“How long are you going to stay, do you think?” I said finally. They said gently, without judgment, that they weren’t in a rush to leave. Danny and Lucy said they wanted me to be happy. They gave me a guitar.
I set off on a hot, bright morning, and it was only then, as I drove out of the Delta, that I realized Baldwin’s assertion of our common humanity—that whether black or white, we are part of each other—was grounded not in effortless human feeling but in work.
One can only face in others what one can face in oneself, he had written. The belief in an ideal of common humanity, in love, wasn’t the right starting point—belief was something you earned. You gutted yourself, were gutted. You put in work; you confronted pain. You wrested your despair, as he did, into a belief in our inseparable destiny.
I had demanded my students put in hard work. I had made David put in work when he looked at that picture of a lynching. He put his head down. Did he do that because he saw an ancestor humiliated? Or was it about the classroom itself? Had he detected, and then resisted, a role desired from him—of bearing witness to a grotesque spectacle, of finding comfort in the fact that the spectacle was terminated?
And I had made students put in work by writing. Liana, fifteen, Patrick’s neighbor, taken care of by her grandma: Dear lord, the mane thing I don’t understand is why my grandma can’t find a good boyfriend and a good job so she can take care of me and my sister why can’t she just hit the lotto or something or get some money what about the 40 acres and a mule.
“Forty acres and a mule?” I asked her, surprised. No other student knew the phrase. “Where’d you learn this?” I pressed.
She said, “My grandma.” It hurt her to think about somebody breaking a promise to her grandma.
Miles had kept writing. But his next poem was a demented twin to the first: I wonder will that man suffer for killing my brother I see the shop and I think of my brother I want the man kill / I feel like a king when I get done. I held the paper and sat half paralyzed. My ears burned as it sank in that writing hadn’t given him “closure,” an end to bitterness, the proverbial new beginning. To the contrary, writing had swung open a door to anguish and more anguish.
And Patrick had put in work. Patrick had continued to show up at school on his own steam. Every morning he got up. Every morning he got on the bus. I had been bewildered by his absence in the beginning. But now it made sense. Why should he attend? Would his world really get better if he graduated? What would he do afterward? Nobody in his family had ever graduated from high school. Still he came to school. He wrote a poem about an animal in the streets. He read about a wizard in Kansas. He appropriated Dylan Thomas. Dark is a way and light is a place, he wrote in his notebook. “It had good sound,” he said.
In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin wrote: We…must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others. And my students had. They had insisted, and I had become more conscious. But there remained an unspoken truth, understood by everyone in the room: I could leave. I could walk out of the classroom, if I really felt like it, and never come back. That I could leave, and they could not, was my trump card.
The cliché, that I’d gotten out of it more than I’d given, was true. What I had now was a metric for judging what a meaningful day might look like. The metric was this: Could you form a live, difficult connection with a person from entirely different circumstances? A connection so genuine that you forgot that you were even attempting to make one? So urgent that you wanted to show up the next day and that person believed you would? If you could do this, then you had a shot at not being full of crap, at making your liberal ideals substantial, a part of your bone and flesh.
I had asked students to put in the work, but what work had I put in? I thought I’d put in a lot, but as I drove away, two years seemed like nothing. Maybe I hadn’t changed at all. I recalled now the bad days of teaching, days that brought to the surface the ideas I had of myself, ideas of my benevolence or patience or strong convictions, and utterly collapsed them. A kid would taunt another—retaliation, eruption, chaos. I would stand there, my arteries bulging in my neck, as they watched me, waiting to see what I would say.
Some must have thought I was fed up. That I wanted to give up, get in my car, and go. Probably true. But most of the time I also felt the opposite. I felt the day could be salvaged. The kids who lost it would feel that they messed up again: Today’s explosion had erased yesterday’s success, cleared the scoreboard, and flung them back to zero. But I would go to them and talk to them. I’d say, Nothing can take away what you’ve done. See that picture of yourself? See that book you’re reading? I’d say, It’s human to self-destruct, to fail, to fall down, to feel bad, to get up again. You’re strong, you’re good; trust me.
The words did matter. They built someone up. But there were some students to whom I seldom had to give the pep talk. Students like Patrick showed up and offered wisdom of their own.
One afternoon in April, after a week where it had rained every day, a leak in the roof destroyed a lot of our classroom books. The students despaired. Monica scratched at a waterlogged book. I panicked.
“Stop crying, y’all,” Patrick said. He stood up and walked out. A few minutes later, he returned with a bucket and mop.
4
* * *
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
LAW SCHOOL QUICKLY RENDERED ME unrecognizable to myself. For the first time in my life I did not feel like a good student. In class I was timid and afraid to speak. My grades were mediocre. I worried about whether I sounded smart. The people who seemed the smartest applied rules swiftly and without hesitation. They were able to do what had been asked of them: to think about a problem abstractly, without being distracted by the likelihood that real people had inspired it.
On the first day of our contracts class, the professor told us a story of a woman whose husband had died. Because of a technicality in the man’s life insurance contract, the insurance company denied his wife money. When the professor explained the technicality, we were appalled. Should she get her insurance? Nearly the entire class of eighty raised our hands, yes. When, three-quarters of the way through the semester the professor read us the same case, only a handful of us voted the same way.
I was reading Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich during that first semester. Ivan is a judge, formerly a lawyer, formerly a law student. He works hard; he ascends; he awaits promotions; he despairs when he does not get them; he gets them; he resumes ascendance; he is appointed a judge. In every way, he tells himself, his life has been correct, decent, and good.
But everything changes when he becomes ill. The physical pain startles him. He moans, he thrashes. And he begins to hear a voice inside of him.
What do you want? asks the voice.
Ivan replies that he wants to not suffer, that he wants to live.