on a conversation he was having with an English priest (who was also a dean at his school). Their discussion was moving, some­what haphazardly, through questions of esthetic theory and how to light fires and lamps, when the two discovered that they used a different word to name the same object–Stephan called the priest’s “funnel” a “tundish.” The priest, with a courtesy that Stephan thought rang false, called tundish “a most interesting word” and repeated it several times to himself. For Stephan, this “little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sen­sitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe,” the priest. Although both Stephan and the priest spoke English–as did Jinx and Mrs. Dunphy­–Daedalus believed that

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How differ­ent are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (p. 189)^[9]

Advocates of critical pedagogy, with their assumption of a multiple, social self, certainly are in better position than workshop advocates to recog­nize the inner struggles of Jinx and Stephan. When Giroux (1991) writes that one’s voice “constitutes forms of subjectivity that are multilayered, mobile, complex, and shifting” (p. 100), he is pointing to a conception of voice that is not far from acknowledging inner conflict in the production of speech and writing in schools. Unfortunately, critical pedagogues have not usually pushed this far. Their conception of voice, as Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989) notes,

Does not confront the ways in which any individual student’s voice is al­ready a “teeth gritting” and often contradictory intersection of voices con­stituted by gender, race, class, ability, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or ideol­ogy. … It is impossible to speak from all voices at once, or from any one, without traces of the others being present and interruptive. (p. 312)

Before I close this section, I should interpret the references to “blood on your hands” and “blood cries out for blood” that interrupted Jinx’s inner musings, above, as he considered the smiling Mrs. Dunphy who sat before him. What you don’t know if you haven’t read Oates’s novel–and what Mrs. Dunphy never knows–is that Jinx is struggling with “Human Conscience” in his “I Believe” essay because he has killed someone.

Jinx killed “Little Red” Garlock, a white boy about Jinx’s age. Jinx killed him partly in self-defense; partly in defense of a white girl, Iris, whom Jinx had befriended; partly because things never quite work out the way you expect them to. The fact that Jinx might be considered innocent of murder­–innocent in legal and moral senses of the word–does not mean that Jinx considers himself so. This is part of his inner struggle.

Another part is that he doesn’t feel that he can share what has hap­pened with anyone other than Iris, who was a witness to the brutal fight within which Little Red was killed; and he is cut off even from Iris because of societal norms proscribing association between Blacks and Whites. He wants to tell his parents, but fears the hurt he will cause in the telling, and also fears that they will make him tell the police. As a young black male, he knows his dreams, his parents’ dreams, of a college education will never be realized if he tells.

Little Red Garlock was loathed by Whites and Blacks alike–after he dropped out of school, he liked to roam the streets on his bicycle, calling out sexual obscenities to women and girls, looking for opportunities to bully. He came from a poor, wretched family. Figuring out how Little Red had ended up dead in the river was not a high priority to the police, and Jinx was never really at risk of being found out. But the burden of what had happened was heavy, and Jinx sometimes imagined confessing to the police:

At the police station, they’ll take him into an interrogation room. They’ll ask questions; he’ll answer. His voice slow and hollow-sounding as it has been lately, in school. As if his voice isn’t inside him but being thrown across a distance. As if he’s a ventriloquist’s dummy. (p. 196)

Police stations and classrooms are linked in Jinx’s consciousness. Both rep­resent white authority–an authority that will, if possible, determine his fate with little need of reference to the truth, what is right, or Jinx’s own dreams.

I should take care here. I am not arguing that classrooms and police stations necessarily are or have to be linked for students who, like Jinx, find no easy place within the dominant meanings and values of society. Class­rooms can be better places, learning places. Many already are such places, spaces where–through the hard work of teachers and students–students speak with voices not slow and hollow-sounding, but quick and resonant.

Classrooms can be better places, and we have a moral obligation, as educators, to make them so. But just because we are working to make them better doesn’t mean that students don’t confront problems in expressing themselves in classrooms, problems originating in conflicts with peers and teachers, in difficult choices of who they will be in relation to school and a larger, heterogeneous social world. I am not trying to be a glass-half-empty person. I am arguing that if our ideas of something better are linked to the flourishing of student voice in classrooms, then our theorizing and efforts to make things better have to account for the risks and problems students face in expressing themselves there.

Perhaps in a better world than Oates’s novel–in a better world than we live in now?–Jinx could have told his story to Mrs. Dunphy and the police, and expected to be understood and treated fairly. But that’s not the world he lived in, not the world he wrote in.

