by Kurt Caswell
I rather liked Dallas. He invited me into his office during my first week of work to explain how he could help me with discipline. He wore a sharp little beard on his chin, rare for a Navajo, and thick, dark eyeglasses. He wasn’t tall, but big, heavy, and powerful-looking. He told me that he had been a Navajo cop and that he had specialized in investigating occult activities on the reservation. Navajo gangs were cropping up all over, he said, mostly boys with little to no home life, and they were practicing the dark arts, sacrificing animals and sleeping in coffins. He was presiding over a Navajo ceremony in the coming weeks, he told me (he didn’t say what ceremony), and if I wanted to participate, not this time, he said, but sometime, I should let him know. Shortly after that he left the school and I never saw him again.
Frank brought a much-needed positive force to school discipline. Younger than Dallas, Frank had a kind face and a gentle, soft voice, yet he commanded space and respect. He made a point of visiting every classroom his first day of work, especially the classrooms of the white teachers. In the middle of my class he stood up to interrupt me and addressed the class like an angry father. First he spoke in Navajo, then he repeated what he had said in English so I could hear it. He told the students that they should be more respectful and that I had something to teach them. That I was living way out here in this place that was not mine and maybe they could appreciate my efforts to bring them a piece of the outside world. And he didn’t want to hear anymore cussing and carrying on in Navajo because they all knew that I couldn’t understand and they were taking advantage of me. And he was going to teach me a few Navajo words and phrases to recognize. If I heard them, he would expect me to report back. Then he would come to the class again and make it stop.
Since coming to Borrego, I had hardly heard a positive word about my work. From Lauren, yes, whom I looked up to as a teacher, and from Bob King, true enough, but I couldn’t quite believe him. My confidence in the classroom was tenuous at best, and over the past weeks I had come to believe very deeply that I was a failure as a teacher, that I had nothing at all to offer these kids, this school, this community. I had come to believe that I was not wanted here and that everyone, but for a few, perhaps, was patiently waiting for me to leave. Frank changed that. For the first time I felt that I wasn’t alone, that someone on the inside valued what I was working for, that if Frank cared, then so could I. Not only did I have a new ally; I also had a new friend.
When I called Frank and told him that Leonard Angel was drunk, he came right over. Leonard was still outside, stooped over with his hands on his knees. He moaned a little, opening and closing his mouth like a fish.
“You been drinking, Leonard?” Frank asked.
“No,” he said.
“I said, you been drinking?”
“No,” he said. “I’m just sick, that’s all.”
“You ain’t been drinking, then?” Frank asked.
Leonard shook his head.
“Go inside,” he said. “Wait for me inside. Tell Tom to come out.”
Leonard went in. Tom came out.
“Has Leonard been drinking?” Frank asked Tom.
“No,” Tom said.
“You sure?”
“Aoo’,” Tom said, this time in Navajo.
“Go back inside, then. Tell Jerry to come out.”
Tom went in. Jerry came out.
“Has Leonard been drinking?” Frank asked Jerry.
“No,” Jerry said. “I don’t know.”
“You sure?” Frank asked.
“I don’t know,” Jerry said.
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
“Go back inside,” Frank said. “Tell William to come out.”
Jerry went in. William came out.
“William, has Leonard been drinking?” Frank asked.
“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know,” William said.
“So he has been drinking?” Frank asked.
“I don’t know. He’s drunk, anyway.”
“All right,” Frank said. “Go back inside. Tell Victoria to come out.”
“Has Leonard been drinking?” Frank asked Victoria.
“What do you mean?” Victoria said. “You can see he is.”
“Yes, but I want to know if you think he’s been drinking.”
“Course he is. He’s always drunk like that,” Victoria said. “Anyone knows.”
“Thank you,” Frank said. “You can go back in. Tell Mary Jane to come out.”
It went on this way until Frank had talked to everyone. I wondered why he needed to talk to everyone; after William and Victoria, it seemed he knew enough. But he made sure no one was left out. Meanwhile, my class was held prisoner inside the portable, and it became clear that today’s lesson wasn’t about reading and writing, but something else. What, I didn’t know. No one complained, however; perhaps they were bored with our textbook too. Finally, Frank asked for Leonard again.
He came outside, negotiated the steps well enough, looked a little better.
“Leonard,” Frank said. “You’ve been drinking. And you came to class today drunk.” It was clearly a statement now, a verdict, and Leonard accepted it.
“Yes,” Leonard said, his head down.
“What you been drinking?” Frank asked.
“Nothing.”
“I asked you a question.”
Leonard reached into his coat pocket and handed Frank a bottle of cologne. A green squarish bottle with a black cap, maybe about seven ounces. It was mostly empty, except for the bit of residue that settles in the bottom. Frank held it up in the light and looked through it.
Borrego Pass had a long contraband list, which included the usuals: chewing tobacco, cigarettes, alcohol, and all recreational drugs. It also included cologne and hairspray, and all sorts of cleaning products, because kids would mix them with water and make a weird cocktail to get drunk. They also huffed gasoline, so, like the Trading Post, most gas stations banned filling any container but a fuel tank. Such substances were highly toxic, of course, but it was a cheap, easy way to get high.
