by Helen Thorpe
Shortly after the brothers from the Congo arrived, Mr. Williams noticed Nadia and Grace chatting with them.
“Do you know Swahili?” he asked the girls from Mozambique.
“Yes,” Nadia said with shy pride.
That was news to Mr. Williams. The two sisters had never mentioned knowing Swahili. Mr. Williams thought it also helped explain their rapid learning curve, for in his experience, multilingual students often progressed more quickly than those who were monolingual. At this point, Mr. Williams mistakenly believed that Nadia and Grace spoke three languages—Portuguese, Swahili, and a little bit of English. Later in the year, however, Nadia would confide that she could speak seven languages—the three that Mr. Williams knew about, plus four languages indigenous to Africa.
Throughout the school year, the sisters from Mozambique would remain enigmatic to me. We ate lunch together several times, both with and without an interpreter, but they never wanted to say much. Grace preferred not to be questioned at all, although she listened with rapt attention to my vain attempt to interview her sister. Nadia simply said, in response to almost every question I asked, “I don’t know, Miss.” At one point, she added, “I don’t remember—I don’t remember anything.” I learned more about Nadia from a single picture that she drew, which Mr. Williams hung up on the bulletin board. Using colored pencils and fine-tipped markers, she created a detailed rendering of eighteen different people. Across the top, she wrote “My Family,” and then she labeled each person by name and by type of relation, using Portuguese terms. The picture included brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, a bespectacled grandmother, and even a tiny cousin in a finely drawn baby carrier. I assured Nadia that it was okay if she didn’t want to say more—some students wanted to share their stories, and others did not. I respected Nadia’s choice to be guarded.
Regardless, I grew to like both girls because of their quiet propensity to help out. When Mr. Williams missed a day, it was Nadia who told the substitute where she could find a particular stack of handouts. If Mr. Williams couldn’t remember where they had left off reading Inside the U.S.A., Nadia or Grace would remind him. Mr. Williams was glad to see the sisters welcoming the brothers from the Congo. Students found it confusing to arrive partway through the year, and it helped to talk to someone who had been in the room from the start.
Two days after Solomon and Methusella arrived, a pair of girls named Jakleen and Mariam walked into the classroom. They stood close together and murmured to each other in Arabic. Both were remarkably pretty, with oval faces, olive skin, and long black hair, and both favored heavy eyeliner painted like cat’s eyes. Sisters, clearly. Mariam wore tortoiseshell glasses and had done her hair in a hip-length braid, which from time to time she flung back around her shoulder so that the braid inscribed a wide arc in the air. Jakleen did not wear the navy blue glasses that she kept inside her backpack, and her black hair was loose, hanging down to her rib cage. Mr. Williams told the class that Jakleen and Mariam were from Iraq.
Mariam’s face wore a soft, tentative expression, while Jakleen studied everybody in the room with fierce curiosity. Mariam was sixteen years old, and Jakleen was fifteen. They had arrived in the United States at the end of August, but for several weeks they had lived with a friend in a suburb that fell outside the city limits. Only after their mother found an apartment they could afford on the outskirts of Denver did they become eligible to attend South. When Jakleen and Mariam walked into their new high school on October 1, 2015, the sisters had missed almost two months of school, and they had lost just about everything they had once called their own, including their father. They had left Baghdad in 2006, at the height of the Iraq War—nine years earlier—and they had been looking for a safe haven ever since. The two girls would tell me later that they entered Mr. Williams’s classroom believing that the hard times were over. Mariam and Jakleen imagined that by coming to America, they had put any kind of trouble behind them. This idea was untested, however, because they had been in the United States for only a few weeks, and did not yet know what kind of reception awaited them here.
Mr. Williams watched all of the new students closely. He knew that the brothers from the Congo had lived in a country that had been riven by conflict for two decades, and that they had not been able to attend school continuously. The same was true of the sisters from Iraq, who had fled an active war zone. Mr. Williams wanted to gauge the ability of his newest students to understand English. He also wanted to find out if they had arrived with school supplies and whether their families could afford food. Solomon and Methusella impressed him right away by demonstrating an instant readiness to learn—anytime Mr. Williams checked on the boys, they were hard at work.
Mariam and Jakleen seemed more distracted. They did not appear to be in immediate distress, for their clothes were clean and they had taken the time to fix their hair and put on makeup. The girls appeared alert, and had shown up with pencils and notebooks. They also demonstrated the kind of basic learning skills found in students who had been able to attend school regularly. When Mr. Williams wrote something on the whiteboard, they copied his words down in their notebooks. Soon there were indications that the girls might be experiencing inner turmoil, however; while both had come to school with their heads uncovered, within a short time Jakleen began wearing a hijab, while Mariam did not. Mr. Williams did not know what to make of this divergence in behavior, but he imagined the two sisters might be struggling with questions of identity and belonging.
