Lit Up Page 25

  Hasan, the media king, became a student; Vanessa stopped her tears and insisted on the primacy of her own thinking; brilliant Marina defined herself with dramatic flair and took responsibility for a possibly self-destructive act; Adam went from silence to intellectual pride; Clare from silence to intellectual empathy; Marco ceased being the class clown and spoke seriously and then became a risk-taking clown again; Nino turned himself into an ambitious solitary reader; Leonardo, whose eyes were dead when literature was discussed, moved from indifference to preliminary engagement; Lauren, whose name no one could remember on opening day, began making shrewd remarks; and others changed in similar ways over the year.

  Mr. Leon talked about structure, metaphor, and theme, and took the class through point-by-point analysis of the texts, but the most powerful part of his class was devoted to the spiritual value of literature and the moral instruction of teenagers at a crucial moment in their lives. He gave them difficult texts, and pessimistic texts, too, and he reached out to what seemed to come naturally to American teenagers, a fascination with the darker side of life. He took that interest and turned it from pop culture to literature, and he ministered to their souls. He introduced them to modernist literature in all its miseries and glories. If they were lucky and ambitious, aesthetic bliss, in Nabokov’s phrase, would be theirs some day. But first they were aroused by reading serious things.

  “There are reasons to engage them now,” he said to me in the depths of PD O’Hurley’s when the school year was over. “We break the texts down down structurally, but, in this society, critical thought has been numbed by media and politics, and thinking critically about the world and themselves is far more important. These are life issues. They all engage. It’s very powerful for them.”

  Everyone milled around at the end of the last class, and some of the students were unwilling to let go. They were located in that time, in that place, in the fifteenth and sixteenth years of their lives, in a single English class, in a shabby building on West 61st Street in Manhattan. In a few years, Beacon will have left the building; the school was getting a big new home on West 44th Street with a sizable gym, increased lab space, more classrooms. No one could say what would happen to any of the students in the future, but it was unlikely that they would be afraid of any book, and unlikely as well that they would go through life thinking that literature couldn’t possibly matter to them.

  NOTE

  CHAPTER TWELVE: HILLHOUSE: THE YEAR

  1. These classes took place in the fall of 2013, almost thirty months before the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, which was widely described as a new book but was actually an old book—a discarded first draft. The book’s publication set off an enormous controversy. In Go Set a Watchman, Scout, a grown-up living in New York, recalls the Atticus of her childhood as a bigot. Much of the public and private conversation that followed about race and representation was fascinating and touching, but it was also, as a discussion of literature, willfully naïve. Atticus Finch is not a real person; he did not “evolve,” as some people absurdly said, into a bigot; the bigoted version came first. If anything, the character of Atticus, after the editor Tay Hohoff worked for years with Harper Lee, “evolved” into the benevolent version of the character in To Kill a Mockingbird. But even putting it that way is misleading. There’s something simple that an amazing number of people could not get through their heads: Atticus is two fictional inventions serving different purposes in two separate narratives. Since the issue is unlikely to go away, the question is this: What should teachers like Jessica Zelenski do in the future if they want to teach Harper Lee? Well, one thing they could do is teach both texts together—not just to further a discussion of race, history, and racism but to demonstrate in the most material way how fiction works.

  AFTERWORD

  Sean Leon

  Marina Rodriguez

  Jessica Zelenski

  Denzel Jefferson

  Raymond Brown

  Philip Todd

  What Students Want and Need

  Teachers

  I met with Sean Leon again about a year after school had ended, this time in an Upper West Side restaurant called Le Monde. (We were both sick of PD O’Hurley’s, which, in any case, closed soon after our meeting at Le Monde.) The past year had been rough for him. He had gone home to Louisiana and had tended to his older brother in his last days; then he took a semester off from Beacon to be with his mother and the rest of his family. For a time, he told me, he seriously considered leaving Beacon altogether and teaching instead in New Orleans, about two hours from home in Opelousas. He sent out résumés, and an offer came from Benjamin Franklin High School, the best public high school in New Orleans, a magnet school for gifted children with an ethnic enrollment similar to Beacon’s.

  “Good school,” he said with a grimace. “But I finally turned them down. Do you know why? Test prep. And I would have to teach literature out of a textbook. I couldn’t create my own reading lists.” Beacon’s withdrawal from the national testing regimens combined with Ruth Lacey’s guarantee of freedom to her teachers had provided the most powerful arguments, in the end, for staying at Beacon.

  “All over the country, it’s test, test, test! Beacon is a school where content drives instruction. Teaching the content is the key to getting kids college ready. Critical discussion, asking questions of yourself, your society, asking the big questions!”

  He was passionate, and other people at Le Monde looked our way. “That approach has to be embraced at grade-school and middle-school levels,” he said. “The arts and critical thinking shouldn’t be just on the side but woven into every humanities course.”

