The Road There

I had several thoughts on what type of project I could do for my class. Originally I had wanted to do a web site for the Hurston/Wright Foundation, located at VCU, because I had already volunteered to work on that. However, that idea was nixed by my professors because it wasn't native hypertext. The Hurston/Wright project would only have presented design changes (at least for the most part).

Cooper and Keller suggested that I could do a site on why Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright hated each other, and then I could link it from the main Hurston/Wright web site. However, I didn't like that idea. I didn't really care, in the end, why they didn't like each other. (While I actually am interested in the reasons, I didn't want to worry about all the research I'd have to do for that type of project and still have to design the sucker.)

At the same time I started this class, a friend of mine, Robin Dunn, who is also a poet in the MFA program at VCU, informed me of a writing technique she had learned over the summer from poet Nickey Finney. Essentially, the process was to think about the timeline of your life in context of the world around you. Robin relayed that the four starting points to your timeline included your earliest memory, your most important memory, a community event, and a world event. Then elaborate on each of these points on the line.

Finney, knowing she was assigning this task to writers, knew that the timelines would be filled way beyond four points by the time the assignment was due. Robin realized how certain events and figures in pop culture played such large roles in her formation. In doing the same exercise, I also realized, not only how much fun it was remembering when the Rubik's Cube was such as hit, but that there was a whole generation behind me who didn't have the benefit of remembering the Challenger explosion; but I did, and it meant a great deal to me that, at the time of the explosion, I didn't care.

So I figured I could write poems about my own pop culture and my history relating to it. Then if I wanted, I could make the poems hypertextual by having alternate endings, like writing a poem about the Challenger from my point of view, and having an alternate ending where the husband of Krista McCullough finishes the poem, or there would be a whole new poem from his perspective. Then I decided that this project would be too much work, and I never got inspired enough to write about my pop culture.

Each week for class we had to find one web site that, hopefully, related to what our major project might be about, then write an annotation of the web site. I realized in looking for different sites, that the idea of hypertext was similar to childhood games I played, like the Telephone Game and 100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. The Telephone Game is where a line of children gather and on one end a phrase is whispered into the next person's ear. By the time it gets to the end of the line, the phrase is so mangled from its original meaning that the new phrase is hysterical. I think everyone knows 100 Bottles..., so I won't sing it here. :)

In any case, I saw a definite correlation between these two children's games and hypertext, in that links are like the Telephone Game's constantly changing phrase. Each time you choose a link, you may get an entirely different subject matter from the previous lexia. And, as in 100 Bottles..., you can choose how long you want to stay on the web or choose how many links you want to follow. It would be similar to singing 10 Bottles of Beer On The Wall during a short road trip, or 1,000 Bottles... on those awfully long family trips. Then I thought, hey, those songs and games are part of my pop culture, so I went back to that idea for my project. But I didn't stay for long.

The only other class I was taking during the Fall '98 semester was Readings in African-American History. Although I'm an MFA student, I am actually very interested in the history and culture of the South. We were reading some great books on the subject of blacks in the postbellum period, such as Frederickson's The Black Image in the White Mind, and Herbert Shapiro's White Violence and Black Response (as well as a staple Afro-American book by Wm. J. Wilson, Power, Racism, and Privilege).

One week in class, my history professor asked us, hypothetically, if any white child who had seen a lynching would have grown up more or less racist. My comment of "Why would it make any difference?" sparked some debate, but then we moved on in the discussion. However, the idea was planted in my head.

I had been looking at my grandmother's old photographs, and I knew she had grown up in the rural South. I wondered if she had ever seen a lynching, so I called her. Since she's near 90, I couldn't outright ask her, because I didn't know what it would do to her mental stability. I verified a few facts, like the name of her high school, then I called my mother and asked her if grandma had ever seen a lynching.

After she got up off the floor, she said no, that if she had, surely she would have said something about it. I figured otherwise, but have not found the appropriate way to ask my grandmother yet without upsetting her.

Wow, these thoughts came rather quickly over a series of two or three days. I had gone home that night after class and wrote two poems based on facts of my grandmother's life, and I knew I could use them for my hypertext project. I wrote them straight out, but I had them linked in my mind in several ways, so I figure I wrote them to be native hypertext, in some context.

Two days later, after deciding that I didn't want to incorporate these poems into a larger context of my pop culture history, I wrote a third poem about my grandmother and an event (the lynching of Wm. & Cora Wales) I read about in Shapiro's book. I wrote this one right into the computer, so I knew it would work hypertextually. I had a foundation for my project: the history of my grandmother in the loose manner poetry affords facts.

Gassing Up &
Heading Out

The Road There

Routes of Travel
(Ways To Read)