The first year

Babies born to Trackton residents are brought home from the local hospital in the rectangular bassinet box it provides. A small supply of disposable diapers and plastic bottles also comes home with the baby, for Trackton mothers do not expect to nurse their babies, and they depend primarily on disposable diapers, accepting these as necessary since their homes have no laundry facilities. Relatively few provisions are made for the baby beforehand; a few shirts, blankets, and wrappers may be new, and shortly after the arrival home, the father, whether present in the household or not, is expected to send diapers and a supply of milk-formula. He and his family come to visit the child and arrange a time for “keepin”im” sometimes every weekend, or a week or so out of each month. If the child is born to a young mother remaining in the home of her family, and the father remains with his family, each family buys independently for the child, especially during the preschool years. The paternal grandparents may buy a snowsuit one week, and the maternal grandparents may buy a heavy sweater the next. The provision of a planned wardrobe to consist of a certain number of particular items is not a goal; the emphasis is on the buying of items for the child. In each household of both the mother's and father's family, the child will have at least a minimal set of provisions kept there at all times.

If the baby is not the child of a young girl whose family will be taking primary responsibility for childcare, the baby does not have the benefits of moving from one home to another. Instead, if the mother has entered a somewhat stable relationship or marriage, usually by her early twenties, the baby is brought into the home of the mother and father. There he enters a household in which any other children born to the mother before this marriage will take some responsibility for the child. The father's family will also contribute, especially if this is either his first child or the first child of this union, but subsequent children of this union may not receive a particularly favored status or spend as much time in the home of the father's family.

A student again

The first chapters of this book have detailed the ways children of Trackton, Roadville, and the townspeople learn to use oral and written language. The ways of the black and white townspeople are different from the ways of either Trackton or Roadville. In businesses, mills, and schools, Roadville and Trackton residents interact with the townspeople, who are the managers of these commercial, workplace, and educational settings. For the children of Roadville and Trackton, school is the first place in which they meet on an extended basis the townspeople's ways of using oral and written language. They have come to school, bearing the high hopes of their parents and believing school can make a difference in whether or not they learn enough to enable them to move beyond their parents' workplaces. Their physical transition from home to kindergarten and the primary grades will eventually be followed by a larger transition to the commercial establishments and institutions of employment controlled by the townspeople. Intuitively, they and their parents feel language is power, and though they may not articulate precisely their reasons for needing to learn to read, write, and speak in the ways the school teaches, they believe that such learning has something to do with moving them up and out of Trackton and Roadville.

Of what use might the detailed ethnographies of communication in Roadville and Trackton be in enabling teachers and students to bridge their different ways? The answer to this question depends on finding ways to make accessible to teachers an understanding of the differences in language and culture their students bring to their classrooms. In the 1970s, the townspeople who studied in graduate courses I taught learned to become ethnographers of their own and others' interactions and to put to use knowledge about the different ways of learning and using language which existed in the communities of their region. These teachers, in taking social science courses, examined their own habits at home and learned to recognize that they carried these home habits into the classroom just as did their students from other communities.

A quiet early morning fog shrouds rolling hills blanketed by pine-green stands of timber, patched with fields of red clay. As the sun rises and burns off the fog, the blue sky is feathered with smoke let go from chimney stacks of textile mills: this is the Piedmont of the Carolinas.

The Piedmont, a term used by outsiders and newcomers to the region, but never by local residents, is the “foot of the mountain” which sprawls east of the Appalachians from the southwestern hills of Virginia through North and South Carolina into Georgia and Alabama. Its textile mills are at home along the rivers and railways of the numerous towns and cities which dot the rolling terrain. From Danville, Virginia to Birmingham, Alabama, the Southern Railway cuts through the Piedmont, mingling the smoke of its locomotives with that of the textile mills along its track.

The Piedmont includes the area west of the Atlantic Coastal Plain and east of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Separating the central Piedmont of the Carolinas from the Coastal Plain is a strip of sand hills with no vegetation except jack pines and scrub oak. Along this strip is a geological fault called the “fall line.” River rapids and shoals mark this point at which the rushing waters of rivers falling from the Appalachians across the foothills enter into the Coastal Plain. Above this line is “the up-country,” below it the “low-country.” Through the Coastal Plain, the rivers slow their pace to meander through pine-dotted valleys to the Atlantic Ocean. Along these rivers, cities such as Columbia and Camden in South Carolina, and Raleigh in North Carolina, mark the historical limits of inland navigation.

Here, in the eighteenth century, slaves, manning barges loaded with goods brought from the coastal port of Charleston, S.C., had to remove the goods for distribution either in these city markets or by wagon through the region above the fall line. In this back country, wagons moved along roads which after a rain could entrap wagon and horses or oxen in a mire of red or grayish clay; rivers too swift to be forded discouraged traveling merchants.

The ethnographic present never remains as it is described. Ways with Words was and is an unfinished story, for its characters and their children have lived on with no resolution of plot or completion of the story told by the book. But because we have a then and-now perspective on their lives, we can consider how the influences of economic, political, and social forces have reshaped their language, life, and work in their schools and communities. How have their ways of acquiring, using, and valuing language adapted in response to structural changes in families, schools, and jobs? We can further see how these shifts now shape the roles of ethnographers and their methods of collecting data.

From ethnographies of communication

In this second decade after the completion of Ways with Words, I remain linked in many ways to the former residents of Roadville and Trackton and the townspeople of the Piedmont Carolinas. I have also moved on to study their children and others like them in distant parts of the United States, focusing again on language and its links to values, behaviors, and beliefs. The children of Ways with Words, some now parents of school-age youngsters and others on their own as young adults in places distant from their childhood, have scattered with their families to inner cities, suburban subdivisions, and small towns, some replanting themselves and others migrating back and forth. I have tried to follow them, always focusing on the what, how, and when of patterns of choice children and young people exercise in their uses of language. But these travels have called for a new set of research tools and approaches.

