“He died.”
Patrick spoke matter-of-factly, without hesitation or emotion. I had thrown him an easy pass and he’d given me a satisfactory answer.
“Anything else?”
He thought for a moment. “He kind of like Jesus.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Because he died?” I offered.
Patrick nodded. “So we can live.”
I felt a little sick. For Patrick, King was a religious martyr, a lone man braver than the rest of us, transcendent and detached from history. Erased, in this account, was the collective moral power in being black, in the ordinary people who risked their lives and helped lead him.
The next day, I brought in Frederick Douglass’s autobiography. I’d always regarded Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass as a rich artifact. I’d read it in high school and wasn’t particularly excited by the idea of reading it again. But it seemed like an important thing to offer Patrick. It spelled out the place of slavery in American history, and it showed the genius of one of the people who’d risen up to fight it. “Do you know who Frederick Douglass is?”
“He made something; he invented something.”
“Close, kind of,” I said. I directed him to the title page:
NARRATIVE
of
the life of
FREDERICK
DOUGLASS
A Modern Day
Slave
WRITTEN BY HIMSELF
Published in Boston
1845
Patrick read the title page, including the date, out loud.
“Do you remember—did you learn when the Civil War started?” I asked.
“1940?”
He saw my face and said quickly, “1900?”
I gave him the answer.
“Civil War the one when they fought over slaves?”
“Good,” I said. “Why do you think there was slavery to begin with?”
“Money,” he said. “Things be cheaper for them. We can do all the work; they get paid for it.”
“Yes, money was a big reason,” I said. “Smart response.”
“So he wrote this before we got free?”
“Yes. That’s exactly right.”
William Lloyd Garrison had written the preface. I told Patrick that Garrison and Douglass had been abolitionists. He didn’t know the word, and I spelled it slowly so that he could write it down. I talked about them. Patrick took notes on what I said. He wrote in his journal:
Abolitionists—people who get rit of slavery
William Garrison—white man
He drew a little curve between the two lines to indicate that Garrison was an abolitionist.
We skipped most of the preface and landed here:
A slaveholder’s profession of Christianity is a palpable imposture.
“I’ll give you a hint. This word”—I pointed to imposture—“is related to the word impostor, a person who pretends to be something he’s not.”
Patrick nodded. “So according to Garrison,” I continued, “what isn’t this slaveholder?”
“A man of God.”
I nodded, and Patrick read on.
He is a felon of the highest grade. He is a man-stealer. It is of no importance what you put in the other scale.
I asked, “How would you say this in your own words?”
Without faltering, he said, “He the biggest crook of them all.”
Then he pointed to the name WM. LLOYD GARRISON at the bottom.
“Ms. Kuo,” he said, with incredulity bordering on apprehension, “you say this be a white dude?”
I laughed.
“Damn,” he said. “I mean, shoot.”
And so we began Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, written by himself.
By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.
Patrick’s voice gathered force when he read and lingered on the word ignorant.
“Shoot. We ain’t know how old we be.” He paused. “White children know, but we ain’t.”
He continued:
I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night.
Patrick stumbled over the word duration—yet he didn’t wait for me to correct him. He kept going.
She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from my home.
He stopped. “Twelve miles,” he repeated, recognizing how far this was. Anxiety creased his forehead.
I asked, “Why would it be advantageous for slaveholders to separate mothers from children?”
“What?”
“I mean, why would it be useful?”
Patrick’s words came in a torrent. “To keep him from helping her,” he burst out. “He gonna try to take care of her, and now he ain’t able to. And Mama—she gonna try to teach him to do the right thing; she know a little more than him. She probably try to help him escape—she wouldn’t want him to be no slave. And if you that boy, you see your mama working as a slave, you ain’t plum dumb, you know what they doing.”
Patrick stopped to catch a breath and then kept talking.
“Everybody’s mama love them. Like my mama, she do anything for me; if I’m right or wrong, she do anything. She be there, like right now, my situation. That’s why it be good to know your mother; she gonna have affection for you regardless. But if you a child, you don’t know all that. He probably think his mother hated him, because she never around. He ain’t able to know about affection; he probably never gonna get to know his mother.” He shuddered at the thought.
Then he resumed reading.
By the time I checked my watch, we had read the bulk of the first chapter aloud. It was already six. I nearly jumped. “Sorry,” I said; I was late to meet Danny and Lucy for dinner.
Hearing the sound of my voice, Patrick started, as well; he’d been lost in the book.
I had feared that he would be bored by Douglass, that its language would sound antiquated and dull, but I was wrong: The book was alive, full of blood for Patrick.
“Hey,” I said. “You don’t need to stop just because I’m leaving. Keep going.”
At this Patrick looked surprised. He asked, “I can keep it?”
Then, answering his own question, he said, “Naw, Ms. Kuo, I can’t keep it.”
I nodded encouragingly. “I have my own, see?” I held up the second copy.
He returned his gaze to his own book, looking at it uncertainly.
“I give it back,” he allowed.
—
WITHIN A WEEK Patrick had read half the Douglass on his own, sitting on the third step of an unlit concrete stairway. He’d gone to the stairs, he told me, because he couldn’t concentrate in his cell. “They be bothering me specially when I reading,” he said. “Like they want me to get mad. I can’t get no peace here.”
Patrick was chapters ahead of me.
I reviewed his homework. “What surprises you when you read Frederick Douglass?” I had asked.
He wrote: It is amazing that Mr. Douglass knows all these big words cause I dont.
“What would you change about yourself?” I had asked next.
He wrote: If I could change something it would be me not dropping out of school.
And last I was startled to discover this list:
Ways im like a slave
Me being ignorant
haveing things deprived from me
cause im in jail
having a master or jailer