* * *
Ryan had a different tally of what he’d seen. “Once, he literally knocked her out. I ran to her, I didn’t know what was going on. She was on the floor. She was unconscious. I was crying, and Adrian was there, leaning over her and yelling at him.”
* * *
“I’d really like you to be there,” he said after the semis. Ryan was on the phone with Cecil, the man who had let his and Adrian’s birthdays go by, year after year, without a call or a gift. Christmases had gone by, too. There were long-distance conversations, sporadically, half a year sometimes stretching between them. Yet the calls sustained hope. “Did the box come for me?” the boys’ aunt Esther, Valerie’s sister, remembered Ryan asking. That was during a period when Valerie left the boys to live with Esther as a refuge from her marriage to Barry.
“Where is the box coming from?” she questioned.
“My father said he was sending a box.”
Now Ryan told his father, “It’ll be a concert in the biggest opera house in the United States.”
* * *
Ryan couldn’t tell Adrian about making the finals because at that point he didn’t know how to reach him. His brother had been released from prison not long ago. He was living on the streets or, at best, on couches—somewhere in California, probably. He had a seven-year-old son he hadn’t seen in several years, not only because he’d spent two of those years locked away, but because his ex-wife had a restraining order against him.
Ryan and Adrian had exchanged vows when they were kids, vows spoken after Ryan burrowed into his brother’s chest while the chaos of their mother’s second marriage consumed the flimsy walls and floors, traveling through the house to swallow them, vows “that we would never be like that,” Ryan said, “and that when we grew up we would never hit a woman.” At birthdays and Christmases they made another set of pledges to each other. “We swore we wouldn’t forget about our children.”
They had made a habit, as kids, of teaming up to steal action figurines from a discount store. One of them stood watch in the aisle while the other took from the shelves. They collected the pliable superheroes, hypermuscled and heavily armed with rocket launchers and mega machine guns. They took Schwarzenegger more than once, took him in several of his roles, carried his spectacular body and bravery home, knowing that their father had once shaken his hand, knowing that their father loved him; they stole him again and again like stealing their father back into their lives, and kept him in their bedroom.
They had made their vows, yet the strength of family history could sneer at good intentions, Ryan felt. It could seize you from behind and shape you at its whim. It could turn you into a man, like Adrian, who couldn’t legally go near the mother of his child, a man whose face his son would no longer recognize.
Best to keep thoughts of the past at bay, Ryan believed, to give history less chance of overtaking you, claiming you. Memories were forces to be fled from, muzzled, sung over. His voice could drown out what needed to be silenced and pull him forward, away from whatever might clutch at him from behind. He just had to keep singing and singing, refusing to let history come up on him as if he were prey. Warnings were everywhere. It wasn’t only Adrian. His stepbrother, the boy who’d shared his and Adrian’s bedroom while Valerie was in Korea, the son of the woman Cecil had then married, the sibling who was Ryan’s age, was a Crip, wore Crip blue, had covered his body in tattoos of rappers, was currently incarcerated. The boys had slept side by side.
* * *
Ryan and I had an arrangement, a rhythm. He would permit himself to linger in the past, then would shut down the conversation, his espresso-colored irises going instantly from liquid to solid, from remembrance to resistance. “I don’t want to think about this anymore,” he would say, and his lips would tighten. The rest of his features, usually so vibrant, would go lifeless.
He was self-aware and straightforward about his fears, his philosophy. The best way to move forward was to focus forward. The benefit of looking away from the past was that you were less likely to repeat it, less likely to be tricked—and trapped—by it. Of course, he knew the common wisdom that warned exactly the opposite, and he trusted in this to a degree, yet there were plenty of moments when he seemed to say, I don’t want to take this risk. I can’t afford to.
