Old World Underground

A few weeks ago, my mom came to town to visit. I'd arranged a dinner with some of the fabulous women here, at the one "upscale" restaurant in town. It had linoleum floors, salad with iceberg lettuce, a little tomato, and tons of shredded cheddar cheese. Ranch dressing of course. The waitress greeted the principal with an "Oh, it's you" and a not even thinly veiled comment about how terrible it was that she'd left the middle school. Yay for small towns.

As the dinner proceeds, we begin discussing my students' photos, and the grandmother (who's about my mother's age) of one of the students asks how he is doing. I say how driven he is, how motivated beyond anyone else in that class. He checks a camera out when we're not working on projects and shoots on his own. For the pleasure of it, for the experience. His grandmother comments on a series of photos he took, which I'd seen on instagram. He walked around their neighborhood and shot beat-up cans, an old tire, a field, a flower on asphalt. I remember being 18 and pulling the car over onto the side of the road to shoot a tiny daisy pushing up out of a gaping crack on Midkiff Road. I was so shy then, so resistant to being seen. But I stepped out onto the hot macadam, electrified by the cars I knew could come, ignored the feeling of foolishness I felt (feel) sometimes when I'm taking a picture somewhere and there's no chance of people ignoring me, no chance of being anonymous. And I crouched, balanced and leaned out and down to get eye-level with the tiny flower, to get close to the gaping crack--something I knew would be its own kind of lovely even before, when I'd sped by at 65 mph. His photos are good and I tell her as much. And she says "but it looks like we live in a dump!"

I know that my mother would have thought the same, would have been distressed about the appearance such a thing creates. But what I know about the student is this: seeing the cracks where everyone else sees a smooth surface is something to be prized in a photographer. It means he recognizes the humanity in what's around him, flaws and all. It means he could actually turn this into something.

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The longer I spend in Florida, the more I see what I once believed it to be. A girl hitch-hiking right at the highway's edge in the dark, so close I could hit her if I lost focus for just a second and slipped across the line. Violence. Horrible violence. In south Florida the other day, a girl shot on the school bus. A story a teacher friend tells about another girl who was killed because she missed the bus, tried to walk. They still don't know what happened. And at my school, a story about something that happened to a girl in the gym with some of the basketball players and coach. The details are vague, told under the breath. In class after we read the nonfiction essay about lynching and are discussing when it stopped (if it stopped), a student calls me over and says he knows it still happens. A friend of his was hog-hunting in Northern Florida a year or two ago and came upon a meth lab in the middle of the woods, the bodies of two black men hanging from the trees. "Really?" I said, "That's horrible." And he says, Yes, I know because right before he turned to run the other direction, he took a picture on his phone. He showed me.

Everywhere I turn is a sea of camo and Vera Bradley. When my uncle tells me there's a reason he stayed in Florida, that he made this place in particular his home, that the people here are just nicer than people anywhere else, I try not to flinch. I think of the annoyance, the apathy, the defensiveness of so many who I've met. Just like that waitress. What I see is a small town, a place many if not most of my students won't leave. A place where poverty is a given, where the sun maybe bleaches out the awareness that everything isn't bright. But that isn't true. What I see in the faces of all these people I meet is resignation. A blanching knowledge that nothing is ever going to change.