by Helen Thorpe
I asked Kimleng how he had gotten involved in the Student Senate.
“Actually, she talked me into it.” Kimleng pointed at Sara.
“I was just walking down the hallway and I saw a flyer about it,” Sara said. “I talked to one of my teachers, Ms. Hijazi”—one of the school’s upper-level ELA instructors—“and she was like, ‘It’s a great thing, you’re going to do great,’ so she kind of encouraged me to do it. We just applied and got accepted.”
“I can’t believe I’m sitting here right now,” Kimleng said. “Three years ago I would not have thought this would be possible for me.”
Kimleng and Sara remembered exactly how hard it was to be a newcomer. “Not being able to express their feelings, or being afraid to talk, because they are afraid other people will judge them because of their accent,” Sara said. “They are afraid that other people will make fun of them. They are afraid that other people will think their accent is funny or their culture is funny.”
Kimleng added, “And they are afraid to ask their teacher for help. They don’t know who is going to help them.”
I said that Mr. Williams’s current newcomer students seemed to think their English was terrible, even though I could see how fast some of them were learning.
“I still think my English is terrible,” Sara confessed.
“Yeah, my English is terrible,” agreed Kimleng. “That’s why, even now, in the Student Senate, I still feel like I don’t fit in. I don’t feel comfortable speaking. I’m still shy.”
Sara had simply decided to get over those kinds of feelings. “You have to develop confidence,” she said. “Me, I decided one day, I don’t give a damn what I’m saying, if it’s wrong or if it’s right, I am just going to express what I’m thinking. Like, I don’t care if people laugh. At South, we don’t have that problem of people making fun of you so much—they understand. Some of them laugh, yeah, but not that many.”
“That’s why I love South High School,” said Kimleng.
* * *
While South’s students were debating whether to drink Coke or Pepsi and the matter of who should lead the country, parents were trying to figure out who should run the school.
PTA president Carolyn Howard was consumed by the looming transition in leadership. The longtime principal, Kristin Waters, had announced over the previous summer that she was leaving. Dr. Waters was a petite woman with blond hair, a cheerleader’s bubbly disposition, and acute political skills; she walked the halls of South every day, hugging kids from all kinds of backgrounds. She had a penchant for bright purple dresses and had acquired that gift which the best principals attain, of radiating a firm yet warm parental kind of authority to all within her purview. In other words, the kids knew that she cared, and it gave them a certain kind of assurance.
As principal, Dr. Waters had presided over the transformation of South into a place that excelled at both English Language Acquisition and Advanced Placement. Thanks to her leadership, the school could support equally well a student who had arrived from a strife-ridden foreign country and a student who had previously gone to Graland Country Day. “It is with mixed emotions that I am writing to inform you of my decision to end my tenure as Denver South’s principal in December 2015, at the end of the first semester,” Dr. Waters stated in a letter sent to parents. “I will be joining my husband in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has accepted a new position.” Waters had remained at South for the first half of the school year, but she was leaving at the end of the month. The district had yet to name her successor. Dr. Waters was beloved by students, faculty, and parents, and her imminent departure made the entire school community anxious.
Throughout the fall, the PTA had organized a series of town meetings designed to capture the full span of families served by South High. One meeting took place in a location convenient for the wealthy parents who owned spacious old houses in the nearby, affluent neighborhood of Washington Park; a second meeting took place downtown; a third took place in the common room of a building that offered affordable housing to recently arrived refugees. At each meeting, parents said there was one thing Dr. Waters had championed that they wanted to remain a priority: South’s diversity. Both the wealthier families and the newly arrived refugee families cherished the experience of walking through the hallways filled with hijabs, niqabs, dreadlocks, head scarves, tracksuits, baseball hats, purple cheerleader uniforms, and a cacophony of languages. Their own children had benefited from the mix. They had all grown. “There are human beings who have seen atrocities and lost everything, and here they stand, ready to start over—which is just astounding,” Howard said.
South was looking for a new principal who would celebrate what was happening in Mr. Williams’s classroom, just as Dr. Waters had done. After spending four months as a regular visitor to the school, I could feel why that might be true. Just the daily experience of walking down the halls proved liberating. Young women from Africa came to school wearing floor-length skirts in bright orange or hot pink, with contrasting head scarves in electric blue. Their counterparts from Southeast Asia showed up wearing hijabs adorned with sequins. Young men from Southeast Asia sometimes wore stripes of yellow paint on their cheeks as a form of blessing. Female students from the Middle East did their hair in elaborate updos and then draped wool scarves over their big coiffures, but wore jeans and American T-shirts. One day, I saw an Iraqi student wearing a black head scarf and a gray T-shirt that said I KNOW THAT GUAC IS EXTRA. You could be anything at all and register as gorgeous—you knew this, if you walked the hallways of this school. It was a place that eroded prejudices and expanded ideas of beauty. Parents and faculty feared that without Dr. Waters, this splendor might vanish. Rising rents were pushing new arrivals farther and farther away. What if South became more and more white? That was the main concern of the school community—a funny reversal from the days when parents had worried that South focused too much on ELA students.
