King/Robinson Nurse Tells Her Story

by Lisa Reisman

Langley signing her book after this week’s 8th-grade promotion ceremony.

Mortarboard messages on Tuesday.

On her rounds through the halls over the last year or so, King/Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School Principal Tessa Gumbs-Johnson would peer into Kevin Secor’s third-grade classroom and see the private-duty pediatric LPN typing on her computer while seated beside the boy she was attending during break time.

As Gumbs-Johnson recalled during her commencement address at Tuesday morning’s eighth-grade promotion ceremony in the packed auditorium of the Fournier Street school, she didn’t think much of it.

“Sometimes I wondered, ‘What is she doing on this computer?’” she told the 42 maroon-and-yellow-clad eighth-graders, as well as their families and friends. “But I have a building to run, I don’t have time to pay attention, I have to keep it moving.”

Then came Read Across America Day on March 2. The school customarily invites outside authors to come in. “There is already an author in the building,” literary coach Joanna Garrison told Gumbs-Johnson. She handed her a copy of “My Red Bird.”

The book. Credit: Lisa Reisman photo

The book is the debut memoir by Laricha Langley, the computer-typing pediatric nurse. Its title refers to a bird that Langley associates with her father, Keith Spruill, who in 1992 was shot and killed in Newhallville. Langley was four. Her father was 23. The slim 81-page volume at once shows a side of him — a charismatic, chess-playing, thoughtful figure — obscured by his tragic end while chronicling, with searing honesty, the adversity she faced as she grew up without a father.

She writes about lacking the tools “to process something so complex, so tragic, so violent” — “we didn’t have therapy, none of that” — and the consequent sense of anxiety that she would lose her mother as well; about an anger that boiled over into fights; about getting caught in the middle of a shootout; about getting kicked out of school for fighting.

She writes of hitting rock bottom when involved in a serious car accident; of finding direction in the Job Corps training program; of how she learned to endure but not to rest, a sort of “hyper-independence” that she wields as a survival mode; of seeking therapy to address her unhealed trauma; of enrolling in nursing school and graduating with honors.  

The copy of “My Red Bird” handed to Gumbs-Johnson originated with Secor, the third-grade teacher. Back in October, having watched her typing on her computer during breaks, he asked what she was working on. Her second book, she told him. He asked about the first.

“I read the book in one sitting and was so impressed that I ordered three copies,” he recalled. He shared the books with colleagues. “Everyone who read the book loved it.”

That included one-on-one educator Lynair Walker, the paraprofessional that worked alongside Langley in the third-grade classroom. “He saw her writing the story the year before and he encouraged her the whole time,” Secor said. For months, the two tried to persuade Langley to do a read-aloud of “My Red Bird.”

“I’m a shy person,” Langley, 38, said. “And I’m at work, and this was personal, so they’re going to know the real me. But they were persistent.”

Later in March, she read excerpts to two of the eighth-grade classes. “I had a lot of anxiety when I got up there with the kids, but once I started reading, it flowed, and the kids were so engaged, like they loved it,” she recalled.

“You could see the impact on them,” said Walker.

“A lot of people have Laricha’s story, but not a lot of people can tell their story in the way that she did,” said Valerie Knowles, the STEM Lab teacher. “It reminded me of poetry.” Knowles, a published poet and editor, and her husband, Frederick-Douglass Knowles II, Hartford poet laureate emeritus and author of the new collection “Sinking in Moonlight Alone” (Woodland Press), have taken to inviting Langley to readings.

“The book’s got motion,” said Langley, who plans to pursue a masters degree in psychology in the fall. “It’s taking me for a ride and I’m just going with it.” It’s that motion that had Gumbs-Johnson buying 20 copies after she read the book on vacation and placing them in the gift bags that she distributed to the graduating eighth-graders. “These kids need to hear her story,” she said. “They need to know that they can overcome.”

Langley said she’s enjoyed positive feedback from the time the book came out last August — she expressed particular gratitude to Rev. Eunice Tucker of Christian Union Full Gospel Church for championing her book early on — but at King/Robinson, which she called a family, “it just took off.”  

“This is my testimony and the people at King/Robinson, they heard it,” Langley went on, thanking her husband Quinn and her three kids for their unwavering support. “This tells me I didn’t go through everything I did for nothing. It tells me I can help other people who are going through it too.”

King/Robinson principal Tessa Gumbs-Johnson singing the praises of Laricha Langley.

The trio that made it happen: Lynair Walker, Laricha Langley, and Kevin Secor at 8th grade promotion.