I am in love. It’s not romantic love; I’m not on a real estate search; nor am I prone to rhapsodizing over the impact of a meal, concert, or play. Rather—and I can’t quite believe I’m saying this—I am referring to the feeling I am left with after spending time with a bunch of 16 and 17 year olds.
In late June, my friend, Kirsten, the principal of the Marble Hill School for International Studies in New York City, set up a Zoom call with summer school participants she had selected for my storytelling class. Over the following four Wednesdays, I would be working with a group of her juniors and seniors to begin to clarify their life stories so they would be better prepared for the essay portion of their college applications. But in addition to the two Zoom boxes containing my and Kirsten’s faces, only Amara’s popped up.
“She’s incredible, this girl,” Kirsten said as Amara’s audio got going. “Just arrived from Ghana, like, last summer.”
On screen, Amara looked quite credible, just like any other kid, long cornrowed hair and a sleepy, heavy-lidded smile, leading me to assume she had just woken up from a nap. She nodded and smiled politely throughout my spiel, and asked no questions. Leaving my house on that first Wednesday morning, I wondered if I might be left on my own in the real-world box of a classroom.
The two-hour-plus commute was ample time to adjust to the jarring contrasts between southern Berkshire County and the southern Bronx. I wound down the familiar backroads of Egremont; then west through Hillsdale’s farmland; then south on the quiet and then less quiet Taconic, still busier Sprain, still busier Major Deegan, and, finally, came to a stop at the 230th Street exit before a right turn into stop and go city driving for a half-mile. In the massive gray parking lot, in the shadow of a massive gray building, mine was one of just a handful of cars.
In room 586 on the eighth floor of the massive gray building, I was pleasantly surprised to greet a full cohort of 12 students—four boys, eight girls—taking up the chairs I had set up in a circle, but Amara was not among them. Bernadette—whose posture and head scarf brought the word “dignity” to mind—missed Amara, too, as she had apparently only come to my class to be with her friend. Ronaldo, who had arrived first, seemed to have an aversion to smiling. I had no idea what to make of Maria, who was going by Victoria for the purpose of the class. As a warm up, I handed everyone a slip of paper describing an ordinary scenario—buy milk at the bodega, trip on the sidewalk, run into someone you know on the bus—with which they were to tell an extraordinary story. This was Victoria’s cue to turn tail and stride to the back of the room in mock horror at the idea of saying anything out loud.
Winning my heart that first day with his ordinary to extraordinary story was Alberto, who came in late from Algebra with Yulissa and Matilda. “I don’t think of myself as a problematic kid,” he started out, speaking in heavily-accented English, “but then I got a letter in the mail saying that I had to report to summer school, and I had to tell my parents about it.”
“Wow!” I had said. “Nicely done setting up a conflict!”
Telling off-the-cuff stories was one thing, but I was less optimistic about the likelihood of summer school students—in the final hour of a three-hour class, having already eaten the pizza and drunk the soda they had been promised as incentive—writing something. So, for incentive of my own, I injected some controversy, asking, “Which are better, cats or dogs?” A good choice, it turns out, as they wrote non-stop for 20 minutes. Jenny, who, I sensed, had spent the class sizing me up like a restaurant critic, had the most persuasive entry. She had taken up my suggestion to argue the opposing viewpoint to the one she actually held, and so had convinced me that cats are the superior pet, for their “easiness and independence.”
Things got off to a late start on the second Wednesday, which afforded me the chance to get to know the early birds. I learned that Ronaldo moved here from the Dominican Republic before COVID and could be made to smile by being asked to decipher his own handwriting. (In our fourth class, I would learn that Ronaldo’s family slept on floors until they could afford furniture.)
I discovered that studious Soo, from South Korea, lived with her family at the same Riverdale address where I lived in 1999. Class clown Diallo, from Guinea, reiterated for a second time in as many classes that he couldn’t play soccer anymore because of his asthma, but was a very good kicker for the football team. Then he did a back flip. He never did complete a homework assignment, but he was a natural storyteller, vividly describing right off the bat a childhood in which he had escape from his mother’s furies by running across the village to his grandmother and hiding behind her legs.
