SEPTEMBER The North High School building is full of graffiti, cigarette butts, broken glass and overturned cans of pop that attract bees; even now, the morning after the first frost. I walk the crowded halls, right before the morning bell. I slip past the smokers standing in a pack outside the northwest door. I see kids in the halls who will not get help from me. They have dreadlocks or mohawks. They talk rap talk, small talk. I smell their perfume, their raspberry lip gloss. We’ve been in school for a month now. My classes in special education are filled with kids from all over Minneapolis. Sometimes I have an hour with them, once in awhile two hours. I still get names wrong. To keep order in my life I write down the name of a girl that John Martin, the science teacher, gives me. He is standing outside the door of his overheated classroom. “ She cries every day and her hair is always touching the paper.” I begin to make lists. These lists are poems about what is left undone. A young girl runs down the hall to algebra class. She is late. Just this morning she has gathered up all her clothes and run away from her pimp. She is frightened that he will follow her. She glances behind as she picks up speed. Her high heels click on the wooden floors. She slips into her seat in the back row. Her bracelets ring loud through the classroom. I have to believe that this girl will survive. I have to believe that despite the loss of her childhood—the mornings of slow cigarettes and angry men—she will find a way to pull ...After All through it all. It is so hard to acknowledge that some kids will never make it. It is difficult to read about ex-students of mine, shot on the summer streets, or tricking in Loring Park, arrested in drag. n the lunchroom I cannot pick out the survivors. I do not know who they are. I watch the kids in line as they shift their weight impat ie n t ly from sneakered foo t to sneakered foot. The woman at the cash register questions each one, fumbles over each name. A small black boy with sixty-two braids woven tight to his head stamps his foot, jabs at the woman’s list: “ Damn lady! Every day you ask me! My name is Joe Washington. I get free lunch. See, right there on the paper!” He moves on, glaring at the flustered woman. Hmong and Indians gesture quietly to their names on the list. Whites grin nervously and point. Some of the kids reach deep into pockets for change to buy extra milk or cartons of sweetened juice. Some take a bag of chips, forgetting about the money they’d already spent on cigarettes that morning. They throw the bags back down on the counter. One boy darts into line. No one tells him he “ butted.” The stitching shows on the bottom of his pants where he tried to sew them up, an old man’s pants from an uncle now in prison. His shoes have no laces. He shuffles just to keep them on. He hunches over his food. None of the kids go near him. He snarls. In my classroom, when I ask for an example of an analogy, he tells me that “ coon just tastes like coon.” The kids talk about his clothes. They laugh. After all the others have gone, he sits and talks. He tells me he can wax a floor better than anyone. “ I’m clean, too. My clothes, my skin. They clean, teacher.” And they are. When the bell rings, he walks off, holding the waist of his pants, pushing his feet down the hall in no-lace shoes. DECEMBER There is tension on the streets, in the building. There is anger in the hallways. A single black braid lies on the floor, ripped out of the head of a young girl during a fight this morning. And there is Michael, who comes to class every day. Until the dancing contest, Mike is the skinny fifteen year old black butt of all the kids’ jokes. Nappy headed, hungry, he has no money for a gerry curl, no money for straight legged pants. He smells of sleeping in urine. In class his head often drops, then rises. He wants to read but can’t stay awake. The other kids smile, point, as his eyes fly open and he tries to read the words on flash cards, words most kids know by the second grade. On the day of the dancing contest, Mike comes in a velvet trimmed jacket and baggy pants pulled in at the waist to keep them on. When the music starts Mike takes off the jacket and places it on the back of a chair. He rolls up his sleeves and starts to dance. His whole body moves at once. His hands push the space around him into curves. His feet are snakes. Head back, eyes closed, he moves. A change in the beat, a change in his step. He pulls the music with him. He pushes it away. He gets down on the floor and swivels on his hips. All the strutters, the taunters and teasers edge off the dance floor. The well dressed, straight legged, gerry curled kids move toward the walls, watching as Mike moves his hips, hands, and feet. He is unaware of their shining eyes, their shaking heads, their “ amens” of approval. Finally, the toughest of them shouts “ Go Mike! Take it with you!” and then Mike smiles, as he takes the music inside, down and around his skinny body. After that day, even though the kids still snicker and Mike still comes in all the wrong clothes, something is different. He walks straighter, dances in the middle of class after he finally reads from a book, stays awake for the entire hour. After that day, Mike sings songs in the hall, his church voice clear as a bell in the morning. The other students smile as they bend over their work. JANUARY J I nger moves inside the school building. There are gangs that recruit kids: twelve, thirteen and fourteen year olds. They wait out in the crysta l w in ter air, skipp ing school. I want to pull them in and sit with them, read to them, watch them work with words, with language. The girl who has run away from her pimp walks to algebra without A single black braid lies on the floor, ripped out of the head of a young girl during a fight this morning. looking behind her. She laughs at something a young man has whispered in her ear. But some of these kids will not survive. J I young student named Pedro is # 1 kicked viciously by four young W B men from a gang. It is an hour after the last classes have been let out. It happens right in front of the principal’s office. There are thirty-six entrances and exits to North High School. There are three and a half miles of hallway. Five days later Pedro dies. He was able to tell his parents, looking directly at each one, that he loved them. I have to believe there is something beyond his death—and yet I hesitate now. It was a freak fight. No one can understand how he could go all the way under those boots: one kick, his liver split in half. Someone gets up in the auditorium at an assembly and pleads with everyone to stop the killing. Later a boy recites a poem by Langston Hughes. Tears move down the sides of the faces of the young men and women who knew Pedro. Some days it is hard to believe in survival. FEBRUARY ittle kids wait at bus stops in the Minnesota winter. They are dressed in moon boots and down parkas, scarves and moon mittens. They are walking quilts. When they march up the steps of the bus, you cannot recognize their forms. They are squares. You are used to them stripped to the skin, their buttocks round, their elbows sharp. But all bodies have the same shape in winter. Fat kids love it. They roll into school with the rest. Dear Jackie, Somewhere on Hennepin Avenue, maybe between the bar where gays hang out after they’ve been to the bath houses, and the book store filled with old men, you stand waiting for the next slow car. Your skin was like a baby’s when I knew you and you were already turning tricks, giving up your round body for a fine man who kept you in food. You were only fourteen and you stepped over bottles in the morning, careful of broken glass, while you lit your first cigarette. The curtainless window let in the glare of a streetlight, which shone on the head of some John you let stay the night. If your pimp found out about the John you’d be bruised blue on the streets the next day. When you showed up for school you showed up in yellow silk and high heels. You came in some mornings smelling of a sweetness none of us could name, covering up a sweetness we could. You helped Donald W illiams struggle through his vocabulary words, sounding out each letter with him, your mouth agonizing like his mouth as he tried every letter one at a time until he could hear it in his head. You were the only one he’d work with besides me. During the class you’d shrug your shoulders, the silk slipping off one side, rhinestones shining. I wonder if your mother is alive. She was dying when I knew you. She walked in for a parent conference like an eighty year old woman leaning on a cane, one side of her face set strangely on her neck. You guided her to a seat with such gentleness. We told her about all the fine things you did: how you worked with Donald, how you cleaned up in the kitchen after everyone had left, an apron over your tight pants. You talked to the white haired home ec teacher about the kitchen you wanted someday. We told your mother about the time you went sledding with us, your blond hair flying out behind you like a flag. We didn’t tell your mother about your pimp, how he followed you to a pizza place one day when we all went out for lunch. You introduced your best friend, Sandy, to him. Who Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988 5
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz