Hey, there’s more in there!

Today we read the short story Aunty Misery, by Juth Ortiz Cofer. It’s a characteristic folk tale — a short story teaching a moral, or a life-lesson, and involves the customary “Magical Realism” found in such work. We covered this information in the first minute or so of class and found ways to relate the magical realism to the last short story we read: The Monkey’s Paw, by W.W. Jacobs.

Magical Realism, for an 8th grader can be taught as simply as this: Where the story told could be completely real, except for one moment or instance of impossibilities, such as a wish. You can, as I did, also tell your students that learning this term in middle school puts them ahead of the regular Literature game by about 5 years. (And I only make this generalism because I didn’t encounter Magical Realism, as a term, as a writing technique, until my first year of college.)

So this story is a simple one, but has a little mysticism built in, and it’s short enough that I’ll just post it here:

Aunty Misery

This is a story about an old, very old woman who lived alone in her little hut with no other company than a beautiful pear tree that grew at her door. She spent all her time taking care of her pear tree. But the neighborhood children drove the old woman crazy by stealing her fruit. They would climb her tree, shake its delicate limbs, and run away with armloads of golden pears, yelling insults at “Aunty Misery,” as they called her.

One day a pilgrim stopped at the old woman’s hut and asked her permission to spend the night under her roof. Aunty Misery saw that he had an honest face and bade the traveler come in. She fed him and made a bed for him in front of her hearth. In the morning, while he was getting ready to leave, the stranger told her that he would show his gratitude for her hospitality by granting her one wish.

“There is only one thing that I desire,” said Aunty Misery.

“Ask and it shall be yours,” replied the stranger, who was a sorcerer in disguise.

“I wish that anyone who climbs up my pear tree should not be able to come back down until I permit it.”

“Your wish is granted,” said the stranger, touching the pear tree as he left Aunty Misery’s house.

And so it happened that when the children came back to taunt the old woman and to steal her fruit, she stood at her window watching them. Several of them shimmied up the trunk of the pear tree and immediately got stuck to it as if with glue. She let them cry and beg for a long time before she gave the tree permission to let them go, on the condition that they would never steal her fruit or bother her.

Time passed, and both Aunty Misery and her tree grew bent and gnarled with age. One day another traveler stopped at her door. This one looked suffocated and exhausted, so the old woman asked him what he wanted in her village. He answered her in a voice that was dry and hoarse, as if he had swallowed a desert. “I am Death, and I have come to take you with me.”

Thinking fast, Aunty Misery said, “All right, but before I go, I would like to pluck some pears from my beloved pear tree, to remember how much pleasure it brought to me in this life. But, I am a very old woman and cannot climb to the tallest branches where the best fruit is; will you be so kind as to do it for me?”

With a heavy sigh like wind through a catacomb, Death climbed the pear tree. Immediately he became stuck to it as if with glue. And no matter how much he cursed and threatened, Aunty Misery would not give the tree permission to release Death.

Many years passed, and there were no deaths in the world. The people who make their living from death began to protest loudly. The doctors claimed no one bothered to come in for examinations or treatments anymore because they did not fear dying; the pharmacists’ business suffered, too, because medicines are, like magic potions, bought to prevent or postpone the inevitable; the priests and undertakers were unhappy with the situation also, for obvious reasons. There were also many old folks tired of life who wanted to pass on to the next world to rest from the miseries of this one.

Aunty Misery realized all this, and not wishing to be unfair, she made a deal with her prisoner, Death: if he promised not ever to come for her again, she would give him his freedom. He agreed. And that is why so long as the world is the world, Aunty Misery will always live.

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The Reality

This is set up in the first paragraph with the children trampling Aunty’s lawn and stealing fruit from her pear tree. I know this is real because I did this as a child and shared it with my students — When I was a child, my best friend lived two houses away and we always played games of soccer or football or kick-the-can or hide-and-seek or tag across those four yards. Between my house and the friend’s house were two yards owned by older folks who just didn’t appreciate us killing the lawns and stomping on their flowers. When they kicked us out we headed to the alley where the wild fruit grew. And being a true middle school teacher I made sure to add that every time we sneaked into the neighbors yards to steal raspberries and strawberries and apricots that we were naturally stricken with diarrhea. After careful observation, I found that the strongest joke to follow this short story was sthis: And then we had diarrhea fights. And just to add a little to their imaginations, you might want to say: But we didn’t use our hands, we just aimed.

Anyway, Digging Deeper

I stopped every paragraph or so — Aunty Misery is beautifully arranged — to talk about the realism and about the magical realism. We talked about Karma (bringing in a term from another class) to discuss the fate of the characters before we even knew what would happen. The students have learned about Karma and boil it down to the phrase: “What Goes Around Comes Around,” and having this prior knowledge helped them understand that the boys in this story were going to suffer from bad karma — they acted improperly and would suffer some indignity for it. They also figure out that the wish Aunty Misery received would net her exactly what she wanted because she did a good deed to acquire the wish. She didn’t ask for anything from the pilgrim, and made her wish only to law down a rule about personal property. Unlike the characters in The Monkey’s Paw, Aunty Misery had no greed in her wish.

