by Michelle Kuo
And now that I was done with receiving grades for the rest of my life, it seemed that in place of grades we had only one thing: the story. Could I tell a story that moved them, that made them understand? This was the urgent thing.
Switching between Mandarin and English, I told them I’d seen Patrick. I told them that the jail was like the school where I’d taught. Decrepit and accountable to nobody. I told them that Patrick didn’t even know the name of his lawyer. At this, my dad shook his head. Then I said it seemed as if Patrick had forgotten just about everything he’d learned. I had him read out loud. He was scared of getting words wrong. I told them that in spite of everything that happened, Patrick was still sweet. He had thanked me for visiting him. As if he expected me to never show up again. As if he didn’t expect anything from anybody. He put everything on himself. I told them I was probably never going to live in the Delta again. “You were right,” I said. “I wasn’t happy there. But I need to go back for just enough time to make peace with it. So I think I need to stay,” I said finally.
I knew from my mother’s face that she understood. She was quiet; she wanted to hear more.
My father asked, “How are you going to pay for it?”
I reminded him that, back when I taught, my monthly portion of the rent for a three-bedroom house, with hardwood floors and a fig tree out front, had been a stunning one hundred fifty dollars. If you added that up over a year, it was about a month’s rent in San Francisco.
“Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “Because nobody wants to live there.”
My mother mourned the labor it would take me to transport my clothes from San Francisco to Arkansas.
Then her face lit up at a thought: We had so many books no one was using, old books from when I was a kid; maybe Patrick would like them?
My father was pleased at the idea that I might clean out the basement.
5
* * *
Crime and Punishment
THE CHINESE RESTAURANT IN HELENA was a place I usually tried to avoid, entering only on masochistic occasions of extreme desperation. Nonetheless, Aaron, my former student with perfect attendance, wanted to eat here, and so I said yes.
Opening the door, I triggered a hanging bell. Two customers, both white, turned to stare at me. I understood at once: They were observing how I, Asian-looking, would speak to the restaurant owner, also Asian-looking.
I greeted her, speaking in English.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” she returned.
At this, the men turned back to their food.
Aaron and I approached the buffet. He packed his plate, accepting every option. “I love me some chicken chow mein,” he said, beaming.
Aaron was doing well. He had graduated from Central and was getting a degree in environmental science at the community college, while working part-time at McDonald’s and supporting his baby boy.
“You hear what happen to Tamir?” he asked, his mouth full of noodles.
My heart jumped at hearing Tamir’s name.
“No,” I said. “How is he?”
“You won’t recognize him,” Aaron said. “He don’t look like nobody. He got no look to himself. He just blend in.”
“Blends in?”
“With the homies on the street.” Aaron wiped some grease off his lips, then plunged back into the chicken. “He’s in Little Rock; he’s a crackhead on the street. Begging for money.”
The last time I’d heard Tamir’s name was a month after I left the Delta, some three years ago. Tamir’s ninth-grade English teacher had left me a voice message. She said she’d asked students to respond to a question, Who is a person who changed your life? Tamir had chosen to write about me.
“How can I find him?” I asked, my voice uneven.
Aaron shrugged at the futility of the question. Once off the grid, you stayed off: no phone number, no email address.
I saw something familiar in Aaron’s manner, something I recognized from my teaching days. What was it? Schadenfreude? No, I thought; it was less glee than relief, with a tincture of pride: That could have been me but it isn’t. In Aaron the tone was tempered by his solid sense of worth, but I heard it nonetheless.
“What about Miles?” I asked.
“Miles? He not doing nothing. He’ll be another Tamir. Lately Miles been shooting at people.”
“You mean with a gun?” I said, nearly choking on my food.
“Yeah, he don’t care. Got arrested, got right out. ’Cause his family be rich now, they post bail in a second. They got a million something and more, and now they blowing it all away.” Aaron was referring to the lawsuit his mother had brought against the flower-shop owner who shot and killed Brandon. It must have gotten settled and paid out. “Yup, they bought a new home, they got five cars, mopeds, truck, Lexus. He used to just have Oldsmobile.”
I swallowed my mouthful.
“And Jasmine?”
“Jasmine got a baby now.”
“Kayla?”
“She got a baby, too.”
“Cassandra?”
“She got two. Would’ve had three but had a miscarriage.”
Aaron finished his plate and I looked at him casually, trying to pretend I wasn’t watching him. Why had he graduated and not the others? There was the matter of him being male: The pregnant students almost always dropped out, unless they got help from family. But his family also had better education. His mother worked in administration at the nursing home and, I recalled, had graduated from high school; his grandma owned a sewing and fabric shop downtown, one of only a handful of businesses that had survived the economic downturn. Few other students at Stars had a parent who graduated from high school and held a steady job. Did it just come down to these basic metrics in the end—the family’s level of education and quality of employment?
“You ain’t eat nothing, Ms. Kuo,” he said, looking up finally from his plate. “Bet it don’t taste like your mama’s.” He helped himself to some chicken from my plate.
Outside, I asked if he wanted to take a drive through the neighborhood.