In the late 1960s, school desegregation in the southern United States became a legislative mandate and a fact of daily life. Academic questions about how children talk when they come to school and what educators should know and do about oral and written language were echoed in practical pleas of teachers who asked: “What do I do in my classroom on Monday morning?”

In the massive reshuffling of students and teachers during desegregation in the South, I became a part of the communities and schools described in this book. I was both ethnographer of communication focusing on child language and teacher-trainer attempting to determine whether or not academic questions could lead to answers appropriate for meeting the needs of children and educators in that regional setting. Described here are two communities – Roadville and Trackton – only a few miles apart in the Piedmont Carolinas. Roadville is a white working-class community of families steeped for four generations in the life of the textile mills. Trackton is a black working-class community whose older generations grew up farming the land, but whose current members work in the mills. Both communities define their lives primarily in terms of their communities and their jobs, yet both are tied in countless ways to the commercial, political, and educational interests of the townspeople – mainstream blacks and whites of the region. The townspeople are school-oriented, and they identify not so much with their immediate neighborhoods as with networks of voluntary associations and institutions whose activities link their common interests across the region.

This book has been about how children of two culturally different communities in the Piedmont Carolinas learned to use language in their homes and communities. This book has also been about how teachers'; knowledge of children's ways with words enabled them to bring these ways into their classrooms.

The patterns of language use of the children of Roadville and Trackton before they go to school stand in sharp contrast to each other and to those of the youngsters from townspeople families. Though parents in all three communities want to “get ahead,” their constructions of the social activities the children must engage in for access to language, oral and written, vary greatly. The sequence of habits Trackton children develop in learning language, telling stories, making metaphors, and seeing patterns across items and events do not fit the developmental patterns of either linguistic or cognitive growth reported in the research literature on mainstream children. Roadville children, on the other hand, seem to have developed many of the cognitive and linguistic patterns equated with readiness for school, yet they seem not to move outward from these basics to the integrative types of skills necessary for sustained academic success.

The townspeople teachers described in the fin final two chapters of this book used knowledge about ethnography as an approach to learningto move to new ways of doingin their classrooms. The townspeople adapted materials and methods by using their ethnographies of interactions in their own homes and classrooms in combination with ethnographies of communication done in their students' communities. Their interactive approach to incorporating these communities' ways of talking, knowing, and expressing knowledge with those of the school enabled some Roadville and Trackton children to understand how to make choices among uses of languages and to link these choices to life chances.

Becoming science “translators”

The fifth-grade science classroom was a mess. One corner was piled high with seed catalogues; the window sills were filled with cups and containers of dirt. Pumpkins and squash were piled in one corner of a low bookshelf, and dead geranium plants hung from the ceiling over the storage shelves. The work tables were filled with hoes and trowels of different sizes and shapes, and photographs of larger tools. A bulletin board was plastered with news clippings. The warm sun of a late November afternoon brightened this untidy classroom of a school just outside Gateway.

Children were clustered in small groups about the room, some working with poster board and magic markers, others with tape recorders, and some poring over science books, almanacs, dictionaries, and how-to-garden books. Four boys on one side of the room were involved in intensive debate:

Terry: What'd you get?

Tony: Wait 'til you hear ol' Mr. Feld.

Paul: We gonna do the old informant or the new one first?=

Tony: =The old – I talk to him a long time ‘fore he tol’ me ‘bout

Gardenin’. Then he start ‘memberin’ 'bout how to cut the potato

eyes, how to hill 'em up.

[

Terry: You get drawings?

Tony: Yea, //pulls pencil sketches out of folder and passes them around// 'n he checked 'em.

Terry: Did he say when he planted, why the sprout come from the eye?

[

Tony: Yea, wanna hear the tape?

Mike: But we gotta hear Mr. Purcey tape too. Ol' Mr. Feld '11 be different from somebody young as Mr. Purcey.

Tony: All that's gotta go on the informant chart.

As the boys listened to the two tapes, one of an eighty-six-year-old retired farmer, another of a thirty-five-year-old part-time farmer, they gathered art materials on the floor around them and doodled on piles of scratch paper. They frequently stopped the tape to talk about what had been said, to ask the boy who had interviewed the farmer what a word meant or how the farmer used a certain tool.

In Roadville

A piece of truth

Roadville residents worry about many things. Yet no Roadville home is a somber place where folks spend all their time worrying about money, their children's futures, and their fate at the hands of the mill. They create numerous occasions for celebration, most often with family members and church friends. On these occasions, they regale each other with “stories.” To an outsider, these stories seem as though they should be embarrassing, even insultingto people present. It is difficult for the outsider to learn when to laugh, for Roadville people seem to laugh at the story's central character, usually the story-teller or someone else who is present.

A “story” in Roadville is “something you tell on yourself, or on your buddy, you know, it's all in good fun, and a li'l something to laugh about.” Though this definition was given by a male, women define their stories in similar ways, stressing they are “good fun,” and “don't mean no harm.” Stories recount an actual event either witnessed by others or previously told in the presence of others and declared by them “a good story.” Roadville residents recognize the purpose of the stories is to make people laugh by making fun of either the story-teller or a close friend in sharing an event and the particular actions of individuals within that event. However, stories “told on” someone other than the story-teller are never told unless the central character or someone who is clearly designated his representative is present. The Dee children sometimes tell stories on their father who died shortly after the family moved to Roadville, but they do so only in Mrs. Dee's presence with numerous positive adjectives describing their father's gruff nature. Rob Macken, on occasion, is the dominant character in stories which make fun of his ever-present willingness to point out where other folks are wrong.