50 pages • 1 hour read
Michelle KuoReading with Patrick
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Silent Reading
Kuo writes about how, in her English class at Stars, silent reading became a sort of institution. She introduced books by Black authors who told stories to which she felt the children could relate. Despite the skepticism of her colleagues that these normally raucous children would read the books, let alone abide by a quiet period in which everyone would read, the students devoured the books that Kuo purchased and looked forward to their reading time.
Kuo also incorporates silent reading into the instruction that she provides Patrick when he’s in jail. Here, the exercise has an even more transformative power, due to it becoming the conduit through which Patrick can temporarily forget about the dehumanizing circumstances of his incarceration while understanding more about the social and historical contexts that helped create his situation.
Silent reading is symbolic of the transformative power of reading and the way in which language can give structure to the world in which we live. Kuo photographed her students at Stars to show them how they looked when they read—“[c]oncentrated, absorbed, and serious” (31). These adjectives are the opposite of how many of Kuo’s colleagues described the students and different, too, from how the students would have described themselves. The exercise is a form of meditation that, for both Kuo and her students, resulted in transcendence from their given circumstances.
The Delta
For Kuo, the Delta is not only a literal setting for which she maintains fondness, but also a state of mind. It is also a symbol of contrasts. On the one hand, the region is symbolic of the United States’ legacies of slavery and oppression. Conversely, the resilience and religious faith expressed by its region’s inhabitants—most of whom are the descendants of slaves—are indicative of the nation’s nobler qualities.
The Delta is an indictment of the nation’s inability to live up to its supposed democratic promises. The region bustled during the antebellum period but became economically deprived when it could no longer serve the interests of White supremacy and American capitalism. Thus, it became a hot zone for cyclical poverty, a galling drop-out rate, police corruption, drug infestation, and a barely functioning justice system—all of which Kuo observed during her time in the region.
The Letter
Kuo conducted numerous writing exercises with Patrick, but it was the epistolary form to which he responded most naturally. Though his initial attempts were inarticulate and barely literate, Patrick became more adept with language through Kuo’s instruction. She compared his writing to that of other works they read in this form—James Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook” in The Fire Next Time, to which Patrick responded viscerally, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.
The letter is symbolic of Patrick’s wish to connect with others, particularly his daughter, Cherish, to whom he addressed most of his letters. Kuo realized that the letter came most naturally to Patrick due to the tradition of prayer in the Delta community. Prayers, she concluded, were essentially letters to God. Patrick and his family engaged in prayer regularly, not only as a means of conveying hope but also to commune with both the living and the dead. Similarly, Patrick reaches out to Marcus Williamson and Marcus’s mother to atone for his crime and to forge connection.
