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

Why, I asked the students, did they think the grandma had left Mississippi to move to Chicago?

"Because there isn't much for us down here," one student said easily, and I felt vertigo at the word us. Others nodded in easy agreement.

For the first time, our conversation about American history was not a strain. Usually the students were so handicapped by a lack of basic knowledge that we made no progress. They hadn't known, for instance, when slavery ended or recognized the vocabulary word emancipation. They hadn't known that promises to give former slaves land had been broken. They'd vaguely heard about violence against black people in the Delta, but most didn't know about the massacres of black sharecroppers who had tried to organize in our county, nor did they recognize the word lynching. But this one question, why a black family would leave the Delta, was not difficult for them to answer.

I talked about Helena's history of violence, which was a taboo topic—for people black and white—in town. This violence, I said, helped drive the mass migration to cities like Chicago. I talked about governments that stood by or even participated in the intimidation of black people. And I passed around a picture of a lynching, a dangling body burned and charred, its edges eerily blotted out. If my students could see how brutal the conditions were, I thought, they might find a channel for their anger and a reason for pride in the history of black resilience.

"This isn't right," said one student, looking disgusted. He passed it on. Another studied it and shook his head wordlessly. Then he, too, passed it on.

Their twin emotions, outrage and sobriety, formed for me a coherent whole. When I learned about lynching in middle school, indignation had made me feel powerful.

Then the photograph stopped at David, a spindly kid who lived with his grandmother and liked to sketch animals. He gazed at the picture and did not move. He looked as if he had stopped breathing. Then he turned over the picture and put his head down.

My neck burned; a knot grew hard in my stomach. It was against my rules to put your head down. The students watched and saw my weakness.

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.