MARTIN LUTHER KING HOLIDAY

January 2008

Someone dared to tell me it’s cold here in Houston today. I told him what a cold advisory was, and how exposed skin will frostbite in ten minutes. I then had to explain how a scarf works and clarify that there are other types of gloves than the ones we use to wash dishes. Oh, Texas.

Last Monday, we observed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. Like other English teachers in Texas, I got the day off. I wrote a column, read a book, did some laundry.

I’ve known about Dr. King since Mrs. Mueller put his picture up in our first-grade classroom. His famous Dream – which we listened to every year without fail - always evoked a sense of detached relief for me, not unlike how I felt about the Salem witch trials or the Civil War. A helpless, naïve, “I’m-sure-glad-things-are-better-now” sort of feeling.

When I got to school on Tuesday, our lesson plans were ready-made, courtesy of Dr. King. Our high school English students would hear the speech, read the speech, find the metaphors in the speech, etc. Really, I only hoped they would understand the speech.

Turns out, I was the one who didn’t understand.

My students filed in, bunches at a time, Hispanic, African, Middle Eastern, Asian, Black, and they sat down with their classmates. When we told them we’d be listening to Dr. King, they didn’t roll their eyes at the assignment. In fact, I saw smiles as they grabbed their handouts to follow along.

These students love not just Dr. King, but his ideals: that one day they might all live together peacefully. It’s a hope all-too distant in their impoverished and dangerous neighborhood. But still the school’s hallways are plastered with his quotes, beautiful ideas that I, ignorant white girl, didn’t even know Dr. King had once expressed.

As Dr. King’s famous speech during “the greatest demonstration for freedom in United States history” rang through the classroom, my students didn’t nod off. They nodded in agreement.

They offered emphatic “Amen’s” and “mmhms!” One stood up and clapped. The girls rubbed the chills off their forearms.

They shared in King’s hope for true freedom. Like so many in the summer of 1963, they also crave equality in their neighborhoods.

They want the freedom to live without fear.

These students didn’t just read Dr. King’s Dream as I did so many times. They drank it in. Their eyes lit up as they considered “the bright day of justice.”

Then, they drafted Dreams of their own. We brainstormed issues together, and every single class told me that racism, despite Dr. King’s Dream, is alive in Houston and other places they’ve lived. They get angry when store owners watch them shop, accusing them of stealing with their glares. They want to speak their native languages without reproach. They told me.

They want civil rights for all, a cure for cancer, a cure for AIDS, and they want a chance to go to the dentist or the doctor. They want to feed their little sisters and brothers. They want us to quit telling race-based jokes and using race-based names. They want to end the gang violence in their neighborhood and the racial profiling on their roads. They want to be able to walk to the bus stop in the morning and feel safe. They told me.

And they’re worried about the war in Iraq, the genocide in Darfur, the future of democracy in Pakistan. They know about the problems in both their neighborhoods and their world. In that classroom, they talked about attaining freedom, together.

45 years after the March on Washington, I watched as 120 15-year-olds of 30 different ethnicities proposed a new vision for the world they will inherit. 15 years after I learned about Dr. King, I finally know what it means to have a Dream.

MORNING IN HOUSTON

February 2008

Pick a number between 50 and 80. That’s the temperature. It doesn’t matter much if you grab a jacket.

Pick a number between 80 and 100. That’s the humidity. It doesn’t matter much if you've washed your face or your hair.  When you hit the Houston humidity at 6 am, your hair thinks it belongs to Don King, and every pore in your face and armpits goes into overdrive.

It does matter if you wear light gray or blue, because you’re going to sweat, and your students will notice and give you a nickname. A colleague of mine learned this the hard way.

Any given Houston morning, I leave the house after a cup of coffee, toting a thermos –two if it was a late night, and it’s dark. Houston doesn’t do sunlight halfway; it’s either light out or it’s not. At six am, there’s not even a hint of morning in the sky. My neighbor is out in his pajamas parading his dog down the sidewalk, and I watch where I step, unsure whether to wish him good night or a good morning.

I squeeze between my car and the Nissan that’s parked too closely next to it, juggling a briefcase, coffee enough to sober up Lindsey Lohan, and a water bottle. I make a mental note to get out the handouts for third period early so I have time to sneak away to the bathroom between my freshmen and my sophomores.

After a solid minute of fumbling around for my keys, my car chirps and the doors unlock. I feel sorry for the people on the other side of the window who are trying to sleep, and say a mental “Sorry.”

I turn the ignition, set the radio or CD player to something I can dance to. Thus begins a Houston teacher’s commute.

I don’t dance, officially. I tap my left foot. I bob my head a little. I sing when I know the words. 105.9 in Houston is the best station in the area, and it plays only Spanish music. That’s because, I assume, the white people who drive through my neighborhood are commuting from all-white Katy, just west of my district, and they have XM radio in their BMW’s. Besides, my Hispanic students listen to 105.9, too, and learning Spanish artists gives us something to talk about.

I go south. You could call it, more appropriately, perhaps, a descent. My street is brick townhouses and swanky landscaping, but that gives way quickly to undeveloped lots, potholes, and strip malls with boarded-up windows.

Westpark Tollway climbs over it all, the one-story, leaky rooftops, the poorly-lit parking lots on its crawl into the city. It’s polka-dotted with traffic that will thicken after seven. Underneath the tollway, groups of uneasy-looking men and women wait for a bus. I’d be uneasy, too, waiting there.

Hooded figures walk on the edges of the road or on the sopping-wet grass. They could be men or women, boys or girls. That’s the point of wearing a hood; it makes women less of a target, makes boys seem much older.  The backpack on one figure is a giveaway; it’s a young man walking to school in the dark. My own students have told me how scary their own bus stops are in the morning, and they know it’s not fair that they should grow up afraid of the morning

Two days before Valentine’s Day, one of the students in my third period class, a sophomore, same age as my sister, was hit by an SUV while walking in the district. It shattered his legs. He was walking on the street, and the vehicle drove away. When I spoke to him in the hospital, he said he was just glad he bought his girlfriend’s Valentine early. He’ll be all right, but I’m having trouble understanding why there are no sidewalks here.

I take a right and head down Bellaire Street. Even on beautiful days I keep my windows up. This isn’t my neighborhood. In fact, I get the sense that no one really wants to live here.

“Good morning” in Alief is not a greeting or a comment on the weather. It’s a wish.