School Pictures

In my classroom, there’s a little boy from Honduras. 

He speaks Spanish — that’s his heart language — but he’s learning English and tries with all his heart to learn new words and phrases that will allow him to live in his new world here. 

He’s 9 years old and his dark hair is cut across his forehead in a wonderfully crooked line. 

He has deep brown eyes the color of a plowed field, and eyes that sparkle like starlight off a lake of calm water. 

He has big dimples that catch teardrops when he laughs until he cries, or when he cries until the sadness in his heart subsides.

He has a broad smile that is sometimes mischievous but most times full of joy.

Sometimes I wonder ... what is he thinking as he closes his eyes at the end of the day?

Is this what he thinks?

"I hope my new world will embrace me, and not call me an illegal alien ... not tear me apart from my Aunt ... not tear me apart ... not put me in the shadows ...not make me a shadow.

Mamí, can you hear me? Will my words reach you over the land, to the valley, between the mountains, to La Esperanza, to Honduras? 

Help me, mamí. 

Please. 

I don't want to be a shadow.

There, in Honduras, I was a human being. 

I walked beside you, mamí, with my hand in yours, over the alfombras, the colored sawdust carpets on the streets, on Viernes Santo, Good Friday, and it was good because I was with you and with people who love me. 

I sat beside you, mamí, with your arm around me, under the midnight fireworks, after the late-night dinner, on Nochebuena, Christmas Eve, and the colors sparkled in your eyes, and I loved you, and you loved me, and I was a human being.

Here, in America, I might become a shadow, mamí. 

Is there no Good Friday on people's feet; is there no Christmas Eve in people's eyes? 

Are there only people, mamí, blocking the light, with angry faces and hateful words and violent hands, trying to make me a shadow? 

I’m afraid, mamí. 

Help me. 

I’m afraid of the dark.”

Is this what he’s thinking?

On a Friday, I, his teacher, am about to call out the winner of the 'student of the day,' an award I give to a student who has worked hard and behaved well for the whole, whole day. 

I wish you could see the hope in his eyes just before I call out the winner, and the happiness when I say, "The winner is ... Tomás."

That look of hope and happiness, the face of Tomás, the life of Tomás, is what I hope you see when you hear the words ‘immigrant’ and 'immigration.'

I hope you see Tomás.

School Pictures

A meaningful moment happened at lunch today.

They often do in elementary school cafeterias.

We elementary school teachers eat lunch with our students.

As we sit and eat our meat and threes with them, we become listeners instead of talkers, we become students of our students’ lives.

Today, I was sitting across the table from Mauro.

He’s a wonderful kid from Guatemala.

Ah, I wish you could know him.

He makes my world better by being in my classroom.

“Mauro,” I’ll say, “It’s too bad you don’t have a twin brother. Then we’d have ‘2 Mauro’s.’”

If you could see the twinkle in his earthy brown eyes and hear the joy in his 9 year old giggle, you’d know what I mean.

He’s a gift.

I stopped by his table the other day while he was writing a story.

I sat down beside him.

“Mauro,” I said, “I just want you to know how glad I am that you’re in my classroom. You’re so smart and you work so hard and you’re so kind. I think you’re terrific.”

You’d’ve thought I’d given him the world.

Maybe I did.

He smiled for the rest of the day.

Today he asked, “Mr. Barton, do you know the story of Mary and Joseph?”

“Yep,” I answered. “I’ve known that story since I was a little boy.”

“Well,” he continued, “Do you remember how they went from place to place trying to find somewhere to stay and everyone kept turning them away? And then finally someone gave them a place...even though it was outside.”

“I remember,” I said.

“My family celebrates that moment when someone gave them a place to stay. That’s what Christmas means to us.”

I HAVE known that story since I was a little boy.

But I’ve never thought of it in that way.

A modern day holy family is a family from Guatemala looking for a place to stay.

Wow.

Thank you, Mauro.

I’m glad your somewhere is here.

School Pictures

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Did anyone ever ask you that question?

