Helen Thorpe - The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

Also by Helen Thorpe

Soldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War

Just Like Us:The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America

To my parents, Marie and Larry, with thanks for showing me the world

From time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul.

Yet despite its toughness, the soul is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush, especially when other people are around. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently at the base of a tree, breathe with the earth, and fade into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek might put in an appearance. We may see it only briefly and only out of the corner of an eyebut the sight is a gift we will always treasure as an end in itself.

Parker Palmer, A Circle of Trust

Room 142 Staff

Eddie Williams, teacher

Ed DeRose, teachers aide

Pauline Ng, therapist, Jewish Family Service

Ruthann Kallenberg, volunteer, Goodwill Industries

Room 142 Students, in order of arrival

Stephanie (Mexico)

Nadia (Mozambique)

Grace (Mozambique)

Hsar Htoo (Burma, Thailand)

Sal (El Salvador)

Uyen (Vietnam)

Amaniel (Eritrea)

Solomon (Democratic Republic of Congo)

Methusella (Democratic Republic of Congo)

Jakleen (Iraq, Syria)

Mariam (Iraq, Syria)

Dilli (Eritrea)

Ksanet (Eritrea)

Yonatan (Eritrea)

Lisbeth (El Salvador)

Kaee Reh (Burma, Thailand)

Abigail (Mexico)

Plamedi (Democratic Republic of Congo)

Bachan (Bhutan)

Shani (Tajikistan)

Mohamed (Mauritania)

South High Faculty, elsewhere in the building

Kristin Waters, outgoing principal

Jen Hanson, incoming principal

Karen Duell, family and community liaison

Carolyn Chafe Howard, PTA president

Ben Speicher, math teacher and wrestling coach

Jason Brookes, Student Senate faculty adviser

John Walsh, math teacher and long-distance coach

Steve Bonansinga, math teacher and organizer of Culture Fest

Rachel Aldrich, science teacher

Jenan Hijazi, upper-level ELA teacher

Noelia Hopkin, upper-level ELA teacher

This is a work of nonfiction. To report this book, I spent a year and a half inside South High School and hired fourteen different translators to interview subjects in their home languages. I changed the names of four individuals, but otherwise, to the best of my knowledge, everything that follows is true.

O n the first day of schoolit was going to be a ninety-degree scorcher and you could already feel the air starting to shimmerEddie Williams jogged up the four stone steps at the main entrance to South High School half an hour before the first bell rang, eager to meet his new students. THE LIVES OF MEN , THE CUSTOMS OF PEOPLES , AND THE PAGEANTRY OF NATIONS CHART THE COURSE OF TOMORROW proclaimed a large mural by the front door. The teacher was a tall man, six foot four inches in his socks, with an athletic body (when there were no kids in the building, he sometimes used the many staircases in the school for exercise), short black hair, and a clean-shaven, angular face. He was thirty-eight years old, but could have passed for twenty-eight. Earnest, ardent, industrious, kind, and highly sensitive were traits that came to mind when I thought about the parts of himself this teacher brought into his classroom, week in, week out, all year long. He almost always dressed conservatively, in long-sleeved dress shirts and chinos, and his wardrobe often made me think of leafing through an L.L.Bean catalog, but that day he was wearing a short-sleeved purple South High polo shirt. All the teachers had put on purple shirts, that being the school color, so that the students could easily see whom they should turn to if they had a question about how to find a particular classroom, how to read the confusing schedules they carried, or where they could find the schools elusive cafeteria, way up on the fourth floor. Mr. Williams usually avoided short-sleeved shirts, even in August, because they revealed the dark blue tattoo that circled one of his biceps, and he feared his students might misinterpret the inked designs as macabre, given their backgrounds. He worked diligently to communicate in all sorts of ways that he was a person they could trust.

Mr. Williams had inherited his Anglo fathers rangy height and propensity to freckle, along with his Latina mothers dark eyes and hair. Fluent in both Spanish and English, he was the sort of teacher who devoted an enormous portion of his warmth, vitality, and intellect to his students. South was a century-old castlelike structure that stood on the edge of a rolling, green, 160-acre park in central Denver, Colorado. The rectangular park boasted meadows, manicured flower gardens, two lakes, a lily pond, meandering carriageways chock-a-block with Lycra-clad joggers, ten much-in-demand public tennis courts, and the busiest recreation center in the city. The grand old homes that ringed the park were selling for upward of $1 million, while modestly sized homes nearby that did not look directly onto the park might sell for half that amount. The neighborhood public high school was a popular choice, even for families who possessed significant wealth. Most of the classrooms were crowded with noisy, chattering teenagers. That morning, however, as he looked around his room, Mr. Williams saw many empty chairs and only seven students. The teenagers assigned to him wore shut-door expressions on their faces. Nobody in the room was talking, not even to one another. The teacher had expected this, for his room always got off to a quiet start.

Welcome to newcomer class! he said, in a deliberately warm tone of voice. My name is Mr. Williams. What is your name? Where are you from?

The seven teenagers who had reported to Room 142 made no reply. Just the act of showing up by 7:45 in the morning had required enormous fortitude. It was August 24, 2015, and the students had spent on average more than an hour negotiating the local public transit system to get to the school. They lived crammed with other relatives into small houses or one- or two-bedroom apartments located in far-flung neighborhoods nowhere near this upscale zip code, in parts of the city where a dollar could be stretched. Rents had jumped dramatically in central Denver in recent years, and affordable housing could be found only on the citys periphery, if at all. Getting from the patchwork zones of cheap housing located on the farthest edges of the city to South via the public transit system took dogged commitment, but that was a quality that Mr. Williamss students typically possessed in abundance. What they did not possess, for the most part, was the ability to understand what he was saying.