theguide11e

Annie Dillard From An American Childhood

Instructor's Notes

To add the “Make Connections” activity as a discussion prompt, click on “Add to This Unit,” select “Create New,” choose “Discussion Board,” and then paste the text into the text box.
To assign the Analyze and Write activities following the reading,click on the “Browse Resources for this Unit” button or navigate to the “Resources” panel.
An autograded multiple-choice quiz, a summary activity with a sample summary as feedback, and a synthesis activity are available for this reading; click on the “Browse Resources for this Unit” button or navigate to the “Resources” panel to find those and other resources for this chapter.

Courtesy of Michele Strub

ANNIE DILLARD, professor emeritus at Wesleyan University, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction writing with her first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). Since then, she has written eleven other books in a variety of genres. They include Teaching a Stone to Talk (1988), The Writing Life (1990), The Living (1993), Mornings Like This (1996), and The Maytrees (2007). Dillard also wrote an autobiography of her early years, An American Childhood (1987), from which the following selection (and the excerpt in Chapter 1) comes.

As you read,

think about how the first two paragraphs in the reading selection prepare readers to understand the story’s significance.
notice how Dillard sets the scene. Why do you think she describes the time and place with so much specificity?

Some boys taught me to play football. This was fine sport. You thought up a new strategy for every play and whispered it to the others. You went out for a pass, fooling everyone. Best, you got to throw yourself mightily at someone’s running legs. Either you brought him down or you hit the ground flat out on your chin, with your arms empty before you. It was all or nothing. If you hesitated in fear, you would miss and get hurt: you would take a hard fall while the kid got away, or you would get kicked in the face while the kid got away. But if you flung yourself wholeheartedly at the back of his knees — if you gathered and joined body and soul and pointed them diving fearlessly — then you likely wouldn’t get hurt, and you’d stop the ball. Your fate, and your team’s score, depended on your concentration and courage. Nothing girls did could compare with it.

Boys welcomed me at baseball, too, for I had, through enthusiastic practice, what was weirdly known as a boy’s arm. In winter, in the snow, there was neither baseball nor football, so the boys and I threw snowballs at passing cars. I got in trouble throwing snowballs, and have seldom been happier since.

. . . this time, the only time in all of life, the car pulled over and stopped. Its wide black door opened; a man got out of it, running. He didn’t even close the door.

On one weekday morning after Christmas, six inches of new snow had just fallen. We were standing up to our boot tops in snow on a front yard on trafficked Reynolds Street, waiting for cars. The cars traveled Reynolds Street slowly and evenly; they were targets all but wrapped in red ribbons, cream puffs. We couldn’t miss.

I was seven; the boys were eight, nine, and ten. The oldest two Fahey boys were there — Mikey and Peter — polite blond boys who lived near me on Lloyd Street, and who already had four brothers and sisters. My parents approved Mikey and Peter Fahey. Chickie McBride was there, a tough kid, and Billy Paul and Mackie Kean too, from across Reynolds, where the boys grew up dark and furious, grew up skinny, knowing, and skilled. We had all drifted from our houses that morning looking for action, and had found it here on Reynolds Street.

It was cloudy but cold. The cars’ tires laid behind them on the snowy street a complex trail of beige chunks like crenellated castle walls. I had stepped on some earlier; they squeaked. We could not have wished for more traffic. When a car came, we all popped it one. In the intervals between cars we reverted to the natural solitude of children.

I started making an iceball — a perfect iceball, from perfectly white snow, perfectly spherical, and squeezed perfectly translucent so no snow remained all the way through. (The Fahey boys and I considered it unfair actually to throw an iceball at somebody, but it had been known to happen.)

I had just embarked on the iceball project when we heard tire chains come clanking from afar. A black Buick was moving toward us down the street. We all spread out, banged together some regular snowballs, took aim, and, when the Buick drew nigh, fired.

A soft snowball hit the driver’s windshield right before the driver’s face. It made a smashed star with a hump in the middle.

Often, of course, we hit our target, but this time, the only time in all of life, the car pulled over and stopped. Its wide black door opened; a man got out of it, running. He didn’t even close the car door.

He ran after us, and we ran away from him, up the snowy Reynolds sidewalk. At the corner, I looked back; incredibly, he was still after us. He was in city clothes: a suit and tie, street shoes. Any normal adult would have quit, having sprung us into flight and made his point. This man was gaining on us. He was a thin man, all action. All of a sudden, we were running for our lives.

Wordless, we split up. We were on our turf; we could lose ourselves in the neighborhood backyards, everyone for himself. I paused and considered. Everyone had vanished except Mikey Fahey, who was just rounding the corner of a yellow brick house. Poor Mikey, I trailed him. The driver of the Buick sensibly picked the two of us to follow. The man apparently had all day.

