All the Silent Spaces

by Christine Ristaino

  Chapter 29:

  Falling Up

  I’m almost late for a meeting and it’s high-traffic time on campus in between classes. Fortunately, the building where I need to be is next door. I’m carrying a book bag filled with papers, my wallet, and an apple-and-cheese combination from Starbucks. I begin to run. There’s a small, cement ledge where people often sit between the two buildings, and I decide to take a running leap so as not to break my stride. My bag is too heavy though, and I’m too old for this. Despite these things, I almost make it. Only my foot hits the cement ledge, but it is enough to send me flying through the air. My shoe decides to go in a different direction and lands feet away, next to an onlooking student. I break my fall with one hand. The other is too caught up in the handles of my book bag to be of any use. I find myself lying on the ground surrounded by people. Professors I know come to my rescue, holding papers that have flown from my bag. A hand lifts me. A student arrives with my shoe. I am bleeding only slightly—a small scrape to my wrist. I stand and smile.

  “Are you okay?” somebody asks.

  “Yes,” I reply.

  Everyone is relieved and then one person says, “That was one of the best falls I’ve ever seen. What would you rate it, a ten?”

  “Well, maybe a nine and a half,” his friend replies.

  “No, an eight and a half,” someone else concludes.

  Suddenly everyone is rating my fall, including myself, and I am surrounded by people, definitely late for my meeting now, but I no longer care.

  Retrogression 30:

  September 15, 2007, 7:03 p.m. and 10 seconds.

  My body lies on the ground, disengaged from my eyes and nose, which are taking in everything around me—the smell of blood and tar, old cigarettes, a loose-leaf paper folded on one edge, a plastic bag, gum, chewed, but still with a touch of peppermint, the black, gritty wheels of the cart.

  Chapter 30:

  Please Don’t Throw Food

  Eleni Gabre-Madhin lived in Ethiopia until she was twelve, when she moved to the United States. Years later, during the famine in Ethiopia, she found herself at Cornell University when a food fight broke out in the cafeteria. She climbed onto the nearest table. “Stop doing this!” she said. “In my country people are starving.”

  At age forty-two, I knew she was the person I wanted to become, somebody who heard her own voice so loudly she would answer its call and climb onto a table without considering anyone else’s reaction to her battle cry. I imagined myself on a table, my mouth open. “Please don’t molest me,” I would begin.

  I’ve known only a few people who remind me of Eleni Gabre-Madhin. One of them is Walter Roberts, who began teaching eight years before I met him. When he arrived, some of his fourth graders were having trouble reading and doing simple math tasks. Many of them were from broken homes and neighborhoods that were falling apart. Mr. Roberts knew math and reading weren’t foremost on his students’ minds and began teaching them skills through discussions of real-life situations, making them write about their own lives and household struggles, the details of which were often heartbreaking. The students responded well, began to read better and to write journal entries with an honesty and rawness that often brought Mr. Roberts to tears. Mr. Roberts created an afterschool program to support their goals, and they named themselves the Roberts Scholars.

  In the fall of 2006, I decided to teach a seminar comparing Italian and American education, which took place mostly within the walls of a classroom at my university. After the attack in 2007, though, I changed the class format completely. What started out as a careful examination of two cultures and their educational systems turned into a quest to understand our own system—what was working and what wasn’t. One group of students suggested we visit the schools around us. I met Walter Roberts a few days later.

  The day I visited his classroom for the first time, Mr. Roberts and I sat at a table across from each other and talked. He was one of the warmest people I had ever met. He asked me about my interest in education. I told him about my disappointment with No Child Left Behind and its focus on testing. “I was always thinking that now was not the time to act. But then my children and I were attacked and I realized life is short, things aren’t always predictable, and I’d better get going. So here I am,” I said. Mr. Roberts told me his story. “I had planned to go to graduate school after the first year of my teaching, but years later my scholars are thriving and I am still with them.”

  Mr. Roberts’s students were from mostly low-income families. Many lived in apartment buildings near the school. His oldest students were just about to graduate from high school, and many of them returned to Mr. Roberts’s classroom every Monday evening to participate in Roberts Scholars meetings. Every time I visited, the scholars’ voices were strong. A student named Vincent spoke of another life, before Mr. Roberts’s classroom. “I used to have a real bad attitude in first through fifth grade. Then sixth grade came around and Mr. Roberts said I was gifted in math. Until then I didn’t know what my subject was. I changed my life around ’cause Mr. Roberts said that and now I want to be an engineer. It brought me eighty-eight thousand dollars in scholarships.”

  Colleen, president of the group, said, “I want to start an organization to help abused children because nobody helped me. It’s going to be called ‘Silent Screams.’”

  There were times when his students weren’t enthusiastic. “We’re tired,” they said one afternoon.

  “Do you know you are tired because you don’t sleep enough or eat well? It’s important you guys eat healthily. There was a time when younger people had more energy than older people,” Mr. Roberts said.

