Reading with Patrick

Helena is a town that sits along the Mississippi River, making its soil some of the world’s most fertile. During the antebellum period, slave owners in Helena and in other parts of the Delta were some of the wealthiest people in the United States, “and the wealthiest 10 percent of Arkansas’s population owned 70 percent of its land” (3). Both the steamboat and railroad industries competed to see which could convey more cotton. Mark Twain wrote about Helena in 1883, calling it a pretty town and a commercial center.

Kuo arrived in Helena in 2004. She found a town with abandoned storefronts and loiterers hanging around a liquor store. Helena tried, though, to capitalize off of its blues history by converting a former train depot to a blues museum. Some locals believed that Helena’s decline began when two major companies shut down—first, the Mohawk Rubber and Tire Company in 1979, then, Arkla Chemical, a fertilizer company. High school graduates who found opportunities elsewhere didn’t return. Those who stayed behind found what jobs they could and usually worked more than one—at McDonald’s, the county jail, and the funeral home. Funerals provided a steady stream of business for the three local funeral homes, as well as for the nearby flower shop and tombstone store. Walmart was also a thriving business. On school days, teenage girls were usually there shopping in the baby section. On weekends, the high school church group handed out abstinence pamphlets.

Helena is the seat of Phillips County, Arkansas. It’s one of the country’s poorest counties and ranks last in Arkansas for public health. Teenage pregnancy was higher there in the early-2000s than it was in 94 developing countries. Shoot-outs were frequent. Drug-dealing was rampant, and the feds often busted the police for taking part. White students who lived there attended DeSoto School, which was private and established shortly after the Brown v. Board decision. The town’s public schools were 99 percent Black. DeSoto, on the other hand, had never matriculated one Black student.

Kuo’s first months at Stars were difficult and alienating. Most of her students had never seen an Asian person in real life before. She was concerned when students came to class with welts from a switch but was told this was merely the way to mete out discipline. She found herself getting mean with difficult students and bribing drug-addicted mothers into paying attention to their children. The difficulties that persisted in the Delta almost made it seem that the Civil Rights Movement had been a dream. One day, a 16-year-old boy whose brother had been killed by a White man while he was robbing a flower shop, walked up to Kuo’s poster of Dr. King at the March on Washington. He observed the sea of White protestors and accused Kuo of posting something fake. He didn’t believe that so many White people would ever be interested in helping Black people.

Kuo soon began to distrust both her own system of enforcing rules, as well as that of the school, which frequently used a police officer to keep the kids in line. She noticed how the school didn’t have basic resources—no guidance counselor, arts instruction, library, gymnasium, or athletic teams—but, there was always a cop on duty. She had been told that her eighth-grade students read at fourth- and fifth-grade levels, but she disregarded the warning and gave them a James Baldwin story to read, as well as a speech by Malcolm X. They either found the language too difficult or got bored. When she showed a video of Barack Obama talking about his upbringing, they couldn’t relate. Finally, Kuo introduced Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. The students loved it, identifying with living in a crowded tenement; with Ruth Younger’s ambivalence about her pregnancy; and claiming Lena Younger, the religious grandmother rooted in Southern traditions, as their favorite character.

Kuo asked her students why they thought Lena had moved to Chicago from Mississippi. One student replied that she had to leave because there wasn’t much for them down in the Delta. In the context of the play, the students were able to talk fluently about American history, though they lacked basic factual knowledge. They knew neither about the massacres of Black sharecroppers nor about the meaning of the word “lynching.” Kuo decided to talk about Helena’s history of racial violence and even passed along a photo of a man who had been lynched and burned. When the photo arrived at the desk of a student named David, he put his head down refusing to look again. Kuo realized her mistake: she had smugly confronted them with their history, thinking that their confrontation with pain would enlighten them. After class, she put the photo “facedown in [her] drawer and never looked at it again” (11).

As Kuo entered her second year of teaching in Helena, she found herself hankering for the old comforts of bagel shops and bookstores. To satisfy herself, she drove 72 miles to Memphis every Saturday. In the café at a Barnes & Noble there, she completed her law school applications. She was still desperate to leave the Delta, but she wanted a noble excuse for leaving. However, she soon started liking the Delta. Kuo found herself learning how to relate to her students and took more of an interest in their lives. This was particularly true about Patrick Browning who had missed so many classes by December that she worried he wouldn’t be able to pass his exams. Kuo called his home. A male voice answered the phone, brusquely declared Patrick sick, and hung up.

Kuo was determined to get to the bottom of whatever was going on with Patrick. She went to his home, which was located in the “ghetto in a ghetto” (17). Shootings were frequent. When she arrived at his home—"a small square house with a porch”—and knocked on the screen door (17), a man limped to the door. Behind him, Patrick approached. When she asked about his absences, he invented another excuse about the bus not arriving. He then relented and said that it was his fault that he wasn’t going to school.