“Where’d you get this?” Frank asked.
“Nowhere,” Leonard said.
Now Frank was losing his patience. He wanted to cuss, I could tell, but he held himself back. “Leonard,” he said, and then he spoke in Navajo, something forceful, something aggressive, something uncontestable.
“Wal-Mart,” Leonard said. “In Gallup.”
“Did you pay for this?”
“No.”
“Is this the first time?”
“No.”
“I have to take this, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“What else you been drinking?” Frank asked.
“Gas,” Leonard said. “Huffin’ gas. They make me do it.”
“Who makes you do it?”
“My brother, and my cousin-brothers,” he said. “Every day,” he said, and he started to cry.
“It gives you a bad headache, doesn’t it, Leonard,” Frank said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said, wiping his tears with the back of his hand.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s enough. I have to take this to Bob King, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’ll have to do detention.”
“Yeah.”
“And I’m gonna get you to a doctor.”
“Okay,” Leonard said.
The front doors of the school were propped open, and the little ones, the elementary grades, were streaming out onto the playground.
“Go to your next class,” Frank said. “Thank you, Mr. Caswell. We’ll talk more later.” Then Frank walked back inside to his office.
Later Frank told me that Leonard had gone down to the Eastern Agency hospital, and the doctor there confirmed that he had about 40 percent of his lungs left.
After that morning when I turned down her pies, Gay became one of the angriest students in all three of my classes. Far angrier, even, than Caleb Benally. She stared at me with a dee
p hatred. If I asked something of her in the classroom, she answered a hot, sharp “No!” or sometimes “Yes!” and that was all. One day, working through a story in our textbook, I called on Gay to read aloud. She was one of the best readers in the sixth grade. I often relied on her to take the lead. Many of the other students were reluctant to read first, or at all, but not Gay. She had no fear of all those words on the page. With her success, other students became willing, and we would cruise right along to the end of our story. But this time when I asked her, Gay pierced me with her eyes and said, “Don’t talk to me!”
Gay was just one hostile voice among many in my classroom, and I didn’t think much about it at first. I certainly didn’t connect her anger with my refusal to buy her pies. That seems obvious now, but maybe I was so absorbed in my own troubles that I was incapable of stepping outside myself. Whatever made her that way, I thought, was her problem. There was little I could do to fix it, or to fix anything in her life. In fact, I came to believe, there was nothing I could do to fix anything in any of these kids’ lives. I didn’t know what my students wanted or needed, or where to look for common ground, or even how to talk to them. I didn’t know if the gap between us was about age or language, or about race, about me being white in a Navajo world, or about something else that I couldn’t identify.
How do I teach these children, I asked? How do I manage them in the classroom? How do I live in this place with them? How do I earn the respect of young Navajos who seemed to believe that all their problems were the fault of rich white people, like me? Of course, I wasn’t really rich—I was just barely paying my bills. But to these kids, I was wealthy beyond anything they might ever know in their lifetimes. This was not a money-in-the-pocket kind of wealth, but the kind of wealth that comes from the privilege of having choices. I could work in Japan, as I had already done. I could move back up to Idaho. I could find a job in Albuquerque or Seattle or New York City, if I wanted to. I could seek a law degree, study to become a doctor, a businessman, a real estate tycoon. I was rich because I had the power to choose to pursue wealth. I had the potential that came with a childhood in which most people I knew told me that I could do or be anything I wanted.
The kids in my classroom, with few exceptions, probably never heard from anyone they respected that they had a wide range of choices about how to live their lives. Many of my students at Borrego did not consider high school an option. At so young an age, they already believed that one of the few options they had was to stay home, which meant to have children and collect a government assistance check. I might say, “What are you going to do when you finish school?” To which someone would answer, “I’m gonna stay home.”
It wasn’t that Navajo people didn’t value education. They did. But life at home was an education too, a better education in how to be Navajo, perhaps, than any classroom could provide. In talking to some of the parents at the school’s quarterly Open House, I sensed that they didn’t wholly trust that what I was teaching was in the best interest of their children.
Still, I expected compliance in the classroom. Some days that expectation seemed unrealistic, hopeless, naive. I felt plagued by where to draw that line between bending to my students’ circumstances and challenging them with standards I brought from a world they seemed to want no part of. So often I could not get through a lesson. I would spend the entire class period working on discipline, trying to teach these kids to pay attention, or to take notes, or to write an exam in silence. After weeks of effort, it all seemed a futile endeavor. So I fell into a kind of sleepy indifference, moving on with my lessons, day by day, week by week, trying to help my students improve their reading and writing skills, and trying not to care whether they ever did.
“Where’s my grade book?” I said. “It was right here on my desk a moment ago.”
“Of course we don’t know,” Valeria said.
“C’mon, people,” I said. “I just set it down right here. We walked into the room. I collected your papers. I took out my grade book and set it down here on my desk. Where is it? Who took it?”
