When Victoria Bradley was in fifth grade, she started asking her mother, Bernita, to homeschool her. Bernita wasn’t sure where the idea came from—they never saw homeschooling on TV. But something always seemed to be going wrong at school for Victoria. In second grade, a teacher lost track of her during parent pickup, and she wandered off school grounds. Bernita went to see the principal, intent on getting the teacher fired. The principal asked if she would consider taking an AmeriCorps position at the school. Bernita cut back her hours at the hair salon she owned and started doing community outreach, assisting teachers and hosting parent meetings.
In 2011, Bernita moved her family—which also included her older son, Carlos—to Detroit’s East English neighborhood, where she bought a three-story, yellow brick house for twelve thousand dollars. Victoria, then in fourth grade, transferred to Brenda Scott Academy, where two girls began bullying her. One wrote “I’m fat” in black pen on the back of Victoria’s shirt. On another occasion, one of the girls spit at Victoria. She screamed at them, and was suspended. (That year, administrators suspended three hundred and forty Black students, or forty-two per cent of the school’s Black population, and another sixteen Black girls were arrested there.)
Victoria moved to a top-rated charter school, where she lasted only a few months—she said that an administrator picked on certain Black students. By fifth grade, Victoria had attended five schools, and she was tired of being the new kid. She brought up homeschooling when she was reprimanded for having blue braids, and again in eighth grade, after some boys dared each other to try picking her up as she sat at her desk. Homeschooling, she said, would allow her to learn at her own pace, without anyone making fun of her. Bernita was sympathetic, but she told Victoria that she couldn’t teach her. She was a single mom, and she’d never completed her college degree.
For high school, Victoria enrolled in a majority-white charter school. Before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered Detroit’s school system, which serves about fifty-three thousand children, she had failed chemistry and barely passed algebra. Soon after school went remote, in March, 2020, Victoria asked Bernita if she could drop out and take a job doing nails.
During the first months of lockdown, Bernita, who works as an educational consultant, spent hours each day talking to other parents of students in the Detroit system on Zoom and Facebook. One mother told her that she had shut herself in the bathroom to cry after overhearing teachers berate her children on Microsoft Teams. Others told Bernita they’d only just discovered that their kids had been performing below grade level. (Before the pandemic, six per cent of Detroit’s fourth graders met proficiency benchmarks in math, and seven per cent in reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.)
Early one evening last July, before Victoria’s senior year, Bernita and Victoria pulled into their driveway and found that a container of dish soap they’d bought at Sam’s Club had spilled in the trunk. While Bernita bailed out the soap using a three-ring binder and some old rags, Victoria looked down the cracked driveway and pointed at a swarm of fireflies. “What makes them glow?” she asked.
Bernita watched Victoria chase the fireflies around the yard for a few minutes. This, she thought, was what a Black kid’s life should feel like—happy and unencumbered. She told Victoria to find a Mason jar. They ran through the grass until Victoria had trapped a single glowing insect. Afterward, they sat on their stoop, researching the specimen on Victoria’s phone. They learned that the bugs belong to the family Lampyridae, and that a bioluminescent enzyme makes them glow.
As Victoria scrolled, Bernita laughed. “You do know this is homeschooling, right?” she asked.
Victoria looked up from her phone. The fireflies lit up around them. “Really?” she asked.
“Yep,” Bernita said. “This is homeschooling. This is science. We about to do this for real.”
Black families have only recently turned to homeschooling in significant numbers. The Census Bureau found that, by October, 2020, the nationwide proportion of homeschoolers—parents who had withdrawn their children from public or private schools and taken full control of their education—had risen to more than eleven per cent, from five per cent at the start of the pandemic. For Black families, the growth has been sharper. Around three per cent of Black students were homeschooled before the pandemic; by October, the number had risen to sixteen per cent.
Few researchers have studied Black homeschoolers, but in 2009 Cheryl Fields-Smith, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s Mary Frances Early College of Education, published a study of two dozen such families in and around Atlanta. Some parents were middle class or wealthy, and wanted more challenging curricula for their children. Others hadn’t attended college and earned less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; one family lived in a housing project.
