“I had to learn how to walk again. Bed rest for two or three months. I got behind. I had to do seventh again. And then eighth. Then I got sent to Stars.”
I tried to imagine his life at home. His mother would have been at work during the day. Something was going on with his father. Maybe he had gotten used to a dull kind of freedom, looking out the window, flipping through channels, watching other dropouts on the street, getting cheap weed. The structure of school must have seemed alien.
“I saw you break up a fight,” I said. “Why did you do that?”
An immense line creased his forehead and he looked down. “May is my cousin. Liana was my neighbor. I don’t want to see my cousin get in a fight with my neighbor. I don’t like to see people fight. Why? And we’re all in alternative school, so it don’t make sense. Maybe they just ready to give up on life; that’s the only reason I can think of.”
I nodded, and then handed him a postcard of Rodin’s Thinker. I’d written him a note on the back, saying the statue reminded me of him.
He looked at the picture carefully, holding the corners with his fingertips. “Thank you, Ms. Kuo.”
I’d chosen him to go on a field trip that weekend. Would he like to join?
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. I handed him a permission slip.
“Thank you, Ms. Kuo,” he said. “Thank you.”
I told him to stop thanking me.
I told him I knew he could make it through the eighth grade.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, in a soft, low voice.
I told him I would work hard for him, but that he would need to work hard, too, through a lot of small steps.
“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, this time turning his head slightly so that his eyes met mine. It was getting dark and there were no streetlights. Yet his eyes offered a small, certain source of light. I wondered if mine did, too.
I told him I’d like to see him in school tomorrow; did he plan to come?
From the way he nodded, in that serious way of his, I knew that he would.
I told him I would be at the ceremony when he graduated from high school. At that, he grinned. He had a gap between his front teeth that I hadn’t noticed before.
Hearing myself make this promise out loud stirred me, made me want to stay in the Delta. This was who I would be: a person who stayed.
When I stood up and started walking toward the street, he seemed surprised, as if he felt I was being careless.
“It ain’t safe here, Ms. Kuo.” He followed me past the porch, and I realized he was escorting me to my car.
—
MS. RILEY WAS my one good friend at Stars. She sang gospel, quoted the Bible and Tyler Perry, and made chicken dumplings that she shared with me over lunch, occasionally feeding a spoonful straight into my mouth. Gentle with me, she was tough on the students. Once, a pair of girls had torn up a roll of toilet paper and scattered it across the bathroom; she confiscated the rest of the rolls. “The good will go with the bad,” she’d said, like a prophet, the streamer of loose tissue dangling behind her like a banner. Officially Ms. Riley was a “teacher’s assistant,” but as often happened in the Delta, where teacher shortages were severe, assistants taught classes. Ms. Riley taught reading.
Over lunch one afternoon, Ms. Riley read the audit report released by our new superintendent. “Fools been running the town, Ms. Kuo,” she said as I leaned over her shoulder to read.
In Helena it is the rare person, black or white, who attempts to defend the public schools. Each year brought a new disgrace. In my first year teaching, our test scores were among the lowest in Arkansas. In my second year, 2005, the Arkansas Department of Education seized power over the Helena school district, deposed our superintendent, and dispatched its own replacement from Little Rock to investigate financial corruption. Among other scandals revealed by the audit was the allegation that an administrator received a raise, unauthorized by the school board, from $90,000 to $124,997 in one year. First-year teachers made around $27,000. Assistants made less than half of that.
“Have you seen Ms. Madden around?” I asked.
“Ain’t seen her all week,” Ms. Riley said.
The attendance record of Ms. Madden, our principal, rivaled that of our worst students. Her major contribution to the school thus far had been to change its name from Stars to Hope. Months later she would change the name back to Stars, for reasons I never figured out, and a decade later she would be indicted for embezzling over a million dollars from a federal food program that gave money to hungry children. But at the time she was just a twenty-seven-year-old woman who, in addition to her job at Stars, ran a daycare program.
Our fourth principal in a year, Ms. Madden would last the longest. Our first, and best, Dr. Rankin, had gotten her Ph.D. in counseling children and forged real relationships with students who landed in her office. Within months of my arrival, she had been “transferred” to the Transportation Services—overseeing the buses. She had been replaced by a Mr. Horton, an assistant superintendent whose assignment to Stars was intended as a punishment for cooperating with the state’s investigation of financial corruption. He sued or threatened suit, and then he, too, left Stars, only to be replaced by Mrs. Eckleson, who lasted a few months. Students referred to days when a principal was absent as “free days”—days when rules were lax and they could test boundaries. They hid in the bathroom during class, let out screams in the cafeteria, and tried to provoke fights; the clever ones stopped short of anything that would get them in serious trouble. And any kid could see that teachers, having nobody to hold us accountable, became lazier. We left campus earlier and didn’t try as hard.