Reading with Patrick

by Michelle Kuo

  Abolitionists—people who get rit of slavery

  William Garrison—white man

  He drew a little curve between the two lines to indicate that Garrison was an abolitionist.

  We skipped most of the preface and landed here:

  A slaveholder’s profession of Christianity is a palpable imposture.

  “I’ll give you a hint. This word”—I pointed to imposture—“is related to the word impostor, a person who pretends to be something he’s not.”

  Patrick nodded. “So according to Garrison,” I continued, “what isn’t this slaveholder?”

  “A man of God.”

  I nodded, and Patrick read on.

  He is a felon of the highest grade. He is a man-stealer. It is of no importance what you put in the other scale.

  I asked, “How would you say this in your own words?”

  Without faltering, he said, “He the biggest crook of them all.”

  Then he pointed to the name WM. LLOYD GARRISON at the bottom.

  “Ms. Kuo,” he said, with incredulity bordering on apprehension, “you say this be a white dude?”

  I laughed.

  “Damn,” he said. “I mean, shoot.”

  And so we began Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, written by himself.

  By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.

  Patrick’s voice gathered force when he read and lingered on the word ignorant.

  “Shoot. We ain’t know how old we be.” He paused. “White children know, but we ain’t.”

  He continued:

  I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night.

  Patrick stumbled over the word duration—yet he didn’t wait for me to correct him. He kept going.

  She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from my home.

  He stopped. “Twelve miles,” he repeated, recognizing how far this was. Anxiety creased his forehead.

  I asked, “Why would it be advantageous for slaveholders to separate mothers from children?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, why would it be useful?”

  Patrick’s words came in a torrent. “To keep him from helping her,” he burst out. “He gonna try to take care of her, and now he ain’t able to. And Mama—she gonna try to teach him to do the right thing; she know a little more than him. She probably try to help him escape—she wouldn’t want him to be no slave. And if you that boy, you see your mama working as a slave, you ain’t plum dumb, you know what they doing.”

  Patrick stopped to catch a breath and then kept talking.

  “Everybody’s mama love them. Like my mama, she do anything for me; if I’m right or wrong, she do anything. She be there, like right now, my situation. That’s why it be good to know your mother; she gonna have affection for you regardless. But if you a child, you don’t know all that. He probably think his mother hated him, because she never around. He ain’t able to know about affection; he probably never gonna get to know his mother.” He shuddered at the thought.

  Then he resumed reading.

  By the time I checked my watch, we had read the bulk of the first chapter aloud. It was already six. I nearly jumped. “Sorry,” I said; I was late to meet Danny and Lucy for dinner.

  Hearing the sound of my voice, Patrick started, as well; he’d been lost in the book.

  I had feared that he would be bored by Douglass, that its language would sound antiquated and dull, but I was wrong: The book was alive, full of blood for Patrick.

  “Hey,” I said. “You don’t need to stop just because I’m leaving. Keep going.”

  At this Patrick looked surprised. He asked, “I can keep it?”

  Then, answering his own question, he said, “Naw, Ms. Kuo, I can’t keep it.”

  I nodded encouragingly. “I have my own, see?” I held up the second copy.

  He returned his gaze to his own book, looking at it uncertainly.

  “I give it back,” he allowed.

  —

  WITHIN A WEEK Patrick had read half the Douglass on his own, sitting on the third step of an unlit concrete stairway. He’d gone to the stairs, he told me, because he couldn’t concentrate in his cell. “They be bothering me specially when I reading,” he said. “Like they want me to get mad. I can’t get no peace here.”

  Patrick was chapters ahead of me.

  I reviewed his homework. “What surprises you when you read Frederick Douglass?” I had asked.

  He wrote: It is amazing that Mr. Douglass knows all these big words cause I dont.

  “What would you change about yourself?” I had asked next.

  He wrote: If I could change something it would be me not dropping out of school.

  And last I was startled to discover this list:

  Ways im like a slave

  Me being ignorant

  haveing things deprived from me

  cause im in jail

  having a master or jailer

  Being a black man Its more favor for white men

  I will have to work for white men

  If a black person is killed its not much fuss or nothing really said about

  A nigger most likely not being successful in America.

  Commonly said Im only promised to be dead or in jail

  I had not assigned a question to prompt such a comparison. He had written it on his own. He must have looked up the word ignorant in the dictionary or checked it against the Douglass text—it was spelled perfectly.

  Soon we started the famous passage where Douglass is introduced to the alphabet:

  Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters.

  Patrick gave me a mischievous look and said, “I know someone like that.” We laughed and he read on. Mr. Auld found out that Frederick was learning. He told his wife to stop: [It] was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read….“Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”

  “How would you put this in your words?” I asked.