Most of the parents told Fields-Smith that the decision had been wrenching. Winning access to public education was one of the central victories of the civil-rights movement. Several parents had relatives who saw homeschooling as “a slap in the face” to the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. Others worried about harming their neighbors’ children, because public schools rely on per-pupil funding from state governments. (In 2020, around seventy per cent of Detroit public-school revenues came from per-student allocations by the state.)
Still, the parents said that they felt as if they’d had no choice, with eighty per cent citing pervasive racism and inequities. Even in the wealthy families, parents said that their kids were frequently punished or seen as troublemakers. In some cases, students had been inappropriately recommended for special-education classes or medication; other students were bullied. In a study conducted in 2010 by professors from Temple University and Montgomery County Community College, homeschooling parents said that they thought Black Americans had been tricked into fighting for integration. “Somebody put in our heads that being around your own kind was the worst thing in the world. How you need to be in better neighborhoods, in neighborhoods where people don’t want you, in schools where people don’t want to teach you,” a mother in Virginia, who was homeschooling two children, said.
Bernita and Victoria first encountered a Black homeschooling family in 2015, when Victoria was in seventh grade and attending an after-school music class with a girl named Zwena Gray. Zwena’s mother, Kija, had worked for many years as a substitute teacher in the University Prep School charter system. Most schools, in her view, prioritize whiteness—the kids are taught about white politicians and white inventors, and teachers and Black children are pushed toward compliance rather than creativity. Kija’s son, Kafele, was frequently bullied. When he was in eighth grade, administrators at the charter school he was attending threatened to suspend him for not tucking in his shirt. Kija decided to homeschool him, and later Zwena, who was then in fifth grade. The children enrolled in online courses; Kija spent less time substitute teaching, and her husband, who works for the Detroit Health Department, also helped. Kafele returned to the charter school in eleventh grade, but Zwena never went back to school.
When we talked in her dining room, Kija was baking cinnamon pound cakes to sell. As she described her journey from charter-school teacher to homeschool enthusiast, she drew a Biblical parallel: “Satan was the closest thing to God, and he saw this shit for what it was, and he was, like, ‘Oh, hell no.’ He started to question things, and that’s what made him cast out, because he didn’t have blind faith—he had critical faith.”
Bernita was astonished by what Kija had achieved with her children. Zwena had built robots, written code for Web sites, and designed her own clothes. But Kija had a bachelor’s degree and a background in teaching. Bernita still couldn’t see homeschooling as an option for Victoria.
In early 2020, an online acquaintance of Bernita’s, Keri Rodrigues, a former labor organizer in Massachusetts and the president of a new organization called the National Parents Union, persuaded her to begin hosting a weekly forum for parents on Facebook Live. At the beginning of June, Bernita invited Kija on as a guest. It was a week after the police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in Minneapolis; thousands of people were protesting in downtown Detroit. The parents who spoke in the Facebook forum connected the uprising for racial justice with their experiences in the educational system. One mother said that she had tried many public and private schools; at all of them, the front office was filled with Black boys awaiting discipline.
Tesha Jordan, a single mother who works for Head Start, said that she’d been urged to transfer her son out of his middle school after his behavioral issues had scared a teacher. Jordan’s son has a learning disability, and she worried that if she homeschooled him he would lose out—the state gave his middle school money for a social worker to help him with his homework twice a week. “I’m not a teacher,” Jordan said. “I’m just a mother.”
Kija, watching from her living room, unmuted herself. “When I heard you say they had a behavioral problem—or you were told that—the thing that came to mind for me was, all Black people have a behavioral problem. It’s called trauma,” she said. “And when you said, ‘I’m not a teacher, I’m a mother’—those two things are synonymous.”
The modern homeschooling movement in America was ignited in the nineteen-sixties, after Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 prohibited school prayer and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial segregation in public institutions. Although homeschooling attracted some left-leaning hippies during the sixties and seventies, by the nineteen-eighties its most vocal and influential supporters were white Christian conservatives, according to Heath Brown, an associate professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of the recent book “Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State.”
