A GOOD TEACHER PASSES : She Recognized the True Nature of This Multicultural Community Before It Knew It Had Become One

On the day our first child is due to be born, I am sitting in the living room, crooning to the baby’s elbows that jut out of my wife’s belly, pretty much cleaving to what must have been the last air-conditioner for sale in Los Angeles this summer. Laurie reads aloud from a baby book, one of the dozens we’ve accumulated, with section headings including “Big Changes,” “The Real Meaning of Discipline” and “Rx for Inconsolable Crying.” By the couch, jumpers, onesies and impossibly tiny booties are heaped in a snowdrift of shower presents. Life is good.

Thinking about babies all the time, I feel closer to my own parents, entirely too late. My father died two years ago, my mother just this spring. Hardly an hour goes by when I do not still reach for the phone to dial her number. She was going to teach me how to change a diaper. Plus, nobody knew children’s books half so well.

She raised three generations of Los Angeles kids, both as mother to me and my brothers and in her quarter-century as the librarian for Dorsey High School, at the foot of the Baldwin Hills. It was impossible to accompany her anywhere in South-Central L.A. that somebody--a waiter in a restaurant, an auto-repair guy, a young doctor--didn’t seem to feel as close to her as I did.

When Dorsey was 40% pupils of Japanese descent--it’s hard to remember how Asian the Crenshaw district was just a while ago--she made sure that Tanizaki novels and books on Noh plays were in the library. As the school became more Central American, she tried to build up at least a basic collection in Spanish. Years before Peter Sellars discovered that Los Angeles was a multicultural city, a full decade before the district’s multicultural mandates, she built up the high school’s collection of African-American literature, often at her own expense. (In the world of post-Proposition 13 choices, library books have been less than high priority.) The couple of times a year a football player would bring a copy of “Black Beauty” up to the check-out counter, my mom would gently explain that the book was about a horse.

She coached the chess team to city championships, over schools traditionally as dominant in chess as Dorsey is in basketball, and she helped coach the Academic Decathlon team to a high finish unprecedented for an inner-city school. She considered herself a subversive force for literature, winning a few kids each year to the side of great writing, hooking hundreds more on horror novels and cheap romances, then moving them up into the hard stuff: Toni Morrison, J. D. Salinger, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes. When a New York rapper I was interviewing a couple of years ago told me that no white teacher ever did anything for a black student for any reason but money, I cringed. I’m not a violent guy, but I’ve always since regretted that I didn’t smack the smirk off his face.

It had never been easy to teach at the school--just last year she stumbled into the midst of a drive-by shooting on the campus front lawn--and she fantasized for more than 20 years about a transfer. But in the end she felt she had to stay, through the violence, the drugs, the apathy of the district and the contempt of most of the students.

She hadn’t been well. The chemotherapy she had been undergoing left her nauseated one week a month. But she had been talking about imminent death at least since I was in the fourth grade, and I suppose that nobody realized she was as sick as she really was. She was hospitalized briefly for what the doctors called anemia on the afternoon I found out my wife was pregnant. My mother held my hand and told me again that she was dying. I finally believed her that day. What was eating away at her ovaries wasn’t cancer, but in three weeks she was dead, reduced to a hundred cartons of books and a pound or so of gritty, gray crematorium ash that my youngest brother and I scattered into Santa Monica Bay.