by Michelle Kuo
My neck burned; a knot grew hard in my stomach. It was against my rules to put your head down. The students watched and saw my weakness.
“If you don’t lift your head,” I said, trying to sound firm, “you’re going to get a zero.”
Finally David muttered, “Nobody want to see that.”
The moment he said it, I knew, instantly, that I had failed to understand something essential. In the tone of his voice, in the sudden change of his demeanor, he was telling me that I had crossed a line. I retrieved the photo from his desk, and even a quick glance at it made my heart skip a beat. It looked different now, something I didn’t at all recognize; some other teacher must have found it, printed it, and passed it out.
I walked to the front of the class and resumed my place at the board. I wrote some words idly, so that my back could be turned and the kids could not see my face. My chest was exploding. How could I be so casual or, worse, smug about a lynching? I had confronted them with their history, treating it like a secret whose exposure would transport them to a painful but necessary enlightenment. I’d meant to be daring and transgressive in bringing up the history of violence against black people. But maybe David and the others wanted school to be a refuge from that memory.
I had expected to be guilty of other things—of sentimentalizing their conditions, of patronizing them with my sympathy. But I didn’t expect to be smug. Here, look, learn, says the smiling teacher with mysterious motives; learn about your history or get a zero.
After class, I put the photograph facedown in my drawer and never looked at it again.
2
* * *
The Free Write
I BEGAN MY SECOND YEAR OF teaching in the same fog of discouragement that I’d ended my first. Except now I was even more sick for a bagel, a bookstore, a movie theater, a coffee shop. Increasingly, I spent Saturdays driving the seventy-two miles to Memphis, Tennessee. Despite its storied history, what mattered most to me was that Memphis was a city. With traffic, and traffic lights! Coffee shops, happy hours, Thai food, parking lots, tower cranes, families out for walks, young people dressed up with somewhere to go, Asians! Cars honked, drivers lurched, the city sang; you knew, deep in your heart, that somewhere not too far away a store was selling tofu. In blighted areas, graffiti shouted joyfully from the walls; for all the poverty in Helena, you never saw it. Even a mediocre tag, I grasped with a jolt, suggested a loftier youth malcontent than the one in Helena: a spirit of public rebellion, a confidence about who your enemy was (property, society, state, the man), a thrill in using color to demand that people see you, even the wherewithal to get spray paint.
Meanwhile, the nicer pockets of the city offered a different kind of wasteland, where you could feel passionate about consumption and empowered by anonymity. At the café in a Barnes & Noble, a man cut me in line—in the rare cases where there was a line in Helena, nobody cut—and, recovering from my shock, I leapt to action. “Apologize!” I yelled at him, in a teacherly way. What did I care? I’d never see him again, which was probably what he’d been thinking. “Apologize!” I repeated, louder, unhinged. The man looked chagrined—it was unclear whether on my behalf or his own. “I apologize,” he said meekly. At the counter I greedily ordered a muffin. And a coffee. And a fizzy drink, just for the hell of it.
In this café, marveling at how spacious and airy and clean everything was, I pecked out law school applications on my laptop, occasionally stopping to eavesdrop. I’d decided that law school would give me a semi-respectable excuse to leave the Delta behind. My self-interest was not unmixed with idealism. Ever since I’d studied the Civil Rights Movement, I’d admired the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and wanted to work there; the stories of lawyers and their battle to desegregate the South in the 1950s and 1960s had drawn me to the Delta in the first place. But, also, I was just desperate to get out of there.
Then something happened. I started to like the Delta. One Sunday I went to a student’s church, a clapboard shack crammed with people in dresses and suits and big hats, and clapped and danced and sweated. Another time I spent all afternoon just taking pictures of the kudzu wilding up the telephone poles—strange, gorgeous, improbable triangles of thick green. I stopped going to Memphis every weekend. I added ice to my tea and drank from my mug on my porch, in arm’s reach of a blooming fig tree, from which I could pluck dessert.
In the classroom I had finally learned how to banter with students and assert authority with ease. In late September, a student interrupted a lesson to ask me if I was related to Yao Ming. I looked at him coolly, letting the silence hang. Finally I said:
“You related to Kobe Bryant?”