Most of the earliest homeschooling textbooks were written from a Christian perspective, and some were racist. Bob Jones University, the private South Carolina college that refused to admit Black students until 1971, began issuing homeschooling textbooks through its press later that decade. “United States History for Christian Schools,” first published in 1991, stated that most slaveholders treated enslaved people well, and that slavery “is an excellent example of the far-reaching consequences of sin. The sin in this case was greed—greed on the part of African tribal leaders.”
Arlin and Rebekah Horton, who met at Bob Jones University, went on to found what became Abeka, a Christian publisher that produces some of the country’s most popular homeschooling materials. Abeka’s “America: Land I Love,” for eighth graders, first published in 1996 and now in its third edition, argued that slavery allowed Black people to find Jesus. Abeka’s eleventh-grade textbook “United States History: Heritage of Freedom,” first published in 1983 and now in its fourth edition, claimed that the Ku Klux Klan only occasionally resorted to violence. A 2018 investigation by the Orlando Sentinel found that Abeka was still producing textbooks stating that “the slave who knew Christ had more freedom than a free person who did not know the Savior.”
Early supporters of homeschooling wanted as little government intervention as possible and advocated against legislative proposals that would have sent money their way, Brown told me. “It was a bargain they were unwilling to take,” he said. “In exchange for small amounts of funding, they would be subject to the things they fear most, which was having to adhere to a set of standardized educational schooling practices, on everything from teacher certification to testing to curricular choice.”
In 1983, a group of white evangelical lawyers formed the Home School Legal Defense Association, to represent homeschooling parents who’d been arrested for not sending their children to school. When officers arrested two farmers in Michigan who’d been educating their children at home without a license, the H.S.L.D.A. spent nearly a decade fighting their case. In 1993, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that homeschooling parents in Michigan did not need to be certified. (Michael Farris, the founding president of the H.S.L.D.A. and its board chairman, is now head of the conservative Christian nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, which in recent years has pushed for a series of anti-gay and anti-trans bills.)
The H.S.L.D.A. offers grants directly to coöperatives formed by homeschooling parents; after the number of homeschoolers spiked during the pandemic, it doubled its grant dollars for this year, to $1.3 million. As the number of Black and Latino homeschooling families has grown, the group has attempted to diversify its membership and staff. All but one of its lawyers are white, but it recently hired several Black and Latino consultants. LaNissir James, who has seven children, ranging in age from five to twenty-three, and who is based in Maryland but “roadschools” across multiple states in her R.V., started working as a high-school educational consultant for the H.S.L.D.A. in 2019. Families “first need to understand the law,” she said, because homeschooling regulations vary widely from state to state. Then James interviews parents to assess their children’s academic needs. “Are Mom and Dad working? Is Mom home? Do they want to be online? You find their strengths and weaknesses so that you can find a curriculum that matches that family.”
For Black families like James’s, the ability to improvise a curriculum is a major reason to try homeschooling. “We are not seeing ourselves in textbooks,” she said. “I love traditional American history, but I like to take my kids to the Museum of African American History and Culture and say, O.K., here’s what was going on with Black people in 1800.” There are now hundreds of curricula to choose from, available on free or inexpensive Web sites such as Khan Academy and Outschool. Last year, one of the most popular offerings on Outschool was a course called Black History from a Decolonized Perspective, taught by Iman Alleyne, a former schoolteacher in Fort Lauderdale, who turned to homeschooling after her elementary-age son told her that school made him want to die.
James said that some of her Black clients need to know that homeschooling is something other Black families do. “That’s a normal feeling,” she told me. “And the answer is yes. There is joy for Black homeschoolers who find out about other Black homeschoolers.”
In August, 2020, Bernita applied for and won a twenty-five-thousand-dollar grant from Keri Rodrigues’s group, the National Parents Union, to fund a homeschooling collective called Engaged Detroit. She hired Kija and two other Black homeschooling mothers, at thirty-five dollars an hour, to coach a group of twelve parents, and used the remaining money to buy software, laptops, and other supplies.
