by Michelle Kuo
It’s amazing to see trees grow out of the water, in so many different shapes. Some have a Y-shape, and others are lying down. The willow trees are so tall that you can hear our necks cracking while we are looking for the top. To the left is a floating log and suddenly I see it has two turtles on it. We watch the turtles until they jump off. You want to feel the water, too, so you put your foot outside the canoe and into the river. I can see it dangling under the surface like a little fish.
I am sitting at the bow, with my hands behind my head, mesmerized. If the wind blows and the trees leaves shake, it sounds like rattling paper.
My chest pounded with astonishment. Where had he gotten these ideas? I could trace the mulberries and the turtles, the cottonwoods and the willows. But we never talked about the blue heron, the silver carp, or the nickname for his daughter (a sleeping berry!). Nor the frog croaking, the muddy water, the necks cracking below the trees.
I read the letter a second time. I was searching for myself, for deposits of our conversations, memories he’d shared or words I taught him. But I was barely there. Each word felt like a tiny impulsive root, proof of a mysterious force that exceeded me.
“Remember what you said about Lucy?”
Patrick looked at me blankly. He did not remember.
“How you said the book was like a gift to her from C. S. Lewis? Now your letter is your gift. Someday you’ll take Cherish on this trip, and you’ll tell her you’d planned it a long time ago.”
—
AND FINALLY WE read Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, printed in The Fire Next Time.
I’d sent him the book when I first learned he was in jail. But he hadn’t read it. “I tried,” he’d said to me simply when I asked about it. I didn’t inquire further.
As I looked at Baldwin’s letter again, the strangest thing happened: I heard Patrick’s voice as I read it.
I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times.
I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother.
I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it.
And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children’s children.
Baldwin wrote the letter in 1962, at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. In its brief pages, it told a story of how American history tested your capacity to love. How it made you love less, hate more. How hate made you lose your sense of self. Hate worsened and deepened your feeling that you did not belong. But you did belong: For this is your home, my friend. Do not be driven from it….you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.
I showed Patrick the letter we would read in a few days.
“What’s the title?” I asked him.
He read, “ ‘My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.’ ”
“And what’s emancipation again?” I quizzed.
“Getting rid of slavery,” he said, and I nodded swiftly.
“And what do you think black people most wanted after emancipation?”
Patrick guessed easily. “Power, money, respect, land.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes. Land, especially. Do you think they got it?” I asked.
He knew the answer. “No.”
I set aside the next couple of days to talk about history.
“After the Civil War,” I said, “the U.S. government set up this law where you could apply for land at an office in Little Rock. What do you think might have gone wrong?”
Patrick guessed again, this time answering in the form of questions: “How you going to get all the way to Little Rock? How you going to know about the land if don’t no one tell you? They probably don’t believe it; it’s a trick. And that land’s valuable, people going to steal it.”
I agreed. “You needed to own a horse or to pay for a ride. There was corruption, and people took bribes to give it away.” In the end, only about 250 black families in all of Arkansas got land.
Guiltily, I skipped through major world events of the next hundred years. I wanted him to examine a book that had large black-and-white photographs of the Civil Rights Movement. I said we needed to figure out what was happening in 1962, the year Baldwin wrote the letter to his nephew. Baldwin had been in a different country, in France, but the Civil Rights Movement had brought him back to the United States. He’d wanted to visit the South.
Patrick examined the pictures. In Mississippi, white mobs at Ole Miss were burning and breaking everything in sight. They were angry because they didn’t want this guy—I pointed to James Meredith—in their classes at law school. We digressed about Meredith. He wasn’t afraid. He pledged to walk a hundred miles across the Delta, starting in Memphis and ending in Vicksburg. He started the walk. A sniper got him on the second day.
“Did he die?”
“No. He was struck; he fell down. But he didn’t die. And he got to law school eventually.”
He paused. “You say James Baldwin came here?”
“Yes. Well, not Helena exactly. But parts of the South.”
“He came back to see his family?”
“No, he’d never lived in the South before.”
Patrick looked incredulous.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Maybe you would.”
“No.” He shook his head.
“Well.” I gave him his homework: to read Baldwin’s letter.
—
PATRICK WALKED THROUGH the doorway, holding up the book in the air as if it were a medal he’d won. “It’s real,” he said. My heart surged: So finally it could be this easy. You give the person a book, he reads it, he’s moved; after a certain point you can just be a delivery woman, a conduit.
Patrick sat down and immediately, without bothering to wait for me to ask how he was doing, wanted to show me his favorite line.
“You must accept them and accept them with love,” he read. He explained what it meant to me, in an authoritative, almost didactic way. “This mean that after slavery and segregation I got to put my pride aside and say it’s okay. James, he be talking about real love. Real love be like a mother has for a child. She don’t love you because of who you are; she loves you because she loves you. He want that kind of love to be everywhere; he know that love grow when you give it. We got to be bigger, we got to be greater.