Voice as Project

It is strange. Advocates of writing workshops and critical pedagogy are profoundly dissatisfied with the status quo. They want our ideas of writing and education, our teaching and learning in schools, our society, to move, change, grow, transform into something better. And yet their work portrays student voice as surprisingly static, undeveloping. In part, this problem can be understood with reference to the above criticism of their work: A sense of student voice as dynamic or in-process can be lost when the complexities, the struggles, the pushes and pulls of actually speaking and writing in classrooms are ignored. But student voice is rendered inert within the writings of workshop and critical pedagogy advocates for other reasons as well.

For workshop advocates, voice is the authentic expression of a stable, preexisting (Enlightenment) self. From this perspective, a student writer may need to look for, discover, her voice in her drafting and revision of texts, but her voice (like herself) is always already there, always already finished. Thus, while individual texts may be constructed or developed, there is little sense of the student’s voice undergoing construction or development­–voice is found, not created.^[10]

I argued that student voice was a starting point within the pedagogi­cal scheme of critical pedagogues. Consequently, advocates of critical peda­gogy pay quite a bit of attention to the contributions that student voice can make to critical, collective work in the classroom. But they do not attend to what this critical work means for the transformation of individual stu­dent voices. In other words, critical pedagogues may sketch how a student’s story becomes the basis of a critical dialogue among teacher and students. Their focus on voice as starting point, however, leads to the neglect of how this critical dialogue then impacts the development of that student’s voice. Within the writings of critical pedagogues, student voice remains frozen at the beginning of the educational process.

We need a revised, alternative conception of student voice–one that affirms workshop and critical pedagogy commitments to student expres­sion and participation, but also helps us see student voice as in-process and embedded, for better and for worse, within the immediate social context of the classroom. I propose that voice be conceived of as a project involv­ing appropriation, social struggle, and becoming. Before discussing each of these aspects, a few words on why I am proposing that we think of voice as a project.

A project takes time, has duration. So voice, here, is not construed as already finished or frozen, but as developing across time and situation. I would extend the prominent workshop images of writing as a craft or pro­cess to voice; that is, imagine our voices as something we can craft, as some­thing we can develop with work.

A project suggests material to be worked, stuff to be manipulated. Voice as project resonates, then, with critical pedagogues’ calls for a trans­formed recitation in which student contributions are grabbed hold of by the classroom community and shaken for integrity. Critical pedagogues, however, only help us imagine collective work on student voice. We also need to be able to make sense of and support individual projects, individual students working and reworking the stuff of their lives.

Finally, “project” has something of the smell and feel of school to it, the sense of a task or problem taken up by actual students as part of their everyday schoolwork. Imagining voice as a project, then, might help us keep our thinking about voice closer to the ground, closer to the struggles, victories, failures, of Jinx and Stephan and Anita and Jessie as they respond to the challenges and possibilities of complex social situations in the class­room. At the same time, construing voice as a project reaffirms the activ­ity, the agency, of student writers in the production of their voices.

This is perhaps the strongest connection of my alternative conception of voice to those of critical pedagogy and workshop advocates. In the end, these advocates use the idea of voice to signal and call for the active pres­ence of students in their own educations. Same here.

Appropriation

We begin with the social self sketched above and assumed by critical pedagogues–a multiple, in-process self created with the cultural resources made available by a complex social environment. My conception of voice is concerned with the speaking and writing of this emerging self, especially in schools.^[11]

The notion of appropriation emphasizes the activity of the self in the face of cultural resources. That is, the concrete individual does not stand passive before the experiences, languages, histories, and stories that con­front her, but assimilates and does work on these resources in crafting a self and a voice. In crafting her voice, the individual responds to and trans­forms the utterances of others in the production of her own speaking and writing. Thus, on the one hand, the idea of appropriation reminds us that our voices are dependent on the voices of others who preceded us and provided us with words to use. George Kamberelis and Karla Scott (1992) write that

As individuals experience the language of others through social interaction, they collect words, phrases, styles, and structures and integrate them, form­ing a new synthetic object which we might call their individuality as language users and social beings. …  [This process] transforms social and cultural experiences, particularly conversational experiences, into traces which live on in individual people, contributing to their being and speaking forth when­ever the individuals talk or write. (p. 369)

On the other hand, the notion of appropriation highlights the taking over, the working over, by individuals, of the language of others. As Bakhtin (1986) put it: “These words of others carry with them their own expres­sion, their own evaluative tone, which we must assimilate, rework, and re­-accentuate” (p. 89).

