Freed captive releases a memory

Like many of my fellow citizens I found myself caught up in the drama of Jessica Lynch, the young American prisoner of war thrillingly rescued from an Iraqi hospital. Her rescue, punctuating the mood of instant pessimism encouraged by the pundits, was doubtless an event greater for its media than its military importance, but it was stunning.

When I saw her face on the cover of Newsweek, I actually thought I recognized her as someone known to me; and this eerie sense became more powerful when I saw in the inner pages a photograph of her in civilian clothes. The faint aura of memory would have remained forever lost in the foggy synapses had I not read that Jessica Lynch's vocational ambition was to be a schoolteacher! Lacking the financial resources to pursue the higher education a teacher must have, she had joined the army. In a flash I realized that I had "recognized" in Private Lynch the spitting image of one of my early teachers, Miss Lawrence.

Ms. Lynch and Miss Lawrence are part of a world, "Appalachia," unfamiliar to most Americans, certainly to most Princetonians. I once knew it well. Miss Lawrence had graduated from a teachers' college in Springfield, Missouri, and she taught general studies to multiple grades of youngsters in a modest schoolhouse in northern Arkansas. She was pretty, just like Private Lynch; though dignified and serious, she was also friendly and encouraging.

What I remember about her is inspirational, but mostly vague, abstract. She made me feel that learning was a good thing, a fun thing, a morally uplifting thing, and something of worth to myself, my family, and my community. What teacher could hope to do more? Yet the only concrete thing I can remember her talking about was the Code of Hammurabi, which I heard as "Hammer Abby." She said it was old, old as the Bible, maybe older; that it came from Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers," and that those rivers were the very ones where the the Jewish captives had hung up their harps and wept. This place was also called the Fertile Crescent and/or the Cradle of Civilization. She said the Crescent-dwellers wrote down things in clay notebooks, making chicken-scratch shapes called cuneiforms on account of an old Latin word for "wedge." The Code was very, very important, since all civilizations needed laws and rules for fairness, happiness, and progress.

Were it not for our textbook, in which the name of the ancient legislator was written out, I should perhaps have thought forever that it was the Code of Hammer Abby. This dogeared book, its thick buckram ripping at spine's head and tale, was called The Human Story, and it had many illustrations, frequently augmented with supplementary facial hair or devils' horns left by earlier readers less respectful than myself. There were pictures of ancient ruins, decorated stone columns, a coarsely panchromatic vision of imaginary Hanging Gardens, imposing reliefs of Assyrian kings and warriors, some in chariots, all of them with herringbone beards, flashing eyes, and a terrible mien.

Miss Lawrence was at my school for only a year, or maybe two, before leaving, like so many others, for some city or some spouse, or both. Older folks called our community "quiet;" younger folks called it "dead." You can decide for yourself, but catching a ride into town to watch the Sears truck unload was considered a really big time.

Yet for a while here was this idealistic, pretty young teacher, an Heloise of the Ozarks, teaching us very earnestly about the Code of Hammurabi, and impressing at least one consciousness indelibly with a fascination for history, an unflagging hope for linear material progress, and the sense of some grand spiritual connection binding together The Human Story in a single cosmic volume. The shade of Miss Lawrence came to me again out of a dim past when I read of Private Lynch's aspiration, so noble, so beautiful, to be a schoolteacher. It came to me again less happily two days ago when I saw the photographs of the smashed shards and shattered tablets among the detritus of the plundered display cases in the Archaeological Museum of Baghdad. There again were fragments of that funny writing, old, old as the Bible, maybe older, now landfill. I rejoice with my countrymen in saving Private Lynch; but I must grieve at losing what was so precious to Miss Lawrence.

Actually, I rather envy the numerous flag-wavers and petition-signers who believe that the Iraqi War is a subject on which it is possible to be a hundred percent right. The question seems quite complex to me. Perhaps we really could do nothing about the "untidiness," as Secretary Rumsfeld has called it, of Baghdad. But I approach a hundred percent in my certainty that Ms. Lynch in a rural school in West Virginia is in the long run a more important chapter of The Human Story than Private Lynch in a helicopter in Iraq. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.