by Helen Thorpe
Perhaps the most telling moment I ever spent with Tchiza and Beya would take place several months later, in the parking lot of the apartment complex. It was the middle of the summer, five weeks after Solomon and Methusella had finished their first year at South. Tchiza and Beya were walking me to my car. They liked to do this, strolling along holding hands, with Zawadi and Ombeni tripping at their feet, clutching at Beya’s long skirt and using the fabric to play peekaboo. After they escorted me to my vehicle, we were standing by my Volkswagen, enjoying the warm night air, when we heard the rat-a-tat-tat of firecrackers. Soon it would be the Fourth of July.
Beya dropped low enough to touch the pavement. It grew quiet. Slowly, she stood up.
More fireworks. Beya flinched and dropped down low again.
Zawadi laughed and laughed. Why was her mother ducking and cavorting? Silly game! Zawadi laughed so much she covered her mouth with her hands.
I did not think the older boys would have been laughing if they had come outside. Zawadi had been born in Uganda, after the family had left the sound of daily gunfire behind. She had never lived in North Kivu. Almost a decade had passed since Beya and Tchiza and their children had set out from Buganza, wearing all those clothes. But Beya reacted to what sounded like gunshots as sharply as though she had left North Kivu yesterday. The past had shoved through into the present. Solomon and his brothers would have known why their mother was cowering in the perfectly safe parking lot. Strange, how the same stuttering sound meant celebration in my country and death in hers. And that was as much as the family ever said, in an entire year—one wordless statement, when my country caught them off guard—about what they had lived through, back in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
I did wonder, later, how this family, who might have seen more than any other family I had known, how could this family be so joyful? And were the two matters related, the not-naming and the joy?
3
* * *
Wir schaffen das
One day in March, Mr. Williams was writing a list of all the verb tenses he had taught his students on the whiteboard (present, present continuous, simple past, past continuous) as Greg and Jaclyn were restocking the food bank. Class was about to begin. Jakleen and Saúl were wrestling to get hold of each other’s cell phones, Lisbeth was preening for another selfie in a revealing gold lace T-shirt, and Hsar Htoo was watching everything while wearing a sunny smile and a black T-shirt that featured white storm troopers from Star Wars. Abigail was sitting by herself, lost in thought, shyly gnawing on a gold-plated ring of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The room had not yet opened up all the way, but there were green shoots of affection going in every direction. Mr. Williams wrote on the whiteboard, USING ADVERBS.
“I really want to help you make sentences that are more complex,” he announced.
The teacher distributed a list of adverbs printed on blue paper: especially, incredibly, superbly, definitely, masterfully, exquisitely, wonderfully, usefully, strongly, extremely, exceedingly, exceptionally, extraordinarily, tremendously, immensely, remarkably, truly, decidedly, highly, particularly. Mr. Williams wrote a simple sentence on the whiteboard: “It was very hot.” He asked how to make that sentence more compelling.
Dilli raised her hand. “Exceedingly,” she said.
Mr. Williams agreed that was an improvement. “If we always use ‘very,’ that kind of makes me go—” He clasped his hands together and laid one cheek against his hands and pretended to fall asleep. “It is boring.”
He had most of the class’s attention, most of them were listening (studiously), but over on one side of the room, Lisbeth, Mariam, and Shani had fallen into a side conversation about whether Lisbeth had a new boyfriend, and were giggling (boisterously). Shani whispered to me (mischievously) that Lisbeth had a beau. I took this to mean that Lisbeth had a crush on a certain boy. He wrote posts on Facebook about his nuclear family or about soccer—Lisbeth did not appear to be much on his mind.
“Mariam? Mariam? Lisbeth?” said Mr. Williams. “Shani, you understand what we are doing?”
The girls looked up. What was Mr. Williams even talking about? They had (absolutely) no idea. Saúl made a blue airplane out of his handout and (daringly) sent it sailing across the room, straight at the girls and their intractable frivolity. Mr. Williams had been talking (dully) about adverbs.
“Mariam, do you understand? You don’t understand? No? We’ll help you.”
