It was early March in 1983 when Darrell Nixon said he would kill me. The day before, Monday, was Casmir Pulaski Day, a state holiday to honor both the Revolutionary War general and the large Polish population in Illinois, and I had scheduled a filmstrip, "The Poetry of Rock," for my Tuesday 10 a.m. freshman English class. It was to be good transition back to studies after a holiday weekend, because the film was instructive but also easy, and it used popular music in its soundtrack, which the kids seemed to like.
We were ten minutes into it, and "Raindrops Keep Falling" was playing in the darkened classroom. A couple of students already had their heads down. The music, the long weekend, the cold, drizzly skies behind the drawn shades—it felt sleepy and I let them be. Maybe the lessons would seep through their subconscious.
I was at the side of the room opposite the open door, leaning against the room-length radiator, cold now, painted mauve during the city-wide renovation a few years back. A lone male figure walked past the door without looking in. Dirty. I tipped away from the radiator and onto both feet, walked around the back of the room so as not to break the light beam from the projector. In the semi-darkness, and with the music tinkling, and the cooling fan for the projector bulb blowing steady, I could slip out and back into the classroom with my students barely noticing.
A teacher didn't go out to challenge every passerby, but only those who fit the profile-those who looked "dirty." Anyone carrying a large wooden hall pass was "clean." A female carrying books, moving quickly towards the stairs, likely late for shorthand or typing or any one of the other business classes that occupied the second floor of Halsted Wing, known as "Petticoat Junction"—these students didn't require my attention. But if you were male, if you had your hands in your pockets, if you were making a wide turn toward the exit way and not the stairs, and you walked slowly, arrogantly, shoulders slightly forward, affecting nonchalance but ready, defensive, lips tight together, eyes watching from their slitted hiding places—then you were dirty. Your body language translated instantly: "I'm wandering in this remote area of the school because I've either just broken a rule or am about to, and I don't think anyone cares enough to stop me."
I moved quietly but swiftly through the door and towards the exitway, and before I got there he was returning, sent back by the chain and padlock wrapping the brass handles of the panic doors. He was walking in my direction. As soon as he noticed me, his left hand came out of the pocket but his right one stayed in. He's about three inches taller than me, maybe six-two, with a very short afro, smooth, light-to-medium brown skin clean complexion, handsome features. But his eyes were steel—an amazing thing to be able to do at what appeared to be age 15—and his mouth set hard. He was wearing black jeans and running shoes, and a very baggy black team jacket—probably with a logo on the back. He gaze met mine and then ricocheted, and then he trained his eyes on some point over my shoulder, past me, down the hallway.
I stood still in his path.
"Where is your class?"
His eyes flickered on my face. He veered a little to the right.
"Let me see your i.d." I moved right to remain in front of him. He pulled up. We're still 7 feet apart.
"I need to see some i.d."
I've said this half a dozen times a day, five days a week, for years. The smile he bore is one I usually see only if your "posse" was with you. But he was alone. There were only the two of us under a dimly illuminating florescent fixture. He didn't move. The only change seemed to be a shinier kind of knowing in his eyes. He was seeing more of me that I of him, so I acted to reclaim the advantage and stepped forward. None of this sequence, of course, was thus contemplated in the moment; I was just reacting to the feel and the pheromones in the air.
"We're walking to the office, then," and I reached out my right hand to take his arm. He recoiled an inch and the smile disappeared. That's when he said it:
"If you touch me, I'll blow you away."
Not shouted, not hissed, but spoken softly, coolly, as if he had studied Clint Eastwood and then practiced the words in front of the mirror. Those eight words filled me with a strange, icy fire, and I actually looked down, expecting it to bleed out and soak my shirt. Those eight words changed my life.
I was 35 years old at the time and teaching at the city's southeast side Archer Vocational High (AVS) School, a 50-year-old cavernous three-story building with 7 miles of corridors, 22 unlocked entry ways, and a campus of roughly six acres-territory variously claimed by the Gangster Disciples and the Vice Lords. Four thousand students, along with a come-and-go population of drug sellers, gang recruiters, and petty thieves. And one cop. But from 11:30 to 12:30, when Officer Krumpke (what we called him) took his lunch, there was nobody.
