by Michelle Kuo
“It’s Mary, right?” I said. “And Cherish.”
She nodded and smiled as if she was about to cry.
“You know when Pat’s court date be?” she asked.
Patrick was still in legal limbo—arrested, charged, and in jail, but with no trial date. I told her the delay was terrible, that it wouldn’t be allowed in big cities. “It was supposed to be last month, in November, you know. But now they say it’s going to be in February.”
She nodded as Patrick’s father had, accustomed to the legal system.
“Patrick’s doing well,” I said.
Hearing this, she at once relaxed.
“Patrick say you an angel watching over him,” she said. “I do believe God is helping us, I do believe that.”
“I’ve been giving him homework; he’s been reading every day, working on his own mind, you know,” I said.
Now her attention strayed. I took out some of Patrick’s homework to show her.
Mary looked absently at the page, not seeming to realize I wanted her to read the actual words.
Pam emerged suddenly from the back of the house and went straight to her niece, stealing her from her grandma, sweeping up the baby so that they touched noses.
“She know a lot of words now, Ms. Kuo.” Pam was bragging. “Quit, no, chair.”
The two disappeared to play.
“I heard you’re a cook at the retirement home,” I began.
“I fry a lot of fries, chicken, and fish; that’s what they love. Older people love that fried chicken and fish.”
Mary was open. This wasn’t the proverbial gregariousness of a Delta storyteller but rather a person without defenses, without secrets, whom it was easy to ask much of. I asked if she liked working there.
Mary said, “My boss, he’s real sweet. He’s real quiet. He walk around with his head down, but he smiles. He’s from Helena, go to Tennessee, come back. He gave us a two-dollar raise.”
“He sounds nice,” I said.
“These women I be working with, they sixty, seventy years old, they been working a low-class job twenty or thirty years, barely making forty cent over minimum wage—and this man came along, he give them a two-dollar raise, and they treat him like—” She shook her head. “It’s weird. If you ain’t treat people the way they used to, they ain’t trust you.”
“They treat him how?” I guessed that this man was white.
“Like, there be another boss, she be calling them the N word, then they sit up straight and say, Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am. That’s what these folks respect around here: They want someone to treat them like dogs, like that the only way to get them to bark right.”
“She just said…said the N word openly?”
“When I started there, she be planning a Christmas party and be asking them about music. One woman, about sixty-five, she say, ‘I got some music,’ and the manager say, ‘We don’t need no nigger music,’ and the woman say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ”
Mary started laughing uncontrollably, a strange mirthless laughter.
“Oh, my God,” she hiccupped, finally getting a word out. “Every now and then the word come out of her mouth and people sit up straight. Ms. Rollins be her name; yes, Ms. Rollins.”
Like her husband, Mary had been born and raised in Helena. She was born in 1969, the same year that DeSoto was chartered to circumvent integration. Her mother had worked at the Helena hospital, and her dad worked at an electrical company on Highway 20 that closed not long after Mohawk shut down in 1979. After that, he started to drink more. He drank himself to death.
Mary met Patrick’s father at Eliza Miller, the same middle school that Patrick and my other students had attended before getting kicked out. She fell in love with him because he was fearless. The gym teacher was white and racist; he called students niggers. James wasn’t afraid. He talked back. “He’d cuss the teacher out; he ain’t afraid of nothing.” Mary shook her head, still admiring after all their years together. She made it to Central High, but she got pregnant and dropped out. “I got myself in deep trouble. We brought up during a time when you didn’t talk about sex. A young girl didn’t mess with a boy till she got married.” Her parents kicked her out of the house. Her mother died of kidney failure; she drank too many sodas, Mary said.
She kept working: at the casino, at Pizza Hut. “I like the night shift better. I take care of the children; I left them with Daddy at night, three or four times a week. It was nice. When he went to jail, he got three years or something. So I keep working.”
“You stuck by him,” I said.
