by Michelle Kuo
The joke is on me. There are too many English teachers at the prison, and, that evening, I end up teaching math.
—
MONTHS LATER, PATRICK calls and says, unprompted, he’s sobered up.
“I’m better now,” he offers, before I even ask how he is. Inside, I swell with relief. I realize how tense I am when we talk.
“I just call to tell you I’m okay. I know you be getting all worried.” He has found work, he continues, at a tombstone store in Helena, on Plaza.
“I know exactly where that is,” I say, able to picture it. It’s on the same block as three funeral homes, where Brandon was shot and killed at the flower shop.
I ask him what his work is like. He says that his boss puts all the dates and names onto the stones, then Patrick loads them into a truck and hauls them to cemeteries across the county. He digs plots and sets the stones. “It be good work,” he says. “It be good to be outside, you know.” I remember a poem he wrote: Under scorching heat / A man is calmly working / Humming to himself.
He tells me his family has moved to a cheaper place. Without his mother’s salary they can’t afford the rent. Another family has moved into his old house, and another death occurs on the porch, also of a black man in his twenties. He is shot in the face. Patrick doesn’t know details beyond that.
“The same place,” Patrick says, and repeats that phrase again, with emphasis. “The same place.”
After we hang up I reach under my bed and pull out my box of loose-leaf papers from Arkansas. A poem drifts out: A. R. Ammons’s “Easter Morning.” Maybe I had planned to share it with Patrick but ran out of time. After months immersed in affidavits, spreadsheets, briefs, and letterhead, my eye tries to adjust to the empty space on the page, as an eye adjusts to light.
The poem is in seven parts, a memory of a single experience: When the poet is four, his infant brother dies. I have a life that did not become, / that turned aside and stopped, it begins. It is to his grave I most / frequently return and return. He wants to ask what is wrong, what went wrong, what might finally put the child to rest. But the child will not rest. And the child, / stirring, must share my grave / with me, an old man…
I tape the poem to my wall. I start to write about Patrick.
—
THE NOT MATH Tutor turns out to be Taiwanese American like me. A graduate student at Berkeley, he studies religion and German history.
“You speak German?” I ask.
“Yes, but—”
“Say something in German,” I command.
He is shy and refuses.
“You probably don’t actually speak German,” I tell him.
I begin to date the Not Math Tutor, whose name is Albert.
—
PATRICK TAKES A bus from Arkansas to California, to visit a friend in San Francisco whom he met through Job Corps. He has just graduated from the program with a certificate in carpentry and plumbing.
Its huge and beautiful, he texts me about California, somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
My mother and father are in town. Albert and I have just gotten married.
Patrick comes to visit. Everyone shakes hands with him. Mortifying me, my dad reaches out to touch Patrick’s giant Afro; Patrick is good-natured about it.
We take a walk alone in Crissy Field, an unfolding sheet of green that overlooks the bay and, farther out, the ocean. We watch a dog gallop past us.
I tell Patrick I am still writing about him, about us, about reading in jail, about Arkansas. “Is this okay?” I ask. “I won’t use your name.”
“You can use my name,” he says. “I believe in testimony; I believe in God.”
I feel relieved. But I am thinking to myself, This is not his testimony; it is mine.
I ask Patrick what he wants to do with his life, if he could do anything he wanted. He says, “Truck driving.” He wants to handle big eighteen-wheelers and see the whole country.
Later, I will say to my parents, “I always imagined him being, I don’t know, an English teacher or something,” and they will snicker.
“Truck driving is good,” they will burst out. “Good benefits.”
My mom: “He’ll make more money than you did as a teacher.”
My dad, pointedly: “And lawyer.”
I tell Patrick I will look into truck driving for him.
He shakes his head. “I already know my felony gonna be a problem.”
We talk some more. I tell him I am sorry about his mother.
He says she was sick and under a lot of stress. She was having seizures every day. She had high blood sugar levels. “Water,” he says suddenly. “I don’t remember her drinking no water.” This strikes him, a new clue, and he turns it over in his mind.
I am thinking about how when we read together, he loved water, images and words relating to water. Rain, river, stream, brook, dew. For the vocabulary word assuage, he wrote: Rain assuage the earth.
I say, “You know she loved you very much.”
“I talk to her every night.”
“That’s good.”
“I talk to Marcus, too. Every night, too.”
“Do they respond?”
“They do, they do.” I remember his mother talking about God. Does he respond to you? He do, he do.
We are approaching the horizon, blue sky mixing with blue water. For a moment we don’t speak, lost in our own thoughts.
Once, I had asked Patrick, “Why do you think Marcus is in heaven?”
“I just think people who be…murdered or whatever, they go to heaven.”
“Do you think you’re going to heaven?”
“I don’t know. If there is a place in heaven for people like me.”
“People like you?”
“People who have made mistakes or whatever.”
The majestic, swooping red arc of the Golden Gate Bridge disappears into fog. I had once showed him a photograph of the bridge, and now we take a long look at it together. It is getting late, we realize, and we don’t have time to cross it.
