An American Childhood: Part Three Summary & Analysis

The section begins with a description of Andrew Carnegie, a vital character in Pittsburgh history. He was the son of Scottish immigrants who were in favor of universal suffrage, and against privilege and hereditary wealth (he’d later refuse a title from Edward VII). He started making steel, wrote four books, and preached what he called the “Gospel of Wealth,” that a wealthy man should give his money away rather than “weaken” his sons with it. At 66 he sold his company to J.P. Morgan, and spent the rest of his life giving away a $350 million fortune.

Carnegie enabled 2,509 libraries to be built, all with “Let there be light” engraved over the doors. But one steelworker told an interviewer that they’d rather have higher wages than have a library built. The workers’ conditions were long, difficult, and dangerous; most didn’t life past their forties. In 1892, Carnegie’s manager Henry Clay Frick had sent hired men to fight unarmed strikers and their families in Homestead, Pennsylvania, leading to a brawl; Frick called in the whole state militia, whose armed occupation quashed all steel unions until 1936.

Pittsburgh’s wealth came from iron and steel but also from many other industries. Andrew Mellon, a Pittsburgh banker, invested in aluminum before anyone thought it would be useful; later he’d be named Secretary of Treasury, and he became one of three Americans who had ever possessed a billion dollars. When Carnegie sold his company, though, Pittsburgh’s death rate was also the highest in the country. The city council members wouldn’t spend money to filter the drinking water, so epidemics kept recurring.

Dillard reflects that Pittsburgh was, in fact, a great town to grow up in as a result of all the artistic and scientific institutions. She felt most herself at the natural history museum, which had a generator you could try out, hundreds of insect specimens, and dinosaur skeletons. Sometimes she climbed the stairs to the art gallery, where she also went with school once a year for the International Exhibition. Each year contemporary artists competed for a prize, and the museum’s curators could buy what they liked: in 1961 Giacometti’s sculpture Man Walking won.

Annie went to the gallery again and again to see Giacometti’s sculpture, a wiry, thin person, six feet tall in bronze. She began to think of him as the perfect embodiment of the inner life, a thinker moving through an abyss: pure consciousness. Annie drew him again and again. Her passions grew divided between the arts and the sciences: scientists were curious about the external world, whereas artists noticed the particularities of the interior mind, adding beauty to the scientists’ visions.

Annie read hoping to learn everything and to be able to combine her father’s logical mind with her mother’s imagination and energy. Still, the books were pushing her away from Pittsburgh—something Mother always knew, as she actually encouraged her daughters to leave.

Annie awakened again into a new stage of life, the speed and excitement of high-school life. She and her friends were blond and blue-eyed; they spent summers comparing tans and playing cards. Annie longed for New York, for Brooklyn or the Lower East Side, where she imagined the thoughtful people from books lived. Rather than living deeply like them, she looked critically at the other girls with their polished fingers and gold bangle bracelets and just-washed, just-set hair—not imagining that their chatter was not all their lives consisted of. Still, she felt that her world was the known one, of women as volunteers and housewives and dutiful mothers. Books didn’t describe housework—it was as if housework didn’t exist.

Now Dillard imagines that there is something beautiful about living and dying where you were born, like people used to: as your grandparents took you to Sunday night dinner at the country club, you too would take your own grandchildren there, the adults drinking old fashioneds and the children eating maraschino cherries and orange slices. From the terrace, sunburnt in their cotton dresses, they’d look longingly at the children in the pool below. This was the world Annie and her friends knew best.

Annie also knew Oma’s world, but that was changing, now that Annie was working in the summers selling men’s bathing suits. For a few spring vacations as a teenager, Amy and Annie visited Oma in her Pompano Beach apartment. On her last visit, Annie was fifteen and infuriated by everything she was required to do. She and Oma argued over whether “overstuffed” was the right way to describe upholstered furniture: she couldn’t believe Oma when Oma said she might know something Annie didn’t.

One day Oma returned from “looking at shoes,” as she said, and broke down, grieving for her husband. Mary tried to comfort her, then said it’d been two years. When Oma said he’d never been cross with her, Amy asked if he hadn’t even once. She launched into a story about him driving on a high mountain road in Tennessee, winding and careening: she cried that they were surely going to go over the cliff, and he said she could either hush or get out—then he was cross. The story lightened everyone’s mood.

Annie would bird-watch in the Fort Lauderdale park nearby, catching sight of the rare smooth-billed anis and filling a notebook with sketches and records. Seeing the pleasure cruise on the canal through her binoculars, she would wonder why anyone would prefer that to bird-watching. During the day, Oma and Mary shopped, and in the evenings they went out to dinner. Amy was bored too, but Annie ignored her. Everyone knew it’d be their last Florida trip.