So it surprised me that there hadn't been more killings, more than the one or two school-related shootings we had had that year. Sure, we had a tough principal, Reginald V. McCain, whom the kids respected and feared. And from our faculty of 200 teachers, we had a subset of mostly P.E. and shop teachers, about 30 men, who patrolled the trouble areas—bus stops, lunchroom, auditorium, the doors farthest from the center of campus. But these men couldn't give their full attention for they also had to teach. McCain cheered them on to monitor the halls, to rush to help when there was trouble, to supervise extracurricular events. But they still had to teach five 50-minute classes a day, during which we sought to reverse the ever-declining test scores and the escalating dropout rate in what then-Secetary of Education William Bennet called the worst school system in the country.
I taught journalism and English at the end of the two-story Halsted Wing, so named since the 1,000-foot section of the building paralleled Chicago's Halsted Avenue. Room 102, my own classroom, was the very last on its first floor, a good quarter mile from the main office, from the discipline office, from official help. Yes, there were other people, other teachers inside the other rooms and vocational shops lining the hallway-the printshop, the graphic arts lab, a math classroom, carpentry shop, woodshop, and one large, unlighted room used for storing equipment. But doors were closed and locked as a means of keeping out the kind of interloper who had just threatened to shoot a hole through my body in the hallway. And with lathes and printing presses and planers whirring and rumbling throughout the day, a blast from a 9-mm automatic or even from a 12-gauge shotgun would have hardly been noticed.
Adjacent my classroom was the office for the school newspaper, The Trade Journal, and across from the office was the Exit #1, infamous since 1973 when a 17-year-old male was found shot to death the day before Christmas Eve, lying in his blood on the dirty pink quarry tile floor between the inner and outer doorway. A padlocked chain wrapped around the panic door handles had prevented him from fleeing his pursuer, who was able to stop and get off a shot at close range from .38-caliber revolver into the victim's chest. The entire freshman class and their teachers, including myself, had been assembled in the auditorium for the music department's Christmas program, and I remember our being ordered to keep the students a full 45 minutes after the show was over, listening to encores of "Away in a Manger" and "What Child Is This?" not knowing until later that the reason for the delay was so the police could finish mopping the blood in the vestibule outside my classroom.
The chain and lock were kept off the doors after that, which meant a constant stream of unimpeded traffic in and out all morning and afternoon. Some was innocent enough, with students leaving to walk home or catch the bus or go to their cars. Then there were those pupils who went out or for lunch-a rules violation under the closed campus policy-and they'd leave a pencil or a hair pick or folded up Sun Times in the doorjamb in order to get back in. Likewise for those just going out for a cigarette or to smoke something stronger.
When Darrel Nixon was turned back by the padlocked panic doors of Exit #1, it should have been as routine as it was with any other kid. Walk him to the discipline office and never think about him again.
Instead, we're face to face in an empty, high-ceilinged hall. There's very little light, and you can smell the rain on the city sidewalks outside of the exit way-cold, salty. Background music for the filmstrip can be heard coming from the inside my classroom-a string orchestra accompanying The Fifth Dimension singing "Up, up and away, in my beautiful balloon." I'm reaching out to take yet another student to the main office, when he uttered those eight words: "If you touch me, I'll blow you away."
Frozen in fear is the cliché. And it's only half accurate. I can't move, but it's not like the paralysis in a dream. It's literal, physical weakness, as if I'm instantly overwhelmed with some disease that saps all my strength and leaves me feverish, hot inside and sweating outside. I want him away, out from in front of me, to disappear. He's kryptonite, and if only he is removed, will I be able to move my arms, my legs-be able to get my breath. I need to tell him to go, go away, you're free to go, upstairs, outside, any place you want, need to tell him right now before he takes his hand out of his pocket, so I'm waiting, we're both waiting, for breath to come back into my lungs so I can speak.
"Go to your class."
I don't know if he hears me because my voice lacks air-if I had needed a fifth word, there wasn't the air to get it out. But he hears it in my voice, sees something in my face, I see him seeing it in my face, and he swings his shoulders jauntily, turns towards the stairwell and leaves, slowly—it seemed like tauntingly-his elbows tucked in close, touching his sides.
He's gone. I'm okay-a little dizzy. But everything is fine. It could have just as well not happened judging by the outcome, right? I go back into the classroom, walk around the back of the room, keeping my face down. I forgot to close and lock my classroom door. I move to the extreme corner of the room so that all of my students are between the hallway and me.
