My Name's Not Susie: A Life Transformed by Literacy

Hamilton here tells how, through the liberation of literacy, she surmounted her cruel beginnings and is today a professor of English at Indiana-Purdue University. As a young girl, she was described by various caretakers as a ``bad apple.'' In her tortured early childhood, wanted by neither her birth nor her foster parents, she was given to rages that frightened her as well as others. Hamilton recalls a defining moment when she was eight and at relative ease with a caring, adoptive mother. To channel the child's incessant chatter, her schoolteacher mother suggested that she write what she could remember from the years of living in foster homes and orphanages, where she was given different names. That exercise, and the stories read to her by her mother, not only became the basis for academic success but also provided coping strategies for a rocky adulthood. Hamilton's story is stark and troubling; it is also homage to the role of literacy in the evolution of the self. (Oct.)