by Michelle Kuo
Jordan asked how California was.
I replied nonchalantly. “It’s okay. I’m going to do legal aid. I’m excited about that.”
Among the dozens or so teachers who had stayed in the Delta, with the exception of Danny and Lucy, I tended to withhold mention of anything that made me look frivolous, likely because I felt exposed around them: They had done what I could not, and more, they’d done it without any apparent agony.
Jordan was now a principal at KIPP. It desperately needed a part-time Spanish teacher, he told me. His full-time teacher, Ms. Alvarado, was overloaded with seven classes. “My Spanish is pretty bad,” I began. “I just had two years of college Spanish.”
Jordan smiled; in the Delta, that was worth a lot.
“I could teach English,” I tried. No, he needed Spanish.
I have never been good at saying no. Also, I wanted Jordan to like me.
“Just two classes,” he said. “Freshman Spanish. Can you do just two? You’d have to start Monday.”
Maybe this was why I had come back—to teach in a school that was functional, where students were expected to achieve. The tidy row of KIPP students lined up at the bus downtown now warmed my memory; nearly every kid carried a book of some kind, Philip Pullman or Black Boy. Besides, a paycheck would be nice—I was living off savings and an IRS return. There was such a dire need for middle-class professionals in this town that within days of coming back, I could have a new job.
“I’m in,” I said, resolving to avoid Ms. Alvarado, lest she try to speak to me in Spanish.
—
I HAD ONLY a few days before my job at KIPP would start, and I still needed to meet Patrick’s lawyer. I’d promised Patrick that I would figure out when his court date was. This was all he had asked of me. He had been in county jail for over a year, and still there was no trial.
Knowing Helena, I half-expected Patrick’s public defender to be wearing sweatpants and chewing tobacco. But Rob looked respectable: sharp canary-yellow tie, tailored black suit. He was black and looked as if he was in his forties. A graduate of the University of Arkansas Law School, Rob had worked at McDonald’s to pay his tuition. He had become a public defender because he believed poor people needed access to legal services. But soon he discovered that he needed a private practice in order to stay afloat. There was only one other public defender in Helena, and both worked part-time, because the state of Arkansas declined to pay for anything more. In total, they each received a copy machine and 1,700 copies a year. Postage, long-distance calls, gas, transportation—all these came from their own pockets. They had zero funds for private investigation, including police-misconduct inquiries, psychiatrists, forensics experts. Investigations required money Rob didn’t have.
“Have you talked”—I paused, trying to word my question carefully—“gotten a chance to talk to Patrick yet?” I asked.
“I’ve got over a hundred clients,” he responded.
Then, as if conceding my point, he said ruefully, “It’s legalized malpractice.”
Rob explained that Helena had only four sessions of court in a year. (In contrast, in Massachusetts, criminal court took place every business day of the year.) Each session in Helena was little more than three weeks long. If a trial was held, all the other cases—and there were usually more than a hundred cases on the docket—were pushed to the next session. Cases such as Patrick’s were not “priority,” and so his case had gotten repeatedly delayed.
“Imperfect self-defense,” Rob continued, was probably Patrick’s best argument. It meant exactly what it sounded like: Patrick’s belief that he was defending himself—he thought Marcus had a weapon—was mistaken, imperfect. This could lower the charge of murder to manslaughter.
I said that in poor communities, where there was a lot of violence and a lot of death, wasn’t it safe to assume that most people had a belief about the dangerousness of others? Wasn’t this belief the very core of fear—a belief in the possibility of harm that could be based in reality but also could be mistaken? Even if Marcus had turned out not to carry a weapon, was it really such a mistake—an “imperfection”—for Patrick to feel afraid, to think he might be in danger?
Rob appeared amused, and his smile seemed to say, This is what a Harvard education is worth.
“That’s a good point,” he said. “But you can’t tell that to the prosecutor. The law’s the law.”
