♦◊♦
One day, I drove Felicia home to speak to her mother about her behavior. She loved the ride in the station wagon. The car was a Subaru, a couple of years old, but was clearly the nicest car Felicia had ever been in. She begged me to turn on the radio, and with her pleading—even remembering what she’d done—I couldn’t resist. I turned up the bass. Nelly bumped from the stereo. She rolled the window down, screaming before I told her to rein it in.
“You tell me where to turn,” I said. She nodded, and pointed every few blocks until we reached the school a second time. She’d just wanted to ride, hadn’t directed me anywhere. I stopped the car and turned off the stereo.
“Man, shoot,” she said.
“What is your mother’s address?”
“You want my mama address?” She narrowed her eyes, then mumbled something and smirked.
“Shoot, Mr. Copperman. My mama stay only five blocks from here.”
She sounded pleased, which just made me angrier. I threw the car into drive and sped down the street, bouncing over potholes.
The house was tucked into a dead-end alley. Packed dirt replaced pavement as we neared her house and I had to slow down. Ten or twelve tin trailers were crushed together, no fences between them, each one with a little plot out front that would have been a yard if there had been any grass. We got out of the car and walked toward the trailer. Cans and cardboard were stacked in front of her unit. Flies zigzagged the ground with an omnipresent buzz. The smell of garbage gagged me. I knocked and heard a muffled stirring inside.
The door opened halfway to reveal a fragile, wispy woman of sixty in a pink bathrobe and black hairnet.
“Ma’am,” I said. “I’m Mr. Copperman, Felicia’s teacher. Can I talk to her mother?”
She looked so taken aback that I wasn’t sure if she was going to say anything. Then she swung the door open.
“Lord, yes, come on in,” she said. “I’m Miz Gates, Felicia’s grandmamma.”
I offered her my hand and she took it with both of hers and squeezed. I made no move to enter. “I’d like to speak to her mother.”
Ms. Gates stood in the doorway looking baffled. “Felicia’s mama in Georgia,” she said after a time. “Felicia ain’t never said nothing ’bout that?”
I shook my head, heat rising to my face. “Well, let’s talk then,” I finally managed.
She grinned, turned, and beckoned for me to follow. “Ain’t never had no teacher come to my home. They never took no interest.”
The interior was clean but sparsely furnished. An off-white couch sat across from a television tray, and an easy chair with torn upholstery held a privileged spot in the corner. On the opposite side of the room, a boy of five or six stared at me wide-eyed, his face oddly elongated. Felicia glanced uneasily at Ms. Gates, then went and sat cross-legged beside the boy and kissed his swollen head. I had seen a number of children like him in the Delta. A sickle-cell child. Ms. Gates took to the easy chair with a sigh and motioned for me to sit on the couch.
“Mr. Copperman, Felicia don’t do nothing but talk, talk, talk about you. My teacher this, my teacher that. You must be doing some job over there,” she said, smiling. She was missing several teeth, and the rest were shot with fillings.
“Well, I guess so,” I said.
“So how’s my baby doing?” she said. I glanced at Felicia. She turned her head away when our eyes met. I looked around the room and saw plastic-framed pictures of Christ along the walls, limp, green curtains, and a yellowed plaster ceiling cracked with water damage. I cleared my throat.
“Felicia’s a very smart little girl,” I said. “She does fine work. Brilliant work, even.” I heard Felicia let out her breath. Ms. Gates beamed.
“I’m so glad. Felicia always say she doing well but I never know. I’ll have to tell Dede, her mother. Felicia don’t see Dede much, but the girl loves her mama, always wants her mama to know how well she doing.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Ms. Gates let out her breath. “I was sure you was gone tell me Felicia cutting up again. I get tired, but that’s cause it ain’t easy taking care of these babies.”
“I’m sure it’s a lot of work.” I glanced at Felicia. She was watching me intently, her face unreadable. “But I’m sure it’s what’s right to do, ma’am.”
“What’s right before God, Mr. Copper-man.” She shook her head. “You go to church much? You know that church there off Main, Living Faith?”
“Yes ma’am, I know. I’m kind of between churches just now.”
“Well, Felicia sings just fine, she does,” she said, smiling. “In the choir there. You should come hear her some Sunday.”
I met Felicia’s eye and winked. She looked at me with a strange intensity.
“I will when I can, ma’am. I do bet Felicia sings just beautifully.”
