![]() Instead, I empathized with Cassie and Jennifer, grateful not only for the temporary relief from exploded shuttles and nuclear blasts, from WIC raisins and powdered milk, but also for the near experience of witness they gave me. Perhaps I would have learned that life was more than the threat of loss, but I never discovered that. To see people like me in the books I read might have alleviated some of that feeling-or at least taught me that people like me could embrace adventure, could thrive. I always felt in peril, devoid of agency, and doomed. Some days, we did drills where we hid under our desks or laced our fingers behind our necks and knelt in hallways, trying to protect the tenderest parts of our bodies from nuclear assault and tornadoes. The space shuttle Challenger blew up on live TV as we watched in the school auditorium. We saw images every day of kids our age who were struggling to survive famine and destitution. The Reagan ’80s were particularly grim for children. I hungered for affirmation, possibility, but all I got was erasure, and it tasted like air. I wanted to read about Black girls who subverted the will of this world-a world that said that when I grew up, I could expect to work as a housekeeper or a nursing-home aide or a hotel maid or on an assembly line in a factory if I was lucky, but that I could never be a writer like Harriet or an explorer like Pippi or a warrior like Aerin. I wanted more of the people I read about to struggle with racial violence or poverty and to also be independent and adventurous, unbound by the restrictions of reality. ![]() I didn’t need everything I read to mirror my own identity and experience, but I wanted more. ![]() Both novels reflected two important aspects of my life-my Blackness and my girlhood-and I loved them for it. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and Jennifer, who fiercely pretends to be a witch in E.L.Konigsburg’s Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. In all my reading, I’d come across only two Black girl main characters: Cassie Logan, the nine-year-old trying to make sense of life in Jim Crow–era Mississippi in Mildred D. I wanted some glimpse of someone who resembled me. “I wanted to read about Black girls who subverted the will of this world.”īy the time I was 10 years old, I’d made my way through hundreds of books, but I also understood that I was searching for something. The care the authors put into their storytelling made me feel that way, even as they enlarged my sense of wonder and witness. But I always felt safe in the cradle of the story. In all my reading, I muddled along with the characters as they weathered loss and disorientation-weighty subjects for any child. I rode an old, lame horse with a lonely girl named Aerin, who mourns her absent father and dead mother while she hunts dragons in The Hero and the Crown. I searched the seas with Pippi Longstocking to find her missing, maybe dead, father. I snuck through the streets of New York with Harriet the Spy, eavesdropping in dumbwaiters. Allowing myself to fall into a book felt effortless and immersive, like jumping off a downed tree trunk into a brown, swiftly moving river. “Every story was a subsummation.”īut I discovered real metaphor and imagery in the tiny library. It was where I first learned that if I stood very still and studied the sky, the clouds would move like great boats overhead, casting their cool shadows on the concrete and grass. I loved the small courtyard near the cafeteria. I spent long moments looking up at their crowned heads, trying to discern some dialogue in the way they swayed in the wind or nodded in the breeze. I loved the tiny square playground where I spent most of my recess hours, surrounded by tall pine trees in an amphi-theater of living green. I’d imagine 20 years later, as I ate my packed lunch in the cafeteria, that slant-walled building looked much the same as it did back then: all peeling, sun-bleached wood, with box fans going strong in the windows because it had no central air or heat.Įven though it was old and dingy, I loved my school. She was one of the first Black students to attend the school when it was integrated in the ’60s. There were three buildings: an auditorium with classrooms, a newer structure with squat ceilings and cinder-block walls, and an ancient cafeteria that had been there since my mother’s time. ![]() In my memory, my elementary school was small and standard for a poorer, rural Mississippi town.
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