Mr. Williams sat down next to Mariam, as Mr. DeRose sat down with Abigail. Abigail (acerbically) wrote a paragraph about how tedious Mr. Williams was today, talking about these stupid things, adverbs. I went over to Lisbeth. She wrote that her summer was “exceptionally” fun because she had gone shopping.
“Good,” I told her (encouragingly). “What did you buy?”
She told me, in Spanish, English, and sign language, that she had bought: zapatos, shirts, and then she pantomimed painting her fingernails. Nail polish, I deduced.
“What are these?” she asked, tapping on the ends of her fingers.
“Those are your fingernails,” I told her. “Or, you can just say ‘nails.’ ”
“Nails?” she asked (incredulously).
“Yup. Nails.”
Jakleen wrote a paragraph about eating cake because it had been her sister’s birthday, although she thought her sister ate too much. Both girls spoke often of controlling their appetites; while Mariam seemed interested in curtailing primarily her own appetite, Jakleen wanted to police her two sisters’ eating habits, too. This would become a theme for the rest of the year, as their personalities emerged, in tandem with their English. Did Mariam and Lulu eat too much, in Jakleen’s opinion?
The following day, noticing that the room had gotten rowdy, Mr. Williams made the students change their seats yet again.
Methusella objected. “No good! I can’t see!”
He meant that his new chair was too far away from the whiteboard. Methusella adopted the habit of leaving his far-off table near the door and wandering over to stand at Mr. Williams’s elbow, as he wrote lessons on the whiteboard. I thought of it as a physical embodiment of how eager Methusella was to learn.
* * *
For the rest of that month, Mr. Williams had the students spend a lot of time reading. After they finished the Hmong fable, he brought out a box filled with folktales from around the world and encouraged the students to choose whatever reading material they wanted. Grace picked Tales of the Shimmering Sky, stories from a variety of countries about heavenly bodies, the seasons, and the weather. Saúl chose Blue Moon Valley, a fable set in China about a girl who leaves her rural home for a big city. Hsar Htoo selected A Tiger by the Tail, fairy tales and legends from Korea, and Yonatan chose Why the Leopard Has Spots, a retelling of a popular African folktale. The students buried themselves in their books for hours on end throughout the rest of the month. Often, the room was entirely still. All I could hear was the sound of pages turning, or, on a warm day, the hum of the fan. At one point, it got so peaceful and lulling that Shani put her head down and fell asleep. Mr. Williams chanted, “Shah-nee! Shah-nee! Shah-nee!” She surged awake with a jolt, her face crinkled and confused. “You need to be reading and writing right now,” he said. “You cannot be sleeping.”
Shani had no idea what was going on and tried to engage Nadia for advice. “You should be writing about your own book,” Mr. Williams told Shani. “Who are the main characters in your book?” That was what they were all supposed to be doing, figuring out their main characters.
In the midst of all this, Abigail leaned way back in her chair, pondering something obscure while staring fixedly at the ceiling. She leaned so far back she assumed a horizontal position and tucked her feet under the table to balance her chair on two legs. Seeing an opportunity to strike, Saúl tiptoed over and tapped Abigail hard on her throat. She was so startled that her chair fell down with a bang and she curled up defensively. Other kids erupted in glee at this spectacle.
Meanwhile, Shan
i did not understand the term “main characters.” I went over to see if I could help. The book she had chosen was Hippo Befriends Fire, a fable from Ghana.
We read the whole thing out loud together and then I asked her, “Who is the main character?”
Shani gave me a blank look.
“Okay, Shani, I’m going to tell you a story,” I said. “Once upon a time, there was a girl named Shani, who came to the United States from Tajikistan and was put into a class with Methusella and Yonatan. Who is the main character of this story?”
Nothing. The look on her face: soft, vulnerable, lost.
“This is a story about Shani. Shani is the main character.”
“Ah!” she said at last, and understanding bloomed on her features.
I tapped her book. “Who is the main character of this story?”
“Hippo!” Shani said delightedly.
