This time, nobody was at the front desk. Another woman, also waiting, shrugged at me. I shrugged back.
I had been pleased with my assignment: Write a letter to your daughter. “It’ll be good to have her on your mind, don’t you think?” I had asked. It would comfort him to think of his daughter and help him understand writing as a direct address to another person.
Patrick had looked scared, but I’d pretended not to notice.
“You want me to write…write a letter to Cherry?”
“Yep, exactly.”
Patrick had opened his mouth to say something but then stopped himself.
After another good ten minutes of waiting, the woman turned back to me. “They ain’t see us,” she said. She pointed at a camera. “Power be broke; the video’s out.” She climbed over the front desk and touched a switch. There was a large buzz and the latch to the security door, which led to the cells, popped open.
She stepped through the door, having broken into the jail.
“Hello?” she called out.
Now Shawn emerged. Untroubled by what, anywhere else, would have amounted to a major breach of security, he waved for us both to follow him.
Just a few days ago, the Helena newspaper had reported an inmate escape. Now I understood how easy it would be. Surprising, really, that more people didn’t try.
Shawn gestured for me to go in.
Patrick emerged.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Stressed-out.” A guy he knew had come in the night before. Domestic abuse. “He kept saying he love her, even though he hit her. I be telling him you can’t mistreat people you love. I try to encourage him, you know. But, really, it stresses me out.” He sighed. Then he said, “Hey, Ms. Kuo, you think you could do me a favor?”
“What?” I asked, happy. He hadn’t yet asked me for anything beyond getting his court date.
“Get me some cigarettes—you know, tobacco.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m not allowed to do that, am I?”
“Naw, it’s contraband. But I really need me some cigarettes.”
“I can’t. If I get caught or—”
“It’s all right.”
“I wish I could—”
“It’s all right.”
I felt guilty saying no.
“Let’s see your homework,” I said, wanting to change the subject and perhaps even cheer us both up.
Now Patrick chuckled. “Naw, Ms. Kuo, I ain’t do it.”
My face fell; my blood rose. Why was he smiling? Did he think not doing homework was funny? But then I caught myself. Patrick was just being realistic: Homework wouldn’t get him out of jail.
Still, my voice was stern. “You aren’t taking this seriously.”
Patrick turned away, as if I had struck him on his face.
—
AS SOON AS I arrived, later that day, to teach Spanish at KIPP, I realized it had been a mistake.
A student asked, “Ms. Kuo, how do you say boat in Spanish?” He liked boats, he said.
“I’ll tell you after you finish your work,” I replied, trying to remember.
The student was respectful; they all were. And diligent. And studious. The school had an extraordinary sense of safety—there would be no random violence here. No threats. No bullying. No sly slap. No promise to jump you between classes. Safety, in turn, generated conditions for concentration. I felt within ten minutes what I had longed to feel at Stars for two years: These kids could do anything; they could go anywhere. In the classroom next to mine, an elderly black teacher taught math. She’d grown up in the Delta and liked KIPP’s discipline. “Black teachers are harder on students,” she said to me, “because we know life will be harder.”
The wall was decorated with pendants representing the colleges that teachers had attended: Notre Dame, Colby, University of Arkansas, University of Michigan, Hendrix, Rhodes. The list went on. The colorful felt triangles pointed unanimously in one direction. Nor was the wall perfunctory: I overheard a pair of girls, both in the ninth grade, gazing upward and discussing the benefits of Hendrix, which “got small class size” and wasn’t “too far from home.”
Surreptitiously, I looked up the Spanish word for boat on my phone.
—
THE NEXT DAY, before Patrick and I had even greeted each other, he handed me his assignment, as if to preempt my hostility or disappointment.
“Good, you did it,” I said. My tone was more gentle. Why, I thought, should he care about homework? Homework had mattered to me—had been central to my childhood—because it was the only task my parents had really expected of me. For him, teachers at Stars didn’t bother assigning homework, because they didn’t expect students to do it. Come to think of it, I hadn’t bothered to assign much, either. I bent my head down to examine his paper, asking absently, “How are you?”
It was a shock. The writing looked crazed. The blue ink was heavy and smeared. The cheap ballpoint pen I’d given him didn’t help; pressed too hard, it leaked dollops of ink that blotted the page. The letters looked like jagged marks that happened to cross one another, scratching the page. They were arbitrarily sized and haltingly drawn.
I did not recognize his handwriting at all.
Hey cherry i know im not in your life it be my fault. it hurt me i aint there wit you. Here people be argurring about nothing tring my pasiens. Siting here doin nothing but how I messed up an thinking of you.
Love Youre Daddy
I tried to maintain an impassive look. Was it so bad? Yes, it was. Capitals, apostrophes, spelling…His English had never been this poor in my class. And beyond its errors, the message was no good for a child. It reminded the child that he, the father, was absent. It stated that he was at fault for the absence, raising the question of what he had done. It alluded not indiscreetly to his pain. This was not a letter that would make a child feel safe.
But wasn’t it natural also for a father to want to apologize to his daughter? At least he was honest and loved her. Maybe the problem wasn’t the letter itself but the fact that the letters were likely to repeat themselves: I’m sorry; I wish I were there; I should be there for you but I’m not. I had thought homework could help him escape from his feeling of failure, but it wasn’t enough. We needed something that would help him step outside himself.
“I know there be all them mistakes,” he said. “I get confused, Ms. Kuo.”
In a casual tone I asked, “How long has it been since you’ve picked up a pencil?”
“I don’t know. A couple years.”
Where to start? I had no idea.
I leafed to the back page of a notebook that I had brought, pretending that I knew what I planned to write.
At the center of the page I wrote, GRAMMAR.
And below:
I’m????????????im
“See,” I said. I pointed to im. “This is what you’ve been writing.”
Patrick looked, the muscles on his face tensing in thought.
“Do you know what’s wrong with this?”
He was silent.
“There are two little things—can you see?” I circled the I and the apostrophe.
Patrick nodded.
“What’s the difference between your I and mine?”
“Yours be capitalized.”
“Do you see how you wrote it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you make it right?”