When the going gets tough, get ‘Reading ’
There are parts of our country so impoverished, so violent and so hope-deprived that most middle-class Americans can scarcely imagine them, let alone choose to seek them out. Michelle Kuo — a shy, sheltered Harvard grad who grew up in Kalamazoo, Mich. — launched herself smack into the center of one of the worst of them and was, predictably, significantly changed.
In Reading With Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life
Changing Friendship (Random House, 279 pp., out of four) Kuo writes of the many revelations that came from volunteering for Teach for America in Helena, Ark., 13 years ago.
Helena, a Mississippi River Delta town that time and the rest of the nation forgot, was depressed and distressed, with few jobs, high violence, deep segregation and little regard for educating the most disadvantaged when Kuo arrived there at age 22 with a brand-new diploma and high aspirations.
The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, she was forsaking the dream of a high-prestige career that her parents had for her by embarking on something she was, as it turns out, ill-prepared for. A tiny Asian presence in a sea of black kids who were attending — not necessarily with great regularity — an alternative school, a “dumping ground for the socalled bad kids,” she endured many variations of “are you related to Jackie Chan?” comments and had to adjust to a hardened culture of disrespect and violence.
And yet, with patience, only slightly dimmed expectations, a devotion to the written word, resourcefulness and determination, the novice teacher began to make a difference. Some kids began reading and even treasuring books.
Her connection with one of them, Patrick, a quiet teen of spotty attendance, was especially strong, and when she left two years later, he was a devoted student and a reader, a kid with actual promise.
But things in the Delta tend to shift back to stasis.
Years later, she received word that Patrick had dropped out and been arrested for murder. She returned to Arkansas to visit him in jail, to try to understand. She paused her life and new career to spend time with Patrick.
She toted books to him every day for seven months. The ones she presented were unexpected offerings under the circumstances: books she loved but ones that a poor kid from the Delta might not be expected to be able to relate to — C.S. Lewis and Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Du Fu’s songs of autumn rain and Richard Wright’s haikus.
Kuo and Patrick spoke of the ways they were processing the words, how they were touched by certain sentences or passages. They learned from each other that the very different prisms through which people from very dissimilar backgrounds view things can cause them to absorb and react to words — perhaps even to life — differently.
One by one, those literary works re-lit Patrick’s curiosity, intellect and hope. And for Kuo, the exercise ushered in greater awareness of self and society.
After 16 months in jail, Patrick opted for a plea deal instead of a trial. Because the 25-year-old he’d stabbed to death was very drunk and a troublemaker, and because Patrick was protecting his sister and he had intended to merely threaten the guy, maybe cut him but certainly not kill him, the judge gave him 3 to 10 years for manslaughter. Patrick was paroled after 21⁄ years because of prison overcrowding. He stayed in the Delta.
Teacher and student, learning from each other, became friends of a sort.