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He continued to write down quotations that caught his ear, these from the lectures and books that presently surrounded him. ” Willie was finding a way to direct his yearning. I would pass on to him books I was just discovering—The Other America; Black Skin, White Masks— and we would talk about the anger that used to knot him up, the hopelessness that landed him in prison. We talked about education and the use of it to direct the anger outward—dissent rather than involuted despair. Willie developed into a truly individual writer and, as well, learned to handle the academy.

What he must not do is hold back from the teeming flow of life, must not sit in his hotel room and drill himself on all possible gaffes before entering the streets. He’d never leave the room. My students, too, were strangers in a strange land, and I wanted to create a safe section of the city and give them an opportunity to acquire the language. We would cover some common errors together during the first few days of class, but, for the most part, I and the tutors I now had would work with students individually through the quarter as particular problems came up on particular papers.

Willie Oates and I spent a lot of time in the lunchroom. Al Petrillo would be holding court at the cash register, and we’d be in a far corner, Willie’s papers and Cokes and open bags of potato chips spread before us. Willie had all sorts of stylistic moves; it was my job to get him to weigh their merits. I would go over an essay sentence by sentence, showing him where he’d kill an effect with excess, or get himself into a hopeless tangle with his eighteenthcentury syntax, or use a word that sounded pretentious to the twentiethcentury ear.