The Darkroom
I learned to write in seventh grade. Not to form sentences, but to know and use my voice on paper, and to hope I would be heard. It was 1969: Nixon was president and I had a new teacher: a 26-year-old draft evader named Robert Rusch. He was six feet four and, moreover, wore cowboy boots. He had a red beard. He took us on class trips to the Apollo theater and Black Panther headquarters. He read aloud to us from Catcher in the Rye and Manchild in the Promised Land. He drew a diagram on the blackboard depicting the typical location of the clitoris. And, on the first day of school, he handed out a pile of 50-page notebooks with blue cardboard covers and told us our homework for... Read more...
