Uncensored by Zachary R. Wood

Author:Zachary R. Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

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In school, my academic focus was mostly on writing. That year, the author Reginald Dwayne Betts came to Bullis as a writer in residence. Dwayne had just published his memoir, A Question of Freedom, about spending eight years in prison after his first offense, committed at age sixteen. In prison, Dwayne graduated from high school and began reading and writing poetry.

Dwayne’s visit was truly inspiring. His message was at once challenging and uplifting, universal and yet unique. What struck me most was the lack of shame he seemed to carry about his past. I wanted to follow his example, to unabashedly own the fact that my experiences had indeed informed some of my strongest beliefs and opinions. The freedom, confidence, and authenticity with which he shared his message were things I aspired to. Most of all, meeting him compelled me to imagine what it would mean for me to tell my story one day.

My English teacher that year, Ms. Heninger, was a disarmingly genuine, brilliant educator who helped me improve my writing probably more than anyone else. I spent hours with her in the classroom after school, going through my essays sentence by sentence and analyzing the impact of every word choice. “Let’s find le bon mot,” she told me—the right word. She took what I said and made it stronger by framing it slightly differently, a technique that allowed me to refine my own arguments by improving the clarity of my writing.

But perhaps the best thing Ms. Heninger did for me was recommend that I share some of my poems with another English teacher, Ms. Chehak, who ran Bullis’s National Poetry Month activities. Ms. Chehak read all my poems and gave me extensive feedback on each of them. Then she encouraged me to read my work at the Jazz Cafe, a nighttime event held twice a year when students performed at Bullis’s Blair Family Center for the Arts, a vast building on campus that held studio spaces for visual and performing arts students and a state-of-the-art 750-seat theater.

We selected a poem I had written that I called “A Bluesman in the Life of the Mind, a Jazzman in the World of Ideas,” which was a line Cornel West used to describe himself in his memoir. It was a poem about spiritual and literal poverty, a call for moral courage and a stronger fiber of resilience. The content was good, but on the night of the performance I was entirely focused on my delivery.

I didn’t want just to recite the poem well; I wanted parents in the audience who didn’t know me to ask the person beside them who I was. I wanted my performance to resonate, affirm, and illuminate my determination to matter more, to be of greater value in the hearts and minds of every person I had ever made eye contact with. When I heard the applause echo throughout the proscenium theater and saw the expressions on the audience members’ faces when I was done, I knew I had achieved my goal.

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