17 - The children of Trackton's children

Summary

The brief finale of Middlemarch, the celebrated tale of families in a Victorian community, opens with these lines:

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web.

George Eliot then capsules in a few pages the lives of Middlemarch's young families as they lived them out beyond the period of time covered in the novel's preceding chapters. Eliot's reminder that any novel is reduction and selection pertains, of course, as well to ethnography. We feel the fragmentary nature of such accounts most especially perhaps when they have focused on children, and after we have closed the pages of such works, we cannot easily quit these young lives, knowing that the ethnographic present never remains as it is described, and we wonder what followed in the after-years.

Such curiosity applies especially to the young of groups known to be in the midst of rapid social change when the anthropologist chooses to write a description of their lives. This chapter looks in on such a community – southern black working-class families described initially during the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (1983) gives ethnographic accounts of how the children of two working-class communities in the southeastern United States learned to use language at home and school between 1969 and 1977.