* * *
On the Friday after Jakleen and Mariam’s arrival, volunteers from Goodwill appeared in the classroom. They had been visiting every week and were surprised to see twice as many students as the week before. Mr. Williams pointed out all the recent additions—Amaniel, with the gold chains, from Eritrea; Methusella and Solomon, the neatly dressed brothers from the Congo; Jakleen and Mariam, the cat-eyed sisters from Iraq—and asked the volunteers to practice verbal introductions. Half of the class had done introductions on the first day of school, but that had been six weeks ago, and it would be helpful for the longtime students to review the material; meanwhile, the recent arrivals could get acclimated.
The volunteers fanned out across the room and repeated what the teacher had said. Mr. Williams assigned Nadia and Grace to different groups, then did the same with Solomon and Methusella as well as Jakleen and Mariam—he separated siblings, to make sure they didn’t lapse into speaking to each other. Jakleen sat down with Uyen and Methusella, two students she did not know at all, and a Goodwill volunteer joined the group. Mystified, Jakleen stared at the volunteer. She had eloquent eyes, and without using words nonetheless managed to say she had no idea what was happening; her eyes had a little bit of laughter in them, too, as if this were funny.
The volunteer pointed to the whiteboard, where Mr. Williams was writing the scripted dialogue. Jakleen seemed unclear how to proceed. The volunteer pantomimed the act of writing, and then Jakleen turned to her notebook.
“Hi, I’m Jakleen,” she wrote in English. “I’m from Iraq, and I speak Arabic.”
I noticed that she had no trouble writing from left to right in Latin script, even though Arabic employs different letters and is written in the reverse direction. She must have studied English before. When Jakleen finished, I asked her a question.
“Jakleen, you’re from Iraq. Did you come in an airplane?”
“Airplane, yes. No Iraq, Turkey.”
“Oh, you lived in Turkey first?”
“Yes. One year, Turkey.”
Then Mr. Williams interrupted, drawing the room back together again. He asked the class to read a handout about a fictional TV game show called Name That City. The banter between the host and the contestants mentioned several major U.S. cities—Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, and Baton Rouge. Mr. Williams walked around the room listening carefully as the students read the dialogue aloud to their respective volunteers. Jakleen could read English haltingly and stumbled only over bigger words such as “contestant
s” and “congratulations.” For her second day at school, she was doing very well. Uyen could read all the words, although her pronunciation was harder to make out. Methusella read softly, and even though he could say most of the words, he did not always know their meaning. He asked the Goodwill volunteer for help when he came to the unfamiliar word “river.”
“It is water,” explained the volunteer. “Like the Nile River.” She made a flowing movement with her hands. Methusella nodded in recognition.
Then he asked about the meaning of “hometown.” I was impressed that he was asking so many questions—newly arrived students rarely did that.
“It is where your family is from,” said the volunteer.
When we chatted about our hometowns, Jakleen named Karrada, a neighborhood in Baghdad known for its diversity, even though her family had left there when she was five years old. Methusella said his hometown was Goma, a large city on the eastern side of the DRC. When I read more about the DRC, I learned that was the part of the country that had experienced the most dire forms of upheaval.
* * *
As his class grew, Mr. Williams gave the students weekly assessments to measure their ability to write, read, understand, and speak English. At the same time, he tried to watch over his students’ general well-being. He noted who made friends and who didn’t. He saw that Hsar Htoo had nobody with whom he could speak Karen, and that Amaniel had nobody with whom he could speak Kunama. Uyen seemed heavily dependent on Stephanie, who was starting to discover other Spanish-speaking students around the building. He worried about the two girls from Iraq, because they were the only students in the room who spoke Arabic, and he did not want them to isolate themselves and withdraw from the group as a whole. At first he held similar concerns about the brothers from the Congo, but then he saw them quickly forge an alliance with Nadia and Grace. They showed up at school every single day, always on time, always nicely dressed, always ready to tackle whatever he wanted them to learn. He was struck to see such motivation. The boys were making the most of every minute they had in his room.
The same was not true for Jakleen and Mariam. For reasons Mr. Williams had yet to discover, their motivation seemed to wax and wane. Hanging over them was a palpable aura of sadness. Often Jakleen stared vacantly out the classroom’s large windows instead of doing classwork. One day Mariam left the room to see the school counselor because she was too upset to stay in class. Why did their level of participation in school fluctuate? After Jakleen began wearing a hijab every day, she encountered vocal prejudice on the city buses that she used to commute to and from school. Even within the school building itself, one student called her a “terrorist.” I wondered if the prejudice she encountered served as a drag on her spirit. Jakleen and Mariam also appeared profoundly weary. Sometimes, they failed to come to school, and after one of their absences, when I asked where they had been, they said, “Sleep.”
