Straddling the division between Kansas City’s predominately black East Side and the white, bourgeoisie Hawthorne Plaza Shopping Center stands the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. A beacon of culture in this cow town, it stands with Ionic columns on a formidable lawn. The building was built in the midst of the Great Depression, erected in 1933. One can’t help but wonder at how inappropriate it was to build such a mockery of abject poverty — an ostentatious art gallery, originally housing private collections of the wealthy.

On the building’s limestone facade, an elaborate relief is engraved. The carving depicts the “March of Civilization.” White families in covered wagons leave the East, and pioneer Westward toward opportunity. Funny how well this metaphor ties to the inevitable white flight that would occur along identical migration patterns within Kansas City only two decades later, migrations that left the East Side a relic of past wealth, a Miss Havisham’s wedding cake of a neighborhood.

Rolling along the East Side of the lawn are the Bloch buildings, a contemporary addition to the Nelson. Unveiled in 2007, these buildings are frosted glass illuminated cuboids. They line the side of the sculpture garden, bequeathing light upon the East Side, in a detached severe modernity

Roughly eighteen months after the Bloch buildings’ glowing cubes were first illuminated, I began taking students to the Nelson each Saturday morning. Initially an attempt to strengthen relationships with students, it quickly became apparent that the same three students — Rayquel, Devinay, and Linda —wanted to attend every Saturday. We made a routine of it: first the library, then the museum, and finally, Winsteads, the diner, for lunch.

Each Saturday morning, the girls will begin to call my cellphone. “Ms. Boody, when you comin’?” As every other day of the week, I will cross town in a silver Corolla. Linda likes to be picked up first. Her house is a crumbling shirtwaist in a decent part of town. She lives in an inherited home; her mother is an aging alcoholic. The water gets turned off regularly. For some reason, there’s always a mountain of dirty children’s clothes and toys in the dining room. Linda’s been held back twice. She has a heavy lisp, and is quick to “jump a motha-fucking bitch.”

Devinay lives down the street from Linda. Devinay is a quiet girl, a responsible student with practiced, neat handwriting. New to the school, she transferred in from a high-performing suburban district after her mother lost her job and was diagnosed with cancer. By all estimates, she’s expected to be proficient on this year’s state exams.

Rayquel is a Goliath of an adolescent. At 5’5”, her skin is a true dark ebony with a shaved head; her shoulders have the breadth of a linebacker. Because of her size, her clothing clings to her body as if it’s wet. Hanes Her Way panties always hang out the back of her uniform pants, held up with a twine rope. A natural born leader, she has the power to move a classroom for good, or collective rowdiness.

“Y’all be quiet, I wanna hear what happens to Ponyboy,” she yells at her talkative reading class, while puffing her chest out in aggression, as she slams herself down in front of The Outsiders. Her classmates follow suit.

“This nigga is triflin’,” she says another day, while flipping a desk over and cajoling the rest of her class to stampede out of the classroom to witness a fight.

She has two younger siblings, and three older ones. Her mom is pregnant again. She has a brother in prison. She can be found around the neighborhood, faithfully making sure her little sister has a jacket on, that her little brother is in school uniform.

Rayquel will sit next to the other two girls in the middle of the austere, white art gallery. Across from her is a Fairfield Porter painting The Mirror. The painting depicts a little girl, dressed in red, staring at the viewer. In the background, a faceless man stands, appearing to paint the girl. On the mid-century black leather bench, she says to the painting, “Look at the man standing behind her. Look, his face is blank, the little girl is staring, she’s looking past him, like she doesn’t see him. Do you think that’s why his face is blank? Because she’s not focusing on him? Because he’s not really there? Do you think it’s her daddy?” The other two girls offer their quieter observations of the painting.

As we enter the diner for lunch, I ask my well-rehearsed questions:

“What did you like best?”

“What did you learn?”

Two of the girls will talk about the furniture in the Victorian era rooms. “The couches were so fancy.” I listen as we order milkshakes at the diner.

“I liked the giant Buddha.”

“I liked the Chinese temple room. All the red.”

“I like the sculpture with the macaroni hair,” Rayquel says.

We repeat this ritual almost every Saturday for the year.

