by Michelle Kuo
On the last day of school we had a “field day,” of eating burgers and playing outside.
“Stay, Ms. Kuo,” Monica said. I didn’t think I detected any judgment in her expression.
—
I DID STAY until the very last day of summer. I played Ping-Pong at the temporary space for the new Boys & Girls Club. I sat on my porch reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. To be useful, she wrote, was the best thing people hoped for themselves; to be aimless was their worst fear. It took a long time to pack up my classroom; I didn’t want to throw anything away. I kept my stickers, which, it turned out, had been a hit with the fifteen-year-old boys. I kept their free writes. I kept their pictures. I kept a drawing from Patrick that said, Caring Teachers, which included a picture of me.
—
ON THE NIGHT before I left, I went to see Danny and Lucy. We talked all night. I told them about the homeless shelter where I had worked. You get the man toothpaste; he tells you the police are harassing him at the airport, where he usually sleeps. You talk for hours. You give him a subway token in case you have no beds the next night. After your shift, you move on with your life; you spend money on things you don’t need; you worry about things that don’t matter. Did this make any sense? When you see somebody who has been absolutely abandoned—in tatters, freezing, foul-smelling, with alcohol on his breath and speech slurred—and you look him in the eye, shouldn’t you be transformed permanently, shouldn’t your life change permanently? It was obvious to them what I was really asking.
“How long are you going to stay, do you think?” I said finally. They said gently, without judgment, that they weren’t in a rush to leave. Danny and Lucy said they wanted me to be happy. They gave me a guitar.
I set off on a hot, bright morning, and it was only then, as I drove out of the Delta, that I realized Baldwin’s assertion of our common humanity—that whether black or white, we are part of each other—was grounded not in effortless human feeling but in work.
One can only face in others what one can face in oneself, he had written. The belief in an ideal of common humanity, in love, wasn’t the right starting point—belief was something you earned. You gutted yourself, were gutted. You put in work; you confronted pain. You wrested your despair, as he did, into a belief in our inseparable destiny.
I had demanded my students put in hard work. I had made David put in work when he looked at that picture of a lynching. He put his head down. Did he do that because he saw an ancestor humiliated? Or was it about the classroom itself? Had he detected, and then resisted, a role desired from him—of bearing witness to a grotesque spectacle, of finding comfort in the fact that the spectacle was terminated?
And I had made students put in work by writing. Liana, fifteen, Patrick’s neighbor, taken care of by her grandma: Dear lord, the mane thing I don’t understand is why my grandma can’t find a good boyfriend and a good job so she can take care of me and my sister why can’t she just hit the lotto or something or get some money what about the 40 acres and a mule.
“Forty acres and a mule?” I asked her, surprised. No other student knew the phrase. “Where’d you learn this?” I pressed.
She said, “My grandma.” It hurt her to think about somebody breaking a promise to her grandma.
Miles had kept writing. But his next poem was a demented twin to the first: I wonder will that man suffer for killing my brother / I see the shop and I think of my brother / I want the man kill / I feel like a king when I get done. I held the paper and sat half paralyzed. My ears burned as it sank in that writing hadn’t given him “closure,” an end to bitterness, the proverbial new beginning. To the contrary, writing had swung open a door to anguish and more anguish.
And Patrick had put in work. Patrick had continued to show up at school on his own steam. Every morning he got up. Every morning he got on the bus. I had been bewildered by his absence in the beginning. But now it made sense. Why should he attend? Would his world really get better if he graduated? What would he do afterward? Nobody in his family had ever graduated from high school. Still he came to school. He wrote a poem about an animal in the streets. He read about a wizard in Kansas. He appropriated Dylan Thomas. Dark is a way and light is a place, he wrote in his notebook. “It had good sound,” he said.
In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin wrote: We…must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others. And my students had. They had insisted, and I had become more conscious. But there remained an unspoken truth, understood by everyone in the room: I could leave. I could walk out of the classroom, if I really felt like it, and never come back. That I could leave, and they could not, was my trump card.
The cliché, that I’d gotten out of it more than I’d given, was true. What I had now was a metric for judging what a meaningful day might look like. The metric was this: Could you form a live, difficult connection with a person from entirely different circumstances? A connection so genuine that you forgot that you were even attempting to make one? So urgent that you wanted to show up the next day and that person believed you would? If you could do this, then you had a shot at not being full of crap, at making your liberal ideals substantial, a part of your bone and flesh.
I had asked students to put in the work, but what work had I put in? I thought I’d put in a lot, but as I drove away, two years seemed like nothing. Maybe I hadn’t changed at all. I recalled now the bad days of teaching, days that brought to the surface the ideas I had of myself, ideas of my benevolence or patience or strong convictions, and utterly collapsed them. A kid would taunt another—retaliation, eruption, chaos. I would stand there, my arteries bulging in my neck, as they watched me, waiting to see what I would say.
