For the first time, our conversation about American history was not a strain. Usually the students were so handicapped by a lack of basic knowledge that we made no progress. They hadn’t known, for instance, when slavery ended or recognized the vocabulary word emancipation. They hadn’t known that promises to give former slaves land had been broken. They’d vaguely heard about violence against black people in the Delta, but most didn’t know about the massacres of black sharecroppers who had tried to organize in our county, nor did they recognize the word lynching. But this one question, why a black family would leave the Delta, was not difficult for them to answer.
I talked about Helena’s history of violence, which was a taboo topic—for people black and white—in town. This violence, I said, helped drive the mass migration to cities like Chicago. I talked about governments that stood by or even participated in the intimidation of black people. And I passed around a picture of a lynching, a dangling body burned and charred, its edges eerily blotted out. If my students could see how brutal the conditions were, I thought, they might find a channel for their anger and a reason for pride in the history of black resilience.
“This isn’t right,” said one student, looking disgusted. He passed it on. Another studied it and shook his head wordlessly. Then he, too, passed it on.
Their twin emotions, outrage and sobriety, formed for me a coherent whole. When I learned about lynching in middle school, indignation had made me feel powerful.
Then the photograph stopped at David, a spindly kid who lived with his grandmother and liked to sketch animals. He gazed at the picture and did not move. He looked as if he had stopped breathing. Then he turned over the picture and put his head down.
My neck burned; a knot grew hard in my stomach. It was against my rules to put your head down. The students watched and saw my weakness.
“If you don’t lift your head,” I said, trying to sound firm, “you’re going to get a zero.”
Finally David muttered, “Nobody want to see that.”
The moment he said it, I knew, instantly, that I had failed to understand something essential. In the tone of his voice, in the sudden change of his demeanor, he was telling me that I had crossed a line. I retrieved the photo from his desk, and even a quick glance at it made my heart skip a beat. It looked different now, something I didn’t at all recognize; some other teacher must have found it, printed it, and passed it out.
I walked to the front of the class and resumed my place at the board. I wrote some words idly, so that my back could be turned and the kids could not see my face. My chest was exploding. How could I be so casual or, worse, smug about a lynching? I had confronted them with their history, treating it like a secret whose exposure would transport them to a painful but necessary enlightenment. I’d meant to be daring and transgressive in bringing up the history of violence against black people. But maybe David and the others wanted school to be a refuge from that memory.
I had expected to be guilty of other things—of sentimentalizing their conditions, of patronizing them with my sympathy. But I didn’t expect to be smug. Here, look, learn, says the smiling teacher with mysterious motives; learn about your history or get a zero.
After class, I put the photograph facedown in my drawer and never looked at it again.
2
* * *
The Free Write
I BEGAN MY SECOND YEAR OF teaching in the same fog of discouragement that I’d ended my first. Except now I was even more sick for a bagel, a bookstore, a movie theater, a coffee shop. Increasingly, I spent Saturdays driving the seventy-two miles to Memphis, Tennessee. Despite its storied history, what mattered most to me was that Memphis was a city. With traffic, and traffic lights! Coffee shops, happy hours, Thai food, parking lots, tower cranes, families out for walks, young people dressed up with somewhere to go, Asians! Cars honked, drivers lurched, the city sang; you knew, deep in your heart, that somewhere not too far away a store was selling tofu. In blighted areas, graffiti shouted joyfully from the walls; for all the poverty in Helena, you never saw it. Even a mediocre tag, I grasped with a jolt, suggested a loftier youth malcontent than the one in Helena: a spirit of public rebellion, a confidence about who your enemy was (property, society, state, the man), a thrill in using color to demand that people see you, even the wherewithal to get spray paint.
Meanwhile, the nicer pockets of the city offered a different kind of wasteland, where you could feel passionate about consumption and empowered by anonymity. At the café in a Barnes & Noble, a man cut me in line—in the rare cases where there was a line in Helena, nobody cut—and, recovering from my shock, I leapt to action. “Apologize!” I yelled at him, in a teacherly way. What did I care? I’d never see him again, which was probably what he’d been thinking. “Apologize!” I repeated, louder, unhinged. The man looked chagrined—it was unclear whether on my behalf or his own. “I apologize,” he said meekly. At the counter I greedily ordered a muffin. And a coffee. And a fizzy drink, just for the hell of it.
In this café, marveling at how spacious and airy and clean everything was, I pecked out law school applications on my laptop, occasionally stopping to eavesdrop. I’d decided that law school would give me a semi-respectable excuse to leave the Delta behind. My self-interest was not unmixed with idealism. Ever since I’d studied the Civil Rights Movement, I’d admired the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and wanted to work there; the stories of lawyers and their battle to desegregate the South in the 1950s and 1960s had drawn me to the Delta in the first place. But, also, I was just desperate to get out of there.
Then something happened. I started to like the Delta. One Sunday I went to a student’s church, a clapboard shack crammed with people in dresses and suits and big hats, and clapped and danced and sweated. Another time I spent all afternoon just taking pictures of the kudzu wilding up the telephone poles—strange, gorgeous, improbable triangles of thick green. I stopped going to Memphis every weekend. I added ice to my tea and drank from my mug on my porch, in arm’s reach of a blooming fig tree, from which I could pluck dessert.
In the classroom I had finally learned how to banter with students and assert authority with ease. In late September, a student interrupted a lesson to ask me if I was related to Yao Ming. I looked at him coolly, letting the silence hang. Finally I said:
“You related to Kobe Bryant?”
The other students started guffawing—at him, not at me.
“Ms. Kuo, that be racist,” he tried, affronted.
“Think about it,” I said. And I continued with the lesson.
When I called my parents to tell them I’d applied to law school, they were intrigued. They didn’t know any lawyers themselves, but they liked the sound of it. Nobody messed with lawyers. Getting sued was one of their chief associations of America before they arrived, and living here reinforced it. But it had never occurred to them that their daughter could be the one suing.
Now they asked, with enthusiasm, “If you get in, you’ll leave Arkansas, right?”
For me their excitement was a clue: If they liked an idea, maybe I should be suspicious of it.
“I guess I’d leave,” I said.
“Good. You won’t have kids making those Chinese sounds at you,” my dad said.