Less Important
Why they had our kids come for a seven am class I never knew–so few actually showed up. But I enjoyed the early start time. I taught the 5th- to 7th-grade reading level, which I considered the sweet spot at Frederick Douglass. Students had the vocabulary to write some, read some more, but the high school equivalency exam remained a few years off–we focused on the literacy skills in this class; we focused on the issues at hand.
During the first five days of school that year, two students showed up everyday, Keisha and Anora, two Trinidadian sisters, 18 and 20. They were joined by Sharon and Irie, unrelated but both had stopped going to school in Jamaica at about the same middle-school age and both were now 18. I drank my coffee, had a cheap little CD player to play some very mellow jazz, and read the Times until I could hear the kids walking up the four flights of stairs. The classrooms themselves couldn’t have been more beautiful, double-paned and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking lower Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn, even bits of New York Harbor. With the early light coming in, I’d feel optimistic about the day, my students, my life, my writing, even my romantic prospects. Life is usually better in the morning.
When the girls came in, I shoved my paper in my ragged briefcase and got out the journals and pens I had bought with the small chunk of change the city gave teachers to buy supplies. First thing, the five of us wrote, or, on that morning, Ceejay and Mohamed, also from Trinidad, had shown up, seven of us worked busily, quietly, with Miles Davis playing in the background. Everyday, we’d start writing on one of three topics which I posted on the chalkboard–give students choices, I had learned in graduate school, so I gave choices—and when they couldn’t think of anything else to write, they could change to another of the topics or simply empty out what occupied their minds. Write about anything. Just write.
On that Tuesday, though, all six kids came on time, which made me proud of them, as I knew that early morning arrivals taxed them something fierce. Because the students had immigrated to the United States, I chose immigration as the topic. The previous week, we started with five minutes of writing. The day before, Monday, I had upped the time to 10 minutes.
1. Who in your family chose to immigrate to the United States and why? Did you agree with the person who decided to immigrate?
2. Which do you like better, your home country or where you live now? Why?
3. What kinds of things do immigrants have in common? What are some differences between immigrants?
I went over some of the vocabulary I wanted them to try to use, immigrant, immigration, homeland, home country, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, cousin, environment, neighborhood. By that morning, during journal writing, they could use profanity and didn’t need to worry about grammar.
We sat in a circle writing–in grad school, they told us to read when the students read, and write when the students wrote. So that’s what I did. There may have been a prohibition against serving coffee to high school students, but in the first years of the new millennium, no one at the Frederick Douglass Literacy Program seemed to follow many of the New York City Education Department’s rules–a benign neglect under which Frederick Douglass and it’s 200 overaged and under-skilled students toiled in order to pass the high school equivalency exam, except for the few that would also go on to college. So I brought in a coffee maker and some of the kids poured their own every morning, stirred in the non-dairy creamer, added spoon loads of sugar, and fastidiously cleaned up after themselves.
I had taken one class getting my teaching degree that addressed adolescent literacy–I had only taught for two years previously before that day. And in that class I took in grad school, the professor and one of the books we read stressed the importance of ritual. Get your students practicing language every day: writing, reading, speaking, and listening. Seemed right. So after they wrote, we went around the circle and read. Everyday. I thought that would be a tough ask, but after the first day of school a week before, the kids–who were barely younger than me–complied.
Irie means good and friendly, he said on the first day, when we wrote about our names, although that was all he wrote. The next day, he wrote that he was also half Jamaican, which is why his father named him Irie. He impressed me. We had been in school for only five days that year, and his writing got longer everyday. Irie liked to read his writing out loud; today, he wanted to go first.
“Some immigrants are punk-ass bitches.”
Although they could write about whatever they felt, the red in his eyes and furrow in his brow surprised me. He didn’t look at me, but he looked at each one of the other students. I had been sailing along writing my own response to the immigration prompt, happy that I had six whole students so early in the morning, drinking my coffee.
Ceejay, however, matched the mood that Irie brought in. “Who you calling a bitch?”
I hadn’t thought Irie had targeted one group of people. Rather, I thought Irie liked to provoke. He did like to provoke, but this time, he had an agenda.
“You. You and the other rassclaat Trinis. ”
And just like that, at seven thirty five in the morning, all that beautiful sunlight and optimism that had filled the classroom–new starts, new beginnings–had lost its sheen and became gray.
Both boys stood up. Mohamed stood up. Sharon stood up. Keisha and Anora looked at each other and crossed their arms.
“Hey, hey.” Now I stood up. “Come on, let’s sit down.” I could feel the sweat start in my pits and on my head. No one sat, including me; Keisha and Anora stood up also, although they moved very close to one another.
“Irie. Let’s walk back that statement a little. It seems hostile and angry.” My words sounded wooden.
Irie, although still a teenager, had a full beard and bright, active eyes. “We’ll be seeing you, you know where.” He turned, nodded at me, and left the classroom, his feet quickly and noisily trampling down the four flights of stairs, almost like a drum beat. Then silence, and finally we could even hear the bottom door open to Putnam Street and slam shut.
Who were “we?” And where was “where”?
“Do any of you guys know what he was talking about?” No one said anything, and then Sharon grabbed her hoodie and made the same exit, also nodding, giving the rest of the kids a sturdy stare, bordering on the same hostility that Irie had.
