Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo

Author:Elizabeth Acevedo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

I

looked around the lecture hall. Exactly thirty-three hours until the wake, and I knew it down to the minute because I hadn’t been able to stop counting even while I’d been teaching. The end of class usually culminated in a collective dismount as the students looked over their notes to see if they had all the information they needed to write their papers. Teaching could be a joy, but I was always relieved when my portion of the day’s work was over. I was still getting used to the ways my younger students used technology. They took pictures on their phones of my presentation slides, or emailed me without any shame to ask things I’d answered in class. They kept tests from previous years and traded them around the way kids in middle school used to hustle Pokémon cards. I tried not to be prideful that as a Dope Young Educator™ I always re-created my tests to match the material and interests of each unique cohort, and that students would still need to do the reading and participate in the conversations in order to fully comprehend the PowerPoints.

“We are building knowledge collectively,” I told them on the first day. “This isn’t data transfer, where I could just hand you a USB with articles and you’d be all set. You aren’t downloading the information. We are searching for the truth of a people and place together.”

And I for real wanted it to be that way. Last semester, when I took off for my surgery, something else had been removed from my body: this connection. Teaching put a battery in my pack. It reminded me why I spent hours on dead hours combing through archives for a single measly citation. Sometimes not even that. Sometimes just for a secondary source that at least corroborated a first. The research was crucial work. And I had many colleagues who saw the research as the primary work, the teaching as the atonement they had to perform in order to be supported by the academic institutions. But for me the teaching went hand in hand with the studies I pursued. I searched harder, faster, more meticulously for information when I saw the awe and awful of how little we knew about ourselves dawn on my students.

The majority of students who took my courses were trying to fulfill the humanities requirements in order to get to their favorite sections within their own major. But students like the ones this morning, who took an advanced course in Kiskeya Land and Living 1500s–1804? These were the ones. The ones I waited for every section, every semester. The Washington Heights and Lawrence and Providence and Miami youngins. The ones who pilgrimaged to this Dominican mecca; public thinkers who tagged street corners with symbols of Atabey and Lucumí prayers. These were the ones who came in already having read, annotated, and written dissenting arguments or celebratory reviews in response to Silvio Torres-Saillant, Ana-Maurine Lara, April Mayes, Ginetta Candelario. These were the

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