I asked it to myself in my middle years as an English Major at UNC Chapel Hill.

“I want to be an inner-city teacher and a writer,” I answered.

That’s what I’ve become.

(Or maybe it’s better to say that’s what I’m becoming, because both of these vocations are more journeys than destinations.)

My second choice was to be a doctor.

I wanted to be a pediatrician.

I wanted to help the world by healing broken arms or asthmatic lungs or leukemia or any and all of the diseases of childhood.

Sometimes, I still do.

So it made my heart smile when one of my students, Ariana, asked, “Mr. Barton, can Natalia and I use our Chromebooks during indoor recess today to search for a cure for cancer?”

“I’m going to be a researcher,” said Natalia. “And Ariana is going to be a surgeon.”

“Yep,” said Ariana. “We’re planning on working together.”

I stopped and let that smile rise to my face and to my eyes.

I looked at these two nine year old girls in my 4th grade classroom in my Title I school in one of the poorer parts of my city with deep compassion and wide wonder.

“Wow,” I said. (That is one of my favorite words, you know.) “Natalia, you can discover the cure in your lab. Ariana, you can take that cure to the people. I just want you to know how thankful I am for you and how lucky I am to be your teacher.”

And as I sit and write in my inner-city classroom on this ordinary Tuesday afternoon, I realize...

I am becoming a doctor.

Through them.

School Pictures

School Pictures

I wrote this part of my story based on the lives of some of the immigrant students I’ve taught...and who’ve taught me.

Hilcias the Silent

Hilcias studied the yellowing eye chart on the back of the closed door of the room at the Barrier Island Free Medical Clinic and practiced saying the letters in his mind, from Spanish to English, from English back to Spanish, until he could think them into a seamless line.

His mamí flipped through the pages of an old Life Magazine with an immigrant mother and child on the cover.

His abuelo stared at a watercolor painting on the wall of a heavy laden peach tree, the colors of the ripe peaches glowing brightly against the white walls of the room, and then clasped his hands in his lap and looked thoughtfully into them as if he were looking into the deepest parts of the earth.

There was a tap on the door. 

A young doctor walked into the room. 

“Buenos Dias, amigos,” she said. “Me llamo Maria. Como estas ustedes?”

She had eyes like his abuelo, deep and earthy brown.

She wore a white doctor’s coat, faded blue jeans and an old pair of red high-top Converse Chuck Taylor tennis shoes.

“Well,” she began, “Let’s talk about Hilcias.

We looked over his brain scans and studied them very carefully. We didn’t find any organic reason why he doesn’t speak. The other tests on his ears, nose and throat came back normal, too. So all of the parts that help him speak are well and good inside of him.”

His mamí put her arm around his shoulder, held him close to her, and breathed out a long, slow, quiet sigh of relief.

“But we still haven’t answered the question,” continued Dr. Maria. “Why doesn’t Hilcias speak?”

She pulled up a chair in front of him, sat down in it, and leaned her face close to his face until her nose gently brushed against his nose.

“So now we’ve got to walk together down a path into places we don’t know,” she smiled. “The only person who can tell us why he’s not talking…is not talking.”

He smiled back at her and looked away from her eyes and down at her feet.

Suddenly, he whistled the most beautiful notes Dr. Maria had ever heard in her life. 

They reminded her of the joy she felt as a little girl standing in the fields with her family on their farm in El Salvador.

At the same time, they reminded her of the sadness she felt as she worked day after day to help person after person who was just trying to make a better life in a place where it was hard to live.

The music brought a stillness and a quietness to the room.

After a moment, his abuelo spoke.

“He says he does speak, but not many people understand him, I think.”

And it was true.

- Trevor Scott Barton, stories for a brown-eyed girl, 2020

School Pictures

Eight of my favorite words are serendipity, genius, simple, beauty, plain, wonder, ordinary and kindness.

I chose eight because the number 8 is the symbol for infinity standing up.

They are my infinity words.

This afternoon, I’m thinking about these words because they describe a person, a moment and a gift.

The person is one of my students. 

