The Woman Who Took on Book Bans

Some of our most compelling stories begin with a stranger coming to town, especially here in the American West. This one certainly does. Lee McCarthy may not have anticipated that she would become a beacon for besieged schoolteachers and blacklisted writers, but it’s a persona she would learn to inhabit with style.

I first met McCarthy in 1999 on an oak-shaded patio at Rivertalk poetry magazine’s annual reading in Ojai, California. At the podium, she stood tall—about five foot nine—and underneath her deliberate cadence was the ragged edge of a woman who had learned how to endure. “Regret nothing” was the poem’s refrain. I was newly sober, hands shaking, just having taken my seat after reading my own poem, about the kidnapping and rape of my younger sister. Filled with a haunting anguish, I sat in the front row, wondering if the author really didn’t regret anything that had happened to her. In 2001, she signed her book “For Kim—fellow poet who knows if the door stays locked in spite of everything, try a window.” McCarthy knew about locked doors—and how to force them open. She recognized a fellow survivor.

This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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Fresno writer and journalist Mark Arax, who knew McCarthy for 13 years, told me that she made a dramatic entrance when she first landed in California’s Central Valley. By the time the two writers became friends, Arax said, McCarthy was “whipping around those two-lane farm roads in a little sports car with the top down, her blond hair blowing in the wind.” Fingers studded with silver and turquoise, her skimmer dresses hovering above her knees, McCarthy, let’s just say, stood out among the self-proclaimed rednecks whose ancestors had settled in the San Joaquin Valley after migrating from the Dust Bowl, bringing with them their farming methods, culture, and evangelical values.

Maybe it’s this nonconformist spirit that gave McCarthy the conviction, at 25, to leave her husband, a struggling writer named Cormac McCarthy, whom she’d met when they were undergrads at the University of Tennessee. The couple moved to Chicago in 1961, married, and had a son named Cullen before returning to Tennessee and settling in a farmhouse in Pigeon Forge. To support his writing, McCarthy’s husband asked that she get a job in addition to caring for their son and keeping their home. McCarthy refused, and it wasn’t long before she stepped onto a train with nothing more than a suitcase and their baby, to chug ahead into a new life. McCarthy couldn’t bring much with her, but she carried inside herself the seeds of her ambition and a devotion to the salvation she found in literature.

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THE BIBLE-THUMPERS

In 1966, after two cold winters teaching in Wyoming, trudging to the supermarket and laundromat in the snow, McCarthy was recruited by the California Teachers Association, which was looking to bring talented young educators west. She first landed as a teacher in McFarland, in Kern County, but left shortly thereafter to earn her master’s degree at San Francisco State University. In 1969, she returned to Central California, this time to be an English teacher at Wasco Union High School.

Thirty miles north of Bakersfield, Wasco was known for its cotton and roses. In 1970, the population was 8,269. Today, it has ballooned to 28,000, with about 20 churches serving the town—a sizable number for a community of that size.

The local churchgoers had issues with McCarthy right away. They complained that her skirts were too short. They soon proved just as unhappy with the books she taught in class, calling them obscene and resolving to terminate her teaching contract.

I had heard from other poets that McCarthy had been branded a teacher of obscene literature, but it wasn’t until after her death in 2009, when I rediscovered letters we’d written to each other, that I began to unpack the magnitude of her fight. McCarthy and I corresponded for 10 years—a friendship that began in my 20s, with her sending me notes on my poems. She shared her hard-earned wisdom about art, ambition, love, and loss. I even wrote about her work, celebrating her second book in a review for the literary magazine Solo.

To fully understand her narrative arc, I flew to Tennessee to find the McCarthys’ farmhouse in Pigeon Forge; I interviewed their son; I spoke with the publisher of Lee McCarthy’s two poetry volumes, Desire’s Door and Good Girl; I tracked down her friends, one of whom gave me key documents from McCarthy’s decades-long battle against censorship. “Kim,” McCarthy writes in one of her last letters to me, “you know this and you know how to do it.… Don’t read the poems. Let the personas in the poems do the talking. The ‘voice’ inside your head who spoke those words to you knows who it is and what it is all about. That’s a hard won victory for anyone.” Only now am I discovering just how hard-won a victory it was for McCarthy to remain true to the principled voice within her.

From my research, I could see that while the religious townsfolk of Wasco focused their complaints on language they found offensive in the books McCarthy taught, their larger objection was to McCarthy herself: a single mother who strode into their small town—sophisticated, willful, frank, and passionate.

