I want to tell you about the essay.
Last week, on a Tuesday afternoon in early November of this year — fourteen months and three weeks after the night on Highway 11W — my daughter Aaliyah came home from her ninth-grade English class at Tennessee High School and she handed me a folded piece of computer paper at our kitchen table.
It had her teacher Mrs. Calloway’s handwriting at the top in red ink. The handwriting said: Aaliyah. This is the best essay I have read in nineteen years of teaching. A.
The prompt of the essay had been five words: The person who changed me.
Aaliyah’s essay was five paragraphs and four hundred and eighty-one words. I am not going to copy the whole thing here because the whole thing is my daughter’s and she gets to choose when and how the whole thing leaves our house.
I will give you the opening sentence and the closing sentence with her permission.
The opening sentence said:
The person who changed my life is a man I do not know the name of and who I have only seen the back of.
The closing sentence said:
He did not save me. He stopped. I want to be the kind of person who stops.
The essay went into a binder on top of our refrigerator.
I have read it eleven times.