A voice over in the filmstrip is reading a poem by Langston Hughes. I'm standing here, sweating, shivering, listening to Langston Hughes gush about the Mississippi River. I realize at this point in the film, there's at least 15 minutes left of viewing, enough time for me to go and report this. I have to go report this. Report that a student threatened me with a gun. Threatened to kill me. And then he walked upstairs to Petticoat Junction.
"Why didn't you follow him?"
I was in the principal's office. The inner office, with furniture and his own washroom. My mouth was dry.
"Why? He threatened to shoot me. I came here to report it."
Reginald McCain wasn't facing me. He was fixing his tie in the mirror.
"There's another way you could have handled that, Flanagan. You…never mind. Did you see a gun?"
"It was in his jacket pocket. He reached, or his hand was in there when he said, 'I'll blow you away'."
McCain turned from the mirror and smiled at me. "You didn't see it, though."
He looked happy or relieved. And I thought maybe it was because he might not have to say "weapon" in the official report.
He was on his way to address an assembly of the junior class in the auditorium, and he took me along so that I could stand on the stage and study the crowd, maybe see the fellow who said he'd kill me if I touched him, since I reported that he looked sixteen. McCain arranged to send a substitute to sit with my class while I was gone.
I sat to his left while he spoke about "excellence in education," and I thought if the kid were in the rear of the balcony where it was dark, he could easily aim toward the stage and shoot me in the face without anyone seeing. I lowered my head, thinking it a real possibility since he knew I could identify him. But this felt better than the hallway earlier, because at least I wasn't alone. For the feeling I had had in the dismal hall, when because of the boy's flat, unwavering voice and his dead eyes, I was convinced he would should a bullet into my body for interfering with his-the feeling was an instantaneous and overwhelming depression because I had been alone, all alone in that hallway. This boy, who did not know my name, did not know I had two children and a wife, would shoot me and walk around me, and I'd be left alone, dying. It's when I realized for the first time that fear was a kind of loneliness—the very worst possible case of it.
Nothing came of the covert "lineup" in the auditorium, and McCain said nothing else to me that afternoon. At home I locked doors and peered out the windows before going to bed. I had told my wife about the incident, but not much about the fear. Maybe she saw but did not ask, or maybe with my description I minimized the gravity, the way McCain had done, so to her it seemed just one of the many wild stories I brought home from work.
She and the children went to bed, but I paced through the house. He could easily get my name from room number, and then find where I lived from one of the many students who were allowed access in the offices. My house was also on the south side and only ten miles from school, so the car I heard stopping at the intersection out in front could be him. Thoughts like those, illogical, ate at my brain through the night.
It was right that my wife should not know my fear. If she knew I was worrying about every sound I heard, she would be afraid, too. I must at least protect them from that, for this fear, I was learning, was like a parasite inside you, eating your strength, your sleep, your joy, your self esteem.
I could skip school tomorrow, could save myself the dark feeling of being at the hallway. Or maybe I could station one of my students in a desk at the end of the hallway; yes, he could be student monitor.Pick one from each class, "deputize" them to check for hall passes, while it would really be to pose interference for me in case he came back, and I would not be alone if I had to go out there again.
The next day I started to get calls from other teachers. They had heard some student had said he'd shoot me. One of my friends was upset because McCain was laughing in the lunchroom, shaking his head about how it was "handled." Vice Principal Charlie Cox visited me between classes. He had been at AVS for 30 years and would regale us with stories about when he taught sheet metal shop during the tumultuous sixties during the enrollment racial turnover and the decade of "white flight" from the city-would shake his head sadly over how everything had gone "downhill." He asked me about the incident, expressed regret over the perennial problems with Exit #1, recalled the fire marshal's citation issued to the principal in 73 for having the door padlocked.
I was surprised to derive relief when he thanked me for my efforts in patrolling the hallway. And then he added: "The sad thing is, Mr. Flanagan, is that the people who are trying to help out around here are the ones that get the grief."
I thought about that after he left, wondered if he meant the grief from being threatened, or the grief from being denigrated by the principal for lack of savvy or courage. Through the balance of my morning class, my thoughts returned to his words, to the "support," he gave me, which eroded a little more each time as I pondered his motivation. I should know Charlie, should know that he was not personally concerned about me. This was just another war story in his ongoing them/us, white/black eternal complaint. By noon, I was wishing he hadn't come by.