In one legal deposition, the school’s assistant principal, Fred George, recounted objections raised during a parent-teacher conference by a student’s mother who attended the same church that he did. George recalled how the mother talked about the gravity of the threat of McCarthy and her books—titles like Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and James Leo Herlihy’s All Fall Down: “Not only was the use of such language wrong and inappropriate, but the feeling was that it was the use of such materials in the schools and in classrooms that was to some degree responsible for the degree of unrest in the large campuses of today.” (This was at the time of mass student protests against the Vietnam War.)

“The way I see it,” George paraphrased McCarthy’s response to this concerned citizen, “if students in high school had been given a greater understanding of the world…they would be less likely to riot on college campuses.”

McCarthy had grown up in a small town in Arkansas that, she felt, had left her unprepared for the complexities and cultural forces that lay beyond. She didn’t want her students to be similarly isolated. She wanted to show them a world beyond the rows of produce. A world where they could, like McCarthy, disappear into the open vault of the imagination. She introduced them to C.D.B. Bryan and Arthur Miller. She justified playing Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” in the classroom by saying that the speaker gets off topic and “sort of rambles around,” and that’s what her students did; she was trying to show them how to “make a success out of something that was a weakness.”

Following the fateful parent-teacher conference and ensuing town meetings the Wasco Pentecostal Church of God held, the Wasco News ran a letter to the editor from the church’s leaders that stressed the need to maintain purity. What McCarthy was teaching, according to the church leaders, undermined their freedom of religious thought. They objected to their members’ tax dollars being spent on such material.

McCarthy’s rebuttal took up a full four pages in the newspaper; it was heavy with irony and metaphor and too lengthy for the Letters to the Editor space. So McCarthy paid hundreds of dollars to publish it as an ad. “The value of honesty,” she wrote, “should always be put before [the] value of respectability.”

The attacks against McCarthy weren’t limited to town meetings and the newspaper. On the street, truckers took to calling her a “commie bitch hag” from their F-150s. Her son was teased at school. She was shunned at the checkout counter at the supermarket.

Why didn’t McCarthy chuck it and head back to San Francisco? She had options, but they were limited for a single mother supporting a son on her own. Still, while she taught, she was composing poems and stories late into the night. On the strength of her writing, she was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. The school offered her a teaching position once the fellowship ended, but she returned to her full-time gig at Wasco. Did she stay because of the security of her salary? Was she devoted to her students? Or was it something in her character—a stubborn commitment to pursuing a life guided by principles at the expense of practicality?

Toward the end of her life, McCarthy lamented the decades she’d spent fighting for respect in a town that would never give it to her and the toll that had taken on her son, noting in a letter to Arax, “It was my circumstances that took us to that town and my choices that led to our becoming its scapegoats.” Yet, she reflected, “if I had caved in to that town’s yelping fear of the humanness in literature—to its fear of The Crucible, Grendel, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, my son would have later come to despise me and thus stand one step away from despising himself.”

CENSORSHIP IN THE WEST

Not long after The Grapes of Wrath was published in April 1939, farmers in the San Joaquin Valley gathered to burn copies of John Steinbeck’s masterpiece of Okie struggle. The book was banned from libraries across the region. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was first banned in Alabama for its purported “anti-white” sentiment; seven years later, it was banned in Bremerton, Washington. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was banned in a California school district in the 1980s, and as recently as 2003, a high school in Bakersfield attempted to remove Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye from its curriculum.

In the summer of 2023, in Glendale Unified, the school district just over the hill from where I live in Los Angeles, Christian nationalists and Proud Boys intimidated school board members who were voting on a resolution to celebrate Pride Month, which subsequently passed. This controversy came on the heels of a protest by a new “parents’ rights” group opposing the reading, at Saticoy Elementary in the Los Angeles Unified School District, of a picture book that portrays homosexual family configurations alongside heterosexual ones.

At the city rec center where my six-year-old plays basketball, I talked with a mom about these revanchist campaigns. “Maybe we should sit this out,” the mom said, “let it blow over so these guys don’t get the attention they’re after.” Many of these extremists are counting on a social media uproar to secure further visibility and resources. But the censorship movement goes well beyond the Proud Boys. PEN America, which advocates for literary freedom of expression, reports that from July 2021 through June 2022, 2,532 books were banned across the United States. And the numbers keep growing.