He chased Mikey and me around the yellow house and up a backyard path we knew by heart: under a low tree, up a bank, through a hedge, down some snowy steps, and across the grocery store’s delivery driveway. We smashed through a gap in another hedge, entered a scruffy backyard and ran around its back porch and tight between houses to Edgerton Avenue; we ran across Edgerton to an alley and up our own sliding woodpile to the Halls’ front yard; he kept coming. We ran up Lloyd Street and wound through mazy backyards toward the steep hilltop at Willard and Lang.

He chased us silently, block after block. He chased us silently over picket fences, through thorny hedges, between houses, around garbage cans, and across streets. Every time I glanced back, choking for breath, I expected he would have quit. He must have been as breathless as we were. His jacket strained over his body. It was an immense discovery, pounding into my hot head with every sliding, joyous step, that this ordinary adult evidently knew what I thought only children who trained at football knew: that you have to fling yourself at what you’re doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive.

Mikey and I had nowhere to go, in our own neighborhood or out of it, but away from this man who was chasing us. He impelled us forward; we compelled him to follow our route. The air was cold; every breath tore my throat. We kept running, block after block; we kept improvising, backyard after backyard, running a frantic course and choosing it simultaneously, failing always to find small places or hard places to slow him down, and discovering always, exhilarated, dismayed, that only bare speed could save us — for he would never give up, this man — and we were losing speed.

He chased us through the backyard labyrinths of ten blocks before he caught us by our jackets. He caught us and we all stopped.

We three stood staggering, half blinded, coughing, in an obscure hilltop backyard: a man in his twenties, a boy, a girl. He had released our jackets, our pursuer, our captor, our hero: he knew we weren’t going anywhere. We all played by the rules. Mikey and I unzipped our jackets. I pulled off my sopping mittens. Our tracks multiplied in the backyard’s new snow. We had been breaking new snow all morning. We didn’t look at each other. I was cherishing my excitement. The man’s lower pants legs were wet; his cuffs were full of snow, and there was a prow of snow beneath them on his shoes and socks. Some trees bordered the little flat backyard, some messy winter trees. There was no one around: a clearing in a grove, and we the only players.

It was a long time before he could speak. I had some difficulty at first recalling why we were there. My lips felt swollen; I couldn’t see out of the sides of my eyes; I kept coughing.

“You stupid kids,” he began perfunctorily.

We listened perfunctorily indeed, if we listened at all, for the chewing out was redundant, a mere formality, and beside the point. The point was that he had chased us passionately without giving up, and so he had caught us. Now he came down to earth. I wanted the glory to last forever.

But how could the glory have lasted forever? We could have run through every backyard in North America until we got to Panama. But when he trapped us at the lip of the Panama Canal, what precisely could he have done to prolong the drama of the chase and cap its glory? I brooded about this for the next few years. He could only have fried Mikey Fahey and me in boiling oil, say, or dismembered us piecemeal, or staked us to anthills. None of which I really wanted, and none of which any adult was likely to do, even in the spirit of fun. He could only chew us out there in the Panamanian jungle, after months or years of exalting pursuit. He could only begin, “You stupid kids,” and continue in his ordinary Pittsburgh accent with his normal righteous anger and the usual common sense.

If in that snowy backyard the driver of the black Buick had cut off our heads, Mikey’s and mine, I would have died happy, for nothing has required so much of me since as being chased all over Pittsburgh in the middle of winter — running terrified, exhausted — by this sainted, skinny, furious redheaded man who wished to have a word with us. I don’t know how he found his way back to his car.

[REFLECT]

Make connections: Acting fearlessly.

At the beginning of the essay, Dillard tells about being taught by the neighborhood boys the joy of playing football, particularly the “all or nothing” of diving “fearlessly” (par. 1). Recall an occasion when you had an opportunity to dive fearlessly into an activity that posed some challenge or risk or required special effort. For example, you may have been challenged, like Dillard, by your teammates at a football game or by a group of volunteers helping during a natural disaster. Or you may have felt pressured by friends to do something that went against your better judgment, was illegal, or was dangerous. Your instructor may ask you to post your thoughts to a class discussion board or to discuss them with other students in class. Use these questions to get started:

What made you embrace the challenge or resist it? What do you think your choice tells about you at the time of the event?
Dillard uses the value term courage to describe the fearless behavior she learned playing football. What value term would you use to describe your experience? For example, were you being selfless or self-serving;responsible or irresponsible; a follower, a leader, or a self-reliant individual?

[ANALYZE]

Use the basic features.

A WELL-TOLD STORY: CONSTRUCTING AN ACTION SEQUENCE

Throughout this story, Dillard creates compelling action sequences by using a variety of strategies. In this first example, she combines action verbs with prepositional phrases to help readers visualize what it was like to move rapidly from place to place.

