Chapter 61
Elise at ten was a reader, a drawer, a fierce and specific arguer, a student who got excellent marks in everything except the subjects she found insufficiently interesting, in which she got merely good marks and considered this a reasonable outcome.
She was interested in: drawing, architecture (a Nia influence, clearly), biology, and stories specifically stories about real things, about real people who had done real things. She was not interested in: sportsday, any organized form of physical competition, and the parts of the curriculum she described as 'just memorizing things.'
'Memorizing things is not learning,' she told Marcus one evening.
'Sometimes you need to know the things before you can think about them,' Marcus said.
She gave him the look. The full-intensity look that was his own look, reflected back at him, carrying all of his conviction.
'No you don't,' she said. 'You need to understand them. Understanding and memorizing are different.'
He looked at his ten-year-old.
'Mr. Okafor would have loved you,' he said.
She had heard about Mr. Okafor. The stories accumulated in her the way all stories accumulated in her she kept them.
'He told you not to be polite,' she said.
'He did.'
'You should tell me that too.'
'I'm telling you now.'
She considered this for a moment, then nodded as though accepting a reasonable policy decision, and went back to her book.
He watched her turn the page. His daughter, full of the specific conviction that things could be understood if you paid sufficient attention. Full of the knowledge which she had received from him who had received it from his mother that her thoughts were hers and they were valid and nobody gave them to her and nobody could take them away.
He felt something very large and very quiet in his chest.
He wrote in his journal: 'She is already more herself than I was at twenty. We gave her permission early. That is the thing. Give it early. Don't make them spend years earning what should have been theirs from the start.