The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  The flirtation lasted for about two or three weeks, and then Jakleen hastily broke off interactions with the athlete after he sent what she considered to be a series of lewd text messages. For the rest of the year, Jakleen dallied with a flurry of other suitors, most of whom she kept at arm’s length. Ghasem tried to regain his former standing as her primary admirer, but never quite succeeded. Among the boys competing for her attention was the student from her music class who had once called Jakleen a “terrorist.” Jakleen appeared to be both dismayed and emboldened by his visits. “This boy very, very, very crazy, and very, very love girls,” she said. It occurred to me that perhaps the boy had been toying with her all along. I knew she had suffered through genuine insults on her long bus rides, when the hijab had attracted verbal abuse, but it struck me that the boy from music class might have intended something different. I asked Jakleen, did she think maybe he had been attempting to tease her, when he had called her a terrorist?

  “Yes,” she conceded.

  The boy was from Southeast Asia and spoke Burmese, Malay, and English. His locker was not far away from Room 142. He never failed to address Jakleen, in some fashion or another, when she walked by. One day, I heard him say to her, as she strode past, assiduously ignoring him, “Konichiwa!” (Japanese for hello).

  Jakleen announced, “I hate this boy.”

  Then the boy said to me, “Beautiful girl.”

  * * *

  Throughout the month of May, Mr. Williams and his students continued to read the graphic nonfiction book about Cesar Chavez. As summer approached, however, and the students grew more comfortable with English and more inclined to flirt or fight or make friends, it grew increasingly hard for Mr. Williams to get his class to focus. At one point, when he asked them to take out their books, Abigail said, in a tone of oh-no-not-that-again, “Cuando es vacaciones?”

  Mr. Williams said that summer vacation was in dos semanas, two weeks.

  Shani was in the middle of making some sort of Tajik joke about how Mariam had “ten mothers” (this seemed to be an insult, although I could never figure out why).

  Meanwhile, Jakleen announced, “I want to go home,” and then laid her body prone on the table for dramatic effect.

  Mariam echoed her sister, saying, “Yes! I want to go now!”

  It was the middle of the afternoon, toward the end of a long day, after many months of hard work, and school had exhausted them all. Mr. Williams asked the students to organize themselves into pairs and then struggled unsuccessfully to engage them in reading the book. Jakleen strolled over to Saúl, who was lying draped over two chairs, and bumped him with her right hip to get him to sit up. Then Mariam got so droopy that she slid over sideways, and Mr. Williams had to rouse her, which he did by chanting her nickname, “Mi-mi! Mi-mi! Mi-mi!” A little later, Mariam put her head down on the table. “Mimi, Mimi, we’re not sleeping,” said Mr. Williams.

  Asking the students to read in pairs was not working, so Mr. Williams decided that the whole class should read aloud. They chorally recited a key passage from the book: “Many farmworkers were paid very little money, lived in poor housing, and suffered from health problems.” Chavez had tried organizing the farmworkers, but doing so had been hard because their work was “seasonal,” the book said. What did that mean? Mr. Williams was trying to get across the idea of work that took place according to the seasons when he noticed that Luwam—who had been assigned to Mr. Williams last year—remained in the room. Ever since lunch, the lonely Eritrean girl had been huddling unobtrusively beside Ksanet.

  “Luwam! Can you please go to your proper class?” said Mr. Williams.

  One table away, Mr. Williams saw that Lisbeth had spread various parts of her cell phone—case, back plate, main body, SIM card—out in front of her. She was more occupied with trying to put those pieces back together than she was with her book, which lay forgotten beside her. Mr. Williams got a little impatient.

  “Please put that away,” he said to Lisbeth. “Right now. No using the cell phone.”

  She looked up and grinned but continued to reassemble the device, sliding the SIM card into place. Mr. Williams walked over, picked up the disparate parts of the phone, and stuffed them into his pants pocket, to Lisbeth’s evident distress.

  Then he tried to get the class to discuss Cesar Chavez’s work. What was nonviolent protest?

  Methusella, who had stuck a yellow number 2 pencil horizontally through the top of his hair, answered that Chavez had been holding demonstrations to bring attention to the plight of farmworkers.