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VICTORY IN COURT

Twenty years of scrutiny—write-ups, demotions, gossip, harassment, threats of termination, reinstatements, and repri-mands—culminated in a First Amendment case, McCarthy v. Fletcher, that stretched from 1985 to 1989. The young, idealistic teacher of the 1970s who was trying to “heal the breach” had become a battle-scarred anti-censorship warrior who knew the stakes. “Those statements look as if they are attempting to create a police state for teachers,” McCarthy testified in response to a list of restrictions proposed by her school’s administration, “and that they are inhibiting academic freedom in teaching.”

During the 1984–85 school year, a student had made a written complaint about reading John Gardner’s novel Grendel in McCarthy’s class, asserting that it was against her religious beliefs. (It’s no Portnoy’s Complaint—there’s no graphic sex. Grendel is a retelling of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf from the perspective of the man-eating monster, which the district objected to because of its purported “emphasis on anti-government, anti-God, anti-religion and anti-personal dignity.”) McCarthy negotiated a compromise with Wasco Union High principal and superintendent Douglas Fletcher: She would now obtain permission slips before teaching “restricted books” like Grendel and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

McCarthy obtained the slips, minus one or two, and submitted her lesson plans for the upcoming semester, which included Grendel and Solitude. Fletcher removed the two books and submitted the purged syllabus to the school board for approval. When McCarthy found out about it, she, along with a student, the student’s mother, and another Wasco resident, filed a suit in federal district court alleging that Fletcher and the board had violated their First Amendment rights.

The district court refused to hear McCarthy v. Fletcher, dismissing it in a summary judgment. McCarthy appealed to the National Education Association and other organizations for financial and legal support; the American Civil Liberties Union stepped in and successfully appealed the initial judgment.

In its final ruling, the appeals court contended that the school board was not protected against McCarthy’s suit through legislative immunity and that the lower court should have inquired into Wasco Union’s motives for its censorship. The appeals court handed the case back to the lower court for trial. Now that the district’s motives were subject to examination, it wouldn’t help the defense that, in a deposition, Fletcher had attributed a destructive power to Gardner’s novel as great as that of Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. “This book,” the principal asserted, “is designed to break down a student’s belief in God, government, and the basic respect for the dignity of people.” This was especially true in Wasco, where, Fletcher noted, “there’s a church on every corner.” Wasco Union wisely folded. McCarthy had won.

McCarthy v. Fletcher is a landmark First Amendment case. According to University of Southern California Gould School of Law professor Erin Miller, “McCarthy sets the beginnings of a standard for when and how curriculum decisions can be made within its jurisdiction, and it will serve as precedent in its jurisdiction unless overturned.”

WHAT MCCARTHY LEFT BEHIND

In June 2023, California governor Gavin Newsom cowrote a letter to school district superintendents and school administrators to address the new wave of book banning in the state. “Access to books,” Newsom wrote with California’s attorney general and state superintendent of public instruction, “including books that reflect the diverse experiences and perspectives of Californians, and especially those that may challenge us to grapple with uncomfortable truths—is a profound freedom we all must protect and cultivate.” Warning against the undue influence of religious and other orthodoxies in the creation of school curricula, they cited McCarthy v. Fletcher.

Lee McCarthy remains as unknown today as her ex-husband is renowned. “My talents have glaringly been wasted and my heart broken,” she wrote in a 2000 petition to Wasco Union for early retirement. “I have been falsely accused, harassed, threatened, demeaned, made a public scapegoat, and subjected to illegal penalties by this school district.” McCarthy had wanted to be part of a literary community. She had wanted to be read, respected, revered. The two volumes of poetry she left behind, and her two unpublished novels, prove that she deserves to be given her due.

Shortly before her retirement, she brought her class to a local bookstore, where they gave a performance to friends and community members. To prepare her students, she played the Gipsy Kings. “Close your eyes and feel the music,” she shouted, and her students slowly formed a circle. She was 60, in flat shoes and a long skirt, letting the music move her across a scuzzy carpet. Her class began to follow her lead. “You look beautiful,” she declared to her students. “You look like yourselves!”

Her teaching career over, McCarthy left Wasco for Bakersfield. After her death at 70 in 2009, her students commented in an online obituary that stepping into her classroom was like stepping into another world. Indeed, my own relationship with McCarthy pulled me into my new life—one built on persistence, community, service, stubbornness, care, and ambition. One of her former students said that in encouraging him to enter a national poetry competition, McCarthy “was the only person that moved me beyond the confines of a small dusty town to greater possibilities.” McCarthy spent her life in service to greater possibilities. She didn’t belong in that town, her students said. “We are less interesting without her.”•