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  Most names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect them from recognition. Where dialogue appears, the intention was to re-create the essence of conversations rather than verbatim quotes.

  Copyright © 2021 by Brandon P. Fleming

  Cover design by Terri Sirma

  Cover photograph © Ranta Images/Shutterstock

  Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: June 2021

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fleming, Brandon P., author.

  Title: Miseducated : a memoir / Brandon P. Fleming.

  Description: New York : Hachette Books, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020054279 | ISBN 9780306925139 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780306925122 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fleming, Brandon P. | College teachers—United States—Biography. | School failure—United States.

  Classification: LCC LA2317.F54 A3 | DDC 378.1/2092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054279

  ISBNs: 978-0-306-92513-9 (hardcover), 978-0-306-92512-2 (ebook)

  E3-20210520-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Dr. Cornel West

  Chapter One: Golden Ticket

  Chapter Two: The Devil Preaches

  Chapter Three: Middle School Menace

  Chapter Four: Drugs & Hoop Dreams

  Chapter Five: Sex & Death Threats

  Chapter Six: Fouling Out

  Chapter Seven: Renaissance in Me

  Chapter Eight: The Great Debater

  Chapter Nine: A Teacher Born

  Chapter Ten: A Leader Born

  Chapter Eleven: Dreams Come True

  Chapter Twelve: Scholarship Meets Culture

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  To my students—the reason for my second chance.

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  I, too, sing America.

  I am the darker brother.

  They send me to eat in the kitchen

  When company comes,

  But I laugh,

  And eat well,

  And grow strong.

  Tomorrow,

  I’ll be at the table

  When company comes.

  Nobody’ll dare

  Say to me,

  “Eat in the kitchen,”

  Then.

  Besides,

  They’ll see how beautiful I am

  And be ashamed—

  I, too, am America.

  —Langston Hughes, 1926

  FOREWORD

  BY DR. CORNEL WEST

  As I enter the last stage of life, one of my great joys is to be inspired by those of a much younger age who plan and pledge to pick up the bloodstained and tear-soaked banner of truth and justice. I first met my dear brother Brandon in the hallowed halls of Harvard University. His brilliance, charisma, and commitment were undeniable as he visited my lectures on Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Lorraine Hansberry, and other Black scholars.

  It became clear to me that his heart, mind, and soul were on fire for truth. We broke bread and I learned about his painful past, I learned of his resilient present, but he primarily focused on an ebullient future—one that held a commitment to his scholars and the plight of American education at the center. It was infectious, his deep delight and genuine glee at reflecting on the great talent and grand victories of his brilliant students. I was elated to greet them upon their arrival in Cambridge, but our plans were thwarted when the coronavirus lockdown set in and university programming shifted to distance learning. But on the virtual platform, I had an opportunity to spend time with them and share rich and wonderful dialogue. And I can attest to their magic.

  Fleming stands in the great tradition of Black writers and fighters who unite thought and action, reflection and execution, based on a deep love of people—especially for young Black people who grow up on the kicking fields of America’s hoods. Like those who helped Brandon turn his life around, he has now taken the lead in transforming the lives of so many young brothers and sisters by means of paideia: a deep education rooted in truth, justice, and love.

  Miseducated is paideia. It is power and insight wrapped beautifully in prose. It is art that touches the heart, incites the mind, and reaches deep down into the depths of the soul. It is poignant the way Fleming’s formation unfolds—from a life of drugs, violence, and hoop dreams to a quest for intellectual and spiritual excellence. The way he cultivates critical thinking in young people puts a premium on academic debate, joyful learning, and the transformative power of language. And his journey in finding self and helping others do the same is both heart-touching and soul-stirring.

  In Miseducated, the upward climb is not about making it to the top, it is about pulling others up when you get there. And Fleming’s fight to moral greatness and societal significance is boundless. The following pages lay bare the stages of failure, of triumph, and the discovery of a special calling that will lift us all in such a grim moment in the history of this country.

  CHAPTER ONE

  GOLDEN TICKET

  I could not seem to die. I opened my eyes in a hospital bed, the faint beeping of a monitor signaling I had been given a second chance I did not want. I was still here. Forced to see, hear, feel, and face the reality I had desperately tried to flee. I did not want to feel anymore, but I felt. I felt cold. I felt pain. I felt alone.

  I scanned the room searching for the culprit, the one who was no friend of mine for dragging me back to the life I was desperate to leave. How could they? I did not want to be saved. I wanted to be free. And if they could feel, see, or sense my anguish, they would not have thwarted my exit, barring the door to my escape. They would have opened it. They would have let me through.

  “Mr. Fleming?” My rush of angry, frustrated thoughts was stilled by a gentle, compassionate voice. “Mr. Fleming, how are you feeling?”