Some must have thought I was fed up. That I wanted to give up, get in my car, and go. Probably true. But most of the time I also felt the opposite. I felt the day could be salvaged. The kids who lost it would feel that they messed up again: Today’s explosion had erased yesterday’s success, cleared the scoreboard, and flung them back to zero. But I would go to them and talk to them. I’d say, Nothing can take away what you’ve done. See that picture of yourself? See that book you’re reading? I’d say, It’s human to self-destruct, to fail, to fall down, to feel bad, to get up again. You’re strong, you’re good; trust me.
The words did matter. They built someone up. But there were some students to whom I seldom had to give the pep talk. Students like Patrick showed up and offered wisdom of their own.
One afternoon in April, after a week where it had rained every day, a leak in the roof destroyed a lot of our classroom books. The students despaired. Monica scratched at a waterlogged book. I panicked.
“Stop crying, y’all,” Patrick said. He stood up and walked out. A few minutes later, he returned with a bucket and mop.
4
* * *
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
LAW SCHOOL QUICKLY RENDERED ME unrecognizable to myself. For the first time in my life I did not feel like a good student. In class I was timid and afraid to speak. My grades were mediocre. I worried about whether I sounded smart. The people who seemed the smartest applied rules swiftly and without hesitation. They were able to do what had been asked of them: to think about a problem abstractly, without being distracted by the likelihood that real people had inspired it.
On the first day of our contracts class, the professor told us a story of a woman whose husband had died. Because of a technicality in the man’s life insurance contract, the insurance company denied his wife money. When the professor explained the technicality, we were appalled. Should she get her insurance? Nearly the entire class of eighty raised our hands, yes. When, three-quarters of the way through the semester the professor read us the same case, only a handful of us voted the same way.
I was reading Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich during that first semester. Ivan is a judge, formerly a lawyer, formerly a law student. He works hard; he ascends; he awaits promotions; he despairs when he does not get them; he gets them; he r
esumes ascendance; he is appointed a judge. In every way, he tells himself, his life has been correct, decent, and good.
But everything changes when he becomes ill. The physical pain startles him. He moans, he thrashes. And he begins to hear a voice inside of him.
What do you want? asks the voice.
Ivan replies that he wants to not suffer, that he wants to live.
The voice replies, To live? To live how?
Ivan finds that when he listens to the voice the pain goes away.
Ivan wonders to himself if he has not lived as he should have. But how could that be, if he has done everything one ought to?
And when it occurred to him, as it often did, that it was all happening because he had not lived right, he at once recalled all the correctness of his life and drove this strange thought away.
—
LAW SCHOOL MARKED the first time in my life I had access to moneyed events: recruiting parties, thrown by corporate law firms. By the beginning of my second year, I spent lots of time in a black dress and my mother’s pearls, assuring recruiters that I was very interested in mergers and acquisitions. Each event in this boozy season of restaurant-hopping—whether it was wine and salmon cakes at Chez Henri or a giant chocolate fountain at the Charles Hotel—was designed to seduce you. You were meant to apply to the firm, then to work there over the summer, and finally—assuming you weren’t too obvious about your hangovers—to receive the Offer. The seduction worked in conjunction with other forces: necessity (law school debt was enormous), social pressure (everybody else was doing it), and rationalization (much of the world is run by corporations, and you should know how they work). You tried your best to blot out the advice of a law professor who called the corporate route “the path of least resistance” and suggested that “when you die, you don’t want your gravestone to say, He kept his options open.”
Between my second and third year in school, I spent a month at a law firm in Manhattan, becoming a “summer.” The work was asphyxiating, although my paycheck astonished me. Besides the free five-course lunches, every few evenings the summers were treated to an event involving open bars and fancy food. The firm held, for instance, a “diversity” event to celebrate Asian Americans; its keynote speaker was advertised as “the Asian guy on Survivor.” Another evening, we attended a gourmet cheese–making tutorial. One firm sent its summers to a night at trapeze school.
Each summer was assigned a lawyer-mentor. Mine dutifully treated me to lunch at an excellent Japanese restaurant in Manhattan. I liked him because, unlike the other mentors I heard about, he didn’t appear to care much about recruiting me. My mentor was actually a year younger than I was, but he had the manner of an old man. He was haggard and spoke of body aches. He talked about alcohol a lot. He was Korean American, I gathered, and had gone straight from college to law school to the firm. With cryptic nostalgia, he recalled his test-taking days. I wondered if the tests reminded him of a time when he knew exactly what hoops to jump through, no questions asked.
For these four weeks, my New York was much like Tolstoy’s Moscow: We had dull work that we interrupted by eating and drinking, and the next day we returned to our work that was dull, which we again interrupted with eating and drinking. I loved my eating and drinking; I hated it, too.
When my mother and father visited me that summer, we met for lunch outside the law firm’s building in Times Square. How very immigrant they suddenly looked, peering up at the skyscrapers. How very long their journey to the United States now appeared. More than thirty years ago they’d come to Michigan from their obscure island nation of Taiwan, learned English, gotten jobs, raised two children in a Midwestern suburb, and now, towering over them, was proof that they had made it: Here, in this tall building, their daughter worked. My father—the sort of person who ponders, at lunch, what he wants for dinner—asked me to describe the five-course meals I was treated to, and I obliged. It was hard for my parents to understand my observation that none of the associates seemed happy, so I didn’t belabor the point.
