Chapter 101
He still wrote by hand not exclusively he had adapted to the technologies as they came, had emails and messages and all the modes of contemporary communication. But for the things that mattered most he wrote by hand, on paper, to be received by hand. Joseph's daughter named Diane for her great-grandmother was sixteen when Marcus noticed she was writing, Not for school, not for assignments. Writing in the margins of her notebooks, on scraps, in the way people write when they cannot not
He had been called many things over the years. Sir, by generations of students. Mr. Campbell, by colleagues and parents and officials. Marcus, by the people who knew him fully. But what he was most consistently, most fundamentally, most truly, was what Thomas called him: Pa Marcus.
Leroy's heart gave him trouble at sixty-eight not catastrophically, not fatally, but seriously enough to require surgery and rest and a long recalibration of how he moved through the world. He sat with Leroy in the hospital and then at home during the recovery with the particular quality of presence that long friendship enables not performing concern, not filling silences unnecessarily, just being there.
What the Kingston Voices Project Became
Thirty years after Marcus had run the first cohort of twelve students in a school hall on Saturday mornings, the Kingston Voices Project served eight hundred students per year across twelve schools, had an endowment, a building of its own, and an alumni network of several thousand.
The fourth grandchild was born on a Tuesday in March when Marcus was seventy-six. He held her in the hospital and she looked at him with the focused attention of newborns and he told her, quietly, that she had arrived in a good family in a good city and that everything essential was already here.
Writing in the Eighth Decade he wrote differently in his eighth decade. Not worse different the sentences were shorter, The thinking was denser but less elaborate. He had lost some of the desire to persuade and retained all of the desire to be precise , He taught Thomas who was studying education and spent his Saturdays at Marcus and Nia's apartment the same things Mr. Okafor had taught him, adapted for a different time and a different world but rooted in the same soil: pay attention, say what you mean, treat every student as someone whose full capacity deserves to be met. Kingston had changed around him across fifty years of his returning life changed and remained, which was what cities did, New buildings and demolished ones new neighborhoods and old ones repurposed. The same mountains to the east.