  He went on for some time, and I realized that we had slightly different goals for the education of fifteen-year-olds. He wanted active, vital beings, active language, a sense of the preciousness of every instant—every second was soul time—combined with love of family and friends. I certainly had no objection to any of that, but I also wanted ego strength, the authority and dignity of an ego trained by experience and reading, a stable center in the midst of economic and media flux. They were different but related goals, and I knew I would miss terribly the sound of his hard, lively, defining voice. In the spring of 2015, I went back to Beacon for a visit and stood outside his classroom just out of sight, listening as he taught a tenth-grade class. The voice was the same.

  * * *

  The young woman who stepped out of the elevator at my office had beautiful skin and eyes; she was slender in leather jacket and jeans, a diamond stud at her nose and throat. As she had said she would, Marina Rodriguez left Beacon at the end of sophomore year. She enrolled at a public school called City As School, which encouraged kids to hold jobs in the city while they were studying—hardly a new routine for Marina, who held three jobs while going to Beacon. But she was socially uncomfortable at Beacon; the students outside of Mr. Leon’s class didn’t take to her challenging ways. Her sense of her own will, her selfhood, was at stake. She had to leave. In the intervening three years, the smart fifteen-year-old, burdened with books, purse, stuff, everything flying all over the place, had changed remarkably. She had lost weight; she dressed well; her hair was sleek and beautiful. But nothing had been easy.

  “I worked my ass off at City As School and graduated in one year,” she said. Sixteen at graduation, she got into New York University, but without enough support to make it possible for her to attend. For the next year she interned at a New York courthouse, a clothing company, a public school, and worked at Jamba Juice and Juice Press. At this point, at eighteen, she was trying to get licensed as a beautician and also as a fitness instructor. “Billionaires have seven different incomes. I am going to build as many skills as possible so I’m never without a job.”

  After a year of working full-time, she entered the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), a two-year branch of the City University, and she hated it. The school had over twenty thousand students, it was overburdened and disorganized,
she said, the student services poor. “No one talks in class, no one reads. It’s dead in there. They wait for me to talk. It’s a drag.” At the same time, she worked as an assistant general manager at the Lucille Roberts Gym, a women’s exercise salon at Fifth Avenue and Union Square. She was as decisive as ever, looking straight at me as she talked, but her manner had softened. She no longer spoke as if every sentence was a challenge issued to the world.

  All through the three years, her family situation remained dismal. She left her father, and, for two years, lived with her painter mother, inhabiting a walk-in closet in a tiny apartment filled with paintings, brushes, books. “Living there this last year while going to college was very tough. I was stagnant. I had to leave.” She now lived with two friends in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, one of the borough’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.

  Pushing defeat and unhappiness into the past, leaving and moving on—that was Marina Rodriguez’s identity. She had defined herself as vigorously as Sean Leon might have dreamed. I saw her as a kind of self-willed urban adventurer, tough as any young man making his way in business or in the service. She loved Sean Leon’s class (her eyes warmed when we talked about it), but she had no regrets about quitting Beacon, even though, in practical terms, it was a mistake: if she had stayed, Beacon’s college office would likely have found her the support she needed at a first-rate college. But she would have felt defeated if she had stayed, and her sense of herself could not bear defeat.

  What now? She could quit BMCC and college altogether, remain at the Lucille Roberts Gym, and probably settle into a good salary there as an administrator. She had grown into a shrewd, very savvy, very pulled-together woman, and she could be a great business success if she wanted to be. But she was also intellectually hungry and contemptuous of ordinary lives, ordinary jobs. In all, I had never met anyone more suited for university education. She dreaded the second year at BMCC, but she said she would stay and finish up. A student again, she had begun reading good stuff for the first time since Sean Leon’s class. “That was the most satisfying thing about going back.” I read some of her written work from BMCC, and it was strong. Yet she needed to get out of where she was in her life. My guess: she would finish up at the school she hated, apply again to a four-year college, and move on and up, always on and up.

  * * *

  I returned to Hillhouse in the late spring of 2015 and dropped in on Jessica Zelenski. She had recently won a teaching award, and the New Haven School District had asked her to sit on a curriculum committee, a definite honor. But she was tired, she was angry, she glared and stomped. She had multiple sections of tenth-grade English in 2014–15, ninety-five students in all, and she was exasperated in a way that I didn’t remember from the year before. The breaking of Hillhouse into three academies, she felt, had cut off both teachers and students from a community that was a good part of the school experience in the past.

  The day I visited, one of her tenth-grade sections was writing short responses in class to both Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir Girl, Interrupted and Ann Patchett’s early story, “All Little Colored Children Should Play the Harmonica.” She moved quickly from student to student, going over passages, posing questions. “Success and happiness are not the same thing. What does that mean in terms of the story?” she asked three students who were sitting together. Then she would turn to me and offer a running public commentary on the class, praising one student or another. “Willie says the things that other people just think. He’s very empathic, talks about feelings.” And she had an extraordinary fifteen-year-old, Tyriq, who finished his work quickly and ran to a computer at the side of the room, looking up anything on the Internet that interested him, a student with ravenous curiosity.