“What about plain old self-defense?” I laid out the case. “You’re eighteen; you’re just a kid. A drunk guy shows up on your porch. He’s bigger; he’s older than you; he’s aggressive. And he’s got your sister with him. She’s just sixteen and she’s a little slow, in special-ed classes. You tell him to get off the porch, and he won’t get off the porch. He’s really drunk and—”
“That really depends on the jury,” Rob interrupted. “But it’s a risk to take it to the jury.”
“If Patrick were white…” I tried finally. This was the elephant in the room. It seemed perfectly obvious that a white resident confronted with a drunk black aggressor on his property would not be charged with murder.
Rob’s eyes sparkled, bemused. I wondered if he thought I was very stupid. “I agree, I agree,” he said. “But there’s nothing we can do about that.”
—
I VISITED PATRICK twice more that week. Even in this short time, conversations had started to blend together. We would speak first of me. “How you be, Ms. Kuo?” he’d ask. (Sometimes, attempting formality, “How are you?”) Just about any trivial fact caught his attention—a movie, a meal, the weather. The conversation tended to the mundane. Did it rain? What you been eating? What kind of car you drive? He would lean forward, not wanting to miss a word. Almost any photo in my phone, no matter the content, captivated him; he studied the image as if it contained an encrypted message from the world. I answered questions, often logistical: What city was this in? How did I get there?
But if we spoke about him, we seemed to talk mostly about the jail and how dirty it was. The showers were the worst. Trusties dumped leftover liquids into the drains, and cockroaches crawled out. Patrick thought that the Kool-Aid was the culprit. “I flush my Kool-Aid in the toilet, but people be dumping it everywhere,” he said. When he showered, he kept his arms close to his body, afraid that his skin would touch the colorful fungus that grew on the walls.
Broken toilets went unfixed, and the jail smelled terrible no matter how far you got away from them. Trusties put black garbage bags over the ones that they couldn’t repair. “We end up using all the same toilet. At the other cell, they was just peeing all over the floor. Ain’t no telling, with these guys back here, what disease I be catching.”
The cells had no doors, so people wandered in and out of Patrick’s. One guy stalked into his cell, spat on the floor, and stalked out. An older guy walked around muttering that he was Martin Luther King, Jr. Patrick’s cousin with schizophrenia had been given the wrong meds—another inmate’s heart medicine—for two weeks. There was always chatter of who’s gonna jump who, who’s in for what, and constant fighting, yelling, beating on walls.
The details became repetitive, insistent, dull: The mold grows on the bathroom walls; the cockroach crawls out of the drain. Sometimes Patrick forgot details he had already told me. “I be in the best cell,” he said. “Because all the other cells got toilets that don’t work.”
I told him I’d talked to his lawyer, assuming this would pique his interest. But he had only one question: When was the trial date? He wanted to get it over with. I repeated what Rob told me, that the date again had been postponed—likely no trial until December or maybe even February. At that he lost interest in the law altogether. He didn’t want to talk about his defense. Offhandedly I used the phrase murder charge, and he winced.
He moved the topic to his past. Maybe he had nothing else to talk about and no other direction to go. In retrospect, all incidents seemed to him connected. When he was twelve or so, he said, he was riding his bike, going to steal someth
ing. It was a friend’s idea. He had never stolen anything before. On his way he got hit by a truck and was knocked off his bike. “That be a sign, Ms. Kuo.”
“A sign?” I repeated. I’d known he was religious, like most of the kids, but I hadn’t known the extent of it.
Yeah, a sign: God was talking to him right then and there. God was saying he shouldn’t have been doing what he was doing. Nobody knew him the way God knew him.
Patrick recast important events in his life as premonitions he’d ignored. When he was eleven he was in his backyard, playing with a jug of gasoline. He ended up in the hospital, he missed weeks in school, and he fell behind. That was the same time the twin towers fell. He showed me his burns, darkened blotches on his ankles.
“Yes,” I said, “I remember.”