—
THE IDEA THAT you can change somebody’s life for the better is powerful. It looms, in particular, over the debate about teachers. Are they good or bad, cheats or saints, unfairly demonized or blindly exalted? Underpinning these opposed portraits is the debate over the nature of the student. One side of the argument claims the student is an impressionable blank slate, a tabula rasa onto which teachers—if they’re good enough, smart enough, and they care enough—can effectively imprint their passions and knowledge. The other side argues that the student is already permanently formed by his conditions—by violence, by neglect, by poverty. No teacher can change his life. Neither side can be completely true.
I met Patrick when he was fifteen. He’d watched dope deals at age five, accidentally set himself on fire at eleven, and seen a lot that I can’t know. It may seem crazy to believe that I, or any educator, could have decisively reversed his fate. In the complex portrait of a person’s life, it’s possible that a teacher is just a speck.
And yet to know a person as a student is to know him always as a student: to sense deeply his striving and in his striving to sense your own. It is to watch, and then have difficulty forgetting, a student wrench himself into shape, like a character from Ovid, his body twisting and contorting, from one creature to another, submitting, finally, to the task of a full transformation. Why? Because he trusts you; because he prefers the feel of this newer self; because he hopes you will help make this change last.
—
NOW TWENTY-FIVE, PATRICK is the same age as Marcus was when he died.
Patrick’s daughter, Cherish, now six, attends KIPP, in Helena. Together, Patrick and I visit her classroom. Kids sit on a large colorful patchwork rug made of squares and animals. Cherish is happy to see her dad. He gives her a book about a panda who likes haiku. She hugs the book close to her chest, not wanting to part with it. “Your daddy got that for you?” another child asks, not without jealous
y. Cherish nods.
Patrick wanted to stay in Little Rock because there were more jobs there. But he couldn’t find one. He applied to a warehouse, but the felony was a problem. He thought about trucking, but the felony was a problem. In Helena the options were even fewer. He applied to the casino. No, the felony. He applied to KFC and Dollar General. No, they didn’t have openings. He has no car, no computer.
I drive Patrick to Phillips Community College. I have been pushing Patrick to take a class there.
The lady at the desk says, “You have to take a placement test.”
“I took it already, ma’am,” he says.
I look at Patrick quizzically. He hadn’t told me this. Had he enrolled and then dropped out?
She checks the file. “Your English scores are very good,” she says, sounding surprised. “Very good.”
I look at Patrick. He is looking at me.
We get back in the car. I ask what happened at the college. He says he took some welding classes, but he dropped out. When was that? I ask. Before he got to Job Corps, he says. I think to myself that this was when his mother died.
The library is next. We have heard that a chemical plant will be opening in Helena. It is a solid lead. He needs a résumé, so I give him a ride to the library. The library is brand-new, clean, and airy.
Inside the library’s new computer lab, where there are ten or so computers and a printer, Patrick and I type his résumé and cover letter. Patrick doesn’t know how to write in a Word document or open one. I show him how. There’s no work beneath me, he types, pecking at the keyboard with his index fingers. “That’s good,” I say. “Why don’t you add that you take pride in your work? Because you do.”
He adds the line.
I show him how to attach a document to his email, in case he needs to send applications electronically.
I print out twenty copies of the résumé, another twenty of the cover letter. Each piece of paper costs me a quarter. I hand cash to the lady at the desk, and Patrick seems sorry to see money being spent on paper.
The plant is on the outskirts of the western part of Helena, away from the river. We drive through flat fields that stretch for miles under clear blue skies, tens of thousands of acres owned by investors of large corporations. The only signs of habitation are the colossal machines that fertilize the crops. Few of the owners live in the Delta or need human labor.
On the ride, I hand him the book of Merwin’s poetry we’d worked from while he was in prison. He touches the thick gray cover. He hasn’t held a book for adults in a long time, I’m guessing. I feel a pang but hide it.
“Let’s see how many lines you remember,” I say.
“Aww, Ms. Kuo,” he says, laughing the way he did when I first asked him to do homework in jail.
“You can test me, too.”
He flips to the right page; he tries. I try, too. Certain lines come back to us easily.
“Have you been writing at all?” I ask, and without waiting for an answer, afraid that I already know it, I hasten to say, “Sometimes a little diary or whatever, you know, helps let out stuff. It helps. At least, it helps me…” I trail off.
He has turned to look out the window. “It’s hard…to make yourself. You know.”
I remember a passage he’d underlined in a Baldwin essay. And they didn’t even read; depressed populations don’t have the time or energy to spare. He said he “related.”
At the plant, the boss is red-faced and chewing on something, maybe tobacco. He has a manner that is freehanded, patronizing.
“The most important thing,” the man intones, still chewing, “is to be clean.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you clean, young man?”
“Yes, sir. I am.”
“Could you take a drug test right now?”
“Yes, sir.”
Until now, I had thought of Patrick’s crime and imprisonment as the culmination of his pain: In his life it was the worst thing that had happened so far, but, I thought, at least things could not get any worse once he got out.
Now I wondered if I had misunderstood totally. His attempt to reenter the Delta—to find a job, to feel at home, to “make something” of himself—was a new battle, excruciating, and, unlike incarceration, with no end date. If school and then prison had, minimally, taken responsibility for him, now he had no one, not even an institution, to claim him.
