Again

A revision of an earlier post — proof that I am working on finalizing all these stories.

1

My eyes scanned ahead, following the line of mourners leading to the white casket.

“I didn’t know we were going to see the body,” I whispered solemnly to Ms. Wood as she stood beside me.  This was true; in my 24 years I had never seen a dead body before, let alone the dead body of my own student.

“Oh, Freeman, I should have told you,” Ms. Wood replied, her voice rising above the organ music.  “There’s always a viewing at these kind of funerals.”  It seemed odd that just yesterday Ms. Wood and I had been discussing our efforts to collectively finish grading our student’s papers.  Now, this hallway conversation seemed frivolous.  I wasn’t sure how she could have slipped in the prepare-yourself-for-a-dead-body detail, but, as we stood in line at the church, I wished she had.

Then, another voice, this one behind me, louder than Ms. Wood’s:  “Seen a news crew outside – I’m hoping I’m on TV.”  My stomach turned.

“You gonna be okay?” Ms. Wood said quickly to distract us.

I nodded my head, my lips pursed.  I wasn’t sure of this fact, but the truth didn’t seem appropriate:  No, no Ms. Wood, I might not be okay.  Am I supposed to be okay?  I was okay – relatively so – until this whole body thing.  Now, I might not be okay. Instead:  “I’ll be okay.”

“Alright, well, hold it together,” she replied.  I interpreted this as her request that I keep the waterworks to a minimum, lest I embarrass her.  Lest I embarrass myself.

Ms. Woods seemed nonchalant as we stood in silence.  I contemplated if this nonchalance was a front or genuine steeliness.  We had been teaching together for only six months; I couldn’t decide.  I did know that my stomach was a wreck and my eyes were a worrisome wet.  Distractions, Alex, distractions.  Hold it together. I looked down at the floor, counting the squares in the carpet, the steps from where we joined the line to the casket.  I do not want to see his body, I do not want to see his body, I do not want to see his dead, dead, dead body. With each step we inched closer to the reality I thought I had accepted, but was now questioning:  we shouldn’t be here; I shouldn’t be here; he shouldn’t be here.  A sixth grader:

In

a

casket.

When we came upon the body, I repeated to myself:  no tears. The only white person in the church, I didn’t want to draw more attention to myself.  Further, with my sixth-grade students scattered amongst the pews, I didn’t want to create unnecessary drama; class would resume on Monday as it did each Monday.  It seems silly now, but in this moment, no tears was utterly crucial.

His skin was darker than I remembered.  Without life, it appeared as if his whole face was in shadow.  It looked remarkably dark next to the bright red of his XXL t-shirt, the vibrant cotton resting on his still body from his neck down to his knees.  Then, white-white pants – the kind of white that has never seen grass or dust or sitting or standing.  The white a corpse wears.  His hands rested in his lap, like black doves, gently curved, sleeping, peaceful.

His eyes were shut.  Ms. Wood screamed.

“They killed my student!” Her voice, once nonchalant, was now shrill and fierce, piercing through the chatter, through the organ.  She repeated herself, drawing her hand to her mouth, tears exploding out of her eyes.  It had been a front.  My eyes remained dry.  I was selfishly happy my attention was now transferred from his body to her pain.

I offered my hand.

Ms. Woods collected herself, the violence of her outburst contrasted with the speed in which the outburst was over.  We made our way to through the aisle and sat in the nearest available seats.

I reminded myself no tears as we waited for the service to begin.  I studied my shoes:  five holes on each side, a scuff on the left side of the left shoe, dully black against the grey patterned carpet.  Looking up, I scanned again, this time for Dani, his girlfriend.  Where was she?  Was she crying?

Rakieyah, a student in my first period class, sat beside me, her hair meticulously straightened, her slightly chubby sixth-grade body squeezed into a hand-me-down black dress.  We said nothing to each other.  I’m sorry Rakieyah, I thought and truly meant to say, but just as I began to speak, I realized I could not do so without tears.  No words, no tears.  A trade I was willing to make.

I was relieved when the service began, as it provided something new to focus on.   The preacher spoke for a long time and with the requisite passion.  Spoke about not seeking revenge.  Spoke about children listening to their parents.  Spoke about God needing more angels.  Things preachers say.

The crowd squirmed in their seats, let out hallelujahs and got up to go to the bathroom at inopportune moments.

2

I first met Jake Jackson on paper after Ms. Thompson, the other sixth grade Special Education teacher, entered my office during one of the teacher workdays preceding the start of the school year.