For example, in our examination of a story by one of my third graders (Lensmire & Beals, 1994), Diane Beals and I noted a number of appropria­tions from oral and written sources that the young writer, Suzanne, had made in writing her text. Suzanne named some of the characters in her story after classmates. From a novel she was reading, Suzanne appropriated other characters’ names, several storylines, and important themes. Within her story, Suzanne had one of her characters call out rhyming lines from the story of the gingerbread man: “Run, run, as fast as you can …” And finally, she appropriated a potent word from the speech of the local peer culture, a word that Suzanne and classmates used to tease and ostracize Jessie and other classmates.

Suzanne’s appropriations, however, were not simple mimicry or repe­tition. She adapted and reworked the words and voices of others for her own purposes. Thus, in Suzanne’s story, the rhyme from the gingerbread man was altered, and was chanted not by the gingerbread man to the wolf hot on his cookie heels, but by a brother who was unmercifully teasing his sister:

Run, run, run,
As fast as you can,
You can’t catch me
You’re the Zit man.

Saying that someone had “zits” (slang for pimples or acne) or was a “zit face” was a common form of abuse among Suzanne’s classmates.Thus, the “Zit man” of the brother’s rhyme echoed oral teasing engaged in by Suzanne and others. But Suzanne also reworked and reevaluated the word “zits” in her appropriation of it. For within Suzanne’s story, two impor­tant characters–the brother and sister’s father, and their older sister­–condemn the brother’s teasing and his rhyme. In other words, Suzanne’s own creations (characters she presents as intelligent and caring in her writing) questioned the sort of teasing that she and her peers effected orally with the term zits.

Suzanne appropriated words, character names, rhymes, story lines, and themes from oral and written sources. She made them her own by giving them her own spin, by adapting them to her own purposes. And in this work, she was engaged in the project of developing her own voice out of the voices of others.

The notion of appropriation helps us to imagine student voice and its development with a concreteness missing from critical pedagogy. It also transforms workshop images of writing and voice. Instead of the writer as one who fishes the depths of subjectivity for morsels worthy of presenta­tion, here we may well imagine the writer as the fish itself, swimming in a rich soup of words, and becoming a bigger or smaller, a faster or slower, a more or less beautiful fish, through its options and choices of what to take into its mouth.

To conclude this section, I will appropriate Michel Foucault’s (1984) discussion of the use of notebooks (hypomnemata), in antiquity, to care for and develop the self. For Foucault, these notebooks “constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation” (p. 364). He emphasized that although these were personal notebooks, their primary purpose was not to give an account of oneself, to confess to temptation and failure as part of a process of purification, as was the case in later Chris­tian versions. The contrast Foucault draws between these later and earlier uses of notebooks is analogous to the contrast I would draw between a workshop conception of voice and my alternative:

The point is not to pursue the indescribable, not to reveal the hidden, not to say the non-said, but, on the contrary, to collect the already-said, to reassemble that which one could hear or read, and this to an end which is nothing less than the constitution of oneself. (p. 365)

Social Struggle

The idea of appropriation certainly suggests that the project of voice involves work. As sketched above, however, it suppresses the emotional turmoil and moral complexity that can accompany speaking and writing, ignores Jinx Fairchild’s teeth-gritting, forgets Stephan Daedalus fretting in the shadow of the priest’s language. To appropriation, then, we add social struggle as an important aspect of the project of voice. I point to three sorts of struggles that confront students in the development of their voices, with the recognition that in any actual production of voice, these three may be of varying importance, may blur into one another, may not be so easily identified and separated out.

The first is the struggle to use something old to do something new.^[12] That is, the struggle to invest words, phrases, styles, and structures that have been used before–the given of convention and tradition–with new meaning, a meaning that is adequate to the student’s goals for expression and the demands of the particular speech or writing situation with which he is confronted. Michael Holquist (1990) evokes this struggle when he writes that

As denizens of the logosphere, the sea of words in which we pass our lives, we are surrounded by forms that in themselves seek the condition of mere being-there, the sheer givenness of brute nature. In order to invest these forms with life and meaning, so that we may be understood and so that the work of the social world may continue, we must all perforce become authors. (p. 66)

For Holquist, to be an author means to struggle to breathe new life into the old words and forms surrounding us. However, we must also recognize the politics of this struggle to appropriate the given. For what if the given are alien or hostile words from powerful others? Are forms not easily ap­propriated for the purposes you would pursue, for the experience of the world you would share?

