first- through sixth-grade classes, were singing “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman. Before she played the folk/rock song on the auditorium’s gleaming black Steinway, Ms. Kaminsky had tried to explain the message of it for everybody. “This moving song, by a young black woman from Massachusetts, is about being dirt poor in the richest country in the world. It’s about being black in the nineteen nineties.” The petite, rail-thin music and visual arts teacher was always so intense.