“I saw you have Jake Jackson on your caseload this year,” she began, her lisp pronounced.  The name was familiar.  Not only was he on my caseload, but also on the roll for my resource language arts class as well.    I would be Jake’s teacher, and as his Special Education case manger, his advocate.  “He was on my caseload last year.  We started the process to get him labeled Behaviorally and Emotionally Disabled, but we never finished it.”  She dramatically placed a thick manila folder on my desk.  “This is all the paperwork I got started on.  I was hoping you could finish it.”  She smiled at me, aware of the ridiculousness of this request, but also aware I had no option but to oblige.

I despised Ms. Thompson, I did, but it was the beginning of the year, so I did my best to keep this feeling hidden.  I nodded, cheerfully agreed and breathed easier as she left.  I was not pleased.  Getting a child placed as Behaviorally and Emotionally Disabled (in education lingo, known as BED) within the Special Education program was well known to be an arduous task, as it involves keeping copious records of at least twenty consecutive days of severely disordered behavior.  Students can get in fights for nineteen days straight and then be an angel on the twentieth day, starting the process over again.  Babies are adopted from third world countries in less time and with more ease than children are placed into the BED program.

Jake’s folder was detailed and similar to a police record. The previous year, he’d been suspended over ten times for a variety of reasons:  he’d cussed-out the assistant principal; gotten into fights; skipped class; roamed the halls; smoked cigarettes.  The records also showed that Ms. Thompson had been similarly delinquent, failing to hold meetings at the legally required times; thus, Jake remained categorized as Learning Disabled rather than BED.  I also noted the files remarked that “due to his excessive absences and poor scores on the state’s end-of-grade tests, Jacob will repeat sixth grade.”

This fact was astounding – retention was nearly unheard of at my school.  With so many students with so many behavioral and academic problems, there was an unwritten rule that students were to be passed along to the next grade without fail, saving the school the trouble of educating them for four rather than three years.  Dogs on life support could pass sixth grade at the school, maybe even earn honors.  Jake must have really pissed someone off to meet such a vengeful fate.

I put the folder aside, hoping the summer had been a period of miraculous reflection and maturing for Jake.  I imagined him to be on par with the greatest sociopaths of our time.  I prepared for the new Charles Manson, a modern day Attila the Hun.  I braced for the worst.

3

Jake walked into the classroom the first day with a swagger.  He was immaculately manicured from head to toe:  his short hair decorated with shaved curlicue designs, his thirteen-year-old body drowning in a large red cotton t-shirt.  His smile was undeniably magnetic, the whites of his teeth made whiter in contrast with his dark black skin.  He said hello to me as he entered the classroom, found his seat and sat attentively.

Could this be Jake Jackson?

That first day I kept waiting for his true self to reveal, for the Jake from the papers to appear suddenly, like the springing surprise of a Jack-in-the-Box.  As the class – hardly a class, actually, with only two students – worked on my required “About Me” worksheets I braced myself.

Jake turned his worksheet in quickly, though his answers reflected genuine effort. As I scanned the sheet, I noted his answers were surprisingly, almost alarmingly – normal.  He liked football and girls.  He hoped someday to play football in the NFL.  He hoped to pass the sixth grade this year.  This was clearly a guise.  I had assumed his interests included arson and fighting, his year’s goal to try new drugs.  Was he tricking me?

That first day, I told the class (comprised of Jake obviously, and a rambunctious boy named Michael) that we were going to learn the same material and complete the same lessons as my other – non-solely-Special Education – language arts classes.  I told Jake and Michel they had learning disabilities, yes, but by definition that meant they had typical intelligence.  Demonstrating this intelligence may be difficult, I admitted, but that did not change my expectations.  Plus, I added, I wouldn’t make them do more work:  when we were done with the lesson (which included the homework I gave in my “regular” class), we were done.  If they listened to me and worked efficiently, they’d have copious free time.

In other words:  listen dudes, we’ve got it good here.  There’s only two of you and it’s the last class of the day.  Let’s get the same amount of work done as those other classes, work to the same level, and do it quickly.  Once we’ve done that, we can sit back and relax.

I hoped the lure of free time would motivate them to occasionally work.  In my limited experience in teaching, I had learned free time was the superior incentive.  It beat candy, praise, good grades, positive calls home, everything.  Free time was king, for sure, but it had its drawbacks, as free time motivated students to think only sparingly.

They, Jake especially, seemed motivated by my proposition.

