by Michelle Kuo
I, too, felt deflated. I’d come to law school thinking I was somehow closer to the levers of power. But the Supreme Court ruling essentially signaled to civil rights lawyers that the issue of school integration was a dead end. Here were two local school districts that had confronted their histories of segregation and voluntarily attempted to integrate. But the Supreme Court had called their systems unconstitutional. As education-law professor James Ryan wrote, many who believe in the goal of integration, including myself, cannot help but feel a sense of loss and betrayal.
The next summer I worked at the law firm and at The Door, two places that could not be more different. I was shooting darts, trying to figure out where I belonged. By the beginning of my third year, I had decided that if I could get one thing out of law school, it would be the acquisition of basic skills that could be useful to poor people in crisis: What do you do if your landlord tries to evict you? If your boss doesn’t pay you for your work? If the government deports your father or mother? I applied for a fellowship to work at Centro Legal de la Raza, a nonprofit in Oakland, California, in a neighborhood called Fruitvale, which would later be made famous as the place where Oscar Grant was killed by police. My clients would be mostly undocumented Spanish-speaking immigrants. “It’s not glamorous work,” a lawyer there said, winning me instantly. “But it’s one of the few places where people feel safe to come and ask for help.”
I got the fellowship. Money would still be tight—less than what I had made as a teacher in Arkansas, cost of living adjusted, and less than some California public school teachers. But the tiny salary seemed like proof that my conscience was intact.
—
THEN DANNY CALLED me from Helena with some bad news. “You had Patrick Browning as a student, didn’t you?” he began. I thought he was going to tell me that Patrick had died.
But it wasn’t that. Patrick had killed someone. He was in jail. He had gotten into a fight and then stabbed the person three times.
I was stupefied. It had to be a mistake. Patrick could not have killed someone.
I talked to Danny some more. Did he know, I asked, the visiting hours for the jail? Was it open on Saturday? I wrote professors to say I would be absent.
—
SATURDAY MORNING, THREE days after Patrick was arrested, I made it to the Phillips County Jail before visiting hours ended. It looked like a benign structure from the outside: brick, stout and short, two stories.
The lobby had a low ceiling, stained with water marks. Its lone decoration was a framed black-and-white photograph of a sheriff sitting on a horse. A sign instructed visitors to give all valuables to the guard at the desk. The only other person waiting with me was a boy who looked like he was in middle school. He handed over his bag of Doritos.
The guard walked me through a narrow hallway. He looked sideways at me, puzzled. “You know what he did, right?”
“Patrick was a wonderful student,” I said simply.
Not replying, he pointed toward a glass window. Patrick was waiting on the other side.
When I walked toward the window, I almost expected the Patrick I remembered: gap-toothed, half-grinning, a sheepish mixture of the wry and pensive. That look that greeted me when he didn’t do his homework, when I visited him at his house, when I said something nice to him.
Patrick’s face had thinned. His striped prison garb was two sizes too big. His mouth was turned downward. He looked older—he was older. It had been two years since I’d seen him.
He looked very surprised to see me.
I picked up the black phone hung on the wall.
“Ms. Kuo, I didn’t mean to,” he blurted out, in a tone of supplication.
Those were his first words to me. They sounded common, the words of a child who had done something wrong. In reality, he was no longer a child; he must have been eighteen or nineteen now. But I suppose in my mind he still was one.
I asked him what happened. He told me that he’d come home that night, looking for Pam, his youngest sister, who was in special ed. She was sixteen. He knocked on a neighbor’s door. Nobody answered. He went home again. This time Pam was walking up to the porch with a man called Marcus. They looked high; he was definitely drunk. Marcus started to talk crazy to him. Patrick told him to get off the porch. Marcus wouldn’t get off. Patrick thought Marcus might have a weapon in his pocket. He got scared and picked up a knife, which, he said, was on the porch because he’d used it to fix his nephew’s stroller that day. He’d just meant to scare the guy. But they fought. Marcus limped away, and Patrick was about to go inside when he saw that Marcus had fallen near the sidewalk. The police came. They handcuffed Patrick. He told me that he’d been in jail for three days, that there were bad people there, and that the jail was like hell.
I asked him what kind of relationship Marcus and Pam had. “They were having sex,” he said. He stopped. “I didn’t mean to kill him,” he said again.
He was silent. We looked at each other through the glass. He shook his head. “Ms. Kuo, I don’t even know.”
The way he said it—“Ms. Kuo, I don’t even know”—made him seem more familiar.
We talked more. How were his dad and mom? Fine. Making it. How was the food? Bad, real bad. How was school? He couldn’t keep up. Just stopped going. He tried, he really did. But he didn’t want to talk about it.
The officer came to get me. Time was up.
I rose and thought about the last time I’d seen him. Toward the end of our year together, some form of self-knowledge had begun to flicker inside Patrick, a self-knowledge too tremulous to be called pride. But I would have called it a kind of warmth toward oneself. “I can hear myself in here,” Patrick had told me about our classroom. Now that warmth had either disappeared or gone dormant. Whatever gains we’d made had receded. Did those gains still matter?