“Drive with you, Ms. Kuo?” He let out a chortle. “I ain’t crazy.” Then he got into the front seat.
Unprompted and garrulous, Aaron gestured at our passing landscape and said that he was going to give me a tour of “Hell-Town.” As I drove, he pointed down roads where I should turn, neighborhoods to enter.
“That where Miles used to stay, before they got rich,” he said. “The sheriff, he got that place on curfew.” I asked what kind of curfew. “You know, lockdown. Because someone got shot at in daylight.”
In reality Aaron had probably forgotten that I’d gone to these neighborhoods often, to drop off Patrick and other students. As if on cue, Aaron said offhandedly that Patrick stayed around here, too.
“You hear about what happen to Patrick, Ms. Kuo?”
Again that tone, the gossipy not-quite schadenfreude—yet now I detected something else, a submerged warmth or regret, a tone more like ersatz detachment, a method to avoid mourning.
We passed by a small green patch near Central. Aaron said, “A little sixteen-year-old got killed the other day, coming home from a football game at Central, the homecoming,” he said. “He was beat up, then somebody shot him in his head. They don’t even know who did it.”
Then the police station, a hundred yards from the county jail: “In July, the day after the Fourth, my cousin, he was killed right over here by the jail, right in front of the sheriff’s office. Two or three leftover flowers still there.”
He rolled down his window and so I slowed the car. We gazed together at the makeshift memorial, a ragged, colorful hodgepodge of objects. Pink and yellow bits of old petals; framed pictures; a stuffed animal.
He shrugged off my condolences over his cousin and said, “That happen right after the sixteen-year-old girl who go to KIPP died,” he said, emphasizing the name of the school. Knowledge Is Power Program was a charter school that had been built a few y
ears before I’d first arrived in Helena. “Somebody was shooting at her mama’s boyfriend, and the boyfriend pushed her in front, like she was a shield. She was shot. Chest, arm, and thigh.”
So this was a change. As KIPP expanded into an elementary and high school, its reputation had grown. It was known as a place where students didn’t slack.
“And she be going to KIPP,” he repeated, with a tone of admiration, as if to say she, a studious person, couldn’t have been responsible for her death.
Aaron pointed out the county jail. I did not mention I already knew it. He said he knew someone who had escaped by climbing to the roof and jumping off.
“He didn’t get hurt?” I asked.
“Naw, he chunky. He ain’t hurt himself at all.”
Apparently the escapee hung out, saw family, and went back the next day.
As a final act of nostalgia we visited Stars. It was abandoned. We peered through barbed wire. A garbage can was knocked on its side. The grass was uncut, overrun by tall weeds.
We drove away and Aaron dialed a number on his cellphone.
“Gina, guess who in town, guess who I’m on the road with?” Then he said, “Ms. Kuo,” and a high-pitched scream burst through the other end. Aaron jerked the phone away from his ear and we both guffawed.
“We got lunch,” he continued. “Gina, only thing I can tell you is, ‘Thank God for seatbelts.’ ”
I laughed, easing back to our old rhythm.
“Matter of fact, her driving got worse. You know Helena got all these potholes? Ms. Kuo hit about seventy of them.”
He handed me his phone.
“Ms. Gina Gordon!” I said, smiling into the phone. “How are you, my dear?”
She said, “I got a tongue piercing, nose piercing. A little change, not a lot done change.”
—
I HAD MOVED in with Danny and Lucy. Lucy was making granola, and Danny had gotten out the Scrabble. Only their cats seemed unhappy to see me.
They gave me the news about Helena. Good news: There was a new Mexican restaurant and it had margaritas. A new health center featured brand-new treadmills and a yoga class. A new library—from funds Danny had helped raise—would be unveiled at the end of the year. It had a children’s section and computer lab. Our Blues Festival, now an annual event, had another successful year. And construction of “Freedom Park,” a public space dedicated to black refugees in Helena, would soon begin.
KIPP Delta had among the highest scores on the state math and literacy tests: Black children from the poorest part of Arkansas had gotten higher scores than white kids from private schools in the wealthiest parts of Arkansas. Ten years ago, most policymakers would have laughed at this as impossible. Some white families in Helena now complained about being excluded from the school.
—
WHEN I WENT TO SEE Patrick the following morning, there was a new jailer, a Mr. Cousins. He was diminutive and rotund and had a cheerful, almost sinister air.
Again, nobody at the jail wrote down my name or bothered to ask it. My bags were not checked, my cellphone was not taken away; I said merely that I was looking to visit Patrick Browning.
Mr. Cousins looked me up and down. Then he said, smiling, “I ain’t gonna let you see him until you give me a hug.”
I coughed. “Excuse me?”
“A hug,” he said. “You know, an old-fashioned hug.”
He leaned in, waiting.
I held my breath. When our bodies touched, he squeezed my back.
Then he pulled away, smirking. We walked side by side.
Sounds of metal clanging grew louder as we neared, and I realized inmates were banging on the cells.
“Guess ’cause they thinking about what they done,” he said, chuckling.
In the control room the jailers were chatting, watching Matlock, and eating breakfast. The odor was a weird mix of grease and must.
