Chapter 38
He met Nia at the Friday writing group in the sixth month of his second teaching year. She arrived with Claudette the poet, who introduced her as 'the sharpest person I know, and I am the second-sharpest person I know, so that is saying something.'
Nia was twenty-four and from Kingston originally, though she had spent three years in London studying architecture. She had come back, she said, because she had a theory about Caribbean cities and she needed to test it in the actual place.
'What's the theory?' Marcus asked. They were in a corner of the yard with their plates, the rest of the group's conversation a warm ambient sound around them.
'That we keep designing cities for other people's idea of what a Caribbean city should look like,' she said. 'For development money. For tourism. And the people who actually live here end up in the margins. The informal settlements, the yards that's where people live, that's where the actual city is. But it's invisible to the official architecture.'
'That's essentially the same thing I think about schools,' Marcus said.
She looked at him. 'How?'
'The official curriculum is designed around a version of the student that doesn't match the actual student. The real student the one who grew up in the yard, who has a specific cultural knowledge, a specific vantage point that student gets made to feel like they're in the margins.'
She was quiet for a moment, holding her plate, considering. Then: 'So we're talking about the same problem from different angles.'
'Maybe,' he said.
They talked for the rest of the evening. He walked her to her bus stop. They exchanged numbers because there was clearly more conversation to be had.
That was how it started. Not dramatically no single moment of certainty, no cinematic declaration. Just a recognition, slow and clear, that she was someone he wanted to keep talking to. And underneath the talking, something else building, careful and real.
He told Leroy in a letter. Leroy wrote back: 'It's about time. Tell me more.'
He told his mother on a Sunday. She set down her sewing and looked at him with the full precision of her attention.
'What's she like?' Diane asked.
'She's sharp,' he said. 'She's honest. She sees things from outside in. She makes me think differently.'
His mother picked up her sewing again. 'Good,' she said. 'Those are the right reasons.'
He watched her sew for a minute.
'You're not going to ask anything else?' he said.
'Not yet,' she said. 'Bring her to Sunday dinner when the time is right. I'll learn everything I need to know from one Sunday.