* * *
But when it came to the prospect of his father arriving in Manhattan, and taking his seat at the Met, and listening to him sing, Ryan’s apprehension about the force of the past was overridden by anticipation: that his father would see him on that stage performing for thousands. An entirely different sort of history would be at play; Ryan would be standing where some of the greatest singers of all time had stood. His father would watch him there, hear him there, hear how his voice carried, for he wouldn’t falter, hear how masterfully he produced this music, hear him from the depths of his range to Banquo’s soaring, resounding final note. Personal history would no longer matter; it would be purged. His relationship with his father would begin from those minutes onstage.
He would be singing, too, as always, for his mother. Despite her violence against him and Adrian, Ryan felt he needed to win her forgiveness, prove himself worthy. He felt he had betrayed her. “My mom has had so much happen to her. She never caught a break. And then I became the not-catching-a-break. She’s had an awful life.”
He didn’t know all of that awfulness, as I learned during one of the drives Valerie and I took through the region where he’d grown up. It was an area where American history hung densely in the air, some of it mythic, glorified, some of it hard to dwell on. Just to the northwest was Jamestown, where, four centuries ago, British settlers built their first surviving community on the continent and planted their first commercial tobacco. Farther up the James River—close to where Valerie’s mother’s relatives, a generation or two older than Valerie, were buried along a country road in a desolate church field, with bent and rusted metal signs the size of license plates driven into the ground as the only grave markers their families could afford—Gabriel Prosser, a literate slave, a blacksmith owned by a tobacco farmer, had plotted a rebellion in 1800. Alerted to the conspiracy, Virginia’s governor, James Monroe, called up the state militia, hunted Prosser downriver, and executed the rebel and his fellow escapees. Seventeen years later, Monroe, whose slaves tended his plantations of tobacco and wheat, became the nation’s president, like the slaveholding Virginians who’d been president before him. Just to the south of where we drove, Nat Turner, viewing himself as a prophet and reading a solar eclipse as a heavenly signal—as a black man’s hand stretching across the sun—led an uprising that killed sixty whites with hatchets and knives before Turner was hung.
“It was suffering, depression, that kind of stuff,” Valerie said about her second marriage as we passed a small, scrappy field of cotton, the clumps of white waiting to be picked and sold. “I was holding all that stuff in, not letting anyone know what actually was going on. Not even my sister. It was—” Her voice, already quiet, wafted away. She wasn’t fully weeping; it was short of that. She said she tried to leave the marriage, was drawn back. “It took me to a point. I tried to commit suicide. There was something I tied a rope up to. I was going to hang myself, I guess.” She laughed, the sound minimal and containing an undertone of shame.
Sometimes it was difficult for me to see the ferocity the boys had grown up with. It had died down in the last several years, it seemed. Her body, too, tall though it remained, no longer held the explosiveness it once had. She moved slowly.
“I checked myself into the hospital. I was there for a day and a half, maybe two days, before I got this call. Child services. I think Barry did something, called them, I can’t remember what, to cause them to get involved. Talking about taking my boys away from me. I had to get myself out of the hospital and get home.”
The suicide attempt was not something she had ever told Ryan about. Perhaps he had felt it on some level, perhaps not. “She’s had an awful life. To survive, sh
e built a wall surrounding herself. It got built steadily. She built it for everyone and everything except her children. And then she had to build a wall for me. Between her and me. A child can only do so much before that wall gets built. I know that. No mom is going to forget: my child threatened my life and probably would have done it if given the chance.
“My goal is to wear the wall down. By singing, living up to my potential—by showing her. It’s something you have to wear down slowly.”
* * *
Ryan’s unruliness had begun before elementary school: in the state records that would later be kept, there was a form that Valerie had filled out noting that Ryan “was kicked out of four preschool day care centers for violent/disruptive behavior.” No one could recall the details, but the principal of one of his elementary schools remembered him clearly from when he was nine. The school was in Yorktown. After Valerie finally left Barry for good, she and the boys were living there, in a low-income complex of two-story clapboard buildings. The development had a name that spoke grandiloquently of quaint English countryside. Hip-hop throbbed in the parking lot, people sipped their forties, drivers drifted through to buy drugs, the woman upstairs was running a prostitution business. Blocks of low-slung bungalows sprawled beyond the development, the houses settling and sinking into the mud of their yards.
