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Volume 8, Number 1 - Fall 2009
People & Stories Opens Horizons to Reading & Study
talking to Shameka Blackwell
When Shameka Blackwell was five years old, she used to prop a thick book of fairy tales on her lap and read it to her collection of stuffed animals. In second grade, encouraged by an enthusiastic teacher, she was in a class play.
But by fourth grade, she was a struggling student, diverting her friends by being “the class clown.” Although she skipped from 7th to 9th grade, she was “getting in a lot of trouble” and barely attended class. Drawing and writing became secret hobbies.
People & Stories helped reverse that trend. Blackwell is now in a two-year program, studying X-ray technology, at Mercer County Community College. In her spare time, she writes motivational poems and “old-time stories.” And she reads more widely, with a perspective that was stretched by her experiences in the group.
People & Stories “opened my horizons about so many things. I’d never had a chance to read different books from all over the world. I learned more about Langston Hughes; I love him as a writer.”
The group, which met at Bo Robinson Education and Treatment Center, a prison-release program in Trenton, also included a writing component, and Blackwell warmed to the idea of having her stories and poems critiqued. “In People & Stories, I was judged—in a good way,” she says.
Coordinator Stephanie Hanzel and staff members at Bo Robinson “saw something in me and reached out after I left. They believed in me.” While it was already her dream to attend college, “the support I got in People & Stories kept me encouraged. I got into school a week after I came home” from Bo Robinson.
Blackwell, who counts her three People & Stories certificates and her copy of Langston Hughes’ collected stories among her most cherished possessions, recalls that “I spoke up all the time; when I read something, I always had an opinion on it.” The group changed her reading repertoire—“before, I was stuck in one category, a Jackie Collins-type of reader”—by introducing her to authors such as Gish Jen.
In Jen’s painful story, “Chin,” a young boy and his firefighter father witness the abuse of a neighbor boy by his father, who is an immigrant from China. Discussion in the group focused not on the abusing parent, but on the father who does not act to stop the violence he sees.
“Everybody had a different opinion about the father who was watching,” Blackwell recalled. “Everybody felt he was so controlling. But I thought he had a job where he wanted to save people and be the hero. Here, he couldn’t even save his own neighbor. He wanted to be a saver, and he wasn’t looked on like that. His wife admired someone who was sensitive—his exact opposite. Maybe he was too macho.”
Now that she’s in school full-time, some of her professors mention authors or ideas that Blackwell recalls from People & Stories. She’s still writing—including poems about the struggles of those she sees around her.
And she dreams of working for a hospital, perhaps one day opening her own freestanding radiology facility. She used to run her own business, a small building-and-house maintenance company; perhaps she could do that again, on the side.
“There’s so much I want to do,” she said. “I’m 33. I missed out on so much.”