#deepkids

Deep Workshop #1 is finally here! Since we'll be asking the kids to write about themselves today, my co-fellow and I are starting them off with Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B" and this piece by Charles Harper Webb:

Charles Harper Webb

“Manly,” my mother said my first name meant. I enjoyed sharing it with kings, but had nightmares about black-hooded axmen lifting bloody heads.

I loved the concept of Charlemagne, and inked it on my baseball glove and basketball. I learned that females pronounce “Charles” easily;

males rebel. Their faces twitch, turn red as stutterers. Finally they spit out Charlie or Chuck. Charles is a butler’s name, or a hairdresser’s, they explain.

(I’ll bet Charles Manson would straighten those guys’ tails. I’ll bet he’d fix their hair just right.) My name contains its own plural, its own possessive.

Unlike Bob or Bill or Jim, it won’t just rhyme with anything. I told Miss Pratt, my eighth-grade French teacher, “Charles sounds like a wimp.” I switched to German to be Karl.

Of all possible speech, I hear “Charles” best. I pluck it from a sea of noise the way an osprey plucks a fish. In print, it leaps out before even sex-words do.

My ears twitch, eager as a dog’s. What sweet terror In the sound: Is Charles there? Oh, Charles. Oh, Charles. Oh, Charles. Charles, see me after class.

Get in this house, Charles Harper Webb! Harper – nag, angel, medieval musician. Webb, from Middle English Webbe, weaver (as in the web

of my least favorite crawling thing), my pale ancestors stoop-shouldered, with sneezing allergies, stupefied by the loom’s endless clack clack clack,