academy. She said the first thing she wanted to do was learn how to shoot a gun.
Chapter Five
School wasn’t so bad after the first few days. Ma gave me money to get some new saddle oxfords, even though she fussed about having to spend more money when she told me the first pair were wrong the day we bought them. She kept telling me what they looked like in her day, so I was certain those were not the shoes I wanted to wear. It turned out she was right.
Black kids made up a whopping 1 percent of the school’s population. I figured it would be an easy thing to make friends with those kids since we naturally had something in common. It’s the thing you can always count on—black folks finding each other wherever we are few. As with every other thing I was learning about the school, it turned out this wasn’t the case. The kids had been attending since seventh grade, and had already established their groups, and most surprising, not all together. They were friendly enough, but I knew they’d likely never be my friends. Not like those in my neighborhood, or the kids I went to middle school with in the West End. Those kids talked like me, listened to the same music, could see the style in a pair of straight-leg jeans cuffed over a new pair of white Converse high-tops.
Not the black kids at my new school. They were about as unlike me as the rich white kids, and they seemed bland and assimilated. They’d heard of the bands that were unknown to me—bands with names like Lynyrd Skynyrd and AC/DC. They could use the word crap without it sounding foreign on their tongues (in my neighborhood, we called it what it was—shit). Somehow, they could actually dance to the song “My Sharona.” I decided that trying to make friends with them would be no less difficult than making friends with the white kids. At least with the kids whose differences showed readily in their skin, in the intonation of their words, in their shiny Trans Ams and Corvettes that blasted “Sweet Home Alabama” from the radio, there would be no guessing where I stood, wondering where our similarities ended. So I did something I never would have expected I’d do a month earlier—I began making friends with some of the rich white kids.
They asked me stupid questions, and our initial conversations often involved discussions I’d never imagined I’d be part of.
“Does your hair get wet?” What, did you expect water would slide off as if my hair were a duck’s feathers?
“Can I touch your hair?” This I allowed only once. That one instance made me feel too much like a rabbit in a petting zoo, or a misunderstood circus freak, to allow it again. Each time someone asked to touch my hair after that, I had to fight an urge to hurt them. I wondered how they’d react if black people were all the time asking to touch their hair. But I didn’t really care to know, and besides, I already knew. In books, hair was always described as flaxen or being like corn silk, and I’d shucked enough ears of corn to know what that felt like. Smooth, shiny hair came on all the Barbie dolls, even the black ones. White people were hardly a mystery to me by the time I’d reached high school, because even though I didn’t know many personally—my teachers at the old school, a girlfriend of one of my aunts—their presence in my world was felt everywhere.
“Oh, you just have to come to the first school dance. You can show us all the new moves.” The most I could muster in response was a serious roll of the eyes. Being my first real experience with “overcoming stereotypes,” I wasn’t adept at doing so. No one asked me about a love of fried chicken or watermelon, but they wondered whether I’d be going out for the basketball team. I found it difficult to say, “Yes, I play basketball. I love playing basketball.”
I hated some of the things that I felt I had to do to make them comfortable with me, like talking differently when I was around them. It took
Chapter Five
School wasn’t so bad after the first few days. Ma gave me money to get some new saddle oxfords, even though she fussed about having to spend more money when she told me the first pair were wrong the day we bought them. She kept telling me what they looked like in her day, so I was certain those were not the shoes I wanted to wear. It turned out she was right.
Black kids made up a whopping 1 percent of the school’s population. I figured it would be an easy thing to make friends with those kids since we naturally had something in common. It’s the thing you can always count on—black folks finding each other wherever we are few. As with every other thing I was learning about the school, it turned out this wasn’t the case. The kids had been attending since seventh grade, and had already established their groups, and most surprising, not all together. They were friendly enough, but I knew they’d likely never be my friends. Not like those in my neighborhood, or the kids I went to middle school with in the West End. Those kids talked like me, listened to the same music, could see the style in a pair of straight-leg jeans cuffed over a new pair of white Converse high-tops.
Not the black kids at my new school. They were about as unlike me as the rich white kids, and they seemed bland and assimilated. They’d heard of the bands that were unknown to me—bands with names like Lynyrd Skynyrd and AC/DC. They could use the word crap without it sounding foreign on their tongues (in my neighborhood, we called it what it was—shit). Somehow, they could actually dance to the song “My Sharona.” I decided that trying to make friends with them would be no less difficult than making friends with the white kids. At least with the kids whose differences showed readily in their skin, in the intonation of their words, in their shiny Trans Ams and Corvettes that blasted “Sweet Home Alabama” from the radio, there would be no guessing where I stood, wondering where our similarities ended. So I did something I never would have expected I’d do a month earlier—I began making friends with some of the rich white kids.
They asked me stupid questions, and our initial conversations often involved discussions I’d never imagined I’d be part of.
“Does your hair get wet?” What, did you expect water would slide off as if my hair were a duck’s feathers?
“Can I touch your hair?” This I allowed only once. That one instance made me feel too much like a rabbit in a petting zoo, or a misunderstood circus freak, to allow it again. Each time someone asked to touch my hair after that, I had to fight an urge to hurt them. I wondered how they’d react if black people were all the time asking to touch their hair. But I didn’t really care to know, and besides, I already knew. In books, hair was always described as flaxen or being like corn silk, and I’d shucked enough ears of corn to know what that felt like. Smooth, shiny hair came on all the Barbie dolls, even the black ones. White people were hardly a mystery to me by the time I’d reached high school, because even though I didn’t know many personally—my teachers at the old school, a girlfriend of one of my aunts—their presence in my world was felt everywhere.
“Oh, you just have to come to the first school dance. You can show us all the new moves.” The most I could muster in response was a serious roll of the eyes. Being my first real experience with “overcoming stereotypes,” I wasn’t adept at doing so. No one asked me about a love of fried chicken or watermelon, but they wondered whether I’d be going out for the basketball team. I found it difficult to say, “Yes, I play basketball. I love playing basketball.”
I hated some of the things that I felt I had to do to make them comfortable with me, like talking differently when I was around them. It took
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