“So, if I do all my work quickly, we’ll get free time and I’ll pass sixth grade?” Jake asked, an innocence in his voice.

“Yes,” I promised.

4

Two months into the school year we had, on average, fifteen minutes of free time each ninety-minute class.  We were incredibly efficient, but Jake and Michael also genuinely worked and even, at times, thought.  They listened to my instruction, internalized it, and completed independent assignments diligently.  Contrasted with the dysfunction of the rest of my day, these ninety-minutes were remarkable, and each day I looked forward to third block to restore my faith in education.

Even more than the actual learning though, I looked forward to our free time.  In many ways, it was as much as reward for them as it was for me.  Most days, the assignments turned in, graded and filed and my supplies put away, we opted to head to the track, Mike and Jake trugging their backpacks with them and setting them along the chain-link fence. We walked laps, and from the outside it must have looked odd:  a twenty-something white man walking laps with two pre-adolescent black boys.  To us, it was different.  On the track, we were friends – racial, age and authority barriers broken down by our common appreciation of these quieter, relaxing moments in the school day.

“Jake, what are you doing this weekend?” I’d ask.

“Football.”

“Gonna win?”

“Of course!  I’m on the team, man.”

Not exactly poignant, but conversations like this were typical of Jake’s endearingly cocky personality.  Despite his obvious academic troubles, he had an inflated confidence about his abilities.  According to Jake, he scored the most touchdowns, got the most girls, wrote the sickest raps, wore the best clothes and had the best family.  When his team lost, it wasn’t his fault.  When a girl broke up with him, he hadn’t really liked her anyway.  Plus, he’d already started dating a new girl, he’d say, almost always subsequently asking me to how to spell her name.  He was so assured in his boasting it was impossible not to believe him.

During these laps, I came to know Jake’s trademark laugh.  It was loud and childish, surprisingly immature even, similar to the sound of a much younger child delighting in Saturday morning cartoons.  While laughing, his mouth was a wide smile, his eyes rolling.  His laugh was joyous and pure, the one time when Jake wasn’t trying to be something, but just was.  His laugh would stick with me after the bell rang and we scurried back into the building.  Jake, my presumed sociopath had turned out to be one of my favorites, a friend even. 

5

The smell of gizzards fills a room quickly.

The smell entered into the classroom with Jake one afternoon as he walked – confidently, as always – with a Styrofoam plate loaded with fried, squishy bird stomachs in one hand and his hallway pass in the other.  I’d written him this pass a good ten minutes earlier.  Lately, he’d been taking too long on these bathroom breaks, choosing alternate routes, visiting bathrooms in other parts of the building, roaming the halls.

“Find those in the bathroom?” I asked, my eyes fixed on the plate of gizzards, trying to be mad but failing.

“Nah.  I saw my sister in the hall and she had them but said she couldn’t bring them back to class because her teacher would go off. So, she let me have them, because I knew you’d be cool.”  He popped one of the fried bits into his mouth and then closed his eyes to show his obvious ecstasy.  “We are cool, right?”

“As long as you eat them all,” I replied.

6

“You hear me?”

I probably heard the phrase a million of times. 

It was his catch phrase.  He always said it the same way: confident, an inflection in his voice that made the phrase both a question and an affirmation.  He said it in the halls as he greeted his friends.  He said it when he answered a question correctly during class.  He said it on our walks at the track.  He said it after finishing the Soulja Boy dance.

“You hear me?” didn’t require an answer, it wasn’t about that.

It would have been ridiculous to answer.

“Why, yes, Jake, I do, in fact, hear you.”

It wasn’t even about hearing, actually.  I was about noticing.  It was Jake’s way of making sure you took note of his greatness:

“I’m going to a party tonight – you hear me?”

“I won MVP this weekend – you hear me?”

“I’m going to the dance and I’m gonna dance with Dani because she’s my girl. You hear me?”

Followed by his childish laugh, the phrase didn’t make literal sense; it was a routine, a logo.

“You hear me?”  We did, we all did.

7

Around December, after a series of short romances, the details of which Jake proudly shared with me, Jake got serious with a girl named Dani.  It was inevitable they would start dating.  Jake, at thirteen, was the oldest sixth grader, a distinction he greeted with pride, with no regard to his retention.  Dani was only eleven, a typical age for a sixth-grader, but little else was typical about her.

