The Redemptive Power Of Public Education: A Story Of A Student, By Her Teacher

The front page of last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section brought back some old memories and affirmed some important truths.

The memories go back to the first day of the spring term in the first year I taught in New York City public schools, at Clara Barton High School in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. At the end of a long day, I met for the first time my final class, an 11^th year American history class. Many years earlier, the parents of the young people sitting before me had been feeling very creative in naming their children, and the students had quite a few laughs as I struggled to pronounce correctly names like Janzel and Edwidge. The last class of the day is often the most difficult, as exhausted teachers and tired students stagger across the finish line, but this class had a special personality, one that was apparent from that first day. They brought a special life and vibrancy to that last period.

This class was a powerful moment in a year that changed my life, as I found an unexpected meaning and purpose in teaching these young people. I had started teaching in September 1984 thinking that it was a job that would support me until I finished my doctoral dissertation and went on to a life of changing the world in academia or political organizing; I finished that school year believing that the work I was doing as a teacher of young people abandoned by our society – entirely students of color, largely poor and working class, mostly female and immigrant – was a calling, the work of a life well spent. Here was the place to change the world.

Dedicated teachers find themselves developing a parent’s love for their students, and that first class is like one’s first child. Even in this class, Edwidge Danticat stood out. She was a shy young woman, radiating a quiet beauty. She would speak when I called on her in class, yet she was self-conscious about her spoken words, having just learned English in the last three years, and her interventions were brief. But in her writing, Edwidge came alive in extraordinary ways. Whatever the assignment, even nothing more than homework, I would receive back pages and pages of the neatest handwriting, filled with thoughtful and insightful commentary on the great issues of American history and society. Edwidge and I shared a passion for social justice, and we conducted, in writing, a dialogue on the pursuit of that end.

In her senior year, Edwidge took another class with me. In these days before No Child Left Behind and high stakes Regents Examinations, there were opportunities to teach electives, and I designed and taught a class in African-American History. Edwidge gave up her lunch period to take the class. In my African-American History class, she read the work of Zora Neale Hurston, and saw herself in Hurston: she had already decided that she wanted to be a writer.

I wrote my first college letter of recommendation for Edwidge, toiling over it like none ever since, and she went on to Columbia-Barnard. When she graduated, she returned to Clara Barton for a visit, and when I asked her what she would do, she said she was thinking of going to business school and getting a M.B.A. A look of utter horror must have come across my face, and I can remember my exact words to this day, “Edwidge, what happened to your writing?”

In the end, Edwidge was true to herself, and went to Brown University for a Masters in Fine Arts in Writing. She began to publish stories, and then a book, Breathe, Eyes, Memory, a coming of age novel in her native Haiti which was featured on Oprah Winfrey’s book club. A book of short stories, Krik Krak, quickly followed. Works on Haiti, Haitians in the American diaspora and life as an immigrant in America [The Farming of Bones, Dew Breaker, Anacaona, Behind the Mountains and more] followed. Edwidge has edited several collections and written introductions to many classic pieces of literature by African-American women novelists, including an introduction to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God which talks of how she first read that book in an African-American history class at Clara Barton. She has acquired a host of awards for her writing – she has been a National Book Award finalist, an American Book Award winner, and a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist.

As the years went by, as I became the father of three young African-American girls, and as they grew older, I shared with them my growing collection of Edwidge’s books. The powerful images, the evocative prose, the brilliant accounts of life as a girl, the underlying dedication to a better world now inspire them, as they have inspired me. My student has become, in very real ways, the teacher of my daughters.

Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge’s latest book, is the work reviewed on the front page of the Book Review section of the New York Times. It is the story of her father and her uncle, who raised her in Haiti for the first years of her life when her parents first moved to the United States and had to leave her behind. Among other things, it tells how her Uncle Joseph, a Baptist pastor and school principal, fled Haiti in 2004 when endemic violence finally claimed his church. At 81 years of age, departing his native Haiti with his life’s work in ruins, he arrives in the United States with a valid tourist visa, but because he thinks he may stay longer than he had originally planned, he asks for “temporary asylum” – with no idea how his guileless honesty will be understood by the Department of Homeland Security. He is taken into detention, and collapses during his interview, vomiting. The medic decides that he is faking, and he receives no treatment. He dies the next day.

The fate of Edwidge’s Uncle Joseph makes this teacher feel shame in what was done in the name of this nation, of the same visceral sort that so many of us felt as we watched the scenes of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But there is solace to be taken in the fact that he did not die a silent death, that there is an Edwidge to tell his story. She calls us to see the injustice that was done, as a necessary prelude to preventing more wrong. In this 2007 Fathers Day op-ed in the New York Times, “Impounded Fathers,” Edwidge writes of the injustice done to so many families stripped of their fathers because of the ways in which our nation’s immigration policy is being implemented, post 9/11.

There is, I think, a tale of American redemption here. At the same time that our nation is capable of visiting wrongs upon Edwidge’s Uncle Joseph and his loved ones, it has given rise to an Edwidge to tell his story. This is a tale, in no small part, of the redemptive power of public education in American democracy – of public schools that took in an immigrant adolescent who knew no English and sent out into the world a young woman who, even at this early age, is a master of the written English word. It is because of those public schools and their teachers that her written words now tell us where we went wrong, and provide a vision of how we might make it right.

We often hear narratives of the failures of public education, told by those who never spent a day in the schools that teach our Edwidge Danticats. Her accomplishments put those narratives in proper context, and remind us that the ability of American democracy to redeem itself lies in a thriving public education.