Subtexts A meeting of the Young Adult Book Club
The cover of Reading with Patrick may give the buyer some pause. It looks like something out of the feelgood genre of a teacher entering a poor community to change the life of students and her own. But the truth of this remarkable memoir is far from that hackneyed tale. And much better.
As a recent Harvard grad in the early 2000s, Michelle Kuo heads out to teach i n r ural Arkansas. She is infused with the idealism of the Teach for America program, which has dispatched her to this remote corner of the Mississippi Delta, in one of America’s poorest counties, to serve as an English teacher. At first, Kuo couldn’t be more enthused. The daughter of Taiwanese i mmigrants, she has g r own up r e a d i ng l i t e r at ure inspired by the civil rights movement of the Deep South. But her stay in the dysfunctional school quickly sours her.
At her troubled school, Kuo sidelines her goal of teaching African-American literature, as most of her middle- school students’ reading skills are years behind. Her attempt to teach the region’s legacy of racial violence ends with the teacher putting her foot in her mouth, her students clearly aghast by her gauche gesture of circulating a photo of a local lynching. Far sooner than she imagines, she falls in with the school’s retrograde discipline (several teachers still legally paddle misbehaving students), yelling at students, and in one case, even tearing up a student’s distracting drawing. For most of the school’s nearly entirely black student body, she is only the Asian person they have ever met.
She is not without compassion for her students, including Patrick Browning, a fifteen-year-old eighthgrader who is f requently absent f rom class. Despite his seeming disinterest in school, Patrick begins to take up Kuo’s reading suggestions, pursuing an unlikely syllabus that freely blends The Wizard of Oz with the novels of James Baldwin, each book an unlikely entrant into Browning’s life of poverty.
But the small town of Helena is a grueling place to live, and Kuo’s parents think she i s wasting her Harvard degree on dubious social work. She succumbs to their wishes and heads to law school after two years in Arkansas. But three years later, nearing the end of her legal studies, Kuo learns Patrick i s in jail, awaiting trial on a murder charge. She flies back to Arkansas with a clutch of books and composition tasks in tow.
The circumstances t hat placed Patrick i n jail would very well have registered as self- defense had Patrick been of another race and class, or simply had access to a decent lawyer. He got into a scuffle with his sister’s drunken suitor, who was acting aggressively toward him. Patrick picked up a knife as the two men fought and fatally wounded the other man as the two tussled. But for his efforts to defend his sister, Patrick is charged with first- degree murder and thrown into a decrepit jail without even the possibility of bail. Michelle Kuo is infused with the idealism of the Teach for America program, which has dispatched her to this remote corner of the Mississippi Delta, in one of America’s poorest counties, to serve as an English teacher.
Over the next seven months, Kuo tutors Patrick in jail. Yes, as a newly minted Harvard Law School grad, she attempts to help with his case. But given his previous confessions to police and his own deeply entrenched cultural sense of guilt, Kuo learns she has a different role. Patrick’s reading and writing abilities have regressed. So the pair read and write together, pursuing an imaginative set of sources — the poet W. S. Merwin, The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe, biblical psalms, Walt Whitman, and Frederick Douglass.
It’s here where the book’s real action unfolds, as an unsentimental, yet somehow mystical, journey between teacher and student. Patrick uses his newfound deep literacy to write moving, imaginatively complex letters to his daughter and family. Kuo begins to reevaluate what the purpose of teaching is, as it cannot free Patrick from his circumstances, but nonetheless liberates his mind.
Kuo remains gimlet- eyed to the forces of racism and the lingering legacy of slavery — expressed through the high incarceration rates of black men — that will forever cloud Patrick’s life and keep him from middle-class ideas of success. But her book triumphs in showcasing the other ways education can be used: to connect teachers and students and move us toward a real understanding of people whose l ives are severely circumscribed by generations of injustice.
The intertwined lives of Kuo and Patrick are proof that, given enough motivation, literature can truly be for everyone. Like W.H. Auden’s misunderstood claim that “poetry makes nothing happen,” it may instead console us and force us to reconsider the paths of our own lives. It’s an unlikely tale of education in a very unlikely corner of America. Told without sentimentality, it’s a picture of a Socratic education that may not change a person’s life — but can utterly transform how they experience and perceive the life they actually live. — Casey Sanchez
Michelle Kuo presents Reading with Patrick at Collected Works Bookstore (202 Galisteo St., 505-988- 4226) on Wednesday, May 30, at 6:30 p.m. Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life- Changing Friendship by Michelle Kuo, 296 pages, Random House