He reached down to touch the flap of his shoe.
“Not knowing what to say,” he said finally. “Only knowing”—he swallowed—“only knowing it gonna be guilty.”
“Do you feel guilty?”
“I know I guilty.”
He put his head in his hands.
I wanted to tell him: It’s not your fault alone. It’s society’s fault. Bad schools, bad neighborhood, family, history, racism, a now-obsolete economy that had for a century depended on black labor and then discarded it.
But how to explain this?
Would that be saying, You are not the agent of your own actions?
Would it be saying, You cannot change yourself; you cannot change your future?
I remembered a January day, when I was working at the homeless shelter in Massachusetts. It was the coldest day of the year; there was snow up to my knees. A man outside the shelter was begging me to let him in, but I couldn’t, because all the beds were taken. He smelled like alcohol, and all his words were slurred. I kept saying, “I’m sorry, there just aren’t any beds left.” He kept begging. I kept thinking, Why should I, or anybody, have power over him?
Patrick’s head was down; I couldn’t see his face.
He said, “Ms. Kuo, I did what I did.”
I felt an uprising in my throat; I felt water in my eyes.
He looked up and saw.
“It’s okay, Ms. Kuo. Don’t cry.”
On a day like this, I didn’t know what I could teach him. But I knew I couldn’t leave.
“I want you to do something,” I said. I told him to write a letter to Marcus’s mother.
Now he seemed fearful.
“Right now?”
I said, yes, right now. I said I knew he wanted to do it. I said he’d already done it a thousand times in his head, when he prayed. I said if he wanted forgiveness he really had to ask for it. I said I knew he was thinking about her and avoiding thinking about her. Anything was better than what we were doing now. We hadn’t learned anything from the law, had we? It hadn’t helped him make sense of how he felt and what happened that night, had it?
“You gonna give it to her?”
“If I can find her.”
“My handwriting ain’t good.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“I’ll write it, but you write it over again.”
“No.”
He wrote her. He wanted her to know that before he went to sleep every night he talked to Marcus and asked Marcus to let him into his heart. He wrote her that he asked God time and time again for mercy upon his and Marcus’s souls. He wrote that it was hard for him to talk to her and he had no way to explain away her pain and grief. He wrote he was sorry and that this was only the beginning; there was a heaven. Marcus was there and watched over all of them. It was a better place for them to join and be happy. And at the end of the letter he wrote: Forgive me Mama.
Then he folded the letter into an envelope. Two creases.
I asked, “Why do you call her mama?”
“Because he’s my brother.”
“Why is he your brother?”
“He ain’t just another nigger.”
He didn’t say, Because he’s black. He didn’t say, Because he’s my neighbor.
Kinship was an assertion. Against the loneliness of feeling degraded, against the way the world sees you. Against its judgment that you must have done something wrong to end up where you are.
10
* * *
To Paula in Late Spring
HIS HANDWRITING HAD CHANGED. HIS letters were small, consistent, and delicate. I could draw a smooth horizontal line tracing their tops. There were no darkened blotches of ink, no trace of the ballpoint pressed too hard; he had gained control of his pen.
Every day he wrote. Every day we recited poems.
We read Anna Akhmatova, Walt Whitman, Yusef Komunyakaa. We read Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, Rita Dove, Czeslaw Milosz, Li-Young Lee. We read Du Fu’s songs of autumn rain and Richard Wright’s haikus. Patrick noticed things, made connections. Richard Wright’s line I am nobody recalled Emily Dickinson’s I’m Nobody! Who are you? He knew when the meter of a poem was manipulated and guessed why. I found myself working alongside him, reading poems as if for the first time, and trying to understand what made a line work. Every evening I searched for a poem to bring the next day. I’d never read so much poetry in my life.
Each day I lugged the books into the prison in two large tote bags, one for each shoulder, and stacked them on top of one another so that the dimly lit interrogation room became a little library of picture books and guidebooks, anthologies and dictionaries. When I’d leave, Patrick would look sorrowfully at my bags, asking if they were heavy. It was April and my visits had started getting longer. In the previous fall I usually left the jail after an hour, in a rush to teach Spanish; now one visit might last a whole afternoon or morning. Conversations digressed. In one day we might have discussed the origins of comets, Hitler, and the atomic bomb.
We looked at all kinds of pictures for reference. I’d bring a random pamphlet, like “Arkansas Backyard Birds”; examining the hummingbird, Patrick wrote, It wings beat a hundred times a second. He studied the solar system in Bill Bryson’s illustrated history of the earth and took notes: Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun. It rings maybe iridescent gold and blue and gray. It looks like a fishing hat or a sheriff’s hat.
In one day, so much happened in Patrick’s notebooks.
Each morning, he imitated a poem. The goal was to listen for the voice, meter, and sound and try to replicate each.
Philip Larkin wrote, Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May.
Patrick wrote, Some pity these leaves are gone in fall / Another season again it’s golden.
Dylan Thomas wrote, Do not go gentle into that good night.
Patrick wrote, Break down the hill and build a house to live.
Pablo Neruda wrote, I do not want to go on being a root in the dark, hesitating, stretched out, shivering with dreams downwards, in the wet tripe of the earth, / soaking it up and thinking, eating every day.
Patrick wrote, I do not wish to be a dream in a grave / A guitar untuned whining at night Howling, with the inflection of a wolf, Complaining, of things that won’t be heard.
Every poem took a long time.
He would count syllables using his thumb, tapping it once on each fingertip.
First his left hand, then his right.
He would frown, lean back down.
He would crack his neck, rotate it.
Then the process would start over.