Train Go Sorry Read online

  Some teachers often used two different attitude between Black and White students. For example, when Black students raise they hand up to answer and White students raise they hand up the teacher pick White student to answer the question first. That not fair to the Black students. Another example, when White students ask teacher to repeat the question teacher accept and repeat the question but when Black student ask teacher to repeat the question the teacher show their attitude and say “pay attented”. That happen to me. Also some counselors encourage mostly white student about college but not me.

  Teachers and Staffs have to stop think negative about Black and Spanish students without know who they are. Students like to dress up to show that they support their culture or the way they like. Some staffs and teachers should have a group meeting with different cultures and learn about each other cultures.

  At the Honors Breakfast, James watches all the others fill their plates before him. He has earned the right to be here, a privilege important enough to make him delay his second attempt to visit his brother in prison. But he cannot bring himself to partake in the festive mood of his classmates, packed shoulder to shoulder around the other tables, sopping up syrup and jelly with their bread, their hands crackling with news and witticisms, all of them reveling in the special treatment. To be here, James has traveled farther than they have from his past, and what he left behind still sets him apart. Thoughts of Paul from the night before and thoughts of Joseph from the morning ahead quietly sandwich him in his own space by the door.

  A little before nine, when the buffet line has dwindled to nothing, James stands and fills a plate for himself. Then he joins a table with a couple of black sophomore boys, keeping his jacket on while he eats bagel and egg. The presentations begin and he watches for his name. When his turn comes, he goes to the front and accepts his certificate. He will take it home this weekend, give it to his mother.

  For now he creases it inside his leather jacket, and it rides with him all the way to Rikers Island, this sheet of calligraphy tucked against his ribs, a promise of future, a voucher for success. It remains concealed within his garments all the way across the channel and through the metal detector and past the guards and up to the desk at C-74, where he is again informed that his brother is in court today. No one knows it is there; no one can guess what James has accomplished, what he has survived. All they see is a young black man who seems a little out of touch, a little slow to understand.

  Late in the spring, he tries for a third time. He has come early, so early the sky hangs low like a canopy of ashes and the streetlights are still on, melonlike globes in the haze. Once again the bus, the bridge, the metal detector, the emptying of pockets, the waiting in line. Only today it happens that when he is called, the guard behind the counter slides him a large white card and a special pen. James signs his name in two places with some sort of invisible ink. Then he gets a locker, deposits a quarter to make the orange key come out, and stores his jacket, sweatshirt, watch, wallet, and all his jewelry except the JAMES stud in his ear.

  A hand-marked sign tells exactly what may be brought in: “1 Pamper, 1 Bottle, 1 Pants, 1 Shirt, 1 pair of socks.” A longer list beneath it tells what is forbidden: hats, cigarettes, money, watches, gum, candy, tokens, headbands, bows, material strips, jackets, bracelets, hanging earrings, sunglasses, chains (“except one small chain with religious significance”).

  James feels someone rub his arm. He turns and there is a short woman saying something with a moderate degree of urgency, her eyes fixed on his feet. James looks down and sees a large and nimble cockroach traversing the tongue of his shoe. He stamps once; it falls to the floor. Twice; it is crushed. James nods politely at the woman. She nods back. He sees she is standing in her socks, dangling a pair of red sandals by their straps. James removes his shoes too, purple-and-white Filas, and waits behind her in line.

  One by one the visitors are summoned through a second metal detector. When it is James’s turn to step through and around the corner, he finds himself facing two female guards at the bottom of a stairwell. They are used to dealing with people who don’t understand English, and with bored gestures they direct him to stand on the third step, untuck his shirt, run his fingers around the waistband of his purple nylon sweats, pull up each pant leg, unroll the cuffs, pull down his socks, bang his shoes together and hold them upside down, and open his mouth. Then he is sent upstairs, where he comes out into a large room appointed with chairs facing each other across dozens of short square tables. At many of these stations, visitors sit opposite men in gray or mustard-colored jumpsuits with DOC, for Department of Corrections, stenciled boldly across the backs.