I knew I should not have made an accusation like that—innocent until proven guilty, of course—but this wasn’t the first time, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. The thing was, this sort of prank was a daily feature of teaching at Borrego, especially with the sixth grade. Lauren told me that on one of her first days at Borrego, someone poured all the water from her water bottle into her waterproof school bag. All her things, including her new grade book, were sloshing around in there like little toys in a bathtub. That bag was supposed to keep water out, not in. She hadn’t considered it might work in reverse.
“Maybe you lost it,” Shane said.
“No, I didn’t lose it. I told you I set it down two minutes ago right here.”
“We don’t have it,” Valeria said.
“That means we all get A’s,” Michael said.
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
“Yeah,” John George said. “I’m gonna get an A.” Then he smiled and laughed, because he prided himself on getting F’s.
“No,” Valeria said to John George. “You couldn’t get an A anyways.”
“Yeah, I can,” John George said. “I can get an A, ’cause I’m too smart.”
“You’re too stupit,” said Valeria. “Like a sheep.”
“No,” said Shane. “He likes sheep. He likes ’em so good.”
Then they were all laughing, even John George.
We seemed to go through this same routine every day—a prank or a wild comment from nowhere, followed by an insult, which resulted in the refutation, followed by a joke, until everyone ended up laughing. I should have learned by now that if I only lightened up a bit, didn’t take myself or my precious lesson so seriously, if I joined in on the joke, I’d have a much easier time in the classroom.
“So where is it?” I said again.
No one said anything.
“If you don’t tell me where it is, we’re all just gonna sit here and do nothing.”
“Hey, yeah,” said Charlie Hunter. “Let’s do nothing.”
“Yeah,” said Kyle Bigfoot. “Let’s go outside and mess around, since we’re doin’ nothing.”
“Can we, Mr. Caswell?” Leanne said. “Can we for reals? I didn’t take your grade book.”
Had everyone lost their mind?
“All right!” I said. “Everyone who wants to learn something, stay here. Everyone who wants to learn nothing, go in the next room and do nothing.”
At first, they seemed stunned. The class didn’t seem to think I was serious.
“I’m serious,” I said.
“For reals?” Shane said.
“Yes, for reals,” I said.
“For really reals?” Leanne said.
“Yes, yes, yes. For really reals.”
A few of them got up and went to other side of the trailer. “No computer games,” I called after them. “You just have to sit in there and do nothing.”
“Okay,” someone called back. They sat in there for the rest of the class. A few students remained at their desks, and I went on with the lesson. It was the best class I’d had to that day.
As class ended, I called over to the kids who had opted to leave class. “It’s recess time,” I said, but no one came out. When I went to the doorway, there they sat with sour faces, dejected and sad, looking at all those idle computers, as if it were my choice, not theirs, that had brought them to this state. It turned out to be no fun at all doing nothing. I thought I’d stumbled onto the perfect trick to get my students into their studies.
A week or more later, I tried it again, but it backfired. This time everyone except Leanne Yazzie went into the next room to do nothing. I started in on the lesson anyway, but Leanne looked very uncomfortable, maybe because there was so little of her in the room against so much of me. She raised her hand shyly and asked, “Mr. Caswell. Can I go over there too?”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s both go.” Only this ti
me, instead of doing nothing, everyone played number and word games on the computers, including me. And we had a great time.
Juan Carlos Morales lived in the trailer next to mine. He worked as the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) coordinator at Borrego Pass, but mostly he seemed to wander around the school all day poking his head into classrooms. He was about my age, athletic-looking, with an evolving belly. He wore his hair greased tight into a little ponytail high on the back of his head. He wore gold jewelry. His face, pitted from youthful acne, was rugged and rather handsome. He only wore black Levis, a black cotton T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a black leather jacket. He looked like a gangster.
Many of the boys at Borrego admired Juan Carlos. They all tried to dress like him. They slicked their hair back like his, with dish soap from home or hand soap from the school bathrooms. One morning Samuel Smith, a seventh-grade student in my homeroom, boasted, “I got so much soap in my hair it took three pitchers of water to wash it out.” Juan Carlos’s cousins, Clemson and Caleb Benally, especially admired him. They formed a little trio with an obvious pecking order: Juan Carlos reigned as a kind of mob boss, while Caleb ordered Clemson around, and Clemson in turn bullied all the boys in the seventh grade. Caleb had such power among the boys at Borrego that he rarely got into fights. Clemson wasn’t very imposing; his power stemmed from the fact that everyone knew Caleb would support him, and Juan Carlos would support Caleb. I had heard that Juan Carlos had an uncle or a cousin on the school board, so whoever that was must have supported Juan Carlos.
The day I interviewed for the job at Borrego, Louise caught Juan Carlos in the hallway and asked him to give me a tour of the school. We shook hands and began a little walking tour of the hallway and grounds.
“This is the hallway,” Juan Carlos said. “And all these doors are the classrooms.” He spoke like he had trouble breathing, or he was overly excited and trying to catch his breath, or perhaps this added duty was a great strain on his day. He didn’t appear to be put off, but friendly, rather, and quite happy to tour me around. His breathlessness I took to be a style of his, like the way he carried himself, something from the street to go with his black outfit and pimped hairstyle.