Some students never doubted the exercise. Patrick immediately bent his head over the page and began to work, his left hand moving across the paper, gathering ink. Periodically he’d crumple up a draft and put it in his pocket.
Kayla, tough, with big eyes, and who threw a notorious punch, had been sent to Stars for fighting. She told me she didn’t understand why she fought. Maybe, she speculated, it was because she liked to do things she was good at. Lately she’d hung on to every word I said. In the span of three weeks she’d torn through all four books Sharon Flake had written. For her “I Am” poem she had chosen to imagine her mother, who had five kids and worked two jobs—a preschool during the day and the casino at night. In another assignment, she’d written, I want to make something happen in life but it seems that there’s this one thing that’s holding me back and I just can’t seem to find out what it is.
For her free write, she wrote a letter to herself:
Dear Kayla,
How have you been doing these last few months. Fine I hope. Have you been in any more fights. I hope that when trouble come your way, you would just hold your head held high and walk away with a smile on your face. I know how you get sometimes, but hey! What’s fighting gonna do, nothing but make things worse than what they are already is.
In my future I want to be a young lady teaching poetry to young teen girls. And when I leave out of that school door I want these students to change their mind and start all over again. I want them to always forgive their self for every mistakes they make in life, Because mistakes happens its okay.
All of my students, even the skeptics, bent their heads in silent concentration, a ribbon of feeling unfurling on the page in front of them.
Because mistakes happens its okay.
That mixture of innocence and experience.
I know how you get sometimes, but hey!
When the seven minutes were up, they always asked for more time.
3
* * *
The Fire Next Time
IN MARCH, I GOT A voice message from the admissions office at Harvard Law. I’d gotten in.
I called my parents. “Gong xi,” my mom said, breaking into involuntary laughter, a happy cry, disproportionate to how I felt. Congratulations. My father grabbed the phone and said now he had an excuse to go out to dinner. It seemed that it’d been a long time since I’d made them happy. Perhaps when I graduated from college. So I did not tell them that I wasn’t going to law school, that I had decided to stay.
“See you soon,” I said. They were visiting in May. They barely heard me.
Then I called a friend already enrolled in an elite law school, hoping for his alternative viewpoint.
“Isn’t there something radical about staying in the Delta and teaching here?” I asked. It was a relief to speak in this way—I didn’t even know the word radical in Mandarin.
But he, too, spoke a different language now.
“Radical?” he said, as if he hadn’t used the word in ages. “You can make real structural change by getting a law degree. You can’t do that staying in the Delta.” He started to talk about everything he was learning. He sounded different. Actually, a lot of my progressive friends who had gone to law school had changed. There was a difference in how they carried themselves. They seemed more sure, more worldly. Their indignation was more concise. They talked about trials and suits. They talked about precedents and distinctions. They knew the names of banks and corporations and firms, and the names mattered.
“Don’t be a martyr.”
I felt wounded.
He asked if I’d been reading all the stuff about state surveillance in the Times.
“The Times?” I repeated idiotically. Apparently my vocabulary had changed, too.
“Yes,” he said drily. “The New York Times. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”
There were hardly any items in the Times about the Delta, I thought, but kept it to myself.
“What are you teaching these days, anyhow?” he asked.
I swallowed and cleared my throat. The “I Am” poem now seemed stupid. I worried he would think I was babying the students, when, in fact, I had been pushing them very hard. And he would definitely not know the names of the young-adult writers I’d discovered.
I said, “Amadou Diallo and police violence and democracy.”
In reality, this lesson hadn’t gone well and I had truncated it after a day. But my friend and I had both come of age when Diallo was killed. The New York City police shot forty-one bullets; nineteen hit him. Diallo, a twenty-three-year-old immigrant from Guinea, was unarmed. To my disappointment, the students were not exercised over it. They thought he had a funny name and joked that the police in Helena didn’t know how to shoot a gun. It hadn’t occurred to me that they wouldn’t relate. The violence of white police officers wasn’t a major issue in the Delta: The police force, like most across the Delta, was 100 percent black, all the way up to the chief, and black people were not a minority here. What really angered the kids about the police here was that they dealt drugs and didn’t investigate the deaths of their friends who got killed. Our lesson quickly digressed into the quotidian. What was it like in New, York, City, the students asked, pronouncing the three words as if each were a distinct place. Did it have bowling alleys?
“Diallo? Wow, that’s great,” my friend said, impressed. “But it’s time to move on, Michelle. With a law degree, you can multiply your impact.”
—
PATRICK FLOURISHED AT silent reading. Books kept his focus. His taste in books was eclectic: Langston Hughes, a Dylan Thomas anthology, a rhyming dictionary. At a school ceremony in the spring, he won the award for “Most Improved” student. I hadn’t nominated him; even our absentee principal had noticed that he’d started coming to school. When his name was announced, he looked surprised; he’d never won anything before. Students cheered. He walked up to the stage, his gait slow and hunched, not sure how to act. External affirmation made him sheepish. He turned to the students, who were still clapping. Then, suddenly, he raised both arms up in the air: a victory pose. Everybody laughed.