Chapter 27
The letters between Marcus and Leroy had, over the years, evolved from the news-sharing of childhood and adolescence into something more substantial: a correspondence between two men thinking seriously about the same world from very different positions within it.
Leroy had left school at sixteen not from failure but from circumstance; his father had become ill and the family needed him to contribute and had worked in construction and then in logistics and had, by the time Marcus was in his final year of university, started his own small courier business in Kingston that was growing steadily, run with the same total commitment and uncomplicated loyalty that Leroy brought to everything.
They wrote long letters. Marcus wrote about education policy and what he was learning about how schools shaped children's expectations of themselves. Leroy wrote about Kingston the changing neighborhoods, the politics of the street, the way certain boys he knew from childhood had found themselves in situations that felt inevitable but weren't, the way that the world seemed to have decided certain futures before certain boys were old enough to choose.
They had, without formally naming it, developed a shared project: a way of thinking about what communities owed to their children and what children owed to their communities. Neither of them had studied sociology. Neither of them used academic vocabulary. But they were circling the same truths that Marcus was reading about in Freire and hooks and Bourdieu, approaching from the ground rather than the page.
In one letter Marcus wrote: 'I keep reading about what education is supposed to do for children from places like ours places without resources, without what they call cultural capital. The writers say school can either reproduce inequality or challenge it. I keep thinking about Miss Morrison and Mr. Okafor. They challenged it. Not by pretending the inequality wasn't there, but by seeing us fully anyway. That's what I want to do.'
Leroy wrote back: 'That's what you're already doing. Even in a letter. You just told me something true and I felt seen reading it. That's teaching.'
Marcus kept that letter at the front of the shoebox.
There were other letters that year from his mother, always practical and warm; a rare letter from Winston, his father, which arrived out of the blue and which Marcus read three times trying to work out how he felt about it, concluding that he felt nothing in particular, which was itself a kind of peace; a card from Mama Vie's granddaughter saying that Mama Vie had passed in February, peacefully, at eighty-three, with all her signs and prophecies intact.
He sat with that news for a long time. Mama Vie had pressed a kiss into his forehead before he left for England at nine years old and told him he was strong enough. He had been. He hoped she had known.
He wrote in his journal that evening: 'The people who shape us are not always aware of their power. Mama Vie believed in signs and prophecy and she was right about some fundamental things not because of prophecy but because she looked at people and saw them whole. That is its own kind of sight.'
He read the entry to Tunde over the phone. Tunde was quiet for a moment.
'You should teach that,' Tunde said. 'What you just said.'
'I will,' Marcus said.