As a black writer in the United States in the late 1920s, James Weldon Johnson (1928 / 1992) considered the given a formidable challenge for black authors who wanted to engage both black and white audiences. Litera­ture, Johnson argued–if it was to achieve any “verisimilitude and final­ity,” any “convincing power”–had to be based on “more or less well­-established conventions, upon ideas that have some roots in the general consciousness” (p. 94). But the rooted ideas, the well-established words about black people in white America, were unworthy, hostile stereotypes, were brute forms too limited for an expansive literate engagement with black history and experience:

It would be proof of little less than supreme genius in a Negro poet for him to take one of the tragic characters of American Negro history–say Crispus Attucks or Nat Turner or Denmark Vesey–put heroic language in his mouth and have white America accept the work as authentic. American Negroes as heroes form no part of white America’s concept of the race. Indeed, I ques­tion if three out of ten of the white Americans who will read these lines know anything of either Attucks, Turner or Vesey, although each of the three played a role in the history of the nation. The Aframerican poet might take an Afri­can chief or warrior, set him forth in heroic couplets or blank verse and present him to white America with infinitely greater chance of having his work accepted. (pp. 94, 95)

Similarly, Carolyn Heilbrun (1988) describes how the conventions of women’s biographies and autobiographies have long denied women’s anger and desires for power and control over their own lives. The auto­biographies of women such as Jane Addams and Ida Tarbell, for example, contrast sharply with their own accounts of experiences in diaries and personal correspondence. In their autobiographies, the work and quests these women determinedly pursued are rendered as good fortune or hap­penstance: “Each woman set out to find her life’s work, but the only script insisted that work discover and pursue her, like the conventional roman­tic lover” (p. 25). Part of the struggle for women writing their lives, then, has been the struggle to resist and transform an inherited script that sup­presses aspects of women’s passion and agency.

But to resist or transform the given is risky, as Jinx learned when he tried to breathe new life into the school essay by investing it with personal meaning. His conversation with Mrs. Dunphy reminded him (if he had ever forgotten) that he could not write his text just to please himself. The question confronting Jinx was the one confronting any speaker or writer who wants to communicate:

The question (and it is a political question involving the mediation of author­ity) always must be: how much uniqueness can be smuggled into a formula without it becoming unrecognizable to others? (Holquist, 1990, p. 135)

Becoming unrecognizable is especially risky for students in school. For the consequences extend beyond the awkwardness or pain of not being under­stood, of your audience not comprehending your meaning. The risk is re­jection. In his attempt to smuggle himself into the inherited script, Jinx was like women who risk being dismissed as shrill or strident or divisive when they report their anger, like the first grader who violates convention with wobbly letters and invented spellings. Given the pervasiveness of evalua­tion in schools and students’ subordinate positions, the risk of “becoming unrecognizable” is also the risk of not being recognized as a competent, worthy student and human being. Sometimes simply being unconventional is enough.

The second social struggle confronting students in schools, then, is the struggle to please or satisfy their audience. Teachers are an obvious, prominent audience for students, but students often speak and write for other audiences as well, including their families and local community. And within the conferences and sharing times of writing workshops, within the “transformed recitations” of critical pedagogy, classmates also command attention.

In her story about a second grader named Sammy, Anne Dyson (1995) underscores some of the difficulties and complexities that students face in writing for multiple, diverse audiences. Sammy joined his class late in the year, and consequently worked hard to fit into already established groups of friends and play partners. One of the places he pursued his desire to belong was in Author’s Theater–a teacher-sponsored event in the class­room in which children performed their classmates’ stories under the direction of the child authors. Dyson traces how Sammy wrote a series of different sorts of superhero stories in an attempt to provide valued peers (especially two popular, white middle-class boys named Seth and Jonathon) with satisfying roles to perform in Author’s Theater. After early appropria­tions of teenage ninja and Superman stories, Sammy settled into writing X-Men stories, which, as Dyson notes, “potentially yielded a large team of good guys. Indeed, these mutant humans, with fantastic powers, soon took over as the dominant superheroes during writing time” (p. 28).