Two years later, Rayquel calls for a favor. Her family has lost their house. They’ve moved back into the projects. A year ago, her new little brother was born. Her mother has fallen ill. They can’t afford school supplies. She wants to know if I can help. I pick her up from church and take her shopping. I buy her a book on the Plaza. We vow to have a book club. We text back and forth for a while. We become Facebook friends. For months, I silently observe her over-sexualized posts, her typical teenage self-portraits, her references to getting high. I don’t know how to address them.

Months pass and I propose that Rayquel help out with some yardwork at my house. She comes over, and we pull weeds on the side yard, while making small talk. She speaks about how she’s a better student now. “I quit startin’ stuff,” she acknowledges. She loves going on errands; eventually she starts coming over practically every Saturday. We go to a particular lawn store out South in the suburbs. Rayquel looks out the window while we drive. “Ms. Boody, are these mansions?” she asks. We’re driving past a post WWII sub-division. Identical ranches with beige siding, and sprawling green lawns.

“No, Rayquel, this is just the suburbs,” I respond.

She nods.

Now attending one of the city’s most notoriously low-performing and violent high schools, Rayquel talks about how she wants to be a lawyer. Once she’s a lawyer, she’ll move out to the suburbs and buy a house with a pool.

We pass by the middle school I went to. It’s an enormous building, with a nature trail wrapping around its grounds, and a glass encased library. The middle school where I taught Rayquel was a windowless concrete box, with leaking ceilings.

Rayquel asks, “Oh, Miss Boody, what do you have to do to go to a school like that?”

“Nothing anymore, it’s closed,” I tell her.

“But it’s so nice,” she says.

“It is. Almost brand new.” I say.

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“It’s not.”

We get to the garden store. Rayquel is partial to roses and columbines. We discuss the difference between annuals and perennials.

Two weeks later, we find ourselves back at the museum. Walking through the museum chronologically, we discuss the polytheistic nature of ancient societies. We spend a lot of time in the ancient Egypt section. We discuss dates and pomegranates, symbols of fertility.

Eventually, we climb the winding stairs to the Indian art exhibit. We find ourselves staring intently at a 13th century sculpture of Shiva Nataraja, the god of death, destruction, and creation. In one hand, the dancing Shiva holds a drum, signifying the beat of life, creation. In the other hand, he holds fire — destruction. He stands atop a dwarf, symbolizing his triumph over ignorance. I explain the symbolism to Rayquel: Life and death are part of a cycle. The only way to transcend inevitable death is to triumph over ignorance, says the placard under the statue. Attached to the statue is the figure of a snake, seemingly about to strike the dwarf. Rayquel asks, “What is the snake?”

“What do you think the snake might symbolize?” I ask.

She shakes her head, looks at me.

“What do snakes do?”

“They kill,” she pauses. “Oh.”

This time we leave in a hurry, late for a commitment. We rush out the ornate iron-clad doors of the museum. We quickly walk to my brand new red Honda. We speed past the “March of Civilization,” and return to the East Side.

Photo courtesy of Frankphotos

Photo courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Images

Mr. Treo has a habit of sucking his teeth, or rather the empty spaces where teeth once were. Fiddling with an omnipresent toothpick, he scrapes it back and forth in the empty spaces. He wraps his tongue around his front tooth, sucks again loudly, then clears his throat. He’s wearing a pull-over sweater and work out pants; his feet are propped on a library table.

Leaning forward he mumbles, “You know what I say, Boody? What these kids need?”

He pauses, sucks a tooth, and snorts.

“What these kids really need?”

I shrug to indicate my ignorance. Once again, my late arrival to the weekly staff meeting has offered me the last seat available in the library, a seat next to Mr. Treo.

“Discipline. These kids need discipline.”

I nod. If I’ve learned anything these last few months, it’s that a strong, confident head nod can convey my docile agreement.

Still, Treo leans in close, eyes watering, “You know what word is in discipline, don’t ya, Boody?”

This time I nod in the negative. He leans closer.

“Disciple,” he whispers. “Think about that.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“Karma, Boody. It’s all about karma.” He moves his eyes back to the meeting’s agenda.

By this point in the school year, staff meetings have devolved into raucous revival events. Led by Minnie Walker, principal and preacher’s wife, we stray far from agendas, but not without peppering each of Ms. Walker’s statements with a perfunctory “mmhmmm” or “amen.” Not much is accomplished, but morale is uplifted as Ms. Walker paces the library aisles, heels kicked off, affirming that we are, indeed making a difference in “these children’s lives.”

