“Sometimes I feel…” he began, deliberating. “Sometimes I feel like I want to switch places with Marcus, give him life back. Take his place.”
I swallowed. How had we come back to Marcus?
“Maybe I’m just talking,” Patrick said, equivocating. “This”—he gestured toward the cells with his hand—“this just what we all go through. It’s anguish; it’s pain; nobody want to feel pain.”
He asked whether we could take a little break.
—
FOR A MOMENT his mood had lifted. For a moment the Baldwin had carried him to a clearing, a precipice. Baldwin seemed to give him a new point of view—that of Herbert’s Love, whose quick eye observes the people going slack, who forgives by telling them to sit and taste the meat.
Then as he remembered Marcus, the mood had vanished. No sooner had he felt the powerful freedom of historical perspective than he was compelled to look back at himself.
It took work to build an inner warmth toward yourself; without it, you could not see yourself in others, in heroes.
It was through reading Baldwin with Patrick that something clicked in me. This was why I loved Baldwin: He talked openly about the struggle to feel warmth toward oneself. He’d written that questions of race operated to hide the graver question of the self. It wasn’t that he denied the existence of racial inequality. But the harder task was to figure out who one was because and in spite of it. So this was why I had done the “I Am” poems, the pictures of ourselves, the classroom exercises when I first got to the Delta. I had not expected to do any of that. I had wanted, instead, to teach directly about politics and history. I wanted to rile them up with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and I hoped they would connect with Obama. For the same reasons, it occurred to me now, I had introduced Frederick Douglass to Patrick. I had wanted to feed students with their examples. I had wanted Douglass’s very spirit to merge with Patrick’s. But, I was learning, you can’t try to fill someone up with stories about the people you think he ought to contain. You first have to work with his sense of himself.
Douglass, King, Malcolm, and Obama were all black men who attained a measure of freedom through the act of writing about their lives. But my students had no stories about the Delta, no frame strong enough to hold these great men. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? wrote Toni Morrison. The absence of stories was itself the violence that I had missed.
Baldwin’s book lay on the table between us, his portrait on the back cover. His famous eyes looked straight at the camera.
“He always thought he was ugly,” I said.
Patrick said, “He ain’t ugly.”
—
CHERISH WADDLED TO the front door of her family’s house and looked through the screen. A school bus stopped in front. Children teetered out, wearing backpacks and filling the street with chatter.
“Don’t she look just like her father?” Mary said. “I broke down crying when I first saw her, she look so much like him.”
I was leaving the next day and saying goodbye. Pam, Kiera, and Willa each gave me a hug. Then Pam swooped Cherish in the air and they all took her outside to look at the school bus.
“If you ever need anything,” I said to Mary, “you can call. You have my number.”
She nodded, but I knew she wouldn’t.
Mary was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Pat, he see his mistakes. He don’t blame nobody for his mistakes. I think that’s a good thing about him. He think he burdening us….Hopefully when all this over with, he be able to forget yesterday and start his life over.”
“Do you think he can?”
“I believe he can. I talk to God every day, all day. Yes, I do.” She started to nod, as if listening to a sermon, and then she clasped her hands. I realized that she was stealing a moment of prayer.
“I always tell him he can come back, this always be his home. But I believe it be time for him to get away from here, find somewhere to live.” She swallowed. “Wherever I’m at, my children always coming back.”
Mary had stuck by her family, and now they wanted to stick by her. When her husband went to prison the first time and got out, she took him in. When he went to prison a second time, she took him back a second time. When her brother got a life sentence for killing their aunt during a heroin high, she didn’t forsake him. When her eldest child, Willa, got pregnant, moved away, came back, and had no place to stay, she took Willa and her baby grandson in, no hesitation. When Kiera dropped out of school, she did the same. Everyone would have a home with Mary. The entire time, she never stopped working. At work, as a cook, she stood for hours on her feet, not complaining. She got seizures from her diabetes, she had a string of minor strokes, but she kept going to work. Her boss used to say nigger this, nigger that, and others got mad, but she didn’t mess with any of them. He who guards his mouth and his tongue guards his soul from troubles, she quoted to me. She did live by those words. She liked night shifts because she liked the quiet.
I wondered how many among those who stayed in the Delta had done so to satisfy obligations to people they couldn’t bear to leave behind. They couldn’t leave their loved ones even for the chance to live a new and different life. With a pang I thought about my parents, how I was constantly moving from one place to the next, never home. They wanted this for me, just as Mary wanted it for her kids. But Mary was in poor health. Her children must have known how fragile she was and wanted to watch over her.
“Maybe I should’ve left already. I be ready to get out of this town myself. I ain’t never live nowhere.” Now she began to nod to herself again. “No, ma’am, nowhere else but here.”
—
“YOU ALL PACKED?”
“Yeah.”
Patrick gave me his homework. “Didn’t want you to get all mad on your last day,” he said, smiling. “How many states do you go through to get to California?” he continued.
I rummaged through my bag, got out my atlas, and handed it to him.
I started to read his homework. He had done it all.
To Cherish: A poem written by W. S. Merwin that I love is called “To Paula in Late Spring.” I know it by heart and I would love for you to know it, too. Close your eyes and listen to the sounds of the words. Where is he coming to? What makes him want to come again? What makes him imagine?…
He wrote: The line I find most mysterious, Cherish, is the line with the phrase “worn griefs.” It’s full of questions. He never says what his worn griefs are but I wonder. I think of clothes and shoes as worn but grief? What has he been through?
He wrote: The last line is “of our long evenings and astonishments.” Do you notice the word our? I wonder where you and I will be standing. What will astonish us?
Then I turned to his imitation of W. G. Sebald, a diary entry from The Emigrants, from a man who had left his native Germany. Patrick had been studying it patiently.