by Helen Thorpe
7
* * *
Miss, I Have Nerves
It was 7:30 A.M. and students were eating breakfast in the sunny, vast fourth-floor cafeteria. The room was only about one-quarter full, and far more peaceful than at lunchtime. I was sitting at a large round table with Shani and Lisbeth, both of whom had arrived at school early.
Lisbeth said brightly, holding up a nectarine, “Qué es esto?”
“That’s a nectarine,” I told her. She did not know that word. I tried another.
“Peach,” I said.
Shani chimed in. “Miss, you like peach? My father—very, very, he likes it.”
We discussed all the items on their plates, naming everything in English. Then it was time for ELA math. On our way to that class—it was held in a funny, tucked-away room, up another flight of stairs that could be found at the back of the cafeteria—we were joined by Saúl. I saw that he had gotten a haircut, quite severe.
“You look nice,” I told him.
He smiled wanly. “It is very small,” he said.
He meant the haircut was too short. It was May, and we had reached the delightful point in the year when the newcomers could get across almost anything, yet still spoke in peculiar ways (almost all of them had progressed to early speech emergence, the third phase of language acquisition). I found their imperfect English far more entertaining to listen to than English spoken perfectly. For example, Jakleen had recently told me that she was “very girl sad,” when she was trying to say that she was a “very sad girl,” but I have to say I found “very girl sad” kind of enchanting.
Mr. Speicher’s math class was held in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows that opened onto a balcony with a stunning fifth-floor view of the soft, rolling foothills, then the craggy mountains. The blossoms on the crab apple trees in the park had faded, while all kinds of trees had leafed out. The hillsides were awash in that pale hue I thought of as the color of late spring. “Green, green, green,” observed Lisbeth.
“Who is not here?” asked Mr. Speicher.
He glanced around the room, which contained most of the students from newcomer class. “Jakleen and Mariam,” he said, answering his own question. “They’ll probably get here soon—they usually arrive a little late. Okay, what did we learn yesterday?” he asked.
I sat down next to Lisbeth, who was preoccupied instead with tomorrow. She whispered to me, “Cómo se dice ‘juez’?”
Confused, I thought I had heard her say “nariz,” so I told her “nose.”
Lisbeth started sniggering and waving her hands, then took out her phone and typed into Google Translate and held the device up for me to see: Juez. It meant “judge.” Both Saúl and Lisbeth had court appearances the following morning at 8:30. She could think of nothing else.
Jakleen and Ghasem strolled into the room together, looking very much like a couple. “There they are,” Mr. Speicher said. “Is Mariam here, too?”
“Yes,” Jakleen told him, though Mariam was nowhere to be seen.
Jakleen had pulled her hair into a braid and was wearing a black sweater with gray sweatpants. Ghasem had on a plaid dress shirt, blue jeans, and running shoes; around his neck he wore a set of oversized red headphones. Mr. Speicher had taken a liking to the young man from Afghanistan because he worked sixty hours a week while also going to school full-time. “Ghasem, do you still work at that restaurant on Colorado Boulevard?” Mr. Speicher asked. He kept meaning to stop by for a meal. Ghasem never complained about his grueling schedule, yet the effect of it was palpable; the fervent way he shadowed Jakleen seemed partly a response to her well-maintained beauty and partly a response to his own self-sacrifice, as if he felt he deserved something nice in return. Meanwhile, she expertly held him at bay. The other newcomers covertly studied Jakleen and Ghasem, to see exactly how this was done.
Mr. Speicher got back to business. Yesterday, they had been talking about slope, he reminded the class.
“Show me x-axis,” he commanded.
Everybody placed their right arm horizontally across their belly, level with their waist. This was another example of total physical response, or the concept that second-language learners may benefit from coordinating intellectual instruction with physical movement.
“Show me y-axis.”
Everybody extended their right arm upward.
“Good! Okay. Today we’re going to start plotting points.”