Kuo asked Patrick how he ended up at Stars. He told her that he had set the entire backyard on fire after pouring gasoline on a pile of kindling. He also nearly set himself on fire. His sisters arrived and dropped a towel over him before the flames licking at his pants consumed his entire body. Kuo wasn’t surprised by the story. The boredom in the Delta caused people to do such things. Patrick went on, telling Kuo that he had been in the hospital for weeks as a result. Teachers were supposed to bring him his schoolwork but never did. He recalled watching television and seeing the towers go down.

Kuo then asked Patrick about a time when he broke up a fight between two girls—his cousin, May, and a neighbor, Liana. He said didn’t like to see people fighting. He figured that they seemed as though they were giving up on life. Kuo gave him a postcard featuring Auguste Rodin’s Thinker. She wrote a note, saying the sculpture reminded her of Patrick.

Kuo understood why May and Liana behaved as they did. The public schools were indefensible. There was financial corruption among administrators, while teachers and assistants barely made a living wage. The attendance record of the Stars principal, Ms. Madden, was as bad as some of the most truant students. A decade later, Madden was “indicted for embezzling over a million dollars from a federal food program that gave money to hungry children” (21). She also operated a daycare program.

Stars endured a merry-go-round of principals, none of whom offered leadership or held students accountable. As a result, the teachers became more lax. They began leaving earlier. Ms. Riley, a teacher’s assistant, became Kuo’s friend at Stars. Ms. Riley sang gospel and quoted Scripture. She talked nostalgically about what life had been like during segregation. The community, she argued, had been more intact and children had more respect for elders. Integration, she concluded, had unraveled Helena’s moral fabric.

Around the time that Patrick stopped attending school, Kuo instituted the “I Am” poem as a means of instruction—an exercise in which the students explained something about their lives. Many students used the task to work through personal traumas. Others struggled about what to write about. Some, particularly Miles Clark, were initially hostile. After Kuo broke through his shell, he revealed that his brother was Brandon Clark, one of Kuo’s first students, who had been killed robbing the local flower shop. Another student of Kuo’s, William, had also been involved in the robbery. They and another kid—the ringleader—aimed a BB gun at the elderly couple who ran the shop. The husband produced a real gun and shot Brandon in the back of the head. Some days after Brandon died, Kuo instructed the students to write about how his loss impacted them. A teacher’s assistant, Ms. Jasper, scolded Kuo for encouraging the kids to empathize with a criminal. The flower-shop owner, who claimed self-defense, was never arrested.

After Kuo visited his home, Patrick returned to school and began attending every day. Kuo continued looking for books to which the children could relate. She bought tomes authored by Walter Dean Myers, Sharon Draper, Sister Souljah, Jacqueline Woodson, and others. She spent the eight hundred dollars that the state provided new teachers entirely on books. Her colleagues thought it was a waste of money—certain that the children wouldn’t read them. Undeterred, Kuo helped match students to books that she thought they’d like. They very quickly began to devour the volumes. Kuo photographed the students while they read, eager to show them how they appeared when they read, how different they seemed from how others perceived them, and from how they may have perceived themselves.

Miles, Kuo noticed, was still resistant to her methods. Suspecting that he was still angry and aggrieved about his brother, she encouraged Miles to write an “I Am” poem for Brandon. While she worked with Miles, she noticed that Patrick was carrying The Wonderful Wizard of Oz while heading off to lunch.

Over the next several days, Miles began to work harder in Kuo’s class and even spent time there during free periods. After he completed his “I Am” poem, Kuo drove to Kinko’s in Memphis to have the poem enlarged to poster-size and hung it between posters of Dr. King and Malcolm X. Next to it, she hung a photo of Miles smiling. Miles stopped by Kuo’s classroom for the next few weeks, before school started for the day, and admired his position on the wall. Miles’s mother later told Kuo that she had the poem inscribed on Brandon’s headstone.

Kuo encouraged the students to continue writing poems. She was particularly struck by how hard Patrick worked at the task, and pleasantly surprised by the talent he demonstrated. Poetry exercises were followed by ungraded free-writes. The students responded well to this task, concentrating in silence and revealing themselves on the page. When the seven minutes of time that Kuo allotted was up, the students always asked for more. 

In March, Kuo found out that she had been accepted to Harvard Law School. She called her parents and told them, though she had already decided to stay in the Delta. She revealed her true plans to a friend who tried to discourage her, saying that she couldn’t implement substantive change in the Delta. He added that she shouldn’t “be a martyr” (43). He reminded her about contemporary issues related to illegal surveillance.