In accepting the grant, Bernita became part of a decades-long political debate. The National Parents Union paid for the grant with money from Vela Education Fund, which is backed by the Walton Family Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute. These groups advocate “school choice”—rerouting money and families away from traditional public schools through such means as charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, and vouchers, which allow public-education dollars to be put toward private-school tuition.
Sarah Reckhow, an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University and the author of “Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics,” told me that the Waltons “have been consistently a key funder of the charter-school movement.” Since 1997, the Walton foundation has spent more than four hundred million dollars to create and expand charter schools nationwide. In 2016, it announced plans to spend an additional billion dollars on charters.
School choice is an especially divisive subject in Michigan, where some of the country’s first charter schools were established, in 1994. Betsy DeVos, of Michigan’s billionaire Prince family, has invested millions, through donations and lobbying, to expand charters across the state. In 1999 and 2000, DeVos and her family backed an unsuccessful campaign, called Kids First! Yes!, to amend Michigan law to allow vouchers. In 2013, the Walton foundation doubled the budget of another DeVos project, the pro-voucher group Alliance for School Choice, when it announced a donation of six million dollars to send lower-income children to private schools. Three years later, DeVos published an op-ed in the Detroit News calling for the state to “retire” Detroit’s public-school system: “Rather than create a new traditional school district to replace the failed D.P.S.”—Detroit Public Schools—“we should liberate all students from this woefully under-performing district model and provide in its place a system of schools where performance and competition create high-quality opportunities for kids.” DeVos’s first budget proposal as Secretary of Education under President Trump, in 2017, would have cut nine billion dollars from federal education funding while adding more than a billion dollars for school-choice programs.
Advocates of school choice say that it gives low-income parents access to institutions that can better serve their children. Critics say that it lures highly motivated Black families away from traditional public schools and further hobbles underfunded districts. Presidents Clinton and Obama supported charters, but Democrats have largely cooled on them, and progressives such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed curbing their growth. Michigan’s charters, most of which operate as for-profit companies, have consistently performed worse than the state’s traditional public schools. Yet parents continue to choose charters, which receive a large chunk of the more than eight thousand dollars per student that the state would otherwise send to non-charters, but aren’t subject to the same degree of public oversight. About half of Detroit’s students are now enrolled in charters, one of the highest proportions of any U.S. city.
The Walton foundation set up the National Parents Union in January, 2020, with Rodrigues as the founding president. Rodrigues’s oldest son, who has autism and A.D.H.D., was suspended thirty-six times in kindergarten alone; sometimes he was sent to a sensory-deprivation room that Rodrigues thought resembled a cinder-block cell. Eventually, a school representative suggested a charter school. “I didn’t know what a charter school was,” Rodrigues said. “I didn’t know I had any options. I just thought I had to send him to the closest school. I didn’t know there were fights like this in education. All I knew was ‘Oh, my god, are you kidding me—why are you doing this to my kid?’ ”
The National Parents Union was less than three months old when the pandemic closed schools. As well-off families set up private learning pods, Vela Education Fund gave Rodrigues seven hundred thousand dollars to help people with fewer resources, like Bernita, create their own. “There was an article in the New York Times about fancy white people in upstate New York creating these ‘pandemic pods,’ ” Rodrigues said. “But that’s how poor Black and brown folks survive in America—we resource-share. We don’t call them ‘pandemic pods,’ because that’s a bougie new term. For us, we called it ‘going to Abuelita’s house,’ because she watched all the cousins in the family after school, and that’s where you learned a host of skills outside of the normal school setting.”
Last summer, the nonprofit news organization Chalkbeat, which receives Walton funding, co-sponsored a virtual town hall on reopening Michigan’s public schools. Detroit’s superintendent, Nikolai P. Vitti, said that expanding to “non-traditional” options, such as learning pods, would hurt many of the city’s children. He warned that homeschooling, like charter schools, would undermine public education and cost teachers their jobs. Legislators were already drafting bills, he said, to take money away from schools so that children could continue learning in pods after campuses reopened.