* * *
Perhaps the main way that the Student Senate and the PTA connected with Mr. Williams’s students was through their support of the food bank in Room 142. The kids in the Senate held a fund-raising drive, which raised $1,000 for the cause, and the PTA matched their gift. I often spoke with Jaclyn Yelich and Greg Thielen as they restocked the food bank shelves, which they generally did during the lunch hour. One day that winter, Jaclyn proudly reported that on the previous Friday they had given grocery bags bulging with food to sixty students. They had started off the school year by serving only twenty students—the number of families being served had tripled, and it was only December. Greg used a clicker to track the number of families they served, and the total kept growing. At the start of the next calendar year, they would be serving more than eighty families each week.
In addition to all the canned vegetables and dried goods, Jaclyn showed me new items, including fresh produce and toiletries that had been provided by the Student Senate. Carolyn Howard’s son, George, had led a “personal care drive” for shampoo and body wash and toothpaste. The toiletry items had proved wildly popular with the refugee students, whose families often could not afford such things, which they considered luxuries. Certain items had been so popular, they had run out. Jaclyn held up two plastic shopping bags filled with the goods she had needed to replenish.
“I just went shopping,” she said. “I bought laundry detergent, body wash, and maxi pads.”
She opened up a plastic bag filled with maxi pads to show me.
“I gave some of these away to girls last week—you would have thought I was handing out a brick of gold. This stuff is expensive.”
For the rest of the year, tampons and maxi pads were the most coveted items that Jaclyn distributed to the school’s impoverished female students. Their families could not afford to buy disposable pads, and if the girls did not get them from Jaclyn, they had to use cloth pads instead, which were messy and leaked. Generally, boys did not select toiletries for themselves. Instead they took food their families needed, or
asked Jaclyn shyly what toiletries she thought their mothers might like. Body lotion, she suggested, and that became the most popular nonfood item with the male students. Generally, though, they wanted to play the role of provider, bringing home the items their mothers most desired—usually rice or beans. The canned vegetables were harder to give away, because newly arrived families were not as familiar with them.
Many of South’s student leaders had been born in the United States, but clearly there was room at the top of the school’s social hierarchy for the young people Mr. Williams was teaching, if they learned fast and moved quickly into mainstream classes. Kimleng and Sara had succeeded in going all the way from Room 142 to the Student Senate, and both of them were planning to go to college. After meeting them, I began to wonder who among the current newcomers would rise as fast. I thought that ambition was key—they had to have high hopes for themselves and be able to sustain their hopes even during difficult times. Because the newcomers’ personalities remained highly cloaked, it was hard for me to discern exactly which of them possessed that kind of drive. After I started riding public transit with the students, however, I could see how their level of motivation played out in that arena. It was interesting to correlate their behavior on the buses and trains with what I saw in the classroom.
Lisbeth, for example, arrived at school early every day of the week. She was never late and she was never absent, unless she had a court appearance. When I drove over to her apartment complex one morning at 6:00—like most of the city’s affordable housing, it consisted of a vast series of similar-looking buildings, but the exteriors had been painted in cheerful colors including deep red and olive green—Lisbeth emerged from her apartment with her corkscrew curls still wet from the shower. She explained that when she had first arrived in Denver, her mother had taken a day off from work to show her how to navigate the city’s bus system, which she quickly learned to manage adroitly on her own. Lisbeth waved to other students as they boarded the same bus. Then she showed me some selfies she had taken with a Spanish-speaking boy whom she liked. After that she pointed with excitement at a squirrel that sat upright to eat something, saying, “Mira!”
At a certain point, we got off the bus, and Lisbeth confidently showed me where to catch a light rail train for the second leg of our journey. Whereas the bus had been filled primarily with people of color who were dressed in jeans or sweats, the train included more white commuters in suits. The bus and train rides together took about an hour and fifteen minutes, and Lisbeth delivered her usual optimistic patter in Spanish for the entire time. It was 7:16 when we arrived at South, and she had a full half hour to relax upstairs in the cafeteria over breakfast before the bell rang for the day’s first class. I saw Nadia, Grace, Hsar Htoo, Kaee Reh, Ksanet, Yonatan, Solomon, and Methusella elsewhere in the cafeteria. Lisbeth took another selfie, scrutinized the image, and turned to me.
“Miss,” she said. “Soy bonita?”
Was she pretty? It was quintessential Lisbeth, to have that question on her mind at 7:30 A.M., and to ask it out loud. She was living through a year when she wasn’t sure if she was getting “removed,” wasn’t sure if she could keep living with her mother, and wasn’t sure where she stood in the affections of a boy with whom she had spent one afternoon in a park. But she was never late, and she knew how to ask for assurance.
“Yes, Lisbeth,” I told her. “You are beautiful.”
