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Compelling humanity, place, and relations growing up Jun 16, 2009
Even though I read Fathers and Teachers by Beldon Johnson a month or so ago, I still feel impacted by the book. First, the sense of place was so strong and a reminder of the rural life that has disappeared. The book vividly captured that sense of place. The relationships among the characters in the book was compelling, often moving and sometimes challenging. I thought these relationships were conveyed with authenticity and contained a quality of realness, and touched the nature of my own struggle with my humanness.Billy's relationship with his peer group, his father, the men in the community and especially with the men who were is someway outcast of the community was extraordinary. I loved his relationship with his grandfather who was different in a softer, gentler way than his father. What I found most astonishing is how well Mr. Beldon captured the child's mind and feelings about the world he inhabited. The story of the Billy and the bull was a wonderful story of a relationship, and power struggle between a boy and a powerful beast. This story reminding me how we all engage in that struggle both externally and internally. Billy's exceptional intellect, creativity and physical coordination, strength and courage made him a very young hero. I highly recommend the book and have given it often as a gift to the men in my life who I care deeply about. Ruth Ghio
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Johnson's First Novel Teaches and Encourages Mar 08, 2009
Father's and Teachers is a coming of age novel of a faintly autobiographical nature. Set in the once lush and rural countryside that stretches between Virginia's Chesapeake Bay and the Shenandoah Mountains, it tells the story of an urban Yankee family (as far as Marylanders can be considered to have been on the Northern side of the Civil War which still has great residual impact in this very Cold Mountain-like setting) who resettle off the beaten path in hopes for escape from the confined rat race of the 1950s explosion of middle class and Life Magazine values. They quickly find, however, that becoming steeped in the Southern antebellum folk-ways still prevalent in this backwater is not the piece of cake they had hoped it would be.
Told through the eyes of young Billy Wilson, the story is rich in the kind of detail on which only a pre-teen would focus, presenting the reader with vivid accounts of rural Southern life at the time, darkened at the edges by glimpses of the covert racism and bullying that is one of the main themes of the novel. As the story unfolds, these themes become less covert, finally erupting into a gripping account of how Southern life slowly but surely fell victim to its own embrace of racism, not to mention the steady erosion of its own identity at the hands of ruthless Northern land developers ("carpet-baggers" to these folks) who practically lay siege to the town.
Fighting both the racism and the land developers is Billy's father, who of course, as the novel's title reveals, is his "teacher," in the parental sense of the word. From his dad, Billy learns moral courage, which is the message of the novel, as well as the topic of the novel's opening short quote from Dr. Ashley Montague, a Rutgers anthropologist who wrote extensively about the relation between race and gender and their impact on public policy.
The novel's author, Belden Johnson, grew up in this same environment, before going on to the University of Maryland and a career as a college lecturer of English at Department of Defense programs in Asia and Germany during the Vietnam War. Since then, Johnson has immersed himself in parenting issues, running a public policy institute in California that focuses on the role fathers play in the upbringing of their children.
His first novel, written in clean crisp prose with vivid detail and ear pleasing dialog, is an artistic outgrowth of his work and his dedication to family values in the best sense of the phrase. Hard to put down, the novel teaches and entertains, leaving the reader refreshed and slightly more optimistic about the nature of man and womankind.
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Author's view Jan 29, 2009
FATHERS AND TEACHERS is first of all a Bildungsroman, a novel of development, wherein I'm trying to convey to the reader what it's like to be a lad growing up in a particular time and place in America. What does it mean to "be a man"? How is a man supposed to relate to women? I spent a lot of time reliving my own childhood and re-entering my earliest feeling states to be able to tell the story through the heart and eyes of a sensitive child who is trying to understand the world and his place in it. I have attempted, in sum, to become again as a little child and hopefully speak for some of them who cannot speak for themselves yet, so that the adults around them might have more empathy for them. We might call this the psychological level.
At the sociological level, this is a book about racism in Virginia in the '50s, as seen from a child's point of view. As Faulkner pointed out, children don't see the general categories of black and white: they see people as, one hopes, we all will again some day.
At the political level, this book contains a fictionalized account of the true story of why Dulles Airport isn't someplace else and how the uprising of a band of citizens can defeat the juggernaut of the Federal Government. As we meet this band of eccentrics, who are certainly not what one would expect in this age of conformity, we might think how life was very different in some small towns, which are characters in themselves, in this country not so long ago.
At the spiritual level--well, on that subject I'll just leave it to you.
My hope is that you will find this book touches you as deeply as writing it has touched me. Happy reading.
Belden Johnson
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