“I don’t judge any parent for using the socioeconomic means that they have to create what they believe is the best educational opportunity for their child,” Vitti said. “We all do that, in our way, as parents. But that is the purpose of traditional public education, to try to be the equalizer, to try to create that equal opportunity.”
Bernita had logged on to the discussion from her kitchen. “Parents are not deciding to take their children out because of covid,” she told Vitti. “Parents are doing pods because education has failed children in this city forever.”
Iasked Kija if it bothered her to accept money from the conservative-libertarian Koch family, who have spent vast sums of their fortune advocating for lower taxes, deep cuts to social services, and looser environmental regulations. “I guess the bigger question is, why don’t we have enough resources so that we don’t have to get money from them? It bothers me, yes—but why do they have so much money that they get to fund all of our shit?” she asked. “I shouldn’t have to get resources from the Kochs.”
Kija and Bernita describe themselves as Democrats. Bernita said that, in another era, she “would be a Black Panther with white friends.” She said that she was “at peace” with her decision to take money from the Koch family, because they fund several of the charter schools that Victoria attended, through their Michigan-based building-supply company Guardian Industries. She is not a “poster child” for her conservative backers, she added—the Koch family has no control over what or how she teaches. In a video about Engaged Detroit produced by Vela Education Fund, Bernita states, “If school won’t reinvent education, we have to reinvent it ourselves, and our goal at Engaged Detroit is to make sure families have the tools so that choice is in their hands.”
Vela Education Fund offered Bernita one year of funding, and in April she accepted another twenty-five-thousand-dollar grant, from Guardian Industries, to sustain her group through the next school year. Rodrigues imagines a scenario in which the per-pupil funding that public-school districts normally receive goes straight to a homeschooling parent. “Instead,” she said, “you have systems that are addicted to that money.”
Celine Coggins, the executive director of Grantmakers for Education, a collective of more than three hundred philanthropic organizations, including the Walton Family Foundation, says it’s not clear yet whether funders will continue to invest in homeschooling after the pandemic. Most are in “listening mode,” she said. Andre Perry, an education-policy expert at the centrist Brookings Institution, suspects that conservative-libertarian philanthropists will not prop up homeschooling as they have charters and vouchers, “but they will use this wedge issue to hurt public schools,” he said.
Perry was once the C.E.O. of the Capital One New Beginnings Charter School Network, which launched in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but he grew skeptical of the school-choice movement. Its funders tend to put their wealth toward alternatives to the public-school system, Perry told me, rather than lobbying state governments to implement more equitable funding models for public schools or to address the over-representation of Black children in special education. “Because of the pandemic, you’ve had organizations saying, Hey, this is an opportunity to again go after public schools,” Perry said. The Vela-funded homeschooling collectives don’t address root causes of educational disparities, he continued: “When people only focus on the escape hatch, it reveals they’re not interested in improving public education.”
Perry went on, “Slapping ‘Parents Union’ on something while you’re constantly trying to underfund public education—that’s not the kind of trade-off that suggests you’re interested in empowering Black people. It’s more of a sign that you’re trying to advance a conservative agenda against public systems.”
Six months into the pandemic, a consensus had emerged that many children, in all kinds of learning environments, were depressed, disengaged, and lonely in the Zoom simulacrum of school. “It’s Time to Admit It: Remote Education Is a Failure,” a headline stated in the Washington Post. “Remote Learning Is a Bad Joke,” The Atlantic declared. For some homeschoolers who rely heavily on online curricula, an all-screens, alone-in-a-room version of school can have a flattening effect even outside of a global health crisis. Kafele Gray, Kija’s son, who is now twenty-one and studying music business at Durham College, in Ontario, liked online homeschooling because it freed him from bullying. After two years, though, he was failing his classes and procrastinating, with assignments piling up. “It got kind of stressful,” he said. “You have to teach yourself and be on yourself.” He especially struggled with math. “When I’m in school, I’m better at math, because I have the teacher there to explain it to me—I’m seeing it broken down. When I was online, I would get it wrong, but I wouldn’t know why.” Still, when Kafele returned to his charter school, in eleventh grade, he’d learned to push himself to figure things out on his own. “School was less challenging” than it had been two years earlier, he told me. “I started getting A’s and B’s again.”
