Excerpt from Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

White people did live, eat, and work here, but their children were hard to spot in daylight. They attended DeSoto School, one of many private schools in the Delta established to circumvent integration. When DeSoto was opened in 1970, a dedicated cohort of white families deliberately sent their children to the newly integrated public schools, which flourished in their early years: Helena's basketball team, a pretty picture of black and white players, became one of the best in the state. But as the economy tanked, property values plummeted, and everybody fled Helena, DeSoto—at first a minority bastion of racists—transformed into an evacuation site for the remaining white families. Helena's public schools, Central High School and Eliza Miller, are 99 percent black. As of this writing, DeSoto has yet to matriculate a single black student. Thus, in a city so small that the combined graduating class of its high schools is fewer than two hundred students and so remote that one must drive a hundred miles to see a movie, two groups of kids grow up, one white and one black, rarely interacting.

My first months in the Stars classroom had a surreal aspect. Most students had never encountered an Asian person before, and they stared. "What you is?" they'd say, and then, with a serious expression, ask if I was related to Jackie Chan. (Others, less polite, said, "Fuck you, Chinese bitch.") Once, a sixteen-year-old student took a piss in a classroom, on a dare. Another kid came to school with his legs covered with welts from a switch. "Should I call child services?" I asked other teachers. No, no; that was just how you kept discipline around here. When kids got in trouble at school, it was universally known, they preferred paddling to suspension. "They're used to that," the secretary explained to me. "And they don't want to go home."

I was shocked by all of this, but I was shocked, primarily, by myself. I yelled. I got mean. At first I tried to appear strict, in a bid to be taken seriously, but this contortion took on a life of its own. To the twelfth grader who called me a Chinese bitch, I said he'd be lucky if he got a job at McDonald's. To a boy who told a girl she was fat, I snapped, "So are you." I tore up a student's drawing, which I'd thought of as a doodle, in order to jolt him into paying attention; he never forgave me, and I will regret it forever. I bribed a mother to sign a permission slip for a field trip. The mother, an absentee drug addict, was angry at her daughter, my student, for calling child services on behalf of her younger siblings. I went to the house. The mother said she'd sign the form if I got her a color TV. We compromised: I'd go to Walmart and get her a kiddie pool. ("Your children are gonna love this," said the cashier at Walmart, shoving my purchase into a huge plastic bag. "Days get hot here.") Another time a kid grabbed my butt, and I sent him to the principal; she asked me, "Paddling or suspension?" I told her, "Let him decide." He chose paddling.

I began to speculate that the modern Delta did not exist in the American consciousness because it disturbed the mind. It crushed part of our American mythology. What had the Civil Rights Movement been for—the violence, the martyrs, the passionate actions—if its birthplace was still poor, still segregated, still in need of dramatic social change? A world of meaning had been built and had now collapsed. Here, one began to worry that the movement was a fabrication of the nation's imagination. And indeed, much later, a sixteen-year-old boy, whose older brother had been killed by a white man while robbing a flower shop, would approach my poster of Martin Luther King's March on Washington with genuine suspicion. He put his face right up to the photograph so that his nose touched an image of white protesters in the crowd.

Excerpted from Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo. Copyright © 2017 by Michelle Kuo. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.