Today’s agenda has involves analyzing student achievement data and monitoring their preparedness for the ever-impending state tests. On the overhead projector, Walker places graphs of past test scores. Vague discussions of data ensue. Most stay quiet, as we look at the embarrassingly low achievement figures. According to the graph, more than 90% of our students are performing below their grade level.

Schools are their own ecosystems. Each individual staff member carves a niche for him/herself. Treo, for instance, is a kindergarten teacher, turned track coach, turned social studies teacher. Protected by tenure, he’s been transferred to seemingly every school in the district. His file cabinets contain sand, gym socks, and old crossword puzzles. Posters of Frederick Douglass and Barack Obama 2008 campaign signs are stapled to the bulletin board outside his classroom, along with the phrase “women’s rights.” In his middle school social studies class, students learn Sudoku, play craps, and watch Amistad. Whenever an administrator or another teacher walks by the doorless classroom, Treo shouts, “John Brown!” This is the signal for students to grab the closest textbook and turn to page 343, which does in fact contain a passage on the infamous abolitionist.

Ms. Walker shakes her head disapprovingly as she reviews the data.

“We can do better,” she says. It’s hard to discern if she’s being encouraging, or trying to convince herself that the possibility exists. She gives general advice on how to improve test scores.

“Keep your eyes on the kids.”

“Give them lots of opportunities for students to discuss.”

“Don’t use too much paper; students should not be sitting there doing ditto sheets.”

The chorus chimes in with the requisite, “mmhmmm,” and “I know that’s right.”

I nod, in docile agreement.

Across from me, Treo interjects, “I think it’s the parents. No discipline in the home. It has to start in the home.”

Walker waves his comment off.

“I know these kids know the stuff. I know they know it. We’ve raised these kids since kindergarten. We just got to teach them how to show that they know it.”

In the classroom across the hall from me is Ms. Crocker. An aging white woman who wears a uniform of track suits, she teaches computer skills. Renowned for her classroom management techniques, she starts each class by lining the students outside her door, inspecting the kids for gum, chips, or anything potentially distracting.

“Get your cotton-pickin’ selves in line,” she says, as students line up single file, heads hanging.

She has a limp, and hobbles through the classroom giving students both praise and harsh admonishments. She ends every class by having the students circle around her and reviews their behavior. I can send her my misbehaving students during class, and she’ll take them under her wing without complaint. She coordinates the school-wide technology services, she volunteers to do cafeteria duty, she arrives at school before 6 in the morning, every morning.

“Don’t you worry about any of those district people, and those tests,” she says. “It’s always changing, always changing.”

Over the last forty years, more than two dozen superintendents have cycled through the Kansas City, Missouri School District. Under the high-stakes testing enacted under No Child Left Behind, Kansas City’s schools overall have shown no improvements; instead, their failures have just been made more obvious. However, there’s a small whiff of reform in the air. After all, it’s fall of 2008. Michelle Rhee, a Teach for America alum and education reform superstar, takes over Washington D.C.’s notorious public schools. As George W. Bush’s term comes to an end, educators wonder what will the ultimate fate of NCLB will be. A new, young enigmatic school board member has been elected. The school district is currently led by an interim superintendent, searching for a new leader. Barack Obama is running for President. Change is possible. Change is coming. It’s been all but promised.

“I just know we can do it,” Walker says, pacing the library’s aisle. Staff members are idly popping the obligatory snacks in their mouths, nodding.

“We can raise these scores. We just got to come together as a team, a real team.”

Treo pipes up again, “These kids aren’t going to learn anything without that discipline.”

Walker shoots him a look. “We’re not going to talk about that,” she says.

Treo changes the subject. “How about we use some of them questions off of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Make learning fun? That’s what I’m talking about. Those questions are like test questions.”

Walker goes on.

Ms. Erikson stays late after school every day, prepping lesson plans. She makes copies, adjusts lesson plans, and rearranges her room. She’s been teaching third grade for two years now, and she’s still struggling with student misbehavior. Behind closed doors, Walker will tell you that “She’s a yelling person. She struggles, she struggles.” A newly engaged white woman in her mid-twenties, Erikson talks in the copy room of worrying about job security.

