by Michelle Kuo
Trying to make sense of Ms. Riley’s words, I recognized that they were more than mere nostalgia. In a neighboring Delta school that had undergone integration in 1968, I’d read, the school board had closed the all-black school and refused to rehire its black teachers. The teachers sued, but the judge dismissed the suit, writing, This is another instance where a school system has accomplished integration as required by Law, which unfortunately resulted in adjustment that caused certain of the teachers to become victims of the “constitutionally required process.” It was not hard to detect his disdain for integration and his apathy at the prospect of punishing black teachers for it.
—
AROUND THE SAME TIME PATRICK went missing, I had discovered one fail-safe. It was the “I Am” poem.
I am
I feel
I wonder
I hear
I see
I understand
I say
I dream
I try
I hope
I want
I pretend
I cry
The poem has a deceptively simple structure. It looks like easy credit: Fill in the blanks. But it was a trick. It forced you into self-reflection. What do you know about yourself? What do you want, what have you lost? It required tough students to cop to an internal life. If you asked them these things out loud, they’d laugh at you.
Once they started working on the poem, nearly every student wanted to write about somebody they’d lost or feared losing. And I could tell, by their eagerness to talk, that it wasn’t often that they met an outsider who found their trauma novel or their stories freshly sad. Though their vocabularies were limited, everyone seemed to know the words heart disease and diabetes. A grandparent’s death was devastating, because he or she was often the main caretaker. The stories could be dramatic. A pastor impregnated a student’s cousin, who was fifteen or sixteen. A stepdad, high on heroin, threw battery acid on his stepdaughter, and she lost a leg. An alcoholic playing with a gun accidentally shot and killed his niece.
Aaron, a bright, wiry kid, one of my best students, took to the assignment immediately. “Can I write about my nephew?” he asked. “He’s two and already going bad.”
“You’re so great,” I said, confused about why he was even at Stars. “Why were you sent here?”
I assumed it was marijuana.
“Fighting.”
“Really? I can’t tell.”
At this he brightened. “Miller was messing me up,” he said. “It’s easy to get into it out there.”
For all of Stars’s problems, its small classroom size was perhaps what Aaron needed. At Stars, he said, “You see everything.” What did he mean, everything? I had asked. “How much help people really need,” he replied.
Aaron spoke in a clinical manner, as if he did not belong to the body of students who needed help but rather was assessing them distantly. And I realized that small class sizes were not just beneficial for the obvious reason—that larger classrooms ignored, worsened, and evicted the problem student. For a student like Aaron, who lived on the borderline of success and failure, the small classroom provided a magnifying glass with which to evaluate his peers: What did they want, what ticked them off, how did they lose their tempers, what help did they take or choose not to take? Seeing these possible mirrors of himself allowed him to realize he wanted to be different.
At Stars I never saw him fight; he remained, in all ways, an ideal student. He was bright, he was curious, and he had perfect attendance. In his house, attendance was “not optional,” he’d said, and he showed up even when he had a cold. His mother and grandma had both graduated from high school, and they expected the same from him. This—regular attendance—would turn out to be one of the most basic predictors of success for my students at Stars.
For his “I Am” poem, Aaron wrote: I hear everyone cursing around me, so I curse, as well / I see my aunts and uncles fighting all the time, so do as I see / I cry when I get a whooping for cursing all the time / I try to be good, but I always find some trouble to get in / I hope one day I will break out of my hard shell and be somebody new.
Sitting next to Aaron was Tamir, who looked afraid. He peered at Aaron’s paper, as though this was the kind of assignment one could copy. I went to him. His paper was blank except for his name. His handwriting was tiny, nearly imperceptible—a common technique, I’d begun to realize, to protect oneself from correction.
In a low voice, not wanting other students to hear, he said, “I don’t know what to put.”
“Sure you do.” I kneeled down to the desk. This had become my favorite part about teaching: the prodding, the slow prying apart of words, the transfer of mind to page.
“How about this one?” I pointed to I see.
“Ms. Kuo,” he said, “things I see ain’t nothing worth talking about.”
I fell silent. We looked at each other, his eyes serious and bright. He wanted to write. He had gone through a lot, things that I could never really know about. I wished there was a way to tell him, I know I don’t know you. But I want so much for you, and that is real.
“I’ll bet there’s somebody in your life who really means something to you,” I said.
Tamir blinked. There was someone. He hedged, deciding whether he should say it out loud. “My auntie,” he said finally. “But she passed.” Now he looked at me questioningly, unsure whether her death disqualified her from being seen.
“But I’ll bet you still see her.”
Tamir lit up at that thought.
He asked, “How you spell aunt?” and I spelled it.
He wrote: I see aunt happy in haven with here father.
“How about this, Ms. Kuo?” He pointed to I wonder.
I said, “There’s no right answer. It just has to be something you really feel, the kind of thing you fall asleep thinking about, you know.” Then I stood up and said loudly, so that others could hear, “You’ve got this.” He nodded.