That afternoon, on my way out through the emptied lunchroom, Officer Krumpke was coming my way. A big grin on his face.
"I heard about that boy," he said. "These kids will say anything."
So that's what was making the rounds. A kid bluffed his way out of trouble, and Flanagan panicked.
That night I surmised that I would go back to school tomorrow, but I would look for another job. They needed good teachers in Wisconsin, Michigan, Missouri. It should be no problem getting certified in any of those places with my background. Moving. A rural area. But with what they were saying and thinking about me at AVS, maybe I wasn't a good teacher.
It was the third night when I had the first dream. He was already walking up the stairs, a yellow Pittsburgh Pirates emblem on the back of his team jacket. I was standing in water, my suit pants soaked to the knees. He turned halfway up the stairwell with gleaming cat's eyes and a mocking grin.
The next day, I was feeling anger. Anger at McCain and Cox and at every teacher whom the boy did not threaten, who did not have to sneak peeks between their draperies at night, or worry about encountering him as they made a right turn down a corridor. And something else was growing besides the fear, something I never thought would happen to me as it did to so many I knew: I was becoming angry with black faces. The source of the fear disease, of all my pain, was associated with the dark hallway, the black jacket, and the black skin. I fought it.It was irrational. But I now understood first hand what happened to poison the minds and souls of the people I knew who had become overnight bigots after a mugging, a car theft, or some other crime perpetrated by a black person.
In my next class, I veered slightly from the lesson on paragraph development.
"You wrote in your paragraph, Brenda, that you like to watch your 'stories' on TV, but you didn't say why."
"You know, the soaps," she said. Brenda was impossibly thin with big, brilliant eyes, an embarrassed smile.
"But why do you like the soaps?"
"I don't know. I just do."
I explained that she raises the question in her paragraph, must anticipate the reader's need for an answer. I didn't let her off, but not for the sake of the lesson.
"I guess, I want to see what happens to all these dudes and all their stuff?"
"Why?"
"I don't know. 'Cuz they're people, and I'm people."
I called on Roderick. And then Cecilia. This went on for forty minutes. There was nervousness in their eyes, and they were attentive till the end. After they left, I looked at the roster, said the names to myself, saw the faces, tried to imagine their hopes and fears. Their humanity clarified my thinking, salvaged my understanding of bigotry's seditiousness and absurdity. I was ashamed of my anger.
My sleeplessness was different now. I would replay last Tuesday morning, rearranging what happened, what I would have wanted to happen: when he says, "I'll blow you away," I reply, "Show me the gun," only now I am the one with the shining eyes and the half smile. Or he says, "I'll blow you away," and I nod, and turn as if I'm going back to the classroom, but spin all the way around and smash my fist into his face. Not the jaw or the cheek, but into the bridge of the nose so that his head caves in and the two eyes are swallowed into the declivity. And if he were too quick, if he got out the gun and got off a shot, that would be okay, too. Death was preferable to fear. So that's what bravery really was, I thought. It was nothing exalted. Just feeling fear and then risking death instead. McCain was right, for I had chosen fear over death.
At school the next day, I was on my way to the faculty lunchroom, weaving through throngs of students in the hallway, open locker doors pinching everyone closer together, when I felt something best described as a hot razor inside my gut. I did not yet see his face, but the slope of the shoulders, the elbows tucked in close, touching his sides, and the tilt of the head viewed from behind were the same as in my nightmare. And then he turned and saw me staring. He bared no smile. In fact, he looked ill. The eyes were unmistakable, though they didn't shine with arrogance, and there was no one-up-manship in the body language. Instead, he averted his eyes to some 'important' object in the locker while closing tight his lips and setting his chin.
It happened too quickly for there to have been thoughts and emotions that I could parse at this time—like being at the top of the ten meter dive platform, knowing it was best to go directly and without delay. I was halfway to him when he must have felt me coming, for he turned his head as if he feared he were going to be struck from behind. Only I didn't strike him. I fastened both of my hands on his right arm. He seemed accepting, almost compliant, looking down, his face a blank. I turned his right arm slightly and held it behind him. I took his left wrist in my other hand and moved to his left side.