“I want to have a baby after we get married, but I’m always worried. My review last year wasn’t very good. And with the test scores… I just want help,” she says.

Walker is gaining momentum.

“I just know we can do this, don’t y’all think so?”

“Mmhmmm,” the staff hums.

“I just got so many good feelings about this school year, everyone working so hard. We just got to work together now, we just got to work together,” she says.

She points back to projection on the wall.

“We can change this. We can make history. I can feel it.”

She replaces the transparency with a new one. One that reads our progress so far this year, based off of a predictor exam. Little growth is apparent, but the graph does prove that there is some small amount of growth.

“See? We’re going up?” she says, with a clap.

The staff nods in agreement.

“Is that you, Ms. Boody? You really standin’ out there on my door step?” Donald, my most despondent sixth grade student, coos though the closed door.

I’m standing next to a bench press held together with duct tape. I imagine Rodney, from the picture I saw in the paper, lifting weights here days earlier. I wonder if the duct tape holding the windowsills together comes from the same roll as the tape wound around the barbell. Malt liquor cans are splayed across the porch.

“You really came to my house? Drove all this way to my house?”

Donald’s voice shifts its direction toward the inside of the house.

“Ma, I said it’s my teacher!”

The door unlocks, and Donald peers through.

“Well I’ll be damned, a teacher come up on in my house. Well come on in,” he says, gesturing for me to enter.

Six months earlier, I remember six months earlier, complaining about how much fog covered the bay of my college town in the springtime. I would grapple with the intellectual dilemmas that we discussed in class — I studied metaphorical extremes existing in texts, good vs. bad, light vs. dark. I was searching for some sort of middle ground, a way to subvert the divergent dichotomies.

It was these kind of musings that made me an ideal candidate for Teach for America. I was a forward thinker, well versed in obtuse theories, likely able to thrust open the doors of opportunity to America’s impoverished youth. A keen intellect, coupled with a steel work ethic and brawny resume can, when applied correctly, solve the pervasive problems of poverty. So Teach for America says.

The door opens into the living room. In front of me is a coffee table; behind that, a leather couch covered in woven blankets. Donald, chin up, has changed out of his school uniform and is wearing saggy sweatpants and white socks. He smiles, tilts his head back, “Ma, I told you my teacher was comin’. She’s here!”

Mrs. Williams emerges from the back of the house, holding a plate. She mumbles a scratchy hello, and delivers the baked chicken and green bean dinner upstairs to an invisible husband and father.

She returns to the couch, dressed in faded leggings and an oversized sweat shirt, legs crossed, a Kool appears lit on her lips, and she smokes while looking blankly at me.

“I’m Ms. Boody, Donald’s teacher.”

She nods, “Yes, of course. Make yourself at home. Donald’s always been a good boy. It’s just been hard lately.”

We speak in vague terms — in sweeping euphemisms, really — about Donald’s erratic behavior.

“He’s still having trouble making it through classes,” is code for Donald screaming “Shut the fuck up” and flipping over a desk after I introduced the concept of a number line.

“I think he might need some extra support,” becomes a nice way of conveying Donald’s insistent calls of “Everyone is fucking dead to me.”

Donald keeps things light hearted during the conversation.

“We really shoulda had you over for dinner, Ms. Boody.”

“Do you watch football?” Donald asks, off hand.

Mrs. Williams points a narrow finger to a mantle behind the big screen television. She looks considerably older than I imagined Donald’s mother would look, almost a grandmother.

“Those was my babies,” she says, pointing at pictures on the mantle.

Past more windows tethered together with duct tape is an erected shrine atop the mantle. Pictures of Rodney are surrounded by candles and “sending our condolences” cards. A handmade collage of photos, tagged with “Rodney, R.I.P.”, acts as the backdrop.

“You know, the first one was hard enough, but two? I’ve lost two babies now. It’s hard to know how to go on somedays.” She lights a second cigarette.

I notice, propped on the shrine, several pictures of a baby girl. Donald proceeds as if his mother is not there.

“I had a baby sister. She died in her sleep last year. In her crib upstairs. You know what SIDS is?”

The way he asks is both curious and malicious. He says SIDS with a particular over-pronunciation of the s.

We go on talking. According to Mrs. Williams, Donald listens to his older sister. Maybe I should call her, she suggests.

The whole thing ends in an even emptier conversation.

