The Fugitivities, стр. 4
On paydays, Jonah and Isaac walked to a new soul food joint on Franklin Avenue, run by a West Indian woman who had anticipated the changes coming to the presently less gentrified parts of Crown Heights. Isaac was offended by the lack of white bread stuck to the bottom of his wings, but the sauce wasn’t bad, and over drinks they talked politics and traded gossip, arguing fiercely about the importance of various music critics they had, in reality, only just discovered.
In the dark on the walk back, they’d swagger, partly on account of the rum and sugar, but also because they felt the eyes of the battered neighborhood watching, and even though not a finger or even a holler was ever raised in their direction (although occasionally it seemed it might happen, and plenty of adventurous white kids, especially white girls, had gotten robbed in the area since their arrival), they knew with unspoken certainty that they were alien to these corners and that no amount of Garveyite pleading would ensure their safe passage should things take a different turn.
Early in the mornings, hungover or not, they left the apartment together, walking in hurried silence down to the subway station at Grand Army Plaza, where they split with a nod and took trains in opposite directions. The subway platform was quiet at those hours, and it wasn’t uncommon to have to wait fifteen or twenty minutes before an arrival. The inbound trains coming from East New York and Flatbush on Jonah’s side were always packed with black and brown faces. White folks started boarding in numbers just one stop farther in the Slope. The cars were so packed by then that they were often left stranded at the edge, with their wet hair slicked, earbuds in, staring icily at the compressed accordion of bodies. But before the crunch, in that precious time before the thundering clatter rolling up out of the tunnel announced itself, Jonah would head to the abandoned stretches of the platform where he could sit on the last bench (unless a homeless man was slumped there) and feverishly compile notes about the previous day in a teacher’s journal that the school administration had recommended he start keeping.
In his first weeks as a new teacher, the thing that struck Jonah most about the students were the tattoos. They all had them. Gangs, he’d figured at first, or the usual rituals of adolescence. Boyfriend-girlfriend, signs and blessings for courage, fearlessness, spirituality. There were plenty of those. But they were not the most common ones. Those were the markings of death. Names and nicknames of friends, schoolmates, brothers, sisters, cousins. One of them Jonah recognized from screen-printed T-shirts he had seen students wearing in the hall. The face, name, and lifespan of a kid who must have been sitting in a classroom with whoever had filled Jonah’s role the year before. This grim reaping, everyone agreed, was nonetheless a measure of progress. Things were far better than ten years earlier, in the terrible early nineties, when the death count had been much higher and even the school’s principal of twenty-six years, Mr. Daly, was shot and killed in a burst of crossfire while out looking for a student who had been bullied. R. J. 1982–2000. Wade Never Forget 1980–1997. Antoine 1984–2004. Krystal R.I.P. in Heaven 1985–2001. Jermaine Noah Howard 1980–2002. The most beautiful, and the saddest, inked along a forearm in tightly bound cursive simply read, “Peace To All My Brothers Who Passed Away.”
Teaching was, among other things, a high-wire act. Jonah learned to walk the wire, often by falling painfully from it. The hours of instruction sometimes felt like battle. Something about the collective charge of restless minds made endings, no matter how calculated, feel sudden and abrupt. The students rushed back out in a vortex, a few strays always lingering, sometimes out of curiosity, or kindness, oftentimes for protection. There was no silence like that of the classroom when one stood at the desk alone, wiping down the blackboard, gathering one’s papers in a quiet shuffle.
The long commute home from Red Hook required a transfer from a bus, since the trains didn’t run there. When Jonah got home, he often found Isaac as drained as himself. They’d barely be able to speak to each other, unless to relate what often sounded like war stories. Jonah hadn’t necessarily expected his job to be what it was, but now he was knee-deep. Almost without realizing it, he spoke more to himself than to anyone else, and he did so in the pages of his journal. The weeks passed, and as he grew more practiced in the form, more accustomed to the rhythms of his own mind, the number of pages scrawled in haste every morning on the subway platform multiplied. So much so, that, more than once, he looked up in a jolt of panic to see the doors jamming shut in his face.
Lesson planning helped, but it could not save them. That was the conclusion that kept resurfacing in his notes as the days began to resemble each other more than they differed. He held a pivotal but tenuous role in the lives of the kids who came to him from the housing projects that sat between the long-defunct waterfront and the elevated tracks over the Gowanus canal. A stabbing incident involving a transfer student less