Chapter 58
He wrote the book over four years, in the margins of everything, exactly as Nia had predicted.
It was about teaching. About the specific experience of teaching in a place that had made you, as someone who had been made elsewhere and then returned. It was about what a classroom could be and what it often wasn't and what the gap between the two cost the children inside it. It was about Aaliyah and Devon and Michael and all the students in his years at Pemberton whose voices had needed permission to exist. It was about Mr. Okafor and about his mother and about Mama Vie's kiss on his forehead and about what it meant to be seen fully.
He sent it to Claudette when the first full draft was done. She read it in a weekend and called him.
'It's a good book,' she said. 'It says true things in honest language. It is going to irritate people who need comfortable things said about education. Publish it.'
He sent it to Dr. Whitfield in Birmingham. She called within three days.
'I've been waiting for this book for twelve years,' she said. 'Since your first essay.'
He found a publisher a Caribbean press in Jamaica that specialized in education and cultural writing who read the manuscript and offered a contract within six weeks.
The book was published when Marcus was thirty-six. He held the first copy in the apartment kitchen, Nia beside him, and felt the weight of it in his hands.
'Four years,' Nia said.
'All of them,' he said. 'Really all of them.'
The reviews were good. The Caribbean review establishment called it important. The education press called it necessary. A reviewer in a London literary journal wrote that it was the most honest account of teaching-as-vocation he had read since Paulo Freire.
Mr. Okafor, who had retired to a village in Devon, read it and sent a letter. The letter said: 'You were my best student. Not because you were the most academically gifted, though you were gifted. Because you understood that the point of the education was to become more fully yourself. That is what education is for. You knew it before you could articulate it. Now you can articulate it. The world needs this.'
Marcus read the letter twice. Then he folded it and put it in the shoebox.
The shoebox was very full now.
He sent a copy of the book to Leroy with a note on the flyleaf: 'For the boy who told me I was still me. You were right. Thank you.'
Leroy called when he received it.
'I'm reading it,' Leroy said.
'I know,' Marcus said.
'I'm going to finish it and then call you back and tell you every true thing you got right.'
He called back three days later. The conversation lasted two hours.