One of my favorite moments in the entire book was during the scene in English class, where the class discussed secrets. There are so many secrets in Black Swan Green - just listing them all could take a whole blog post. For one, there's the broken watch from the very first chapter, haunting Jason as he seeks to repair it and worries sick about what his Dad would think. Then there's the secret of Jason's role in the whole affair of Ross Wilcox and his leg, a situation so grey that it's really hard to tell how much blame and if any falls on Jason's shoulders. There's Jason's secret identity as a poet, as Eliot Bolivar. There's the gigantic secrets kept from all the adults, as children often do, of the reality of school and other children. Neither of Jason's parents know of anything that happens to him at school - not his crushes, not the Spooks, certainly not the bullying. Neither do the adults in the school know what's going on - it all happens beneath their radar. Is it really a secret if the whole student body knows and just the adults don't?
The issue of definition comes up during the class as well - about what constitutes as a secret. How many people need to know before the secret is no longer a secret? Or does it only need to be kept from specific people to still constitute as a secret? For example, Jason tells the woman at the shop about the broken watch, but his parents still don't know he broke it, and therefore it is still a secret.
Morality is another issue that comes out. What secrets should be told? Should Jason tell people about Ross Wilcox? Will anything come out of it? It certainly won't get Ross Wilcox his leg back. Secrets have consequences. There's a reason that for so long, Jason's father didn't tell his wife about mortgaging the house, or else she would've wanted to know why, and their marriage would've spiraled much faster. As far as Jason's father knew, she might've never found out. Jason thinks he knows what the consequences of him telling certain secrets will be. Snitches get stitches. Despite this, he still grinds the calculator and then that tells the administration of the awful bullying happening at the school. While grinding the calculator may have not been the most ethical step, it was a necessary one to get the teachers aware of what was happening in the school.
However, he often ends up wrong about the consequences. Jason ended up getting a sort of sense of status at the school after the incident. Jason's dad dismissed the watch breaking as not a big deal. His sister knew he was Eliot Bolivar and enjoyed his poetry.
The novel ends bittersweet, but with most of the secrets off the table and in the air, Jason's ready for a new start.
One implication of this great scene with Miss Lippetts and "secrets" is that she *does* seem to have a pretty good idea of what's been going on, and she's come up with this surreptitious way of addressing it in class. I love how she seems almost to be collaborating with Jason, giving him a look at the start of class when she sees that he's sat in Neal Brose's seat, and feeding him lines about Neal's secret and his reputation as a "golden boy." It's clear to me that Lippetts is on Jason's side, but we see in "Maggot" that she knows it won't work for a teacher to just stand up for a kid directly--when Drake is making fun of Jason's stammer, but she knows she can only call him "weak" but can't directly discipline him for it, as that would only raise his status and implicitly make Jason a "grass."
ReplyDeleteI found that chapter to be very thought provoking as well. I think that as long as there are a group of people actively trying to keep another group of people from knowing something, it is a secret--even if it's one hundred people keeping it from one. That's why surprise parties exist, I guess. From my experience, nearly all secrets just get worse the longer you keep them.
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