When the fall semester started, Bernita and Victoria tried to replicate the course load Victoria would have undertaken in a normal year. Bernita searched for online chemistry and trigonometry classes, and Victoria decided to take dance at the charter high school she’d attended before the pandemic. Bernita wanted the Engaged Detroit families to learn about Black history, so she signed them up for a six-week virtual course with the Detroit historian Jamal Jordan. Victoria bought pink notebooks and pens and a chalkboard for writing out the weekly schedule, and Bernita set up a desk for her daughter in the den. Though Bernita spent many hours on Zoom for her consulting work, the family ate lunch together most days.
As the semester continued, Victoria faded. She stayed up until seven in the morning and slept until two every afternoon, and she stopped doing chemistry. In October, Bernita told her that she couldn’t go on a planned post-pandemic trip to Los Angeles. Later that week, during her weekly coaching session with Kija, Bernita bragged about disciplining Victoria. Kija asked her to reconsider: teen-agers like sleeping in, and homeschooling allows kids to follow their natural rhythms. Besides, Kija said, Black kids are disciplined more than enough. Rather than punish Victoria, Kija suggested, Bernita should ask her daughter what she wanted to study.
The advice worked: Victoria replaced chemistry with a forensic-science class that met the state science requirements for graduation. She pored over lessons about evidence and crime scenes for hours at a time. By spring, she was waking up early to study for the core classes she needed to pass. One cold, sunny Wednesday, wearing a sweatshirt that read “Look Momma I’m Soaring,” Victoria sat down to puzzle out the trigonometry lessons that had always confused her. She emptied a pail of highlighters onto the table. At her high school, teachers hadn’t let her write in different colors, and she couldn’t make sense of her monochromatic notes. She opened a Khan Academy lesson on side ratios, and as the instructor explained the formulas for finding cosine and tangent Victoria drew triangles, highlighting each side with a different color.
The lesson included a nine-minute video and several practice questions. Every time Victoria attempted to find the cosine of the specified angle, she got the wrong answer. In a regular class, she would have pretended to understand. At home, she paused the video, rewound it, and flipped back through her notes. Eventually, she realized that she didn’t know which side was the hypotenuse. She Googled the word.
“The longest side of a right triangle,” she read. “Oh.”
She tried the formula for sine—opposite over hypotenuse—and this time a green check mark of victory flashed on her screen. Victoria solved for the angle’s tangent, and when she got it right she smiled. “O.K., I’m smart,” she said.
The parents of Engaged Detroit meet on Zoom every other Monday night. One evening in mid-March, Bernita set her laptop on the kitchen table next to a plate of broccoli and mashed potatoes. A dozen squares popped up on her screen, showing kitchens and living rooms from across the city. The parents updated one another on their children’s progress. Two preteens had started a jewelry-making business. An elementary-age boy with a stutter was relieved to be learning at home with his mom. Victoria watched for a minute, then went upstairs to feed her guinea pig, Giselle.
A mother, Jeanetta Riley, recounted how, at the beginning of lockdown, she had discovered that her daughter, Skye, a freshman in high school, was performing two grades behind in math. After she joined Bernita’s group, she found a tutor, and now, using Khan Academy, Skye had caught up to her grade level.
Like Bernita, Jeanetta had thought of homeschooling as something only white people did. “A lot of Black people are struggling,” she told me. They don’t have the resources to stay at home all day teaching. Before the pandemic, Jeanetta worked long hours in customer service at the Fiat Chrysler plant. The company laid her off in March, 2020, and she isn’t sure when she’ll return to work. Skye is old enough to stay home alone, though, and Jeanetta plans to continue homeschooling after the pandemic, a decision some of her family members do not support. One relative berated her at a party for thinking she could take charge of something others go to graduate school to master. But Jeanetta was enjoying her weekly coaching sessions with Kija, and Skye seemed happier.