“I’m gonna quit this motherfucking job.”
“You ain’t gonna quit nothing.”
“You watch me.”
“Boy, you gone get fired in any other place. That mouth of yours, you know you got it.”
“I sure do.”
I tried my best to be unobtrusive. But nobody appeared to notice I was there.
Back in the windowless room, I was looking up at the ceiling, searching for the source of a puddle on the floor, when Patrick suddenly appeared in the doorway. Seeing me, he smiled and pulled up his baggy black-and-white-striped jumpsuit.
“Ms. Kuo,” Patrick said, walking in, shaking his head, marveling. “You came back.”
Then he asked, “What you doing here, Ms. Kuo?”
I told him I was going to be around Helena for longer than I’d expected, that I’d missed living here.
“Here?” he said. “That sure crazy.” He shook his head again, but he was smiling.
We caught up. I told him I’d just gotten back from seeing my parents in Indiana.
“You got a mom and a daddy?” he asked.
I said I did. I took out my phone to show him pictures.
“You can take pictures on these?” he asked.
Patrick watched the screen carefully as I swiped the screen with my thumb and the next picture appeared.
“See?” I said. “Now you try.”
He wiped his hand on the side of his jumpsuit and placed his finger on the screen. Gingerly, he imitated my gesture.
“You look like them,” he said.
He seemed interested in the pictures, examining every image thoroughly before proceeding to the next. “What’s that?” he’d ask. I had taken pictures of my mother’s cooking. Noodle soup, I’d say, or Chinese vegetables—I didn’t know the exact name in English. For a few he supplied the answer. “Shrimp,” he said to himself.
Then he said, “You been to China, Ms. Kuo?”
“Yes.”
“You been to Africa?”
“Yes.” I paused. “Do you want to go to any of those places?”
Still looking down at my pictures, he said, “I don’t know about all that. I just wanna get out of jail.”
He handed me back the phone.
“How are you?” I asked.
Patrick’s mood shifted suddenly, as if I’d brought up a forbidden topic. He slouched back in his seat, shoulders sagging.
“Ain’t nothing happening here.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Just crazy stuff.”
He put his hands over his face, then took them off.
“My cousin be here; there be this other dude messing with him. Dude went crazy, threw my cousin’s tray against the wall. Then he took the juice jug, threw it up in the air.” He paused. “And they be burning plastic.”
“Burning what?” I asked, unsure if I’d heard correctly.
“Plastic,” he said, louder.
I was puzzled.
Patrick tried to be patient. “It cover the windows, you know. They be trying to burn a hole through the windows.”
I recalled The Shawshank Redemption and Tim Robbins chipping away at the wall.
“Why?” I asked, feeling foolish, wondering if the answer was obvious. “To escape?”
“Naw. To get weed through the windows. Then they sell it to the jailers. Or the trusties.” At this he scowled.
“Who?”
He explained. The trusties were inmates who lived in separate quarters. The jail outsourced janitorial work to them. “They cook, you know, clean up around here. They mop; they work; they just don’t get paid.”
“Trusty?” I repeated. I’d never heard the word before.
“Yeah, trusty. Like somebody you supposed to trust. People who supposed to be trustworthy.” He grimaced, affronted—he still expected words to mean what they promised to mean.
He opened his mouth to say something but stopped himself. His head dangled lower, a gesture now almost familiar to me.
“Ms. Kuo, I don’t—I don’t know what I got myself into.”
He laid his head in
his hands.
“I can’t sleep. I can’t help but breathe in all that smoke.”
The room was still. I was at a loss.
I heard myself ask, “Can you get a different room—cell?”
His voice came out muffled from under his hands: “If the jailer let you.”
Then words poured out of him. “And nothing be working here. Like, they got these intercoms. But they don’t work. If you need some attention or someone get to fighting, you gotta beat on the window. Like the other day, this guy had a seizure back there. But the jailers only come back when they feel like coming back. You gotta beat the window, and they don’t know if you serious or not, because people beat the window all the time for nothing.” He rubbed his hands over his temples. “Trapped around these niggers all day long.”
I reached awkwardly to touch his shoulder, a tentative pat on his back. Yet his body was coiled so tightly that he didn’t appear to register my touch.
“Time,” he said. “You can’t go back in time. Everything that happen is about cause and effect. One day lead to another. And now I’m here.”
Patrick covered his face with his hands.
“Hey, Patrick,” I said finally, consolingly, wanting to say something. “You’re being strong. Keep your chin up.”
At this he lifted his chin, as if I’d meant the phrase literally.
—
THAT AFTERNOON, OUT of the blue, Jordan, an old teaching friend, called. Jordan was among that special breed of teacher who had come with Teach for America and decided to stay. He’d started the year before I had, bought a house, married another teacher, had two kids, and was planning to live in Helena permanently. He was a Catholic with religious tattoos and sported the grim persona of a former gang member turned priest.
My students at Stars had had him at Miller and recalled him with a mixture of respect and recoil. Kids never forget a class where they feel expected to succeed at a deep level and are given the means to do so. The memory of feeling smart, even if only for a day or week, doesn’t ever go entirely away.
