The Further Tales of Tempest Landry by Walter Mosley Page B

were illiterate. They were semiliterate. Knowing their alphabet and sounding out words I found that they were able to write—after a fashion—but at a very low level of craft, often with poignant results. I had them do assignments each week in which they would answer a single-sentence question with an essay of about a page in length.
    While they had little ability in ways of spelling, grammar, and style—their stories were often captivating. Each week we would take one or two of these short essays and go over them sentence by sentence until the words and their meaning satisfied the expectations of the classroom.
    That week’s assignment was the simple interrogative:
Why are you here in prison?
    I was interested to hear their excuses, but first someone had to volunteer.
    The silence stretched into discomfort.
    We waited.
    “Harris,” Tempest said finally. “Come on, man. I know you got sumpin’.”
    Next to me Tempest was the oldest man in the room; his body, and his life, were both thirty-nine years old. The rest of the students were all under thirty and the guards weren’t much older.
    Harris Maraman was twenty-four years old.
    “Do you have something for us, Mr. Maraman?” I asked the handsome, diffident young man.
    “Um…well,” he said.
    “Come on, brother,” Tony Anthony said, “let’s hear it.”
    When the men turned toward Harris their chains tinkled like wind chimes under a light breeze.
    “We live in a house on Stanton Street,” Harris said, reading from his lined notepaper with no preamble or introduction. “Me; my mother and sister, Lafisha, and brother, Zarryl; and my mother’s boyfriend Warren; and my sister’s child Rolanda and her little brother, Charles. They had turnt off the water and the electricity and the steam. My mother, Amelia, went to the City but they said that they were busy and that she would have to come back later. That’s when Warren left and I robbed a white man in New York City for three hunnert an’ fi’ty-six dollahs. My mother was so happy she could feed my sister and her kids that she didn’t even ask where the money come from. Warren came ovah for dinner but I sat down at the head of the table. I started goin’ ovah to New York from the Bronx ev’ry other day just about and jump on men and women and take their money an’ hit’em if they said no. They arrested me this one time but my lawyer, a white lady named Charlene, said somethin’ to the judge about the way they arrested me and they had to let me go. I was happy at the time but now that I think about it it would’a prob’ly been bettah if I had got put in jail then and then maybe I could’a had this class and got my GED an’ got a job where I didn’t have to hurt people. But then I was home again and my mother and my sister’s kids was cryin’ and Warren had a new girlfriend that bought his clothes. So I robbed a couple’a people and then I tried to rob this one man named Samuel somethin’. I knocked him down and took his money but that crazy white man got up an’ jumped on me. He grabbed at that money and I got mad. You know that money was for my fam’ly and I felt like he didn’t have no right to try an’ rob it back so I beat on him like a dog. A dog.
    “That was five years ago, when I was nineteen. Now I got seventy-nine years left on my sentence. My momma’s still on Stanton Street but my sister’s gone. Nobody knows where to. Warren come up to see me now and then. We don’t really talk but I guess I like it that he comes.
    “I know what I did was wrong but when I think about it I don’t know what else I could’a done. So I’m here in Mr. Angel’s class learnin’ how to write down what happened so that maybe one day I could understand it.”
    I looked out the window. Three of the black-and-white cows were staring at me. I turned my gaze back in the room and saw Tempest watching my eyes.
    It dawned on me then that Tempest didn’t have to plan his arguments with me. He was like