“Tigers are easy to find, but I needed adult wisdom to know dragons. ‘You have to infer the whole dragon from the parts you can see and touch.’” —Maxine Hong Kingston The Woman Warrior

To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee is once again being challenged by a school district. It contains language that “makes some people uncomfortable,” so it’s no longer required reading for the school district’s eighth graders. It’s available in their library, though.

I’d like to see how many times the book has been picked up and thumbed through in that library, now. If anything is guaranteed to increase the popularity of a book, in my experience, it’s when well-meaning, but misguided parents and teachers decide to “ban” it or make a fuss about its language or contents.

My sophomore year in high school, the book, Valley of the Dolls made its way around our class room, moving from hand to hand, friend to friend, with muffled giggles, whispers and stealth. It was easy to find what the fuss was all about; the risque parts of the book fell open for our eager eyes. Steamy sex. Drugs. Corruption of young minds by the best selling novel of that year. (And one that was strictly forbidden by our parents.)

I remember packing up a picnic lunch with one of my best friends, Jane, and riding our bikes along a country road, finding a comfy spot beside Pine Creek and settling down to chat and laugh. Just warm, summer breezes and all the time in the world away from adult supervision and peer pressure. Jane’s mother worked in the local drugstore that sold paperback books. Jane had managed to grab one of the paperbacks that had been set aside to send back for credit on the store’s next shipment of books. She proudly produced a copy of the novel, Candy, which we devoured over the next few hours. Candy was the story of a free-spirited young woman, experimenting with (gasp!) sex. (Well, that’s as much as I remember about it. Obviously, I only connected with the tigers that afternoon.) The book was later made into a movie starring Ringo Starr (as a Mexican-American gardener!), Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Walter Mattau, and a few other recognizable actors. The book was intended as satire. I’m not sure Jane picked up on that, and I know I didn’t. That would have meant inferring the dragons to be found. We were far more interested in the salacious details. 

Having confessed that, do I think either of those popular novels “groomed” Jane or me? Maybe. But not in the way those who seek to ban books might believe.

Jane went on to be a bank officer and immerse herself in the theater scene in San Francisco. I took a more extended route into academia, where I have immersed myself in literature and teaching academic writing. I consider those first experiences with “forbidden fruit” an impetus for both of us–to keep dragon hunting our way through literature and the arts.

Harper Lee’s novel has made the American Library Association’s banned books list nearly every year since 1966, when it was banned from Hanover, Virginia schools for being “immoral.” Another frequently banned book is one I have taught in my Multicultural Literature course—Toni Morrison’s Beloved. A Republican senator referred to it as “smut,” and school districts have banned it for being “sexually explicit.”

Those tigers. So easy to find.

Try the hard questions: Who is this novel really about? Who is Beloved? And what about that dedication: “Sixty Million and more”?

Or how about the peculiar experience of reading the chapter written from Beloved’s point of view?

Here be dragons to be inferred.

One evening recently, I began a discussion of Isabel Allende’s short story, “An Act of Vengeance” with a group of students. We began with tigers.

“How did you like the story?” 

Various responses: 

“It’s sad.”

“It’s dark.”

“It’s surprising at the end”

From me: 

“Ok. But, who is more ethical or moral in this story?

Or—who holds the power? And why?”

I stood back to watch the fireworks. Watching them struggle to “infer the dragon” from the parts of the story I hoped they could “see” or “touch.”

Literature isn’t easy.

There, I said it. 

This is the “good stuff.” I want my students to be uncomfortable. That is how they attain adult wisdom. Wrestle with this idea; grapple with that one. Recognize that you see this text just a bit differently than the person sitting next to you and maybe completely differently than the person across the room. If everything is comfortable and easy and we all agree, what is being learned?

Last week, I saw a photo of a library cartful of books that have been banned from a Florida high school. I zoomed in on the photo to read the titles on the book spines. And there it was: two copies of a book I have assigned for my class this semester, The House on Mango Street. So a question for the dragon hunters enrolled in my class: Why is this book being banned from a high school library?

Literature requires thoughtfulness and a willingness to read something more than once. Even more, it requires the reader to recognize that although many things are being said, much remains unsaid. Some ideas must be inferred. 

Dragon hunting. That is what I really teach.