by Michelle Kuo
“Do you mind if I steal Miles and Patrick to make up work they’ve missed?”
Frowning at the screen, eyes fixed on the numbered squares, Mr. Thompson was immobile, his index finger on the mouse the only sign of life. “Ms. Kuo,” he said, not moving, “you know you don’t need to ask me for permission. Take ’em all, if you want.”
Miles and Patrick followed me back to my room and sat at desks next to each other. I slid into a third desk and rotated it so that I faced them both.
I gave them their writing folders. Miles was angry that I had taken him away from his free time. He knocked the folder off the desk. Then he sneered.
“Don’t tell me I got an attitude,” he said. “I don’t got no attitude. What I got is nobody.”
Patrick, bent over at his desk, glanced up. “That ain’t no reason to disrespect everybody.”
Miles stiffened. He looked up to Patrick. Patrick never teased people, never bothered them—not about their appearance, not about who their family was, not if they struggled with reading.
Others looked up to Patrick, too. “Patrick don’t pick,” someone said. And it was true. He kept to himself. He seemed a lot older than Miles, even though both were now sixteen.
“We all got our problems,” Patrick said. “My uncle, he killed my great-auntie over some crack. Over some stupid high. How do you think that feels? But see, here, people around you just trying to help you. Ms. Kuo, people like her don’t come ’round every day.” They both looked at me, diminutive at my desk. “She ain’t trying to hurt nobody, she trying to help. You gotta take that help now, before they give up on you.”
Miles blinked.
Patrick continued, “Because they gonna give up on you in a few years. Trust me, I know.”
Miles looked down. Nobody spoke.
Patrick stared at the wall of windows, where the sun shone through our mounted pages of vocabulary words, each word distinct in marker—jubilant, diligent, grave. He had used that phrase again: give up. How had he put it before, when we were sitting on his porch, about the kids fighting? “Maybe they just ready to give up on life.” How did he know that feeling so well at sixteen?
But he seemed fine at the moment, and I needed time alone with Miles. I nodded at Patrick, gesturing toward the beanbags. That meant silent reading. He nodded back and went to our shelf to choose a book. I saw him touching spine after spine, trying to decide.
“Hey,” I said to Miles. His arms were crossed. “When you’re ready to write, just say, I’m ready, Ms. Kuo. And I’ll be right here.” Miles tilted his head down at the paper, at the blank spaces next to the simple prompts: I am, I feel. Perhaps, like Tamir, he honestly didn’t know how to finish these sentences. I took a risk and brought up his brother.
“You miss Brandon?”
He nodded, then turned away. “I can’t look at my mama in the eye, ’cause I know she thinking about her son. Thinking about all the shit he done, wondering if I end up the same way.”
“Do you think you’ll…you’ll end up the same way?”
“I don’t know the future,” he said tersely. “Only God know.”
Miles swallowed; he’d said too much. Now he was determined to say nothing. We each waited in silence for the other to speak. I broke.
“I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you write an ‘I Am’ poem for your brother?” I said.
“How?” he asked, in spite of himself.
“Where do you think Brandon is now?”
“Heaven.” He didn’t hesitate.
“What’s he doing there?”
“Having fun.”
“There. You just got your first line.”
This made him smile, but the smile disappeared as soon as he glanced at the first blank. His face twisted—he didn’t know what to do.
I said, “How about, I am Brandon Clark in heaven and having fun. Hurry and write it, before you lose it.”
He wrote.
“What I do now?” he asked simply. The next line read, I feel.
“Well, how do you think he’s feeling right now, up there?” And we talked through the lines like this for the rest of the hour.
Occupied by Miles, I had forgotten to talk to Patrick. This was like Patrick—he didn’t demand your attention. I wondered what book he’d chosen. Knowing this would make me feel as if I hadn’t lost track of him.
On the way to lunch, I spotted him carrying The Wonderful Wizard of Oz under his arm.
—
MY PARENTS CALLED later that day. “Have you heard from law schools?” they asked by way of greeting. I had almost forgotten that I’d applied and now resented being reminded.
“Thanks for asking about my day,” I said.
“How was your day?” they asked.
—
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, Miles returned to my room—during lunch, during breakfast, or during “free periods” where teachers let them sleep or play on the computer. He had never worked so hard in my class before. He kept revising and revising again. “This be spelled right, Ms. Kuo?” he asked. “This sound good?”
In objective terms, the poem was sentimental. It was written in simple language. It should not have taken so long to write. He should have known how to spell heaven, everyone, misses; he should have known what a comma was. But in terms of where he had begun—his distrust of writing, his grief about his brother, his aggressive outbursts—the poem was a triumph.
I hear my mom pray every night about how she misses me / I want nothing to happen to my little brother the way it happened to me / I tell my mom, Keep your head up and stay strong, because I am getting good care in heaven / I worry about nothing because Jesus has my back / I cry and Jesus comes and wipes my tears from my face / I try to make it in the NBA in heaven / I hope everyone is not worried about me / I am Brandon in heaven, having fun.