She is from Honduras. 

She is an ordinary nine-year-old.

She is extraordinary, too.

She has a learning disability. 

She has to work twice as hard to learn half as much as her non-disabled peers.

She works infinity times harder than other students.

After over 100 days of being her teacher, I already knew her life makes the world a more beautiful and wonderful place.

The serendipity for me today was learning that she is a genius. 

A kind genius at that.

And that takes me to a moment.

First thing this morning, at 7:45 a.m., she appeared at my classroom door with a twinkle in her brown eyes and a smile on her earthy face that brightened my classroom and lightened my heart.

“Mr. Barton,” she said in her Spanish/English way that endears her to me, “I painted this for you.”

She held up a small canvas.

And that brings me to the gift.

Look at the painting.

See the genius.

See the plain beauty.

See the wonder.

See the simple kindness.

See the serendipity that I found on an early morning on an ordinary day in public school.

School Pictures

We were on a field trip to the Bon Secours Wellness Arena to watch Auburn play Vanderbilt in the first round of the SEC Womens Basketball tournament.

My group of twenty 4th graders and I got to sit in court side seats for the first quarter of the game.

I sat beside Mauro and Daniel.

Mauro and his family are from Guatemala.

Daniel and his family are from Mexico.

Both of them are on our school soccer team and know a lot about fútbol.

On Fridays at recess, they became my teachers and I became their student and they taught me to yell “Woah!,” cheer “Woo hoo!,” and watch the beautiful game (and them!) with eye that see, ears that hear and a heart that understands.

They taught me to watch in wonder.

I was on my school basketball team so I know a lot about the greatest game ever invented (according to Dennis Hopper as Shooter Flatch in the greatest story ever told about basketball, Hoosiers),

“Have you ever been to a basketball game before?” I asked them just before tip off.

“No,” they answered. “This is our first one!”

I loved explaining the game to them.

They loved learning about it.

They watched in wonder as a player made a 3 point basket from way beyond the line.

“Woah!” they yelled as a player drove to the basket and hit the floor hard when she was by another player and got to shoot 2 free throws. 

“Woo hoo!” they cheered as a player made a great pass to her teammate under the basket.

This is teaching and learning at their best - loving the subject, watching in wonder, smiling at the serendipity of it all.

Together.

Wow.

Immigrant Hearts

 I listen to political debate, read articles, and talk with my neighbors about immigration. 

As I listen and talk and read, I witness xenophobia raise it’s ugly head out of the fear, anger and despair of peoples lives and hearts. 

“They're taking our jobs," shout politicians. 

“They're taking over our country," write pundits. 

“How can we protect ourselves from them? What about the terrorists among them?" ask people around me. 

Immigrants have become 'they.' 

Through demagoguery and dehumanization, immigrants have become a nameless, faceless spectre around 'us,' have become the stranger, have become the enemy.

When I hear the words 'immigration,' 'immigrant,' or 'illegal alien,' I close my eyes and see the face of one of my students, who I wrote about here -

https://www.scjustice.org/i-send-tomas-to-you/

Ilook through history and find pictures in places like Life Magazine of people putting on tattered coats, holey shoes, and red scarves; picking up battered suitcases that are taped around the sides to keep in their meager, precious possessions; and leaving the lives they know and love in hope to make a better life free from war, famine, disease and extreme poverty. 

In the life of my student and his family, in the faces of the people in the pictures, I see human beings. 

I remember that I was an immigrant once, that I was welcomed into the country of Mali in west Africa, that I was cared for and loved into a more compassionate, creative and committed person by the people there. 

I promise to care for and love immigrants around me as my neighbors in Mali cared for and loved me.

I wrote this poem to help us see the human face of immigration, feel the hearts of immigrants, and know ourselves in the lives of the immigrants around us.

Go now in the name of the immigrant, the human being, and the holy stranger. 

Go now to make neighbors out of strangers. 

Go now to make friends out of enemies.

Go now with an immigrant heart.

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/issue27/trevor_scott_barton1.html