Walker 1 Corbie Walker Lynn M.

Raymond ENGL 1103 09/09/13 What Has Become of Me My literacy narrative, well where do I begin? As I have been thinking more and more about how I started reading, or when I started to love reading and writing; I have remembered more and more. I can remember learning the alphabet so I could go and get a new computer game. I remember trying to read books that were way to complex for me. I even remember the year when it all hit me and I realized that I actually enjoyed reading and writing. The earliest memory that I have of being literate in any way, was when I was about five years old. We had just gotten our first family computer, and I didnt really have much to do with it. But that all changed when I learned about games. Now at about this same time, I was learning my ABCs. So to get me to really learn them, my Mom and Grandma bribed me with a new computer game. This was just the earliest memory though. As we progress in my years, I can remember reading books like Biscuit. Then a little farther, I remember reading books from the Magic Tree House series. At this point, reading was not really a big deal to me. It was something that I was required to do thirty minutes a day during the summer. This would change, though, when I got really intrigued with a book or series. The first series that I remember going full blast into was the Captain Underpants series. They had just come out, and I had just ordered them from my local school book-fair. These were books that I would read non-stop. I would come straight home from school and just start reading. This is how Sherman Alexie was. In his essay Superman and Me, he says, I read books in the car when

Walker 2 my family traveled to powwows or basketball games(Par. 7). And this is what happened to me with this book series. It did not matter where we went, I would always have some book with me from this series, and this was the first time I had been like that. If we move a little farther into my years I remember a time when I even wanted to become a better reader. When I was in second grade, there was this one girl in my class who was much better at reading than the rest of the class. Because she was a better reader, she would get to read books from a different section than the rest of us. I think the point that really comes from this little snippet of a memory is that I was almost jealous of this girl. I mean, when someone gets something better than you what are you going to do? Well, you are going to try to go after that better thing. Since she was getting to read these better books, I wanted to be able to read them too. This was then kind of like a push for me to become a better reader. The most important memory however is from when I was in my junior year of high school. This is when it all hit me. This is when I learned that I loved to read and write. I will tell you, that I was homeschooled from fifth grade to the day I graduated so there will not be a chance of confusion. When I was in my junior year, I took a class that combined my History, Bible and English into one class. Now with this course there was a whole lot more reading and writing than I had been used to in my previous years. This was not a bad thing however, because I was particularly excited about this course and what I was going to be doing in it. I do know, that in the beginning as I learned about how much I had to do, I would just get a pit in my stomach and get worried about everything I had to do. Thankfully this did not last long. With this class though, the main focus was American History and then the Bible and English portion were wrapped around it. This meant that what I would be reading and writing about for English was based off of this too. I read books from the The Scarlet Letter, to Little Women, to Uncle Toms

Walker 3 Cabin, even to How to Kill a Mockingbird. Now these were books that I never had really thought about reading, but I ended up loving them. Even more, I learned how much that I enjoyed reading about how things were in the 1850s to 1960s. One other note is that even though these were required reading books, I read them like they were just for casual reading. Something that Malcom X says in his Learning to Read essay reminds me about how I was. He said, When I had progressed to really serious reading, every night at about ten P.M. I would be outraged with the lights out. It always seemed to catch me right in the middle of something engrossing (2). Once he started reading a book, he did not want to stop, he just wanted to keep on reading through the night, and this is how I became. This in turn helped me see how much I enjoyed reading. I had enjoyed reading books, before I took this course, but they were typically newer popular novels. These on the other hand were not new; they were quite old in fact. The reason I think I enjoyed these more, was because I could see these as being real. I could imagine myself in these stories, and when I read them it was almost as if I was watching a movie. Something else I realized is how emotionally attached I would get to the characters. A good example would be from Uncle Toms Cabin. Towards the end of the book, there is a scene where Tom is being questioned about a slave and the slave owners wife. Now in the scene before this, these two characters decided to hide out away from the slave owner until they could make a clean get away. But as soon as the slave owner realizes they are gone, he goes straight to Tom to get an answer. To sum up what ends up happening, is that Tom is beaten to death because he will not tell where these other two characters are hiding, and he ends up dying for them. Now as I was reading this, I got angrier and angrier about the situation. Like how could someone treat another person with that much hatred? How could they ever see that as being right in any way? Or how the heck could he feel good about himself at night after he has done things like this? This

Walker 4 is what I asked myself as I read. And this is what caused me to get so angry. The interesting part though is that I had never really felt like this about a book. Being emotional about a book seemed a little different, but I also liked it. It was a new type of experience, one that was both exciting and weird at the same time. I did not just learn about how I felt about reading though. I also realized how much I enjoyed writing too. With writing, I was never really excited about it, but it was something that I could get through. This, however, was the other thing that changed for me during my junior year. Because I had to write so much, it almost forced me to enjoy it. When there are multiple writing assignments you better enjoy writing or you will be having a really tough time. Although, I do not think it was just the amount of writing that I had to do that made me enjoy writing. I also think it was what I was writing about, which was American History. This topic has been one of my most favorite topics of any history course that I have taken. There was just something that I really liked about it. Everything that I read would pull me in and this was an affect on my reading and writing. When I would write, I had something that I wanted to share. I mean, how could I be so excited about all of this and not want to share it. With this excitement, I also think I learned a lot, not only about what I was reading, but how I write too. Now this really was the big moment for me and my literacy narrative. I have even noticed this over that past few weeks. I started reading a book entitled, The Secret Life of Bees. When I started this book, I was told that it was set in the 1960s and was around when the Civil Rights Act came about. What I did not realize though was that it was going to contain things that were similar to what I read back during my American History course. There was one line that really struck me, and made me think back. This line was, He looked up and saw us, Rosaleen fanning and shuffling, swaying side to side. Well, look what we got coming here, he called out.

Walker 5 Where you going nigger (Kidd 31)? This particular quote may not have been the nicest, but it was how things were in that particular time period. This type of dialogue was in the books that I read, and especially in Uncle Toms Cabin. I think though, that these types of literature were shocking to me and still are, because I had never known the severity of these racial issues and when reading, they become a reality. I have realized through these past few weeks, just how much of an affect this course really has had on me, and it continues to have an affect on me. Between this course and an English class that I took at a local community college last year, I really have become the reader and writer I am today.

Walker 6

Works Cited Page Alexie, Sherman. The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me. McQuade, Donald, ed. The Writers Presence: A Pool of Reading, Fifth Edition. Bedford/ St. Martins, 2006. 73-76. Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. New York: Viking, 2002. Print. 31. Malcolm X. Learning to Read. Smccd.net. Web. 29 Aug. 2013. Par 7.