“I’m banned from Walmart,” Josh said. I sat on his bed, which was made. His room was bare and neat. He’d been drawing pictures, and these he’d tacked to the wall, pictures of cars alongside pages ripped out of my father’s lowrider magazines, which featured pretty Hispanic girls bending suggestively over elaborately painted Chevys.
“How you get banned from Walmart?” I said.
“We was stealing,” he said.
“Josh!”
“It was just little stuff. Candy and boxers.”
“What would have happened if they would’ve called the cops?”
“They didn’t. They just took us back in the back and took all our names and told us that we was banned.”
“You could’ve went to juvie.”
“We done stole out there before and ain’t got caught. The time before last they hollered at us when we walked out the door but we started running and they couldn’t catch us.”
I laughed at the image and felt like I was encouraging him, so I stopped. I’d meant to chastise him, be the big sister who reminded him of larger consequences. I was worried for him, worried at what the world demanded of him as a young man, and of what he would do to satisfy it, to stand. Yet I admired his recklessness at the same time. He was still struggling in junior high: then, I did not understand why he was having such a hard time in classes. He was smart, witty, adept at solving problems quickly and efficiently. Now, I assume he learned and tested differently from other kids, and the public school system didn’t recognize that. Even though he stole stupid things from stores, he was still a tame kid: I knew he’d experimented with weed, but it wasn’t something he smoked all the time. I also knew he’d gotten drunk for the first time with Aldon, and our older cousin had then loaded him and Aldon into the backseat of his Cutlass and spun do-nuts in the middle of the road, causing them to throw up all over his car. I’m assuming he was trying to teach them a lesson, and as far as I knew, it had worked, since Josh really didn’t drink much after that.
“So I guess we can’t walk over there and get something to eat, huh?”
“Naw,” Josh said. He laughed. “Come on.”
We left the house, which had the sort of low ceilings that feel oppressive even to me, a short person, and walked out into the street, where we stood for a minute before seeing one of his new friends, skinny and dark in the distance, his shadow trailing him like a tail, and we set off walking toward him. I missed my brother.
When I was in school during the week, I wondered about Joshua, running through the hallways of a new school, being collared by new teachers, navigating the world without the luxury of having known all his classmates since elementary school. He was alone. Like me.
As I grew older, I became a part of my private school’s community, sort of. I was a cheerleader and in the drama club, served in student government, and briefly revived the student literary magazine, but I was still other, racially and socio-economically. My mother forbade me to date anyone (in or out of the school). Like most mothers in the Black South, she was terrified that I would become pregnant as a teenager. She didn’t allow me to go to any of the school dances until my senior year, when I was allowed to attend my senior prom, alone. I hated all of the music. One or two of the White boys I attended school with were attracted to me, and I heard rumors that others were as well, but they wouldn’t act on it because I was Black. They feared the judgment of their families and community. I found out how dangerous this intersection was when I was heavily petted by a boy one night during my senior year, and the next day, in conversation with another one of my classmates, another White boy, he said: I don’t believe in the mixing of the races. Years later, I recalled that he’d touched me, but he’d refused to kiss my mouth or my face. My otherness was physically tangible. At least, I thought, my brother doesn’t have to deal with this in his school.
To cope, I spent more and more of my free time, what little there was, at school, hiding out in the library, picking random books off the shelf to read. In seventh grade I read Gone with the Wind; while Scarlett’s and Rhett’s relationship spoke to the teenage romantic in me, the defeated Confederates’ vilification of the freed slaves did not. And the fact that the book and movie were so beloved in America, across regions, horrified me. Do they really think of Black people like this? I wondered. My time at school seemed to attest that some did. By the time I was in my junior and senior years of high school, I was reading Roots and Invisible Man and Native Son and The Color Purple and, at my father’s insistence, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. This was the early nineties, when conscious rap groups wore African-print clothing and Chuck D exhorted us to “fight the power.” I wore a Malcolm X T-shirt that my father had given me to school and I was cornered by a girl in the bathroom and told: “Well, Mimi, I see I should have worn my David Duke T-shirt today.” In my reading life, I was proud of my African heritage; at school, I was reticent. While I was reading and listening to Public Enemy, I understood resistance and fighting for civil rights as strength; when I was at school, I was bewildered. At home, I’d have moments of clarity while riding down the street with one of my friends, listening to Tupac, and I’d think: I love being Black; then a few hours later, I’d wrestle with my hair while obsessing over my antiseptic dating and social life at school, and loathe myself. When my mother picked me up from school one day, I began telling her about a school project, and she interrupted me, speaking to the pebbly asphalt road, the corridor of trees leading us home to our trailer, and said: “Stop talking like that.” As in: Why are you speaking so properly? As in: Why do you sound like those White kids you go to school with, that I clean up after? As in: Who are you? I shut my mouth.
I worried about my brother. While I faced a kind of blatant, overt, individualized racism at my school that had everything to do with attending school with kids who were White, rich, and privileged in the American South, Joshua faced a different kind of racism, a systemic kind, the kind that made it hard for school administrators and teachers to see past his easygoing charm and lackluster grades and disdain for rigid learning to the person underneath. Why figure out what will motivate this kid to learn if, statistically, he’s just another young Black male destined to drop out anyway? He was never referred to a counselor, never tested for a learning disorder, never given some sort of individual attention that might better equip him to navigate junior high school and high school. Both my brother and I were coming up against something larger than us, and both of us were flailing against it, looking for a seam, a knob, a doorway, an opening through. And both of us were failing.
I was sixteen when I had my first drink. I spent the night with my best friend from my high school. She was a tall, generous girl who was unfailingly honest with me, who pulled me through some of my darkest bouts of teenage angst and adult depression, those times when my vision narrowed to a pinpoint and the world as I knew it beat me into hopelessness. We sat on the floor in her family’s living room and took shots of cooking sherry. When the buzz hit me, I was euphoric. All the self-loathing, the weight of who I was and where I was in the world, fell away. I lay with her on the sofa, watching television, and said, “Mariah, I hope this feeling never ends.”