“Let’s keep in touch,” are the hollow words we exchange as Donald lets me out of the door.

I’m mortified he’ll see my own mother in the Nissan across the street. She has insisted on following me. I am embarrassed of my mother’s unwavering support. I’m embarrassed by our Japanese sedans. They seem to be taunting Donald’s family with their middle-class reliability; no matter what happens in the universe, we will be alright. We will be fine.

“You never know what kind of situation you could end up in, you know, over here,” she had cautioned when I objected to her tailing me.

I remember my mom picking up second jobs to pay for ballet lessons and, later, my college tuition. She helped pay for studying abroad, an out-of-state education. I would email term papers home for my dad to edit. He would make generic corrections for spelling and grammar. As the years went on, his comments on the content became limited; he would say, “I don’t understand half of what you write about anymore.” I would continue to write, anyway, proving or disproving theories in textualities.

Outside, it is typical of late fall Midwestern days. The sky is overcast. My car’s iPod is reeling through my school week playlist — TV On The Radio, PJ Harvey, MIA.

I think of college. I remember six months earlier, my preoccupation with finding liminal spaces in every text. Liminal translates roughly in Latin as “threshold.” In laymen’s terms, it’s simply what sways in between extremes. It’s not undefined, like a straight line dissecting an axis; instead it’s less static, more vague. It’s that fragile point that simultaneously refuses the extremes of white and black, while inhabiting the middle.

Liminal is the median — the space that lingers with intentions of subverting absolutes, instead ends up defining them.

In beautiful Bellingham, the sleepy town where I went to college, I wrote frivolous papers on liminal spaces. Perhaps today in Kansas City, I found it — this fragile thing we experience between life and death, and in between words that carry any meaning.

Photo by Yuma Hori

Donald Williams is an eleven-year-old wannabe player. Nattily dressed in his pressed uniform shirt and navy slacks; he has ultra-confidence and a razor sharp wit. Even at four feet tall, his ghetto stroll is a refined dance that floats him from school bus, to school entrance, to cafeteria seat, as he saddles behind a lonely looking sixth grade girl in the cafeteria during breakfast, and skillfully shoulder-leans his way into her conversation. He is as adroit with all three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic), as he is with making middle school girls blush.

This morning, I am perched in the doorframe of my doorless classroom, clutching a cup of coffee while mumbling my obligatory “good mornings” at the children, as they run from the busses to the cafeteria for breakfast. Two weeks into the school year, I’ve developed mostly positive relationships with students. I say “good morning.” The kids smile back. Some give me hugs. Everything is becoming routine.

Donald saddles down the steps and comes straight into my classroom. Deferring breakfast, he beelines to the back of the class. Something is off. The swagger, the stroll, the grin are all gone. He sits quietly for a few moments, and after I somewhat absently greet Donald, I continue the the sing-song “good mornings,” belted aimlessly into the hallway.

“Why don’t you go on and get breakfast?” I ask.

“I don’t feel like it.” Donald says.

I ask him if he’s okay.

“I said I don’t feel like it.”

By this point, Donald’s entire body is tightly wound, his face a scowl, exaggerated by his gap toothed overbite. I walk toward him carefully, gripping the coffee cup in my left hand. My right hand reaches out toward him, in a reticent attempt to comfort.

A final prod: “Donald, you can tell me if something is wrong.”
Donald sticks his chin up at me, while scrunching up his nose. His eyes narrowed.

He breathed in deeply, and spit out a shrill, chilling “fuck!”

He now stands, and with his full-on thug swagger restored, he walks across the classroom screaming a litany of his favorite four-lettered.

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck all of you!”

With this, he walks toward me. His head falls, his eyes sink deeper, and all forty-some inches of him collapse in a pile surrounding my legs. He shoots out an arm that grasps my waist. Pressing his face into my knees, he sobs uncontrollably. At this moment, students begin to flood in, quietly watching the spectacle with an unusual quiet acceptance of his erratic behavior. I look around for help. I’m surrounded by eleven year olds.

I crouch down and pick up the puddle that is now Donald. Kneeling close to his face I ask him what’s happened. Donald collects himself, wiping tears, and begins strutting his now highly affected pimp stride through the classroom. He puffs his tiny chest out, and sticks his chin straight into the air. A little rooster, putting on a show.