I told Patrick I’d write. It was a promise, I reminded myself, that I must keep.
—
I HAD BEEN taking a writing class when Patrick was arrested. After I returned from visiting him, I started to write about my time teaching. Frenzied, concentrated, I wished to remember everything. Two years had passed since I’d left the Delta, yet the names of certain students returned to me like reflex. Miles, Tamir, Kayla. Writing was like stepping back into an old dream.
At first, writing felt urgent and necessary. Writing joined me to Patrick, allowing me to remember who he was and my time in the Delta. In the privacy of my room, I could confront the Delta and consider what I had and hadn’t done for it. I tried to evaluate myself honestly. I asked, with dread, whether there was any connection between my leaving and Patrick’s dropping out of school. Like a vaccine that injects you with a strain of illness, writing infused a kind of negative life. I was admitting danger, admitting fallibility, and in so doing I was becoming stronger.
But that strength also felt odd. For, by the time I was done writing, it felt very nearly as if I was done with Patrick. No detail from my memory of him had gone unravaged; his gestures started to repeat themselves.
In trying to remember him, I had treated him like someone who was lost. In my writing, Patrick had become a thing on the page, somebody who existed to serve me and my need to not forget the Delta.
—
FIVE WEEKS PASSED. In November of 2008, Obama won the presidency. On a windy Boston evening, I searched three newsstands before I found one that hadn’t sold out of The Boston Globe. I wanted Patrick to see Obama’s triumphant picture, to feel a part of this historic event. I put together a package, also enclosing James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, marking an X in the margins of passages I liked. I had never shared the book with the students, afraid that they would be bored.
And I wrote him a letter. It began in a too-civil manner. How are you? I am well.
* * *
There was a black male in a red shirt lying face down [sic] just to the left of the hedge bush with blood under him. Myself and Ofc Rose was on scene as I rolled over the victim, he was gasping for air.
I then try try [sic] to find a pulse but could not find one there was 2 large what appeared to be stab wounds to the upper chest area on the victim and his eyes were fixed and dilated.
In the spring of my last semester of law school, I showed Patrick’s police report to my professor, a former public defender whose ruthlessness I hoped Patrick might benefit from. I had enrolled in her criminal defense clinic and been assigned several cases. My main client was a heroin addict charged for assault and battery—of his mother. She was a sixty-seven-year-old diabetic from Mexico, whose five strokes had put her in a wheelchair. The whole family was fed up with him. He’d stolen her disability checks, left her place ravaged with needles, and nearly gotten them evicted.
My professor had told me to find out where the mother lived, knock on her door, and convince her to drop the charges.
“You want me to talk to…to talk with his mother?” I said, swallowing nervously.
“Who else?”
I’d done what she asked and gone to the apartment. But—perhaps to my own relief—the mother refused to budge.
Surely this professor, of all people, could uncover some aspect of the case that might help Patrick.
Patrick’s warrant stated capital murder, meaning lethal injection in Arkansas, and had since been reduced to first-degree murder—still an overcharge. Jury trials are expensive and time-consuming, and the overcharge is a standard prosecutor’s tactic, intended to scare the defendant into taking a plea. The state also overcharges for a simpler reason—because it can. To overcharge sends a message: We have the power to really hurt you, so obey us. The sentence for a first-degree murder conviction is life; the sentence for manslaughter, three to ten years. Few defendants—including those who are innocent—want to take a gamble on a jury trial that might send them to prison for life.
Only in certain cases—where, for instance, the defendant has the public’s sympathy—does the prosecutor undercharge, or charge with the law in mind. The white guy in Louisiana who’d shot the Japanese kid at point-blank range on his doorstep was charged with manslaughter, for instance, in consideration of two legally relevant factors: the “castle doctrine”—that one’s home is one’s castle, and a man has a right to defend his castle—and genuine fear. These two factors could certainly have been weighed in determining the appropriate charge for Patrick. But Patrick was not a white man living in the suburbs, so he was charged with first-degree murder.
My professor didn’t seem surprised by the overcharge. “He’ll need to try to get that charge down,” she said, leafing through the pages. Then she asked, “Did he talk to the police?”
“He signed a waiver,” I said.
Her face fell.
“There wasn’t a lawyer with him?”
“No.” I hurried on. “It says that he was read his Miranda rights, but, to be honest, I doubt he knows what Miranda is or what those rights entail.”
She was uninterested in this argument: This is true of most criminal defendants who are poor and uneducated. The law on Miranda v. Arizona barely makes exceptions for defendants who are mentally handicapped.
“He confessed?”
“Yeah. And his dad signed a statement, too.”
She closed the file. He’d confessed; no question existed as to legal innocence. Patrick was the one who did it. The case was just ordinary, a fight that had ended badly but not unpredictably. He had won the fight and then he told the police everything. He had protected himself too much and then he hadn’t protected himself at all.
She handed the file back to me. “I hate to say that it’s too late,” she said. “But there’s not much you can do.”
This was not a “close” case. She, an experienced defense lawyer, was telling me to not have hope.