He wrote: I am red like the sun as it rises / I hear a dog barking as I try to fall asleep / I pretend I don’t feel anything / I wonder if I am going to live to be eighteen.
After Tamir finished his last line, he read the whole poem to himself. Then he asked if he could use my computer to type it.
Miles, an eighth grader freshly dumped from Miller, was also reluctant. He’d arrived to Stars with a reputation: My friend Vivian, who taught at Miller, had said a couple teachers were ready to throw a party when he left. But he seemed fine at first. He dressed neatly. His shirt was always tucked in; his pants never sagged.
“Get out of my face, China woman,” he said when I neared him. Then he made a mocking sound, ching chong, and stared at me to see what reaction he’d produced.
I simply gave Miles a rueful look, affecting a distant sadness, as if he had hurt himself. Then I said, “At the end of this class period”—here I pointed to the clock deliberately, slowly—“you’re going to apologize to me for insulting my heritage. And it’s going to feel great.”
In the background, students snickered. “Ms. Kuo got him good.”
I was used to the Asian-mimicking sounds by now. The first time a student had made them, my stomach cramped. I thought of my grandfather, who had walked me to school every morning of the second grade, even in the stinging winter cold. He was twice an immigrant: born in China and rendered a refugee in Taiwan after 1949, he had recently arrived in the United States. One day, classmates made similar sounds at him, singsong and grotesque. I begged him to stop walking to school with me. Eventually we compromised; he agreed to walk behind me.
Now I had enough experience to hide the memory. My lack of anger appeared to calm Miles.
“Did you know my brother?” he asked. “He went to Stars.”
“Who’s your brother?”
“Brandon Clark.”
My heart fell. Brandon had been one of my first students. He was the one who had been killed robbing the flower shop. On New Year’s Day, he’
d gone into the shop with two other kids, including a quiet student of mine named William. The third, supposedly the ringleader, had pointed a BB gun at the elderly couple who owned the shop. But the husband had a real gun and emptied a clip of five rounds. The kids scrambled. One bullet hit the back of Brandon’s head just as he reached the door. He’d been holding the bag of money and it went flying: The total amount stolen was one hundred and three dollars.
Days after Brandon died, I had asked students to write about him and how his death made them feel. Somehow Ms. Jasper, a teacher’s assistant who had recently paddled a sixteen-year-old with severe learning disabilities, caught wind of what I was doing. She burst into my room.
“Chickens coming home to roost, Ms. Kuo,” she yelled. “You telling the students that it be okay what Brandon doing. A boy got hisself shot and you’re writing little poems about it.”
I was dazed. The students stopped writing. Was she right? Was writing silly? Did it do little more than endorse Brandon’s crime? I hesitated. Ms. Jasper came from the same generation as Ms. Riley. She believed in the vital black community that seemed, in the past three decades, to have lost its moral high ground. In her eyes, to write about Brandon was to grieve Brandon, and to grieve Brandon was to claim his innocence. By having students write, by authorizing emotions other than shame, I had authorized Brandon’s robbery. For her, shame was a source of dignity.
The flower-shop owner who killed Brandon had not been arrested. He claimed self-defense. It was Miles who would later doubt the veracity of my poster of black and white protesters together in the March on Washington.
“Brandon was a good person,” I said to Miles, right as the bell rang.
He examined my face to see if I was lying.
—
TRUE TO HIS word, Patrick came to school soon after I visited him at home. And then he began to come every day. He’d get off the bus holding his books in that lost way of his, as if his arrival was a mistake, but now that he was present, he did well. You never had to worry that he’d erupt over somebody picking on him and get sent to the office to be whacked by the wooden paddle.
I had asked the students to tape their “I Am” poems on the walls, to make them proud of their own writing. Then I noticed something surprising: They wanted to read one another’s work. Certain students—who, during my attempts at collective reading, put their heads down or slapped the head of a studious classmate, trying to keep him from “being good,” as they called it—would now stand attentively in front of a classmate’s poem, tracing the line methodically with an index finger, not saying a word.
“This is good,” one of them would finally say. And then, often, they gave the same reason: “This is real.” Patrick, like many of the others, read every piece of student work.
After I’d watched them do this for a few days, I suddenly realized what I had been doing wrong. I had not tried to sell reading. I had not spelled out how a book could be personal and urgent—that it was like an “I Am” poem. Besides A Raisin in the Sun, students still had not connected with any book I had assigned. So I tried a new tack.
“You all talk about fronting,” I said to them. “What do you mean when you say that word?”
“It’s when someone pretends to be all that.”
“It’s like being fake.”
“It’s when somebody tells you one thing but doesn’t do what they say.”
“It’s when somebody clowns, trying to get attention.”
I wrote on the board, People think I’m _____ but I’m really _____. I asked them to fill in the blanks. They wrote:
People think I don’t care, but I really love my mom and want to make her proud.