Back in my room in California, I search for his letters. I do not even know where I have tucked them away. I want—I need—to read them.
Envelopes of Patrick’s letters—the ones he wrote from prison after I left—spill out of a yellow folder. No rubber band binds them, and they’re arranged in no particular order. Before today, the envelopes have been opened just once, the letters read just once.
I begin to read.
Once I begin, I cannot stop.
He writes: The “Sequoia Park” must be the one of those giant trees on the postcard. That’s good you got to go there and visit. California must be one of the best places in the U.S. and I bet the air there is very pure.
He writes: I’m sending my favorite poem I’ve read so far by Langston Hughes. We go to the library every other day and I look for books.
He writes: I’m still gladly recieving your letters. I really don’t like you having a cold and I hope you get better soon.
He writes: I write my mom but she doesn’t respond. She is busy I know supporting the family. You know I’m not social but I listen to the stories people tell. When you get time write me. I miss and love you dearly.
He writes: Last week I passed the pre-test. Next week I’ll take the GED test. Also they put my picture on their board because I’m a distinctive student.
He writes: Yea, I passed the GED test. In English and writing I made 600. On the essay I made a 4. “The best scores,” they say.
He writes: Hey! I got the postcards. My friends admired how enormous that church is in Spain. I love it. It’s great you were able to travel to Spain and Taiwan that’s special. I’m in peace because you are safe.
When I first received Patrick’s letters, I wanted them to represent his progress. I wanted the letters to be my evidence of Patrick’s total, radical change. But to see them that way was to miss the hidden work. What is a letter but a stab at the void, an admission of need and of friendship, an expressed desire for a place in the world of human relationships? You give an account of yourself that you hope is worth reading. It is like deciding to look into a mirror while burnishing it.
He writes: I want to share this from Ecclesiastes. “There is nothing better for people in this world but eat, drink and enjoy life. That way they will experience some happiness along with all the hard work God gives them under the sun.”
He writes: You are the person who brought me out of my depth. Whatever you do I’m with it to the end.
And the letter of Patrick’s that I love most of all: I found the “Mysteries, Yes” poem by Mary Oliver fascinating. Really, I laughed when reading grass being nourishing, in the mouths of lambs. Isn’t that cool. My favorite line is, “How people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem.” This line reminds me of you know, everything. Whats your favorite line.
—
I’M MOVING AGAIN. I untape the poem “Easter Morning” from my wall, in the process ripping off a corner. I read it and find myself sitting down.
The poem ends like this: The narrator takes a walk. On this walk he sees two great birds, maybe eagles, blackwinged, whitenecked. They fly, they coast, one swoops away then circles back. It is a picture-book, letter-perfect Easter morning. It’s about twos, about doubles, about pairs, about converging and diverging. Two birds make up one pattern and forever they move in relation to the other. One merges, veers away, and returns. So two meet in a dream, two share a grave, two break in flight.
It seems to me that once you decide to find doubles, you find them everywhere.
How does a single human mind come to be
divided into two beings, into a life that “does not become” and a life that does? In one, life stops, ceases to exist. In the other, life keeps going, like a tree that flowers against its will, enduring.
So Patrick talks to Marcus at night, keeping him alive, as if the man he killed never died. So Patrick talks to his mother before he goes to sleep, placing her next to him, at his bedside, the person he loved most in life, whom he believes he abandoned, now ash.
For Ammons, of all the places in the world, the place where his brother died is the dearest and the worst to him. He cannot leave this place. Here he must stand and fail. Does everybody have such a moment, a juncture or place to which they return, to which they say, Come back to life, so that we go on with our lives, sustaining our shadow selves, spirit-beings who talk to us and also punish us?
Here is my life that did not become, a place to which I return and return.
I am back in the Delta. It is 2006, and I’ve decided to tough it out. Just a few more years, long enough for me to watch my first batch of eighth graders graduate from high school. I get a dog to ease the loneliness, and this dog is spectacular. On a Delta kind of night, sun setting late and stars visible, my dog scratches at his mosquito bites, and I sip a beer. I call my parents; I tell them I’m going to stay. When I speak, my voice does not tremble: I know who they are, and though they are disappointed now, I know that they will come not only to accept but also to understand.
Because Stars had been shut down and I’ve started teaching at Central, I see Patrick roaming the halls. When he tires of crowds or noise, he visits my class. He steps in through my doorway, wanting to say hi. I am erasing stuff on the chalkboard, distracted, tired out of my mind. He shows me a poem or rap he’s written on a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket.
But it’s a chaotic school with regular fighting, and Patrick starts to go absent. I do not notice at first, of course—a new crop of students keeps me occupied—but another teacher mentions it to me. Didn’t you have Patrick Browning? He hasn’t been showing up.
I get groceries at Walmart, and, stepping out into the parking lot with my cart, I remember—his house is just a few blocks away. I knock on his door. Nobody answers and it is dark inside, but I know his father is lying on the couch; I know to wait. Patrick emerges.