* * *
Solomon and Methusella had other priorities. One afternoon, I asked the boys if I could ride home with them. Methusella looked faintly horrified at the prospect of being accompanied by a middle-aged American woman (I knew from having a son that my presence might represent a form of social death), while Solomon gravely accepted this trial without betraying any sign of alarm. Even though the shortest route home consisted of simply catching two different city buses, one of which they could board close to school, the boys preferred to take a longer but more scenic route. Along with a steady stream of other students from South, I walked with them for about three-quarters of a mile to a nearby light rail station. At the station, we eschewed the stairs, which would have been dull, and rode down in an elevator, because it was cool and shiny and we could.
On the train platform, Methusella spotted a friend of Yonatan’s from Eritrea sitting on a nearby bench and walked over to sit beside that young man—even though they did not share a common language, at least Methusella was able to align himself with a fellow African. Solomon appeared to feel that his job was to serve as my chaperone, and remained at my side. When we all boarded a train, Solomon and Methusella sat down on a bench seat, but a young African-American man abruptly grabbed the two seats facing them (one seat for his rear end and one seat for his backpack) before I could claim that space. I sat by myself in another part of the train, and the seats around me quickly filled up with students. As soon as a few passengers disembarked, however, Solomon moved over to join me, because that was the polite thing to do. We barely spoke, because he preferred to look out the windows.
At first, the train hugged I-25, the main north–south thoroughfare that bisects Denver. Wealthier commuters moved alongside us in their private cars, two forms of transit shuffling people of different income levels along in tandem. Eventually, the train curved along with the highway toward the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of downtown. Watching the high-rise buildings slip into view, I could see why the boys liked this route: It took them through the heart of the city.
We exited the train at a busy intersection in the middle of downtown and walked to a bus stop where we waited for the number 15 bus. It was windy and cold and the boys had no jackets; they insisted they were not freezing, but I saw them shiver when they sat down on the cold metal bench. Finally a warm bus pulled up and we found seats about halfway down its length. The boys stared out the scratched plexiglass windows as the driver made several stops, navigating the lumbering bus past the limestone bulk of city hall and the gold-domed statehouse. Then we headed east down Colfax Avenue toward the seedier parts of the city, where we saw more dive bars and tattoo parlors. Partway along Colfax, the driver stopped the bus and, without saying a word, got up and climbed off the vehicle, leaving us all sitting there, stranded.
“What the fuck he doin’?” asked an African-American kid whose jeans were down below his behind, in a theatrically loud voice.
“I always wanted to sit in that chair!” exclaimed a white kid with dyed scarlet hair, eyeing the driver’s seat.
Conversation broke out among the American-born passengers. Why had our bus driver abandoned us? Was he hungry? Did he have to take a piss? Had he always wanted to walk off the job like this, leaving behind a bus full of passengers voicing questions about his whereabouts? Solomon and Methusella silently took in the hullabaloo. The expressions on their faces remained accepting, alert, and watchful. The only question on their minds appeared to be whether they faced danger. Their response to the situation differed from that of the nonimmigrant passengers, who had gone straight to anger and defiance, because they felt entitled.
The bus driver climbed back on board without a word of explanation and we continued down Colfax Avenue. A little while later, Solomon turned to me and pointed out a redbrick building near the intersection of Colfax and Quebec, on the eastern side of Denver. His father went to church there, Solomon said, his voice barely audible over the rattle of the old bus, which was how I learned that a Swahili-language church service took place within walking distance of my own house. The boys got off the bus an hour and fifteen minutes after they had left school. If they had taken the shorter route, the trip would have taken only forty-five minutes. To them, however, it was worth the extra half hour, riding on the light rail train, checking out the city’s dramatic skyline, wandering around the granite-and-glass canyons of downtown, and staring at the statehouse through the bus’s scratched windows. Technically it was a detour, but they were absorbing all kinds of extracurricular lessons about where influence was concentrated, and how one got
from here to there.
* * *
Jakleen and Mariam, on the other hand, cared more about sleep. Often they did not manage to catch the early bus that would get them to school on time and instead caught a later bus that let them snooze, which meant that they regularly walked into Mr. Speicher’s first period math class shortly after the bell had rung. Typically, they were accompanied by Ghasem, the young man from Afghanistan who had spent only a few days in the newcomer class. Ghasem was devoting himself to Jakleen, walking her around the school and meeting her for lunch. He made clear he was fond of Jakleen, though she remained coy about whether his feelings were reciprocated.
Jakleen and Mariam walked for almost one mile each morning to catch a bus that would take them all the way to the school without requiring transfers. It was the fastest route, and their total commute took about forty-five minutes, which allowed them to maximize their rest. On the way home, when they were invariably more tired, they opted for a longer commute that eliminated the long walk. They caught a bus that stopped right beside South, then transferred to a second bus that let them off close to their apartment. Going to school for seven hours a day in English exhausted the girls, and by midafternoon they were looking for the least strenuous way home.
One day, I bumped into Oula’s sister, Sam, after a Student Senate meeting, and asked how it was going, in terms of mentoring Jakleen and Mariam. When I wondered which sister she was mentoring and which sister was being mentored by her twin, Sam told me, “We just kind of share them.” Mr. Williams had arranged for Sam and Sana to join Jakleen and Mariam in his room one day over lunch. The four girls had spoken to one another animatedly in Arabic.
