The Paris Review - Fall 2016

some Langston Hughes in the newspapers. The Simple series. I read some
things in high school, routine stuff—Edgar Allan Poe and all that. They
didn’t introduce us to a single black author. But I really didn’t start reading
poetry until I started at the university. The university was like a trade school
for me. Matter of fact, I stayed too long, because within two years I had all
the tools necessary to make a modest income as a writer.
INTERVIEWER
Did you enter university thinking that that was what you wanted to do, to
be a writer?
REED
When I went to grammar school in Buffalo, I got mostly negative reviews
from the white women teachers—these teachers would say such terrible
things about my behavior that I was ashamed to take their report cards home.
I had only one black teacher during my whole education, a woman named
Hortense Butts. She encouraged me and gave me tickets to concerts. Called
upon me to play Christmas carols on the violin. I used to get beaten up by
black women and white women. I was an equal-opportunity target. In first
grade, I was slapped so hard by one white teacher my mother took me out
of school. In eighth grade, I was assaulted by a woman teacher. She had a
Victorian style. It was because I had a fistfight with her teacher’s pet, who
called me a rat in front of the class. I thought to myself, How do I gain this
woman’s affection? Because I wanted to be liked. That was my whole thing.
I was someone who wanted people to like me—I still am.
And how did you win her favor?
INTERVIEWER
REED
She told me that the greatest thing in the world for me would be to be a
tech man. She told me I should go to the technical high school. So I did.
I was totally unequipped. I got Fs. We had a thing in woodshop where the
first assignment was to make a box to put your tools in—I never got beyond
that. I spent most of the time in the band room playing the trombone and
the violin.
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