The Sue Duncan Children’s Center

One of my former students was shot and killed in Chicago over the weekend. I’m conflicted about narrating this from my own perspective, about putting myself ahead of Tyjuan (in narrative, in pronoun, etc.), but knowing no other way to do so, that’s how I’ll begin.

Within the first week of starting at the University of Chicago, I began working with the Neighborhood Schools Program, which partners university students with local schools and mentorship programs. I was placed at the Sue Duncan Children’s Center, an after school program founded by Arne Duncan’s mother in 1961. Sue’s, as it is affectionately known, is an entirely idiosyncratic experience. It is a heavily localized experience. Most of the students are children or siblings or cousins of other Sue’s kids. Everyone lives close to the Center, many within walking distance. Many of them even attend school in the building in which the Center is located.

My first day at Sue’s, my boss put me at a table with Tyjuan and told me to help him with his math homework. I didn’t know then that this was actually a test, that Owen always had the newbies work with the toughest kid in the room to see how well they could hold up under pressure. And back then Tyjuan was tough, even if he was only in third grade. That moment seems so much more complex and experience-laden when I think back on it now. Tyjuan was coming into that moment full of his experience as a black kid on the South Side of Chicago, with not the best home life, not the best school life, craving attention. I was coming into it desperate to please, terrified of failure, and conceiving of “homework completion” as my only aim (this was before I ever thought of behavior management or character education or any of those other quaint notions that underpin “real” education). Thinking back on it now, there was no real communication between me and Tyjuan in that moment. We were speaking two separate languages. I didn’t understand his temper tantrum; he didn’t understand my frantic pleas (literally- not my proudest teaching moment) to just finish his work.

I later wrote about that moment in my application to Teach For America. I narrativized it differently then; I talked more about the injustice that had been done Tyjuan, the racism and inequity that had gone into creating his temper tantrum. And even though that’s not a lie, I still don’t consider it the truth of that moment. The real core of that experience was the impossibility of communication, the words and stories and needs that Tyjuan and I both had, but that neither of us knew how to share with the other. What I wrote about in my Teach For America essay was only half the story; Tyjuan’s half.

By the time I graduated from the University of Chicago, I didn’t come to Sue’s as often as I used to. I had a second job, leadership positions, and general senior-year things that kept me busy. Tyjuan had also stopped coming as often; something to do with his home life. I think he had moved, and it was harder to get to the Center. My later memories of Tyjuan aren’t nearly as crisp as the early ones of the surly boy who glowered when you tried to get him to do multiplication. But I do remember how grown-up he had gotten. He carried himself taller. He was taller, inside and out. I remember him looking out for the younger kids. He had outgrown his surliness, had casually discarded it as a worn remnant of a no-longer-useful childishness.

I found out about his death from Facebook. Two Sue’s kids had posted a local CBS news article about it. The lack of processing on my part was a very visceral sensation. The disconnect between the headline (“Boy, 14, Fatally Shot in Kenwood”) and the picture of the boy I so easily recognized was a very tangible feeling. My eyes kept darting between the headline, so painfully generic these days, and the photograph of Tyjuan in his cap and gown, looking almost exactly as he had the first time I saw him, but my brain struggled to connect the two.

Since then, I have found other aspects of this story to be more substantive fodder for my academic ruminations. But I keep thinking about that moment, so tactile in its disconnect, even if I have no further analysis or comments to offer about it.

The Right To Mourn

My first coherent thought in the wake of Tyjuan’s death was about the right to mourn. I’ve also had this thought in connection with 9/11. In relation to 9/11, there seems to be a hierarchy of mourning. We assume that relatives have more right to grief than those who didn’t personally know any of the victims; this is exemplified by their having access to the special room at the 9/11 Museum, carefully guarded, whose very purpose is the demonstration of the grief which they so rightfully feel. In turn, New Yorkers have more right to grief than other Americans, since they were there when it happened, and experienced the event in real time and place. And of course Americans have more right to grief than people of other nationalities, since it was their country that was attacked.

In connection with Tyjuan’s death, my categorization of the right to mourn is heavily influenced by my time at Teach For America. Teach For America is very self-aware of their status as a mostly-white organization, and so much of their rhetoric seeks to apologize for this. They are ashamed of being white, ashamed of pushing their whiteness onto minority communities, and this shame has seeped into me. Once the numbness faded, once I had processed that a child I knew and taught no longer existed, I cried. I am usually fairly reserved when it comes to personal tragedy; I don’t think I’ve ever cried at a family funeral. But I cried for Tyjuan. And as soon as I was done crying, I wondered whether I was even allowed to have done so. Was I appropriating the sadness of minority communities affected by gun violence? I can in no way relate to Tyjuan’s story or community, though given the six years I spent teaching in his community, I’m bold enough to say I understand it. Is understanding enough to warrant the expression of emotion? Or does my privilege necessarily void any impulse I have to demonstrate grief?

Locality and Diaspora

Though locality is essential to the Sue’s experience, I found that Tyjuan’s death, or at least my experience of it, was characterized by diaspora. The Sue’s people who knew him had long since scattered to Massachusetts, New York, D.C., even Texas. I hadn’t spoken to most of these people since I graduated, so there was that second layer of diaspora as well. But this event brought us together again. Facebook’s habit of combining posts about the same link literally linked us as we shared the news and tried to parse our grief in words that were inadequate to our feelings, edited for political correctness and length. It created a new locality, a space to come together and share our grief and our love. It is in honor of that locality that I have named this post.

In high school we learned about eros and thanatos, the two most universal and yet most opposite of human experiences: love and death. Their universality and importance is such that I can never think of them except by their Greek names, which are laden with a formality their English equivalents can never capture. Besides their literal meanings, eros is synonymous with creation, thanatos with destruction. In a moment that should have been comprised only of destruction, a new locality was created, one in which we could share both the love and grief we felt. Tyjuan’s death is laden with eros and thanatos. Even though it expresses the very depths of thanatos, the horror of violence, the injustice of a life ended too soon, it also exemplifies the very best of eros, and the instinctive communion and sympathy that humans are capable of.