“They were bad kids,” my mother said, laughing, as if I had already left and the kids were just memories from my past.
I felt immediately that I had erred in portraying my students. I must have complained too much. I considered admitting to my parents that I hadn’t applied to law school for the right reasons, that I was starting to make a life in the Delta with my students, and that I’d begun to find ways to reach them. But it seemed like a lot of trouble to explain these little triumphs to my parents. I wanted them to like and respect me. Law school and the prospect of my departure seemed to have cheered them up, and I decided not to ruin it.
—
PATRICK HAD BEEN in my class since the beginning of the year, but he was quiet, and it was easy to miss quiet students. He always chose a seat in the back and kept his head low. His voice was low, too. “Patrick, could you speak up?” I often heard myself saying—at which he smiled slightly, as if I had said something funny. He seemed at once distracted and alert. His eyes searched the walls of the room, seeking a place to settle. A couple of times, from his seat, he reached his arm out to touch a nearby bookshelf, knocking on it softly to see what it sounded like. And he was empathetic. Once, a student slapped another, lightly, on the back of the head. Patrick winced and looked away, as if he’d been slapped himself.
There were students who no longer interested me, in whom I’d found a hard, mean edge. My fifteen-year-old student Ray was one of these. One teacher said, “He’s always got an ugly face on, don’t he?” Another told me, “Don’t even try—the devil’s already got him.” Even though what he needed was a counselor, I did try for a while. I felt hope when Ray stole a poster of mine, a Picasso Blue Period in which a blind man is eating; I thought it must have moved him. Once, I got him to write a poem. But those acts were anomalies; generally he was impenetrable. He never laughed, even if the whole class was keeling over about something funny. He put his head down a lot, and if you tried to talk to him, he called you a bitch and told you to get the fuck away. Rumor had it that his mother was an addict and, unlike a lot of the kids, he appeared to have no grandparents in his life. And still I got tired of trying to show him I was on his side.
By my second year teaching, I had started to regard students in a utilitarian way: Who would respond with enormous success to just a little adult interest? Few students answered that question better than Patrick. He wanted to try; he was thirsty for encouragement, yet he had failing grades. Patrick could excel if somebody was there to push him every minute. But he kept missing classes. Now I knew why he’d been sent to Stars; he simply did not come to school.
In December, he’d missed so many classes that I was worried, concerned he would fail his upcoming exams. I called Patrick’s house. I wanted to know why he was absent. A male voice said, “Pat’s sick,” and hung up. Worried that Patrick had dropped out, I decided to go find him.
Patrick lived in the “ghetto in a ghetto,” as my students called it, where the shootings were so frequent that the city council had threatened to impose a curfew. Most of the neighborhood’s house numbers had faded, and many of the houses were vacant. A group of teenage boys walked down the middle of the street, challenging cars to swerve around them. I drove back and forth, lost, until finally I gave up and pulled over. A boy rode by on his bike, and I asked him if he knew where Patrick Browning lived. “Pat stay right there.” He pointed to a small square house with a porch, just a few feet away.
I knocked on the screen door. It was dark inside. A man in an undershirt got up slowly from the couch and limped to the door.
“I’m Patrick’s teacher, Ms. Kuo,” I said, through the screen. “I think we’ve spoken on the phone before?”
He looked at me. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. Then he dropped back into the darkness.
Another figure approached. It was Patrick. His face emerged into the sunlight and, seeing it was me, he smiled—a huge, boyish glow at being noticed, at being favored. He suddenly seemed years younger. Then, with a twitch, he remembered he hadn’t come to school.
He said very fast, “The bus didn’t come.” Then he looked away. He knew he wasn’t a good liar.
“I missed the bus.”
Then, “I’m sorry, Ms. Kuo.”
We sat on the porch.
“Doesn’t…doesn’t anybody”—I turned to make sure the front door was closed—“make you come to school?”
“It ain’t on them, it’s on me. They tell me to, you know, but sometimes I just don’t really feel like…” He trailed off. “My mother, she real busy; she’s always at work. And my daddy, you know…”
He stopped, not wanting to say anything bad about his father.
“How did you end up at Stars, anyway?” I asked.
“I got in an accident when I was eleven,” he began. “Gas was cheap, a dollar for a gallon, and I had a whole gallon of gas. I was just playing in the backyard, pouring gas onto some sticks on the ground. Just pouring gas for fun, really. I wasn’t thinking about gas being flammable. It was real stupid. I ignited a whole jug; it flew into a fire. I looked down and my pants were burning. Pretty quick the whole yard was on fire. Lucky my sisters, they was there, and they got a towel.”
I had been in the Delta long enough not to be surprised that he was in the backyard casually starting a fire. There wasn’t much to do in Helena besides going to Walmart, and boredom kept you from thinking straight. It wasn’t malicious. It was the opposite. He was trying to find something to do that wouldn’t bother anybody.
It reminded me of Richard Wright, who, at the opening of Black Boy, starts a similar project. The son of a sharecropper, Wright had grown up in the Delta and spent several years in Helena in the 1910s. Four-year-old Wright had ached with boredom as he watched the coals burn in the fireplace. An idea of a new kind of game grew and took root in my mind, he wrote. Why not throw something into the fire and watch it burn?…Who would bother about a few straws, he thought, tearing a batch from an old broom. The fire rewarded his attention; it crackled and blazed. My idea was growing, blooming. How would the fluffy white curtains look, he wondered, if he held lit straws against them? Soon, to his fright, the house was in flames.
Patrick looked down at his leg, stained by burn marks in large, irregular splotches. “I was in the hospital for maybe weeks, out of school for months. Teachers was supposed to bring work to my house but never did.” His voice was flat, not angry, as if such failure was ordinary. “The hospital got a TV, and I saw the towers go down.”
The towers: It was jarring to connect him to 9/11, or to any national experience, and for a moment I realized that, in my mind, the Delta existed as a place disconnected from the rest of the country.