“This real, Ms. Kuo,” he repeated. “He be writing to a nephew—I got a nephew, too. Really, it just make me feel better about, you know, being black.”
I felt like celebrating at his expression of racial solidarity. I nodded eagerly, not hiding my pleasure.
“What’s your favorite line?” Patrick now asked me.
“It is the innocence which constitutes the crime….For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”
He agreed it was a good line. “What does this mean to you?” I asked.
“It’s deep, it’s no joke. I think what it means is, white people don’t know our history. Or don’t understand. It’s deep—he don’t just say white people be evil, that they be lying. He just saying they don’t know because they don’t want to know, so they ain’t going to know. Maybe this is why a lot of black folks give up in life.”
“And why is that a crime?” I pushed. “To not know?”
“It’s like we black people are kinda left behind. So for them not to know, not want to know, that be coldhearted. Because when James say, For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it, that remind me of Douglass, how Douglass say this be our home, too. So thank God for Frederick Douglass; thank God for people like them protesters. Thank God he fought; thank God they fought.”
At this Patrick halted, doubting himself. “Bu
t the truth is that even when we be thanking them, they be stressful to think about it. People don’t want to think about it. Like when James talk about white people, how they be fleeing from reality. For me, it ain’t just about them, it about us. Drinking, getting lost, getting high, trying to forget, being confused—we want to forget, because we don’t want to know about slavery, about our history. It real; it painful; it stressful. It unbelievable. But the only way we gonna overcome it is by thinking about it.
“I don’t know nothing about slavery, Ms. Kuo, but I can tell you about my life. I really got so many problems. I can kind of figure out that my life is hard, but I just don’t know how hard. I only know what I know. I can compare it to yours and say, Oh, this be harder than yours. But compared to a slave, my life is easy. And compared to white people, I don’t know, because I don’t know really anybody white, so how can I talk about them?”
His voice had grown soft so gradually that the silence now didn’t seem strange.
“Sometimes I feel…” he began, deliberating. “Sometimes I feel like I want to switch places with Marcus, give him life back. Take his place.”
I swallowed. How had we come back to Marcus?
“Maybe I’m just talking,” Patrick said, equivocating. “This”—he gestured toward the cells with his hand—“this just what we all go through. It’s anguish; it’s pain; nobody want to feel pain.”
He asked whether we could take a little break.
—
FOR A MOMENT his mood had lifted. For a moment the Baldwin had carried him to a clearing, a precipice. Baldwin seemed to give him a new point of view—that of Herbert’s Love, whose quick eye observes the people going slack, who forgives by telling them to sit and taste the meat.
Then as he remembered Marcus, the mood had vanished. No sooner had he felt the powerful freedom of historical perspective than he was compelled to look back at himself.
It took work to build an inner warmth toward yourself; without it, you could not see yourself in others, in heroes.
It was through reading Baldwin with Patrick that something clicked in me. This was why I loved Baldwin: He talked openly about the struggle to feel warmth toward oneself. He’d written that questions of race operated to hide the graver question of the self. It wasn’t that he denied the existence of racial inequality. But the harder task was to figure out who one was because and in spite of it. So this was why I had done the “I Am” poems, the pictures of ourselves, the classroom exercises when I first got to the Delta. I had not expected to do any of that. I had wanted, instead, to teach directly about politics and history. I wanted to rile them up with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and I hoped they would connect with Obama. For the same reasons, it occurred to me now, I had introduced Frederick Douglass to Patrick. I had wanted to feed students with their examples. I had wanted Douglass’s very spirit to merge with Patrick’s. But, I was learning, you can’t try to fill someone up with stories about the people you think he ought to contain. You first have to work with his sense of himself.
Douglass, King, Malcolm, and Obama were all black men who attained a measure of freedom through the act of writing about their lives. But my students had no stories about the Delta, no frame strong enough to hold these great men. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? wrote Toni Morrison. The absence of stories was itself the violence that I had missed.
Baldwin’s book lay on the table between us, his portrait on the back cover. His famous eyes looked straight at the camera.
“He always thought he was ugly,” I said.
Patrick said, “He ain’t ugly.”
—
CHERISH WADDLED TO the front door of her family’s house and looked through the screen. A school bus stopped in front. Children teetered out, wearing backpacks and filling the street with chatter.
“Don’t she look just like her father?” Mary said. “I broke down crying when I first saw her, she look so much like him.”
I was leaving the next day and saying goodbye. Pam, Kiera, and Willa each gave me a hug. Then Pam swooped Cherish in the air and they all took her outside to look at the school bus.