“Didn’t you see the news? Didn’t you watch the fucking news?” Donald asks.

I must’ve missed it. Since beginning teaching, I had been busy reinventing the term “workaholic,” logging on average some 17 hours a day. I changed my homepage to The New York Times for the simple comfort that if a major world event did in fact occur, I hopefully would notice the headlines before logging in to my email account.

“Rodney. Rodney Williams, did you hear about Rodney Williams?”

I don’t know who Rodney Williams is, or why he is so significant. A father? Brother? Cousin? Friend?

In a moment of clarity, Donald composes himself, stands straighter. Looking at me calmer now, he simply says, “He’s gone. He’s fucking gone.” Donald collapses again, my waist and slacks his pillow. Donald’s favorite four lettered words are sobbed into my knee caps.

I go on attempting to teach math class, reading, and homeroom. Donald refuses to leave my classroom. He sits through three consecutive, identical math classes, attempting to follow along for a little bit, before the collapsing, wailing, and cussing.

During my planning period, I search for the local news article about Rodney. Rodney was murdered last night, outside his family’s home. Donald was there. Rodney was Donald’s older brother.

Only a few weeks into the school year, it had been made painfully clear that the administration did not care for teacher “complaints” about student behavior. I decided to notify our principal of what has happened anyway.

Minnie Walker, a black woman in her late sixties, is a long-winded Christian woman who has been “saving lives” in the inner city for over forty years. Always immaculately dressed and coiffed, she wears the master set of keys for the school around her neck. Her way of speaking is circular, a pattern that undulates between an emphatic preaching of the gospel and the recurring phrase, “We save children’s lives here. Their lives.” I tell Mrs. Walker, matter-of-factly, what has occurred, “I think Donald might have seen his brother die last night. I think he might need some help.”

Mrs. Walker looks thoughtful, shakes her head, and replies, “Another one? Yeah, these kids see a lot. That’s too bad, another kid gone. But Donald feels safe with you. Let’s leave him in your classroom for now.”

“All day?” I ask. Selfishly, I’m horrified just thinking that I might have to endure weeks straight of waist-hugging, fuck-screaming Donald.

“Just for a few weeks, until he feels a little more… acclimated.”

I ask if there’s someone he can talk to. Mrs. Walker refers me to our school counselor, Mr. Smitts. Smitts is a balding white man who wears an oversized Chiefs jacket paired with acid-wash jeans and a fanny pack. He’s consistently equipped with a Bluetooth piece hanging off his ear. He is never seen without a giant Quik Trip mug. I coax Donald to come with me to meet with Mr. Smitts. Initially, Donald refuses. Eventually he agrees, as long as I stay with him during the session. So we enter Smitts’s tiny office. The dark, cinderblock office has only two chairs. Smitts takes his own chair, and looks at Donald and me, trying to determine who to seat.

“Well Donald, are you going to offer the lady a seat?” Smitts says.
I decline, but Donald insists, half smiles, says “ladies first,” and slumps against the wall, legs straddled to the side.

Smitts begins the session, “You know, I’ve recently lost a brother too.”

Donald immediately begins to narrow his eyes and glare at Smitts. Such an angry young boy.

“No, you didn’t just lose a brother,” Donald snarls at Smitts.

Smitts, clearly a middle-aged man in his fifties, looks down to Donald and explains to him that he had indeed just lost a brother, to a long fight with cancer. He tells Donald he understands what it means to lose someone.

Donald stands.

“You don’t understand shit,” he screams. This time, I agree with Donald, as he regresses into one of his fits, arms again locking themselves around my waist. His head is thrown back. Sobs. We leave the office. I feel defeated. Smitts simply shrugs.

We continue this pattern for weeks; Donald has periodic tantrums and rarely leaves my classroom. Eventually, the middle school team of teachers persuades him to attempt going to his other classes, and he slowly returns to a normal routine. His erratic tantrums, though less frequent, don’t completely disappear. Instead, the grief no longer shows, the same sense of loss and misunderstanding. No more tears and hugs. In their place, a deeply rooted anger takes hold. The kind of anger that masks the wit, the flirtation, the smirk that once defined Donald Williams.

I speak with Mrs. Williams on the phone several times, expressing my sympathies. She always talks in a fragile, brittle voice, and seems genuinely grateful that someone has called. She promises each time that when she finds a ride she will come up to school to check on Donald, encourage him to do better. She never arrives. Frustrated, I call her and ask if a home visit would be more appropriate. She agrees.