  I averted my eyes from the infusion pump to a petite woman dressed in white. Her blonde hair was backlit and luminescent. She looked harmless enough, but I felt vulnerable, exposed, weak. Surely she would take one look at me and see everything, all the insecurities that fueled my cowardly desire to run. Surely she would see I had no reason to be alive. I felt ashamed to be here, in this room, receiving this attention. It took a while for me to g
ather the courage to look at her. At her soft gray eyes that made me somehow feel safe. Her smile was perfectly appropriate. It was subtle enough to respect my circumstance yet assertive enough to assure me that everything would be okay.

  “Here, drink this.” She gently braced my neck as she held a bowl of gritty black liquid to my lips. “This is activated charcoal. It will help to dissolve the drugs you took.”

  I grimaced as I gulped the elixir. It tasted like cement mixed with the castor oil my aunt made me drink as a child. As I gagged through the last swallow, the nurse dabbed the corners of my mouth and carefully nestled my head back at rest. She promised to return to check on me and disappeared through the veil that separated me from other patients.

  I did not want her to leave. She was all I had. My feeble hand lifted and beckoned her to stay, but I did not have the strength to speak. Wide-eyed, I lay back and gazed at the ceiling as tears welled in the gutters of my eyes and streamed slowly down the contours of my face, dissolving in the stubble on my chin. I was alone—with my thoughts, my feelings, and the life I did not want.

  Lying there, I thought about the day before. It was my last shift on the assembly line of Vitamin Manufacturing. I was an eighteen-year-old college dropout dating a girl whose mother insisted that I try to earn a living. My girlfriend had not yet developed a radar for detecting low-lives, so her mother had intervened with a passive-aggressive introduction to the local temp agency. In this way, she’d avoided challenging her daughter’s taste in men while also demonstrating her distaste for jobless suitors. I had no education, no resources, and no skills, so menial labor was my only hope for making a decent living.

  The agency had assigned me to a vitamin plant in Anderson, South Carolina, about twenty miles from Greenville, where I’d finished high school almost two years prior. Mom’s deployment to Iraq had separated and scattered my siblings and me. Sierra was twenty-two and had gone to live with her boyfriend. Barry was a year older than me and had gone to live with his father in New York. I’d moved to Greenville, where I temporarily stayed with my aunt. Ben, the youngest of us, was the only one with nowhere to go. So he’d gone with me until Mom’s return.

  Mom was away in Iraq for a year. She was now back home in suburban Washington, DC, settling into civilian life as a retired veteran. She, too, had no job, no education, and limited resources. And she did not have the emotional capacity to take me back in. She was tired, and getting older. Raising us took everything she had, between Sierra’s teenage pregnancy, Barry’s street fights, and my drug peddling. After all that strife, she was still not yet an empty nester, watching my little brother—now at home with her—be kept back in school while he followed my footsteps into delinquency and danger. Instead of intervening and imposing strict rules like she’d tried with us, she raised her hands in surrender because she had nothing left to give. The chances that she would take me in, after I’d gone off to college and dropped out my first semester, were unfavorable. “When you turn eighteen,” she’d always said, “you’re on your own.” And she’d meant it. Now I jumped from house to house, sleeping on couches and floors belonging to friends whose parents were kind enough to shelter an unemployed boy who was barely a man. But even those kind parents had a threshold.

  One of those friends was Kevin. His family allowed me to make a pallet on their living room floor. The floor was much more comfortable than their derelict sofa, whose yellow cushion seeped through the abrasions in the aging leather. They gave me six months, but under one condition: I was to maintain a job or be out of the house looking for one during business hours. For a few months they had kicked me out and banned my reentry until 5 p.m. each day. But instead of job searching, I spent most of that time with my girlfriend. Until her mother self-aligned with Kevin’s parents in trying to pressure me into responsibility. That’s when I’d started at the temp agency.

  Once I began work at the vitamin factory, my old-fashioned tabletop alarm clock blared at 5 a.m. each morning. I despised the dreadful sound. I swiped blindly at the clock, my face still buried in the pillow, hoping to hit snooze, or I yanked the cord from the wall to silence the damn thing. New days were nothing to look forward to. Sometimes I would lie there in the dark contemplating my options, which were few. Reluctantly, I rose, donning my blue long-sleeved coveralls and boots, remembering the imposed conditions of my stay.

  I was out the door by 5:30 a.m. In my Honda Accord, I’d blaze down a dark freeway as day was breaking. I’d lower the windows and blast the music to fight back drowsiness. I tried coffee. I tried Red Bull. But my heavy eyelids and grizzly yawns never acclimated to the early rise.

  The factory was a dystopia. No one laughed. No one smiled. No one hugged in the morning. The first-shift workers filed into the factory like androids, punching our time cards and fastening our goggles, assuming our positions on the assembly line, where we’d slave for the next ten hours.