And she got busy, writing about that.
“Miss, what’s this word?”
It was Methusella, at my elbow again. These days, I practically had a shadow, he came over so often, to see if I could help him figure things out. The word Methusella did not understand was “hulking.” I asked him if he had ever heard of the Hulk. Big green guy, superhero? He had no idea what I was talking about.
Simplify, I told myself.
“It means really big,” I said.
Methusella drifted away, satisfied. Then, over came Plamedi. He had been watching Methusella seek all the right answers from me and decided he could do the same. Plamedi pointed to a word he did not understand in his book. The word was “hummingbird.” I covered up the word “humming,” showed him “bird.”
“Do you know what that is?” I asked.
“This?” he responded, pointing to a drawing of a bird.
“Yes,” I said. Then I put out my arms and flapped really, really quickly, so that he could see why this particular bird might be described as humming.
“Aha!” said Plamedi. He’d seen those fast little creatures before.
* * *
By March, Miss Pauline was making greater headway in getting the kids to open up emotionally. One day that month, the therapist from Jewish Family Service took half the class away for a group therapy session, as Mr. Williams worked with the remaining students. When the missing students came back, they carried dusty chalk drawings of their colorful inner selves. Miss Pauline announced that the students had made drawings to represent the feelings they had experienced upon coming to America—now that they knew some English words for what was going on inside themselves and had grown used to discussing such things out loud.
Students who wanted to share their work lined up at the front of the room. Nadia had drawn horizontal bars of light blue, rose, green, cream, and gold. She had labeled each of those bars with an emotion: “Anxious,” “Scared,” “Confused,” “Sad,” and “Happy.” She had also drawn unlabeled green star shapes in her light-blue anxiety. Lisbeth had written nothing on her drawing, but it was a dramatic purple gloaming sky, with an enormous black bird swooping through the air. Solomon had sketched a large green circle against a deep blue background, and inside the circle he had written just one word, “Happy.” Mariam had drawn a furious diagonal rainbow, with no words. Jakleen had refused to participate at all.
Then a stunning, shy girl from Africa glided across the room, her face all cheekbones and dignity. She held up a chalk drawing with two words: “Sad” and “Ashamed.”
“Really?” cried Mr. DeRose incredulously.
The girl was so beautiful, and her face looked so fine—it was hard for him to believe her written declaration.
Her face fell. She had disappointed him. Inadvertently, dreadfully.
“No, no, no, no!” Mr. DeRose rushed to say. “It’s okay!”
The girl stared at him, turned around, and walked steadily away, heading off in the other direction.
What exactly had taken place was impossible to record, but I felt a current of feeling move through the room. Maybe something had happened in Africa to make the girl feel those heavy emotions and she had carried them all the way here, or maybe she had arrived light and free and it was her experience of America that had generated her distress. She had elected not to speak with me, so the riddle of what those words meant was hers; I could only watch from a safe distance, while rooting for her to succeed in resolving her unnamed dilemma. I saw that Mr. DeRose felt the same way. That was what he had managed to convey with his blunder: He cared about her well-being. That was what he had conveyed to me, anyway. Communication with the newcomers was so fraught that I could not begin to say what he had conveyed to the girl.
* * *
In the middle of March, while the students were reading their chosen folktales, I drove over to East High School to talk to Jen Hanson, the incoming principal of South. She was going to take over from the in-terim principal at the start of summer break. I described all of the students in Room 142, and she responded that it was unusual there was nobody who was entirely nonliterate. Typically, the newcomer classroom included at least one or two kids who had never learned to read in any language. But that year, Mr. Williams had gotten a roomful of kids who knew how to read and write in at least one language, if not several. Hanson talked about how Mr. Williams’s multilingual students had what linguists call a “literacy road map” in their minds, a concept of how languages worked and how one language varied from another.