—
I TOOK THE BAR EXAM over the summer and moved to California. It was September and my life was set to begin. The fellowship in Oakland was to start in a month and a half.
My mother flew to San Francisco to help me unpack. With her characteristic meticulousness, she ironed each piece of clothing—blouses, blazers, dresses, slacks—shaking her head tragically at the wrinkles wrought by the long journey west. When she thought a blouse and a blazer made a particularly good match, she placed them together on the same hanger. I took my mother for a walk in the neighborhood. “You’ll be happy here,” she said, pleased.
I was to live in the Mission District in San Francisco. My friend Adina had found the two of us an apartment; we signed a yearlong lease and paid the security deposit. We were excited to live together. Down my street was Tartine, Mark Bittman’s favorite American bakery. On a single block were three excellent bookstores, arrayed in puzzling and wonderful proximity to one another. On one side of my neighborhood, Diego Rivera–inspired murals greeted me in fantastic swirling colors. If I walked in the other direction, the names of businesses amused me, playful or ironic or obscure—like the restaurant Foreign Cinema.
At every corner, a bar advertised happy hour. Big, gorgeous sheepdogs shared the streets with preposterously small Chihuahuas. Accenting the streets, always, were people and more people, dressed chaotically in argyle, boots, leggings, and rebellious-looking hats. Gentrification had begun, but the rent was still affordable.
The day after my mother left, my friend and her husband visited. We took the bus to Ocean Beach and looked out at the Pacific. The salty air, the pale drama of the fog—the California that had existed in my fantasy was now reality. Sharing a loaf of sourdough, the three of us sat on the sand and followed the sound of barking yelps to a herd of seals on a nearby island. A golden retriever chased a ball into the ocean and emerged triumphant and sopping, treasure in jaw.
—
PEOPLE IN MY workshop told me that my writing about Patrick was good enough to get published. I felt guilty considering this. Then I tried to comfort myself: The writing was not triumphalist, it did not downplay my moral failure; I had tried to depict Patrick and my students warmly, humanely. Did that effort mitigate the exertion of power, the betrayal of intimacy, that was intrinsic to telling someone else’s story?
A teacher had put me in touch with The New York Times Magazine, and an editor offered to publish it as a “Lives” column. I made a pact with myself: If Patrick didn’t like it, I would not publish it. I mailed Patrick the essay I’d written about him.
But he didn’t write back. Had he even received it?
I told the editor to go ahead and publish.
Then—after the deed was done—I worried. I worried what Patrick would think. Would he find my portrait wrong? What if he thought I only cared about writing his story and didn’t really care about him? It was a strange, sudden, unexpected opposition between writing and caring. I had never doubted the latter; indeed, I had built my whole identity out of it. Anybody who knew me knew I was a clichéd bleeding-heart liberal, sure, but my heart truly bled! Now my act of publishing seemed to have undermined my sincerity.
I made another little pact with myself. When you go back in October to see Patrick—I had planned one more visit before my job started in Oakland—you’ll show him the piece, face-to-face.
—
ON A SATURDAY MORNING IN early October, almost exactly a year since I’d last seen Patrick, I drove to Helena’s county jail. There was no traffic. The streets were empty. Having lived in San Francisco for a month, where the sheer effort required to park your car can steal your soul, I was incredulous at the parking spot I found squarely at the entrance.
I sat down in the waiting area. At the front desk was a sign in orange block letters—OPEN—but there was no guard.
This time, the only other person there was a woman, who wore a shirt that said, DON’T ASK ME SHIT.
After ten minutes a guard appeared, holding a jumbo-sized bag of hot chips.
I told him I was there to see Patrick Browning.
“You can’t see him,” he said.
“But aren’t visiting hours now?” I asked, confused.
“Maybe I ain�
��t feel like getting him,” he said. Then he winked.
Now I understood. He was “just playing” with me and wanted me to play back. I was no longer puzzled—indeed, had he been professional, I probably would have been more surprised.
Mock-affronted, I furrowed my brow. At this, he cocked his head.
“You got a boyfriend?” he asked. Suddenly I felt his hand on mine. “You don’t got no ring.” He puckered his lips at me, then grinned.
In the Delta, banter was sexual harassment. It didn’t really matter what you looked like, as long as you were under fifty.
He introduced himself—his name was Shawn; he was very pleased to meet me.
Shawn said he’d give me the lawyer’s room, which was better than speaking through a Plexiglas shield. I wasn’t sure why. Was it because he knew I wasn’t a family member? Or because he thought I had traveled on a long journey from the Orient? Or because I had let him flirt with me?
He walked me to a private room labeled INTERROGATION in faded stenciled letters. The room was dank and musky. A bucket sat near the corner, collecting water. Above, a purplish-black splotch spread on the ceiling. I tried to hold my breath, not wanting to inhale the vaguely toxic smell. Patrick emerged. He was shocked, and then he smiled.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I’m all right, ma’am. I’m doing all right.”
As if suddenly remembering something, he said, “How are you, Ms. Kuo?”
“Good.”
“Where you be living now?”