Dani saddened me, as had I not been privy to her birthdate on my roll, I would have mistaken her for a hardened, grown woman. She was nearly six feet tall, and always cramped her curvaceous body into several sizes too small jeans.  They were so tight; they failed to even function as jeans, resembling tights instead.  The tightness continued to her torso, where she paraded her chest in brightly colored tank tops. Her face fit her body, as her skin was bumpy and her features looked hardened by decades of hard knocks.  Fake braids spouted from her head like shriveled snakes.  Her voice completed the package:  low and manly.  If I’d heard her voice without the visual of her face, I would have assumed she was a gas attendant with a nasty Pall Mall habit.

She have could easily been served at a bar and it was rumored she was easy.

Besides their physical maturity, Jake and Dani shared a similar outlook on life:  do what you want when you want.  Save for Jake’s slight acquiescence to the work in my class, they both treated school like a year-long playground, wandering the halls at will, walking in and out of classes, completing work only when necessary.  They weren’t rude or outwardly disobedient.  They were wild.

Where other students’ relationships constituted a quick hug in between classes or short phone calls after school, Jake and Dani bypassed the typical sixth grader relationship awkwardness and strode about school confidently.  When together, they seemed blissfully happy, silly, yet calm.  It was if they had a secret.

Dani figured Jake and herself married, I guess, as she wrote “Dani Jackson” on all her papers, carefully accenting the dot of her “i” with a heart.  There were stories from other kids about the things they did behind closed doors – each week a new base, until all the kids accepted as truth that they had sex daily.  Jake and Dani neither confirmed nor denied these rumors.  There was power in the mystery.

When another student chanted that Dani was a “nasty girl” in the hallway, Dani smiled, dancing to the chant, clapping her hands, raising her smile to the ceiling.  Oddly, this is the moment I chose to define their relationship:  joy amongst adversity – haters, as they would say – a world too quickly closing in on them.

I hope it was as close to love as sixth graders can get.

8

He followed my rubric to a “t:”  3 paragraphs, 3 – 5 sentences each, a hook at the beginning, a thesis statement and a question at the end.

Do you have a hero?  I do.  My hero is my mom.  My mom is my hero for these three reasons.  She looks after me, if she didn’t who else would and she supports me.

The first reason my mom is my hero is she looks after me.  She buys me clothes and when those get old or not fresh, she buys me new clothes.  She cooks me food like hot dogs.

The second reason my mom is my hero is if she didn’t look after me, who else would?  My dad left.  If she didn’t look after me, I wouldn’t have nobody.

The final reason my mom is my hero is she supports me.  She goes to my football games.  She talks to me.  She is a good mom.

These are the three reasons my mom is my hero.  She means a lot to me.  Do you have a hero?

9

I got the call as I drove alone in my car on the way back to Charlotte from a Virginia wedding.  I recognized the number immediately as my school, and on account of it being Sunday, answered with trepidation.  I figured my sloppy paperwork had finally caught up to me and I was being fired.

“Hello?”

“Yes, Mr. Freeman, this is Mr. Carr.”  My principal.  He paused, the silence heavy and somber, even over the phone.  “I’m calling with bad news.  One of your students was shot last night at a party.   Jacob Jackson.  He died.  I wanted to let you know because there’s going to be a lot of media coverage.”

I thanked him, then winced (it was odd to thank him for such news) and turned off the music.  I drove in silence through the Blue Ridge Mountains, over bridges, through bypasses, onto exits, off exits, making my way south.  The car wheels cycled on the pavement like our feet had on the track’s asphalt.  In the silence, Jake’s laugh echoed.

10

He died in the back of a car, on his friend’s lap, blood draining from the left side of his head.  He died Dani’s boyfriend, thirteen, scared, waiting for an ambulance to come.

He died, according to rumors, repeating:  “Help me!  I don’t want to die.”

He died while the boy who shot him ran away amidst a crowd of hundreds in a parking lot.  Angry about something, this boy shot Jake.

11

I was fine, as fine as I could be, as the preacher spoke, able to look up and focus on his animated face.  But when the preacher called the family up to the front of the church to say a few words, as I watched his brother make his way to the microphone, his face shadowed under his baseball cap, the price tag still dangling in front of his right eye, I had to refocus on my shoes.

“I remember just days before, before all this,” his brother began, his mouth too close to the microphone, “when we were slap-boxing in the kitchen and Mama came in and told us to quit…”  The brother’s voice trailed off.  “I wish he was here now.”

Short.  Sweet.  What was there to say?