  “He not gonna be a slave anymore when he knows what’s going on. Ain’t gonna be a slave all right.”

  Under her husband’s influence, Mrs. Auld changed. “The tender heart became stone,” Patrick read. He looked up and said, unprompted, “She gonna stop teaching him, and he gonna have to teach himself.” And Patrick was right: Soon Douglass was found with a newspaper, and Mrs. Auld rushed toward him in fury, snatching it from him.

  So Mrs. Auld had stopped teaching Douglass, but it was too late. At the shipyard, Douglass watched carpenters write letters using chalk. The larboard was marked L.; the starboard, S.; the larboard aft, L.A. He copied the letters to practice.

  After that, when I met with any boy who I knew could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be, “I don’t believe you. Let me see you try it.”…[M]y copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk. With these, I learned mainly how to write.

  Suddenly, Patrick flipped to the front cover of his book to stare at the indubitable Mr. Douglass, venerable and black, a thick mane of white set against his dark skin. Patrick studied the picture as he had studied that of the Faun, so carefully and gravely that his expression resembled a frown.

  —

  “HEY,” I SAID, bundling up to go. “I picked up some cigarettes for you from the store. Because you’ve been working so hard.” I handed him the package.<
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  “Thanks, Ms. Kuo,” he said. “But I got one at the house. Can you get it for me?”

  There was something unnatural in Patrick’s tone—at once urgent and uncomfortable.

  “You’ve got this one already. Why do you—”

  “Naw, my dad got it for me.” He looked away.

  I was suspicious.

  “Is there something you want to tell me?” I said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “What makes his different from mine?”

  “See, my mama got it for me.” I hesitated; hadn’t he just told me his dad got it? “I don’t want her to feel bad,” he continued. “It make her happy to give me things, you know.”

  I looked him in the eye. He couldn’t hold my gaze.

  “Okay,” I relented.

  —

  AS I PULLED up to Patrick’s house, I was nervous. Heroin? Coke? Weed? His dad must have put something in the package. But Patrick wasn’t using any of them, was he? No, his homework was too good.

  The yard was steeped with water; it had been a rainy January. In the large ditch, leaves and pinecones floated on top.

  I trudged to the door and saw his dad immediately—he knew why I was there. I wiped off my sneakers while he poked his head under the couch.

  Now I was sure something was wrong. Why would tobacco be hidden? I started to back away. “I’ll come back later,” I lied.

  “Naw, I don’t want you to leave empty-handed.”

  He gave me what looked like a typical package of tobacco leaves. But for the first time I noticed Scotch tape on the front. It had been opened and sealed again. How many other packages, I realized with dread, had also been opened? How many of these had I given to Patrick from the house—three, four, five? I’d lost count.

  Back at Danny and Lucy’s house, I parked in their driveway, relieved that the dark of the rain shielded my windows. I broke the tape open. Some leaves flitted out like confetti, and there it was—weed.

  I felt like a fool. Patrick had lied to me, and so had his father.

  Over dinner, Danny fumed. “Do you know how fucked-up it is that his dad is giving this to him? That it might get his son more in trouble with the law? And to put you, the teacher, a lawyer, in that position?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What if it had been worse than pot? Heroin? Cocaine?”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  I didn’t tell Danny what I was worrying about myself—that I was in the process of filling out the “moral application” for my bar. If the California Bar Association caught wind, it would hurt my chances of getting admitted.

  “Why do you think you have been giving him those cigarettes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “To reward him,” he said, supplying my answer. “But you reward him with your presence, with your teaching, by showing up.”

  I hung my head.

  Danny said, “Stay away from the father. And destroy the package.”

  —

  THE NEXT DAY, Patrick stretched out his arm to hand me his notebook.

  I didn’t reach for it. Confused, he pulled the notebook back toward his chest.

  “I know about your cigarettes,” I said impassively.

  Patrick froze.

  “This isn’t the first time, is it?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why?” I said. My anger swelled, remembering the lie about his mother. “Why? Why would you risk it?”

  Quickly he asked, “What’d you do with it?”

  That this was the first thing he said made me even angrier. “I threw it away.”

  He cringed. “Ms. Kuo,” he protested.

  “Do you know how fucked-up this is?”

  Patrick flinched. I rarely cursed in front of him. “Having your teacher sneak in weed to the jail? Your teacher who’s going to be sworn in to be a lawyer? Who’s trying to help you? Letting your dad give the drugs to her? What do you think your dad was thinking?”

  “I don’t look at it that way. It’s up to me; I make my own decisions.”

  “If I were your parent,” I began, a perilous phrase. “If I were a parent and I had a child in jail—”

  “I ain’t a child,” Patrick burst out.

