“You just don’t fit in here.” That was an exact quote from a man who wouldn’t hire me for a job that I could do in my sleep.
He never said, but implied: “I won’t bother you with elaborating on that statement. Come on. Trust me.”
“You are in the slow group.” That was not an exact quote. It may have been called ‘group b.’ My teacher explained, “That class in the school where you came from was on the 3 times multiplication tables. That is where our slow math group is here. You also belong in our slow reading group.”
In third grade, I assumed school meant excruciating boredom and casual meanness. In third grade, I had a library book that was maybe at sixth grade level. I smuggled it into the classroom and hid it behind the text book before Mrs. Lundqvist swiped from my hands as I tried to read behind my text book. That’s all I could do. Read and read and read, as I waited for my turn to recite out of the text book filled with pictures of little tow-headed kids named Nan and Anne and Dick and Jan.
I started out as an artist in kindergarten. My teachers let me have that one. They didn’t smash my crayons or take them away. I graduated from a state college with a B.A. in fine art and drew escapist scenes. I also kept journals. From my place inside of my family of origin, I was too abridged to be anything aside from ‘just a girl.’ In the outside world, I was bad, even though I didn’t move around, wave my arms, or talk a whole lot.
I heard from a sibling lately saying that a black administrator found some mysterious files of kids from that grammar school I attended. He finally figured out that the earlier administrators kept files of every black child that integrated the school. Apparently, by age seven, we were scary, and the admin needed to track us like enemy agents.
As of late, I have impressive spurts of anger. And sometimes I stop and think of what my life would require in order for me to have the full heaping dose of white privilege, and then the anger fades away, and I am grateful that there is no part of me that the larger culture insists I that I starve off as I master the art of standing a few feet outside of my body while observing how brilliant my witty banter is. Besides, I am alright when I am writing.
I can relate to your story. I love to read. I could read very fast. I remember when I was in the 6th grade at Catholic) school in East Oakland, the teacher, a nun, had several groups of readers. The one group of “advanced” readers were all girls, and white. They were all Catholic, I was not. There were about five of them. I was horrible with math, but reading was my passion, books were my treasure and I knew I read faster than the girls in the advanced group. I read at the level of a 10th-12th grade student. I remember reading like the Dickens to reach the book they were all reading to prove I was just as capable and smart as them. I remember enjoying religion class, and took the lessons more seriously than my friends who were Catholic. I would be given only C’s or C+’s for those grades, never higher despite my reading up on every facet of the Church. I enjoyed reading books about nearly every saint in the College of Saints, it did not matter.
I remember when I first started Skyline High, we were in same Algebra class. We did not know each other then. I was in total fear of being asked to come up to front of class to do board work. I would blank out. You once went up, and solved a problem on old-school projector, and got answer right. It was a number line. We were only a handful of black girls in that class. I thought: “damn, she is smart, I wish I could do that like her without fear”! Needless to say, you were a very talented artist and was ahead of the game “ blerd” re: the environment, science fiction, etc., before that word came about in the 21st century. 👍🏾. We have come a long way and are still here, still moving through life.