The other students started guffawing—at him, not at me.
“Ms. Kuo, that be racist,” he tried, affronted.
“Think about it,” I said. And I continued with the lesson.
When I called my parents to tell them I’d applied to law school, they were intrigued. They didn’t know any lawyers themselves, but they liked the sound of it. Nobody messed with lawyers. Getting sued was one of their chief associations of America before they arrived, and living here reinforced it. But it had never occurred to them that their daughter could be the one suing.
Now they asked, with enthusiasm, “If you get in, you’ll leave Arkansas, right?”
For me their excitement was a clue: If they liked an idea, maybe I should be suspicious of it.
“I guess I’d leave,” I said.
“Good. You won’t have kids making those Chinese sounds at you,” my dad said.
“They were bad kids,” my mother said, laughing, as if I had already left and the kids were just memories from my past.
I felt immediately that I had erred in portraying my students. I must have complained too much. I considered admitting to my parents that I hadn’t applied to law school for the right reasons, that I was starting to make a life in the Delta with my students, and that I’d begun to find ways to reach them. But it seemed like a lot of trouble to explain these little triumphs to my parents. I wanted them to like and respect me. Law school and the prospect of my departure seemed to have cheered them up, and I decided not to ruin it.
—
PATRICK HAD BEEN in my class since the beginning of the year, but he was quiet, and it was easy to miss quiet students. He always chose a seat in the back and kept his head low. His voice was low, too. “Patrick, could you speak up?” I often heard myself saying—at which he smiled slightly, as if I had said something funny. He seemed at once distracted and alert. His eyes searched the walls of the room, seeking a place to settle. A couple of times, from his seat, he reached his arm out to touch a nearby bookshelf, knocking on it softly to see what it sounded like. And he was empathetic. Once, a student slapped another, lightly, on the back of the head. Patrick winced and looked away, as if he’d been slapped himself.
There were students who no longer interested me, in whom I’d found a hard, mean edge. My fifteen-year-old student Ray was one of these. One teacher said, “He’s always got an ugly face on, don’t he?” Another told me, “Don’t even try—the devil’s already got him.” Even though what he needed was a counselor, I did try for a while. I felt hope when Ray stole a poster of mine, a Picasso Blue Period in which a blind man is eating; I thought it must have moved him. Once, I got him to write a poem. But those acts were anomalies; generally he was impenetrable. He never laughed, even if the whole class was keeling over about something funny. He put his head down a lot, and if you tried to talk to him, he called you a bitch and told you to get the fuck away. Rumor had it that his mother was an addict and, unlike a lot of the kids, he appeared to have no grandparents in his life. And still I got tired of trying to show him I was on his side.
By my second year teaching, I had started to regard students in a utilitarian way: Who would respond with enormous success to just a little adult interest? Few students answered that question better than Patrick. He wanted to try; he was thirsty for encouragement, yet he had failing g
rades. Patrick could excel if somebody was there to push him every minute. But he kept missing classes. Now I knew why he’d been sent to Stars; he simply did not come to school.
In December, he’d missed so many classes that I was worried, concerned he would fail his upcoming exams. I called Patrick’s house. I wanted to know why he was absent. A male voice said, “Pat’s sick,” and hung up. Worried that Patrick had dropped out, I decided to go find him.
Patrick lived in the “ghetto in a ghetto,” as my students called it, where the shootings were so frequent that the city council had threatened to impose a curfew. Most of the neighborhood’s house numbers had faded, and many of the houses were vacant. A group of teenage boys walked down the middle of the street, challenging cars to swerve around them. I drove back and forth, lost, until finally I gave up and pulled over. A boy rode by on his bike, and I asked him if he knew where Patrick Browning lived. “Pat stay right there.” He pointed to a small square house with a porch, just a few feet away.
I knocked on the screen door. It was dark inside. A man in an undershirt got up slowly from the couch and limped to the door.
“I’m Patrick’s teacher, Ms. Kuo,” I said, through the screen. “I think we’ve spoken on the phone before?”
He looked at me. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. Then he dropped back into the darkness.
