I thought I’d been brave to move from the East to the West Coast; I’d rejected the law-firm offer, chosen to work at a nonprofit, and was starting afresh. Correct, decent, good, Ivan had thought about his life—had I started thinking this way, too? Ivan, it seemed, had not done anything explicitly wrong. But in his educated social circles, he’d developed an attitude, an orientation toward others. This attitude was one of expectation that his life would be comfortable rather than uncomfortable, that he could be spared an exercised conscience.
Had I turned my back on all that was vital in life? As I thought about Patrick in jail, my conscience started to agitate.
It occurred to [Ivan] that those barely noticeable impulses he had felt to fight against what highly placed people considered good…that they might have been the real thing, and all the rest might have been not right. His work, and his living conditions, and his family, and these social and professional interests—all might have been not right. He tried to defend it all to himself. And he suddenly felt all the weakness of what he was defending. And there was nothing to defend.
Alone on the street, I tried to figure out what had just happened between Patrick and me, no longer teacher and student. What had we talked about, really? Somehow I had thought we would have more to say to each other. There was a cliché about teaching: Once a teacher, always a teacher. But there was truth to it. Your sense of responsibility to your students never leaves you. You wonder about the different paths they might have taken. You wonder if you failed them.
A voice inside said, If you hadn’t left, Patrick might not have ended up in prison. You owe him something. And the voice continued, Stay here. Drop everything and stay a little while.
Don’t be crazy, I argued back. Your job starts in three weeks. What, you’re going to call your future boss and say, Sorry, I can’t come after all? And the funders who interviewed you and gave you money to work there, what will you say? Hey, I need to go to Arkansas to…do what? It’s irresponsible; it’s flaky. You’re an adult now; act like one. And Mom and Dad actually approve of you; they think you’ve gotten your act together; you took your bar exam and probably passed; you have a job and they like California. Mom just helped you move in all your crap, all those dresses and dishes—where are you going to store it all? And a subletter—you’d need to find a subletter for your room. Adina is going to hate you. She had to look at so many apartments before she found this one.
You’re not thinking straight, I told the voice, because you feel bad that you’ve moved on and Patrick’s here in jail. You feel bad that he has a baby daughter and he’s afraid to think about her. You feel bad that writing about Patrick meant so much to you and then turned out to mean nothing to Patrick. You feel bad that you made him read when he didn’t know how to read anymore. You feel bad because the essay was really not about him, it was more about you, about who you used to be. How na?ve of you to think that when you let him read on a beanbag in your classroom, when you sat on his porch, that you changed his life. Now you see Patrick in jail, alone, not expecting anything of you or anybody—Patrick blaming himself, Patrick not knowing what he was charged for, Patrick not even knowing how many times he stabbed a person, just knowing he took away a life. Now you know who you aren’t, who you weren’t.
No, said the voice. That’s cynical. Why should optimism be a crime? You were a believer. When you woke up each day, you decided that showing up to work mattered. And it did. Remember the kids’ silence as they read? You didn’t have to enforce it. Because everyone understood: For twenty minutes or so they had gone somewhere new, someplace private and safe. It’s in moments like these that we realize how capable we are of quiet and care: The consciousness is filled to the brim. From the outside of the Delta classroom, it can look hokey or insignificant. From the outside, it’s smarter to talk about the Delta with a certain educated tone of fatalism mixed with ambition: “Until there’s a massive redistribution of wealth and a national effort to revitalize this historically neglected region,” you might intone, adjusting your glasses, “there’s very little hope.” But on the inside nothing seemed so sure. On the inside so much could happen in one day, in one hour.
And then you left. You justified your leaving by saying you wanted to learn the law, because it was a powerful language to know. And perhaps you can make some broader change. But maybe you’ve forgotten the language you started to learn in the Delta: the one that allowed you to connect with people from different circumstances. This is a powerful language, too, and maybe you’ve forgotten it. Maybe this is the only language that matters. Sure, yes, you’re going to work for a nonprofit. But in a place like New York or the Bay Area, a nonprofit has plenty of educated do-gooders to choose from. You’re simply more disposable. It’s not wrong to want to come back to the Delta. It’s not shameful to be motivated by the feeling of being needed. Don’t block out your desire to feel a part of what is raw and vital. To embrace what is not part of official business. Just—don’t—think.
My defenses began to soften. I thought about what I could do here, if I decided to come back. Help him with his murder case? But the case was straightforward; my teacher had said so. I could teach again. But where? Stars had shut down. Maybe the Boys & Girls Club: I never got to see the new facility I helped build. I could write more, about the Delta. But writing was pointless if all I had to say was It’s too late.
Don’t write: Writing is part of the problem. Writing requires that you close the door. It’s what sad people do. You were a person who did stuff, stayed close to people: You answered the cellphone when a student called, you were that person people would talk about and say, She was there for me.
Accept this picture of what happened: You left prematurely. You stumbled upon law school, showing up basically by accident. You gave in to your parents. You were weak. You thought that teaching was not prestigious. You thought the Delta was not a place to make a life.
But what can staying do? I wondered. Was staying just a way to make myself feel better, and make up for what I didn’t do before? A way to get back to a time when, for me and Patrick, all paths seemed possible.
Don’t think. Just come back. If you don’t come back now, it’ll be too late for Patrick. If you don’t come back now, it’ll be too late for you: You’ll never come back.
—
THE DRIVE FROM Arkansas to Indiana took eight hours. Somewhere in Missouri, I pulled into a service station to fill my tires with air. I could feel my heart beat in my chest.
First I needed to tell the source of my funding: the director of my fellowship, famed for her exacting speech, ironclad memory, and knockout red suits.
I called her.
“I need to see through Patrick’s case,” I said. She had read the Times piece, so I didn’t have to explain who he had been to me. “I need enough time to run through his options with him. And I just feel like I’ve been running away from the Delta and have unfinished business there.”
“How much time do you need?”
I didn’t know. “Until May,” I tried. I was just guessing. May sounded like enough time for me to reconnect but not so much that she would say no.