  Yet in her whole time at Hillhouse—fourteen years—she had never been unhappy in the way she was now. I asked her if she would consider leaving. Would she take, for instance, a job in an upper-middle-class Connecticut community? She stared at me. “No, never upper-middle class. Working class only.” Then she paused. “I always thought this is where I was going to make my career. I need grieving time. I can’t just leave.”

  Later that week, she sent a note describing what another English teacher had told her years ago: “His seniors were writing their life stories and a student wrote that I had saved her life earlier with our mutual love of reading. Her mother had recently died, and she and her five siblings and alcoholic father had uprooted and moved to New Haven following her mother’s death. She was playing mother to the whole family but never breathed a word of this for a few years—never to me, either. But when I heard what she wrote, I was happy to have found a kindred spirit, especially such a young one. That’s my most important ‘teaching’ moment and it has nothing to do with skills.”

  * * *

  During the same visit to Hillhouse I tried to see Denzel Jefferson. His mother Shiniqua Jefferson, a paraprofessional at the school, buttonholed me in the hallway outside Miss Zelenski’s classroom—she knew I was looking for her son. A short, powerful woman with a long braid of reddish hair and many bracelets, she told me she was driving Denzel out of town on the weekends to basketball games—he played in Amateur Athletic Union teams. “I’ll wear ten-dollar shoes,” she said in the hallway, “so he can wear two-hundred-dollar shoes and not sell drugs to pay for them. What I don’t want to spend money on is a bail bondsman and a lawyer.” She laughed loudly, and students walking by smiled—she was a familiar, in-your-face presence in school. “I’ve had my turn. You know? You gotta pay. Anything that gets him out of the inner-city ghetto is good.”

  I found Denzel a bit later. He was fit; his long, sorrowful face had turned handsome; he looked straight at me rather than turning away. He told me he would take college-prep courses at Gateway Community College in New Haven in his senior year. He wanted to go where his sister went, Virginia State, but the out-of-state tuition was $24,000, and he wasn’t sure his mother could afford it.

  I asked him about his friends. His face turned sorrowful again, but then he smiled. The situation had passed beyond simple grief. “In the last eighteen months, I’ve lost four friends,” he said. Two more had died in the year since I last saw him. “It’s ridiculous. You go out to play basketball with friends, a couple of weeks later one of them gets shot. Ridiculous.”

  I asked him how he saw himself in ten years. “I would like to have a good job,” he said, “and be able to take care of whatever I have to take care of. I want to be a normal black man and live as long as I can.”

  * * *

  I looked up Raymond Brown, too. He still had a furtive grin and spoke in a whisper. The year before, when he’d told me his Trinidadian father was in jail, he’d said he didn’t know why. Now Raymond told me he had been convicted for drug possession. After three years in Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center in northern Connecticut, his father had recently brought a court case to appeal the conviction, but he had lost and was now being deported back to Trinidad. Raymond didn’t know when he would see him again. His kid brother was now twelve, and they continued to play basketball near their house in the Tre; Raymond kept him away from older neighborhood kids. “I don’t want him trying things he shouldn’t,” he said.

  He said he liked to write for himself, but only in long uninterrupted periods, not in school. He was keeping a journal of his life.

  * * *

  A year after Miss Zelenski’s class ended, Philip Todd, then seventeen, sent me a draft of his college-application essay, which turned out to be an account of his birth and stealthy development as a moviegoer. He didn’t have the money to see new films, and, in any case, the availability in New Haven (outside of Yale) of anything besides mass-market hits was limited. Some college town! Anyway, Philip did what other movie-hungry kids did, he downloaded films from the Internet and squirreled them away. Then he turned systematic.

  “I made it my goal to hunt for the best directors,” he wrote in his essay. “I studied Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Marti
n Scorsese, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, Danny Boyle, Steven Spielberg and of course the master himself Stanley Kubrick. When I had exhausted the ‘must-see’ classics, I turned to independent, older films from the ’80s and ’90s. When I couldn’t fall asleep, I tiptoed downstairs to watch films like Terrence Malick’s A Thin Red Line or Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy.… I’d get my laptop and turn the audio down low so that each film is a whisper inviting me to its world.”

  Phil’s secret habits—and unorthodox tastes—required a certain bravery to maintain. An urban, working-class African American boy, very dark, easily six feet two, he rejected the clichés of macho culture, and some of his friends in Miss Zelenski’s class had called him “Uncle Tom” and “Oreo.” But he stuck to his passion, an opening to art that was also an opening to the world. The movies of the eighties and nineties, he told me, had led him to the music of the same period. Maybe he’d eventually get to fiction and journalism, too. As I knew from a year earlier, he wanted to go to a college with good film program. Yale with its Promise initiative would pay his tuition at local colleges and universities, but none of them had the courses he needed, and he hadn’t figured out yet how to get serious support from Wesleyan or NYU, which had exactly what he wanted. At the end of his junior year, Philip Todd needed persistence and luck to make a life out of what he loved.