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  Jessica Zelenski was born in Connecticut—in Wallingford, about fourteen miles from New Haven, where she still lived. A Catholic single mother of Italian and Polish descent, she had a beautiful three-year-old daughter named Amia whose picture was prominently displayed on the wall behind her desk. (The girl’s father was Jamaican, a special-education teacher in town.) She had light brown hair, parted in the middle and falling down on her shoulders, hazel eyes, a radiant smile. In September’s warm weather, she wore a short red skirt, brown fishnet stockings, and high boots. She was excitable and gregarious; she taught from all over the room, and was contemptuous of teachers who remained behind desks. She wanted to force the issue, whatever it was. She was a little like Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich. Her attitude was, “Deal with it.”

  She taught three sections of tenth-grade English. Each class was eighty minutes, and the classes met five times a week. She was also one of three union representatives in the school. She made a salary of $60,000 a year.

  * * *

  “I’m asking for some compassion for the girl; I didn’t say you had to like her,” Miss Zelenski said.

  After the preliminary readings in September, including a famously provocative story by Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” the class had launched into the first major reading of the year, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The girl in question was of course Mayella Ewell, the nineteen-year-old who insists that she was raped by a black farm hand, Tom Robinson. When she takes the witness stand, Tom’s defense counsel, Atticus Finch, gently but persistently works her over. As much as two greater novels, Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, had become American scripture, read in countless high school courses. Set in Maycomb, Alabama (Harper Lee’s Monroeville), in 1932, the story is told through the eyes of Scout Finch, six when the novel begins, eight when it ends, brave and irrepressibly curious Scout, who flourishes as the much-loved daughter of the stalwart, sublimely calm Atticus Finch, the role Gregory Peck was born to play.

  Read again as an adult, To Kill a Mockingbird feels a little smug in its gently patriarchal view of the African Americans in Maycomb. But Miss Zelenski’s students were reading it for the first time, and, in any reading, Mockingbird offers the enchantment of childhood, the mild thrills of gothic fable, the pleasures of indignation over obvious injustice.1 Many Americans remember it fondly for its humor, its sensuous and lyrical realization of small-town southern life in the early thirties.

  At the climax of the trial in To Kill a Mockingbird, as Atticus persists in his questions, it becomes obvious that Tom Robinson, who has a withered arm, couldn’t have raped Mayella—that she had in fact asked him into the family house and had thrown her arms around him, only to be discovered by Bob Ewell, her alcoholic father, who called her a whore, beat her, and then brought charges against Tom. Mayella, who found the robust Tom attractive, and maybe even loved him, was easily intimidated. She was a victim—not as much as Tom, who doesn’t survive the trial and its aftermath, but an oppressed, abused, beaten creature.

  The class began talking about Mayella after spending several weeks on the book. In the beginning, the discussion had stalled. Most of the students did not read To Kill a Mockingbird at home. They simply wouldn’t do it. They came in looking blank, as if the assigned pages were some kind of mistake, a strange imposition on them. Miss Zelenski had been teaching at Hillhouse for thirteen years, and she had seen this refusal in other classes, and rather than making a big deal out of it, she began reading aloud: “MAYCOMB WAS AN OLD TOWN, BUT IT WAS A TIRED OLD TOWN WHEN I FIRST KNEW IT,” she shouted. “IN RAINY WEATHER THE STREETS TURNED TO RED SLOP; GRASS GREW ON THE SIDEWALK, THE COURTHOUSE SAGGED IN THE SQUARE.”

  She had their attention, and after a while she asked for volunteers. “Reading aloud—how many afraid?” she said. A few raised their hands. “I don’t want to force you to be uncomfortable. Don’t you find it obnoxious when people giggle and groan when you don’t know a word?” General assent, and then as people began reading and someone got stuck, one of the other kids would help out. On this occasion and many others, Miss Zelenski’s students did not put each other down. Just the opposite. They supported each other whenever they could. When the class stopped reading and talked the book over, the boys, who earlier seemed unwilling to let the conversation go forward—they joked nervously through class—got up out of their chairs now and then and congratulated a guy who said something funny or interesting.

