“I…” Lina squashed her emotions and again affected a deep concern. “I am so sorry to hear Mrs. Jacovitch isn’t feeling well.”
“You’ve been hired to teach art, Miss Lina. And if I remember correctly, one can usually make art in silence.”
Mrs. Romano turned away toward the papers on her desk, and though Lina would have liked to run a red marker over the education certificates on the wall, she instead lifted her cheeks into a smile nearly as cloying as Mrs. Romano’s.
When she got back to her classroom, Lina bit her lip and watched her next class tumble in. She wondered if the kids would accept the idea of a talking stick: only if you’re holding the silver marker can you speak.
She skipped lunch to clean the classroom. Seventh period, she descended to the auditorium for the First-Year Faculty Orientation.
“Don’t worry too much about your training. You will certainly know more than the kids,” said Dean Bianchi. “Most of them are illiterate, and most will be incapable of earning more than Cs.”
Lina dug into her purse and popped a caramel in her mouth—to gum up her teeth, so she couldn’t say anything. With these old teachers and supervisors still in the buildings, community control was off to a snailish start.
The striking teachers returned after two weeks, having gained salary and benefit increases. Yet for the rest of the year, on any given day, it appeared that half the faculty had the flu. Or teachers would arrive late, complaining they’d missed the bus from Canarsie, Midwood, or Nassau. Lina often heard them gossiping in the lounge about thedecentralization experiment: they didn’t like seeing so many parents in the school building; they thought Rhody McCoy, the local superintendent appointed by community leaders that summer, was unqualified for the job.
After Christmas break, almost a fourth of the faculty and administration disappeared from J.H.S. 271; they’d requested transfers out of Brownsville. And good riddance to them, Lina thought. If they didn’t want to teach Brownsville’s kids under the direction of Brownsville’s community leaders and first Black superintendent, Brownsville didn’t want them either. Superintendent McCoy hired a new principal for J.H.S. 271 and a number of replacement teachers.
One was Mr. Parson. A Black man from Chicago, he had taught history in Harlem before arranging his own transfer to Brownsville, and he and his wife had bought a house on the Ocean Hill side of the neighborhood and were quickly making themselves part of the community.
When she had a free period, Lina attended Mr. Parson’s history class. He was teaching the eighth graders about the kingdoms of ancient Africa, the Harlem Renaissance, the sit-ins down South, and the Black Panthers in Oakland. Mr. Parson did not tell his students which way was right, only that there were many possible paths to liberation, each of which must be properly understood and assessed.
It was her first time considering the idea of a separate Black Nation within the United States of America. On some level she liked the idea, but if African Americans had their own nation, on which side of the border would the Puerto Ricans live?
Later, Mr. Parson dedicated a whole two weeks to Puerto Rican history, and it was during that unit that Lina realized not only her father, but her mother, too, descended from Africans, at least partially. She also learned about the maroons, the movement for Puerto Rican independence, and Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. The day Mr. Parson described the genocide of Native peoples, she got up to close the classroom door, afraid that Mrs. Romano would fire Mr. Parson on the spot.
“Sir, I’m just looking out for you,” she explained after class. “We have some supervisors here that I know would take issue with the stuff you’re teaching.”
“You don’t need to worry like that.” He leaned back in his seat. “Principal Harris knows who I am and how I teach. This is an unprecedented moment. No use wasting it.”
She went back home and thought about Mr. Parson’s words all evening, inspired by him, and frightened. Her pride in her people, Black and Puerto Rican, was like her love for women: kept in the closet.
On parent-teacher conference night, one of the neighborhood activists ran down the third-floor hall. From her classroom, Lina saw him whip past and mistook him for a student. She poked her head into the hall to scold him and then realized it was George Furman from the Brownsville Community Council, and that he was dashing into Nick Parson’s classroom.
“The King.”
It took a moment for everyone to understand. Then he told them where and how, and the significance of each fact reached them, and everyone began to break down.
Lina didn’t need to hear the radio. She believed it, was not surprised, and she was gripped with that all-too-familiar rage, the one that had sent her, at eleven years old, walking all the way to the docks to find answers on the night the cops had killed her father. She embraced every student within reach. Their bodies hung limp like wilted plants in her arms. Principal Harris came onto the loudspeaker and announced the rest of the night’s conferences canceled.
Lina ran into Nick Parson on the stairs, and he gave her what she needed most: an invitation to the Parson home in Ocean Hill, and an umbrella to share on the walk there. She didn’t want to be in her apartment that night, reminded of the hate of the world by the orange mold on the bathroom ceiling, the inconsistent hot water,and the boarded window, which, more than eight months since she’d moved in, Mr. Wong still hadn’t repaired. She intended to move out as soon as the school year ended.
In Mr. and Mrs. Parson’s house, they watched theABC Newsreport on the little TV.
“Here in Memphis, of course, a great deal of shock, a great deal of confusion and some violence, I can’t say a great deal because I don’t really know…” one newscaster said. “There is some rock throwing and some fires recorded and some shooting… The full curfew has been imposed…”
“Turn it off, Nick,” said Mrs. Parson. “The white man won’t tell us anything new.” She was a buxom, deeply black woman, and the oldest woman Lina had ever met who wore her hair natural.
“Tell us what you are feeling, Miss Lina,” said Mrs. Parson.
Lina closed her eyes. “Like I always knew it would happen.”
“This is what I’ve been trying to say,” said Mr. Parson, his eyes on his wife. “It’s not about asking to be loved.”
It was around then that the sounds began in the street. Above the gush of rain, they heard wailing and cursing, then the shattering of glass, the drowned-out protests of someone’s mother.
Lina put her forehead against the window glass and saw young brothers hurtling toward the avenue. She recognized one of her students, Derek, an older boy who’d been left back; he was charging down the block, a rag-stuffed bottle in his hand. Without an umbrella or her coat, Lina pushed the front door open and dashed down the street.
“Derek!” she shouted, running toward him, catching him, grabbing his arm. “Where you going, Derek?”