I drove to Kinko’s in Memphis to have the poem enlarged to a gigantic 36-by-44-inch size—as large as the classroom’s posters of Malcolm X and James Baldwin—and hung it in the front of my classroom. Next to it was an eight-by-ten photograph of Miles smiling. And every morning for the next few weeks, before classes even started, he would drop in to look at my wall, making sure his photograph and poem were still there. “You love that poem I wrote, don’t you, Ms. Kuo?”
I did. “Of course I do.”
His mother later told me that she had laid the poem on Brandon’s headstone.
—
“WE ARE GOING TO KEEP writing poems,” I told them.
“This isn’t real work, Ms. Kuo,” said Gina, a quick-minded, spirited girl who’d gotten into fights at Miller because people made fun of her weight.
Gina wasn’t the first to say this about our creative work. Like others, she thought grammar worksheets were “real work,” likely because they were tedious. I ignored her and smiled. Then I asked the kids to think of metaphors for hope. We brainstormed. A candle, a window; a patch of light, a playground; a tree because it looks up, a hole a dog digs.
Patrick began to write. He tilted his face close to the paper, nearly crouching. He wrote with his left hand; it moved across the page, smudging ink on the side of his palm. I peered over his shoulder, but he was concentrating so deeply he didn’t notice that I was there. His paper was full of words crossed out. He crossed out mind and wrote blank mind. Each word presented difficulty: It didn’t express what he felt; it didn’t look good; it wasn’t spelled right. Every word that failed him, he viewed as a personal failure––he wrote like a writer.
“Ms. Kuo, how you spell drought?” he said. “Never mind.” He got up to get the dictionary.
Finally, he brought me the result.
Pat is a dog
an animal in the streets
with a blank mind.
In a collar in the yard,
cooped up behind a fence,
no master to train him or feed him
Always finds his own way.
Judged as some low-life creature,
Not trusted nowhe
re but
Around other dogs.
Valued only by a price.
Half-dead from
the drought,
Thirsty for water.
I was dumbstruck. This, his first effort, was, in some fundamental way, a real poem.
Patrick wrote his title last: The Neighborhood Beast. He stretched his neck, making a loud crack, and I realized how hard writing could really be. Physically, it changed you. You forgot to breathe. Your hand hurt. Your shoulders were sore. But it carried emotional challenges, as well. You risked a lot when you decided to write. You took off a mask. You said, I feel these things; now tell me I’m silly. You said, I tried to make sense of some stuff; now tell me I’m wasting my time. Only you would ever know how hard you concentrated, how you broke open a new space inside. The point of it was never connection with others, but if connection did fail, then that space shrank a little. A classroom made everything riskier. What if you spelled something wrong? If you couldn’t even spell it, did you have a right to use it? What if somebody saw your teacher help you and claimed you didn’t write it yourself? What if people thought you were a kiss-up or soft? Or pretending to be someone you’re not? What if it was too late, everyone knew you’d never been good at school? Freedom to take these risks, concentration, intrinsic desire—these, I realized, were the conditions for writing, or any meaningful work.
I started to assign free writes in the classroom. The free write was not graded. It was not corrected. They could write anything they wanted, any way they wanted. I would not look for errors; I would not circle their desks looking over their shoulders; in fact, if they wished, they could keep their work. If they wanted someone to read what they wrote, I would feel privileged to do so, but I would mark nothing on the actual writing.
How to describe the incredulous looks on their faces when I explained this to them? Demarcus said, “Then I just ain’t gonna write nothing.” Cassandra said, “You’re supposed to teach us.” Yet every student wrote. And during this strange time of silence—the heavy, deep sounds of breathing, the arrhythmic scratching of pencil, the surprising absence of talking—there was a palpable sense of desire.
Some students never doubted the exercise. Patrick immediately bent his head over the page and began to work, his left hand moving across the paper, gathering ink. Periodically he’d crumple up a draft and put it in his pocket.
Kayla, tough, with big eyes, and who threw a notorious punch, had been sent to Stars for fighting. She told me she didn’t understand why she fought. Maybe, she speculated, it was because she liked to do things she was good at. Lately she’d hung on to every word I said. In the span of three weeks she’d torn through all four books Sharon Flake had written. For her “I Am” poem she had chosen to imagine her mother, who had five kids and worked two jobs—a preschool during the day and the casino at night. In another assignment, she’d written, I want to make something happen in life but it seems that there’s this one thing that’s holding me back and I just can’t seem to find out what it is.
For her free write, she wrote a letter to herself:
Dear Kayla,
How have you been doing these last few months. Fine I hope. Have you been in any more fights. I hope that when trouble come your way, you would just hold your head held high and walk away with a smile on your face. I know how you get sometimes, but hey! What’s fighting gonna do, nothing but make things worse than what they are already is.
In my future I want to be a young lady teaching poetry to young teen girls. And when I leave out of that school door I want these students to change their mind and start all over again. I want them to always forgive their self for every mistakes they make in life, Because mistakes happens its okay.
All of my students, even the skeptics, bent their heads in silent concentration, a ribbon of feeling unfurling on the page in front of them.
Because mistakes happens its okay.