“Ryan was unusual enough, troubled enough, that I recall him very well,” the elementary school principal said. “Hitting. Throwing things. Knocking things over. He was one of the ten or so most troubled children I’ve had in my forty-two-year career. I recall his teacher actually taking all the other children out of the room in order to protect them”—and in order to contain him within the classroom till help arrived.
In the local middle school, meanwhile, Adrian was in special ed classes, “because,” he recounted, “I couldn’t be around a lot of students. Because of my anger. My rage. One of my teachers, she was pregnant, and one time I was doodling on my paper. I was doing a badass drawing I really liked, and she snatched it away from me. I flipped a wig. I threw a chair at her. I threw a table. They called the cops. They cuffed me. There weren’t any charges or anything because I was already in special ed. But there was a lot inside me. I don’t know, but I would say the rage came from my mom. When she got mad, she got mad.”
Frequently the brothers turned on each other. Dependent though Ryan was on Adrian’s comfort as their mother’s life continued to reel, and reverent though he was of Adrian’s art, the two of them battled. Adrian had a memory of Ryan throwing knives, missing. Adrian beat him. Once, during a visit that they’d made to their father in San Bernardino—one of the three times, in total, that Ryan would see his father between the ages of four and eighteen—Adrian lifted his brother and dropped him onto a hot grill. Ryan still had the scars on the backs of his legs.
* * *
For the most problematic elementary schoolers in the entire district, the school superintendent created a special class. It was six or seven students, all boys, grouped together regardless of their ages. Ryan was going on ten when he was placed in this classroom. All day, every day, this was his room for the next two years. Yet it was one part of his past he had no qualms about revisiting.
The room was run by Mrs. Hughes, a short, round-faced Italian Irish woman with four inches of blond-tinted hairdo piled atop her head. She had wanted to be a teacher since she was a third grader in a Catholic school, imagining herself a Chinese nun in charge of her own students. Her father had been a ditchdigger, her mother a laborer in a lampshade factory, and how the wish to be Chinese got into her head she no longer had any idea, but in her bedroom in the family’s cramped apartment in New Jersey, she used Scotch tape to pull and narrow her eyes, employed her mother’s cotton housecoat as a kimono, and arranged a towel on her head to approximate a nun’s habit. On her bed she lined up her dolls and stuffed animals; she sat opposite them behind a small desk and led them through their lessons. Her standards for them were high, her lessons carefully planned. She wedged pencils into their hands or propped them against their hooves, and taught them cursive. She taught them to write stories, which she produced for each member of the class, and she dealt them cards to excite them about math. The animals flipped their cards over. “Now, who has the highest number?” Another flip. “Now add your numbers up.” At the end of the term, she sent everyone a report card with marks in each subject.
When the superintendent asked her to take on his newly created class, she refused. She’d been teaching regular classes happily for three decades; she’d just been named the district’s teacher of the year. But eventually she relented. On his first day in the classroom, Ryan seized his desk and hurled it, sending his books flying and the desk crashing. “I’m not learning from no white woman,” he said. The two of them stood amid the wreckage. She’d already been worried—Valerie had intimidated her, during an initial meeting, with her height and the bulk that had accumulated on her body. “Is that ‘Green’ with an e?” Mrs. Hughes had asked her.
“No. That’s just for rich folks.”
