Being a black man Its more favor for white men
I will have to work for white men
If a black person is killed its not much fuss or nothing really said about A nigger most likely not being successful in America.
Commonly said Im only promised to be dead or in jail
I had not assigned a question to prompt such a comparison. He had written it on his own. He must have looked up the word ignorant in the dictionary or checked it against the Douglass text—it was spelled perfectly.
Soon we started the famous passage where Douglass is introduced to the alphabet:
Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters.
Patrick gave me a mischievous look and said, “I know someone like that.” We laughed and he read on. Mr. Auld found out that Frederick was learning. He told his wife to stop: [It] was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read….“Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”
“How would you put this in your words?” I asked.
“He not gonna be a slave anymore when he knows what’s going on. Ain’t gonna be a slave all right.”
Under her husband’s influence, Mrs. Auld changed. “The tender heart became stone,” Patrick read. He looked up and said, unprompted, “She gonna stop teaching him, and he gonna have to teach himself.” And Patrick was right: Soon Douglass was found with a newspaper, and Mrs. Auld rushed toward him in fury, snatching it from him.
So Mrs. Auld had stopped teaching Douglass, but it was too late. At the shipyard, Douglass watched carpenters write letters using chalk. The larboard was marked L.; the starboard, S.; the larboard aft, L.A. He copied the letters to practice.
After that, when I met with any boy who I knew could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be, “I don’t believe you. Let me see you try it.”…[M]y copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk. With these, I learned mainly how to write.
Suddenly, Patrick flipped to the front cover of his book to stare at the indubitable Mr. Douglass, venerable and black, a thick mane of white set against his dark skin. Patrick studied the picture as he had studied that of the Faun, so carefully and gravely that his expression resembled a frown.
—
“HEY,” I SAID, bundling up to go. “I picked up some cigarettes for you from the store. Because you’ve been working so hard.” I handed him the package.
“Thanks, Ms. Kuo,” he said. “But I got one at the house. Can you get it for me?”
There was something unnatural in Patrick’s tone—at once urgent and uncomfortable.
“You’ve got this one already. Why do you—”
“Naw, my dad got it for me.” He looked away.
I was suspicious.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” I said.
“Ma’am?”
“What makes his different from mine?”
“See, my mama got it for me.” I hesitated; hadn’t he just told me his dad got it? “I don’t want her to feel bad,” he continued. “It make her happy to give me things, you know.”
I looked him in the eye. He couldn’t hold my gaze.
“Okay,” I relented.
—
AS I PULLED up to Patrick’s house, I was nervous. Heroin? Coke? Weed? His dad must have put something in the package. But Patrick wasn’t using any of them, was he? No, his homework was too good.
The yard was steeped with water; it had been a rainy January. In the large ditch, leaves and pinecones floated on top.
I trudged to the door and saw his dad immediately—he knew why I was there. I wiped off my sneakers while he poked his head under the couch.
Now I was sure something was wrong. Why would tobacco be hidden? I started to back away. “I’ll come back later,” I lied.
“Naw, I don’t want you to leave empty-handed.”
He gave me what looked like a typical package of tobacco leaves. But for the first time I noticed Scotch tape on the front. It had been opened and sealed again. How many other packages, I realized with dread, had also been opened? How many of these had I given to Patrick from the house—three, four, five? I’d lost count.
Back at Danny and Lucy’s house, I parked in their driveway, relieved that the dark of the rain shielded my windows. I broke the tape open. Some leaves flitted out like confetti, and there it was—weed.
I felt like a fool. Patrick had lied to me, and so had his father.
Over dinner, Danny fumed. “Do you know how fucked-up it is that his dad is giving this to him? That it might get his son more in trouble with the law? And to put you, the teacher, a lawyer, in that position?”
I didn’t say anything.
“What if it had been worse than pot? Heroin? Cocaine?”
“But it wasn’t.”
I didn’t tell Danny what I was worrying about myself—that I was in the process of filling out the “moral application” for my bar. If the California Bar Association caught wind, it would hurt my chances of getting admitted.
“Why do you think you have been giving him those cigarettes?”
“I don’t know.”
“To reward him,” he said, supplying my answer. “But you reward him with your presence, with your teaching, by showing up.”
I hung my head.
Danny said, “Stay away from the father. And destroy the package.”
—
THE NEXT DAY, Patrick stretched out his arm to hand me his notebook.
I didn’t reach for it. Confused, he pulled the notebook back toward his chest.
“I know about your cigarettes,” I said impassively.
Patrick froze.
“This isn’t the first time, is it?”
He shook his head.
“Why?” I said. My anger swelled, remembering the lie about his mother. “Why? Why would you risk it?”
Quickly he asked, “What’d you do with it?”
That this was the first thing he said made me even angrier. “I threw it away.”
He cringed. “Ms. Kuo,” he protested.
“Do you know how fucked-up this is?”
Patrick flinched. I rarely cursed in front of him. “Having your teacher sneak in weed to the jail? Your teacher who’s going to be sworn in to be a lawyer? Who’s trying to help you? Letting your dad give the drugs to her? What do you think your dad was thinking?”
“I don’t look at it that way. It’s up to me; I make my own decisions.”
“If I were your parent,” I began, a perilous phrase. “If I were a parent and I had a child in jail—”
“I ain’t a child,” Patrick burst out.
“You sure are acting like one,” I said.
Patrick jumped back as if I’d slapped him. Then he covered his face.
“Take those hands off,” I said.
He didn’t obey.
“I know you heard what I said. Look at me. I’m not perfect; you’re not perfect. But let our trust be perfect.”
At this he let out a small sound.