50 pages • 1 hour read
Michelle KuoReading with Patrick
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Legacy of Slavery and Understanding Its Impact Through Reading and Education
Embedded in Kuo’s memoir is a sweeping historical narrative about the Delta—from its hey-day as a bustling, cotton-rich territory during the antebellum period to its downfall after the Second World War. It was a region that once depended on free Black labor, but then discarded after the invention of more sophisticated machinery for harvesting cotton. Worse, in the 1920s and 1930s, Philips County, where Helena is located, held the record for the greatest number of lynchings in the country. Black people became literally disposable and any attempt that a Black person made to improve his or her circumstances or even to assert humanity was quickly met with vigilante vengeance.
Patrick recognized himself within the writings that dealt with this history. Kuo’s introduction of Frederick Douglass’s The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass helped Patrick identify the ways in which White supremacy threatened to tear his family apart, just as it had deprived Douglass of his mother, and to see how he, too, had been deprived of a decent education until Kuo entered his life.
While reading Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, particularly “My Dungeon Shook,” Patrick realized that the only salvation, if only for himself, was not to become consumed by hate. Love had to prevail, despite White America’s unwillingness to contend with its history out of a stubborn refusal to admit either to guilt or complicity.
Arguably, these lessons from both Douglass and Baldwin helped Patrick continue on. He retained his peaceful character in prison and, despite a brief period of insobriety after his release, he drove himself to look for work, refusing to be thwarted either by Helena’s lack of opportunities or the pain of his mother’s death. For Patrick, the legacies of slavery and oppression, which he couldn’t grasp before reading these works, did not result his defeat but in his determination to survive, like his ancestors.
The Meaning of Activism
After Kuo graduated from Harvard, she decided to use her degree to help others. Inspired by the civil rights activists whom she learned about, she joined Teach for America. Throughout the narrative, Kuo questions how important one person can be, how much of a difference one can truly make when so many social and historical forces work to thwart progress.
After law school, Kuo thought about where her training could be most useful. Fellow classmates focused on the major concerns of the day—illegal surveillance and the constitutional violations intrinsic to the Patriot Act—while Kuo’s mind wandered frequently back to the Delta and, particularly, to Patrick.
Kuo’s effective work with Patrick, immensely improving his literacy over a seven-month period, reveals that there is no single path to activism. One can make as much of a difference with the incremental effort of teaching one student as one can by winning a major court case. In both examples, a precedent is set, for the changes fostered will positively impact others. Patrick was better prepared for the job market and also able to engage with his daughter, Cherish, in a way that he could not before Kuo reentered his life.
Kuo’s work is in keeping with that of the civil rights activists whom she so greatly admired. It is especially reminiscent of the work performed by the first Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader, Bob Moses, in Mississippi. Moses, too, was an educator who focused his efforts on illiterate Black people in the rural Delta and helped them register to vote. Kuo’s legal expertise didn’t help Patrick elude jail time, but she did help him understand what was happening to him in lieu of access to a proper defense attorney.
Comfort Versus Obligation
Though proud of her decision to return to the Delta after graduating from Harvard Law School, at various points in the memoir, Kuo contended with peer and parental pressure to lead a more comfortable life.
Kuo was in her early-twenties and freshly graduated from Harvard when she began working at Teach for America, and she was in her mid-twenties when she returned to the region to focus on instructing Patrick Browning. The work, in both instances, was fulfilling to her social conscience, but it came at the expense of a romantic life and at making a better living financially.
While interning in Manhattan, Kuo and her classmates at Harvard Law were enticed by elite corporate law firms with expensive dinners and other pricy treats. Kuo was offered a position at one such firm. When she told her parents the starting salary there for a junior associate, they were shocked that one could make so much money. Nevertheless, Kuo rejected this luxury in favor of working for a non-profit in the Bay Area that focused its efforts on undocumented Mexican immigrants who faced evictions or were routinely stiffed out of their wages by greedy employers.
For Kuo, earning a law degree, especially one from a prestigious school like Harvard, was wedded to a moral obligation: her access to the privilege of this education meant that she had to help those who didn’t have the resources to help themselves. Her mission began with Patrick, but continued on the non-profit law firm and the San Quentin Prison Project, where she combined her passion for education with her equal drive to help those who had been cheated by an unfair system.