Then Death Shows Up

And that dude is a whiner. He makes this whole story hilarious. He sighs when Aunty Misery makes a final wish. He complains because he hears this every time he takes away a life. He seems to be a naturally good guy (time here for a discussion about Protagonists and Antagonists and how we view them) because this obviously isn’t the first time he’s allowed a final request. If it was the first time, he wouldn’t sigh the same way teenager do when they’re asked to do something for the thousandth time (like “clean your room,” or “take out the trash,” or “bury your sister”).

And the Whole World Goes to Shit

Once Death is out of the picture — remember, he’s stuck in the tree (and according to the story, we really don’t know how long he’s been there, because it says “Many years passed” — it could be 4, or 20, or 180 years, who knows? — and on a similar point, when Aunty Misery left those boys up in the pear tree at the beginning of the story it said she left them up for “a long time,” which could be 3 minutes, or it could be 3 hours, or it could be 3 days (again, who knows)) — everyone in the world is suddenly immune to dying. If Death can’t make his rounds, then everyone’s sitting around waiting.

That’s why, in the story it talks about who Death really helps: doctors, pharmacists, the clergy, undertakers, etc. And after a while, Aunty understands she’s making the world worse and trades eternal life for Death being free to do his work.

Let’s stop talking about the story

Here I told the kids the story was cute and all, but that I wanted to get into the nitty gritty. I wanted to think about the “realistic” side of the story, and not worry about the old lady who cheated death. We made a list on the board of all the people affected by Death’s absence and talked about why they’d be upset. I started with the Clergy.

Clergy: If we focus purely on Western religion the we have to think about the concepts of heaven and hell, and the fact that those religions ask their followers to lead a moral life and believe in their deity. Simple accordance of these rules will generally lead those followers to heaven. Refusal to do so will lead the followers to hell, and so they try to live morally. But if they do not die, and cannot die, then the need to go anywhere after this life is unnecessary. If you’re not going up or down after you die, then there’s no need to follow a code. And if there is no code to follow, then there’s no need to be informed of that code. Hence, upset clergy.

No one was going to church because they saw no goal. No one going to church meant the church was not funded (as many churches are funded by the followers), and without funding or followers the clergy could not operate.

We had a lengthy discussion about this which led the kids to start offering answers for the other people mentioned in the story.

• Doctors: If no one was dying then their workflow would decrease by half, at least.
• Pharmacists: No need to make drugs to prolong life. Funding decreased by at least half.
• Undertakers: No business, period.

And the kids brought up a few more topics, but I staved them off to discuss this in small groups before sharing with the class. Each group was supposed to offer at least one reason each group was upset and list it on the whiteboard (if it wasn’t already listed by another group), and to create a new subgroup who was also affected by the absence of Death. I gave them five minutes and then handed out markers. I even left the room to get a drink, they were so involved in the discussion.

The kids added the following (which are abbreviated below)

• Police: They’re overburdened. The whole world devolves into chaos because people aren’t afraid of dying, and thus crime goes up.
• Businesses: They go bankrupt because people won’t show up to work any more. There’s no reason to save money or even to acquire it, especially if you can loot (with no fear of dying).
• Crime: Crime benefits. It becomes a way of life.

The Benefits

And then this led to another discussion about the benefits of a life without death. The kids were able to see past all the bad stuff to discuss what might actually come out of having to deal with a problem. (I guess this is a model of getting students to understand the phrase: “Necessity is the Mother of Invention.”)

• Law: People would have to find a new way of living with one another. Crime couldn’t go on forever — people would get bored with it. A new set of rules would have to be borne from this mess.
• Science: One result of no death is overpopulation, and this would require people to seek out new worlds, new planets, new places to live once the Earth gave out.
• Equality: We’d have to find a way to work together, because ultimately we’re like Aunty Misery — we’re good people, and we want to live simply.

Where’s the Story?

We stopped talking about the story a long time ago. We forgot about Aunty Misery and started talking about ourselves, about our lives, and about how our world works. We talked about personal responsibility and about human nature. I think the students were very astute in their belief that (and it was every class brought this up) chaos is the result of a world without death.

Our discussion is one that might reach across several lessons. Hell, it could extend for a semester or even a year, but I kept it central to just today’s lesson. I wanted the kids practicing what we good readers practice, which is to take a story and enjoy it; to laugh along with it; to see the reality and the seriousness buried inside, and to apply what we know about life and extend the story to our own world.

We’re not that far separated from the characters we read about, and their worlds often intersect with ours, and what happens to those characters might actually influence the decisions we make in our own lives. This is why we read, and this is why we enjoy reading. We don’t do it for school, or because someone tells us to — we read because we want to expand our thinking. We read because we want to evaluate ourselves. And I think we accomplished that today.