A Child, Lying on the Ground

There is something about teaching that stays with you.  I think it's because teaching is such an intimate thing (sorry, former students...not trying to squick you out.)  You learn so much about your students through the work you assign and the discussions you have in class.  You learn about their families and their hobbies and their hopes and fears.  Watching them come into class, you learn about which girls they think are cute and which boys they are afraid of.  You learn about how they hold their shoulders when they are happy or confused.  You learn which ones have hair-trigger tempers and which ones will cry at national disasters.  It is sometimes a one-way relationship, because they, as children, are too busy trying to figure out how to become an adult to pay attention to the ones trying to help them do so.

If you're an English teacher, as I was, you learn even more as you assign journal entries and you discuss literature, because literature, at its heart, is about the human struggle.  Literature is about good versus evil, almost always, even if it looks like it's about two teenagers in love, or a family trying to own a home, or life in a concentration camp.   You learn details about your students that hurt your heart ("Please don't tell anybody, Mrs. Ray.  He doesn't mean it...") and that make you wonder how they make it into your classroom each day in one piece.  You learn what they feel about the way the world works and why they feel that way.  You learn that even the boy who towers over you, who has been shaving for years, who pushes people into the lockers as he passes, has a soul that is incomplete and needful of so many things to finish it.  You try to pour in as much goodness as you can.  You try to teach stories and poems that give a view of the world that is not as dim as the reality in which they live.  You find stories and poems that they can use as stepping stones out of the tumult of their world.  You love them, most of them.  You try to love them every day, even when they are absolutely unloveable, because they are not finished yet, and you know this by their actions and the words they turn in on crumpled paper.

I taught future (and even current) criminals.  I taught children that frightened me, sometimes, because they were bigger than me or angrier than me.  I taught children that stood over me in rages and called me ugly names, children who ran out of my classroom crying over my policies.  I'm not going to lie and tell you that I adored those children, but at the end of the day, what kept me coming back to the classroom to deal with them is that I had it fixed in my head that they were kids:  incomplete, full of possibility, my responsibility because I had made it through the process and was being paid to help them through it.

I've seen my former students on Crimestoppers reports.  I've seen them on arrest reports and once, to my horror and eternal sadness, I saw one on a news story about a man who was killed in a nearby town.  "He isn't a man, " I thought as I sobbed over the kid who asked me if I liked frogs during a serious discussion about the political ramifications of political and social prejudice.

But he was.  He was a grown man, responsible for his choices and unprotected by his elders who knew he wasn't finished.  He was finished, my former student, in more ways than one.

And that is why, I think, that the Trayvon Martin case hurts me so much.  It isn't that it has highlighted (yet again) how very far away we are from any sort of society in which color of skin is used as an excuse or impetus or cause, even, for discussion.  It isn't that it has highlighted (yet again) the questions of guns and crime and responsibility that our country has never answered suitably for everyone.  It's that a child was killed.  A child was killed by an adult, in a situation in which there was no plausible reason for the killing.

Yesterday, accidentally and to my complete horror, I saw a picture of dead Trayvon.  He was a skinny thing, bless his heart, all long legs and long arms.  He was unquestionably dead, his smooth face and blank eyes empty of everything.   There was no hint that he was a thug, as some people have labeled him.  There was no hint that he was an angel, as some people have labeled him.  All potential that he had, every future Trayvon he could have been, was gone, bled out of him.  What he would have been, what he might have been, what he actually WAS--thug or angel or just a regular teenage weirdo kid--was lost.

In the end, all of that stuff was erased for me by the fact that what I saw in that picture was a child, lying on the ground.

A dead child, lying on the ground.  And in his face, I saw all of the boys I taught as they stumbled toward manhood.  I saw my own boy.

And I wept, once again, for what was lost.