“Excuse me? Can someone tell me what is going on here?” No one did, and the students, I guess bonded in some way by country of origin, looked meaningfully at each other. Recognition. Just for a moment. They gathered their things too, dark colored book bags, light sweaters and purses, and they started leaving. “Hey! What are you doing? You can’t just leave school.” But they did, all but Ceejay. In my two years at Frederick Douglass, nothing like this had ever happened.
“Ceejay. Can you explain to me why everyone else just walked out of class?” I noticed my descent into heavy breathing and my voice sounding tight and high pitched. Ceejay looked amused.
“It isn’t you, Mister. It has nothing to do with you. Trinidad and Jamaica. That’s why they dipped. It’s about heart and blood and revenge. You’re a good teacher, Mister. But you’re not more important. Less important.”
Revenge for what? Then Ceejay walked a little closer to me. “Mister. I want to show you something.” He moved the bottom of his long and open hoodie so I could see the brown butt of a gun. He turned the heat up, and at that, I began sweating even more.
“What?” My voice sounded high pitched. “What are you doing, Ceejay?”
“It’s mine. Protection. You stay inside, Mister. You okay. But you can’t fight this fight for us. You can’t do anything.”
What do teachers say when a student flashes a gun at them? What do they do? There must be a protocol or a correct response or even helpful words, but I didn’t know any of them. Suddenly, I felt so unuseful, so completely naive and stupid. And scared, although I knew Ceejay didn’t bring a gun to school for me.
“Ceejay. You could be arrested for bringing a gun into school. You know that, don’t you?”
He smiled at me, and, taller, brought his hand down on my shoulder warmly, his pudgy smile showing all his teeth. I felt like a child. “Bless up,” he said.
He left the way the other five kids did, and I sat down, but immediately stood up, then sat down, then got back up and walked over to the coffee maker, and realized it had been emptied. I knew schools had a procedure for teachers to leave in the middle of the school day, but I didn’t know those either as I never had. I followed the kids down the stairwell and out the door, not to go find them, but to walk to the Jamaican cafe down the block. How can you be a teacher if you have no one to teach? Seven forty five now, I looked at my watch. I needed to get a cup, and return for my next class in 10 minutes, which has also had a low turnout. I didn’t put on my jacket, just walked shirt-sleeves the one block to Frenchman’s Cove, didn’t make small talk with the owner, and walked back, shaky. Were the Tridadian kids going to fight the kids from Jamaica? Why would they do that? Would they shoot each other? Would they hurt each other? What would happen to Ceejay, to the sisters, to Irie? The trees on Marcy Avenue had a full complement of leaves, maples and ash, not really fall yet at all, the end of summer. Warm, but strangely, no cars driving up and down the street. Just warmth on my skin and a testy anxiety in my belly.
As I walked down Marcy to Putnam, I heard some yelling, and turned my head left, on Putnam toward Nostrand Avenue. I saw none of my kids. But I did see a crowd, a dozen boys, maybe, 15, kicking someone on the ground in the middle of the street there. There was a boy in that street, fallen and grunting. I saw one very tall boy–I guess I should call them young men, for they had the bodies of men–stand the other young man up from the ground and then punch him in the face, his arm reaching back and, in his white tee-shirt, land a blow with such force that I heard it like a pop. The sound sickened me, made me nauseous. I opened my mouth but nothing came out. The fighters started pummeling the stricken boy, body blows, and to his face. They wore shorts and sneakers, sunglasses, and flags over their faces. I didn’t know the fist against a human could make such sounds. I expected a dampened thud but the fists sounded so much sharper than that, a sound that rang up the block to where I was standing, bouncing off the extra ornate and old red-brick high school building.
For the second time that day, I didn’t know how to respond. I had the convenient thought that Ceejay spoke the truth, that this was not my fight. The boy went down again and the kicking started. Would he die? Would they kill him?
I ran. And felt worse for it. Down Marcy Ave into the official teacher entrance, by the school security officer, who was reading a New York Post, and then up the stairs, my heart beating with indecision and panicked confusion. When I got to the classroom, I locked the door, turned the CD player off and the lights out, although the overhead lights hardly made a difference with the morning in full bloom.
What a shielded person. What a stupid, inexperienced man. Of course teenagers fought each other. They always had, in high school all across the country, everywhere. That’s what teenage boys did. “‘Heart and blood and revenge,’” Ceejay had said. What did I know of it? It was not my fight, I kept repeating to myself.
I sat there in the empty classroom. No one in my second period class came in either. Eight o’clock. Eight fifteen. Eight thirty. Eight forty five.
I heard the plane crash into the first tower, which sounded like a bomb going off, or what I imagined a bomb sounded like, an explosion. But I felt too overwhelmed by the events right here in Brooklyn, so I did not look up.
Fiction by Garth Wolkoff
Garth Wolkoff is a writer living in Brooklyn. He has a daughter, a job, and a coffee pot. He has published work in the Indiana Review, Downtown Brooklyn, Mr. Bull, and 86 Logic. He was a finalist for the Fractured Lit Winter Fast Flash Challenge, second place in the 2023 Fiction Potluck on the Writer’s Workout website, and has a story coming out in Every Day Fiction.
