In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Thug-Life Sonnets
  • Heather Kirn (bio)

Jerrell Smith was humping everything in sight. I knew the question well. "Jerrell, why are you out of your seat?"

"Sharpen my pencil." He raised his yellow stub proudly to prove he had one, and having one was a feat I should praise. Yesterday he hadn't brought a pencil. He'd brought only what he'd worn—his jeans that sagged into bunches at his ankles, a crisp, black Hanes T-shirt eight sizes too big that hung over a white Hanes T-shirt seven sizes too big, and his wild, frizzed-out hair that extended from his head like fine antennae. He'd sung Outkast's "So Fresh and So Clean" (I'm dressed so fresh so, so fresh and so clean, clean!). He'd chanted the name of his housing project, Westpooort!, in opposition to Nick Ward's Lakelaaand! He'd called Teddy Rogers "Titty," and Latonya Perry "a ho" in a way that she somehow found charming, and everybody, including Teddy and Latonya, who were each a half-foot taller than Jerrell, laughed. Because Jerrell was a short comic genius.

But he had done nothing that required a pencil.

Today was hardly different—he'd still called Teddy "Titty" and Latonya "a ho," but he'd done so with pencil in hand. This was his small step toward compliance, and now the pencil needed to be sharpened.

But on his way from his desk to the noisy hand-cranked sharpener stood or sat idly a whole lot of humpable stuff. Latonya Perry. An empty chair. My table of neatly stacked poetry worksheets. Me. But Jerrell Smith hadn't humped me, wouldn't hump me, and this I considered a success. Like the pencil.

What I counted as a victory probably said a lot about the size and number of my losses. I'd been teaching in Baltimore City (or anywhere, for that matter) for only four months. I'd just graduated from college where I'd spent my years studying the narrative stances of Virginia Woolf, appreciating the relative plotlessness of Mrs. Dalloway, reading the Tao Teh Ching and aspiring to master [End Page 111] the Taoist concept of wei wu wei—doing without doing. Hell, I wrote poems; I was accustomed to loving the lyrical quality of stillness. Of inaction. If ever I wrote short stories, my characters sat at desks and thought. Now I was an anomaly: an introverted white woman at the mostly black, very loud Southwestern High School, which locals had once coined "The Terrordome." I taught kids who often shouted what, in myself, would have remained private thoughts: they proclaimed when they had to pee; they declared how much they hated so-and-so; they announced, or at least Teddy had, which type of condoms gave them genital discomfort. While I tried to teach, truant kids from the hallways pressed their faces against the classroom door's window, called out my students" names, commented on my ass, or banged on the doors just to see how the sudden rattle of it also rattled the class. In my first month, someone set my door on fire; while I stood in shock, my mouth gaping, unable to move, a valiant student quickly stamped out the fire with his boot. In my second month, a neighborhood gang of grown men barged into my room, and the tallest one, the obvious ring leader, wielded a half-empty wine bottle. He offered me a sip and attempted to teach. Okay, class. What are we doing today? I jammed my index finger repeatedly on the emergency call button, the one that supposedly reached the main office but that never yielded a response, and sternly told the men, "Please leave." Call me a skeptic, but I doubt that their eventual departure had much to do with my order.

My old self—the quiet writer of poems, the dutiful student of lyrical prose—did not conjure effective remedies in moments such as these. I had to rewrite my hardwire, to learn quick countertactics for kids like Jerrell Smith. I was now Ms. Karen, or Ms. Kahn, was now The Skinny White Lady (according...

pdf

Share