Mariam strolled into the room, wearing a magenta sweater that I thought of as Jakleen’s. I guessed she had been on the phone with Abdullah; it was 4 P.M. in Iraq.
“Rate of change,” said Mr. Speicher. “The amount something changes—another name for that is slope.”
Mr. Speicher showed the students a picture of a skier. “We can think about this in terms of the mountains,” he explained. “Downhill—that’s a slope.”
He asked if anyone could name other examples of slope. Nadia said the flag, and Mr. Speicher confirmed that was a good example—the pole was standing out diagonally from the wall. Shani was still thinking about the downhill skier.
“Miss, you like?” she asked me.
“Yes, I like to ski,” I said.
“My mom is, ‘No,’ very very—” and Shani made a scared face.
Mr. Speicher displayed an image of Elitch Gardens, a local amusement park. He showed a picture of a roller coaster climbing laboriously to the top of its ascent—an example, as he said, of “Slope! Slope, slope, slope!”
“Where is this?” Yonatan demanded.
Any American-born resident of Denver would have known exactly where the amusement park was located, but the kids in this room had no idea.
“It’s downtown,” Mr. Speicher said. “If you go on the light rail, it goes right to Elitch Gardens. So in the summer, if you want to go, it’s a good way to have fun or to get a job. Lots of South students work there.”
It was early in the morning, and Lisbeth’s hair was still wet; the fruity smell of her shampoo wafted over to me. She was bouncing both of her legs rapidly up and down under her desk. Mr. Speicher digressed from the math lesson to coach the newcomers on riding a roller coaster.
“You have to put your hands up, and you have to scream loudly,” he instructed.
Nadia was mystified. “Why?”
None of them had ever been on a roller coaster, I realized.
“That’s just what people do,” Mr. Speicher said. “So, the best roller coasters have slope—steep slope. The boring roller coasters have less slope, they are more flat.”
Mr. Speicher quizzed the kids, calling on them to make sure everyone understood what he had been saying. He drew a line that went up from a low point to a high point and asked Nadia if this was a positive or negative slope.
“Positive,” Nadia answered.
“Okay, good. And decreasing slope, what direction does that go?”
“Down,” said Plamedi.
“What do you think, Jakleen?”
“Down,” she agreed.
“And what kind of slope is that, positive or negative?”
“Positive,” she said.
“Oooh, no, negative, negative,” he corrected.
The most vocal students in math proved to be Methusella, Nadia, and Yonatan—the same kids who spoke up downstairs, with the addition of Yonatan, who had a knack for math. Kaee Reh did not say much but was equally proficient in this subject. Jakleen showed skill at solving math problems, while Mariam only half grasped this thing called slope. Shani appeared totally lost and Lisbeth completely distracted. The rest of the class seemed to understand the material, more or less.
Mr. Speicher glanced at the clock and then looked around the room. Who could help him stay on track? Bells were not audible in his room. Ghasem could help, Mr. Speicher decided. He asked the young Afghan student to let him know when the period ended. Ghasem nodded agreeably and set a timer on his phone. Mr. Speicher got the class busy plotting points. As the students bent over their notebooks, he went around the room
helping those who required aid, starting with Lisbeth. Mr. Speicher looked a bit fringy that morning. When the wrestling team had advanced to the state finals, all of the wrestlers had used peroxide to dye their hair an unnatural shade of blond. As their coach, Mr. Speicher had adopted the new look, too. By this point, it wasn’t so new, however, giving him black roots and whitish-orange ends to his hair.
Ghasem took out a ruler to draw very straight lines. Meanwhile, after Mr. Speicher moved along, Lisbeth tried on Shani’s black leather jacket. “Es de rusia,” Lisbeth told me in Spanish. Shani had bought the jacket in Russia, which Lisbeth seemed to find romantic. After she finished her problems, Jakleen sauntered over to Ghasem and attempted to steal his phone. He splayed one hand flat on her belly and held her off as he slid his phone securely into his back pocket. She tried reaching around to grab it, but he swiveled his hips away.
