The Disappeared

Photo by Brenton Smith

The Disappeared

Jay Wamsted

        “Hey, Mr. Wamsted—you talk to Ms. Jones ‘bout my excuse last week? ‘Cause I was locked up.”
        It was early in my second year of teaching, and Eddie interrupted me as I was introducing the day’s assignment.^{“All names are pseudonyms unless otherwise noted.} He had missed a good bit of class, and I was already aware that he had been in juvenile detention—youth jail—for most of that time. He hadn’t made this announcement for my benefit, however; he was targeting his fellow ninth-grade classmates. Among the usual tools teenagers employ to earn the respect of their peers—appearance, athleticism, and intelligence—students at inner-city schools like mine sometimes add a trick or two. Unfortunately, coming back from a run-in with the police is one of these techniques.
        Being a young teacher I had no idea how to handle his bravado. Instead of responding with any skill, I mumbled official speak about various absences being handled through different administrative channels. Eddie wasn’t really interested, though, in squaring his days away with the school authorities. His comment had achieved its purpose before I even began speaking, and so he cut me off.
        “I can have some coffee then?” Like many of my students, Eddie had been wheedling me for a drink from my classroom percolator since the first day of school. I typically rejected such requests out of hand, but in this moment I saw an angle that might redirect our floundering conversation. Taking a shot, I answered against type.
        “Tell you what, Eddie—you come back from lunch today, do some math, and I’ll get you some coffee. Deal?” When Eddie did manage to make it to school, he typically failed to return after lunch for the second half of class. I hoped with my response to engage him in some manner—to tack away from his monologue and into a sort of dialogue about our path forward. My play worked: Eddie nodded triumphantly, and we got about the business of class. Soon the bell rang and students scattered to lunch; a half-hour later I was surprised to see Eddie be the first one back. He sauntered into the room, immediately went to his desk, and got to work. What happened next was equally unexpected, even looking back from a distance of over a decade.
        Eddie plowed through several days’ worth of missing assignments, accomplishing more in that first thirty minutes after lunch than he had in the previous month combined. After checking his papers I made him a cup of coffee, for which he thanked me before going straight to his seat and returning to work. After a while, questioning the idyllic nature of the events, I became nagged by a feeling that he must have had a friend answering questions for him. I called him over, sitting him down in a desk away from the others; periodically I would look over his shoulder and ask him why he was doing what he was doing. Not only was he getting correct answers, but he could also explain every step to me. Unexpected, approaching bizarre.
        We were working on a problem at one point when, as if we were TV characters in some procedural drama, he looked off thoughtfully into the middle distance and took a long sip of his second cup of coffee. I seized the moment, shoving the math away and shifting gears to a little speech that went something like this:
        “Listen Eddie, I figured you out today. You’re smart. But you’re so busy trying to impress everyone that you’re missing out on the fact that you’ve got something going on. So this is what we’re going to do the rest of the year: you’re going to ignore all this distraction, come to class, and I’m going to ask you to do math for me, to work that brain of yours. And I think that you just might like it. I think you’re smart, and you know it, and you like it.”
        He nodded along with me, sipping his coffee and peering attentively over the rim of his cup. I was brimming with adrenaline and pride, thinking that in addition to a little bit of math I had also taught a life lesson to a troubled kid. It had all the tropes of a movie moment—first day back from jail, boy’s life changed by a caring teacher. The bell rang again, and the rest of the students flew out amidst flurrying papers and screeching desks. Eddie, however, still holding most of a cup of his hard-won beverage, stayed in his seat, finishing his coffee and chatting with me as he passed on precious time in the hallways with his friends. He left only as my next class was filing in; it seemed as though he wanted to stay much longer.
        I never saw Eddie again. I wondered about him for a while as I counted him absent every day, but eventually his name dropped off my roll, unceremoniously effacing him from existence as far as the school was concerned. Sometimes when students withdraw I know where they are headed. I catch a vision of their next phase when we say our goodbyes. Often, however, especially for a student like Eddie who fades out without an official withdrawal, I will never find out why they left, never know where they went.
        Eddie’s movie-moment life lesson turned out to be just that—fictional aphorisms vanished into the void of a lost student.
                                                                * * *
        For the past twelve years I have been teaching math at Mays High School (not a pseudonym) in Southwest Atlanta. Mays is ninety-nine percent non-white—in fact, almost entirely black—with over eighty percent of students living under or around the poverty level. Early in the twentieth century Southwest Atlanta was a white suburb, but the white flight that followed the Civil Rights Movement turned the Mays neighborhood into a proud bastion of the black middle class. The area has fallen on economic hard times in recent decades, however, and our schooling outcomes have followed suit. Based on the complicated metrics used to measure school competency, Mays probably dwells in the lower three to four percent of public high schools in Georgia, a state that ranks near the bottom nationally in both SAT scores and graduation rates. The accounting of dropouts is a haze of obfuscation surrounding most low-income public schools, as protocols keep official numbers artificially low, but our numbers have at times approached fifty percent.
