Sincerely, Antoine’s Mother

Since I last wrote, I have been thinking about the other student I spoke of.  Although his story also begins on a day that is different, like Iankel’s, it is a story I will probably never know.  I can only tell you about the character – and what a character he was.

Unlike the year before, Antoine’s class was difficult.  Every year brought a few kids who had tough lives, and as a result, their needs were…complicated.  In Antoine’s year, that was over half the class.  (I had not seen a class like that since my first year, but that is another story entirely!)  Being a fifth grade teacher, I had heard for several years what worked and didn’t work for him and quite frankly, I was a little nervous.  He wasn’t the only one who would need a lot of attention and I worried that if I didn’t think of something, this boy would struggle through yet another year, and that did not sit well with me – not in the least.

So the first day of school, I prepared to meet the people I would spend the next nine months with.  I tried to plan things that were fun, yet challenging, arranged my room so that it was neat and organized but also comfortable, and I tried to remember to smile (it was a big day for all of us) so that they would know I was happy to see them.  I opened the door, and in walked Antoine.

With eyebrows raised in a questioning way, and a completely bald head, he walked right past me, into the room.  I couldn’t help but notice that each step on his left foot was high and each one on his right foot swung his body into a much lower position.  He was strutting.

“Heeyyy, Mrs. Buckner,” he drawled as he searched the room for the perfect desk.  (They already had names on them, but he didn’t seem to notice.)
“Good morning, Antoine,” I said.
He paused low in his strut and looked back at me. “You know my name?”
“Of course I know your name,” I said. “I’ve watched you grow up.”
He looked at me skeptically. I guess it didn’t occur to him that I might know something about him. He plopped into a seat in the back.
I walked over to where he sat and pointed to a desk by the opposite wall.
“I know this looks like a good seat, but I have a spot for you over there. You’ll be able to see the the morning work and the front board much better.”
He looked at me, I smiled. I waved my hand for him to follow. I knew he had a way of standing his ground, but before I reached the other seat, he passed me, pulled out his chair and began checking the other names at the table. Returning to greet the others, I left him to get settled.

The other students filed in, some rowdy, some quiet, and each found a seat waiting for them. I looked at the students, wondering how they felt, how the year would go, and ready to get started, I began explaining the first activity. It was a sheet with a list of fun facts and a blank next to each one. The students were suppose to get to know each other by finding a different person to fit each statement. They milled around talking and writing for about 15 minutes and then we shared some responses. Antoine didn’t share, but he had quite a few comments on what others said. For example,
“You can’t be a vegetarian – I see you puttin bacon bits on your salad!”
“Antoine, this part is for listening and learning,” I said. I had to stifle a smile though, because that student had already put her lunch in the tub and I could see a big salad through the clear plastic and a mysterious baggie filled with brown crumbles.

At the end of the activity, I gave each student a packet to fill out on what they wanted to do and learn this year while I looked over the questionnaires. I was curious to see which blanks Antoine signed his name in. I scanned the sheets, not finding his name on any of them. I had seen him writing, so I looked again. That’s when I noticed that several blanks had random words written in them. Like a puzzle, I pulled out those papers and tried to find a pattern. The words were written in a different blank each time, never the same word twice. Then a thought occurred to me. I took those papers and kept rearranging them until they made a sentence.

I’m just chillin on the bus makin rhyme with my cuz.

The sentence was clear. I don’t know why, but it struck me as funny and before I could help myself, I burst out laughing. I couldn’t stop. The students were all watching me and I still couldn’t stop. When I finally did catch my breath, I read some of the statements he’d signed his “name” to.
“Antoine, could you come back here for a minute?”
The class all watched him as he strutted back to my table and looked at me with his raised eyebrows. I pointed to a fact next to one of his “answers.”
“I didn’t know you liked spinach?” I said.
He looked at me and the papers spread out on the table. And then he smiled back. Not a sassy smile, but a conspiratorial smile.
“I can’t be divulging all my secrets,” he whispered.
I nodded. Yep, I recognized a good sense of humor when I saw one.
I pointed to some of the other responses he gave – I like to read, scary movies give me nightmares, math is hard, writing is fun.
“Me too,” I said. “I completely understand.” He lowered his eyebrows, nodded several times, and returned to his seat.  I couldn’t be sure, but it felt like progress.