Action verb

Prepositional phrases

He chased Mikey and me around the yellow house and up a backward path we knew by heart: under a low tree, up a bank, through a hedge, down some snowy steps, and across the grocery store’s delivery driveway. We smashed through a gap in a hedge. . . . (par. 12)

Here’s an example where she uses short phrases, often with similar sounding words and parallel sentence structures, to convey a sense of repeated action:

Similar sounds

Parallel structures

He impelled us forward; we compelled him to follow our route. . . . We kept running, block after block; we kept improvising, backyard after backyard. . . . (par. 14)

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph analyzing one of Dillard’s action sequences in An American Childhood:

For more about action sequences, see Chapter 14.

Skim paragraphs 11–14, marking similar words and parallel sentence structures, action verbs, and prepositional phrases. (Don’t feel you have to mark every instance, but get a sense of how often Dillard uses these strategies.)
How well do these narrative strategies work to represent action? How does using the same strategies over and over contribute to the effect?
Try writing an action sequence of your own, using parallel sentence structure, prepositional phrases, and/or words that echo one another as Dillard does.

VIVID DESCRIPTION: CREATING A DOMINANT IMPRESSION

The describing strategies of naming, detailing, and comparing portray people and places vividly:

Naming

Detailing

Comparing

The shopping center was swarming with frantic last-minute shoppers like ourselves. (Brandt, par. 2)

Brandt names a familiar location for readers. She selects details carefully to conjure a specific image of that shopping center before Christmas. Perhaps most evocatively, she uses a metaphor to compare the shopping mall to a “swarming” beehive, a comparison that reinforces the image of “frantic” shoppers in a place teeming with hurried, excited people.

Describing strategies, like Brandt’s, not only help readers imagine the scene and people at a particular place and time; they also contribute to the dominant impression. The description evokes Brandt’s youthful excitement, suggests the crowds and chaos that motivated Brandt to pocket the button, and it foreshadows the swarm of intense and conflicted feelings Brandt experiences as the story unfolds.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph analyzing Dillard’s use of naming, detailing, and comparing to help readers visualize the man who chased her and to create a dominant impression in An American Childhood:

Skim paragraphs 9–10 and 16–21, highlighting Dillard’s use of naming, detailing, and comparing to describe the man.
Dillard’s description of the man is spare, with only a few carefully chosen details. What kinds of details does Dillard focus on and what do they suggest about the man? Who is he? Where does he come from? Why would he bother to chase the kids?
Notice the repetition of the word normal in paragraphs 10 and 20. What about the man makes him seem like a “normal adult” and what makes him seem anything but normal? How does Dillard help the reader reconcile these contrasting images to form a dominant impression?

See “Naming” and “Detailing” in Chapter 15 for more about these describing strategies.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE: SHOWING AND TELLING

Writers use both showing and telling to convey the autobiographical significance of the event, what it meant at the time and why it continues to be memorable. As you’ve seen, showing, in narrating the story and in describing people and places, not only helps make the writing vivid, but also creates a dominant impression. However, showing alone cannot help readers fully grasp an event’s significance. Readers also need telling, the writer’s explicit comments and reflections. In this example, Brandt uses showing and telling to give readers a clear understanding of how she felt at the time:

Telling

Showing

As the officers led me through the mall, I sensed a hundred pairs of eyes staring at me. My face flushed and I broke out in a sweat. Now everyone knew I was a criminal.. . . The humiliation at that moment was overwhelming. I felt like Hester Prynne being put on public display for everyone to ridicule. (par. 18)

Narrators may use telling to articulate remembered feelings and thoughts from the time the event occurred and to present perspective on the event—what the writer feels and thinks now, looking back on it after time has passed.

To alert readers that they are telling, writers sometimes announce their reflections with words like felt and thought. But they may also choose words that name or imply a particular emotion or thought (for example, “The humiliation at that moment was overwhelming” [Brandt, 18]).

Similarly, to signal a shift from the past to the present perspective, writers sometimes announce the transition with words such as then and now. But a more subtle strategy is to use sophisticated word choices that show a deeper, more mature understanding of the experience (for example, when Brandt compares herself to Hester Prynne, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, “being put on public display for everyone to ridicule” [par. 18]).

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph analyzing the autobiographical significance of this episode in An American Childhood:

Skim paragraphs 11–21, noting where Dillard tells readers her thoughts and feelings. (Don’t feel you have to mark every instance, but try to get a sense of how much she tells as well as what she tells readers.)
Review what you have highlighted to determine which of the passages indicate Dillard’s remembered thoughts and feelings from the time the incident occurred and which indicate what she thinks and feels now looking back on the event from her present adult perspective. How can you tell the difference between her past and present perspectives?

[RESPOND]

Consider possible topics: Remembering unexpected adult actions and reactions.

Like Dillard, you could write about a time when an adult did something entirely unexpected during your childhood — an action that seemed dangerous or threatening to you, or something humorous, kind, or generous. Consider unpredictable actions of adults in your immediate or extended family, adults you had come to know outside your family, and strangers. As you consider these possible topics, think about your purpose and audience: What would you want your instructor and classmates to learn from reading about this event?