        I have taught somewhere around two thousand students in my career, close to a thousand of whom either did not or will not graduate. Around seventy students a year sit with me for a season, sometimes the entirety of a semester or even two, and for a constellation of reasons fail to finish high school. Teaching these seventy students is one of the most difficult aspects of my job, as I watch them drift away from the promise of school and into the demimonde of the neighborhood, each disappearance its own kind of blow to my sense of value and efficacy as a teacher.
        This damage is far worse for the students themselves, of course. Once or twice a week I will admit a new student to class mid-year, a young man or woman who has disappeared from some other school across the city or the country, and for many the evidence of their pain is unmistakable. They will sit in corners, speak to no one, and live inside their phones. It is not uncommon for such a student to transfer again soon after joining my class, on to a third school for the semester. Trying in vain to reach these teenagers is a shocking reminder that the worst thing about the disappeared is not the effect it might have on a teacher. I missed Eddie, yes; far more painful is the thought that he was somewhere missing all of us.
                                                                * * *
        Marcus was wild, a whirlwind of motion and noise that distracted from the fact that he was exceptionally smart, one of the brightest students I have ever taught. Once I realized just what he could accomplish in our tenth grade classroom if he could maintain focus, I began to encourage his talking in class, forcing him to engage mathematically in exchange for every out-of-turn comment. Initially, I had moved him to the front of the room from a management point of view, intending to rein him in; ultimately, having him sit center stage was a catalyst for academic conversation of a caliber I had never seen before. Marcus had a halo effect that covered the rest of the students in the room, my favorite class period that year: it was noisy, chaotic, and eminently educational.
        As the year progressed, however, I quickly realized the game Marcus was playing. Math class notwithstanding, he was constantly in the hallways. I would watch him parading past my room all day; it seemed as if every time I stepped out for even a moment, I would see him leaning against some wall or another, talking to one of his many friends. I would ask him where he was supposed to be, to which he would always reply, with an ingratiating grin, “Aw, Mr. Wamsted, that teacher just don’t like me.”
        As the weeks wore on and I tallied up the score, as near as I could tell I was the only teacher in the building with whom Marcus did get along. I have seen this effect many times. It’s not unusual for one favored teacher to be the only adult in a student’s life who “understands” how a student can succeed in one class and fail everywhere else. Typically such academic indifference is accompanied by profound learning troubles, though Marcus had no such problems. He just couldn’t pull his act together.
        He took Spanish next door to me, a class that lined up with my free period and, consequently, regular hall duty. A couple of dozen times he abandoned that room in the middle of class and approached me, shrugging his shoulders and smiling. I would give him a perfunctory lecture and put him in my empty room, knowing that his potential for trouble was far less there than in his intended act of meandering. Several times when he did remain in class, his teacher came out into the hall and made her way straight to me, furious. Marcus had done something disruptive but was refusing to step outside; he had no compunction about leaving at the slightest hint of insult or boredom, but his pride refused to let him accede to a teacher’s demand. My job as hallway designee was to remove him from class, ideally without additional disruption. I would go to the doorway and glance in—the classroom in disarray, students laughing, and one foolish teenage boy flush with negative attention. Our eyes would meet, and again the smile, the sheepish shrug. To him, all of this was a sort of victory, and he would walk out with me, exultant.
        Ultimately, Marcus pushed things too far, writing “Fuck Ms. Smith” on the board just moments before said teacher walked in. She was understandably apoplectic, and this time, as I removed him, she involved our principal. He moved Marcus from my room to his office—a precursor to an official act of discipline—and I overheard him speaking to Ms. Smith about a permanent reassignment not only out of her Spanish class but also away from Mays altogether.
        I flipped out a little inside, feeling my troubled prodigy slipping away, and went to the mat for Marcus. Don’t put him out yet; I’ll talk to him; let me handle him; he can sit in my room anytime he needs a break; he’s so smart; we need to work with him; I’ll take responsibility. My principal relented and took me up on my offer. By the end of the school year, Marcus was in my room for four or five hours a day, excelling at math, eking out mediocrity everywhere else.
        We finished out the year, and Marcus scored the second highest grade of my students who took the statewide end-of-year assessment. His success in mathematics was unequivocal, and I went home for the summer feeling good about my work with him, an optimism which redoubled in the fall when we came back to school. I was pleased by his return for junior year; anecdotally, if a troubled kid can make it through the first two years of Mays without dropping out, he or she has an excellent shot at finishing altogether. He was no longer taking my class, but we spoke almost daily. These quick conversations with a former problem-student were a high point during my first few weeks of the year, giving me strength to go in and get to know my new crop of sophomores.