After these words, a choir sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and I rose from my seat to sway along to the music, flanked by Ms. Wood and Rakieyah, closing my eyes and letting the sound envelop me.

Why should I feel discouraged?

Why should the shadows come?

Why should my heart feel lonely?

And long for heaven and home?

We sat.

His mother’s scream pierced through this moment.  The scream was high, then low, guttural, animalistic; the sound of millions of mothers who have buried their sons trapped in a mason jar and then released, history amplified into one horrifying pierce.  My loss was nothing compared to hers.

I sing because I’m happy
I sing because I’m free
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me

Really? Tell me how exactly He is watching over me, my sacrilegious thoughts raced, tell me how He watched over Jake.  Last I checked, someone doesn’t get shot when God is watching over them.  Tell me because I disagree.  I should have watched over Jake more because He most certainly did not.

Just when I thought the ceremony was about to be over, just when I was about to hurriedly walk to the car and finally let out the tears that were painfully resting behind my eyes, the preacher invited everyone for a final viewing.

“Come now, see Jake.  See Jake once more, once final time.  Come to the front, again,” the preacher said, his arms beckoning us forward.

“Unusual,” Ms. Wood remarked, as the crowd lazily got up and formed a new line.  Ms. Wood stood to join them.  She turned to me.  You coming? she said with her expression.

I refused to see the body twice.

The line made its way in time with the organ slowly through the church again, swaying and rocking, again, and then ultimately spitting kids out at the casket when they reached the front, again.  This time, they pulled their cell phones from deep within their pockets and snapped their final pictures.

12

Jake was dead, but he was everywhere.  In the weeks after Jake’s death and funeral,  the students wrote RIP Jake on every imaginable surface:  the desks, the walls, the bathroom stalls, their papers, the floor even. Where his name wasn’t, our sorrow was:  in my fingers as I tried to write on the board to begin class, in the slow dirge of adolescent feet tromping to the lunchroom, in the misted bottom lids of eyes.  In a sad twist of fate, the free newspaper subscriptions we had fought for delivered his image on the front page each day into our classrooms.  The headlines told the story with succinct accuracy:

“Thirteen-Year-Old Shot At Party”

“Mother of Murdered Teenager Asks Community for Information”

“Police Say Party Goers Know Identity of Killer”

“Killer Still Unknown”

How does one cope?  How does one teach sixth graders to cope?  I didn’t have the answers then and I don’t have the answers now.  That week and beyond, we coped in different ways:

“I’m mad at God because He could have taken anyone, but not Jake.  Someone else, please,” my student Montana said.  A part of me agreed.

“Sometimes, I just pretend that he’s sleeping, sleeping forever,” another student Stephanie added, clearly repeating some Lifetime special she’d recently viewed.  When she said this, I snapped at her and reminded her that, no, Jake was dead, which was different than sleeping, which we all knew.  I was snippy often.

We made cards to send to his family, full of platitudes, those words that you say because you think you’re supposed to.  We talked about our feelings, the lessons to be learned.  Clearly there was a silver lining.

I coped by drinking red wine at night and allowing myself the tears I fought during the day.  A part of me felt like a failure; it’s a teacher’s duty to protect his students, to teach them the ways of the world, to guide them from danger and hurt and, most certainly, death.  I had failed at this most basic responsibility.  I regretted the assumptions I made about Jake when I met him on paper.  I regretted not knowing what I never could have.

I wanted him back, wanted to see the curlicues in his hair, wanted to sign a bathroom pass with his name on it.  I was all I could bear to go through class each day, his empty seat a statue, a monument, a reminder that he, once more, would not pass sixth grade.

I coped by pretending, erasing the image of his black skin in the casket from my memory.   Then, one day, Dani approached me with a smirk on her face.

“Mr. Freeman, I have something to show you.”

“Ok.”  She pulled out her cell phone, perilously pulling it from the pockets of her too-tight jeans.  She pushed a few buttons and shoved it in my face, her eyes studying my face for reaction.

It was Jake, as I had only seen him once before.

Without words, I pushed the phone from my view, making it clear I was disgusted.  Dani, don’t you get it? I thought. Don’t you know?  I can’t see him like that.  I can’t see him like that because I’m holding on to something else.  I’m holding onto the idea of again, the idea that I signed him out to go to the bathroom way too long ago.  It’s getting really ridiculous actually, but he’s roaming those halls, those halls he roamed with you, smiling that smile, laughing that laugh.  Gizzards in hand, I can hear him chanting “You hear me?”