Their proficiency in English was all over the place. On the homework paper of recent arrival Allan, I wrote a mini-lesson on the need to add “ed” to create a past tense verb. But certain vocabulary, I found, seemed to be universally understood. In class four, someone’s story reminded me of “resilient,” so I wrote it on the board and offered a definition. But later that same class Yulissa—who had passed three Regents exam despite only arriving in the country less than a year ago—stood up and read her homework, a love letter to her “resilient” great-grandmother.
There was a lot of unforced clapping in our class, and it was always louder when a story was infused with courage, meaning, in the language of storytelling, vulnerability. Soo received the most strenuous applause for her final story, in which she starts out ashamed and silenced, disavowing her Korean-ness because kids are making fun of her eyes, and the strong smell of her lunches. It ends years later, with her correction of a classmate. “‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not sushi. It’s gimbap, a special Korean dish. My mom made it herself.’”
And what about Amara? She had arrived an hour late for class one, was too shy to tell any story at all in class two, and didn’t make it to the third class. In fact, she waited until the final 10 minutes on our last Wednesday, when I finally dragged her to her feet to share her story, to make a believer and a speechless, crying mess out of me.
“When I came here, I spoke only French,” she told us. “I understood nothing. I got lost every time I left my apartment … The voice in my head was telling me I was stupid, telling me I sounded ridiculous.”
When our applause died down, I turned to the room and asked, “Who has a voice like that inside your head?” Everyone, of course.
It is worth detailing the setting for this revelation. The Kennedy Campus is now home to six small high schools, but the building opened in 1972 as John F. Kennedy High School. It was meant to be an “educational park,” strategically located at the dividing line of Manhattan and the Bronx in order to attract both black and Latino students from Inwood and Washington Heights and white students from Riverdale.
These progressive ambitions did not come to pass. Within less than 15 years, the city had deemed it deficient; within 20 years, it was cramming nearly 6,000 teenagers into a building meant for 4,000; and in 1995, not even one in four students left with a diploma.
The early 2000s ushered in the Gates Foundation-sponsored small high school movement, which, in New York, turned huge, unwieldy institutions like Kennedy into campuses of smaller schools. (Another Bronx high school, Walton, from which my grandmother graduated in 1927, and where the DOE assigned me to teach in 1999, was closed down for overcrowding and criminal activity in 2008.) Today, NYPD officers monitor each entrance, elevators are off-limits to students, and signs at the escalators issue warnings to those who would try to turn them off.
All of this is to say that the Kennedy Campus does not, on its brutalist face, inspire anything. Yet, I am cooking up an after-school storytelling club so I can get back as soon as possible. My experience there reminded me something I have always known, but frequently forget, about beauty. Lovely mansions—and glittery movie stars and sparkling jewelry—will mesmerize you, but keep you always at arms-length. Their beauty is inaccessible. It makes us aware of our distinctions instead of our commonalities.
The dull container holding my students only accentuated their brilliance—and our unity. In their presence, “the American Dream” is not a dried-out phrase that only politicians can invoke with a straight face. No, no, no. It is incontrovertible evidence. It is a beautiful Black girl named Amara, pulled up to her feet, standing in front of us at last, playing timidly with her long braids as she accepts our opening applause, a bashful, sleepy smile just visible behind them, clearing her throat to tell us the truth of her life.
These kids have not given up on anything, or anyone. They have not gotten the memo that resignation and discord are the order of the day. They are fresh-eyed, full of faith, fun-loving. Ready.
John F. Kennedy High School failed in 1972 to bring about its founding promise as an integrated oasis, but that is exactly what I found there in 2023. True, I was just a Mary Poppins teacher, dropping in for a moment and popping out when the wind turns. Back when I was teaching full-time in the New York City public system, I could hardly have afforded—and was in no way inclined toward—the sort of reverie in which I am now indulging. But, today, I am an outsider looking in with fresh eyes, seeing wonders I never had the time or perspective to notice. I have a renewed appreciation for the people who attempt daily miracles in a dreary setting.
At the end of my last class, I walked to the far northeast corner of the huge, empty parking lot, which was incongruously green. It was a garden oasis of trees, shrubs, and raised beds, surrounded by a tall metal fence. Inside I could hear a coop full of clucking chickens. Abundant green and red vegetables waited for hands to harvest them. The small pastel fruits of a peach tree hung over a parking spot. Three days later, I made peach cobbler with peaches not from this or that farm, but from a tree that grows in the parking lot of a Bronx high school. Who would think to build a garden there?
Hopeful people, that’s who.