But Sammy was not settled for long. In writing his stories, Sammy fol­lowed his male peers in denying satisfying roles to female classmates, and this despite the fact that the X-Men stories of comic books and TV cartoons include powerful X-Men women. In other words, Sammy pleased only cer­tain members of his peer audience, and he did it by writing stories that re­affirmed traditional gender stereotypes and relations. Girls in Sammy’s class objected publicly to his and other boys’ stories, let Sammy know that they were not pleased with the roles he would have them play.

Sammy was confronted with hard choices, choices wrapped up with his identity as a black working-class second grade boy and his desire to be accepted (recognized) by his classmates. Would he continue to write for and in solidarity with Seth and Jonathon? What about Holly and Tina, two black working-class girls from his neighborhood? They wanted good roles. Did he want to deny his common ground with them and deny them agency in his stories? Could he somehow please both boys and girls in his class, given their seemingly conflicting ideological positions on gender roles and relations?

Sammy’s experiences point to the third social struggle students en­counter in pursuing the project of voice in the classroom: the struggle to choose. Student speakers and writers are confronted with multiple voices expressing multiple and sometimes conflicting perspectives on the world. They are confronted with multiple audiences making multiple and some­times conflicting demands. In the appropriation of certain voices (and not others), and in the particular ways they rework these voices, students po­sition themselves with and against certain meanings and values, with and against certain audiences, in a social setting marked by asymmetries of power. Thus, the central challenge that Bakhtin (1984a) claimed confronts the heroes of Dostoevsky’s novels, also confronts our students:

All that matters is the choice, the resolution of the question “Who am I” and “With whom am I?” To find one’s own voice and to orient it among other voices, to combine it with some and to oppose it to others, to separate one’s voice from another voice with which it has inseparably merged–these are the tasks that the heroes solve in the course of the novel. (p. 239)

In the course of her study, Dyson’s (1995) classroom hero, Sammy, gradually worked to separate his voice somewhat from those of his male peers, and created superhero stories with good roles for girls in his class. Indeed, he eventually described the characters in his stories not as X-Men, but as “X-people” (p. 34).

Still, any choice means saying no to other choices. And we must not underestimate the difficulty, risk, and pain that can accompany saying no to powerful voices and audiences.

If Foucault (surprisingly) helped me end the previous section on a rather upbeat note, I intone Karl Marx to close this section on social struggle. In his preface to the first German edition of Capital, Marx (1867 / 1978) chided fellow Germans who comforted themselves with the belief that, because Germany was less developed industrially, it avoided the worst of the modern evils of capitalist production, as evidenced in England. Marx countered that not only did Germany have plenty of modern evils, but it was also plagued by a “whole series of inherited evils … arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms” (p. 296).

In their speaking and writing, students strive to satisfy multiple, liv­ing audiences who reward and punish their efforts. They also struggle with a complex language inheritance, struggle to choose among and to redirect old words to new meanings. Students may well agree with Marx: “We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead.”

Becoming

My account of voice-as-project has progressed peculiarly. My discus­sion of the social struggles students confront in producing voice made a problem out of what I had just said was the very way that students’ voices develop. That is, appropriation, as the creation of one’s own language out of the words of others, became the occasion for difficulty and strife.

We move peculiarly again, here, in order to recast the role of social struggle in the project of voice–not to forget its dangers, but to recognize its possibilities. For the very struggles that put the project of voice at risk are also the very possibility for growth and change. The new arises out of the struggle with the old, out of the struggle to please self and other, out of the struggle to stand with and against others and their words. To appro­priation and social struggle, then, we add becoming as an important aspect of my conception of student voice.

What does the addition of becoming entail?

First, a recognition that there are no guarantees. The development of voice can, has, and will go in directions other than becoming. In other words, if becoming suggests an opening up of student voices, it also points to the possibility that they can be shut down. They can be shut down when students are overwhelmed by the inadequacy of the available or required forms of expression, despair at bridging the gap between old and new (O’Connor, 1989). They can be shut down when students refuse to speak or write in the face of hostile audiences and official voices, perhaps out of confusion and fear, but also out of dissent and anger–a silence grown out of a “deeply felt rage at those who live their unexamined privilege as en­titlement” (Lewis, 1993, p. 3). Student voices can be shut down, as well, when students refuse to pay attention to other voices (if Sammy plugs his ears in response to Holly and Tina) and their voices harden and calcify, as habit (and not struggle) determines choice.