  After much reading aloud in class, the students finished Mockingbird on their own. They were alive to the emotionally plangent moments in the book, and when the conversation caught fire, the students talking back and forth to one another, Miss Zelenski let the ragged class move along without interruption. She wanted to get them going, but, at the end of one conversation, she got tough. “Don’t use Sunday school lessons about kindness,” she said. “You’re almost adults. And some of what you hear about life isn’t good.”

  Then she turned the discussion in their direction. The class was talking about Scout’s aunt and uncle, who disapprove of her tomboy behavior, and Miss Zelenski asked, “How many of you have a mean relative?” The girl who was initially uninterested in Ishmael Beah, and then changed her mind, cried out, “All my relatives are mean!”

  That was a conversation-stopper. Miss Zelenski moved the issue to fathers. What kind of father was Atticus Finch? He could be a little remote, but he had extraordinary judgment about many things, and he gave Scout and her brother Jem the freedom to find things out on their own. To sharpen the question, she set up a contrast. Late in the month-long span of classes on Mockingbird, she showed the kids Benh Zeitlin’s lyrical and brutal independent movie, Beasts of the Southern Wild, from 2012. In Beasts, an indomitable little African American girl, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), who is roughly the same age as Scout, and her alcoholic father, Wink (Dwight Henry), live in the bayous south of New Orleans in the Bathtub, a sloshy, ramshackle but happy community. The off-the-grid poor families in the Bathtub hold to a powerful and defining code: you don’t let anyone down who’s in trouble. Wink, speaking in his coarse, strong voice, leaves Hushpuppy for periods, but he’s there when she needs him. The students loved the movie, although one girl, in tears at the end, said furiously to Miss Zelenski, “I’m a G [gangsta]. How can you make me cry in front of these people?”

  Most said they would prefer Wink as a father. He was wasted and harsh, but, as Denzel said, others agreeing, “He taught his daughter how to survive.” This led to a full-scale conversation about fathers. What was a good father? Should fathers lay down the law? Or should they let kids do what they want to do? “He wouldn’t know if I was dead or alive,” one girl said. “For how many of you is your father your hero?” Miss Zelenski asked. Five raised their hands. “How many live with your father?” The same five raised their hands. There were twenty-three students in the class.

  “He keeps a roof over my head,” said Denzel. “He stops by. He provides some money to the household. But he’s not close.” In class, Denzel would be lost in music playing into his ears; suddenly, he would raise his palms, do a kind of Egyptian shimmy, moving from the back corner where he sat into the center of the room even as people were talking. Yet he encouraged other students to speak, and he took Miss Zelenski’s side in arguments. He was the principle of order and disorder at the same time. As a child, he had been diagnosed with ADHD and Oppositional Defiance Disorder. At 10:40, he was supposed to be attending a study-hall class for special-education kids, but Miss Zelenski figured he would learn more by sitting in her class. All through the year, he wandered in and out of the discussions, saying smart things, poetic things, outrageous things.

  “What do we know about Mayella when the trial begins?” Miss Zelenski asked. “We know someone beat the crap out of her. But we don’t know what happened to her. She doesn’t speak well, does she?” Everyone said no. “What societies are there in Maycomb?” Students sho
uted out: “White people. Poor farmers. Niggers.” “The Ewells are in a society of their own,” Miss Zelenski said. “What is it?” “They dirty, they lie.” And Denzel said, “The nigger don’t lie.”

  “Guys, he has a name. It’s Tom. Why do you keep saying that?” She paused. “What’s the Ewell home like?” and they called out, “Cold, dirty, everyone sick.” They knew what Mayella was—white trash. Some thought she was worthless—at least at first they did. But Miss Zelenski wanted some sympathy; she wanted to engage their sense of what a tough life was like and, at the same time, push them out of themselves and make them realize that other people also had troubles. Later she told me, “They have heard about slavery, racism, Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement since grade school. They need to hear something else.” She now said to the students, “Imagine if you had to do what Mayella does, get up in the cold every morning to haul up a bucket of water.” A girl named Malia raised her hand, and said, “She may have been raped by her father, she’s poor, she’s one of seven children.”