“Cause and effect,” he repeated to himself, as if this were the reason he was here now, the common phrase assuming theological weight. Patrick appeared trapped in a feedback loop: first self-reproach, then a desire to forget, and then, for wanting to forget, self-reproach.
Each conversation had patterns. He would speak and then break off. He would say something that depressed him and he’d drop his head so far down that his back and neck formed a smooth surface, like the top of a table. There were long stretches of silence in which neither of us spoke. I didn’t want to fill the silence with chatter or idle consolation. By not speaking, I thought, I was being honest about who I really was—not the rousing giver of pep talks, not the person who said, You can do it, I believe in you. By not speaking I was trying to say, rather, This is who I really am, a person who doesn’t know what to say, lost like you.
But in the end I usually could not take the silence: He needed to hear good news; he needed a messenger. “Hey, look at me,” I’d say. He’d raise his head slightly so that his eyes met mine, and I’d force myself to give him a pep talk. “Who you are isn’t what happened one night in your life, Patrick, okay?” Or, “Your family has only kind things to say about you, do you hear me? Only kind things.” Or, “Your family loves and misses you.” Or, simply, “I’m sorry this happened.” And despite the lack of substance or originality of these words, their tonal breakings suggested genuine grief.
If he spoke in reply, it was always an assent: “You right,” or “Yes, ma’am,” or “Thanks, Ms. Kuo.”
Before, school had been a world we shared. In the three years I had been absent, we had not simply lost touch with each other, we had ceased to have anything in common. I had assumed just being together would suffice. But we lived in two distinct worlds. His reality was sensory assault. My reality was apparent in the bright screen of my phone, which he touched with his fingertip, trying not to dirty it. Our bond was that between a former teacher and her former student, and its weakness now seemed exposed.
It was possible that for Patrick our conversations were not so terrible; talking to someone is usually better than having nobody to talk to. But for me our conversations were tedious. The shoddy county jail had appeared to accomplish its purpose: This was a punishment, and he had fixed himself into a state of perpetual confession. He wanted to feel guilty; he wanted to suffer. And I wasn’t qualified to act as a default priest.
And yet the idea that Patrick was solely guilty for the death of Marcus was nonsense, wasn’t it? Charged with murder, Patrick was the opposite of an archetypal murderer. He hadn’t covered his tracks. He hadn’t invented an alibi. He hadn’t rinsed the blood off the weapon and hidden it. He had watched the man he hurt walk away. It didn’t occur to him the man would die. He sat on the porch waiting for the police. He cried waiting. He got in the police car, he didn’t ask for a lawyer, and he didn’t feel like talking about a defense now. He did not blame society or poverty. Just himself. The problem was not that he wouldn’t confess but that he had confessed too much; it wasn’t far-fetched to think he might spend the rest of his life confessing.
And yet maybe he needed his guilt; otherwise the death would have happened for no reason, a result of senseless collision—of mental states, physical impulses, and coincidences. He needed, for his own sense of meaning, to knit his failures into a story. “Cause and effect,” as he put it. The thread was that he messed up by ignoring God.
But I didn’t believe the story he told himself. I wanted to break it. For me to do that, we needed to forge a connection. But what did I have that I could share with him?
All I could think of was books. There were other things he liked—he’d tended lovingly to his go-cart and said once that he wanted to be a mechanic. I didn’t believe that reading was inherently superior to learning how to fix a car, or that reading makes a person better. But I did love books, and I hadn’t yet shared with him anything I myself loved. Had I known how to sing, I would have had us sing.
Thus, at the end of October, about two weeks after I’d arrived, I heard myself say, “Patrick, I’m going to ask you to do something.”
Patrick looked at me expectantly.
I said, “I need you to do homework every day.”
He emitted a little childlike shriek—the first smile all day. “Ms. Kuo!” He laughed and covered his open mouth. “Naw, it’s over with.”
“What else are you going to do? Eat? Sit around?”
He was still laughing. “What you mean, homework?” He hadn’t heard that word in a while and it amused him. Then he went silent. “It’s over with,” he repeated.