Several days later, I am heading to the Williams’ home. My mother, a social worker nearby, agrees to follow me, just in case. From the school’s block, we travel farther east, farther into the blighted belly of the East Side. On the drive, I think about the rumors I’ve been hearing about the Williams. Other students call Donald’s mother a crack head. Veteran teachers in the building warn me about her unpredictable demeanor. “She can be a handful,” they caution with a nod and a hushed tone in the hallway. I again think about her friendly voice, her enthusiasm over the phone. The house, tall and blue with a sickly porch, is a typical midwestern shirt-waist, a pre-WWII Kansas City family home. I walk up the stairs and knock on the door. I hear the muffled sounds of a TV inside. Donald’s voice is shouting repeatedly, “Ma, it’s my teacher.”

Photo by massmatt

“Hello class, my name is Ms. Boody. Like Boo-ty, but with a d.” I inhale, then exhale. “You have exactly one minute to laugh.”

My declaration rings out coolly, and I can feel it barreling down the rows of the classroom. With each passing desk, the hilarity and absurdity of my name gains strength and momentum. The students, at first slumped and inattentive, are now upright, facing forward, focused on me. “Did this teacher just say her name is boo-ty?” has become a sincere expression on their small faces.

My right thumb bears down upon the “beep” button of the kitchen timer, signaling the beginning of this unusual introduction. Twenty-some students of C.A. Franklin’s inaugural seventh grade class continue their stare. Some of their serious tight lips begin to turn upward into sly smiles, as they internalize the meaning of this teacher’s name. I pace the aisles of the classroom, with an affected scowl and upright posture. I make direct eye contact with each student as I pass.

“No middle school student can escape my gaze,” I think, though I am knowingly baby-faced, and uncomfortably stuffed into an unflattering Ann Taylor navy blue power suit. I always thought I would never wear navy. Navy is the color of the hideous pumps with the thick unflattering heels my mother always insisted on wearing. Navy is the only color one can’t match with black.

Vigorously flat-ironed hair, a look that takes painstaking effort that I rarely exert, and newly bought rectangular rimmed glasses feel like a prop as they frame my twenty-one-year-old face. The whole look screams that this is my first “real” job.

After a few seconds, the students’ alert and hushed attentiveness wears off, and they begin to respond with giggles. A few laugh out loud. Shaking my own insecurities, I continue my glare in stride. “Ms. Boody,” is written on the chalk board behind me in cursive scroll and colorful, pastel chalk.

I dare them to make fun of me: “That’s it?” I prompt. “That’s all you got?” I tease, continuing my now methodical pacing of the aisles. The students’ voices meet my heckles. “Get it out now,” I provoke. I’m becoming more comfortable with the serious tone my voice has now assumed. Slowly, the students’ taunts begin to build, to undulate, and swim into a soft churning murmur of the word “booty.” A chant of “booty” builds. I look around. Some students stay quieter, whispering the name repeatedly, shaking their heads. Seconds pass. Some students begin to bang on desks, seized by fits of laughter, and overtaken by the word. Some stand yell, scream, point, and proclaim, “Miss Booooooo-tayyyyy!” According to the kitchen timer, this cry lasts ten seconds.

The booty chant changes route, and students force the chant into a chorus of various booty songs.

“Shake, shake, shake… shake, shake, shake… shake your booooty, Mrs. Boooooty.”

“Booty, booty, booty, booty, booty, rockin’ everywhere!”

“Hey, you, Miss new Booty…”

Thirty seconds still remain.

The songs begin to recede. Students begin to look self-consciously around the room, checking to see if others are still high on the booty hype. More and more students sheepishly redirect their gaze toward the fraying carpet. Guilt begins to set in. One student, a serious boy with the charming demeanor of a politician pipes up, “Y’all, this ain’t right. This just ain’t right. She’s our teacher.” Other students, impressed by his integrity, speak up in agreement, “Yeah, y’all. This ain’t right. It’s just a name. It really ain’t that funny.” The booty calls subside. A few diehard booty enthusiasts carry on with booty songs, sung quietly to themselves.