  “Okay,” said Miss Zelenski, “why don’t you write about that?” And she asked them all to write a short paper in defense of Mayella. The request produced some dismay. Why do it? They were being asked to write about someone worse off than they were, a white farm girl who had been beaten and likely abused by her father. In class, Malia read aloud what she had written: “In Mayella Ewell’s defense, she is a lonely nineteen-year-old girl. She was never treated properly with respect.… Tom was the only person who showed her respect so she became excited and wanted him.” A womanly girl with a soft voice and intimate manner, Malia didn’t speak much in class, but she was one of the best readers Miss Zelenski had. Her mother and father, she told me, had never married, separating as a couple before she was born, and her mom had two other kids, each with a different father. She remembered her father “around” when she was a child. “He doesn’t work now,” she said. But her grandmother had motivated her. “She was my mom. She read to me, pushed me through school.”

  Some of the other girls wrote in the same vein as Malia, but most of the boys balked. Leonardo, the boy who lazed and slumped, a fifteen-year-old of mixed Latino and Italian background, fished around in his notes, and read, “The life of being an outcast is intimidating,” and much more of the same, eloquent but vague. “It stinks,” said Raymond, an African American boy sitting near him, and he read from what he had written: “You can’t blame Mayella for lying about Tom. If she had told the truth, her father would have been arrested, and so no one would be there to take care of them in that shit-ass house. You can’t blame Mayella because she hasn’t been brought up right. She’s one of seven. She stays away from society so she doesn’t know right from wrong.”

  These were the most sustained remarks that Raymond had made so far. I talked to him after class. He was slender, handsome, with a thin mustache, an earring in his left ear, and an engaging, furtive smile. His mother worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant. His father, at the age of five, arrived in the States from Trinidad. He was now in prison in the Corrigon-Radgowski Correctional Institution in northern Connecticut. Raymond hadn’t asked him what he was convicted for. “I’ll wait till he comes home to ask him,” he said. He has three brothers, three sisters, all his mother’s children except for his older brother.

  After school one day, I met him in his own neighborhood, the Tre (pronounced “Tray”), about a mile from Hillhouse. In the early nineties, during the wild crack wars, gang violence ruled the Tre, and, according to a veteran reporter in New Haven, Paul Bass, now editor of the New Haven Independent, every streetlight was shot out, grown-ups stayed away from windows, and kids were known to sleep in bathtubs to protect themselves from stray bullets. Those days were over, but the Tre was still a ravaged piece of the city. Walking around, we passed a boarded-up Chinese takeout, a boarded-up pizza joint. It was a New Haven–style bad neighborhood—nothing like such deserted war-zone wrecks as the South Bronx in the seventies and eighties. There were trees and hundred-year-old wood houses on separate lots, but many of the houses were fenced, chain-locked, worn-looking. At New Haven’s industrial peak in the years immediately after the Second World War, relatively prosperous families lived in these buildings. But the industrial plants had closed down, including Scovill Industries, in nearby Waterbury and, in 2006, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in the New Haven neighborhood of Newhallville. The life was sucked out of the Tre. During the day, the streets were not so much menacing as forlorn, like a small town in the middle of the Depression. We walked into Dunkin’ Donuts, the only commercial enterprise flourishing in Raymond’s part of the Tre, and the site, over the years, of gang violence, and he ordered a strawberry Coolatta.

  He has an eleven-year-old brother at home. “I keep him out of trouble,” he said. He spoke very softly, barely above a whisper, as he pointed to a spot a few blocks from his house where he and his brother play basketball. “I try not to make friends in the neighborhood. I don’t want to be with people when I don’t know what they do.”

