Fifty Books Project 2023

The New Plantation by Jason Trask

Looking around at the barren landscape, my soul seemed a liability.  I sucked it deep within myself and followed other pedestrians across the parking lot to a sidewalk where a CO allowed everyone to pass but me.

I handed him my ID card.

Except for a customs agent in East Berlin, and occasionally my wife, no one has ever observed my face with such attention.  That afternoon, as I was leaving , he waved me past.  For the remainder of that school year and the two that followed, he would never check my ID again.  Thousands of people passed this man each day.  If you were new, he checked your ID; otherwise, he waved you past.

The New Plantation recounts and analyzes Trask’s three years teaching at the Rikers Island Educational Facility High School in the early 1990s.  It is a powerful, narrative and discussion that is timely for a number of reasons – the dawning awareness of the school to prison pipeline that exists in many neighborhoods and the imminent closing of Riker’s Island among them.  Trask makes very little of the fact that his story takes place so long ago.  There is no reason to think that anything has changed, though the waning of the crack epidemic has likely affected the number and ages of the children that pass through RIEF.

The story is told episodically, with more than a third of the book recounting his first few days at the school.  This serves to introduce us to the characters – Trask explains in a prologue that he has changed people’s names and, in some cases, combined several individuals into one for clarity.  He also, apparently relying on notes, recounts detailed conversations.  Much of the early section of the book is focused on establishing that his classroom at RIEF was not your ordinary classroom.   There is abundant cursing and talk of crude sex.  Trask frequently succeeds because he is willing to talk to students on their level. The focus on the early days of his tenure is effective in letting the readers share some of the shock and fear Trask experienced in adjusting to this environment and to see how well-suited he was to that adjustment.

After the first two weeks are recounted in detail, the narrative is less chronological, as Trask takes up topics and uses anecdotes and character sketches to illustrate his points.  There is compelling narrative here, but also a didactic and persuasive aim reflected in the title.   Trask is essentially focused on opening the reader’s eyes to the harsh conditions in the school and how little chance at education or rehabilitation the inmate children are given.  He consistently focuses on ways in which this “school” experience is a continuation of the systemic racism its students have faced and, as the title (taken from something a student said to him in his first week) makes clear, a continuation of the history of oppression faced by people of color in America.  While the eye-witness nature of this is an important and powerful addition to this discussion, it is by nature this argument is more powerfully handled in books like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon.  

What is strongest here is the portraits of the teachers and the children – their dialogue and the way they forge relationships with Trask even in the short time they are at RIEF. (Riker’s Island is a jail – most of the inmates are awaiting trial because they could not afford bail.  While there have been horrific and important exceptions, most inmates are there for months rather than years).  Trask is especially good at portraying himself.  He makes clear the moments when he is afraid, when he fails and when he gives in to his own prejudices.   This renders him human and approachable so that the clarity of his courage and compassion can come through without seeming egotistical.  He is generous in his praise of his colleagues even while he makes clear his disagreements with some of them.

There is a good chunk towards the end in which Trask analyzes race relations between the teachers.  Much of his discussion with his students is about race – there is no doubt that part of his success is based on his honesty with his students about the history of racism and his own complex part in that history as a beneficiary of white privilege.  His relationships with his peers is at least as nuanced, and this is an excellent reflection on the complexity of race relations in professional settings.  There is little overt hostility between white teachers and teachers of color, but it seems that friendships are rare and delicate.   

Trask ends with a lengthy argument that the power of racism is alive and well in this country.   While few who read this book will disagree, these arguments are not what readers will remember when they put the book down.  It will be the voices and energy of Michael and Tony and Metatron – the way they tested their teacher to see if he could be trusted, and the way that teacher passed their test.