“Mr. Patterson!”
The voice on the other end of the phone sounded the same. Exactly the same. How could that be?
In 1984, I hung up my hatchet hammer and tool belt, packed up all I owned into my ‘57 VW Window Van, and moved sight unseen to Oakland, California, to begin a 32-year career teaching kids. It was early October. I left behind the deserts of central Arizona, still shimmering in 100-degree heat. As I drove through East Bay, Autumn already crisped the air and had begun to paint the wide oak leaves red and yellow and brown. A new world spread across my horizon. More than I knew!
I had last taught three years earlier in a small, two-room rural schoolhouse just outside Wellington, in New Zealand, where students more often than not arrived to school barefoot, by choice, and the playground was sprinkled with sheep sorely in need of shearing. Those days, I awoke each morning on the farm where I stayed at 3:45 to milk the cows before getting to school by 6:45 to load up and light the three coal stoves used for heating the classrooms. Afternoons were filled with basketball practice at Wellington Teachers College before getting my tired body in bed by 8:30 to get up the next morning and do it all again. I thought those experiences were other-worldly and would remain unmatched the rest of my days. Now I see they were just a precursor for what was yet to come.
Oakland, then, was a restless, desperate congestion of broken families with broken hearts and faded dreams. During those eight years, I saw more than most people could ever imagine. If a movie was made of what I witnessed, it would need to be scaled back with some serious editing to make the story more believable. Home visits where Mom was interrupted smoking crack; kids seeing parents and siblings get shot and killed, a student pulling a gun on me at point blank range, my finding a dead body on the schoolyard, multiple lock-downs with one time a running shootout on top of the bungalows, a female special-ed student sexually assaulted by an outsider during a bathroom break, preteen pregnancies, a teacher being carted away strapped to a gurney after suffering a breakdown, drive-byes that claimed too many kids I knew, a sixth-grader of mine working the streets as a prostitute, and promising beautiful kids sidetracked by the constrictions of violence, poverty, drugs, alcoholism, and hopelessness. Fourteen-year-old Torrick, one of my former students, getting off a bus, hair braided Snoop-style, shirt completely unbutton, gun tucked in the waistband in full view, while the third graders I was then teaching and I boarded on our way to a field trip at the zoo. Thirteen-year-old Courtney, while being chased by the police, swallowing a baggie of heroin, only to have it burst inside of him and kill him before he hit the ground. Twelve-year-old Janelle proudly introducing me to her newborn baby. You get the picture . . .
Amidst all that heartache and sytemic insanity, the indelible spirit of each child, each adult, and the community as a whole continually rose up and celebrated each day, glad to have another day of being alive. Willie Hamilton, Christina Wilson, Willie West, Katherine Hunter and so many others at Webster Elementary School day-in and day-out provided stability, positivism, and accountability to kids where sometimes none could be found at home. Our custodian, our janitor, was the unofficial king of East Oakland. I observed first-hand, many times, his rule of the streets and his role as caretaker. I could roam anywhere in East Oakland, day or night, free of fear and harassment, because of him. And the students! Wow! Ever-embracing, ever-connected to an outsider who came in with naivete and ignorance, these young people forever brought joy and endless possibilities to what we could build together. What began as a few kids balling with their teacher on Thursdays after school grew to 90+ kids playing rec softball, attending church regularly, and gathering for weekend retreats during high school to learn to better navigate their way through life. I see their faces in my mind’s eye like it was just last week: Dee Hall and Antquenette and Deborah and Anissa and Roy and Qiana and Jimmy Butler and Joy and Darnell and Eric and Latrina and Sia and Lynelle and Jerome and Melanie and Terrence and Douglas and Trashawnia and Jamal and all the rest of you. I am eternally grateful for what you brought to me and the dignity in which you always treated me. Thank you! Thank you for the lives you have led and the impact you have had on those you have touched! All of you! Especially you, Alethea, from the sixth grade class I taught that first year. It was you who taught me what true treasure really is.
“Alethea! After all these years . . . How have you been?!”
“Mr. Patterson, you sound the same!'“
“So do you Lee-Lee! Exactly the same!”