Meanwhile, Patrick became more immersed in books. He read poetry by Langston Hughes and Dylan Thomas. He also won an award at school for “Most Improved.” Soon after Patrick accepted his award at a school ceremony, the filmmaker Richard Wormser came to town, asking to talk to troubled kids in Helena. He had recently shot a film in Elaine, Arkansas—a town even more rural than Helena and famous for being the town where Richard Wright’s uncle was killed by White men who coveted his successful liquor business. Wormser’s film was about the Elaine massacre, in which White residents terrorized Black residents after they got word about Black sharecroppers who threatened to sue planters for unpaid wages.

Wormser spotted Patrick and expressed an interest in filming him. Patrick was flattered by Wormser’s attention and agreed to be filmed. He talked about Kuo and how much she cared about the students.

One afternoon in the spring, Kuo walked through her neighborhood, looking for Maple Hill Cemetery, nicknamed “Confederate Cemetery.” She climbed up “green, sunlit hills of unseemly majesty” to find what “was, by far, the nicest public space […] anywhere in Helena” (47). There, she found monuments dedicated to former rebels, honoring them for their dedication to the proverbial “lost cause.” Kuo was flabbergasted.

Helena had been a key site during the Civil War. The Union Army seized the town in 1862 in an effort to keep Vicksburg, the site of an important battle the following year, from receiving its war supplies. The Union soldiers also evicted people from their farms, took control of them, and freed slaves. Slaves in the Delta, who got wind of the Union Army’s arrival, tried to make their way to Helena. The Confederate Congress decreed that any Black soldier who fought for the Union would be killed; Black men fought anyway. By the end of the Civil War, there were five thousand Black volunteers in Arkansas—85 percent were from the Delta.

Kuo compared the regality of the Confederate Cemetery to Magnolia Cemetery, which was for the Black people in town. It was unkempt and headstones were hidden by tall weeds.

Helena was also a site of the repatriation movement in the 1870s, though few of the town’s inhabitants made it to Liberia. Instead, like many ex-slaves in the former Confederacy, many were victims of convict-leasing—a system in which Black people were arrested and sentenced to hard labor for minor infractions. Some flourished, starting their own schools. With the help of Quakers, Black soldiers stationed in Helena helped build Southland College—the first Black college west of the Mississippi River.

Despite some signs of hope, the Delta was still a dangerous place for Black people. More lynchings occurred in Phillips County between Reconstruction and the Second World War than in any other county in the country. In 1923, the Ku Klux Klan held a rally that had over 10,000 attendees. Around this time, Black Arkansans left the state in droves. The state lost a third of its Black population and didn’t care: the mechanical cotton picker, which could pick 1,000 pounds of cotton per hour compared to the human ability to pick 20 pounds per hour, had made Black people obsolete to the White planter.

Black people who left the Delta, however, tended to have a bit more education and connections. Those who stayed had no other recourse. Kuo understood that her students were descended from those who didn’t have the means to leave. They may have been illiterate or too accustomed to defeat.

Kuo prepared to tell her parents about her decision to remain in the Delta. They were due to visit. She took them out for a dinner of ribs and cornbread and brought them to Stars with her on their last day of the trip. Her father showed the kids how to subtract fractions during an after-school math class. That evening, while drinking iced tea on her porch, Kuo told her parents that she was thinking of staying in the Delta for another couple of years. Her parents were crestfallen. Kuo was afraid to disappoint her parents, but she also felt that her mission was important. She felt connected to the Delta. There had been an Asian American community there, too. During World War II, Japanese Americans had been interned about 100 miles south of Helena. There, they “cut down trees, cleared the land, and planted crops” (61). Kuo realized that she needed the Delta “to fill the absence of [her] own history and claim an American past” (61).

When her parents asked about the romantic life she was sacrificing, Kuo refused to admit aloud that she was lonely. She convinced herself that dating was for other women. Her celibacy, she thought, contradicted stereotypes about Asian women which cast them as “feminine and exotic” (64). She triumphed female friendships over heteronormative romance. She began to wonder, though, if her parents might not have been right. She started doubting that she had any real connection to the Delta. Soon thereafter, Kuo decided to leave and go to law school.

Two weeks after she made her decision, the district announced that there wasn’t enough funding to keep Stars operating. The only people who cared were the White families who lived in the rich neighborhoods near Central High School, where many Stars students would end up. They worried about “bad kids” being so close to their homes.

Kuo announced her decision to leave to her students. One of them, Monica, expressed skepticism that she could be a good lawyer, stating that Kuo was too nice. Kuo stayed in Helena until the last day of the summer. She wondered if her former students would continue attending school. She thought about how easy it was for her to leave the Delta, while they couldn’t.