“Who’s done?” Mr. Speicher asked, noticing that he was starting to lose control of parts of the room. “Stand up if you’re done.”
He had lost one soul entirely.
“Bachan, wake up!” the teacher said, giving the boy a gentle shake. “Wake up, wake up!” It is way too early for slope, Bachan’s sleepy, confounded expression seemed to say.
Lisbeth was moving a heart charm violently back and forth along the chain around her neck. The charm had been a gift from her mother at Christmas, marking their first Navidad together in many years. A moment earlier, Lisbeth had been jiggling her heels rapidly from side to side, and later she began rocking herself backward and forward in her chair. All day long, her body was in constant motion.
* * *
Her hearing in federal immigration court took place the following morning in downtown Denver in a tall stone building that housed eleven federal agencies. When I had asked Lisbeth if it would be all right if I accompanied her, she had thrown her arms around me in a headlock hug and said yes. I found the right courtroom on the third floor and sat down in a large waiting area. A young woman showed up with a toddler, very active. The uniformed guard said, in heavily accented Spanish, “Los libros, por el niño . . .” and he pointed to the back of the room. The young mother got up and retrieved a picture book. Near the books, I saw a wall of pamphlets. A sign said SELF HELP LEGAL CENTER or CENTRO LEGAL DE AUTO AYUDA. I was not sure how effective auto ayuda would be, but I imagined not very. I wondered if Lisbeth had found a good attorney.
Lisbeth arrived wearing a salmon-colored blouse and black leggings. Her younger brother followed in her wake. He was reserved—the opposite of Lisbeth. We entered the windowless courtroom and sat together on a wooden bench. The room had stark white walls, fluorescent lights, a dark blue carpet, cherry-colored furniture, and an American flag. Carts overflowing with blue manila folders waited in the center of the room, a sign of how many lives were at stake. Lisbeth picked at the chipped red polish on her fingernails and jounced her legs incessantly.
“Miss, I have nerves,” she said miserably. “So much, I have nerves!”
She had spoken in English—it was the first time she had communicated something essential to me in her new language.
Saúl walked into the courtroom, wearing his typical uniform, black track pants and a maroon T-shirt. The two cases would be heard by the same judge, on the same day. I was witnessing the bureaucratic aftermath of the surge in unaccompanied minors entering the United States. As El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala fell into violent disarray, with mafia-style gangs taking over swaths of countryside and whole city neighborhoods—targeting vulnerable young people who were coming of age—hundreds of thousands of children began crossing illegally into the United States by themselves. During fall 2015, when both Saúl and Lisbeth had enrolled at South, more than ten thousand unaccompanied minors had been apprehended by immigration authorities in the months of October and November alone.
The swell of traffic had caused a massive legal pileup in the federal system, leading to delays of up to five years in other types of cases. In Colorado, lower-priority cases that would normally have come before this court relatively quickly were being assigned dates three or four years into the future. Meanwhile, Judge Eileen Trujillo, the black-robed woman seated at the front of the room, was working furiously to fly through the higher-priority cases involving unaccompanied minors as fast as possible. Trujillo did this by squeezing as many cases as she could into a given day, and according perhaps five minutes to each matter.
When Lisbeth’s case was called, she and her brother pushed through a swinging wooden gate and sat at the table for the defense, along with their attorney, Alejandra Acevedo, a tall woman in a gold sweater, black dress pants, and high heels. Acevedo worked for the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Immigration Advocacy Network, and she had a great familiarity with the laws concerning unaccompanied minors. She told the judge that they were not prepared to speak because the Department of Homeland Security had failed to respond to a Freedom of Information request she had submitted. This led to a flurry of tense exchanges with the prosecutor. Eventually, the judge ruled that the hearing for Lisbeth would be postponed until October 26, 2016—a date that was six months away. Trujillo seemed more concerned with getting on to the next case, as opposed to allowing the attorneys to squabble.