  Denzel lived in a still worse neighborhood, Dixwell, and said the same thing. You went out at night, got caught up with strange kids, you didn’t know what they were into, and suddenly there was a fight—not a gang thing always, maybe a quarrel over a Facebook insult or a girl, but someone might get stabbed or shot. Anika said virtually the same. And so did a tall, very dark, extremely gentle boy in Miss Zelenski’s class, Philip Todd. These were not kids in gangs, kids in trouble with the law. They were not, in current sociological terms, “disconnected”—teens who were both out of school and unemployed. They wanted to go to college, find their way, maybe get out of New Haven, join the middle class or better. At the very least, they were trying to get through their teenage years without being hurt. But they were already hurt: all four were essentially imprisoned in their homes at night.

  * * *

  As they read through Mockingbird together, Miss Zelenski talked about the Deep South in the thirties. She gave the students a sense of the technology and transportation, the food different people were likely to eat. She seemed determined to teach them not just the book but everything that could be suggested by the book, and everything that was needed to understand it. “Frontloading” was the pedagogic term for what she was doing, except that she loaded in the front, in the middle, and in the rear. She used whatever they were reading to create knowledge of how the world worked, even a small corner of it. If they could understand one corner, they might be able to understand many corners. After discussing how Maycomb was structured socially, the students grappled with a complicated situation: Mayella, a white woman in the South, was nominally superior in class and status to Tom, but when she exercised her freedom, breaking a racial code, she got a beating.

  The students I talked to knew a lot about families, about love and the absence of love, about loyalty and betrayal, and a great many other things. They knew how to take care of younger children, and they were perceptive about the character of the people around them. They knew whom to trust, they knew about their neighborhoods, how to stay safe. They demanded fairness; they had a very active sense of justice—not in the legal sense, necessarily, but in all the relations of life.

  But many of the Hillhouse students lacked necessary information—facts, for want of a better word. When wars took place, how American politics worked, who were the country’s great men and women, how a bank did its business, what, exactly, they had to do to get into the professions or get any kind of good job—general information about how the world worked. What they experienced every day was shaped, in part, by political and economic forces that they were barely curious about. They also lacked the rich vocabulary of students who had been frequently read to when they were children, and had then developed reading habits of their own. Except for Philip Todd, who, it turned out, was passionate about movies, they didn’t cultivate curiosity, at least not openly, and at times they seemed defensive and irritated, as if they felt that learning s
ome new words or specific things about politics, business, science, and art would somehow make them responsible for learning everything. But of course no one is responsible for learning everything.

  Some kids from poor families do brilliantly in school; some rich kids barely make it through or drop out (and get second, third, and fourth chances). Some poor parents invest time and imagination in raising their kids; some rich parents are negligent and distant. Family wealth is not the necessary cause of good or bad school performance, but, in general, as many studies have shown, it’s the surest predictor of it, with performance highly correlated to family income.

  A famous experiment in the 1990s by University of Kansas researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley established that children from professional families heard more than three times as many words per hour as children in families on welfare. By the age of three, wealthy children had heard millions more words than poor children. Later research, completed at Stanford in 2013, established that a gap opened as early as eighteen months: children from prosperous families were already several months ahead of children from poor families in language proficiency. Follow-up studies indicated that differences in language and interaction experiences have lasting effects on a child’s performance later in life.

  The thematic rubric for tenth-grade English at Hillhouse, it turned out, was the same as at Beacon: “The Individual and Society.” At Beacon the students had an abstract notion of society as an oppressor, but they sensed that they would flourish as individuals. They could even talk, in their Siddhartha classes, of life as a journey composed of special moments in which existence was at its most intense. But at Hillhouse, the African American students didn’t openly claim the privilege of being individuals. Mere survival came first, before selfhood and “journeys.” And for Hillhouse students “society” was not so much a hostile abstraction as a blank, something so little known that it was hardly mentioned.