I put my pen down and glare at Shahteik. “Boy, I will wax your butt so bad, you’ll have to wear Pampers.” I accept the bait.
He whips my butt at all three rounds of checkers, talking shit the whole time. Then, as if the thought of me leaving has finally dawned on him, he says, “Yo, Ms. P, even though you really, and I mean really got on my nerves, I ain’t gonna front, you were the best teacher I had. Now, don’t get too excited ’cause I’m giving you some love.”
“Shahteik, I know that must have been extremely painful for you to admit.” We share a laugh.
“I’m about to go upstate so I won’t miss seeing you here at Rikers, Ms. P.”
“Yeah right, Shahteik, you’re gonna be thinking about all those vocabulary words I gave you but you refused to write down.”
“Ms. P, you wilding. I know my vocabulary; I ain’t have to write them down ’cause I’m nice like that. I’mma damn sure miss your Poof though. Ms. P, you crazy, yo.” He shakes his head and laughs. “I’mma be laughing ’bout that shit for a minute. I’mma be Poofing niggas upstate, watch.”
“Watch that word,” I say as I beam.
“My bad, Ms. P. Yo, where you come up with that Poof thing, though? That’s really type crazy—it’s original, but damn that shit is crazy.”
“Y’all rug rats inspired it. There was no Poof before I started working with y’all.”
“Oh, word?” Shahteik is proud of that.
Wow, my archenemy, the black-gnat nemesis, bane of my existence, Lil’ Rumbles rug rat supreme, is actually warming my heart. Well, I’ll be damned. We finally bonded.
I hand out their evaluations, which are full of positive encouragement and constructive criticism. When I get to Malik, he asks, “What’s this?”
“An evaluation and personal letter from me to you, because you’re one of my favorites.”
Malik stares at me momentarily before he cracks a warm smile and begins reading his letter.
“Everybody got one?” he quietly asks.
“Everybody got a personal student evaluation. But you got a letter and an evaluation. Don’t make it hot. Keep that between me and you,” I whisper, making Malik feel extra special.
“I got you, Ms. P. Thanks… I’m kinda tight you leaving though. But I’mma be all right. I’m up outta here soon anyway, so it’s all good.”
“You better be up out of here. You’ve got a bright future. And I still got my peoples up here, so I better not ever hear about you being back up in this place, ya heard?”
“Naw, never that, Ms. P. I’mma be a poet.”
My heart swells.
“You already are.”
Malik lights up and leans back in his desk, showing all of his teeth, flashing me a warm solar smile with luminous rays. Malik is gorgeous.
Then it dawns on me. I need something tangible from them too, so I ask, would they mind writing an evaluation on me? I want honest feedback about what they thought of me as a teacher. I let them know it isn’t mandatory at all, but it will help me to improve as an educator. They all begin writing on pieces of paper. I am so curious to know what they got from me and what they have to say about Ms. P.
Raheim aka Harlem:
The way I think of Ms. Peterson as a teacher is she shows and teaches her students how to learn. When Ms. Peterson teaches her class we are interested in learning because we want to know about our community and our history. One of Ms. Peterson’s weakest points in teaching is that sometimes she has no patience. When Ms. Peterson stops teaching, her class will not be the same because most teachers don’t care to teach you if you don’t care to learn.
Shahteik aka Lil’ Rumbles:
Tu Ms. Peterson better known as my Black queen you noe that you gets me so mad I just wish I could erase you but you teach some gud work. I be mad at the world and you jus ache my nerves but I still love you and I apologize for disrespecting you cause if someone disrespect my moms I’ll come rite back to jail. I’m sorry my Black queen. Out of everything you taught the only thing stood out was the essay. You are a very special teacher and you tried to teach me a lot.
Lil Rumblez
Diaz:
Throughout my time here I’ve enjoyed learning and spending time in Ms. Peterson’s class. Ms. Peterson is a very intellectual teacher. She focuses mainly on making sure that the lesson’s learned, the goal is reached and assuring the task gets completed. She is a great teacher overall. She reaches out to the kids when needed.