For the next few weeks, I got to know Antoine quite well. A mixture of humor and changing the procedures a bit to fit his comfort zone was the way he made it through the day. He was far behind the class and it turned out that these skills were a way of saving himself embarrassment when he felt uncomfortable, and not a way of tormenting the other people in the class.

I chose to watch and learn.

When we had indoor recess and he convinced the boy with dyslexia and the bully, who never want to read, to play Pretty Pretty Princess, I knew there was more to the story.  I noticed that when they took turns reading the game cards, they often added their own words.  He was making friends with the one who could hurt him and the one who understood him.  And he was making fun, in a good natured way, of all of them at the same time.  And when we had a reader’s theater, he wanted the lead because making mistakes isn’t such a big deal when it looks like you are there by choice…and because of your enthusiasm, the teacher might overlook the fact that you improvise every time the words get hard.  Because of this new comfort zone, he doesn’t notice the real reason the teacher has for loving his improvisation so much is so that he won’t think anything of it when she has him write down his own version (difficult words included) and reread it for someone else’s class.

We each studied hard that year, and it paid off.  He made great progress…and he felt it.

Antoine was not the character that I expected when he swaggered into my class, but he was a character nonetheless.  He had strengths and weaknesses and a whole string of quirks, just as all good characters have.

So when I received a phone call from the office and listened to the message I would have to relay, it was not easy to hear.  (I began to notice a pattern here and wished I could start letting that phone ring off the hook.)

Antoine had come in that morning, just like always.  Smiling, joking, seeing what he could get away with.  We never talked about his home life and there was no need.  We both knew it wasn’t easy.  What I did not know that day was that he had spent the night with an aunt because the authorities had decided that his mother’s next few months would be spent in a county jail and they had picked her up the evening before.  For Antoine, this was another problem he would overcome.  My message to him was that his father, a man he hadn’t seen in years, had driven all night from Mississippi to Texas and was standing in the office waiting to take him home.  To Mississippi.  Antoine took the news like he took everything else.  In stride.

“Guess I finally found a way to get out of homework,” he said.
I looked at him and stifled a laugh, both of us knowing he had never done his homework.
“I think being home probably took a lot of work all by itself, didn’t it?”
He breathed out a little laugh and nodded. “That’s the truth right there.”
“He drove all night. Did I tell you that?” I asked.
“You told me. Kinda makes me wonder what was keeping him so busy all those other nights that he couldn’t have driven here on one of them.”
“That’s the truth right there,” I said. We both laughed at that. “Sounds to me like he’s going to be stuck in the car for a lot of hours tonight with a kid who has a lot of questions. You think he thought of that?”
“I hope he did,” he said. He zipped up his backpack and slung it over his shoulder. “I guess this is it.”
“I guess it is. Will you make me a promise?”
“What promise?”
“That someday you’ll tell me how you keep finding better and better ways to survive this complicated life of yours.”
He lowered his eyebrows and nodded a slow nod. “We’ll see, Mrs. Buckner. But I can’t be divulging all my secrets.”
I hugged that little character and watched him walk down the hall until I couldn’t see him anymore.

It wasn’t until summer that I found out a little about how he was doing. His mother was released after school let out and as I packed my classroom for the break, my phone rang. It was Antoine’s mother. She told me that Antoine had really gotten to know his dad and had decided to stay with him for a while. In her new found quest to put him first, she had decided that that was the best thing for him. I smiled thinking he might be getting to settle down into a routine and thanked her for her call. That’s when she started to cry.
“I actually called to thank you. I have talked to Antoine a few times on the phone and each time he talks about you. He says you were the first teacher to ever make him feel like you liked him. I can’t tell you what it means to me to have my baby happy. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

I was glad to think that things were looking up for Antoine all the way around. He had a lot of days that looked like the end, that were really the beginning, the days of his story that were different. And like the ambitious kid that he was, he faced all of them head-on…the first day of class, the day his mother was taken, the day his father returned, and the day he chose to stay in Mississippi.

Strong characters don’t always realize the full impact of their choices, but they make them just the same. Mick Harte chooses not to wear his bicycle helmet, Theodosia chooses to follow the strange man, and Reynie chooses to go to the Institute.  What books do you love that have strong characters that create a day that is different from all the rest by a choice that they made?  My favorite right now is Hunger Games.

Happy reading!

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