My job at the firm ended after four weeks. As part of its recruitment strategy, the firm had agreed to pay for my internship at any nonprofit for the remaining summer. After cleaning out my office at the law firm quickly—there was nothing I wanted to save—I stayed in New York to work at an organization for kids, called The Door. It was a boisterous Hull House for young people: dance and rap classes, onsite counselors. I helped get a visa for a Chinese kid who’d been trafficked. I felt happy. During these four weeks, I lost the BlackBerry my firm had loaned me, which I was expected to return at the end of the summer—it was somewhere on my desk at The Door or, possibly, not on my desk. On a Friday morning, buoyed by a workers’ rights training that I’d organized, I received a phone call on my private cellphone. “Where are you?” It was the law-firm coordinator for summers.
“What do you mean?” I replied. Apparently I’d missed the ceremony for summers who got offers, the details of which had been conveyed via the missing BlackBerry.
“Well, you got an offer,” she said. “Thanks,” I responded, nervously wondering if she could now revoke it.
Other summers called their parents when they got offers; I didn’t.
I tried to date, or to learn how to date. Inevitably during these dates I would talk about teaching in Helena. As with any intense experience, it was hard to put into words, and it was still recent enough that I did not yet think of it, or want to think of it, as my past—as, merely, a “good experience.” Perhaps this explains why I would revert to talking about the Delta in the future. “If I had a partner who was willing,” I would say on a first date, “I might go back and live there.”
And I wondered why these dates went no further.
Mostly I entered my last year of school preoccupied, like everybody else, by the hunt for a job after graduation. I had the offer from the firm but was on the fence about taking it. I considered working for the government or for nonprofits. Students at Harvard were lucky in this way; jobs at nonprofits were scarce and when they did hire, they tended to choose unfairly from the top-ranked schools. My friends at other law schools who desperately wanted to work in the public sector were bound for the private sector instead. I had the luxury of options. But where should I work?
I’d come to law school with the idea of fighting for education as a civil right. Since college, I’d admired the civil rights lawyers from the 1950s and 1960s, who had risked their lives to desegregate schools in the South. I’d had my sights set on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and interned there the summer after my first year of law school. But I discovered that schools were no longer the battleground for civil rights lawyers. Judge Robert Carter, formerly a leading attorney for the LDF in the Brown litigation, reflected on the iconic victory in an essay published in 1980.
A primary mistake lawyers had made, he wrote, was that they assumed an integrated education meant an equal education. They could not be blamed for thinking so: Until Brown, school districts in the South publicly, openly, and shamelessly shortchanged black schools, and a bulk of the evidence compiled by Brown lawyers showcased the glaring disparity in per-pupil allocation of funds, dismal salaries for black teachers and principals, and decrepit facilities. But it was only after Brown that they understood the fundamental vice was not legally enforced racial segregation itself; that this was a mere by-product, a symptom of the greater and more pernicious disease—white supremacy. Needless to say, white supremacy is no mere regional contamination.
In the North, affluent whites fled to the suburbs to avoid being in the same schools as black people. Residential segregation was and remains the most common cause of racial isolation among children: It is why white children go to schools with white children, black children with black children, and why schools are more segregated today than in 1954, the year Brown was decided. Meanwhile, in the South, the governor of Arkansas blocked the schoolhouse door with state militia. In rural areas like the Delta, a slew of small private schools o
pened. By 1980, Judge Carter had already seen the writing on the wall: Integration would not happen in his generation. For the present, however, to focus on integration alone is a luxury only the middle class can afford. They have the means to desert the public schools if dissatisfied. For the sake of children’s education today—for the sake of real life, as he put it—people should concentrate on having quality education delivered to the schools these blacks are attending. W. E. B. Du Bois’s words in 1935 seemed prescient: There is no magic to either segregated or mixed schools, he warned. The Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education.
Others held to the dream of school integration. The point was not that black children needed the presence of white children to learn. Rather, as sociologist Orlando Patterson wrote, integration brings Afro-Americans and Euro-Americans together at a time when their life-long attitudes are being formed. Studies showed that whites who went to school with black people tend to be more tolerant and more in favor of greater educational and economic opportunities for Afro-Americans. Black children, in turn, acquired access to social capital and valuable networks to broader groups. As Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote, Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.
I stood somewhere between these two views, but I was rapidly learning that my view, and anyone’s views on the matter, had been made irrelevant by the Supreme Court. On a hot day at the end of June 2007, I climbed the steps of the Supreme Court with the entire staff of the LDF to hear its decision on a landmark case. In a hushed, packed room, Justice Roberts read an opinion that prohibited the school districts in Seattle and Louisville from taking race into account when assigning students to schools. Justice Roberts called the systems racial balancing, and wrote that Brown stood for the proposition that schools could not assign students by race. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race, he opined. Dissenting, Justice Breyer remarked from the bench, “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” Dissenting as well, Justice Stevens said that the majority, in rewriting the history of Brown, was a cruel irony.