Rashid aka Leaky:
High Points
1. Black History: You teach me a lot about Black History that I didn’t know cuz I was blinded by the white mans way of teaching Black History
2. Getting work finished and done: I never did so much work in jail in my life. Shaking my head
3. Keeping your Kool: If I was you I would be right here with everybody else
4. Last but not least Don’t Touch My Radio: Goddamn!
Low Points
1. Making it Hot: it’s the next kind of hot
2. Yelling at another person cuz somebody else got you mad
Malik aka Far Rock:
Ms. Peterson I’m really going to miss u. What I’m going to miss the most is the Poof and just bugging u til u get belligerent, but besides that you are a great teacher. U taught me a lot about Black History and the class is going 2 try 2 keep the same thing going. U even taught me a lot about poetry and I hope to get some more poems even one valentine’s.
The End
My rug rats brought out the best in me, forced me to confront my fears and walk boldly and humbly through my insecurities, all day, every day. I had to show up, daily and consistently, for something greater than myself. My dusty boys taught me Yoda-like patience and compassion under pressure. They brought out dynamism in me, proving to myself that I can indeed teach and reach the seemingly unreachable. The universe clearly put me here for a reason and these loud potty-mouth rascals had a profound impact on me, helping me to grow as an educator, an artist, and a human being. Most importantly, they forced me to discover a deeper purpose that isn’t about me at all. We undoubtedly had a symbiotic relationship. I’m going to miss this motley crew of criminal-minded, dangerous minds, menace II society, bad-news bears who I carry in my heart. These beautiful wounded warriors. These kids with potential. My rug rats.
On my way out I found this in my teacher’s mailbox. Someone left it there anonymously:
I Do Make a Difference (by Dr. Chaim Ginot)
I’ve come to the frightening decision that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or dehumanized… I Do Make a Difference.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MoMo and Friends
As I exit the A train on Thirty-Fourth Street, starting my new job at Friends of Island Academy, I feel free. People are zipping by, zigzagging around; some of us are slowpokes, like myself, easy-walking to our office. I wonder if the speed racers even like where they’re rushing to.
Working in midtown Manhattan, beginning my workday at 9 a.m., is a far cry from waking up at 4:30 a.m. to travel two hours to clock in at 7:30 a.m. Now I’m waking up at 7 a.m., out the door by eight, and I don’t punch a clock. This feels normal. This I can manage. I stop into Starbucks and order a Doppio Soy Espresso Macchiato. Fancy shit. Then I quickly duck into the gourmet deli on the corner and get a sesame bagel toasted with chives cream cheese, tomatoes, smoked salmon, and capers. Foo-foo, chichi. I’m rolling. I didn’t even need to bring lunch today because there is a plethora of cute lunchtime dining options in the vicinity I can stroll to. Sipping on my overpriced designer coffee feels great. I smile and do a happy-bop to work.
Kathy, the program director, is thrilled to have me back on board at Friends of Island Academy to help resuscitate the program, and she gives me a hero’s welcome. Because I worked there during what we former employees called the “glory days,” I know the culture of the place and what it takes to keep the kids engaged. I’ve worked with many teenagers in the past who, as a result of their involvement with Friends, have turned their lives around and evolved into dynamic, responsible young adults. I’ve seen kids coming straight out of Rikers or off the streets walk through the doors of the program and, within months, begin to develop and exhibit their true potential. My coworkers and I worked hard to chip away at the gangster-thug survival façade they desperately clung to. We were the dream team. We helped untangle each kid from the grips of the criminal justice system and from the negative lure of the streets by employing various methods of tough love and doing court advocacy to achieve our collective goal: helping youth stay alive and free. I’ve also seen my share of knuckle-busting fistfights, rearrests, and relapses back into the gang/drug/fast-money culture—enough to dishearten staunch optimists like myself. But I’ve also witnessed enough triumphs from tragedy that give me just enough hope to keep believing in unexpected, unpredicted, sudden change. The X factor.
