Chapter 75
The Kingston Voices Project at twenty years was a different organization from the twelve-student Saturday morning programme it had been.
It served three hundred students annually across eight schools. It had a full-time director a young woman named Amara who had been through the programme as a student at fourteen and who had come back to run it at twenty-eight, which was, Marcus thought, the most complete confirmation possible of what the programme was for. It had five facilitators, a proper board, a funding base that included government grants and private philanthropy and the continuing committed support of Leroy, who had remained as treasurer for twenty years with the same total commitment he brought to everything.
It had also, without intending to, created a community: a network of alumni who had stayed connected across the years, who mentored new cohorts, who published and taught and built things and sent their own children through.
The twenty-year gathering was held in a new space a proper community arts center that had been built partly with advocacy that included Marcus's work and that Nia had designed the interior of, which was not a coincidence so much as a characteristic of the way their lives had been built.
Marcus did not give a long speech. He thanked the people who had made it possible Claudette and Patrick and George (who could not come, at eighty-nine, but sent a letter that Marcus read aloud); Mrs. Baptiste, who came in her retirement; the students who had become the thing he hoped.
Then he said the thing he wanted to say: 'The tree does not forget the soil that held its roots. You are all roots now. For the students who will come after. What you do with what you were given here that is the programme continuing. I cannot run it for you. It runs forward on its own now. That is how it was always supposed to be.'
Amara, beside him, was crying. She would be embarrassed about it later. He was quietly, privately moved by it.
He went home and sat with Nia in the kitchen with two cups of tea.
'Twenty years,' she said.
'Twenty years.'
'Well done, Marcus.'
He held his cup.
'Well done us,' he said. 'You designed the building. Leroy kept the accounts. George kept us honest. The students did the work.'
'Well done us,' she agreed.
They drank their tea in the warm evening and the Kingston sky outside the window was doing what it did.