“You all is just childish,” a final girl says, arms crossed and lips in a pout. Her statement silences the class. Her words of disapproval create a beautifully, uncomfortable silence, one that turns class’s collective gaze back toward me.

In one proud moment, my name has attained a rare power — the power to inspire laughter, jeers, admonishments, and finally, respect. In one minute, I, a suburban reared college graduate of the Pacific Northwest, was able to make an impression upon students from Kansas City’s notorious East side. And I think to myself, with twenty-some twelve-year olds‘ eyes fixed upon me, expressing a genuine sense of both curiosity and mistrust, “Now what?”

By the time I moved back home to Kansas City, it appeared that Kansas City’s East Side had refused any kind of meaningful progress. With its clapboard houses, blighted blocks, and dismal school district, the East Side is American Southern segregation, re-imagined for the twenty-first century. While Downtown and the West Side have undergone dramatic revitalization, the chasm between the city’s very well-to-do whites and abject, minority poor has become an elephantine gorge. Grocery stores carrying fresh produce cannot be found for miles; obesity and drug abuse reign; property values bottom out, all while homicide rates soar. This world — the world of EBT, evictions, and the neighborhood crack head — is the only world that these students’ upturned eyes have ever known.

I grew up fifteen minutes away from the East Side in a suburban subdivision of mirrored split-level houses. I went to a high school with the best golf team in the state, with classmates who were heirs to fortunes, drove brand new Escalades, and spent their evenings rubbing elbows with Brandy-breathed executives at country clubs. My own family wasn’t as wealthy, but were well-educated and respected in the neighborhood.

The students in front me carry a rightful distrust of any outsider — in fact, they carry a rightful distrust of simply anyone else at all. They are aware of the rift between us. So they jeer. They laugh. They yell, scream, shout, sing and then finally stare at me. They are waiting to see what I will introduce, promise, lie about, falsely assume, and fail to mandate as the course of the school year unveils. My name in the suburbs never got more than a snicker.

The funny thing is that the only training I’ve received at the point is five weeks of team-teaching Mexican-American immigrant children in an outdoor campus school nestled in a Phoenix, Arizona trailer park. A Teach for America corps member, I attended a teaching “institute,” or boot camp, where I was more or less brainwashed into believing that my enthusiasm and lesson plans alone are the antidote to poverty and injustice in America. Now here I am, with all five weeks of pedagogical training, a crash course on the injustices of the American public school system, and a degree in English Literature and Dance, facing these children. In an irony of all ironies, I’m expected to teach them math.

Now that I have their full attention, I prompt students to open the manila folders I had meticulously color coded and prepared the night before. I direct them to take out the first piece of paper, a bright yellow document titled “student contract.” We go over the rules of the classroom — the non-negotiables, the consequence system. I explain that I am their math teacher, but will also be teaching a homeroom class and a reading course on the side. I explain that I have high expectations, and that if we all vow to work really, really hard that we will all be on-grade level, college bound, and reach our dreams. I enthusiastically explain our class motto, which I also spent hours cutting out of giant construction paper and plastering on the Pepto-pink cinder blocked wall: “Dreams real big, goals real big, effort real big, results real big” (a lyric from a Big Tymers song).

The school lacks real walls, and instead has ’70s cubicle partitions to separate classrooms. Classrooms do not have doors. There are no windows in the entire building, save for a bulletproof plastic partition at the front door, manned by a security guard. The school, formerly a kindergarten through fifth grade center, has now added a middle school with fifty-minute class rotations. The principal forgot to make a bell schedule, or order a bell system for that matter. Copy paper is rationed out by the administration. Students arrive at school with no school supplies, no pencils, nothing. Only 4% of students are testing on grade level. Several students are close too being illiterate. One student can only write his name, misspelled. In contrast, the school I went to fifteen minutes away, boasts an Olympic-sized pool, private tennis courts, and two libraries.

Despite all of this, I share my goals and aspirations with the students. Amazingly, they receive them excitedly on this first day. They allow themselves to believe me, to listen. The period draws to a close, and I collect the small assignments I’ve given to the students, the get-to-know-you surveys, the name tags. Class ends, and I usher in a new class. I inhale again, thumb pressed to timer, and introduce myself.

“Hello class, my name is Ms. Boody…”

I think I’ve started this first day off right; we’ve seemed to find one common denominator — the word booty.

Photo by the U.S. National Archives