“Come on,” I said lightly. My voice sounded too casual.
“Too late, Ms. Kuo.” His fingernail scratched the wood. “It’s too late.”
“What do you mean, too late? Dude, you didn’t graduate from high school,” I said. I cringed at how my words sounded in the air, affecting an ease that we didn’t yet share. I already knew he would do whatever I asked of him. Patrick, like Aaron and Gina and Kayla, always took guidance from adults, particularly me.
More gently, I said, “When your daughter sees you and can talk to you, won’t it feel good to read to her?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you know I’m right.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then it’s settled. Homework every day.”
I had no idea what the homework would consist of. What would I teach? How would I check his homework if I was coming only once a week? And what if I only knew how to relate to Patrick by exerting authority over him?
6
* * *
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
ON MONDAY MORNING I WAITED in the lobby of the jail, excited to read Patrick’s first piece of homework.
This time, nobody was at the front desk. Another woman, also waiting, shrugged at me. I shrugged back.
I had been pleased with my assignment: Write a letter to your daughter. “It’ll be good to have her on your mind, don’t you think?” I had asked. It would comfort him to think of his daughter and help him understand writing as a direct address to another person.
Patrick had looked scared, but I’d pretended not to notice.
“You want me to write…write a letter to Cherry?”
“Yep, exactly.”
Patrick had opened his mouth to say something but then stopped himself.
After another good ten minutes of waiting, the woman turned back to me. “They ain’t see us,” she said. She pointed at a camera. “Power be broke; the video’s out.” She climbed over the front desk and touched a switch. There was a large buzz and the latch to the security door, which led to the cells, popped open.
She stepped through the door, having broken into the jail.
“Hello?” she called out.
Now Shawn emerged. Untroubled by what, anywhere else, would have amounted to a major breach of security, he waved for us both to follow him.
Just a few days ago, the Helena newspaper had reported an inmate escape. Now I understood how easy it would be. Surprising, really, that more people didn’t try.
Shawn gestured for me to go in.
Patrick emerged.
&
nbsp; “How are you?” I asked.
“Stressed-out.” A guy he knew had come in the night before. Domestic abuse. “He kept saying he love her, even though he hit her. I be telling him you can’t mistreat people you love. I try to encourage him, you know. But, really, it stresses me out.” He sighed. Then he said, “Hey, Ms. Kuo, you think you could do me a favor?”
“What?” I asked, happy. He hadn’t yet asked me for anything beyond getting his court date.
“Get me some cigarettes—you know, tobacco.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m not allowed to do that, am I?”
“Naw, it’s contraband. But I really need me some cigarettes.”
“I can’t. If I get caught or—”
“It’s all right.”
“I wish I could—”
“It’s all right.”
I felt guilty saying no.
“Let’s see your homework,” I said, wanting to change the subject and perhaps even cheer us both up.
Now Patrick chuckled. “Naw, Ms. Kuo, I ain’t do it.”
My face fell; my blood rose. Why was he smiling? Did he think not doing homework was funny? But then I caught myself. Patrick was just being realistic: Homework wouldn’t get him out of jail.
Still, my voice was stern. “You aren’t taking this seriously.”
Patrick turned away, as if I had struck him on his face.
—
AS SOON AS I arrived, later that day, to teach Spanish at KIPP, I realized it had been a mistake.
A student asked, “Ms. Kuo, how do you say boat in Spanish?” He liked boats, he said.
“I’ll tell you after you finish your work,” I replied, trying to remember.
The student was respectful; they all were. And diligent. And studious. The school had an extraordinary sense of safety—there would be no random violence here. No threats. No bullying. No sly slap. No promise to jump you between classes. Safety, in turn, generated conditions for concentration. I felt within ten minutes what I had longed to feel at Stars for two years: These kids could do anything; they could go anywhere. In the classroom next to mine, an elderly black teacher taught math. She’d grown up in the Delta and liked KIPP’s discipline. “Black teachers are harder on students,” she said to me, “because we know life will be harder.”