Second, making becoming part of the project of voice means that stu­dents and teachers are choosing, are valuing, what Dewey (1938) called growth or the reconstruction of experience; that is, the continual movement to “experiences of a deeper and more expansive quality” (p. 47). In terms of the project of voice, we might characterize becoming as the refusal, in our speaking and writing, to merely repeat the old. Instead, we are aiming for the reconstruction of the old–old words, old relations with audiences, old choices–in the service of the ongoing renewal of our perspectives on the world and our places within it. Becoming points to taking a position in relation to others and the meanings and values that precede us, but it also points to revising that position, that voice, across time.

Finally, the inclusion of becoming in our conception of voice entails the recognition that students cannot do it all by themselves. Students may be plagued by the living and the dead, but they need both if their voices are to continue developing. There is no way to fashion the new without the appropriation of the old. There is no opportunity for affirmation from your audience and the energy of collaboration without the risk of rejec­tion. And there is no chance to become who you want to become, to speak with a voice that is yours–even as that voice sounds with the voices of others with whom you’ve learned and struggled–without the pain that often accompanies saying this, and not that. Students need others if their voices are to continue to develop. Within the classroom, they need teachers who recognize their struggles for voice, and help them transform these struggles into occasions for becoming.^[13]

In the end, committing ourselves to becoming is committing ourselves to a view of what it means to be human. It is to align ourselves with Dewey’s belief that humanity is

A participant in an unfinished universe rather than a spectator of a finished one. In order to survive and exalt our existence, we must creatively solve our problems and evolve life-affirming values, perhaps of a kind that have never before existed. (Garrison, 1995, p. 418)

Bakhtin says somewhere that to be is to communicate (actually, he prob­ably says this everywhere). And to communicate is to struggle to speak and write in ways that somehow answer to the unique demands of unique situations that have never occurred before. In other words, Bakhtin saw demands for becoming in our everyday existence, saw struggle and cre­ativity as facts of life.

In Charles Dickens’s novel A Christmas Carol, an old Scrooge looked back with joy at his employment under a man named Fezziwig. It was not that the work that Scrooge and his collaborators performed was easy–the work was very hard and toilsome. But in Fezziwig’s treatment of Scrooge and the others, in his way of being with them, Scrooge thought that Fezziwig had the power to make the work heavy or light–and Fezziwig made it light.

The project of voice is hard. Appropriation, social struggle, and be­coming demand labor, risk-taking, and imagination. The challenge for those of us who would have student voices flourish in schools is to extend the work of writing workshop and critical pedagogy advocates, and continue to find better ways of being with students–ways that make the unavoid­able burdens of voice light.

A Conclusion

One of the last times we see Jinx Fairchild in Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, he is about to interact, again, with someone who works for an important institution of white authority. Jinx is 24 years old, married, searching for meaningful work (his shot at a college scholarship ended with a broken ankle in the final basketball game of his senior year). But this time, the person behind the desk is black. And when Jinx ap­proaches, the person stands, embraces his hand. And to Jinx’s surprise, the person even recognizes him, calls him by the name that celebrated his nerve, his power, on the basketball floor, the name he was known by when life seemed open:

Birth certificate carefully folded in his inside jacket pocket, Jinx Fairchild takes the bus uptown on this Saturday morning in November 1963 to the United States Army recruiting station on South Main Street and first thing he sees, shyly entering the office, is that the smartly uniformed man behind the counter, seated at a desk, is black … which he hadn’t envisioned.

At once he’s flooded with relief.

Then the second amazing thing: this man Jinx Fairchild doesn’t know, could swear he has never laid eyes on before, strong-boned handsome face, skin dark as Jinx’s own, a man in his mid-thirties at least, is evidently from Hammond, for it seems he knows Jinx, or recognizes him: rising quickly to his feet, reaching across the counter to shake Jinx’s hand, smiling, happy, deep booming voice: “Iceman–isn’t it?” (p. 367)

Jinx was recognized, accepted, not by his teacher, but by his army recruiting officer. And he would lend the powers of his body, not the powers of his voice, to his country’s project. November 1963–signing up then, the month Kennedy was killed, would give him enough time to get ready for Vietnam.

I conclude with a few lines from Cornel West’s (1989) statement of what it is we might learn if we pay close attention to the voice of W.E.B. Du Bois. They are an appropriately hopeful and sobering conclusion to my meditation:

Creative powers reside among the wretched of the earth even in their subju­gation, and the fragile structures of democracy in the world depend, in large part, on how these powers are ultimately exercised. (p. 148)