This seemed to be the answer Travis was looking for. He nodded and said, “I guess not.”
GRANDPA’S CHEST. THE YEAR IS 1691, and the settlers at Jamestown are packing up and moving the colony inland. Imagine that you are helping your grandfather sort through his belongings. Each item that he puts into his chest reminds him of some significant event or person in Jamestown’s history. For instance, an old tobacco pouch might remind him of the crop that saved the colony from total ruin (“Ah, I remember it well—if Pocahontas hadn’t taught John Smith how to plant tobacco, we never would have survived. But rich folk back home loved chewing the stuff. Soon everybody was growing it—even in the streets!”). Write a scene in which you describe this conversation with your grandfather as he reminisces over the contents of his chest. Note: You will need to include at least eight items!
“Before I read my scene,” Audrey said, “can I tell a joke?”
Ms. Hempel said yes.
“My father told it to me. It’s a dumb joke, but I wanted to tell it. First he said, ‘Why is it important to learn about American history?’ Remember? The assignment we did? And then he said, ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat’”—Audrey paused, sheepishly—“‘the seventh grade!’”
The class laughed. So did Ms. Hempel.
“The best reason yet!” Ms. Hempel declared. “Who wants to repeat the seventh grade?”
And then it occurred to her: She was repeating the seventh grade, in fact for the fourth time, and she would still be repeating the seventh grade when Audrey and Kirsten and Travis were out in the world, doing things. Over and over again, the Jamestown settlers would complain of the mosquitoes, the tea chests would tumble into the harbor, the Loyalists would be tarred and feathered and paraded through the crooked streets. Every November, the war would be won; every October, the colonies would rebel; every September, Ms. Hempel would turn to the board, pick up the chalk, and write: First Assignment.
OUT OF ALL THE DAYS in the month, Affinity Day was perhaps the most difficult. Ms. Hempel questioned the choice of Affinity, which she normally used to describe how she felt about Thomas Hardy, but the word was already a fixture, Umoja’s gentle way of saying No White People Allowed. The organization’s founders had decided, in the interests of unity, that once a month its nonwhite members should congregate without its white members. Or, to put it a preferable way, its members of color should gather without its members of noncolor.
Now Ms. Hempel was left with a classroom half full of students, nervously rattling their lunch trays. Where to begin? The white members probably suspected that as soon as the door swung shut, the Korean kids would start speaking Korean, and the Puerto Rican kids would start speaking Spanish, and the black kids would start speaking in some new and alluring way that no one else had caught up to yet. From inside the room would come the sounds of profound relief: laughter, slapping of hands, little moans of commiseration. Delicious food would be shared. Maybe some hilarious imitations of the other, absent members would be performed.
“So,” Ms. Hempel began. “Is there anything that’s on your mind? Anything you’d like to talk about?”
Everyone concentrated on their lunches. No one wanted to talk. The wall clock suffered one of its attacks; the minute hand shot forward, and then jumped back again. Balancing their trays, they had come, docile and curious and considerate of Ms. Hempel, but they didn’t know what to do next. She didn’t know how to show them. She exhaled noisily to signal that it was now safe to let go, but no one seemed to take her cue. Perhaps they weren’t holding in their breaths.
Perhaps they moved through this school with ease and ownership; perhaps it was unfair to expect that they should feel discomfort. But that’s what Ms. Hempel half hoped would come spilling forth: tales of woe, a collection of slights and insults and misunderstandings. Wonderment at the nature of one’s hair; clumsy impressions of the deli man’s accent. Expectations of brilliant athleticism, or of preternatural skill with calculations. A belittling of one’s dearest accomplishments: We all know why she got in early to Yale. They could gather together here, with their lunch trays, and share these offenses. Theirs would be a kinship based on grievance. Then Ms. Hempel could feel as if she were providing something: a community; a sense of—affinity.
But no one was talking. Either they felt no outrage, no struggle or unease, or else they felt all these things and were not comfortable enough around Ms. Hempel, or each other, to describe it. Ms. Hempel feared that the latter was true—for she was aware of the struggle, she had been witness to it—she had seen Alex and Shanell and Andréa walking toward the bus stop, their heads bent together in solace and conspiracy; she had seen Nestor smiling, widely, entreatingly, altogether too readily; she had seen Clive rambling down the hallway, looking as if he had lost something. It could not be easy, being at this school. She had no way of fortifying them. In fact, she was making it worse—making them trail up here to her classroom, making them parade out of the lunchroom, carrying their trays.
Ms. Hempel felt the tenuousness of her claim. She wished she wasn’t only half.
“Well, I have something on my mind,” said Amara, Umoja’s newly elected president. “I had an encounter with Mr. Meacham.”
It concerned the list of research topics that he had presented to his Intellectual History class. “According to Mr. Meacham, Montaigne and Hobbes and Ralph Waldo Emerson were the only ones around doing any thinking.”
Amara spoke of the great Nubian civilization, its delicate art and extensive trade and ingenious devices for irrigating the land. And the kingdom of Aksum—their alphabet and their gods, the grandeur of their obelisks! The stone thrones and colossal statues. She then leapt