“I tried to.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. I guess we was always told do unto others what you want others do unto you. If I went to jail, I’d probably want him to wait on me.” She clasped her hands, unclasped them, scratched her head. “I loved him, I did. I still love him.”
At the age of thirty-four, she discovered she had diabetes. Her blood sugar was over 200. She tried to walk more and switched to sugar-free sodas. “Sometimes I don’t be speaking clear, I can’t remember too much of nothing,” she went on. “It’s because of my diabetes. I get stressed; I get seizures. I think it be all the stress I’m under. I talk to God all day, yes, I do. I ask him a lot of why questions.”
She looked up silently at the ceiling, as if she actually was talking to God. I waited for what seemed like a long minute.
“How…” I managed finally, “how did you feel after what happened with Patrick?”
“I ain’t sleep; I ain’t sleep for weeks. I keep wondering about that other boy and who his mom be. I be thinking about the two of them together. Then I ask God to put me in a room with her.” She smiled faintly. “And he did.”
She had asked around at work to see if anybody knew Marcus’s mom. “Someone told me her name, Ms. Carly. I looked her up in the phone book, and I just call her. She picked up the phone, just picked it up, and told me to come over. She lived two, four blocks down from where we live.”
Mary had been nervous. She worried it was a trap. “I thought something bad was gonna happen when I meet her, I swear to God I did. I thought a cousin or brother or somebody was gonna do something to me, I sure did.”
But Marcus’s mother answered the door and was alone.
“She looked kind of like one of my aunties: short, dark-skinned. She got this little smile on her face—it let me know everything. I thought she was gonna be mad with me, but she say she ain’t surprised that it happen. She said he used to jump her, his own mama, when he got to drinking. It was all crazy there; we be crying and hugging. She was more sorry about it than I was. I had more tears on me than she did.”
Mary touched her face in a remembering way. “When I say my prayers, I ask God to forgive me, to let me start a new day. I be praying all the time. I wake up in the morning, I ask God why this, why that. All day long I talk to him.”
“Do you feel like God responds?”
“He do, he do.”
She went quiet. I said eventually, “Did it surprise you, what happened that night?”
“Pat, what he did…it surprised everybody. He never do physical fighting, he just don’t do it. I believe…” She paused. “I believe he was trying to impress his father.”
Impress his father? I must have looked confused, because then she explained, “His dad love to see that type of stuff. His dad ain’t scared of nobody, you know. So I believe Pat didn’t know what to do but he didn’t want to back down. I try to tell him, ‘You were protecting your sister, not killing nobody.’ ”
It dawned on me how different Patrick was from his father. The crippled leg had misled me. He had a much stronger street mentality than Patrick, embodying a male code fundamental to surviving: Meet a blow with a blow, defend your honor. A Stars student had told me: “My dad told me if someone lays his hand once, you walk away, but the second time, you got to hit back.”
Just because Patrick himself generally avoided fighting didn’t mean t
hat the code didn’t rule him. His dad wanted him to be tougher, to fight back. Maybe Patrick was unused to fighting, to the point of responding with too much force. Had he grabbed the knife because he wasn’t skilled with his fists? There were two different stories about where the knife came from: The police wrote that he’d gone into the house, but he said it had already been sitting on the porch. I did not want to confront him. I didn’t know what to believe, but I did believe he had been scared.
“I try to tell him that things happen for a reason. That boy’s death…maybe that be what it took for Patrick to separate himself. He been hanging on with that boy Harrison; they family all do heroin. So…” She clasped her hands and looked down.
Inwardly, I was trying to decide if she was being crazy: Did someone have to die in order for her son to stave off a potential drug addiction? But I remembered that Patrick had told me that his uncle had killed his great-aunt during a heroin high. Given these circumstances, her thought was just utilitarian. Prison was better than addiction.
As if on cue, she said that her brother was in prison for life, out at the maximum-security prison. Patrick had been nine when he went away.
