Chapter 63
He wrote to Mr. Okafor regularly had done since leaving England, letters of the proper kind, by hand, on paper, sent to the village in Devon. Mr. Okafor wrote back in a hand that had grown somewhat smaller with age but remained precise, each letter a considered thing.
In his thirty-sixth year, Marcus wrote a longer letter than usual. He wrote about the book. About the anniversary of the programme. About Elise's look that was his look, about Joseph's early moral certainty. He wrote about the teaching about what fifteen years in the classroom had taught him about teaching, which was almost opposite to what he had thought it would teach him when he started.
'I thought I would learn how to deliver knowledge,' he wrote. 'I have learned instead how to create conditions for knowledge to be received. The difference sounds subtle. It is not subtle. One is about the teacher. One is about the student. One reproduces the teacher. One produces the student.'
He wrote about what Okafor had given him. He tried to be specific not the general gratitude of distance but the precise accounting of a man who understood now, from the inside, what that particular gift cost and what it was worth.
'You saw me at a moment when I was spending most of my energy managing myself down to fit,' he wrote. 'You told me not to be polite. Those four words are the most important four words anyone has ever said to me in an educational context. Because what you were really saying was: I see your real capacity and I refuse to pretend it is smaller than it is. I have been saying that to students for fifteen years. I say it in my own words. But the source is you.'
Mr. Okafor wrote back three weeks later. The letter was shorter than usual. His health was variable, he noted, without complaint. He was eighty-one.
'You were not my student,' he wrote. 'You were my reminder. In all the years of teaching you wonder sometimes if the thing you believe in is real that education is liberation, that attention is a gift, that every student carries something worthy. You were my evidence. I needed you as much as you needed me. That is how it works, at its best. That is what you are now for your students. You are their evidence.'
Marcus read the letter at the kitchen table while Nia was at the drafting board and the children were in the other room and the Kingston morning came through the windows.
He read it twice.
Then he put it in the shoebox, which was, by now, full enough to require a second box.
He started a second box.