My friend, Ms. Riley, had grown up in Helena, and she talked a lot about what life had been like during segregation. Buses carrying white children would splatter mud all over the black children as they walked to school, but they didn’t care: They walked together; they had one another. No neighbor ever stole, no door had to be locked; if you went out and forgot you left your clothes drying on the line, a neighbor would see them flying and bring them into your house and not a thing of yours would be gone. Children respected parents; parents respected education. According to Ms. Riley, integration had ruined a lot of it. Black teachers, generally not welcome to teach at newly integrated white schools, lost jobs, while white teachers kept theirs. When Central integrated, administrators began to offer alternatives to paddling, because they didn’t want the few black teachers who’d found jobs to whip a white child. And, anyway, white families had started DeSoto, so what had been the point of it all? Helena had been better off segregated.
Trying to make sense of Ms. Riley’s words, I recognized that they were more than mere nostalgia. In a neighboring Delta school that had undergone integration in 1968, I’d read, the school board had closed the all-black school and refused to rehire its black teachers. The teachers sued, but the judge dismissed the suit, writing, This is another instance where a school system has accomplished integration as required by Law, which unfortunately resulted in adjustment that caused certain of the teachers to become victims of the “constitutionally required process.” It was not hard to detect his disdain for integration and his apathy at the prospect of punishing black teachers for it.
—
AROUND THE SAME TIME PATRICK went missing, I had discovered one fail-safe. It was the “I Am” poem.
I am
I feel
I wonder
I hear
I see
I understand
I say
I dream
I try
I hope
I want
I pretend
I cry
The poem has a deceptively simple structure. It looks like easy credit: Fill in the blanks. But it was a trick. It forced you into self-reflection. What do you know about yourself? What do you want, what have you lost? It required tough students to cop to an internal life. If you asked them these things out loud, they’d laugh at you.
Once they started working on the poem, nearly every student wanted to write about somebody they’d lost or feared losing. And I could tell, by their eagerness to talk, that it wasn’t often that they met an outsider who found their trauma novel or their stories freshly sad. Though their vocabularies were limited, everyone seemed to know the words heart disease and diabetes. A grandparent’s death was devastating, because he or she was often the main caretaker. The stories could be dramatic. A pastor impregnated a student’s cousin, who was fifteen or sixteen. A stepdad, high on heroin, threw battery acid on his stepdaughter, and she lost a leg. An alcoholic playing with a gun accidentally shot and killed his niece.
Aaron, a bright, wiry kid, one of my best students, took to the assignment immediately. “Can I write about my nephew?” he asked. “He’s two and already going bad.”
“You’re so great,” I said, confused about why he was even at Stars. “Why were you sent here?”
I assumed it was marijuana.
“Fighting.”
“Really? I can’t tell.”
At this he brightened. “Miller was messing me up,” he said. “It’s easy to get into it out there.”
For all of Stars’s problems, its small classroom size was perhaps what Aaron needed. At Stars, he said, “You see everything.” What did he mean, everything? I had asked. “How much help people really need,” he replied.
Aaron spoke in a clinical manner, as if he did not belong to the body of students who needed help but rather was assessing them distantly. And I realized that small class sizes were not just beneficial for the obvious reason—that larger classrooms ignored, worsened, and evicted the problem student. For a student like Aaron, who lived on the borderline of success and failure, the small classroom provided a magnifying glass with which to evaluate his peers: What did they want, what ticked them off, how did they lose their tempers, what help did they take or choose not to take? Seeing these possible mirrors of himself allowed him to realize he wanted to be different.
At Stars I never saw him fight; he remained, in all ways, an ideal student. He was bright, he was curious, and he had perfect attendance. In his house, attendance was “not optional,” he’d said, and he showed up even when he had a cold. His mother and grandma had both graduated from high school, and they expected the same from him. This—regular attendance—would turn out to be one of the most basic predictors of success for my students at Stars.
For his “I Am” poem, Aaron wrote: I hear everyone cursing around me, so I curse, as well I see my aunts and uncles fighting all the time, so do as I see I cry when I get a whooping for cursing all the time I try to be good, but I always find some trouble to get in I hope one day I will break out of my hard shell and be somebody new.
Sitting next to Aaron was Tamir, who looked afraid. He peered at Aaron’s paper, as though this was the kind of assignment one could copy. I went to him. His paper was blank except for his name. His handwriting was tiny, nearly imperceptible—a common technique, I’d begun to realize, to protect oneself from correction.
In a low voice, not wanting other students to hear, he said, “I don’t know what to put.”
“Sure you do.” I kneeled down to the desk. This had become my favorite part about teaching: the prodding, the slow prying apart of words, the transfer of mind to page.
“How about this one?” I pointed to I see.
“Ms. Kuo,” he said, “things I see ain’t nothing worth talking about.”
I fell silent. We looked at each other, his eyes serious and bright. He wanted to write. He had gone through a lot, things that I could never really know about. I wished there was a way to tell him, I know I don’t know you. But I want so much for you, and that is real.
“I’ll bet there’s somebody in your life who really means something to you,” I said.
Tamir blinked. There was someone. He hedged, deciding whether he should say it out loud. “My auntie,” he said finally. “But she passed.” Now he looked at me questioningly, unsure whether her death disqualified her from being seen.
“But I’ll bet you still see her.”
Tamir lit up at that thought.
He asked, “How you spell aunt?” and I spelled it.
He wrote: I see aunt happy in haven with here father.
“How about this, Ms. Kuo?” He pointed to I wonder.
I said, “There’s no right answer. It just has to be something you really feel, the kind of thing you fall asleep thinking about, you know.” Then I stood up and said loudly, so that others could hear, “You’ve got this.” He nodded.
He wrote: I am red like the sun as it rises I hear a dog barking as I try to fall asleep I pretend I don’t feel anything / I wonder if I am going to live to be eighteen.
After Tamir finished his last line, he read the whole poem to himself. Then he asked if he could use my computer to type it.
Miles, an eighth grader freshly dumped from Miller, was also reluctant. He’d arrived to Stars with a reputation: My friend Vivian, who taught at Miller, had said a couple teachers were ready to throw a party when he left. But he seemed fine at first. He dressed neatly. His shirt was always tucked in; his pants never sagged.
“Get out of my face, China woman,” he said when I neared him. Then he made a mocking sound, ching chong, and stared at me to see what reaction he’d produced.
I simply gave Miles a rueful look, affecting a distant sadness, as if he had hurt himself. Then I said, “At the end of this class period”—here I pointed to the clock deliberately, slowly—“you’re going to apologize to me for insulting my heritage. And it’s going to feel great.”