Hanson mentioned that her husband was Thai, and her children were bilingual. She had both a professional and a personal understanding of language acquisition. She knew from learning Thai herself that some languages do not make plurals by adding an s, and do not use verbs to show the passage of time. We discussed the main issues that affected the pace of learning for the newcomers: language proximity, interruption of schooling, education of parents, trauma, and motivation. Then Hanson listed an additional factor. I thought it was related to motivation, but she articulated it separately as the “push-pull factor,” or volition. Had a given student showed up in Mr. Williams’s classroom of his or her own choice? Or had the student walked into the room thanks to someone else’s decision making?
Kaee Reh had advocated that his family relocate. He had been walking through the Ban Mai Nai Soi refugee settlement in Thailand, where his family had been living, when he saw a flyer about the possibility of resettlement posted on a bulletin board. Kaee Reh had gone to his parents and suggested that the family resettle in the United States. His parents had been reluctant. They had wanted to stay where they were, in the hope that someday the Karenni people might regain their former place in their homeland of Burma. Later, however, Kaee Reh’s parents had changed their minds. They had come around to their son’s way of thinking. In essence, Kaee Reh himself had instigated the family’s decision to move to the United States.
Hanson was making the point that for a student like Kaee Reh, who had chosen to be in Room 142, language acquisition would happen more easily. Another student who had come to the classroom of her own volition was Abigail, whose mother had left Mexico when she was a small child, leaving Abigail in the custody of her grandmother. Her mother had worked to support them by cleaning apartment buildings in the United States and sending money back to Mexico. It was Abigail who had decided that she wanted to move to Denver, to live with her mother. Abigail told me, “I wanted to meet her, I wanted to know her. And my mother said, ‘Yes.’ ”
Saúl and Lisbeth had also chosen to be in Room 142. I thought that Methusella and Solomon were pleased to have arrived there, and that Plamedi, Grace, Nadia, Dilli, and Hsar Htoo all wanted to be at South. Jakleen and Mariam, not so much. Once they had hoped that living in America would be a positive experience, but after they arrived, at a time when the subject of Muslim refugees figured so largely in the national discourse, they found that leading figures in American culture were overtly hostile to their presence, and they longed to return to Turkey. Amaniel, the boy from Eritrea with a star cut into his hair, also appeared to hav
e reservations about being in Mr. Williams’s class; he seemed to feel it was beneath him. And Bachan still looked as though he would prefer to be anywhere in the universe except a place as alien as the United States. As soon as I grasped the importance of volition, I could see how it affected the motivation of every student in the room.
Before transferring to East, Hanson had been the staff person at South who oversaw the school’s ELA team. The main thing she had tried to convey to the other ELA teachers in her care, including Eddie Williams, had been the importance of using “comprehensible input.” This was a fancy term for making sure the kids knew what you were talking about. The biggest mistake ELA instructors typically made was assuming they could explain things in English to kids who did not understand English. “You can’t just stand up there and lecture at them,” Hanson told me. “You need to make the input comprehensible.”
Eddie Williams remembered being coached by Hanson. When he said, “Open your books,” he folded his hands into a prayer shape and then opened them outward into a book-holding shape, to show the room what he meant. Hanson had taught him the importance of making those gestures. Later that same month, I watched her charm a roomful of Burmese and Bhutanese refugee parents at the aptly named Mercy Housing apartment complex, where she deftly shared stories about her own family, using many hand gestures to make things more comprehensible, as well as a variety of interpreters sprinkled around the room, in a way that communicated to the foreign-born parents her essential respect for their struggle. I left the meeting feeling the same elation as members of the high school’s ELA team—Jen Hanson was inspiring.
* * *
At the end of March, Mr. Williams introduced a unit on U.S. currency, and then he spent many days on the subject of food. After speaking with Hanson, I paid closer attention to those moments when Mr. Williams rendered the incomprehensible comprehensible. For example, he thought it would be a great thing, while introducing the concept of food, to talk about tamales, because the room held so many Spanish speakers. Someone like Abigail might not understand English words for food, but she would know all about tamales. Mr. Williams’s Spanish was imperfect, however, because he had learned the language as an adult. When he wrote the singular for “tamales” as “tamale,” Saúl spoke up to correct him.
