“What were you doing with it? Selling it? Smoking it?”
Now Patrick got evasive.
“It ain’t matter—it make no difference.”
“Patrick,” I said, now more quietly. “What the hell were you thinking?”
He didn’t answer. He just said, “If I weren’t in jail—none, none this would happen. I don’t know—I don’t know how to get better.”
I got up and left, leaving his homework on the table.
—
WHAT, REALLY, WAS I SO mad about? Was it just the basic fact that nobody—nobody—likes being used? Few emotions are as universal as this. In the end he was just a kid trying to get some pot.
The next morning, Patrick walked in, carrying his notebook and his books. He held out his notebook tentatively.
I reached for it—a gesture of reconciliation.
“What’s been on your mind?” I asked.
“Wrong stuff. Bullcrap.”
He avoided eye contact—he was still afraid of me. Maybe he thought I was going to curse again or raise my voice.
He had written down some things that were not assigned. One paragraph in particular was really a note to me.
My family are getting old and I’m sitting in here wasting time. My momma is waiting on me to come home. This place is ruining me more than I already am. It’s like I need help, but I can do bad on my own. Sorry for my mistakes. Thank you for tring to help me.
My voice was low, almost tender. “I’m sorry I lost my temper yesterday. I can’t know how stressful things are in here, I really can’t. Only you know.”
Patrick didn’t say anything. He was watching me, testing my sincerity.
“And I’m sorry I said those things about your dad. I guess I just don’t…I don’t relate. I thought I could, but I guess I can’t. My dad taught me math just about every night growing up; he didn’t let me—”
“It ain’t like that with my daddy,” he burst in. “Really, I got to help him with his times table.”
He cleared his throat and paused, weighing his words.
“When I was little, we all stayed in Helena. But my daddy had another house where he was selling dope out of. I was living there and I be thinking to myself, I five years old and it a dope house. My dad, he’s like a professional at selling drugs; he strict about how he handles business. He don’t sell to anybody he don’t trust. He used to teach me how to sell. Teach me things like, don’t never call them crackheads. Teach me that it better to deal with people who work, like who fix pipes or got a job. Teach me that at nighttime it got to be a different price, like the price need to go up.” After a few years, his dad was arrested. “He was out on a bond and the night before he went in, we rode around. He was buying me stuff, buying me everything, buying toys. Just spending time together. The next morning I saw the sheriff’s car outside.”
His dad was in prison for two years, came back, then got caught again shortly before Patrick was sent to Stars.
Patrick stopped himself. “My daddy was good, he was, he a good person, he a good person to me, I’m glad I got him. He was there. A lot of fathers, you know, ain’t there, at home. And his daddy weren’t there. He had to learn how to hustle. He the one who showed me how to fix my go-cart. He be real good with his hands; he know how to fix stuff. And how to draw, he can draw.”
“Drawing?”
“When he was in jail, he sent a lot of letters home with drawings. And he know how to sew, stitch up clothes and stuff. When I got holes in my pants, he stitch them up. Though he’s the strongest in my family, it really—it really tore him up I’m here.”
My neck was burning. I hadn’t helped Patrick by casting judgment on his father.
He paused. “Like what I say in there”—he gestured to his notebook—“it’s true. Really. Thank you for trying.”
We were back to where we’d started, the dynamic in which he thanked me and felt as if he’d let me down. How much of this dynamic had I myself created? I wished he would associate me with feeling successful. Of course we were not on a level playing field, but I wished he knew we were equals.
“You start,” I said. “Then I’ll go.”
He looked at me blankly.
“Yeats or Dickinson?”
“Emily,” he said. He referred to her by her first name; sometimes he called Douglass “Frederick.”
“Have you got a brook in your little heart,” he began. He closed his eyes to remember the next line. “Your turn,” he said, when he was finished.
—
I STOPPED GIVING Patrick cigarettes, and he didn’t ask for them again.
We kept reading Frederick.
“The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers,” Patrick read. I asked what he thought abhor meant, and he said, “To hate,” and kept going. “I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes.”
His reading was improving: He read now with a steady pace. Words fell from his lips with control, not too fast, like arrows aimed at a target. Gone was the hesitation, which had hidden the depth of his voice. Perhaps the marijuana incident had cleared the air, permitted us both to be less than perfect.
“…learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition without the remedy,” he read.
“How do you think Douglass is feeling?” I asked, though I already knew what he thought from the way he read.
“Hopeless,” Patrick said. He was tense, keen-eyed. “Because freedom, opportunity, all the things that he missing out on, that all be”—he paused, searching for the right word—“weighing on him. He learning to read depressing him. What the master said is coming true.” He looked back at the words. “And the pit”—he was referring to the line It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out—“that be a metaphor or whatever for how he be feeling, because he can’t leave.”
Without waiting for me to respond, knowing that he had answered my questions, Patrick continued reading. “In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it.”
Patrick grimaced, perhaps shocked by the passage’s direct applicability to him.