  The day I brought my students to visit Mr. Roberts’s fourth-grade classroom changed the way we talked about education in my class. My students were all freshmen. I was their first university teacher. Micaela had long, braided hair and a strong Jewish faith. She founded a mentoring partnership with our university and Mr. Roberts’s students shortly after our visit. Ravi was from India. During high school he had felt a tremendous amount of pressure from his parents and often discussed this particular challenge with the class. Benjamin had curly, blond hair and looked like he could be my younger brother. Diya was an Indian American. She was passionate and stood her ground. Justine quietly changed the world, teaching sex education in Africa and joining Teach for America after college. Justine, Diya, and Micaela all became close friends. There were also Deepika, Maneesha, Benjamin, Mia, and Anay, complex, motivated students who united around each other and the Roberts Scholars that year. Janine was my student assistant. She had taken my class a year before. With her encouragement, I looked up Mr. Roberts, and we took our first field trip to meet his students.

  When we arrived, Mr. Roberts asked if we wanted to see the Line Game in action, an activity described in The Freedom Writers Diary by Erin Gruwell and her students. Mr. Roberts’s students stood on either side of the room and he asked them questions. If they could answer yes to the question, they would move onto the line in the middle of the room.

  “How many of you like ice cream?” he asked, and everyone stepped on the line.

  “How many of you are angry that gas prices have gone up?”

  Again, everyone stood on the line.

  “Who did well on the last test?”

  A handful of students stepped on the line.

  “How many of you live in single-parent households?”

  Most students moved to the center.

  “Who has heard gunshots?” he said.

  All of the scholars stood in the center.

  “How many of you hear gunshots every night?”

  Most students again returned to the center line.

  My undergraduates didn’t move. They stood quietly on the sidelines, mouths open.

  On the way home, we all commented that we never hear gunshots in our neighborhoods. My most talkative student, Micaela, sat quietly, talking occasionally. “I’m impressed with how they can have such difficult
experiences and still have so much hope,” she said.

  As Micaela said this, Justine and Diya sprang from their seats in the van. “We were just talking,” Diya said. “We want to see the scholars again, and most of them have talked about going to college one day. Let’s have a college day for them.”

  The day the fourth-grade Roberts Scholars arrived on campus, there were spurts of torrential downpour. My students took them on tours when the rain stopped. At lunch, while most of my students were in the cafeteria with the scholars, Ravi came into the classroom and sat with me. He began to talk about the scholars. “I can’t believe it. In the class where I brought them, they were all taking notes and asking questions. I have been intimidated by the class size. I never speak up. I now realize how approachable my teacher is,” Ravi said.

  “You know,” he said, “I grew up in a big house and I have never needed anything. But sometimes I don’t work hard enough. The Roberts Scholars, they don’t have much, but they do so much with what they have. They made me realize all I am capable of.”

  In the late afternoon, we brought in a college admissions counselor who asked the scholars questions and gave them advice about applying to colleges. At the end of the day, we lifted plastic cups of fizzy apple cider and toasted to our dreams.

  One afternoon, four of my students accompanied me to visit the Roberts Scholars. Micaela asked if she could bring her grandparents.

  When I arrived to pick them up, I could see Micaela’s grandparents from the car window. They were well-dressed. Her grandfather wore a pressed blue suit and Micaela’s grandmother had on a beautiful dark blue dress. I wondered if Mr. Roberts’s students would feel on display with us there.

  Micaela and her grandparents climbed into what my son liked to call “our old, rusty Volvo,” and the other three students drove with Janine. All the way there I couldn’t get my air conditioner to work. It was sweltering hot and we were caught in a traffic jam on a one-lane road that was under construction. We showed up at the Roberts Scholars classroom forty-five minutes late. Mr. Roberts welcomed us. He had been placing his students into learning-style groups and we walked in at the end of this process.

  “Would the kinesthetic learners please stand,” he said.

  They did and the class went wild with applause.

  “Would the visual learners rise?”

  Again, applause and accolades.

  After acknowledging each group, Mr. Roberts gave his students a math problem. As he made his way around the class, he asked his students about their learning styles and how to best address the problem. “Okay, my kinesthetic learners,” he said, “what approach do you want to take on to solve this?”

  We all joined the students and spoke with them about their learning styles, the math problems, their impressions of Mr. Roberts, their goals, and what it meant to be a scholar. They were happy to share, confident, open, eager, lovely. When I looked up again after a little less than an hour, I noticed Micaela’s grandfather sitting in a chair wiping tears from his face with a handkerchief. I walked over to him.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “This man,” he said. “I can’t believe what this man is doing.”

  Mr. Roberts asked some of his students to talk. They stood, telling us who they were, who they wanted to be one day, and how they were going to accomplish their goals. Then he asked us to speak. We all stood and told the scholars how much they had affected us. When Micaela’s grandfather began to talk, the class went silent.