“If you ever need anything,” I said to Mary, “you can call. You have my number.”
She nodded, but I knew she wouldn’t.
Mary was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Pat, he see his mistakes. He don’t blame nobody for his mistakes. I think that’s a good thing about him. He think he burdening us….Hopefully when all this over with, he be able to forget yesterday and start his life over.”
“Do you think he can?”
“I believe he can. I talk to God every day, all day. Yes, I do.” She started to nod, as if listening to a sermon, and then she clasped her hands. I realized that she was stealing a moment of prayer.
“I always tell him he can come back, this always be his home. But I believe it be time for him to get away from here, find somewhere to live.” She swallowed. “Wherever I’m at, my children always coming back.”
Mary had stuck by her family, and now they wanted to stick by her. When her husband went to prison the first time and got out, she took him in. When he went to prison a second time, she took him back a second time. When her brother got a life sentence for killing their aunt during a heroin high, she didn’t forsake him. When her eldest child, Willa, got pregnant, moved away, came back, and had no place to stay, she took Willa and her baby grandson in, no hesitation. When Kiera dropped out of school, she did the same. Everyone would have a home with Mary. The entire time, she never stopped working. At work, as a cook, she stood for hours on her feet, not complaining. She got seizures from her diabetes, she had a string of minor strokes, but she kept going to work. Her boss used to say nigger this, nigger that, and others got mad, but she didn’t mess with any of them. He who guards his mouth and his tongue guards his soul from troubles, she quoted to me. She did live by those words. She liked night shifts because she liked the quiet.
I wondered how many among those who stayed in the Delta had done so to satisfy obligations to people they couldn’t bear to leave behind. They couldn’t leave their loved ones even for the chance to live a new and different life. With a pang I thought about my parents, how I was constantly moving from one place to the next, never home. They wanted this for me, just as Mary wanted it for her kids. But Mary was in poor health. Her children must have known how fragile she was and wanted to watch over her.
“Maybe I should’ve left already. I be ready to get out of this town myself. I ain’t never live nowhere.” Now she began to nod to herself again. “No, ma’am, nowhere else but here.”
—
“YOU ALL PACKED?”
“Yeah.”
Patrick gave me his homework. “Didn’t want you to get all mad on your last day,” he said, smiling. “How many states do you go through to get to California?” he continued.
I rummaged through my bag, got out my atlas, and handed it to him.
I started to read his homework. He had done it all.
To Cherish: A poem written by W. S. Merwin that I love is called “To Paula in Late Spring.” I know it by heart and I would love for you to know it, too. Close your eyes and listen to the sounds of the words. Where is he coming to? What makes him want to come again? What makes him imagine?…
He wrote: The line I find most mysterious, Cherish, is the line with the phrase “worn griefs.” It’s full of questions. He never says what his worn griefs are but I wonder. I think of clothes and shoes as worn but grief? What has he been through?
He wrote: The last line is “of our long evenings and astonishments.” Do you notice the word our? I wonder where you and I will be standing. What will astonish us?
Then I turned to his imitation of W. G. Sebald, a diary entry from The Emigrants, from a man who had left his native Germany. Patrick had been studying it patiently.
He could
do anything at this point. It was both the right and wrong time to leave.
I moved on to an essay—we still called it a free write—he’d composed about stress.
The first time I encountered stress here in jail is when Ms. Kuo first came to see me. I cried after the visit was over inside of the visiting room. A dude was in there said “you are the one who threw your life away.” It is the thought that somebody cares about me that’s stressful because I stress them. There are responsibilities that I have to meet the standard of, he wrote. Then later: I cried because somebody cared for me.
I hadn’t expected to hear that I was the first source of stress in jail—I’d meant to be its relief. I didn’t know he cried after he saw me. I didn’t know he was caught crying and was told it was his fault. Did it always circle back to this, to one’s culpability?
I tried to remember the first day I had come to jail. Yet, like his memory, mine centered not on the visit itself but on what happened afterward: the sudden warmth of dusty air when I stepped outside, the shock and confusion of being seen by someone who knew me formerly. Was this why I had come back? To be known that way, to live up to that memory?
“Did I tell you that I went back to Stars with Aaron…?” I began.
Patrick looked up. He had started to leaf through the pages of the atlas one at a time.
Oklahoma, Oregon.
“It’s all fallen apart. Everything’s still there, trash cans in the yard. But the gate’s all locked up, so we had to look through barbed wire.”
“They didn’t bulldoze the place or nothing?”
“No. That would’ve taken them—”
“Too much work.”
Patrick grunted in recognition, able to picture the school abandoned and in decay.
“Let’s be honest. You went to crappy schools. What would have happened to you if you hadn’t?”
