Better. Hearing the word caused her face to flush. She hadn’t connected it before, but hearing Jesse talk, the similarities between the two of them were apparent. In Jesse, she saw Javion.

“I had this student,” she said. “He reminded me of you a little.”

“Oh yeah? He give you shit?”

Mira paused and Jesse took her answer for yes, laughing in response. “Well,” he said. “He must really be like me then.”

Mira found herself telling Jesse the story—how he acted in her class, what she’d said to him the last day she saw him, and what happened with the other teacher. “He dropped out, I think. I have no idea what happened to him or where he is.”

“That’s not all on you,” Jesse said after she was finished.

“But part of it is. Don’t we have a responsibility to each other? I had a responsibility to that kid and I failed him.”

“You didn’t fail him.”

“Yes, I did.”

Mira had failed Javion because she’d judged him in the same way all the white teachers judged not just him but the other black kids at school, and she’d let her judgments affect how she saw him. She’d never seen him at all, because if she had she would have seen a kid struggling and in pain.

“I thought if he just acted better that the world wouldn’t be so hard on him. Who was I kidding? I mean look at all this!” Mira threw her hands up in the air and spun in a circle. “This is what we’re up against. A place like this existing to remind us of our place. That we’ve never been equal. We were never free. Knowing that, don’t we have a responsibility to do our best to fight against it, to stand up for each other in any way we can? Maybe all of what happened to Javion wasn’t my fault, but you can’t tell me I didn’t fail him in some way, and—you can’t tell me I didn’t fail you too.”

Jesse was about to respond but stopped, his attention caught by something in the distance. He squinted toward the darkness, but when Mira looked she didn’t see anything. “Jesse, what is it?” she asked, and he shook his head and told her it was nothing.

“I thought I heard something, that’s all. This plantation is starting to affect me a little,” he said, changing the subject. He gave a heavy sigh and kicked the dirt, forming a dust cloud that soon dissolved in the air. “I don’t understand how people can’t see it for what it is.”

“I think they do. That’s why they come,” Mira said.