“I see such growth in her,” Jeanetta said. “She’s always painting stuff and bringing it to me. If that builds up her confidence, then I’m going for it. We didn’t even know she could paint. We didn’t know so much stuff about her. How is this my child, and I didn’t know?”
The day after the Engaged Detroit meeting, Victoria logged on to a dance class she was taking at the charter high school. Her teacher also joined from home, where she demonstrated the day’s lesson under a framed poster of the Beatles. She was a white woman who often played white music in class, Victoria said—that Tuesday, she streamed an Adrianne Lenker song as the students stretched. Victoria preferred R. & B., but she felt close to her teacher, who often e-mailed her to check in. Other instructors had disappeared early in the pandemic.
For the class’s final project, the teacher had encouraged the students to do something personal. Some choreographed a dance to music or to a poem. Victoria had written an original poem about being sexually abused as a child. Part of it read:
Near the end of that day’s session, the teacher asked Victoria to stay online after class. When the other students had logged off, she told Victoria that she was worried about her poem. “I don’t want to censor anything,” the teacher said. “I just don’t know from a school standpoint that we can share.” The performances would be public, she said, for a “family audience.” She asked Victoria if she could revise the poem. “Some of the lines are very, very vulgar,” the teacher told her. (She was evidently referring to a stark couplet that switched the identity of “you” to disorienting effect: “you touched me in a way i never knew was true / before you could make anyone else hard he got hard off of you.”) Victoria slumped a little in her chair, but she tried to keep smiling. “O.K.,” she said.
A few nights later, Victoria opened an acceptance letter from Wayne State University. She’d won enough scholarship money to cover four years of tuition. With Pell Grant assistance, the amount came to more than thirteen thousand dollars a year. “That’s crazy,” she whispered to herself. She carried the letter around the house the next morning; she paused her trigonometry lesson to reread it. On her lunch break, buzzing with triumph, Victoria called her dance teacher on Microsoft Teams. She asked if, instead of revising her poem, she could add a trigger warning. The teacher said again that parts of the poem were “vulgar,” then laughed—a high-pitched giggle. If Victoria wanted to perform it, the teacher would need to consult with the school’s social worker: “I feel like there’s a fine line there, and I don’t know what’s acceptable for our audience.”
Victoria told her that she understood. She smiled, big and inviting, and she thanked her teacher for her time. “I appreciate it that you’re being understanding, that we’re having a good conversation about this,” the teacher said. “Other people would get into this intense thing.”
Bernita walked by and asked if she could speak to the teacher. Embarrassed, Victoria quickly closed her laptop.
“You just hung up on her,” Bernita said. “You know what I’m going to do is e-mail her, right?”
“Mom,” Victoria said firmly. Bernita stared back. Victoria bent over onto the table and buried her face in her arms. “She’s scared that [the teacher] is going to start acting funny with her,” Bernita told me. “That’s what always happens when she addresses something. The teacher turns around and starts feeling some kind of way about her, so she don’t want to address that, because she’s, like, ‘Just let me finish school.’ ”
She turned back to Victoria, who was sobbing.
“Ain’t that how you feeling?”
Victoria sat up to blow her nose, but cried harder. She nodded.
“People don’t know the damage they do to kids,” Bernita said. “She’s somewhere now thinking, ‘Oh, that went well.’ Baby, I’m going to e-mail her, O.K.?”
Victoria’s tears dropped onto her acceptance letter, soaking it.
Bernita suggested that she put her emotions into something creative, so Victoria collected herself and went upstairs to her room, returning with green and yellow ribbons and a pair of white Nike Air Force Ones. She wouldn’t have a normal high-school graduation. She wasn’t even sure what her high-school diploma would say. “Homeschool Academy”? But she wanted to celebrate, so she’d started planning the outfit she’d wear when the semester ended. Wayne State’s colors are green and gold.
For years, Victoria told people that she didn’t plan to go to college, because she feared no college would accept her. Now, the damp acceptance letter underneath her laptop, she wrapped a ribbon around the shoe and did what she’d done every year for the past twelve: she told herself that what came next would be better, and that, eventually, she’d find her place. ♦
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