People think I don’t want to learn, but I want to get my education.
People think I’m dumb, but I’m really smart.
People think I’m evil, but I’m not.
Patrick wrote, People think I don’t care, but I do.
“We all front,” I said. “You know why I love to read? It’s because books don’t front.”
They were listening—it was working.
“You can hear what people are thinking in books,” I continued. “They do crazy things, but you can figure out how they feel. You get to figure out what’s happening to them on the inside.”
We talked about what it meant to see only the outside of people. I asked, “Why do people keep their insides hidden?” The responses were painfully insightful, and the most common was a variation on this one: “People are afraid that if they’re honest about what they want, they won’t get it.”
I realized that I needed also to give them a sense of ownership over the people and stories in these books. I researched black writers for teenagers: Walter Dean Myers, Sharon Flake, Sharon Draper, Sister Souljah, Nikki Grimes, Jacqueline Woodson. I ordered these books and then I read them. I felt these writers knew better than I did what stories the kids needed. The heroes were people who looked like them, talked like them, and faced the problems they faced. In Tears of a Tiger, by Sharon Draper, Andy, a teenager, blames himself for his best friend’s death. In Jazmin’s Notebook, by Nikki Grimes, Jazmin, fourteen, is her mother’s primary caretaker. In Begging for Change, by Sharon Flake, Raspberry has to decide whether or not to welcome her estranged father back into her life. A state fund for new teachers had given me eight hundred dollars for the classroom, and I spent it all on these books.
“Ms. Kuo, why are you bothering? You know they ain’t going to read them,” Coach Dodd yelled from his window, watching me lug a box to my classroom. Coach Dodd was the recently hired “guidance counselor.” An assistant football coach at the high school, he was sent to Stars because he needed a faculty position. If you asked him how he was doing, he always said, “Same crap, different toilet.”
I tried, like a matchmaker, to help students find books they might like. Demand grew, word passed quickly about which books were good, and my shelves were plundered. Pretty soon I saw these books clutched to chests and carried from class to class. The students guarded them like amulets. New readers pored over the books, whose inside covers gradually acquired territorial graffiti—This a good book, JG. “Who’s JG?” they’d ask, pondering. When they figured it out, they were often shocked.
“Jasmine loved it,” I’d respond briskly.
Worn and read, the books were gathering dignity.
Did the students know, I wondered, how they looked when they read? Concentrated, absorbed, serious. I took their pictures. This was before camera phones, so real suspense built as they waited for me to get my film developed. And when I brought the photographs in to class, they studied these unexpected portraits of themselves.
I decorated the walls with their pictures, which, like watchful spirits, seemed to encourage us. We finished one book after another, charting the number of pages read by coloring in rectangles on a grid hung on the wall. Silent reading became an institution in my class. Among the best qualities of silent reading, I was learning, was that it was impossible to guess who would be good at it. You could never know the quiet a person craved. Kayla, recently sent to jail for fighting, enforced silent reading most strictly. When a student disturbed the peace with whispering, Kayla stiffened and threw a piercing glare. Liana and May, the same girls whose fight Patrick had recently tried to end, curled up in adjacent beanbags, as if silent reading was a kind of cease-fire.
—
EVERY MORNING I AWOKE AT five. I prepared lessons, I graded quizzes, I drove to school at six-thirty and waited in the parking lot for the janitor to open the gate. I developed weird habits around food. At school I didn’t eat, and at home I was always eating. I gained a lot of weight; I lost a lot of weight. I talked to myself, in my head, all the time. How I’d screwed up or what I’d done well. Sometimes I found that I was talking to my students. I talked to them, by myself, out loud. “I know you know better,” I’d catch myself saying into space, or “This writing is beautiful.”
My notebooks were strange, filled with often
-contradictory self-exhortations and resolutions. Be kind. Don’t be afraid to be mean. Sometimes the notes read as if I had joined a cult: Change is happening every day. No spiritual work is ever wasted. And there were notes from Dostoevsky that felt directly relevant: Work tirelessly. If, as you are going to sleep at night, you remember: “I did not do what I ought to have done,” arise at once and do it. On my less-frequent jaunts to Memphis bookstores, I found myself browsing the self-help aisle for books like Staying Positive or How to Unclutter Your Life, the latter of which I bought and subsequently lost under piles of papers, books, and clothes in my filthy house. I had neither the time nor the inclination to clean. When flies bred in the kitchen, I simply put up sticky squares of flypaper, which collected so many victims that they tumbled off the tape and onto the counter.
—
“MR. THOMPSON,” I said.
Mr. Thompson, the permanent substitute history teacher, didn’t turn around. He was playing Minesweeper. It had been nearly a year since the history teacher quit, and the school still hadn’t found a replacement.
During my free period, I sometimes tried to track down students who had been absent. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Patrick and Miles on the computers, watching music videos, their large headphones like earmuffs.