  I was there to collect a check, like everyone else. But I had never labored so hard in my life. The assembly line was about twelve feet long. I’d start on one end of the machine, where the forklift drivers delivered endless boxes. The towering stack nearly rose to the ceiling whenever I fell behind. The forklift man would grow increasingly irritable and growl, “Pick it up! You’re slowing me down!” I’d be going as fast as I could, but sharp spasms would shoot through my spine from the bending and rising and bending and rising to break down boxes and load bottles into the machine. Then I’d sprint to the middle section of the line, where another forklift operator piled bins of vitamins that had to be poured into the machine. But the vitamins were gelled and stuck together. To break them up enough for the machine to ingest, I had to deadlift each twenty-pound bin, lofting it over my head and slamming it on the floor. I’d reach my hand into the bin to loosen the capsules that were stuck together, gagging as I inhaled the abysmal stench. I’d do an overhead press with a bin as I climbed a ten-foot ladder to the mouth of the machine. After dumping the vitamins, I’d climb back down and dash to the end of the line to help screw caps on the bottles. Then I’d run to the front of the line to start all over—for ten hours a day, six days a week.

  On this day, I was supposedly unpacking boxes of bottles and lining them up on the conveyor belt when Rita, my line leader, caught me daydreaming. Every chance I got, I stopped and leaned against the machine to catch my breath while thinking, I can’t do this shit. But I was quickly reminded that I had no choice. On this occasion, I was imagining the life I wanted—one where I didn’t have to sacrifice my sanity and my body while toiling like a cotton picker in high August for a measly two dollars above minimum wage.

  “Watch out!” Rita screamed from the end of the line, snapping me back to my miserable reality.

  I rushed to organize bottles on the belt, but it was too late. The timer opened the valve that dispensed vitamins into waiting bottles, but no bottles were in place. Pound after pound of gelled capsules spilled onto the conveyor, quickly building a mountain that became an avalanche onto the factory floor. Another coworker slammed the emergency button and the entire machine jerked to a halt. I stood in shock, breathless and ankle-deep in pills. I felt laser beams of anger from my coworkers’ eyes hit me like the red dot of a sniper’s sight.

  “What the hell are you doin’?” Rita shouted. Her voice was a thunderstorm. She looked like her grandchildren might call her Big Mama. She was as large as Tyler Perry and she was channeling Madea in a towering, dramatic rage. Her voice was so terrifying that, at first, I could not raise my eyes to see the expression on her face. I flipped through a mental index of excuses that might break the tension but came up empty. Finally, I looked at her and said nothing, hoping she would somehow take pity on my youth.

  A few seconds of awkward silence was broken by her sigh. Hands on her hips, she rolled her eyes as if she felt sorry for me. We were all dressed in the same coveralls, face mask, and elastic nets on our head and shoes. The place felt like the contemporary hotbox version of a plantation. This one was
filled with industrial workers tending robotic machines and looking as busy as possible when “Massa” strolled by our stations with his checklist and clipboard. I was tired. Tired of the same steps, same movements, same people, same routines. Every minute. Every hour. And every single day. It was a living nightmare of drudgery on an endless loop.

  Rita grabbed me by the arm and whisked me off to the side. Once out of the other workers’ hearing range, she released my arm and returned her hands to her hips. She looked carefully over both shoulders and pulled down her face mask. “The hell you doin’ in here anyway, boy?” I didn’t understand why she was whispering so aggressively. “You ain’t got no damn business being in this factory.” Her tone sounded like she was telling me a secret—like she wasn’t mad anymore. She seemed sympathetic and loving. But this was that hard love, like when Mama says, “I’m doing this because I love you” before she swings the belt across your hind. For a moment it felt like she knew me. Her voice sounded like she loved me, like she knew something that I didn’t. It felt like she was begging me to get out.

  “I dr-dropped out of college,” I muttered. I flinched as her hands flew from her hips. Her arms folded across her chest, she leaned forward and hissed, “You did what?” Her tone had shifted toward the one she used when the pills hit the floor. I was confused by the sound of rage layered with disappointment and a touch of love. I barely knew her but, in that moment, I felt like her son.

  “Look around this room, boy.” With one hand she gripped my arm and with the other she made a sweeping gesture. Instantly, I knew what she wanted me to see. I saw a warehouse full of blue bodies moving as fast as foot traffic in Times Square. I saw hundreds of intense faces moist from labor. I saw dozens of backs hunched with soreness and fatigue. I saw drudges sneak tiny moments of relief each time their machines were temporarily inactive. That’s what I saw: a seemingly endless cycle of heaviness and hopelessness. And I couldn’t bear to look anymore. I wanted to run back to the dream where I had been before I screwed up with the bottles. Those daydreams were often my only fleeting moments of escape. Sometimes nostalgia made the hours pass quicker. My mind left the factory in those moments and traveled back in time to relive basketball triumphs. I replayed championship wins. I reenacted game-winning shots by counting down, “Three… two… one” and making a buzzer sound as I held my arm arched in the air after shooting bottles into the mouth of the machine. It made me remember the time when I once had a purpose. And I smiled. But then Rita’s desperate voice yanked me back into reality.