The Achievement of Desire” - everettsdorg.doc

“The Achievement of Desire” Richard Rodriguez I stand in the ghetto classroom - “the guest speaker”- attempting to lecture on the mystery of the sounds of our words to rows of diffident students. “Don’t you hear it? Listen! The music of our words. ‘Sumer is icumen in . . . And songs on the car radio. We need Aretha Franklin’s voice to fill plain words with music - her life.” In the face of their empty stares, I try to create an enthusiasm. But the girls in the back row turn to watch some boy passing outside. There are flutters of smiles, waves. And someone’s mouth elongates heavy, silent words through the barrier of glass. Silent words—the lips straining to shape each voiceless syllable: “Meet meee late errr.” By the door, the instructor smiles at me, apparently hoping that I will be able to spark some enthusiasm in the class. But only one student seems to be listening. A girl, maybe fourteen. In this gray room her eyes shine with ambition. She keeps nodding and nodding at all that I say; she even takes notes. And each time I ask a question, she jerks up and down in her desk like a marionette, while her hand waves over the bowed heads of her classmates. It is myself (as a boy) I see as she faces me now (a man in my thirties). The boy who first entered a classroom barely able to speak English, twenty years later concluded his studies in the stately quiet of the reading room in the British Museum. Thus with one sentence I can summarize my academic career. It will be harder to summarize what sort of life connects the boy to the man. With every award, each graduation from one level of education to the next, people I’d meet would congratulate me. Their refrain always the same: “Your parents must be very proud.” Sometimes then they’d ask me how I managed it - my “success.” (How?) After a while, I had several quick answers to give in reply. I’d admit, for one thing, that I went to an excellent grammar school. (My earliest teachers, the nuns, made my success their ambition