At sixteen, Annie felt set on a new path, feeling drawn down a long tunnel like the turnpike tunnels near Pittsburgh, although Annie felt pitched forward against her will. Her moods shifted wildly between violent anger and uncontrollable hilarity. She read a few books reverently, from start to finish, over and over again. She played a loud, crashing overture on the piano over and over again. She had a boyfriend whom she loved so strongly she imagined she might “transmogrify” into vapor. When she felt bored, she would feel nauseous and then weak and raging. People called teenagers like Annie a “live wire”: she couldn’t manage to control herself.

For most of her life Annie had felt unselfconscious, curious and directed to the outside world. Now she couldn’t shed her own body and mind, nor imagine how to forget herself. She was vaguely conscious that this might just be an adolescent stage, but she worried about losing the world she’d so loved forever.

Annie soon quit the church by writing a strongly worded letter to the minister. Father came to Annie’s room (something that increasingly drove her crazy) to ask her about the letter: he said she seemed bent on humiliating him and Mother. Annie had a meeting with the assistant minister of the church, Dr. Blackwood, in his office. He lent her a copy of C.S. Lewis’s radio shows for a paper she was writing. She’d just written one on the Book of Job, and was interested in the problem of suffering: she liked Lewis’s The Problem of Pain.

It was now May and baseball season, a year into the wild feelings Annie couldn’t rid herself of. She drove around all of Pittsburgh, asking herself why she was trapped at home and at school. In study hall, 40 or 50 girls in green jumpers sat, bored to tears, reading Hamlet or L’Étranger (by Albert Camus). Feeling restless, Annie wrote a boy’s name in her notebook, picturing his face. It was maddening to her to realize that the students outnumbered their teachers, and yet no one thought to revolt.

Annie was fascinated these days by the French Symbolist poets, some of whom went insane; she loved Rimbaud, who ran away as a teenager and wrote a poem called “The Drunken Boat,” before dying young and tragically. She daydreamed and wrote poetry about the older prep-school and college boys whose wit, knowledge, and boldness mesmerized her. She understood that while they drank, played word games, and cracked jokes in public, they were serious and studious, reading voraciously, while alone.

Annie had started to get into trouble: she’d been in a drag race the previous September, and was hospitalized after a crash. She started to feel the ground spinning beneath her after this—only a moment ago, she felt, she’d been on the swing set or chasing butterflies. She’d been suspended from school for smoking cigarettes: her parents both wept. She wondered what would happen if she didn’t straighten out—unable to glimpse a future without the French poets or her constant rage.

Annie’s parents grounded her for the school suspension, and Amy began visiting her in her room. Amy had become tidy and pleasant-looking as a thirteen-year-old. In Annie’s room, Amy listened to her sister rant and laughed at her jokes. She was going to boarding school the next year in Philadelphia, part of their parents’ attempt to stave off more issues like Annie’s. Mother sighed and asked what they were going to do with Annie; Annie couldn’t think what.

Annie moved on from the French Symbolists to the British war poets, and started reading Asian and Middle Eastern poetry in translation. She wrote poems herself: one teacher met with Annie and others during lunch to discuss them. Annie was almost offended by this, feeling that poetry should be hidden and subversive, not sanctioned by authority.

One afternoon, at Judy Schoyer’s house, Annie saw a book called On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, from the first century BC. It was ancient physics mixed with philosophy: Mr. Schoyer was reading it, and he lent it to Annie, who found it dull and confusing (why read wrong science?) but admired Lucretius nonetheless. Judy had grown tall and graceful; her family took Judy and Annie to the ballet, the symphony, and the arts festival in Pittsburgh.

Annie read linguistics and all of Freud’s works that spring, reading greedily and without snobbery. She devoured social criticism and novelists like Updike and Henry Miller. She learned about Platonist philosophy through Emerson, writing a paper on his notion of the soul. She was enamored with his flouting of authority and his appeal to each person to develop his or her own relation to the universe.

One one of these spring mornings, Annie was called into the headmistress’s office to hear what one of her teachers, Madame Owens, had written as part of her grades: “Here, alas, is a child of the twentieth century.” Annie didn’t know what to think about this, other than that it was indicative of the individual attention one got at private school.

Annie drew all morning in class, sometimes with intent but sometimes doodling at random. She also drew at home: always faces and bodies, mostly of women and babies. In class, though, she couldn’t bear to listen if she wasn’t drawing, and one of her English teachers let her sit in the back of the classroom and paint. She paid no attention to what came from her pen: when she did, she realized they were often monstrous, swollen figures. Sometimes, though, she’d be on a family trip or walking to school when she’d seem to recognize a stranger, then realize with a jolt that she’d drawn his or her face.

The fall of her senior year, Annie recalled the smell of the Nabisco plant baking sweet white bread wafting across the field to her school. She knew the twenty other students in her class like her own family; she imagined them all leaving, crawling away like the Polyphemus moth down the driveway. Annie loved French and Chinese poetry, but she knew almost nothing about her own city: it was the poems that told her there was another world.

Annie knew she was going to Hollins College in Virginia, where the headmistress had gone. The headmistress sent all the “problem” students there, because of the school’s renowned English department. She hoped she’d be able to maintain her rough edges there. Still, she’d visited, and it was beautiful.