Raised by intelligent, socially conscious parents who taught their children the fact that discrimination against black citizens in America was real and your job as a white citizen was to do better, was a good start. That was the reality of my upbringing in a farmhouse outside of Princeton, New Jersey in the sixties and seventies. My father, a professor of English at Rutgers actively supported black faculty denied tenure based on their “radical” ideas and my mother worked within the black community in Lawrenceville as an architect who designed affordable housing and advocated for the black community. Brought up to see race as a fundamental issue in this country and racism as a scourge in the world I had no choice but to push back.

After publishing my first novel and returning to Brooklyn College to get an MFA, I was given a fellowship which required teaching English composition. The class was a hundred percent Haitian immigrants, seventy-five percent male, and a hundred percent eager to pass the English test administered at the end of the semester that would allow them to remain at City University of New York tuition free. No pressure. I was a terrible teacher. My hand shook when I wrote on the blackboard, I talked too fast and gave them the assigned readings, wonderful essays by E. B. White about Maine and swimming and death and Annie Dillard being ecstatic about nature, identifying the work as perfect. I loved these essays, but my students did not, on the whole, have any idea what these writers were talking about and frankly, didn’t care. They were immigrants who had jobs at night, some who were close to destitute and all were strangers in a strange land. I was awful and they were so kind. They respected me because I was their teacher, their inexperienced, white teacher.

Reading their first batch of essays, responding to a prompt about finding a place in nature to feel happy, I was filled with despair. Not only was it an idiotic and vague prompt, they had no idea that nature was a thing. Some of them had come from slums and urban chaos and others had grown up in shacks next to the ocean. Their essays were very bad, filled with errors but also deadly dull. And these students were not dull. They talked and laughed before class started, they asked me lively questions and their spoken English was good. Most of them were bilingual, easily slipping from rapid Haitian-Creole to English. But the essays were awful.

I went back to things I had found inspiring and written clearly. I revisited James Baldwin’s A Letter to My Nephew. The Fire Next Time My Dungeon Shook and Martin Luther King’s A Letter from Birmingham Jail. In both essays the writing was lucid, poetic, and powerful while remaining real. Choosing Baldwin’s essay for his family connection, a loving uncle helping his nephew understand racism, I returned to the class and asked them who wrote letters? They all raised their hands. We read the Baldwin essay together, one paragraph at a time, each reader volunteering and the entire class participating.

All the theories I learned over the years about writing and reading and how it feels to be a minority were suddenly irrelevant. Here we had found material to address actively, to emulate and use. I asked them whether they could choose a younger relative who they loved and a topic they cared deeply about. Hands raised and quickly the blackboard was full of words. Previously I had attempted to teach tone but now we were all identifying Baldwin’s tone together, loving, angry, sad, hopeful. The assignment was to write a letter to a younger person to encourage clarity, whom they loved, to encourage connection, about something very important, to encourage authority. They started writing in class and demanded to read their letters aloud when we next met, two days later.

The work was stunning. Yes, there were grammar issues, tense issues, fragments, and run-on sentences but the tension, substance and clarity made these things seem irrelevant in a rough draft. One young man wrote about his father building him a bicycle from spare parts as a way to explain to a younger brother how to accept being poor and finding pride in their father’s ingenuity. One woman told her niece to think carefully about becoming a mother, describing her own struggles, and suggesting she wait. This class was the first one in which the teacher cried but not the last. When the date of the qualifying exam was close, we discussed how to use the letter form, removing the opening, and closing salutation, to answer the prompt. All my students except one passed the exam. Frankly, his paper was close to his regular voice, a black voice. The essay was full of strong details, humor, and rhythm. I appealed the grade on the single failure and as it became clear the examiner was biased, he also passed. This was no small grade. For many a third failure would mean expulsion.

Since that experience I have taught every level of English and writing from AP literature to a level that had no name but was a group of mainly minority students with several members of rival local gangs’ present. We read Othello together and acted out scenes and wrote essays and generally survived. A black teacher who sat in on the class one day said he was astonished no one had killed anyone. He told me he didn’t understand why those students seemed engaged and happy when the majority were failing high school and possibly life. I had no clear answer except to say I knew they trusted me, saw how I searched for material to inspire them and also, I respected exactly who they were and how much they had to overcome to show up in my classroom. I stood at the door every day and thanked them for being my student at the end of every class. I loved them because they were my students. We were completely different from each other but that didn’t affect my ability to teach or their ability to learn. Except, they lived in a racist society, a country where micro-aggressions were common and opportunities scarce. When they came into my classroom they carried the heavy truth of slavery and oppression, a burden I tried to lighten through kindness and literacy. Their academic success meant everything to all of us.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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