Chapter 83
He went back to Birmingham at fifty-eight to give a keynote address at a conference on education and identity. The university had changed new buildings, new people, the specific smell of that institution that he had forgotten he remembered and then remembered immediately upon walking through the gates.
He walked to the old halls of residence. The canal path was there. He ran it in the early morning before the conference, the grey water and the willows and the cold in the way it was never cold in Kingston.
He thought about Tunde and the jollof rice on the third evening. About Priya's speed. About Dr. Whitfield's marginalia. About being eighteen years old and arriving somewhere that had no idea what to make of him and making himself, over four years, into someone it would remember.
He gave the keynote. He spoke to several hundred education researchers and practitioners about the relationship between place and identity in education, about what it meant to teach from the inside of experience, about the Kingston Voices Project and what it had learned in twenty-five years about giving students permission to examine their own lives.
Afterwards, a young woman came to him. She was about twenty-two, Jamaican, a postgraduate student in education. She had the slightly formal, slightly uncertain manner of someone approaching a person whose work has meant something to them.
'Your book changed how I think about my own teaching,' she said. 'The first one. I read it when I was deciding whether to go into education.'
'What did it change?' he asked.
She thought about it properly, which he liked.
'It told me that where I come from is a resource,' she said. 'That I don't have to translate myself to teach here. I can bring all of it.'
'Yes,' he said. 'That's exactly right.' He paused. 'Don't be polite.'
She blinked. Then, slowly, she smiled.
'Someone said that to you.'
'Someone gave me the whole thing,' he said. 'I've just been passing it forward.'
He flew back to Kingston the next day. He thought, looking out the window as England fell away below, about the full shape of the circle Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Kingston, Kingston, Birmingham and what it meant to carry all of it, to be made by all of it, to have built all of it into something lasting.
He was fifty-eight years old and still building.
The building was the point.