        And then, like Eddie, one day Marcus just disappeared. Because we mostly saw each other in the hallways it took me longer to notice. A week or two probably passed before I asked one of his friends about him. The young man looked surprised that I hadn’t heard. “He gone, Mr. Wamsted.”
        “What do you mean, gone?” I asked, almost indignant. “Where did he go? What school?”
        “He ain’t say, his mom just up and pulled him out. No one heard from him since he left.”
        These vague words felt like a physical blow. Withdrawal in the middle of a semester is almost never a good thing, typically an effect of family dysfunction, poverty, or both. I talk to dozens of students in such situations every year, but usually at least a pretense of a plan is put forth; given a lack of even ostensible action it was likely that Marcus wasn’t enrolled anywhere at all.
        The thought of this brilliant boy wandering the streets made me sick, and I desperately pressed the friend for more information, to no avail. After he left I stood in my doorway for a long time, nursing an angry feeling that easily could have ended in tears had I allowed myself the luxury. I worried for Marcus’s future and for the potential that was seemingly in the process of being wasted; I wondered how he was handling himself as he navigated his way through this stress.
        But also, selfishly, I felt cheated. I had worked so hard with this young man, finally letting myself lean in to what seemed a feel-good story, an accomplishment I could look to for encouragement. His sudden departure left a hole in my sense of self-worth, and the end state of my concatenation of thoughts was a sort of hopelessness. I cratered out in self-pity.
        I had no time for such indulgence, however. Class was underway, thirty-nine students in chaos and disorder without my presence in the overcrowded room. I put Marcus out of my mind, walked in, and went about the business of being a teacher. I had been doing this job long enough to know that, just as with Eddie, I couldn’t let Marcus’s disappearance get to me; I would have to let it go. I asked around about him for several weeks, but soon gave up. No one seemed to know where he was. He had disappeared from his friends; I might never know where he went.
        He was simply gone.
                                                                * * *
        I was standing in the halls one day during a class change, reading, when I chanced upon a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, the last from her book Annie Allen:
                There are no magics or elves
                Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must
                Wizard a track through our own screaming weed

        Having spent months searching for metaphors about students like Eddie and Marcus, I was deeply affected by the lines—something is still so broken for these young black men living in places like Southwest Atlanta, and, like Annie Allen, each will have to wizard his own track through the weeds. There are no magic or elves on offer; I am a good enough teacher, but no fairy godmother. And so our stories diverge—theirs into the screaming weed, mine to navigate around the disproportionately-sized holes left by their absence.
        I process by writing, putting my experiences at school down on paper in an effort to make sense of them, and reactions to this work vary. Sometimes I hear a desire from a reader to know more about Marcus and Eddie, to find out what happened in the end. Other times I hear a sort of obverse, that as a white person I shouldn’t be writing about my black students at all. Typically I am unable to address either of these thoughts. For the most part I never will find out what has happened to the hundreds of young men and women I have watched disappear over the years. My writing reflects my limited point of view, even as I hope it shows respect for the dignity of my students and their stories. Of course there is danger here; I understand the long legacy of carpetbaggers and colonialists, and I don’t take that lightly. However, these stories seem too important to give up their telling simply because I am white.
        Lacking magic, I can write only about what I know.
        “He gone, Mr. Wamsted.”
                                                                * * *
        Once during the first week of school I was calling roll with my new students when I noticed an unusual last name, one I had known well long before. A student from early in my career at Mays, Bria, had the same distinct last name, so I asked the new girl if they were related. In fact, they were sisters, and I winced. The beginning of school is a tenuous time, and you look for any advantage possible and try to avoid problems at all costs. A popular student like Marcus showing up to brag about you is a good thing; meeting the little sister of a girl with whom you never got along is not.
        It isn’t that I hadn’t liked Bria. On the contrary: she was smart, with such potential; the problem was that I convinced myself I could help her, save her, fix her when she started sliding off the rails early in the school year. It began with missed homework and incomplete class work, then quickly escalated to cut classes and skipped school. Before long she was showing up once a week at best, haggard and exhausted, falling asleep minutes into class. I was certain she was doing drugs; knowing the economics of my school, I didn’t want to think about what she was trading for her high. I tried to talk to her when I saw her, but as a new teacher with little experience, my lectures would be more likely to annoy than to encourage. Even at the time, I knew I sounded like an adult in a Peanuts cartoon to her. Toward the middle of the year she was noticeably pregnant, and by spring she was gone.