Now that I have official Board of Education teaching experience under my belt, I’ve been asked to coteach GED classes in addition to other responsibilities. My business card reads Senior Youth Advocate Specialist, but it should say “Cirque du Soleil–juggling contortionist.” I do a lot and my range is wide.
I teach the coed GED class in the mornings from 9:30 a.m. to 12 p.m., and one day out of the week I travel back out to Rikers Island to do outreach with the adolescent girls detained at Rose M. Singer Center. I meet with potential participants, one-on-one, to make an assessment of her needs and tell her about the various support services that Friends has to offer upon her release. Meeting a girl behind the wall and developing a rapport while she’s still incarcerated helps strengthen the chances of her walking through our doors when she gets out. Seeing a flyer posted on a bulletin board in the jail doesn’t compare to meeting me in person. Human contact is much more effective and offers me an opportunity to personally connect with the girls before they come home.
I enjoy spending that one-on-one time with the teen girls at Rikers because I become like a big sister–favorite aunt to many of them, offering life-skills advice, a boost of needed encouragement, honest “real-talk” feedback, and sometimes, many times, a shoulder to cry on. I’ve been doing it so long, I’m “Oprah Master Class Yoda” with it. I get the girls to open up and talk, which doesn’t take much because they all need someone to confide in who will listen without judgment.
Another male coworker does outreach with the adolescent boys in the sentenced building, a different building altogether from where my lil’ rug rat rascals are housed.
I wonder how they’re doing, who’s home, who’s upstate, who’s still at Rikers—and are they learning? Tyquan jumps in my mind and I say a silent prayer for his safety up top. I hope he takes his GED while he’s there and remembers what I told him: “Don’t serve time, but let the time serve you.” I catch myself reminiscing about their shenanigans, laughing to myself thinking about Shahteik, my Poofs, and Peanut’s spontaneous Harlem shaking. I miss my boys. I pray they’re somewhere winning.
On the days I’m out at Rikers doing outreach with the girls, David holds it down in the class, drilling them with mathematics. He’s a wiz at math and excellent at explaining the alchemy of numbers, dissolving algebraic mysteries for the shorty-rocs to easily digest. The kids feel accomplished and smart after they tackle challenging equations. He hits ’em with numbers; I hit ’em with words. We make a dynamite teaching duo.
My new classroom is open and airy, on the second floor, and overlooks the ground-floor main entrance, which is street level. The office space used to be a trendy, split-level clothing warehouse with huge frosted windows that don’t have pigeon shit on them.
Now that I have my official teacher badge and earned my stripes on the Island, I step into the classroom at Friends with confidence. I mastered working with a roomful of rowdy rug rat boys, so I got this. However, this new dynamic, adding loudmouth, hard-as-nails firecracker Betty Boop girls into the mix with the boys, I wasn’t quite ready for. Like MoMo, a tough cookie from Brooklyn who makes her presence known as soon as she enters the building. Her entrance is performance art. Walking in with loud music blasting from her earphones dangling around her neck, MoMo feels compelled to talk extra loud on her cell phone while popping gum all at the same time. And her strut is classic hood couture. Babygirl has hips that switch to the beat of her own soundtrack and she walks harder than Naomi Campbell in an Alexander McQueen runway show. MoMo’s walk serves high drama. And if by some miracle she’s not yakety-yak-yakking on the cell phone when she walks in, not to worry, she’s singing loud and abrasively off-key some random lyric to her favorite song playing on her ghetto playlist. And, if by another miracle from the iPod gods, she’s left her pocket-sized boom box at home, not to worry again; MoMo is singing her very own entrance theme song with lyrics she done made up in her own mind: “Owww, you already know MoMo’s in the house, yes, yes y’all, to the beat y’all… owww.”