"We're going to see the Principal," I said.
He did not argue—in fact, walked easily, almost with resignation by my side through the gaping throngs of his classmates.
Maybe it was my voice. Or my own eyes. Or the grip I had. It wasn't causing him pain, but he surely felt it through my fingers—felt every tension pulsing through my tendons—every memory, every doubt, every paryoxm of shame I had endured for the previous seven days.
About halfway to the office, I could see teacher Bob Stone staring into my face. A thoughtful, philosophical English teacher, Bob was often at odds with the administration over what he considered blind or inert policies.
"Need some help, John?" he said.
To this day, I'm not entirely sure why I couldn't voice an answer—why his simple offer of help felt like an invitation back into the world. I nodded, and Bob joined our procession to the Principal's office, marching on the right side of our threesome.
We stood while waiting for the Principal's secretary to buzz us into her outer office.
"Is Dr. McCain in?" I said.
Esther was used to seeing a lot of things, but her eyes showed surprise at the three of us grouped before her, still pinning the kid's arms. I was well aware that standard procedure was to take delinquents to the discipline office, to Mr. Rawlings or to Officer Krumpke. But I would release this boy to no one else except Reginald McCain. And if he weren't in, I'd probably hold him this way until McCain arrived, whether it was later or the next day or the day after.
"Yes. He's in a meeting."
We took that as an invitation and marched through the doorway and into the inner office where McCain was conferring with another man in a suit, someone I didn't know, possibly a school board administrator or administrative staff member.
"Here he is," was all I said.
McCain stood up. He rolled his shoulders forward, and I could see his mouth and eyes transform and adjust for this scene, which would be somehow different because of this other man's presence.
"You can let go of him," said McCain.
Stone did.
"I haven't searched him," I said.
McCain's face changed again, and then I realized he didn't remember who this teenager was until I said "search." To his credit, he stepped up and searched him thoroughly—there were no weapons—removing his wallet, getting his name, Darrell Nixon. He asked if this were, then, the same student and I said yes. He called his secretary to call Officer Krumpke, and then he thanked me (Stone had left) for bringing him in.
I stepped outside his office, but I didn't leave the vicinity. I stood in the main corridor, watching students enter the lunchroom, others exit the building. It was as if I wanted to remain on the scene until I felt the fullness of my life returning, felt the infection-heavy husk of fear drop from my body and disintegrate into powder on the floor. An enormous, dizzying relief at being given a chance for this redemption; a chance so rare that I resolved, standing outside McCain's office, students streaming by, to never need one again.
In the months and years that followed, I still stopped "dirty" students in the hallways, broke up fist fights, tried to help if a student or teacher were in trouble, sometimes even wading into another's classroom. I paid scant attention to the looks of puzzlement or disapproval, for I knew that to plunge into troubled waters, either to drown or exalt in the immersion, was far preferable to standing at the edge, questioning and shivering interminably. I also found this resolution to be liberating. I cannot know if I helped make AVS a slightly-less frightening, slightly more desirable place for Brenda and Roderick and Cecilia to spend time, to live their lives; but I do know I became a happier teacher. I worked six more years at AVS, then moved on to fill a position as an English faculty member at a private college: my own office, my own computer, four-day work weeks, and students and teachers who address me as "Professor." "The Poetry of Rock" is housed in our library, but in video format, not filmstrip. There are 8,000 thousand students, and I've yet to encounter a gang member or smell marijuana in the halls. Some of the PhDs complain about student apathy and unpreparedness. I do not ask if they have taught anywhere else.
I lately check the box scores in the Sun Times for the AVS baseball team. I read with interest the accounts of the Chicago schools superintendant's efforts to install metal detectors and eliminate social promotion, and I puzzle with everyone else over how to improve the citywide scores that still fall way below the national average. And last week, when I read a two-inch story in the "Metro Section" about shots fired in a Chicago south side elementary school, the darkened hallway in the Halsted Wing and the eyes of Darrell Nixon flash briefly in my head.
Darrell Nixon, a budding Gangster Disciple, was suspended for ten days for his offense; and when he returned, he was immediately suspended again. I heard later that he quit school, and I never heard of him anymore.
Sometimes I wonder where he is and whether or not he's even alive. And I often think about how much I owe him.