Another figure approached. It was Patrick. His face emerged into the sunlight and, seeing it was me, he smiled—a huge, boyish glow at being noticed, at being favored. He suddenly seemed years younger. Then, with a twitch, he remembered he hadn’t come to school.
He said very fast, “The bus didn’t come.” Then he looked away. He knew he wasn’t a good liar.
“I missed the bus.”
Then, “I’m sorry, Ms. Kuo.”
We sat on the porch.
“Doesn’t…doesn’t anybody”—I turned to make sure the front door was closed—“make you come to school?”
“It ain’t on them, it’s on me. They tell me to, you know, but sometimes I just don’t really feel like…” He trailed off. “My mother, she real busy; she’s always at work. And my daddy, you know…”
He stopped, not wanting to say anything bad about his father.
“How did you end up at Stars, anyway?” I asked.
“I got in an accident when I was eleven,” he began. “Gas was cheap, a dollar for a gallon, and I had a whole gallon of gas. I was just playing in the backyard, pouring gas onto some sticks on the ground. Just pouring gas for fun, really. I wasn’t thinking about gas being flammable. It was real stupid. I ignited a whole jug; it flew into a fire. I looked down and my pants were burning. Pretty quick the whole yard was on fire. Lucky my sisters, they was there, and they got a towel.”
I had been in the Delta long enough not to be surprised that he was in the backyard casually starting a fire. There wasn’t much to do in Helena besides going to Walmart, and boredom kept you from thinking straight. It wasn’t malicious. It was the opposite. He was trying to find something to do that wouldn’t bother anybody.
It reminded me of Richard Wright, who, at the opening of Black Boy, starts a similar project. The son of a sharecropper, Wright had grown up in the Delta and spent several years in Helena in the 1910s. Four-year-old Wright had ached with boredom as he watched the coals burn in the fireplace. An idea of a new kind of game grew and took root in my mind, he wrote. Why not throw something into the fire and watch it burn?…Who would bother about a few straws, he thought, tearing a batch from an old broom. The fire rewarded his attention; it crackled and blazed. My idea was growing, blooming. How would the fluffy white curtains look, he wondered, if he held lit straws against them? Soon, to his fright, the house was in flames.
Patrick looked down at his leg, stained by burn marks in large, irregular splotches. “I was in the hospital for maybe weeks, out of school for months. Teachers was supposed to bring work to my house but never did.” His voice was flat, not angry, as if such failure was ordinary. “The hospital got a TV, and I saw the towers go down.”
The towers: It was jarring to connect him to 9/11, or to any national experience, and for a moment I realized that, in my mind, the Delta existed as a place disconnected from the rest of the country.
“I had to learn how to walk again. Bed rest for two or three months. I got behind. I had to do seventh again. And then eighth. Then I got sent to Stars.”
I tried to imagine his life at home. His mother would have been at work during the day. Something was going on with his father. Maybe he had gotten used to a dull kind of freedom, looking out the window, flipping through channels, watching other dropouts on the street, getting cheap weed. The structure of school must have seemed alien.
“I saw you break up a fight,” I said. “Why did you do that?”
An immense line creased his forehead and he looked down. “May is my cousin. Liana was my neighbor. I don’t want to see my cousin get in a fight with my neighbor. I don’t like to see people fight. Why? And we’re all in alternative school, so it don’t make sense. Maybe they just ready to give up on life; that’s the only reason I can think of.”
I nodded, and then handed him a postcard of Rodin’s Thinker. I’d written him a note on the back, saying the statue reminded me of him.
He looked at the picture carefully, holding the corners with his fingertips. “Thank you, Ms. Kuo.”
I’d chosen him to go on a field trip that weekend. Would he like to join?
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. I handed him a permission slip.
“Thank you, Ms. Kuo,” he said. “Thank you.”
I told him to stop thanking me.
I told him I knew he could make it through the eighth grade.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, in a soft, low voice.
I told him I would work hard for him, but that he would need to work hard, too, through a lot of small steps.
“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, this time turning his head slightly so that his eyes met mine. It was getting dark and there were no streetlights. Yet his eyes offered a small, certain source of light. I wondered if mine did, too.