        I hadn’t thought about Bria in years when I looked up into the face of her sister, the same age as Bria was when she disappeared. I saw the resemblance immediately, though, and the memory softened my normally rock-hard first-week-of-school façade. As with Eddie, years before, I acted against type and smiled. “I taught Bria back in the day, you know.”
        “Uh-huh”. Barely a grunt from the slouched teenager, her eyes skittering back to her phone after briefly taking me in.
        “How is she?” I knew I had to ask, though I nervously braced myself. The news, however, was shockingly good. She was living on her own with her now six-year-old daughter, had finished her G.E.D. and enrolled in college when her child started school. She seemed to be finding a track through the screaming weed, and this update so inspired me that I took another chance. “Ask her about me. See what she thought.” This tack was foolish, as I had no reason to believe Bria would say anything encouraging about me to her younger sister. She might be doing just fine, thank you very much, but this had nothing to do with me or my classroom. I was asking for trouble here, but I let myself get carried away by the excitement engendered by knowing that Bria wasn’t “gone.”
        A few minutes later her sister called out to me, “I texted Bria.”
        I affected calm, more than a little worried about Bria’s response. “Oh yeah? What’d she say?”
        “She said you were cool. That you gave her a chance when she was messed up and probably didn’t deserve it.” Bria’s little sister smiled—or, at least, she smirked in the similitude that passes for a smile in most adolescents—and went back to swiping at her phone.
        I was elated. It is spare praise, to be sure, but the aggregate effect of Eddie and Marcus and the untold others has proven to be more difficult than I could have imagined. I tell myself that I am doing some good, that I am planting seeds that might come to fruition in another time, that kindness and attention are never wasted on a student no matter how seemingly lost, but attrition gnaws on these noble thoughts. Caring for a student as he or she is flickering out is emotionally draining. Shamefully, the disappearance is almost cathartic when it comes. After years of students vanishing, never hearing much more than an echo of a whisper back, this encouragement was the most hopeful word I could have received. To discover I had spoken some small good into Bria’s life, to know our time together was not entirely in vain, although Marcus’s absence was like a physical pain, this news of Bria was like a visceral relief. It may seem a little thing, Bria’s response to her sister, but hope is no mean feat, no simple trick.
        Full of optimism that I had to share, I immediately emailed the story to my wife. She, too, remembered Bria, and cried upon reading it.
                                                                * * *
        Recently I was sitting in my room alone when the door opened and a familiar face walked in. I hadn’t seen Simeon in months, not since he transferred during his junior year. I had taught him four semesters in a row, the entirety of his freshman and sophomore years, and considered my work with him another mini-success story. He had entered high school entangled with some rough friends, and much of his time had been taken up by gangs and drugs. We pushed through, however, and he proved to be an able student; he even led some of his friends out of the streets and back into school. I stood up, hugged him, and grabbed a chair. He sat down, and we talked.
        The news was mixed. He had dropped out of school and wasn’t working on his G.E.D. He had managed, however, to shake some people and habits that had dogged him during our time together, the same ones that later precipitated his removal from Mays. He was working at a temp agency, living with an uncle in a different part of town. Once a job went permanent he would look into the G.E.D., until then he just needed to lie low and keep himself together, working, busy. He told me how he loved my class, how much he enjoyed his time as my student. I took it as the encouragement it was intended to be, but it also dispirited me. We had worked what felt like magic together, but it just hadn’t been quite enough. He said he had things to do, we hugged again, and he left.
        As Simeon walked out, I pictured myself slumped in the doorway that day, catching my breath and screwing up my courage after finding out Marcus had disappeared. I had bottomed out in that moment; it was no easier to sit at my desk and think I might never see Simeon again. Like Eddie, all he would carry with him from our work together were some long-forgotten mathematical skills and a handful of fragile conversations—the distant memory of an apparently unmagical time. An oft-quoted statistic is that if historical incarceration rates hold, one in three black teenagers today will go to prison at some point in their lives; some estimate that the probability for a high school dropout could be twice that number. Watching Simeon walk away I could not help remembering this threat, and I felt an impotent desperation imagining the illicit temptations awaiting him as he tried to make ends meet.
        In the past it has been difficult for me to snap out of such thinking: worries about Simeon following Marcus and Eddie, all three fading out of the mainstream and falling into the prison-industrial complex. Now, maybe, I know better. Bria managed to speak to me from that liminal place, so fragile, considering statistics on teenage mothers in poverty are as grim as those on incarceration rates for black males. Here is a reason to hope the others might find their way as well. Bria’s future is far from certain, still so tenuous, but she is tripping a track through the screaming weed, and I need to believe the others just might be able to follow suit.
        I watched the empty doorway for a moment after Simeon left, sitting in silence and stilling my mind. Then, not without a whisper of hope, I went back to work.