♦◊♦
From then on, Felicia’s behavior was different. The change in Felicia wasn’t a shift in character—she could be as vicious as ever, and she still searched for the madcap and naughty angle, the means to assert her dominance. It was more that she turned all the force of her personality to pleasing—me. Something had happened when I sang her undeserved praises to her grandmother, or rather, kept her sins to myself out of guilt: A bond had been formed, its binding lines strong. She’d glance to me as she went into her usual aggression, an insult on her tongue—and bite it back. I reinforced this behavior with constant praise: “That’s great,” or “Excellent,” or “Thank you, sweetheart,” sending her to greater effort still, her face alight. She grew used to thinking before she spoke, to speaking softer, gaining a new habit of gentleness from the thirst for praise. She sat straight in her chair each day, working furiously; she was far more advanced than the rest of the class, and so I tailored her assignments, working algebra with her and having her write on topics she cared about. I wanted to understand her life out of school, at her grandmother’s apartment and beyond. What was it to walk those dirt roads, to linger at the edges of those chain-link fences? What was the feel of the back alley and grassy lot, the purposeless search for something bright in the coming dusk?
She did not tell me. Her stories were her own, and revealed more in what was left unsaid. Most of her writing concerned her brother—her “sickle-cell baby,” as she called him, who “can’t do nothing for hisself but have these big brown eyes and this smile that like the sun come up on the edge of the sky, and who love-love-love his big sister who keep him safe.” From this I understood she cared for her brother all afternoon, every afternoon. She spoke frequently, if somewhat indirectly, of her mother: “My mama gone a lot to Georgia cause she got thing to do, but who take me down to the beauty shop and get my hair waved like them actress on TV so all the men gone watch me.” She demanded less of her mother than of everyone else, accepting what little maternal attention she received.
Felicia’s life on the streets was there only in passing mention, in telling detail: “Was down at them ball courts last night by the high school, where they ain’t no nets cause them big dumb boys cut them down. That boy Pipe gone look at me wrong talking bout my brother slow, ‘I need to leave the boy at home and bring what I got on over to the Pipe.’ Pipe so fat-head and stupid he had forgot he the slow one in them slow class for them kid who don’t know they head from a melon and they right from they left—but I told him til he know.” I was sure she told everyone until they knew. She pushed against everything preemptively, anticipating the strike; yet finally, she wanted only to protect what little she had to care about, hoping only for a mother who’d be around to tell her how to be a woman, a life for her brother free from judgment. I could create a safe space for her to be—herself. The possibilities unfurled in arcs of story: She would pass the fourth grade, I would get her a merit scholarship to summer programs, she would write a college application essay so eloquent that they would pay her way and hold banquets in her honor. Years later, I’d sit with her at dinner in some cultured city at a fine restaurant of dark, burnished wood and glittering chandeliers, her a young, successful woman and me grown into some easier, happier life. She’d thank me for what I had done, and I would say to her: “You did it yourself. It was always within you.” And she’d smile, and shake her head, biting back the disagreement that would have been there for a moment in her eyes.
♦◊♦
I invited Felicia to help me before class, and mornings came to have a dependable rhythm: Felicia would be there at the door waiting, would embrace me with sleep-loggy slowness, and together we would prepare the classroom. The daily schedule and morning assignments had to go on the blackboard, and I needed to organize my lesson plans, collate worksheets, reread lesson objectives, and be sure the necessary student practice was available. These tasks were balanced by the dozen familiar chores Felicia began without a word: The floor needed sweeping and mopping, the rug vacuuming, every desk needed to be wiped free of fingerprints and pencil-lead smudges. This work was comforting, the rituals created the day ahead, and, too, there was a satisfaction in working with Felicia, who threw herself into each task. Sometimes I would pause and watch her at work, incredulous: There was no bristle now, nothing but dedication to what she’d been asked. She polished the floors until they shone; the desks were in undeviating rows, the worksheets neatly stacked. There was nothing she did without care and as I wished. Sometimes she’d nod in the direction of a task she completed with special pride—the spines of every book straight on the shelves, perhaps—and blush with aw-shucks satisfaction, her face aglow.
Some mornings I’d talk to her, if what I had to do required less of my attention. What was her favorite subject—math, of course, ’cause it just make sense. I’d pulled an Algebra II textbook from a bin of resources at my program’s office, and mornings when I had time, I’d start her on a lesson, needing to explain only once, and tell her to work through it by day’s end; usually that meant she’d finish by the time the rest of the class finished the morning math sheet. Other mornings, we’d talk of the books she was reading—she favored material too adult for her, had gotten her hands on Lois Lowry’s more mature books and S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, which she loved more than anything—“That the way it go, Mr. Copperman,” she declared. “You got to fight. Ain’t no room to do nothing else.”
I insisted she’d missed the point, that the boys had been harmed by the violence. But she scoffed and said, “So Johnny was supposed to stand by and let Ponyboy get hurt?” I said there was plenty of room to do a lot else, and she suffered my diatribes on the benefits of nonviolence with skepticism, waiting for me to finish before saying, “Well, that do sound nice, Mr. Copperman. Maybe that how it is back in San Francisco.”
I’d say, no, no, that’s how it was right here in Mississippi—this was where Dr. King made it all happen.
“And what happen to Dr. King?” she said.
I blinked, and her eyes flashed a little, and she added quietly, “Mmmhmm. And why it is that them white childrens don’t come up in this school, and them white folks have all that cotton and all them fine, fancy houses?” I stood, trying to think of what to say about the measured progress of history, the necessary sacrifices, the pace of possible change.