This became a kind of joke after a while. “Jakleen, what do you want to do after you graduate from high school?” I asked her one day. “No work,” she said. “Eat, sleep.” Then I noticed that her eyes were laughing. Eventually she admitted that she wanted to pursue a career in fashion design. But she would have to finish high school to do that type of work, and meanwhile she and Mariam were accruing more absences than anybody else in the room. Mr. Williams worried about keeping the sisters engaged. He also wondered about their sadness, which they wore to school every day like a down jacket, as if it offered them some sort of protection. They did not have enough English to explain that to him, however; they did not have the words, and maybe what they had lived through was too big to describe easily in any language.
* * *
Eddie Williams felt a sense of kinship with these students who struggled to determine their place in American society. He had been born in a tiny border town in Southern California. His mother had grown up nearby, in a Spanish-speaking household. Her parents had emigrated from Mexico, and when she was a child, Mr. Williams’s mother had learned English in ELA classes. For her, the experience had been searing. As an adult, she had not taught her own children Spanish, for fear they would encounter the sort of virulent prejudice she had experienced in school. When her children were small, she did not even share with them the complete story of her own background, because of the degree of prejudice toward those of Mexican descent. She had married an American, and when her children were small, they believed they were Anglo. One day, while we were standing on the front steps of South, chatting about his background, Eddie Williams recalled that when his mother had finally revealed her Mexican identity, his sister had cried. In her mind, to be Mexican was to be dirty or unlovable. It was not something she wanted to be. Although he did not say so, I thought perhaps he, too, might have struggled to embrace fully the part of himself that had been treated as inferior by white society. I could see why teaching at South might make him feel more whole.
Given his mother’s experience, Mr. Williams was careful to treat his students with the utmost respect. He never wanted a student like Jakleen to feel he disapproved of her heritage—the way his mother had felt. At the same time, the students presented him with huge challenges. They arrived all throughout the school year, from all over the world, speaking every kind of language imaginable, and they learned at vastly different speeds. Some of them showed up in bad shape and needed time to heal; some grew frustrated with the pace of their own learning, and he had to cajole them to keep trying; others learned so fast he could barely keep pace. The more students he got, the harder he had to work to stretch those who were learning quickly without leaving anyone else behind.
With the addition of the latest students, the class size grew to eleven. So far, Mr. Williams had collected students from the Democratic Republic of Congo, El Salvador, Eritrea, Iraq, Mexico, Mozambique (or Burundi), Thailand (or Burma), and Vietnam. Two students spoke Spanish, while the other nine spoke languages that Mr. Williams did not know. Eight had learned to write using the Latin script, and three using other kinds of lettering. Already, the room included students from some of the countries in the world that were producing the largest numbers of refugees: Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, and Iraq.
Most people fleeing the continuing violence in El Salvador did not arrive in the United States with refugee status; typically, they entered without legal permission and then sought asylum. Saúl, for example, had left his home country in the company of an eighteen-year-old sister, crammed into the back of a panel truck along with more than seventy other travelers. So many bodies were squeezed into the truck that several passengers fainted. Saúl found it difficult to breathe. He was apprehended by immigration officials on the U.S. side of the border in McAllen, Texas, and was released into the custody of a twenty-six-year-old sister who lived in Denver. Given the conditions he had fled, Saúl was hoping the federal court system might grant him permission to remain in the United States.
Meanwhile, it was only October, and more kids were almost certainly on their way. Mr. Williams expected the class to double in size again before year’s end. His goal by that point was both straightforward and daunting: to ensure that as many students as possible could answer basic verbal questions in English in both the present and past tenses. He hoped the majority of students could also justify their answers, giving him either a rationale or an opinion. If they could produce original phrasing, they would enter the third phase of language acquisition, known as “speech emergence,” and they would be ready to move upstairs. If not, they would stay with him for another semester. He thought that was fine—some kids simply needed more time to adjust.
When the teacher was not in his classroom, I generally found him glued to his laptop in the copy room, worrying about how to help the growing number of students he had acquired to evolve simultaneously. What he brought into the classroom every day was a passion to help the newcomers thrive. He was like a gardener, excited by seedlings. Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were l
agging behind their peers, Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead. He often told me that he felt lucky to work in a room like this one—a room that spoke of just how big the world was, and how mysterious.
Meanwhile, I started visiting some of his students at home, and that was when I began to appreciate more fully how illuminating Room 142 was going to be, for the room quickly began to serve as an almost perfect microcosm of the global refugee crisis as a whole. Once I began meeting with particular families, I started hearing about every kind of journey a refugee family could survive. The stories that intersected in this one classroom brought to life the global crisis in a way that I never saw represented in the daily papers. The kids were at South to learn English, but in the process they were sharing with me and with the school’s staff and with their American-born peers all kinds of lessons—about fortitude, about resilience, about holding on to one’s humanity through experiences nobody should have to witness. About starting over, and about transformation.