  The guard at the top of the stairs makes James open his mouth again; she looks straight in, then waves him behind a wooden partition into a small holding area filled with other visitors. Instead of taking a seat, James leans his elbows on the partition and scans the great room beyond. It is not raining, but a kind of oily spring wetness has caused drops of moisture to cling to the iron bars that cage each window. Through these few square panes, pale gray light is permitted to mix with the light from the bald fluorescents. The visitors, having left their watches in the lockers below, sit in bolted chairs, caught in a helpless stupor. The guard, a woman with long copper fingernails, directs a dead look at the far wall when someone asks her the time. After a languid pause, she utters a response, but James doesn’t catch it. He can’t stop yawning.

  James begins to think there has been a mistake; maybe Joseph is in court again today. He has been in the holding area for more than an hour—longer than anyone else—when finally he is called. A male guard leads him out onto the floor and deposits him far across the room at a table with two empty chairs. James sits in one and looks around.

  He is struck again by the fact that nearly everyone is black or Latino. He doesn’t see any white people, except a few of the guards. Around him, couples clasp hands across the tables as they talk. They run their hands over each other’s forearms. If the bodies start inching too close, a guard materializes and separates them like a chaperon at a parochial school dance. Two inmates are led right past James out of the visiting room; one has a pink scar across his cheek, the other’s cheeks are pink with lipstick smears. James tips his chair back against a pale green pillar and stares past them, out the window, out of this room, until he feels a commotion and turns to the front of the room. A new batch of prisoners is being brought in.

  James sees Joseph before Joseph sees James. He is still tipped back on two legs of the chair, arms folded over his chest, and he watches Joseph coolly, without signaling to him. The other inmates have located their visitors and dispersed themselves accordingly. Joseph, ten yards away, surveys the room indifferently, then spins back to the guard desk in a short fluid move. James sees him shake his head. The guard says something; Joseph turns again and glances casually, slit-eyed, from face to face, until finally he lights on James. Then there is a tiny flicker of recognition before his features snap shut and he looks away again, apparently engrossed in inspecting the rest of the room while he weaves slowly, almost incidentally, toward James’s table. Only when he is standing over James does he reach down an arm, still without looking, and the brothers grip hands in a neat three-part shake.

  “I thought you were Daddy,” Joseph accuses, by way of greeting, after he has claimed the vacant seat.

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s the same fucking name.” James is really James Lee Taylor III.

  Joseph makes no effort to moderate his speech or maintain eye contact. But he is James’s brother, and even when James misses specific words, he understands the meaning. A smile tiptoes across his face; he is smiling at his brother’s nerve, at his crazy, reckless, self-damning bravado. He keeps the smile off his lips, keeps it small and wary and constrained in the fringes of his eyes. He smiles because any alternative is unthinkable.

  Joseph spends a considerable amount of time attending to the rest of the room, tossing a terse nod
at one inmate, cutting his eyes contemptuously at another (“He’s scared of me,” Joseph brags), waving to a third with the back of his hand, fingers splayed in a clawlike salute (“He’s my son,” explains Joseph, grabbing his left pectoral in a gesture intimating the depths of this jailhouse kinship. “My son.”). He tells James that he refuses visits from family and will come out only if the name on the slip is that of a girlfriend, but James knows that his mother and sisters haven’t ever tried to visit. “I thought you were Daddy,” Joseph repeats. “I wanted to see what he wanted.”

  James tells Joseph about the babies at home; two new nieces have been bom this spring, one named Onisha and the other he’s not sure of, he hasn’t quite been able to decipher it on anyone’s lips, but he thinks it’s M something. He tells Joseph about taking driver’s ed and getting his learner’s permit. After failing twice, he passed the written test at the Department of Motor Vehicles just this week. He has been accepted at Camden County College and will start its summer orientation program in July, but he doesn’t tell Joseph this.

