Chapter 11
Mr. Okafor taught English at the secondary school Marcus moved to at eleven, having passed his entrance exams at the top of his year group. He was a Nigerian man in his early forties, tall, with a precise manner and the kind of calm that Marcus had learned to recognize as the particular calm of people who have been tested and have not broken.
He noticed Marcus in the first week. Not in the way that teachers sometimes notice the bright child with that particular hunger to have one's own expertise validated by an apt pupil but in the quieter, more respectful way of someone who sees someone else seeing things.
"You," he said one afternoon, stopping beside Marcus's desk during an essay exercise. "You write as though you're trying not to be seen. Why?"
Marcus looked up. He was not used to being addressed this directly by teachers.
"I don't know what you mean," he said.
"Your sentences," Mr. Okafor said, not unkindly. "Each one is correct. Each one is careful. They don't take up any more space than they need to. That is good discipline. But it is also" He considered. "a kind of hiding. Writing can be the place where you take up space. Do you understand?"
Marcus thought he might understand. He wasn't sure.
"Try again," Mr. Okafor said. "This time, don't be polite."
Marcus looked at his essay. He thought about what he actually wanted to say not what was correct, not what was expected, but what he actually thought and felt and noticed.
He wrote for the rest of the period without stopping.
Mr. Okafor read the revised essay after school, standing at his desk, while Marcus sat in the front row waiting. The essay was about the mango tree in the yard in Arnett Gardens. About what you could see from the top branch. About what it meant to have a place that was yours in a world that didn't have much space to spare.
When he finished reading, Mr. Okafor set the pages down.
"Good," he said.
Just that. But the way he said it as though the word had weight, as though it meant something specific and earned was enough.
Marcus started writing seriously after that. Not just essays. He began keeping a journal, like his mother, though he didn't know then that she did the same. He wrote about school and about Auntie Beverley and about things he observed on the bus and about memories from Kingston that arrived without warning the smell of the yard in the rain, Mama Vie's hands on his face, the sound of Leroy's laugh.
He wrote to understand what he was living through.
It worked, imperfectly and necessarily, the way writing always does.