  “Methusella, I liked that,” pronounced Mr. Williams.

  He wrote that answer on the whiteboard, and after it he added, “. . . without fighting.” Then he went over the concept of nonviolence.

  Mr. Williams wrote five key concepts on the board:

  labor

  migrant

  nonviolence

  protest

  rights

  He asked the students to choose one word and define it. They were supposed to write their key concept in a bubble and then list attributes of that concept in satellite bubbles. Methusella wrote “migrant” in the center of his page, and in satellite bubbles he added “moving often,” “working,” “immigrants,” and “low wages.” He speedily defined the concept of a migrant as “a person who leaves his home country and moves to a new country.” Meanwhile, Mariam and Shani became so involved with one another that they wrote nothing. Mr. Williams said, “Mariam, I think I’m going to change your seat. That’s not going to work. You and Shani can’t focus.”

  While he was thus preoccupied, Lisbeth and Mohamed began sparring in a sibling-like fashion.

  Lisbeth pointed at Mohamed, and said, “Abalah!”

  Jakleen and Mariam had taught her the Arabic word, meaning “crazy” or “goofy.” They had often applied it to Lisbeth herself.

  “Abalah, YOU!” Mohamed retorted, pointing back at Lisbeth.

  She threw her hoodie at Mohamed.

  At that point, Methusella joined the fray, saying in a commanding tone, from his remote location, “Cállate!”

  That was Spanish for “shut up,” a word Lisbeth had taught Methusella.

  This swept Lisbeth into a gale of giggles, at which point Mr. Williams interrupted. “Lisbeth, can you please do something? No es una vacaciones ahora.”

  Seeing that Mr. Williams had his hands full, I went over to work with Lisbeth. Her word was “rights.” We consulted the text to figure out what that meant. Eventually, after referring to the book a lot, we added “drinking water,” “toilets,” “rest periods,” and “use of short-handled hoe” in the satellite bubbles. Then we wrote down the terms “discrimination” and “sexual harassment” as well.

  Mariam got up to retrieve her cell phone from where it had been charging in a far corner of the classroom. Mr. Williams interrupted her pilgrimage, saying, “Mariam, would you like to work on your word?” Mariam reversed course. Shani was not working, either. She had somehow attached the piece of paper to her forefinger, possibly with spit, and was holding her finger out with the paper floating below it. Elsewhere, Saúl reached around behind Jakleen to tap her on the far shoulder, causing her to look in that direction, and when she realized she had been tricked, she shoved him hard by way of reprimand.

  Tired of all this end-of-year antsiness, Mr. Williams spoke sternly to the students. “Guys, you’re going to make us pull our hair out,” he said, in a fed-up tone of voice. “Have you ever heard that phrase? That means someone is frustrated.”

  Mr. Williams thought for a moment. He needed a different approach. They had worked for long enough on defining the key concepts, he told the class. They should stand up, holding their books. At the whiteboard, the teacher listed the book’s characters. They were going to act out the book in parts. In effect, Mr. Williams turned his room into a stage and his students into actors.

  Solomon and Hsar Htoo played the starring role of Cesar Chavez. They read his dialogue together, their
two voices combined as one. Methusella played “the Bad Man in a Hat,” as Mr. Williams labeled the book’s villain. To look appropriately sinister, Methusella pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and tightened it around his face so that only his nose remained visible. Shani, Lisbeth, Jakleen, Mariam, and Nadia played the beleaguered farmworkers. Shani, Lisbeth, and Mariam mumbled a bit, but Jakleen and Nadia delivered a strong joint performance, at one point hushing the entire room, as they announced: “We crawl through spiny rosebushes for them. We work at top speed. The growers promised us $9 per thousand plants, but they pay us only $6.50.” Saúl played a Catholic priest who advised Chavez. When it was his turn to speak, he jumped onto the seat of a chair and proclaimed in a thunderous voice: “They are asking for a 40-cent raise to $1.40 an hour. They are living in poverty.”