The teacher glanced at Ryan’s desk and books scattered on the carpet. In all of her career, she’d never sent a student out of her room. “Never, never, never,” she told me. “Because if I send them out, they’re thinking, She can’t handle me.” Later she corrected herself. Not long before Ryan came into her group, she had taken on a boy named Trevor. The superintendent had placed her class at the end of a corridor, next to a back exit door, so the havoc he counted on would be remote from most of the school and these kids couldn’t destroy the chances of the rest. Two desultory tennis courts sat out back, and Mrs. Hughes bought rackets for her boys. They flailed at balls first thing in the morning, before she brought the students inside. But for Trevor, her attempt to exhaust some of his energy was irrelevant; he heard things, saw things. Besieged by voices and visions, Trevor sometimes cowered, sometimes railed, sometimes wandered about as though intoxicated, sometimes slept while class went on around him, his head in Mrs. Hughes’s lap. Once, child services took him off to the dentist, where he grew so terrified he fled the hygienist’s chair, zoomed out the door, and crouched behind shrubbery until Mrs. Hughes was called to talk him out of hiding. But one morning he grabbed a tennis racket inside the classroom and wielded the metal frame wildly against imagined enemies, and she had to send word to the principal to phone the police, who dragged him away.
Flatly, as though it was a logical solution, she suggested to Ryan that, if he wished, he could learn from the floor, since his desk and books were down there. She returned to teaching, and at the end of the day—by which point he had turned his desk upright—she walked over to the wall where, beside a sign that asserted “Self-Learners Are Happy Learners” and a chart titled “Climb to the Stars,” she had put up a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. along with lines from his “I Have a Dream” speech printed out in marker. She had posted the lines partially because it mortified her to recall the church minstrel shows she’d been featured in as a girl, tap-dancing proudly with the men around her in blackface; partially because just about all the students channeled to her by the superintendent were black, and she wasn’t; and partially because of the phrase “content of their character”—she wanted these kids to focus on those words. She needed them to consider who they wished to be. They had to feel that they could construct themselves from this juncture forward, that they had the ability to do this, that whatever had been said about them in the past, whatever judgments they had absorbed, along with the stigma of being exiled to this room, did not matter.
She did not read their school records. She avoided hearing about their evaluations, their catalog of incidents; when her colleagues tried to help by telling her, she all but covered her ears. She understood that not all of them would end up reinventing themselves, that most wouldn’t be able to, yet she was a woman who filled her home with porcelain figurines, with Santas during the weeks leading up to Christmas and snowmen through the rest of the winter and he
ar-no-evil monkeys year-round, a woman who adorned her dining room walls with folk art bearing messages like “Love Much Laugh Often.” “Read this, please,” she said to her class, pointing: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
“Now please begin memorizing these words.”
* * *
In the mornings, after they swatted tennis balls into the fences and trees, Mrs. Hughes’s students set their chairs in a circle on the gray speckled carpet of her room.
“Does anyone have anything they’d like to talk about?”
Often she answered her own question. She said she had something, a problem on her mind. She and Mr. Hughes had squabbled last night. Or she was concerned about her daughter. Somehow the kids seemed to perceive a kind of equivalence—this bubbly woman with the hairdo had her troubles—along with the distinctions. Within the circle they shared things that had happened inside their apartments or outside their doors. They lived in places like the low-income complex where Valerie had settled with her boys. “Well, you don’t have to worry about that here,” Mrs. Hughes said. She kept the sessions brief. “Shake hands with each other,” she instructed. “Let’s wish each other a good day.” They pulled their chairs back to their desks and school commenced.
Who are the people of the Amazon rain forest and how do they live?
What is the purpose of the human skeleton and what is its structure?
She spent her weekends designing separate lessons to match the divergent skills of the boys who’d been tossed her way, and Sunday nights she was nauseous: had she tailored the tasks correctly? To tug the slow forward? To challenge the ones who showed spark? She made a game called Cause and Effect by cutting out gingerbread men and writing a sentence on each one. “The gingerbread men are looking for their right partners, and you can help them. There is a cause or an effect printed on each man. Match the cookies together by reading the sentences.”
Sing for Your Life Page 4