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Not a surprise that he was gone, really; more of a suspicion confirmed with a glance at the all-knowing machine. Nonetheless there was surprise that I had heard nothing of it, five years later.
The most ordinary of circumstances, Father Novajosky and I were talking over dinner at the kitchen island of books we had read long ago and reread later, authors we returned to after having been introduced to them in high school. J. D. Salinger came up, somehow, as by some tortured route we went there from “Field of Dreams”, the movie, and its associated books and authors. If a body meet a body coming through the rye…ah, Holden Caulfield.
We read Catcher in the Rye, of course, but also Franny and Zooey, I think, and maybe some stories too. I still have the books. We did other normal English-class things as well, like diagramming sentences; it was normal then, anyway. I could always escape the test for that by diagramming correctly on the first try the paragraph-length sentence written on the board. Writing on the chalkboard was normal then, too.
‘Tis not deep as a well, nor wide as a church door, but – ‘twill serve. I am worm’s meat! He had me read Mercutio as we worked through Romeo and Juliet. When we had to recite a poem from memory, I chose Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty: Glory be to God for dappled things…
Southern literature was an emphasis in that Alabama classroom. Amarantha, Amarantha, how beautiful with shoes! I can still hear him declaim in his strong accent. It was he who famously introduced us to Flannery O’Connor without mentioning (I swear!) that she was Catholic. A Good Man is Hard to Find for ninth graders is hard enough, but Wise Blood in tenth grade? Hair-raising and possibly unwise, as it turned me off Flannery for a long time – or what seemed like a long time, since it was all of seven years before I tiptoed back into her writings while exploring short fiction by modern Catholic authors.
That started me reading her other stories, and her letters, then over time, urged on by new enthusiasm for her amongst culture-conscious Catholics, yet more stories, her prayer journal, her other short novels. Admiration and amazement grew, but the hair-raising never went away. Still, a deep aversion to Wise Blood kept me from going back to it until just last year, when I re-read it and then, one night with Father Santandreu, watched the John Huston film of the same name. Oh my. Nobody needs redemption who has a good car! Now, I wear it rather like a badge of honor that I read it as a fifteen-year-old; perhaps it’s a red badge of courage, that left a scar. Thanks to him.
He was my high-school English teacher, four years’ worth. Two summers, before junior and senior year, he offered the coming year’s course to a group of us who met one day each week at a local library, to free up a period for other pursuits during the academic year. Senior year, that pursuit would be “English 13,” the only English course I had with any other teacher, as four of us met with the principal in her office to learn The Modern Novel at the rate of one book each week. Thereby hangs a story, too, of course, but for another time.
Last saw him almost twenty years after graduation, in 2001, at the funeral of a friend close to both me and him, who died young and in the worst way. When I entered, a Catholic priest at an Alabama protestant funeral, a strange beast indeed, he greeted me from among a group of students from those high school days and had to say his name when I was slow to recognize him; perhaps the missing mustache threw me. I was embarrassed to need the help, but truly delighted to see him. That was a hard moment, however, and not a time to catch up. We never did get a chance. He wasn’t at our next reunion, in 2012.
He spent his youth in, and as an adult later returned to, Morris, Alabama, a place so rural, so remote and redneck that we kids couldn’t comprehend it then in the late years of the Cart
But he could teach, and teach he did, all these and many things besides. I am grateful; God rest ye, Jesse Booker.
