Chapter 32
By the end of the first term, Aaliyah had given Marcus four more stories and an essay that she described as 'not for class just because I had to write it.' The essay was about growing up in her grandmother's yard in Kingston, about the sounds and smells of a shared space, about the way poverty was not the defining characteristic of a life but one of its conditions one condition among many, including love and creativity and the particular richness of communal living.
Marcus read it and thought about his own early life and his mother's notebooks and Mr. Okafor's permission.
He wrote on the last page of the essay, in the wide margin: 'This is excellent. Publish it.'
She knocked on his door after class the next day, the essay in hand.
'Publish it where?' she said.
'There are youth literary journals,' he said. 'I'll look into it. But first will you read it aloud? To the class?'
She looked at him with the expression of someone who has been offered something they want very much and are not sure they're allowed to take.
'It's personal,' she said.
'The best writing always is,' Marcus said. 'That's not a reason not to share it. That's the reason to share it. People recognize truth.'
She read it to the class the following Thursday. Twenty-eight students in Year 10, most of them from backgrounds not unlike hers. When she finished there was a silence not the silence of indifference but of recognition, the silence of twenty-eight people hearing something that reflected something true about themselves.
Then a boy at the back said: 'That's exactly what it's like.'
And the room opened up. Students started talking about their own yards, their own grandmothers, their own particular textures of growing up. Marcus sat at the front and let the class teach itself for twenty minutes, asking occasional questions to deepen the direction, watching the room with the quality of attention that Mr. Edwards had identified as his gift.
After class, Aaliyah stopped at his desk.
'Thank you, sir,' she said.
'Thank yourself,' he said. 'You wrote it. You read it. You were brave enough.'
She half-smiled still calibrating, still not fully sure what to do with genuine encouragement.
'Do you really think I should publish it?'
'I think you should write three more first,' he said. 'And then yes.'
She left. Marcus sat in the quiet classroom and felt, precisely, the thing he had told his mother about: the room. The girl. The reason.