  Joseph tells James about the fights in prison, fights all the time, over the television and the phone and the food line, even over coming from different boroughs. He tells James he fought a man just because he was from Brooklyn. He cut him, Joseph says, he cut him in the jugular, and the man had to be taken to Kings County Hospital and Joseph went into the lockup for ninety days—one bed, one sink, one toilet, and solitude for twenty-three hours a day; they let you out to shower and you get your food under the door; it makes you crazy, he says. He tells James that his lawyer is scared of him, afraid to come close to him. He says he’s in trouble now because he lied to his lawyer. He says the inmates make knives out of anything—this chair (and he reaches beneath himself and strokes the metal leg), your glasses (and he half reaches out toward James’s face). He tells James he could make a knife out of anything, tells him he knows what he’s doing.

  James jerks his head back and laughs shortly. “You’re bad. You’re a bad boy now,” he says, as if it’s a joke.

  “No. I’m good.”

  “You look different from before,” says James. “Ugly.”

  Joseph stares at him. He wears the mustard DOC garb. Outlined by the thin cotton, his stomach muscles lie in rigid bars. His eyes keep flicking away, checking out movement, watching his back. His skin looks dry, yellowish.

  “Jail make you ugly,” says James.

  Joseph looks at him hard. “Jail don’t make you look ugly. I look nice.”

  Joseph asks James for money four or five times, tells him to leave cash for him at the window downstairs. It’s one of the few signs he knows: money, girl, home, eat. “Don’t come visit me if you don’t bring money,” he tells his brother. But James already knows he won’t be back.

  The strange thing is that all those years of growing up, it was James and Joseph together with the neighborhood boys, getting in fights, playing hooky, stirring up trouble. Not until James moved into the Lexington dorm did he really sever ties with the homeboys and their dangerous schemes, although they will never be completely foreign to him. Even that day last June, that Saturday afternoon when a group of boys pulled a gun and committed armed robbery—who is to say that if James weren’t deaf, he wouldn’t have been there too? James himself believes that if he were hearing, he might be in jail now beside his brother.

  It is past noon, time for James to leave.

  “You stay here and I’ll go home,” says Joseph, so quietly he seems serious.

  “No,” James retorts lightly, mock appalled. He stands and stretches his back, ready to depart.

  But there is something else Joseph wants to say. He makes the sign for home: all five fingertips bunched together and touched lightly next to his mouth. The way he signs it, it could also mean a kiss on the cheek.

  “Home is nicer than jail” is the message he delivers. He says it seriously, instructively, as though it is a realization that has come to him lately, something he wants to be sure James understands. “Home is better than here.”

  James shakes his brother’s hand goodbye. He knows. It was Joseph who had missed the boat this time.

  13

  Whose Apple Pie?

  Oscar is sitting cross-legged on the floor of his office underneath the little plastic basketball hoop, a picture book propped against his shins. His guests, four elementary school students, have plunked their knapsacks and jackets on the couch by the window and positioned themselves in front of him on the nubby brown carpet. Even though Oscar has greeted each by name, they act very formal, almost prim. One boy has his hands folded in his lap.

  Oscar looks severe. Not especially so this instant; just in general, around school, he has a reputation for looking severe, a touch somber. It’s the eyes, set so deep below the wide forehead, the prominent brows. And it’s the teeth, what Oscar calls his Bronx teeth, by which he means unmitigated by orthodontia, the lowers tucking into one another crookedly. It’s his stature as well; he’s six-two, lean and broad-shouldered. Some of the littler children think possibly he is the president.

  It’s not that they haven’t seen him get a pie in the face (he did so in the spring dance show) or dress up in green tights and tunic and play a forlorn, bewildered Robin Hood (he did so in the senior class play). It’s not that fifteen minutes ago they weren’t giggling at him onstage, as he acted foolishly addled in the staff skit that touched off the elementary school’s Literature Week. It’s that within the world of Lexington, this seven-acre red-brick world on the edge of Jackson Heights, home to their extended family, Oscar is the head. Cohen, they call him. His name-sign, a C hand shape tapped against the shoulder, combines his initial with the sign for boss. He is the patriarch. And also, he is so tall.

