The fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education was approaching, yet on a recent national reading test for fourth graders, 45 percent of white students had passed, as opposed to 13 percent of black students. Considering the Teach for America job, I began to think I could pick up where the Civil Rights Movement had left off. “This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with,” Martin Luther King had said. “Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.”
I wanted to touch that heroism or at least work in its shadows. I believed in James Baldwin’s injunction: If we…like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others,…we may be able…to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. And I felt I knew what Baldwin asked from me: reparation that required my whole body, my whole being. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime, Baldwin wrote of whites in 1963. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. Yes, I told myself, I would prove that I was no innocent—Baldwin’s softer, and more damning, term for ignorance. Teaching in Helena, Arkansas, a rural town located in the heart of the Delta, might help acquit me of Baldwin’s charge.
Nearly a thousand miles from my parents, I easily made the decision to go to the Delta. When I told them, over the phone, they were befuddled, then angry. “You’re going to get killed down there,” my mother said.
At this I chortled loudly. This made my father stern.
“It’s not funny, mei mei,” he said, using the Chinese word for little sister. “It’s dangerous down there.”
Growing up, I’d attributed to my mother and father a particular hysteria, a sad misapprehension of America, where I—unlike them—was born, and belonged. This feeling had persisted through college.
I started to tell them the literacy statistics and, detecting my pious tone, my parents cut me off.
“Are you even going to get paid?”
I replied that the local district gave a salary.
“It won’t be much,” my dad said. “You want to throw away your Harvard degree?”
I was hurt. But within a day I was joking about their disapproval with my friends.
—
TEACH FOR AMERICA assigned me to an alternative school incongruously named “Stars,” which the local administration used as a dumping ground for the so-called bad kids. These were the truants and the druggies, the troublemakers and the fighters who had been expelled from the mainstream schools. Stars was a kid’s last shot at staying in the system before being banished, entirely, from public education.
This is where I met Patrick, who was fifteen and in the eighth grade.
Mild-mannered, he walked with more hunch than swagger. In class, he preferred listening to speaking. Patrick never bullied anybody. He never cussed anybody out. He appeared to abide by a self-imposed code: Keep to yourself, don’t mess around, don’t get involved with other people’s trouble. But he was willing to break his own code for a cause: Once, he leapt between two girls to stop a fight, and, in the process, got slammed to the ground.
Other students rushed and jostled to get to the front of the lunch line. Patrick hung back. His mind always seemed to be somewhere else: Frequently, while he was working, he would hum to himself, often not realizing it until someone poked him. He left papers strewn about his desk or unfolded them from his pockets. His grin was a half grin, as if he’d once trained himself to smile fully but had since abandoned the project.
More than anything else, Patrick seemed lost, as if he’d gotten on the school bus by accident. And indeed, just a month after he arrived at school, he stopped attending.
—
IT WASN’T HARD to imagine why Patrick had stopped coming to school. Maybe it was just depressing. It could be violent, and when students got into fights, the school sometimes called the police. Shoved into a police car with the rest of the school watching, some pair of kids, freshly scratched and bruised, would spend the weekend in county jail—where, as one teacher put it, they could “think about where they’re going in life.” And we, the teachers, were also violent: For more minor incursions, like cussing out a classmate or teacher, students were paddled. Corporal punishment was legal in Arkansas and widely practiced in these parts. Stamped with ARKANSAS BOARD OF EDUCATION, an updated paddle had been engineered with holes to make it swing faster. I did not personally paddle, but like most teachers who have sent kids to the principal’s office, I was complicit. Still, by far our most common method of disciplining a student was simply to send him home. Since all the students qualified for a free lunch, they liked to joke that if you wanted to mess around, you should do it in the afternoon.
In spite of everything, many of my students, including Patrick, remained optimistic about their futures. Patrick said he wanted to graduate and become a mechanic. He said he’d like to visit New York. Other students wanted good jobs so that they could take care of their grandparents. And when I looked for the source of this hope, most kids told me it came from God. This belief in God, this idea that because human beings were made in God’s image their value was inherent, was foreign to me, but the longer I lived in the Delta, the more sense it made.
I often thought of the words Baldwin had written to his nephew: This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Except in the Delta, the ghetto was not a corner of a city but an entire region of the country. This ghetto is all my students knew, and it occurred to me that if you live in a place that you cannot leave, where you can’t travel or work if you can’t afford a car, where land is endless space that’s been denied you, where people burn down their houses because the insurance money is worth more than the sale price, where the yards of shuttered homes are dumping grounds for pedestrian litter, where water is possibly polluted by a fertilizer company that skipped town, you want to believe that you do not at all resemble what you see. You want to believe that your town’s decay is not a mirror of your own prospects, that its dirtiness cannot dirty your inner life, that its emptiness does not contradict your own ambitions—that in fact you were born linked to beauty, to the joyous power of resurrection.
Yet for all the hours I spent thinking about my students’ fundamental beliefs, I fretted mainly about the tasks in front of me. How to get them to read and write and talk. How to get students like Patrick to show up at school. I generally tried not to think too hard about the perils that lay ahead of them, after they finished school. I didn’t entirely acknowledge everything they were up against. In other words, had an oracle knocked on my door and told me what the future held for Patrick, I wouldn’t have believed it. I would have shut the door. And maybe that would not have been wrong of me: There are just certain kids for whom you bring all your hope.
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A Raisin in the Sun