“I guess yesterday is gone,” she continued. “I can’t change it. I try to live one day at a time. I just wish I know what was gonna happen next.”
I didn’t know whether she was speaking in spiritual terms or about Patrick’s trial date.
“I’ll go see Rob,” I said.
“Who?”
“His lawyer.”
She nodded, still playing with her hands.
I said I should probably get going.
—
“GOOD NEWS: MARCUS WAS DRUNK,” Rob said. “Very drunk.” His blood alcohol level was 0.26, more than three times the legally permissible level.
It had taken more than a year for the coroner’s lab in Little Rock to send back the autopsy. (“Helena doesn’t have anyone to do the autopsy?” I asked. Rob laughed.)
“How can I help?” I asked.
“Matter of fact, you could go to the police station and pick up Marcus’s record. Character assassination,” he continued. “If the victim is an undesirable, we’ll have a better case.”
Undesirable? I wondered.
Then, as an afterthought, he said, “Maybe I’ll even have you do some case research.” He winked, suggesting that case research wasn’t something public defenders in rural areas did.
At the station, where a pile of homemade DVDs titled Jesus sat in a basket, free for the taking, I got Marcus’s reports. I managed to restrain myself from reading them until I got into the car. Was Marcus a sociopath? A rapist? Did he have a record of violent felonies? I hoped that the record was bad. I began to read, struggling to make sense of the poorly written police reports. The year before, in May 2007, he was charged for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. A girl was cutting school and hiding out at his house. Ms Rowan call to the school and found that her daughter was not at school. Mr Rowan neibhor that lives next to informed Ms. Rowan that Marcus was inside the house with two other kids. Ms Rowan call the police…
In May 2008, four months before he ended up on Patrick’s porch, police were dispatched because he was drunk. On 05/06/08 unit were dispatched to 871 Chicago for a disturbance upon my arrival spoke to a Rhonda Sampson who stated her boyfriend [Marcus] Williamson was drunk and cause problems. He had already been into a fight with several unknown people. Mr. Williamson walked out of the house cursing with a bat in his right hand. He was told to drop the bad twice. Which he did not due. The report ended: Mr. Williamson had a strong odor of intoxicants coming off his breath.
On another morning that same month, at 5:02 A.M., the police were dispatched in reference to a unwanted male subject. Another disorderly. He was pepper-sprayed after trying to kick out the windows of the police car. Marcus went to county jail for a week.
The earliest charge, eight years prior, was made when he was seventeen. He had broken into a person’s house and stolen a pair of shoes and a box of cassette tapes.
In sum, his charges included second-degree reckless destruction of property; disorderly conduct; public intoxication; and resisting arrest. No infraction had been serious enough to send him to state prison.
It seemed clear that Marcus was, at worst, an alcoholic who could get aggressive. By the look of it, he was not so much dangerous as unlucky. He had been drunk on the wrong night and shown up on the wrong porch.
“So what do you think?” I asked Rob, ferrying the reports back to him the next day, hoping he would find something nefarious where I had not.
Rob was unimpressed. Swiftly, he leafed through the pages.
“I do know this name,” he said. “Williamson, Williamson…” He searched back in his memory. “Matter of fact, I defended her, the mother. Sure did. She was robbing a house with one of her sons. Police found her hiding out in the bushes.” She and another son had stolen a DVD player.
He clapped his hands, celebrating the strength of his memory.
—
BUILDING A LEGAL case was fundamentally contrary to grieving. You showed no respect for the dead. You mounted evidence of his poor character, implying that he helped cause his own demise. I found myself trying to assert Patrick’s innocence in terms of Marcus’s guilt.
“Good news,” I said the next Monday, trying to channel Rob’s ease. “Marcus was drunk.”
I knew the words came out wrong, because Patrick winced.
“We got Marcus’s autopsy,” I said hurriedly.
At the word autopsy, Patrick looked down.
“How do it…how do it look?”
