“How?” he asked, in spite of himself.
“Where do you think Brandon is now?”
“Heaven.” He didn’t hesitate.
“What’s he doing there?”
“Having fun.”
“There. You just got your first line.”
This made him smile, but the smile disappeared as soon as he glanced at the first blank. His face twisted—he didn’t know what to do.
I said, “How about, I am Brandon Clark in heaven and having fun. Hurry and write it, before you lose it.”
He wrote.
“What I do now?” he asked simply. The next line read, I feel.
“Well, how do you think he’s feeling right now, up there?” And we talked through the lines like this for the rest of the hour.
Occupied by Miles, I had forgotten to talk to Patrick. This was like Patrick—he didn’t demand your attention. I wondered what book he’d chosen. Knowing this would make me feel as if I hadn’t lost track of him.
On the way to lunch, I spotted him carrying The Wonderful Wizard of Oz under his arm.
—
MY PARENTS CALLED later that day. “Have you heard from law schools?” they asked by way of greeting. I had almost forgotten that I’d applied and now resented being reminded.
“Thanks for asking about my day,” I said.
“How was your day?” they asked.
—
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, Miles returned to my room—during lunch, during breakfast, or during “free periods” where teachers let them sleep or play on the computer. He had never worked so hard in my class before. He kept revising and revising again. “This be spelled right, Ms. Kuo?” he asked. “This sound good?”
In objective terms, the poem was sentimental. It was written in simple language. It should not have taken so long to write. He should have known how to spell heaven, everyone, misses; he should have known what a comma was. But in terms of where he had begun—his distrust of writing, his grief about his brother, his aggressive outbursts—the poem was a triumph.
I hear my mom pray every night about how she misses me / I want nothing to happen to my little brother the way it happened to me I tell my mom, Keep your head up and stay strong, because I am getting good care in heaven I worry about nothing because Jesus has my back I cry and Jesus comes and wipes my tears from my face I try to make it in the NBA in heaven I hope everyone is not worried about me I am Brandon in heaven, having fun.
I drove to Kinko’s in Memphis to have the poem enlarged to a gigantic 36-by-44-inch size—as large as the classroom’s posters of Malcolm X and James Baldwin—and hung it in the front of my classroom. Next to it was an eight-by-ten photograph of Miles smiling. And every morning for the next few weeks, before classes even started, he would drop in to look at my wall, making sure his photograph and poem were still there. “You love that poem I wrote, don’t you, Ms. Kuo?”
I did. “Of course I do.”
His mother later told me that she had laid the poem on Brandon’s headstone.
—
“WE ARE GOING TO KEEP writing poems,” I told them.
“This isn’t real work, Ms. Kuo,” said Gina, a quick-minded, spirited girl who’d gotten into fights at Miller because people made fun of her weight.
Gina wasn’t the first to say this about our creative work. Like others, she thought grammar worksheets were “real work,” likely because they were tedious. I ignored her and smiled. Then I asked the kids to think of metaphors for hope. We brainstormed. A candle, a window; a patch of light, a playground; a tree because it looks up, a hole a dog digs.
Patrick began to write. He tilted his face close to the paper, nearly crouching. He wrote with his left hand; it moved across the page, smudging ink on the side of his palm. I peered over his shoulder, but he was concentrating so deeply he didn’t notice that I was there. His paper was full of words crossed out. He crossed out mind and wrote blank mind. Each word presented difficulty: It didn’t express what he felt; it didn’t look good; it wasn’t spelled right. Every word that failed him, he viewed as a personal failure––he wrote like a writer.
“Ms. Kuo, how you spell drought?” he said. “Never mind.” He got up to get the dictionary.
Finally, he brought me the result.
Pat is a dog
an animal in the streets
with a blank mind.
In a collar in the yard,
cooped up behind a fence,
no master to train him or feed him
Always finds his own way.
Judged as some low-life creature,
Not trusted nowhere but
Around other dogs.
Valued only by a price.
Half-dead from
the drought,
Thirsty for water.
I was dumbstruck. This, his first effort, was, in some fundamental way, a real poem.
Patrick wrote his title last: The Neighborhood Beast. He stretched his neck, making a loud crack, and I realized how hard writing could really be. Physically, it changed you. You forgot to breathe. Your hand hurt. Your shoulders were sore. But it carried emotional challenges, as well. You risked a lot when you decided to write. You took off a mask. You said, I feel these things; now tell me I’m silly. You said, I tried to make sense of some stuff; now tell me I’m wasting my time. Only you would ever know how hard you concentrated, how you broke open a new space inside. The point of it was never connection with others, but if connection did fail, then that space shrank a little. A classroom made everything riskier. What if you spelled something wrong? If you couldn’t even spell it, did you have a right to use it? What if somebody saw your teacher help you and claimed you didn’t write it yourself? What if people thought you were a kiss-up or soft? Or pretending to be someone you’re not? What if it was too late, everyone knew you’d never been good at school? Freedom to take these risks, concentration, intrinsic desire—these, I realized, were the conditions for writing, or any meaningful work.
I started to assign free writes in the classroom. The free write was not graded. It was not corrected. They could write anything they wanted, any way they wanted. I would not look for errors; I would not circle their desks looking over their shoulders; in fact, if they wished, they could keep their work. If they wanted someone to read what they wrote, I would feel privileged to do so, but I would mark nothing on the actual writing.
How to describe the incredulous looks on their faces when I explained this to them? Demarcus said, “Then I just ain’t gonna write nothing.” Cassandra said, “You’re supposed to teach us.” Yet every student wrote. And during this strange time of silence—the heavy, deep sounds of breathing, the arrhythmic scratching of pencil, the surprising absence of talking—there was a palpable sense of desire.