Hello, Walt Whitman, the young man said as he walked up California Street in the afternoon, greeting the poet in a gentlemanly manner. He laughed at the thought that the poet wouldn’t recognize him, or maybe he would. Iranian, he told Walt Whitman, or perhaps Persian, in your day.
It’s true either way, he said to the poet. Either way I am a part of everything I see along the way. I am a part of everything between my home and a schoolyard. Recognized and unrecognized. It doesn’t matter. It is morning, noon, and night. It is childhood, adulthood, and death.
Death too, he told the poet. You are able to look death in the eye when you have looked life in the eye among children. In the schoolyard I have seen the truce to end all wars, the love that conquers hate, the reconciliation with the life of the earth. I have also seen new battles sprung up, new hates and jealousies, born and embraced with the freshness of sudden discovery. I have left the schoolyard in the evening believing that you are never going to get rid of a smallness and ugliness in the life of human beings.
And yet among children I have walked home declaring to the world—I’ll be a fool. If somebody has to be so foolish as to find worlds of hope in a conversation with a boy or girl of five, I’ll do it. If somebody is such a fool to think there is a line from the child in the sunny afternoon to the darkest night, let it be me. Give me every kind of comeuppance for my naivete. Throw every kind of disillusionment at me. The work of being with children is the promise to remember what even they themselves might grow up to forget. There are young people in this city, San Francisco, Mr. Walt Whitman, who are walking among the world as though they have never been anything other than the age they are. Which is how they should be. But meanwhile I am in clear possession of stories of who they were as little children, which I could recite for them with fine precision. You might not know it to look at me. You might look at me and see only a learner and a student at best, as brown skin has always been a mark more of dispossession than possession in America. That would be all right too. My capacity to entertain you with stories of American children is there either way. It is not dependent on a listener.
Who was it, Mr. Walt Whitman, who carried your America and carried an America that dismissed their claim to it? You didn’t hear Langston Hughes say that he, too, sang America, and neither did your country. I’ve often thought it’s a shortage of imagination—that America couldn’t imagine Langston receiving what it had given him and still singing it. Don’t you know that there’s only more laughter to be found there? Don’t you know that the stories of children only get better?
I sing a schoolyard in America. Like nobody you’ve ever seen. I sing the children who will greet me this afternoon. I sing of Asa Camp, encouraging me toward a professional basketball career, having watched me make two three-pointers in a row. Why not? The world is as young as it is old. I sing of Katie McDonald, whom I will see today reading, and I will ask her what the book is, and she will hold up the cover for me to see. I will ask her how it is and she will say it is good. In that moment, worlds of understanding will pass between us, and a girl who uses a schoolyard as her library will appear to be an artist and a genius. I sing of Michael Turrion and his patience when the tag game among the girls in his class spills over and interrupts his handball game. He understands that the schoolyard is a place of work, and work includes unforeseen interruptions. I tell myself to be as patient as he whenever I am writing and I find myself interrupted. I sing of Ayana Graves, looking for a way to bring Max Wise into the play-acting even though the other girls don’t know how he fits into the horse family.
I sing an America that starts in a schoolyard and goes everywhere from there. I sing a home in America carved out of the stories of American children. I step into your shops and businesses from that home, and I bring it everywhere with me. In the schoolyard and away from it, there is a child watching me, and asking, Is this the place? I owe them an answer: Yes. And are there a million wrongs and inequities built into it too? Yes again.
Sometimes the probationary standing attached to my skin is revealed. You are allowed to sing America as long as it is a happy song, a voice says.
I wish I could do it that way, I say. I really wish I could. But I learned in a schoolyard that a song is no good in one tone. The children are coming and going, entering and leaving childhood at once. The sky brightening and darkening. And the place itself—as tiny and inconsequential as any place in the city, and yet the city can cower before its size sometimes.
To anyone who says that a schoolyard is no place to start, I say, Where did you start? To anyone who says it is too far away a place, I say, It is right next door. To anyone who says it is too easy a place, I say, Have you watched the questions grow on a child’s face?
To take one afternoon and to infuse it with the spirit of the words of James Baldwin: “I would like us to do something unprecedented, to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy.” We traffic in the unprecedented in the schoolyard. It is our bread and butter. So much so that we forget and lose track of what is precedented sometimes.
I have seen this creation of a people on many afternoons. I have seen it start in the sun and dissipate in the fog. I have seen wild and furious games of handball and kickball and soccer in which there was no enemy to be found. I have watched their camaraderie and searched high and low for an enemy and found none.
Is it life? Is it a newness to life that does it? I have wanted to take what I have seen in the schoolyard and rush out into the streets to tell them—there is no need for enemies when we can be new to each other. And then the fear that they might say, that is well and good, but we are old to it.
Am I such a solitary rememberer then? I refuse to believe it. I refuse to believe I am walking among men and women who have forgotten and boys and girls who will one day. I walk up California Street and refuse it. Be the thread, I tell myself. Be the thread between a schoolyard and the world. Quietly, quietly. No one needs to know. I am not you, Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs. Except sometimes I am. One of the roughs and one of the softs. I have seen too much majesty in softness to think it is anything feeble or weak. The weight of the world bounces off soft people sometimes, because they know themselves and they know what is theirs to keep and what is not. America could use more of the softness I have seen among its children. It could use more of a softness toward my country—Iran—four letters arranged in an order that makes Americans brace and harden at the mere sight. I wish I could tell them of the softness of Iranians, a people who have sought the softest depths in their poetry, having a need to make the weight of the world into a bouncing thing.
Did any Iranian ever have a home in America like I had in a schoolyard? I have wished a place like that for Iranians and Americans alike. I have wished for them a place from which all the other places can grow. We do not bring anything there but ourselves. We come open-handed, asking only questions with our eyes.
Are there movements and stretchings of the body that can do it? Can they reach our hearts? Is it not a wonderful thing to try together? Is it not wonderful that in our trying we forget about success or failure altogether?
What is a successful day among children? I have no measure for it because we are all in the world even while we are in the schoolyard. A fall from the slide, a fight between friends, a secretive exclusion, are these failures of some kind? I have never known a moment of indifference there because the breathing hearts of children do not allow it. Any indifference would be an indifference toward myself. Each second I have spent in the schoolyard has been utterly inside of life, so much so that I have wondered sometimes if I could bear its squeeze. Should anyone see this far into life? Should they see this far knowing that the vision is harder to hold away from a schoolyard, though still true?
I have looked at the world away from a schoolyard and said, You’re going to have to be the one to catch up, somehow. Who ever did anything so ridiculous? It may be that the world will always be trying to get there, but at least I have a destination. It is a great gift to have a destination, but loosely, loosely. Acting almost as I have no destination at all. Like I am just a man walking up California Street, Walt Whitman, greeting you in the afternoon. Hello to your poetry and hello to mine. There is an added poetry in an Iranian man needing American children to make his greeting, but I will trust that it is there in the song of my hello, whether you can hear it or not.