When my students were supposed to be working on their papers, I overheard them sharing their stories of immigration, the tales where the holes were as significant as the fabric pulled taut. I heard tell of generations upon whose shoulders they enrolled in college, into our class. T shared the frayed thread of a story about the woman with the red cloth. It’s all she had to go on, all she had to weave the story of her family’s story of origin in the Americas.

When my students were supposed to be working on their papers, T leaned over and said, “You’re so lucky, J. You know where your family is from.” J wondered, given the shape of T’s nose and the formation of her cheekbones and the texture of her hair where her people may have come from. “All I know,” said T, “is something about a woman with the red cloth. And that she came through the Carolinas.”

When my students were supposed to be working on their papers, we looked up what a red cloth might mean. What significance does a red cloth has to the narrative of people sold into slavery on this soil? We googled “red cloth” + “slave” + “woman” and what we found was our education that day. That week. This semester. This life that connects us more than it taxonomizes us.

When my students were supposed to be working on their papers, we did other research. We leaned in and we pored over the woman with the red cloth, a woman who is perhaps both a symbol and an individual. She was, along with many others, lured onto a ship festooned with cloths and jewels to enchant the eye and sever the body. She was given no chance to say goodbye; she was given no choice. She was deceived, that the red cloth was hers for purchase when in fact she would be treated as goods sold in a foreign land. The mere pigmentation of her skin was her appeal and her curse. She carried a red cloth, a talisman from her native land, a foreshadowing of the plunder.

When my students were supposed to be working on their papers, we were all undone.

When my students were supposed to be working on their papers, we wasted time. And yet, nothing was wasted besides the stories that have been buried, the time that has been frittered away, the documents that have fallen to dust mites, the bones and muscle and marrow grounded down into ash. Nothing has been wasted in the resurrection of their stories.

When my students were supposed to be working on their papers, they wrote a new curriculum upon which I would be challenged for the rest of my life’s term, from which we can never be fully emancipated when the red cloth still stains the white papers we write and turn in for a grade.