Remembering a Different Era of Reading

11 Jan, 2026

I first came across Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” when I was twelve or thirteen; it was one of the stories assigned in my seventh grade reading class. I can’t imagine what sorts of meaningful discussion could have ensued with a roomful of tweens, but I’m both grateful and amazed that the teacher trusted us to handle and appreciate it, and that the school district and parents let her do it. It was a midsized central Texas town in the eighties, after all; hardly a bastion of liberal thought. Like so much else about the US of A today, though, that era’s conservatism is a thing of the past; last year, at least one school district in that solidly red town shut down its secondary school libraries in order to weed out offensive titles; another district to the north banned the graphic version of Jackson’s story.

But back in that other world of the seventh grade, we were asked to consider what it might mean for a good old American town to get together every year and good-naturedly stone one of its citizens just because. Did we really understand that even small children were eligible, just as likely as anyone else to wind up with the black-dotted paper? Did we consider what it meant that the designated family’s two older kids, realizing neither was holding the winning ticket, “both beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of paper above their heads,” no longer harboring a care in the world, even while knowing that meant their mother would soon be dead at their hands?¹ Again, I have no memory of our discussion, nor of anyone either being traumatized or suggesting the popular kids should have a nerd lottery. What I do remember is that, in the way of confident young people, we thought we were being taken seriously because someone wanted to know what we thought about a disturbing situation.

I hadn’t read the story again, or anything else by Jackson, until I pulled out a collection of her short stories a few weeks ago. My god: without even coming close to heavy-handedness, or often even outright naming anything, Jackson pointed with faultless precision at the hypocrisies and ugly desires and assumptions that sustained, were even a foundational part of, US life in the mid-twentieth century. The polite masking of racism that didn’t even realize what it was masking; the ease with which children learned and embraced cruelty; the meanness behind propriety; the romantic delusions that led to wasted lives: all of this and more. All the nastiness that society at large realized had to be curbed if some sort of peace or equilibrium was to be maintained, feelings or thoughts that were shameful enough not to be admitted or allowed into the open—but still pleasurable enough to keep from discarding them. Jackson saw the particular ways in which her compatriots were sinister and imperfect, the ways in which communities and norms are often built at least in part on falsity, lies, unreason, and prejudice—and presented them without softening any of it at all, without apologizing for what she was doing or whom she might be offending. She probably realized that many a bourgeois reader would relish the spice of it all, while never considering themselves guilty of any of the sentiment or sin found in what they were enjoying. Apparently, “She was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned “The Lottery,” and she felt that they at least understood the story.”²

Just like the school district of the present day, they got it: they were being accused. Readers offended by Jackson’s work saw themselves in it, and didn’t like it one bit. Instead of stopping to consider whether she had a point, and if so, whether they might want to change anything about their assumptions or attitudes or behaviors, they huffed, denied the possibility that they could be anything but perfectly justified, and consigned the conversation to the dustbin. Knowing this is the way Jackson’s and others’ work has been and is still received, I'm pretty fortunate to have had the public school experience that I did, and that its effects are holding out in a new time, where many of those evil sentiments have shed their veils to be celebrated out in the open.³

Fortunate to be exposed to something that’s still causing fireworks—but also and especially to the sensibility and vulnerability that likely lay behind that particular teacher’s use of that text and others to get children to think and talk about what was going on in their heads and hearts. Because red-cheeked, jumper-clad Mrs. B. was no hippie or other sort of leftie. She was the patriotic sponsor of the evangelical Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which got together in the mornings to sing repetitive praise music and encourage right living. I doubt she’d ever watched a snippet of MTV, and she had an earnest talk with us when she discovered someone making a jokey remark about drug use in a slam book. She was also the teacher who, in the aftermath of watching a (sex-scene-omitted version of) Places in the Heart put forth a personal problem she wanted herself and us to think about: the fact that, knowing it made no sense intellectually, knowing that Jesus loved us all equally, if she saw a Black man coming down the sidewalk, her fear would drive her to cross the street. There she was standing before us in her wholesome, shapeless dress, a bunch of adolescents not supposed to be able even to control their gangly limbs, much less think straight, admitting to something embarrassing and cancel-worthy and despicable from which, try as she might, she was unable to free herself.

All I remember about that discussion was that it was open and awkward, and that we got through it, and that we weren’t shielded from the fact that humans are imperfect and life isn’t always a bed of roses filled with clear decisions or feelings. What else was our teacher reading that probably ran contrary to the way she preferred to look at the world? Did she know any other work by Jackson, maybe “Flower Garden,” whose destruction of a friendship comes thanks to just the sort of feelings she’d admitted to us? I don’t know whether Mrs. B. had pulled “The Lottery” out of an anthology; I don’t know anything at all about the books she enjoyed outside the classroom or the Bible. But something had instilled in her the need to consider work and situations that didn’t let her or us off the hook, and something about the time and place meant she wasn’t an outcast for doing it. When a future history comes along that examines how this country slid, and slid so fast, into circumstances that might not even think a class called Reading is a good idea, I hope it gives its due to the everyday figures who took reading, and the kids who did it, with all the gravity they deserve.

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