In the background, students snickered. “Ms. Kuo got him good.”
I was used to the Asian-mimicking sounds by now. The first time a student had made them, my stomach cramped. I thought of my grandfather, who had walked me to school every morning of the second grade, even in the stinging winter cold. He was twice an immigrant: born in China and rendered a refugee in Taiwan after 1949, he had recently arrived in the United States. One day, classmates made similar sounds at him, singsong and grotesque. I begged him to stop walking to school with me. Eventually we compromised; he agreed to walk behind me.
Now I had enough experience to hide the memory. My lack of anger appeared to calm Miles.
“Did you know my brother?” he asked. “He went to Stars.”
“Who’s your brother?”
“Brandon Clark.”
My heart fell. Brandon had been one of my first students. He was the one who had been killed robbing the flower shop. On New Year’s Day, he’d gone into the shop with two other kids, including a quiet student of mine named William. The third, supposedly the ringleader, had pointed a BB gun at the elderly couple who owned the shop. But the husband had a real gun and emptied a clip of five rounds. The kids scrambled. One bullet hit the back of Brandon’s head just as he reached the door. He’d been holding the bag of money and it went flying: The total amount stolen was one hundred and three dollars.
Days after Brandon died, I had asked students to write about him and how his death made them feel. Somehow Ms. Jasper, a teacher’s assistant who had recently paddled a sixteen-year-old with severe learning disabilities, caught wind of what I was doing. She burst into my room.
“Chickens coming home to roost, Ms. Kuo,” she yelled. “You telling the students that it be okay what Brandon doing. A boy got hisself shot and you’re writing little poems about it.”
I was dazed. The students stopped writing. Was she right? Was writing silly? Did it do little more than endorse Brandon’s crime? I hesitated. Ms. Jasper came from the same generation as Ms. Riley. She believed in the vital black community that seemed, in the past three decades, to have lost its moral high ground. In her eyes, to write about Brandon was to grieve Brandon, and to grieve Brandon was to claim his innocence. By having students write, by authorizing emotions other than shame, I had authorized Brandon’s robbery. For her, shame was a source of dignity.
The flower-shop owner who killed Brandon had not been arrested. He claimed self-defense. It was Miles who would later doubt the veracity of my poster of black and white protesters together in the March on Washington.
“Brandon was a good person,” I said to Miles, right as the bell rang.
He examined my face to see if I was lying.
—
TRUE TO HIS word, Patrick came to school soon after I visited him at home. And then he began to come every day. He’d get off the bus holding his books in that lost way of his, as if his arrival was a mistake, but now that he was present, he did well. You never had to worry that he’d erupt over somebody picking on him and get sent to the office to be whacked by the wooden paddle.
I had asked the students to tape their “I Am” poems on the walls, to make them proud of their own writing. Then I noticed something surprising: They wanted to read one another’s work. Certain students—who, during my attempts at collective reading, put their heads down or slapped the head of a studious classmate, trying to keep him from “being good,” as they called it—would now stand attentively in front of a classmate’s poem, tracing the line methodically with an index finger, not saying a word.
“This is good,” one of them would finally say. And then, often, they gave the same reason: “This is real.” Patrick, like many of the others, read every piece of student work.
After I’d watched them do this for a few days, I suddenly realized what I had been doing wrong. I had not tried to sell reading. I had not spelled out how a book could be personal and urgent—that it was like an “I Am” poem. Besides A Raisin in the Sun, students still had not connected with any book I had assigned. So I tried a new tack.
“You all talk about fronting,” I said to them. “What do you mean when you say that word?”
“It’s when someone pretends to be all that.”
“It’s like being fake.”
“It’s when somebody tells you one thing but doesn’t do what they say.”
“It’s when somebody clowns, trying to get attention.”
I wrote on the board, People think I’m _____ but I’m really _____. I asked them to fill in the blanks. They wrote:
People think I don’t care, but I really love my mom and want to make her proud.
People think I don’t want to learn, but I want to get my education.
People think I’m dumb, but I’m really smart.
People think I’m evil, but I’m not.
Patrick wrote, People think I don’t care, but I do.
“We all front,” I said. “You know why I love to read? It’s because books don’t front.”
They were listening—it was working.
“You can hear what people are thinking in books,” I continued. “They do crazy things, but you can figure out how they feel. You get to figure out what’s happening to them on the inside.”
We talked about what it meant to see only the outside of people. I asked, “Why do people keep their insides hidden?” The responses were painfully insightful, and the most common was a variation on this one: “People are afraid that if they’re honest about what they want, they won’t get it.”
I realized that I needed also to give them a sense of ownership over the people and stories in these books. I researched black writers for teenagers: Walter Dean Myers, Sharon Flake, Sharon Draper, Sister Souljah, Nikki Grimes, Jacqueline Woodson. I ordered these books and then I read them. I felt these writers knew better than I did what stories the kids needed. The heroes were people who looked like them, talked like them, and faced the problems they faced. In Tears of a Tiger, by Sharon Draper, Andy, a teenager, blames himself for his best friend’s death. In Jazmin’s Notebook, by Nikki Grimes, Jazmin, fourteen, is her mother’s primary caretaker. In Begging for Change, by Sharon Flake, Raspberry has to decide whether or not to welcome her estranged father back into her life. A state fund for new teachers had given me eight hundred dollars for the classroom, and I spent it all on these books.