That mixture of innocence and experience.
I know how you get sometimes, but hey!
When the seven minutes were up, they always asked for more time.
3
* * *
The Fire Next Time
IN MARCH, I GOT A voice message from the admissions office at Harvard Law. I’d gotten in.
I called my parents. “Gong xi,” my mom said, breaking into involuntary laughter, a happy cry, disproportionate to how I felt. Congratulations. My father grabbed the phone and said now he had an excuse to go out to dinner. It seemed that it’d been a long time since I’d made them happy. Perhaps when I graduated from college. So I did not tell them that I wasn’t going to law school, that I had decided to stay.
“See you soon,” I said. They were visiting in May. They barely heard me.
Then I called a friend already enrolled in an elite law school, hoping for his alternative viewpoint.
“Isn’t there something radical about staying in the Delta and teaching here?” I asked. It was a relief to speak in this way—I didn’t even know the word radical in Mandarin.
But he, too, spoke a different language now.
“Radical?” he said, as if he hadn’t used the word in ages. “You can make real structural change by getting a law degree. You can’t do that staying in the Delta.” He started to talk about everything he was learning. He sounded different. Actually, a lot of my progressive friends who had gone to law school had changed. There was a difference in how they carried themselves. They seemed more sure, more worldly. Their indignation was more concise. They talked about trials and suits. They talked about precedents and distinctions. They knew the names of banks and corporations and firms, and the names mattered.
“Don’t be a martyr.”
I felt wounded.
He asked if I’d been reading all the stuff about state surveillance in the Times.
“The Times?” I repeated idiotically. Apparently my vocabulary had changed, too.
“Yes,” he said drily. “The New York Times. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”
There were hardly any items in the Times about the Delta, I thought, but kept it to myself.
“What are you teaching these days, anyhow?” he asked.
I swallowed and cleared my throat. The “I Am” poem now seemed stupid. I worried he would think I was babying the students, when, in fact, I had been pushing them very hard. And he would definitely not know the names of the young-adult writers I’d discovered.
I said, “Amadou Diallo and police violence and democracy.”
In reality, this lesson hadn’t gone well and I had truncated it after a day. But my friend and I had both come of age when Diallo was killed. The New York City police shot forty-one bullets; nineteen hit him. Diallo, a twenty-three-year-old immigrant from Guinea, was unarmed. To my disappointment, the students were not exercised over it. They thought he had a funny name and joked that the police in Helena didn’t know how to shoot a gun. It hadn’t occurred to me that they wouldn’t relate. The violence of white police officers wasn’t a major issue in the Delta: The police force, like most across the Delta, was 100 percent black, all the way up to the chief, and black people were not a minority here. What really angered the kids about the police here was that they dealt drugs and didn’t investigate the deaths of their friends who got killed. Our lesson quickly digressed into the quotidian. What was it like in New, York, City, the students asked, pronouncing the three words as if each were a distinct place. Did it have bowling alleys?
“Diallo? Wow, that’s great,” my friend said, impressed. “But it’s time to move on, Michelle. With a law degree, you can multiply your impact.”
—
PATRICK FLOURISHED AT silent reading. Books kept his focus. His taste in books was eclectic: Langston Hughes, a Dylan Thomas anthology, a rhyming dictionary. At a school ceremony in the spring, he won the award for “Most Improved” student. I hadn’t nominated him; even our absentee principal had noticed that he’d started coming to school. When his name was announced, he looked surprised; he�
�d never won anything before. Students cheered. He walked up to the stage, his gait slow and hunched, not sure how to act. External affirmation made him sheepish. He turned to the students, who were still clapping. Then, suddenly, he raised both arms up in the air: a victory pose. Everybody laughed.
Soon after Patrick won his award, a scruffy New York filmmaker, Richard Wormser, with wrinkled slacks and graying hair, descended on Helena. He had been told by several people that if he wanted to talk to the “at-risk” kids in Helena, he should come to Stars. Richard had recently done a film about Elaine, Arkansas. Just fifteen miles inland, near the center of Phillips County, Elaine was “the country” to Helena residents. It was in Elaine that Richard Wright’s uncle had been killed by whites for owning a thriving liquor business that they coveted. The night he was shot, his family fled to Helena, loading their clothes and dishes into a farmer’s wagon and rolling away in the dark. There was no funeral, no farewell, no burial. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled, Wright wrote. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.
Wormser’s film, I gathered, told the story of the “Elaine riots,” as they were called around here. That was a misnomer. The “riots” had been a straight massacre of black people.
It began at a church: Black sharecroppers had gathered to discuss their plans to sue planters for failing to pay them. Whites stormed into the church, firing inside. When one white person got shot, the town erupted. Within days, hundreds of whites poured in from neighboring counties, hunting down any black man, woman, or child—in the open streets, in the cotton fields, anybody in plain sight. Federal troops came, too, armed with machine guns. According to some historians, they helped shoot down black people. Five whites died; hundreds of black people died. The police arrested only black people, depositing them in Helena’s county jail. Because no whites were charged, no murders of black people were recognized.