  “I grew up poor,” he said. “We had no money. I only stayed through eighth grade and then I had to quit school and work full time. We lived in the slums. The only reason I made it was because I used to sneak into the library and read. I read everything in that library. That’s how I was educated. It saved me. What you children are doing. What you are doing, Mr. Roberts, I have never seen before. Please, you have so much to share with the world. You are such wonderful, beautiful, intelligent children. You are so smart. Please keep going in this direction and don’t look back. You can do it. You can make a difference in this world. You can and you will and you are. You don’t have to do it alone.”

  Micaela’s grandfather was crying. I was, too. As I looked around the classroom, I realized everyone had tears in their eyes.

  Then we left.

  As Mr. Roberts gathered his students back into the classroom, we watched him from the open door.

  “‘Invictus’ is a poem written from a hospital bed by William Ernest Henley, a victim of bone tuberculosis,” he told them. Through determination and struggle, he lived thirty years longer than any doctor had predicted.

  Mr. Roberts explained to his students that “Invictus” to him meant strength and courage in the face of adversity. That it meant hope when things seemed hopeless. “Anytime you feel there is no hope,” he told his scholars, “recite ‘Invictus’ and you’ll see the power you have inside of you.”

  Then a student who had memorized the poem recited it as though her life depended on it.

  INVICTUS

  OUT of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

  Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

  On the day of the Roberts Scholars new member induction, Mr. Roberts asked me to talk about how the scholars had affected me and my students. It was an improvisational request, and I wondered how I could convey to parents just how much their children had given me. Then I remembered Eleni Gabre-Madhin standing on a table at Cornell University imploring her classmates not to throw food, and I knew what to say.

  “Your children have pulled me from a rocky nightmare onto a warm, calm shore,” I began, and then I told them about how the Roberts Scholars had made me feel part of the world again, how they had taken me and my students in, adopted us, and given us a home with them. I remembered a day when Mr. Roberts, his students, and I had lain on the floor of a classroom. We closed our eyes, and Mr. Roberts read a poem about his struggles with administrative policies, which had mandated he change his teaching methods. We all knew that Mr. Roberts would continue to reach his students despite these new policies.

  “I’d like to thank somebody,” Mr. Roberts had said. “I’d like to thank somebody for always believing in us, for inviting us to her school, for the sincerity, integrity, and love she has shared with us. Thank you, Dr. Ristaino.”

  I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling, listened to the melodic, reassuring tones of Mr. Roberts’s voice, and for a brief moment, I was one of them, part of the scholars’ collective voice, part of the world’s wholeness, part of Eleni Gabre-Madhin’s message, sharing the human struggle as I lay on the floor in a classroom in Atlanta. Closing my eyes and stretching my body toward the infinite, I could have been anywhere and anyone in the world.

  Retrogression 31:

  September 15, 2007, 7:03 p.m.

  The world around me has completely stopped. Nothing breathes. I lie on the ground, perfectly still, and then I take in a full breath.

  Chapter 31:

  Juvie

  Ada, Sam, and I are in the car and we have just passed that dreaded store. Snapshots of the attack flood into my mind, and I wonder if my children are having similar recollections. Ada begins telling me about her day. “In class we talked about how parents will always love you even when they’re angry,” she says. There is a pause. “Mom, I promise not to do this, but if I kill
ed Sam, would you still love me?”

  I look at my daughter in the rearview mirror. Despite what she just said, she seems angelic—blond, feathery hair, blue eyes, a whisper of a smile, and a face that is still cherublike at seven years old.

  I look at Sam to see his reaction, but he’s staring out the side window. My son’s brown, button eyes shine. He is five years old and a boy’s slender frame has finally taken over his chubby arms and legs.

  “Ada, I love you,” I say. “But I would be very angry at you for a long time. And, you know, I would lose two children. Sam would be dead and you would have to go to juvie.”

  Ada’s eyes light up and Sam turns from the window. One of Ada’s friends at school had told her about juvenile hall and ever since, juvie has been a topic of interest.

  “Would you visit me?” Ada asks.

  “Yes, after I calmed down,” I respond.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can we change the subject?” Ada says.

  “Sure,” I say.

  Nobody talks.

  “Mom,” Sam finally says. “Ada wouldn’t be able to kill me because I would use my karate moves on her. Mom, did you know you should never get into a stranger’s car even if he has a gun?”

  “Yes, Sam. Probably he wouldn’t use the gun unless you got into the car, right?”

  “And the best place to kick someone is in the testicles,” Sam says. “Or you can poke a person in the eyes.”

  “Sam, where did you learn this stuff?” I ask.

  “Karate,” he tells me.

  “Mom,” Ada says. “I really want to poke somebody’s eyes out. I hope I get to one day.”

  “I don’t,” I say. “It would mean you were in real danger.”

  “But you don’t know how angry I am. I could really do it. I want to, Mom.”

  “Tell me, sweetie, what are you angry about?” I ask.

  “I’m angry at that man. I’m angry because when he was hurting you I didn’t do anything,” she says.