“Yep,” she said. “That what I thought.”
She liked best to talk about what she was going to do: “When I finish up in this school, and all them schools, I’m gone go as far as I can,” she declared. “Gone see the world. See an ocean with some palm trees. Go to that Japan, where your people come from, and they eat with them little sticks.”
“Some of ‘my people,’” I said, laughing.
“Sure,” she said. Japan was a new development for her—before she’d wanted to go to Spain, Mexico, New York, the North Pole.
“Where else?”
She glanced out the window as if seeking direction, then looked at me. “Where you gone go?”
I chuckled. “You mean, when I’m not teaching here anymore?” It hadn’t occurred to me that she was aware I’d leave. In fact, it hadn’t occurred to me in a while that I’d ever be anywhere else at all.
She nodded once, her gaze on the world outside the window, where the sun was just clearing the angled tin of the roofs. She was serious.
I cleared my throat. “Well—back out West, I suppose,” I said. “To San Francisco, or Seattle. Portland.”
“Is it nice out there?” She was still watching the sun, a hovering orb in a pale sky.
“It’s—well … it’s real different.”
She looked at me, her gaze unusually piercing. She spoke quietly. “That sound good,” she said. “West.”
I let the direction be, turned back to the work at hand. Felicia lingered at the window and returned to wiping desks. Some ideas didn’t bear explanation, like how little elsewhere meant: The West was like London, the North Pole was to Japan as San Francisco was to Spain. All were equally distant.
♦◊♦
I taught a unit on poetry. I read Felicia’s handwriting over her shoulder:
My past a broken bicycle
laying on the side of the road.
My present a firecracker
that shoot light high in the sky.
My future a perfect test
in a pile of tests that the
teacher never gone grade.
I stood, stunned, then bent over her desk. “Is that really true, honey?” I said gently.
She put her chin to her chest and said nothing. I saw that she was staring at my tie, which had fallen across her hand on the desk. There was a tremor to her hand. “Sorry,” I said, pulling back.
“That—okay,” she said. “I don’t mind.” She folded her hands on her desk.
“But—your poem, Felicia.”
She turned from me so she was looking out the window where the day was blindingly bright. Her voice was small and quiet. “It just some words. Don’t you worry, Mr. Copperman. I just like the way it sound.”
I put my hand on hers where it rested on her desk. “Well, Felicia, I like the way it sounds, too.”
She looked at our hands and up at me. “Then I guess it a good poem.”
I nodded. I could think of little else to say, so I stood by her, letting her know I was there.
♦◊♦
It wasn’t enough. Three weeks later, Felicia’s mother came by from Georgia, and told Felicia she didn’t want her—that she’d never wanted her. The next morning, Felicia tore every poster from the hall walls. In the principal’s office, she was calling the principal an ugly old ho as the superintendent stopped by. The superintendent tried to intercede, and Felicia told her to go fuck her fat, ugly, old self, and that was it—she was nine years old, and permanently expelled from the School District. I pleaded for reprieve and was denied. When her grandmother tried to get her accepted in schools in nearby districts, she was refused. They’d already “heard too much about Felicia Jackson.” There was no place for her anywhere.
I’d been no better than the rest, had turned her into an altar on which I’d offered more than I had to give. She was finally just a girl—a girl grown too soon, clutching at anything she could seize. There were no excuses for her attitude, flamboyance, and temper. I make no excuse for my single-minded efforts, which ultimately did more harm than good.
Yet whenever I think of that feverish year, I can still see her as she might have been: shining with rare possibility. I did not know she was burning that potential so fast it was flaring out. I saw only the brightness—it was blinding. Even glorious.
When I try to picture Felicia now, I picture the photograph I took the day I brought my camera to class. The photo itself was lost when my camera and computer were stolen through the broken window of my car, but I remember the occasion of the picture. Felicia had taken the globe on my desk and detached it from its base. She held it at her chest, as if poised to serve a volleyball, her back to the window so that light poured over her shoulder, white and erasing, leaving only the shadow of the globe, its oceans and continents spreading beyond her fingers. She was grinning, her eyes full of mischief and confidence, for she knew full well she’d found a way to get my attention—that though I’d be angry she was playing with the globe, I’d have to take a picture with her cradling the world, for the gesture was right, the moment was perfect. Everything was in her grasp.
Read more:
Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race
A version of this essay originally appeared in the 2009 Race in America issue of the The Oxford-American.
Image credit: Barrett.Discovery/Flickr
Yeah. The newbies get the tough classes. Seniority, or in this case, retirement threats.
Generally speaking, the highest per-pupil expenditures are in the big cities, associated with the worst results. For arguing purposes, though, there’s usually a handy, up-scale ‘burb spending more and the activists can pretend all the ‘burbs spend that much, although they almost never do, and never spend as much as the big cities.