  The whole class got caught up in the saga. At a point when I would have thought it impossible, Mr. Williams channeled the strange energy caroming around the room into a rousing show. For many of the students, the book had been at the outer limit of what they could comprehend, and the idea to turn the room into a stage enabled many to finally grasp that the narrative concerned human beings oppressed by an economic system that had been unresponsive to their demands for a long time (presumably something most of them could relate to after watching their parents find work in the lowliest sectors of the American economy). Enacting the story allowed them to experience the central drama—Cesar Chavez’s struggle to give the farmworkers a voice. It was one of the most inspired things I saw Mr. Williams do all year, turning around the topsy-turvy mood in the classroom that day. And at that point he had to have been feeling pretty ready for a vacation himself.

  * * *

  Mr. Williams closed the year with a raucous party in Room 142, which Miss Ruthann from Goodwill helped to organize. The students took turns sitting at different tables, while the teacher and the Goodwill volunteers taught them how to play various board games. Mr. Williams also let the students use his laptop to play musical selections from their home countries, and kids clustered around the machine vying for control of the playlist. Jakleen wore a revealing pink camisole, which I recognized as one of the items Nabiha had donated to the family. She had also curled her hair into ringlets. Gone was the girl who had hidden beneath a hijab—here stood an American teenager.

  “Nice hair,” I told her. “Pasta!”

  “Pasta,” she confirmed, eyes laughing.

  Jakleen strode across the room to play a game with Kaee Reh, who appeared to have replaced Saúl in her affections. When I stopped to watch them battle each other in Quick Cups, Jakleen told me, “Miss! Kaee Reh very nice boy, very good boy!” Both Jakleen and Kaee Reh had fast hands, and they competed with furious passion. Kaee Reh looked less like the diffident student he had sometimes seemed to be in Room 142 and more like the confident young man I had seen on the soccer field.

  Lisbeth, her own hair curly again, was playing Jenga with Mariam and Mohamed. At another table, Saúl, Grace, and Abigail were playing the same game—carefully stacking wooden pieces into a tall tower, slowly removing one piece at a time, trying not to cause their stack to topple. Elsewhere, Mr. DeRose was teaching Nadia, Amaniel, Methusella, Solomon, Ksanet, and Dilli how to play the card game Spoons. Shani had taken control of Mr. Williams’s laptop, and she grew excited when she found a song by the renowned Tajik singer Noziya Karomatullo on YouTube. Shani said to me, “She’s father—” then she pantomimed holding a gun at her forehead, adding, “She no have father. And he very good people, Tajikistan.” When I looked all this up later, I learned that Noziya was the daughter of a famous Tajik musician who had been murdered by a militia group during the Tajik civil war, along with a number of other leading cultural figures.

  Next it was Lisbeth’s turn as DJ. She put on Daddy Yankee, then came over to announce, “It’s my music, Miss!” Lisbeth danced away, singing the lyrics loudly. Then Abigail jostled with her for control of the laptop, but they found a selection they both liked. Lisbeth said hopefully to the other girl, “Más volumen?”

  Halfway through the party, Mr. Williams came over with a news update. “Methusella is going to be in the Student Senate next year,” he told me. “He’s texting some of the seniors in the Senate right now to make sure he gets onto the right email lists.”

  “That’s great!” I said.

  “Yeah, it is.” Mr. Williams was smiling broadly, taking pride in his star student’s latest success. “He told me he was interested in politics and government, and that he wanted to be a school principal someday, and that, combined with his astronomical language growth, makes him a very good candidate.”

  “A great candidate!”

  Mr. Williams had recommended Methusella for the Senate. He had also suggested that when he returned in the fall, Methusella should skip one and a half years of ELA instruction (passing over 1A, 1B, and 2A) and be placed in ELA 2B. I had not foreseen that anybody in the newcomer room would travel so far in just one year. Methusella had grown at a rate I had not known to be possible. I went to congratulate him and found both boys from the Congo in a corner of the room, locked in a death match of a checkers game. The hypercompetitive duel culminated with Methusella getting a king and dominating the board.

  “I am the best, bro!” Methusella crowed.

