René Garrett ’22
Ms. Williams
“I’m sorry,” Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and imaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.”
—Khalid Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
I went to the hospital two days after I returned to Detroit. My phone was broken, so my friends didn’t know where I was. The doctor came in, asked me if I had recently had unprotected sex, and I had but I lied—I was weak—and no match for what was to come. Clasping the top end of a flat sheet by both hands up to my nose and shaking with terror, the doctors told me I had tested positive for HIV and that they would run a second test to make sure, but they wouldn’t tell my mother if I didn’t want them to. And in a week I was back in school as if nothing had happened. But everyone who might have caught my glance a month prior knew I was deeply unsettled, especially Ms. Williams. What stays with me today still is that she saw an opportunity to intervene, and she did.
*
Ms. Williams and I had an affinity for criticism. The primary focus of our critique was the school and the academic culture it conditioned among faculty and students alike. Detroit Edison Public School Academy Early College of Excellence, the name of my secondary school, reflects its culture. Smack in the east of Detroit, the high school sat amongst empty lots in what is an abandoned industrial park turned meat market, known as Eastern Market. It was a fifteen-minute walk from the Brewster Douglass Projects—the new projects, not the towers where Diana Ross grew up. The new ones were where I lived for some of elementary and middle school. My family had settled down by the time I started at ECE, a school of about four hundred, all of us roaring about from class to class in our khakis and blazers and blue and red striped ties, the latter akin to something from a Netflix anime.
ECE had IB and AP programs, doing everything it could just short of altering test scores to get students into the best colleges. Ms. Williams and I often thought this approach missed the simple point of it all, which was education. Ms. Williams and I both loved stationeries and planners, fierce intellectual discussions, and reading. I had always done well in class; Ms. Williams knew this, as she was my instructor for my British Literature course in my sophomore year.
Senior year, in her AP Literature course, the work I was producing was below my ability. I showed up late, I was a mess. The week before my diagnosis, I was in Des Moines, presenting my copied and pasted research on new water sanitation projects in India at the World Food Prize Borlaug-Ruan Conference, which awards the Nobel Prize in Agriculture. At home we would get eviction notices sometimes and I lived with my grandma off and on, so no one was going out of state. This presentation was all expenses paid. The day I landed in Iowa I couldn’t shake the smell of grass, which I suspected was the source of my overblown sinus sensitivity and fever. I thought maybe I’d run out the door too quickly after a shower and the weather caught me; I wasn’t sure why I was so fatigued, it was as if I missed all my meals that day, and the day before.
“I don’t think I can do this, I need to go lay down,” I told the coordinator, asking to sit out one of the early activities.
All the student-researchers were packing lunches for those less fortunate. I really just wanted to eat one, so I had to go. I slept for the remainder of the weekend program, never mind the awful amount of arugula I was expected to consume over dinner. Stuck in my hotel bed, I recalled how, as I sat on the floor in my high school hallway, the loudspeaker rang and the announcer called upon students to congratulate me, “OMARI GARRETT!” on this success. I didn’t need my mentor telling me I was ruining this for other Black students from our lab, I did my own self-flagellating. The fever I had would outdo myself and my mentor. I just needed some TLC—I did not know what was happening.
Back in Detroit, it was all about keeping a smile on, and I was in school like nothing happened. “Ok, it’s time for second period,” I would announce to my cadre of queer academic elites. I came in rattling my 64-ounce water canteen; I was always interested in supplies that were refined but obnoxious. Clink-clunk, wish-wash ice-cubes knocked the interior of my canteen as I sashayed into class. Miss me? In English class? Never. English class was my best class, it was where I shined as a student and scholar. But upon returning from Iowa, I didn’t even care to make the other students feel bad about how much less they knew than me. I sat, morose, completing my daily journal entry for class without an impulse for my next breath. Typically when class ended I would engage Ms. Williams for a brief chat, it was our ritual that we both enjoyed. On this day, as the class egressed, she followed from her end of the room to the door, which disrupted our usual setup as she often stayed by her desk, as her following period was free. Nearing the door, I caught her for a few words, I apologized for the anomalies in my performance, I honored what we both brought to the intellectual space and I felt that I was no longer able to, at least not then. She extended her arm around my back, asked, “Would you like to talk for a minute?” At the brink of tears, I accepted, with relief.
“My mom just had a miscarriage, it’s difficult for her,” I began, not knowing how hard it was on me.