Lisbeth longed for resolution, but instead received a stay. That was better than deportation, though—at least she could finish her freshman year at South while living with her mother. When she reappeared before the court during the following school year, her attorney planned to submit either an application for asylum or an application for something called special immigrant juvenile status. Individuals seeking asylum had to prove they were being persecuted because of their religious beliefs, political beliefs, or their membership in a “special group.” Lisbeth’s legal argument for asylum would involve asserting that she belonged to a special group because of the danger presented by her mother’s work as a police officer who had attracted the ire of a violent gang—but the question of whether a family could constitute a “special group” was being adjudicated in the courts. Acevedo wanted to wait and see how those cases turned out before she decided which option to pursue.
When it was Saúl’s turn, his attorney announced that they were seeking special immigrant juvenile status, an alternative strategy to seeking asylum. Because Saúl’s body was riddled with scars, some of which Saúl attributed to his father’s violent temper, Saúl’s attorney thought he might win a special visa provided to those unaccompanied minors who had been abused, abandoned, or neglected by a parent in their home country. The idea was that such children could not be safely reunited with their families without the risk of further abuse or neglect.
That day, a score of other lawyers spoke for a series of scared but desperately optimistic-looking young people, each of whom took a turn at the defense table. The parade of children on the day’s docket presented a poignant visual reminder of the numbers of unaccompanied minors who had entered the United States—a slew of young women who appeared just as conscientious as Lisbeth, and young men who seemed just as hardworking as Saúl. It was a social catastrophe unfolding mostly invisibly inside this government building, the particulars documented in all those blue manila folders. On each teenager’s face I thought I could read the strain of having to participate in legal proceedings inside this tall building, even as they were trying to learn English and master American culture, while simultaneously getting used to living with parents they had not seen in years or living without parents they had left behind. At one point, I commiserated with Lisbeth about her circumstances, but she did not require pity. Instead she said, with complete acceptance of where she found herself, “Es mi historia.” It is my story.
* * *
By the time Lisbeth and Saúl reported for their hearing, the press had accepted that Donald Trump was going to win the Republican nomination at the convention that would take place over the summer, but still treated him as unelectable. The likelihood of a Trump ticket was described as a boon for Hillary Clinton, whom the m
edia began to cover almost as if she had already won the general election. At South, the students who paid attention to politics continued to view Trump’s bid as a form of comedy, making it feel like the election had turned into an especially weird reality TV show.
With Trump’s ascendance, I found myself managing an increasingly divergent set of experiences. On the one hand, I spent most of my days in Mr. Williams’s classroom, where the students had been opening up more and more, in a way that allowed me to appreciate their intelligence, their potential, their playfulness, and their capacity to learn. On the other hand, when I read the newspapers, it was becoming harder to reconcile what was unfolding on the national stage with what I was witnessing in Room 142. In particular, Trump kept making derogatory statements about exactly the sorts of families to whom I had devoted this period of my life. Because of the amount of time I was spending at South, the election had become for me a barometer of this country’s appetite to help refugees.
In the news media, the question of how many refugees to admit into the United States was discussed as if the country had a noblesse oblige–type relationship to the rest of the world. I no longer viewed the matter in those terms. For a while, I had been trying to weigh Room 142 to take an accounting of the refugee crisis; I had been trying to use the students’ stories as a means of assessing to what extent the United States was implicated in the Middle Eastern crisis, versus the African crisis, for example. I thought perhaps we bore some responsibility for the state of the world, and wondered if we owed a particular debt to this or that group of refugees. As time passed, however, such efforts at math keeping started to seem beside the point. Instead, I found myself surrendering to the joy I was experiencing in Room 142, which began to feel like an end in itself. I wasn’t as interested in determining our collective guilt or innocence in causing one or another part of the global crisis; the refugees I had gotten to know simply felt like a gift.