She didn’t doubt Perry's ability to read a book. She loved reading herself and had passed the gift of literacy on her own children. She knew that the best way to encourage him to read was to give him a real book. She also knew that feelings mattered. That is why she never spoke to him in anger or with recrimination on her mind. Above all she wanted him to feel important. She was a remarkable woman who embodied the quiet dignity, sereneness, and intelligence of the Caribbean.

Her own identity as a reader was uniquely cultural and social. Her mother was the daughter of a Carib Indian, one of the last speakers of the Carib language, and a Portuguese immigrant who had come to St. Vincent as an indentured worker from the island of Madeira. Her father had been a police constable in the service of the colonial government.

Her mother was a strikingly beautiful and defiant woman: deep set hazel eyes, luminous hair, and a glowing complexion. In a society where whiteness was a sign of authority and blackness disdained, mixed race women possessed stature. When she told her parents she wanted to marry the local police officer they were scandalized. He was ebony black and below her in social status. In desperation, they pleaded with the village priest to talk her out of it. She stood her ground. Her parents threatened to disown her. Unfazed, she left home for St. Lucia with her new husband. 

Her father had been born and educated on the island of Antigua. He was a police officer, carpenter, avid reader of Scripture, and a preacher.  Although an imposing six feet four, he had a gentle demeanor and followed a simple rule: never speak to children in anger. At night he narrated stories about the islands he visited as a young man. He also read stories from the Bible. He believed that character and achievement were the only recourses in a racial society. 

The Joseph family built a home on a hill that overlooked the high mountains and green valleys to the west and the deep blue Caribbean to the east. Theirs was a cohesive and self-reliant family. They grew their own food, sewed their own clothes and practiced literacy. Although buying books was a luxury, reading was very important part of their lives. Each child took a turn reading aloud from the Bible at evening devotions. 

Adella thrived in this environment. Quiet, unassuming, intelligent, and deeply religious, she learned to read and write at home and excelled in school.  Her respite became reading. After school and chores she would escape to her secret place, a sea grape tree that faced the brilliant sea. There on this windswept hill she nuzzled into the boughs of the tree to read and dream. 

With the Second World War raging in Europe, British support for her overseas colonies fell off dramatically. The market for export crops such as cocoa and nutmeg vanished and so did employment. Unable to pay for further schooling, Adella’s parents sent her to live and work with her older sister in Trinidad. Two years late she married and had her first child. Over the next fifteen years she and her husband had nine more children.

When her family had grown up she returned to school to complete her high school education and begin college. Her will to succeed was unyielding. When she learned that her first grandson had not learned to read, she committed herself to his education. She was not going to let the redemptive powers of print  slip away from him. 

Perry adored his grandmother. The first thing he did when he went  to shop or to the beach was to stick a book in his back pocket. He read to himself and to his grandmother. He especially loved to share his favorite parts with her after supper. That part of the evening was important  to him. She listened and replied with sensitivity and a feel for irony.  At night he put his book under his pillow. 

Each day his reading improved. Soon his desire to please his grandmother gave away to reading for himself. The more he read the more easily he recognized words. He zipped across the pages eager to find out what would happen next.  Patterns appeared to him and soon he expected to see certain words. The story line became just as predictable. He would anticipate what come next and read to see if he was right. If a baby was upstairs, he expected to be crying. These expectations pulled him from page to another. He was suddenly reading words that had stumped him a few months earlier. Tentativeness had given way to confidence; pauses and skips to fluency. 

On the day he returned home, he asked me to buy him  Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. I looked up from my magazine puzzled. After all, this was the boy who regarded reading as a thing to be avoided. I could not imagine what had changed him. My mother in law as not a teacher or a reading expert so she could not have taught him to read. Reading fluency  depended on translating letters and words into thought. At least that is what researchers and text book writers had led me to believe. I had no clue that a simple dictum to read had given my son a reason to read. 

I had always imagined hearing Perry ask me for a book after he had learned to read. His transformation discredited my thinking. Adella had made him a reader by making him her reader. This is not as far fetched as it sounds. It is the basis of constructivist theory  long advocated by Frank Smith, and portrayed humorously by Garrison Keilor Lake Wobegon Days. In the following passage the narrator reminisces about his reading:
 

It took me a long time to read. I was wrong about so many words. Cat, can't. Tough, through,  thought. Shinola. I was like reading a cloud of mosquitoes. Donna in the set behind whispered right answers to me, and I learned to be a good guesser, but I didn't read well until Mrs. Meiers took me in hand.

One winter day she took me aside after recess and said she'd like me to stay after school and read to her." You have such a nice voice, "she said, "and I don't get to hear you read in school as much as I'd like."

No one had told me before that I had a nice voice. She told me many times over the next few months what a wonderful voice I had, as I sat in a chair by her desk reading to her as she marked worksheets.

"The little duck was so happy. He ran to the barn and shouted,' Come! Look! The ice is gone from the pond!' Finally it was spring."

"Oh, you read that so well. Read it again, "she said. When Bill the janitor came into mop, she said, " Listen to this. Doesn't this boy have a good voice?" He sat down and I read to them both. " The little duck climbed to the top of the big rock and looked down at the clear blue water. ' Now I am going to fly,' he said to himself. He waggled his wings and counted to three.  'One two three.' And he jumped and-"

 I read in my clear blue voice." I think you're right," Bill said. "I think he has a very good voice. I wouldn't mind sitting here all day and listening to him."

My mother in law had given Perry what years of  direct instruction in school and at home had failed to provide--a reason to concentrate on print. I recently shared Perry’s magical summer of reading with my youngest son Josh. I wanted to see how a young child regarded this event. Books had become real to him in the second grade when he had been given  chapter book to read. Besides, he had just completed Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. This is what he told me: 
 

If you like a book, you will know it. If you like a book you will learn it. You have to have fun with a book. Fun helps you to learn. If you know about it you won’t be bored. But if you read something that is boring you won’t be able to concentrate on it and say the words. Then you won’t love it.  Take Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Perry’s in the fourth grade and he has a little brother so he says to himself, that’s just like me. I have a little Peter. 

It was clear to Josh that if someone's mind is elsewhere you"can't say the words."  His understanding of attention is remarkably similar to that of David Krathwal who wrote years ago that the desire to read and talk about reading precedes attention to saying the words on a page.  In Perry 's case, he had little reason to read and was uncomfortable being asked questions about his reading. Yet he wanted to be a good student and he wanted someone to listen to him discuss the things that mattered to him.  He found his audience with his grandmother when he took turns reading to her. That is how he discovered the  pleasure of spending time with a book. 

As a former teacher, a professor of reading and parent of two bright children, I was totally ignorant of  the most necessary condition of learning--a compelling need to read. I was versed in the latest psycholinguistic theories of language development, and I even understood Plato's theory of innate ideas, but deep down I  believed that children had to be taught to read. Learning came from some one else.Children could not construct skills and strategies on their own.  

Perry's lesson humbled me.I couldn't wait to reread Smith and to share my insights with my students. Visions of Perry's success in school  made me happy. My excitement gave way to indignation and anger as soon as he began school. As before he was assigned to the lowest reading group without  any assessment of his needs or consultation with his parents. The school's decision was based on the recommendations of his third grade teacher and it was binding. I wanted to scream  because no one listened to his remarkable story. What loomed ahead was another year of the same dull, superfluous skill and drill that had defined his previous reading experiences. Predictably, he would come home filled with tears, anger, unwillingness, and resentment. That is because his aspirations, his intelligence, and his spirit counted for nothing. Perry could not shake his past.