My mom and I experienced so much together, transience, homelessness, abuse, but we were worlds apart, playing our mother and son roles together. I was coming into my own as a flaming, flamboyant f-word and the distance between my mother and I had the added benefit of me never being questioned. Extracurriculars lined my college application: Robotics Manager, Green Team Vice President, Student Body Vice President, Coding Club, Debate, Peer Forward Leader, Telluride Associate, Ecotek Lab Scientist, Honor Society. Ostensibly, those clubs were where my time was spent; I also had two jobs on the side and I caught the bus in one of the worst cities to get to them. How could I have time for anything else? In between making my mother proud and getting into college, which was a narrow space but just the spot where a closeted 17 year old me went out on Grindr to have a gay experience, or whatever it was supposed to be, I had ended up with a deadly virus. And in all of it, I sat queerly in a cellophane closet while my mother was engulfed in the tumult of her maternal life. It was all bad, and I told Ms. Williams just how bad it was.
She reassured me, “This country doesn’t do a lot right, but it has the virus under control, and it’s not a death sentence—at least it doesn’t have to be. Unfortunately, the numbers aren’t all that great for Black gay men. Half of the new infections are Black gay men.”
We talked more often from then on. She knew better how much I needed it, knew more than I did. I wasn’t really clear on how to cope, I started running four miles a day. Two miles from home and the two back. It was a disguise for the virus and my slimming.
There had been so much going on, but I’d learned to mindlessly go along with things and not be introspective in ways that were meaningful. It was the fall semester of my senior year, an important one no doubt. My IB Algebra II B teacher told me to drop his course and that I would fail. I didn’t listen, I just knew I could catch up. I had missed three weeks of daily instruction and it was never going to happen.
These ineffective responses to my own stress were not healthy, but I took care as best I knew how. I worked out every day to cover up any weight that I would lose, not even acknowledging that I was in fact maintaining my health. Hiding my situation and keeping it secret from my mom and larger family was difficult. I asked my grandmother to take me to some of my doctors appointments, knowing she wouldn’t ask me any questions. I applied to well over twenty schools because I had something to prove, to everyone and to myself, that I could overcome, but it was so hard. I did well on the test for A Thousand Splendid Suns in AP Lit, but the F I earned in IB Algebra II B would in turn get me sixteen rejection letters. I could not yet conceive of myself as being over-extended, simply because of my dexterity. I was able to give a little to projects here and there. I needed to learn about consistent investment and commitment. Ms. Williams showed me.
*
We worked together on my college application, pulled together some of the best writing I’ve done. The narrative told my struggle with coming to terms with sexuality and coming out to my gay aunt, and what the experience revealed to me. I learned from Ms. Williams how to extend love and kindness—to see someone who is close suffer, and to love them. She kept me, but also spared me nothing. I went on that semester to do some of the worst work I’d done, earning Cs and not doing my best. I did what was sufficient.
“You checked out,” she would say, her eye always on me.
The pedagogy of love she modeled was powerful, I was encouraged by her stalwart adherence to her morals and refined ability to argue passionately for what she believed. The standard was clear and so was the expectation.
The work I was putting in, although subpar, was sustained; I was engaged both with my health and academics. I did what I could so that I would not be so completely miserable. I often hung out with friends and lived a fulfilling life working in Planned Parenthood as a sex educator. I had begun working there before I seroconverted. After, I was faced the challenge of how to change my instruction, keeping my status a secret. I couldn’t go “full testimonial” about my own sexual experiences.
I modeled my teaching on Ms. Williams approach; the workshops I led were taught to empower students with the knowledge and experiences necessary to create their own sexual world, not to simply have one thrust upon them. My experiences with Ms.Williams taught me to lead with love and compassion in my own personal and professional ventures. It showed me how impactful someone can be on another. Receiving the support I knew I couldn’t receive at home from Ms. Williams was a godsend, and I don’t know how I would have been successful otherwise.
Now, I’m completing my Bachelor’s degree at a top liberal arts institution, much of which is thanks to the investments both she and I made. I can pay these efforts forward and show kindness where I encounter weakness—there’s no way to know how much it might mean to someone. I also learned that no matter how someone might respond, how much my effort may or may not take hold, it is an effort they have a lifetime to remember if of course, they are a lifelong learner. My challenge now is to be kind to myself, and that is a lesson I’m still learning.
Works Cited
Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.