  The whole elementary school has been split into storytelling groups. The four children assigned to Oscar sit hushed and reverent, chins up, throats elongated. It is early March; the world is just beginning to go soft and muddy, with old snow slopping from the junipers and crabapple trees outside the window. They wait for him to begin the story.

  “Do you want me to speak or sign?” he asks first, doing both. Some of the children in the elementary school have not learned to sign, because of resistant parents or a natural aptitude for oral communication or a simple lack of exposure. Many others benefit from a combination of auditory input and signs. “Both? Okay,” Oscar agrees to their shy nods.

  The book is Tar Beach, by Faith Ringgold. Really Tar Beach was a quilt first, with panels stitched together to compose a single story, a dream-story about a girl and her brother, who fly from their Harlem rooftop and soar above the city at night. Later the words and images of the quilt were made into a picture book. When Oscar explains this, the students wriggle closer and peer at the pages.

  “Beautiful pictures,” says a smallish boy with an Afro shaved into a fade.

  “Yeah. They’re beautiful.” Oscar holds up the page and shows it slowly around. He reads, and the children’s bodies relax. A girl with lavender glasses rests her chin on her knees. A boy with a black velvet yarmulke stretches out on his side.

  “What’s the sign for W-A-T-E-R-M-E-L-O-N?” Oscar stops to ask, having come to that word in the text. On Knox Place, his family would have fingerspelled it. One boy shows his own made-up sign: he mimes eating a wedge. Another shows the more widely used sign: water plus thumb and middle finger thunked against the opposite wrist, melon. “Thank you,” Oscar says to them.

  When the story is over, he asks, “So what does ‘tar beach’ mean?”

  “Roof,” says the boy with the yarmulke.

  “Star beach,” the boy with the fade pronounces musingly.

  “Not S-T-A-R,” says Oscar. “T-A-R.” He fingerspells it slowly. They find an illustration and look at the tarred roof.

  “You know, black stuff, smells,” explains a large boy with long eyelashes. The smaller one nods in comprehension.

  “Do they swim at this beach? What do they do?” asks Oscar.

&nbs
p; “Fly!” This from the girl with the lavender glasses.

  “Do you think that family is rich or poor?”

  “Poor.”

  “What kind of work does the father do?”

  “Construction,” answers the large boy. They turn to a picture of that. The book explains that the father couldn’t always get work because he wasn’t in the union, and he couldn’t join the union because he was black. The children ask what a union is.

  “Workers form a club,” Oscar explains. “They have to pay dues, and they try to improve the organization where they are working. In Lexington we have a union. The teachers have a union called the TA and they try to improve the working conditions at Lexington.” He sits there on the floor of the superintendent’s office suite, facing an audience of rapt ten-year-olds, and warms to his subject as though he were a labor organizer crouching with migrant workers in the shade of a peach tree. This is the great joke, the paradox that has haunted Oscar ever since he became principal in 1976: the administrator as agitator.

  Over his desk, a photocopy of an old cartoon hangs in a cheap blue frame. It shows a school principal flanked by a group of teachers brandishing picket signs and a group of board members in three-piece suits, each churlishly demanding, “You used to be a teacher—talk some sense into them!” The print was given to him by an old friend, a deaf teacher, during Lexington’s teacher strike of 1979. It is a relic from the days when Oscar, uneasy in his relatively new role as management, would leave home early and slip into school before dawn so as not to cross the picket line.

  In those days, Lexington’s function as a spiritual hearth for the deaf community was more pronounced. The dorm housed 150 students; their lives filled up the building and gave it a visceral charge. The umbrella organization, Lexington Center, and its affiliates that serve the outside community had not yet been created; Lexington was still a single organism, a family tree whose limbs were all connected to the same roots.