Chapter 79
The third book the autobiographical one, about being between places found its reader in ways Marcus had not anticipated.
He had expected it to be read by the same audience as the first two: educators, Caribbean academics, diaspora communities. All of these read it. But it also reached people he had not thought of: young people from immigrant families in England and America who were navigating the same in-between-ness he had navigated, who had grown up between worlds and did not have language for what that felt like.
He received letters. More letters than from the first two books combined. They came from London and New York and Toronto and Birmingham and from Kingston and Trinidad and Barbados. Many of them were from young people. Many of them said some version of the same thing: I thought I was the only one who felt this. I thought feeling between was a failure. Your book told me it was a vantage point.
He read them all. He answered most of them.
He was fifty-three years old and still answering letters, still keeping them in boxes that were now a full shelf of the study. The correspondence of a life of attention.
One letter came from a teacher in Manchester who had been using the book with her students a class of fifteen and sixteen-year-olds, many of them from Caribbean and South Asian families, many of them navigating exactly what Marcus had navigated.
'One of my students,' the teacher wrote, 'read the chapter about Mr. Okafor and said: I need a teacher like that. I told him: you have one. He looked at me. I said: you have me. And I meant it more than I had in years.'
Marcus read that letter twice. He folded it carefully and put it in the shelf.
He wrote in his journal: 'It goes further than the room. The room is where it starts. But it goes very far.'
He had first written that entry when he was thirty-one.
He believed it more completely now.