  Solomon asked sheepishly, “Miss, you write about this?”

  “Oh, yeah!” I told him. “Two brothers, locked in mortal combat? Of course!”

  “I’m becoming stronger, bro!” Methusella taunted. “I’m the best! Oga! Oga! Oga!”

  “What does oga mean?” I asked.

  Methusella pantomimed crowds going wild. I said, “Oh, cheering.” I wrote that down in my notebook as the English translation for oga, and jotted that it was a Swahili word. (Actually, oga turned out to be a Yoruba word, and it meant “man in charge” or “boss.”) Solomon and Methusella staged a rematch and feuded intensely, their pieces flying across the red and black squares. Once again, Methusella got a king and seemed poised to win, but then Solomon got two kings in quick succession.

  “Shit,” Methusella said.

  It was the first time I had heard him say anything that could be possibly construed as impolite all year long. I decided that Methusella’s cultural adjustment was nearly complete. Solomon walloped his younger brother at checkers in the second contest. And that was how their school year ended—jostling, happy, rambunctious. The transformation of Room 142 was complete. The class that had been filled with frightened silence at the beginning of the year was now filled with joyous play. Mr. Williams had brought them all this way, from paralyzed terror to happy integration. He called out that it was time to switch tables—everybody had to learn a new board game. Most of the students quickly got involved in learning the rules of the next game, but Jakleen, Mariam, Lisbeth, and Shani instead scrounged around for fruit-scented markers and some spare paper and started writing affectionate goodbye notes to their teachers. “La queremos!” they wrote on the fruity-smelling paper they gave to me, signed by each of them. “We love you.”

  During the art-making session, Shani acquired two new tattoos (haram, surely)—Mariam’s name in Arabic, scrawled across both of the Tajik girl’s forearms. Meanwhile, Saúl serenaded me one last time, while staring deeply into my eyes, with perhaps a hint of amusement behind the faux passion. So fervent was the young man, he convinced me that I was being sung a beautiful love song. Actually, the song was called “Ya lo supere” by Ariel Camacho, and the lyrics were about the singer telling a former lover somewhat disdainfully that she has been replaced. For a while, Solomon and Plamedi sat side by side, playing a car-racing game on their phones—here, at the very end of the school year, Solomon had made a friend—and I saw Plamedi wind one of his legs around Solomon’s, as they might have done back in the Congo.

  Then they all switched games again. For reasons I could not fathom, Mr. Williams went around the room with Yonatan, chanting “Huelga!” They were on strike about something, appare
ntly. Suddenly, we all stopped what we were doing at the sound of an enormous, shuddering crash. Everybody turned around to see Plamedi, a look of total astonishment written across his face, holding one single, innocuous-looking wooden Jenga piece in his fingers. Hsar Htoo sat across from him, laughing and laughing, their once tall tower fallen all around. Then Mr. Williams asked everybody to clean up, and most of the students packed up the games, while Lisbeth primped for one more selfie, and Shani leaned out the enormous windows, reached down into the spirea bushes blooming in pillowy billows outside the school, and broke off a white-laced branch of flowers. She presented this tribute to me, and then she and all the other newcomers walked out the door forever and disappeared into summer.

  * * *

  PART IV

  * * *

  Summer

  1

  * * *

  Heal Africa

  In June 2016, shortly after the school year ended, I traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo with two instructors from the United States Air Force Academy who were researching how best to disarm militia groups, which is the Congo’s central puzzle. They were studying how entities like the United Nations persuaded militia members to put down their weapons and return to civil society, and they planned to spend several days in Goma interviewing former rebels and the people who had disarmed them. Goma was the closest big city to Solomon and Methusella’s home village, and I asked the Air Force instructors if I could travel with them, in the hopes of understanding the region better and perhaps being able to meet some of Solomon and Methusella’s relatives. Parts of the Congo feel secure, but in some areas kidnappings are rampant. One month before we traveled to the DRC, bandits had stopped a truck filled with Red Cross workers in the province where Solomon and Methusella had grown up, and held the aid workers for ransom. I would not have felt safe going to Goma by myself and was grateful to be included on their trip.