He played with the edge of his notebook.
Then he blurted out, “Ms. Kuo, he just came at me, talking crazy. I kept telling him, ‘Get out of my yard, get out of my yard.’ ”
“Did you think…” I hesitated. “Did you think about calling the police?”
Apparently this was an absurd question. “Naw, naw, ain’t no one call the police. The police here ain’t no police. They out smoking weed and dealing drugs. How they gonna come to your house?” He paused. “Besides, they know my daddy—they gonna think I started something.”
—
AFTER KIPP CLOSED for the winter holiday, I went to my parents’ house in Indiana. I turned twenty-eight. My brother baked me a strawberry shortcake for my birthday. My parents gave me, among other things, a card with a sizable handwritten message that had oddly encouraging words. “Do you like it?” they kept asking. Apparently they’d spent hours in an aisle dedicated to Hallmark cards, trying to find the card that matched what they wanted to say. The winner, though, had an ugly picture, so they copied the message onto scrap paper and purchased a prettier blank card.
“I love it,” I said, feeling suddenly crazy with love for them.
Satisfied, they returned to the usual topic of conversation: why I was not married.
“She’s not mysterious,” my mother said.
“She’ll spill her guts to anybody,” my dad agreed.
“I’m right here,” I said.
—
BACK AT THE county jail, the New Year had passed and the rain bucket needed emptying.
“It’s raining, ain’t it?” asked Patrick.
“Yeah.”
“Man. I be missing all of it.”
“What’ve you been up to?”
“Nothing. The food’s better on Christmas.”
“There was this MLK Day parade in Helena yesterday,” I said. It had been a cold day in Helena, with light rain. One store had put up a sign that read: CLOSED FOR MARTIN LUTHER KING AND ROBERT E. LEE’S BIRTHDAY. Twenty-five years earlier, the Arkansas state legislature had passed a law to combine both commemorative days into one state holiday.
“What’s that?”
“MLK,” I said. “Martin Luther King.”
“Oh, yeah.”
I asked, “Do you know what he did?”
“He died.”
Patrick spoke matter-of-f
actly, without hesitation or emotion. I had thrown him an easy pass and he’d given me a satisfactory answer.
“Anything else?”
He thought for a moment. “He kind of like Jesus.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Because he died?” I offered.
Patrick nodded. “So we can live.”
I felt a little sick. For Patrick, King was a religious martyr, a lone man braver than the rest of us, transcendent and detached from history. Erased, in this account, was the collective moral power in being black, in the ordinary people who risked their lives and helped lead him.
The next day, I brought in Frederick Douglass’s autobiography. I’d always regarded Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass as a rich artifact. I’d read it in high school and wasn’t particularly excited by the idea of reading it again. But it seemed like an important thing to offer Patrick. It spelled out the place of slavery in American history, and it showed the genius of one of the people who’d risen up to fight it. “Do you know who Frederick Douglass is?”
“He made something; he invented something.”
“Close, kind of,” I said. I directed him to the title page:
NARRATIVE
of
the life of
FREDERICK
DOUGLASS
A Modern Day
Slave
WRITTEN BY HIMSELF
Published in Boston
1845
Patrick read the title page, including the date, out loud.
“Do you remember—did you learn when the Civil War started?” I asked.
“1940?”
He saw my face and said quickly, “1900?”
I gave him the answer.
“Civil War the one when they fought over slaves?”
“Good,” I said. “Why do you think there was slavery to begin with?”
“Money,” he said. “Things be cheaper for them. We can do all the work; they get paid for it.”
“Yes, money was a big reason,” I said. “Smart response.”
“So he wrote this before we got free?”
“Yes. That’s exactly right.”
William Lloyd Garrison had written the preface. I told Patrick that Garrison and Douglass had been abolitionists. He didn’t know the word, and I spelled it slowly so that he could write it down. I talked about them. Patrick took notes on what I said. He wrote in his journal:
