Chapter 66
A Second Book
He began the second book when he was forty-one. It was different from the first less personal, or rather personal in a different register. The first book had been about his own experience as a lens for understanding teaching. The second was more directly about the Kingston Voices Project: what it had done, what it had not done, what the attempt to build community-based educational spaces revealed about the gaps in formal schooling.
He wrote it with the same patience he brought to everything slowly, carefully, revising extensively, testing each claim against what he actually knew rather than what he wished were true.
Nia read it chapter by chapter as he produced drafts. She gave him feedback in the precise, unsparing way she gave feedback on everything not unkind, never unkind, but absolutely specific. 'This paragraph is performing concern rather than analysing it.' 'The argument loses its nerve here.' 'This is the truest thing in the chapter lead with it.'
He revised every time. She was always right.
The book was published when he was forty-three. It did well in the academic press it was the kind of book that got assigned in education programmes, that was cited in policy documents, that made its way into the reading lists of teacher training courses in Jamaica and Trinidad and Barbados and, eventually, England.
He was invited to speak at a conference in London. He went it was his first time in England in eight years. He took the train to Wolverhampton and walked through the streets he had walked at nine and ten and eleven and fifteen and felt the strangeness of a place that had shaped you and which you had outgrown, but which remained part of you precisely because you had grown through it.
He stood outside the house on Elmwood Crescent for a few minutes. The garden was different. Different curtains in the window. Beverley's house, someone else's life now.
He felt her clearly.
He walked to the canal path he had run along for six years. He ran it once more slowly, in good clothes, not caring. The grey water and the grey sky and the willows trailing and the cold that was not tropical but that was, somehow, still home in the way all places where you have been made are home.
He flew back to Kingston and told Nia about it.
'Did you need to go?' she asked.
'I needed to check,' he said. 'That I'm still from there. That it's still in me.'
'Is it?'
'Yes,' he said. 'All of it. Every cold morning. It's all still there.'
'Good,' she said. 'It should be.