  “You sure are acting like one,” I said.

  Patrick jumped back as if I’d slapped him. Then he covered his face.

  “Take those hands off,” I said.

  He didn’t obey.

  “I know you heard what I said. Look at me. I’m not perfect; you’re not perfect. But let our trust be perfect.”

  At this he let out a small sound.

  “What were you doing with it? Selling it? Smoking it?”

  Now Patrick got evasive.

  “It ain’t matter—it make no difference.”

  “Patrick,” I said, now more quietly. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  He didn’t answer. He just said, “If I weren’t in jail—none, none this would happen. I don’t know—I don’t know how to get better.”

  I got up and left, leaving his homework on the table.

  —

  WHAT, REALLY, WAS I SO mad about? Was it just the basic fact that nobody—nobody—likes being used? Few emotions are as universal as this. In the end he was just a kid trying to get some pot.

  The next morning, Patrick walked in, carrying his notebook and his books. He held out his notebook tentatively.

  I reached for it—a gesture of reconciliation.

  “What’s been on your mind?” I asked.

  “Wrong stuff. Bullcrap.”

  He avoided eye contact—he was still afraid of me. Maybe he thought I was going to curse again or raise my voice.

  He had written down some things that were not assigned. One paragraph in particular was really a note to me.

  My family are getting old and I’m sitting in here wasting time. My momma is waiting on me to come home. This place is ruining me more than I already am. It’s like I need help, but I can do bad on my own. Sorry for my mistakes. Thank you for tring to help me.

  My voice was low, almost tender. “I’m sorry I lost my temper yesterday. I can’t know how stressful things are in here, I really can’t. Only you know.”

  Patrick didn’t say anything. He was watching me, testing my sincerity.

  “And I’m sorry I said those things about your dad. I guess I just don’t…I don’t relate. I thought I could, but I guess I can’t. My dad taught me math just about every night growing up; he didn’t let me—”

  “It ain’t like that with my daddy,” he burst in. “Really, I got to help him with his times table.”

  He cleared his throat and paused, weighing his words.

  “When I was little, we all stayed in Helena. But my daddy had another house where he was selling dope out of. I was living there and I be thinking to myself, I five years old and it a dope house. My dad, he’s like a professional at selling drugs; he strict about how he handles business. He don’t sell to anybody he don’t trust. He used to teach me how to sell. Teach me things like, don’t never call them crackheads. Teach me that it better to deal with people who work, like who fix pipes or got a job. Teach me that at nighttime it got to be a different price, like the price need to go up.” After a few years, his dad was arrested. “He was out on a bond and the night before he went in, we rode around. He was buying me stuff, buying me everything, buying toys. Just spending time together. The next morning I saw the sheriff’s car outside.”

  His dad was in prison for two years, came back, then got caught again shortly before Patrick was sent to Stars.

  Patrick stopped himself. “My daddy was good, he was, he a good person, he a good person to me, I’m glad I got him. He was there. A lot of fathers, you know, ain’t there, at home. And his daddy weren’t there. He had to learn how to hustle. He the one who showed me how to fix my go-cart. He be real good with his hands; he know how to fix stuff. And how to draw, he can draw.”

  “Drawing?”

  “
When he was in jail, he sent a lot of letters home with drawings. And he know how to sew, stitch up clothes and stuff. When I got holes in my pants, he stitch them up. Though he’s the strongest in my family, it really—it really tore him up I’m here.”

  My neck was burning. I hadn’t helped Patrick by casting judgment on his father.

  He paused. “Like what I say in there”—he gestured to his notebook—“it’s true. Really. Thank you for trying.”

  We were back to where we’d started, the dynamic in which he thanked me and felt as if he’d let me down. How much of this dynamic had I myself created? I wished he would associate me with feeling successful. Of course we were not on a level playing field, but I wished he knew we were equals.

  “You start,” I said. “Then I’ll go.”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Yeats or Dickinson?”

  “Emily,” he said. He referred to her by her first name; sometimes he called Douglass “Frederick.”

  “Have you got a brook in your little heart,” he began. He closed his eyes to remember the next line. “Your turn,” he said, when he was finished.

  —

  I STOPPED GIVING Patrick cigarettes, and he didn’t ask for them again.

  We kept reading Frederick.

  “The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers,” Patrick read. I asked what he thought abhor meant, and he said, “To hate,” and kept going. “I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes.”

  His reading was improving: He read now with a steady pace. Words fell from his lips with control, not too fast, like arrows aimed at a target. Gone was the hesitation, which had hidden the depth of his voice. Perhaps the marijuana incident had cleared the air, permitted us both to be less than perfect.

  “…learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition without the remedy,” he read.