I told him I’d like to see him in school tomorrow; did he plan to come?
From the way he nodded, in that serious way of his, I knew that he would.
I told him I would be at the ceremony when he graduated from high school. At that, he grinned. He had a gap between his front teeth that I hadn’t noticed before.
Hearing myself make this promise out loud stirred me, made me want to stay in the Delta. This was who I would be: a person who stayed.
When I stood up and started walking toward the street, he seemed surprised, as if he felt I was being careless.
“It ain’t safe here, Ms. Kuo.” He followed me past the porch, and I realized he was escorting me to my car.
—
MS. RILEY WAS my one good friend at Stars. She sang gospel, quoted the Bible and Tyler Perry, and made chicken dumplings that she shared with me over lunch, occasionally feeding a spoonful straight into my mouth. Gentle with me, she was tough on the students. Once, a pair of girls had torn up a roll of toilet paper and scattered it across the bathroom; she confiscated the rest of the rolls. “The good will go with the bad,” she’d said, like a prophet, the streamer of loose tissue dangling behind her like a banner. Officially Ms. Riley was a “teacher’s assistant,” but as often happened in the Delta, where teacher shortages were severe, assistants taught classes. Ms. Riley taught reading.
Over lunch one afternoon, Ms. Riley read the audit report released by our new superintendent. “Fools been running the town, Ms. Kuo,” she said as I leaned over her shoulder to read.
In Helena it is the rare person, black or white, who attempts to defend the public schools. Each year brought a new disgrace. In my first year teaching, our test scores were among the lowest in Arkansas. In my second year, 2005, the Arkansas Department of Education seized power over the Helena school district, deposed our superintendent, and dispatched its own repla
cement from Little Rock to investigate financial corruption. Among other scandals revealed by the audit was the allegation that an administrator received a raise, unauthorized by the school board, from $90,000 to $124,997 in one year. First-year teachers made around $27,000. Assistants made less than half of that.
“Have you seen Ms. Madden around?” I asked.
“Ain’t seen her all week,” Ms. Riley said.
The attendance record of Ms. Madden, our principal, rivaled that of our worst students. Her major contribution to the school thus far had been to change its name from Stars to Hope. Months later she would change the name back to Stars, for reasons I never figured out, and a decade later she would be indicted for embezzling over a million dollars from a federal food program that gave money to hungry children. But at the time she was just a twenty-seven-year-old woman who, in addition to her job at Stars, ran a daycare program.
Our fourth principal in a year, Ms. Madden would last the longest. Our first, and best, Dr. Rankin, had gotten her Ph.D. in counseling children and forged real relationships with students who landed in her office. Within months of my arrival, she had been “transferred” to the Transportation Services—overseeing the buses. She had been replaced by a Mr. Horton, an assistant superintendent whose assignment to Stars was intended as a punishment for cooperating with the state’s investigation of financial corruption. He sued or threatened suit, and then he, too, left Stars, only to be replaced by Mrs. Eckleson, who lasted a few months. Students referred to days when a principal was absent as “free days”—days when rules were lax and they could test boundaries. They hid in the bathroom during class, let out screams in the cafeteria, and tried to provoke fights; the clever ones stopped short of anything that would get them in serious trouble. And any kid could see that teachers, having nobody to hold us accountable, became lazier. We left campus earlier and didn’t try as hard.
My friend, Ms. Riley, had grown up in Helena, and she talked a lot about what life had been like during segregation. Buses carrying white children would splatter mud all over the black children as they walked to school, but they didn’t care: They walked together; they had one another. No neighbor ever stole, no door had to be locked; if you went out and forgot you left your clothes drying on the line, a neighbor would see them flying and bring them into your house and not a thing of yours would be gone. Children respected parents; parents respected education. According to Ms. Riley, integration had ruined a lot of it. Black teachers, generally not welcome to teach at newly integrated white schools, lost jobs, while white teachers kept theirs. When Central integrated, administrators began to offer alternatives to paddling, because they didn’t want the few black teachers who’d found jobs to whip a white child. And, anyway, white families had started DeSoto, so what had been the point of it all? Helena had been better off segregated.