Sporting a bright pink tongue piercing, which is in full view every time she throws her head back and belts out a deep-rooted, gutbucket-belly laugh, MoMo has an endearing charm just beneath her ’groid grit. There is something about the heavy register of her laughter that sounds like home. It feels familiar. Authentic. I never did trust a woman who talked or laughed like Minnie Mouse, all squeaky-like from their nasal cavity. MoMo has an earthy, grounded tenor with a straight-no-chaser resonance that reminds me of my Hennessy-sipping homegirls. MoMo is a teenage saloon broad, a loud and honest mirror reflection of my seventeen-year-old self. A fashionista rumbler. Unafraid of bright neon colors, which are highlighted by her dark mahogany skin, MoMo is certified “Brooklyn fly.” Always sporting a ladylike pocketbook, acrylic nails, dressy shoes (the kind usually reserved for the club), and big, bold costume jewelry, she wears Cookie Monster–blue or Ronald McDonald–red streaks of synthetic weave in her hair. This week she’s giving us Smurfette. Electric blue.
“Ay, yo, who the fuck got my phone?” MoMo has a mouth like an auto mechanic, always barking at the boys. There are usually ten to fifteen students on any given day, with two to three girls mixed in. Female numbers are low. Today she is the only girl, which means nothing to MoMo because she hangs with the boys with pool hall ease.
I snap, “Watch your mouth, MoMo!”
“Excuse me, Sista Liza,” she says so politely. Then she rephrases her pit bull attack: “Which one of y’all niggaz got my phone?”
I first met MoMo at Rikers. She hadn’t been there long and was about to be released on bail. Her family had some resources, so she could fight her case while home. She was one of the lucky ones. Though she was looking at a possible three-to-five-year sentence, her paid attorney said there was a good chance she would get off with just probation since it was her first offense. What a difference a paid lawyer makes. The case looks like it might swing in her favor but she isn’t quite out of the woods—anything can happen. MoMo needs to stay productive, out of trouble, and focused in school. Our program is perfect for her.
During our initial conversation at Rose M. Singer, aka Rosie’s (the female facility at Rikers where the women and adolescent girls are housed), MoMo presented me with the not-so-spicy mild-chili-pepper version of who she is. I meet Emily Post: Yes ma’am this, yes ma’am that—she was so polite and sweet as pumpkin pie. Her smile could melt butter. Seeing her walk through the doors of the program asking for me a few weeks later was a victory. Many girls I meet and connect with behind the walls never come. I was really glad MoMo showed up. Half the challenge has been met. The tough part now is getting her to come to class consistently, on time, and not high, while monitoring her involvement with classroom soap operas
—the “he-said-she-said-who-you-talking-to?” drama—that she always seems to get tangled up in.
After the morning classes are over, the kids break for lunch and are expected to come back for the scheduled afternoon groups. Group is mandatory. The primo bargaining chip and main incentive to get the kids to show back up after lunch and not just tear ass and go home is giving them a round-trip MetroCard at the end of the day. If they attend a full day until 3 p.m., they get a full fare.
Today’s afternoon group is with the International Center of Photography. ICP conducts photography workshops teaching kids the art form, using it as a tool to help young people see themselves and their community differently while fostering self-reflection and development. It’s one of our favorite partnerships. Today ICP is bringing in a world-renowned guest star photographer, Jamel Shabazz, to show his work and help the kids with their photography projects. Of all the days to not show out, today is the day, but of course the rug rats seem to love showing out in front of company.
Jamel Shabazz’s photography work is iconic. He’s most famous for his body of work that chronicles the 1980s era of urban life. None before him have documented it so brilliantly and authentically, ever. His books A Time before Crack, Back in the Days, and Seconds of My Life archive images from the early eighties, during the dawn of hip-hop. Having grown up in the eighties as a young teenager myself, I find the fashion, people, poses, and scenery in his photos to be absolutely riveting and nostalgic. To have Jamel Shabazz come to our little bad-news bears program is an honor, so I am beyond mortified that he is witnessing what is fast escalating into a full-blown dramatic escapade with firecracker supreme MoMo leading the charge. I have to defuse the situation as quickly as possible and douse her flames before they rage. I tell MoMo to wait in another room as I address the group of boys already seated around the table ready for group. I figured if I frame it as a bad prank and not a theft, maybe the person who has taken MoMo’s cell phone will return it under the guise of just joking.
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