Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, A Student And A Life-changing Friendship

Michelle Kuo’s impassioned account of life in the Deep South is at once urgent and mournful of the past. Kuo arrived in rural Arkansas in 2004 as an idealistic young teacher, and struggled to adjust to the vicissitudes of life in the Delta: a place where corporal punishment and racial segregation remained prominent features of an area long-since used to violence and discrimination. Among her students is Patrick Browning, a softly-spoken 15-yearold whose upbringing with a crippled ex-con father and diabetic mother is as typical as any of his peers’, but who is set apart due to his quiet studiousness. Years later, Kuo returns to teach Patrick again, this time from the confines of his prison, adding structure to his structureless days behind bars for manslaughter, from where he is unable to take care of his baby daughter. Kuo’s triumph is to place Patrick’s story within the larger story of the American South: to insist that learning can transcend space and time, if not actually solve the myriad injustices that still tip the scales against so many of the area’s black inhabitants. A moving and important work at a time when America remains gripped by inner turmoil.