“The invisibility of the one-two punch that is Blackness and poverty is brutal.”
School was our salvation. We coped by excelling academically. We loved learning. We didn’t want to end up in the same situation as our parents, worrying where the next meal was coming from.
School was also our haven. We stayed late, participating in sports, music, drama, and student government. My sisters and I became overachievers, even in areas that didn’t interest us.
Deloris and Dianne made the Rhode Island and National Honor Society. They blazed a path for me. But, at school, I was always so sleepy, hungry, and ashamed. I would arrive to school at 8 a.m. and by 8:30 I was falling asleep. For many years I had problems sleeping through the night; I never slept through the night. At best, I slept periodically, warily, because it was during the middle of the night that a lot of my parents’ fights happened.
If I got two hours of full sleep, I was lucky. We’d be awakened by a scream, a screech. The only hope, the only blessing, was the fight that didn’t last long. But sometimes their conflicts would last all night or night after night, for days. If it lasted all night, we did not sleep. Imagine your father beating your mom with a two-by-four piece of wood, slamming it on her back, the screams for help, the screams of anger and rage. That trauma would keep me up at night and make me fall asleep in class.
I wet the bed until I was fourteen. I’d often go to school smelling. Having no hot water sure didn’t help. Try washing up with ice cold water and rarely any soap in the dead of winter. We chose between laundry detergent, soap, or dishwashing liquid. Usually, we substituted one for the
other based on our needs. Hauling bags of laundry a mile or two in freezing temperatures, with ice and snow, was no picnic. And having the quarters for laundry was a luxury.
So, usually the night before, we washed our clothes by hand in cold water and soap and hung them to dry. We would hang wet clothes over doors or a chair because a clothesline would be exposed to snow, rain, and/or freezing cold air that would make the clothes turn to ice. The next day, they were almost never dry, but we had no choice. We would put on wet clothes and they would dry as we went through our day. I reeked of urine.
My sister Deloris and I went to Cowden Street School when I was in fourth grade and she in fifth. Deloris absolutely loved school. She was that student who came home excited if she had a test coming up. She was also a voracious reader. Before she entered sixth grade she was consuming books like Wuthering Heights and those by Agatha Christie. And unlike me, she never got in trouble in school as she was very respectful of teachers.
Well, one day Deloris came home excited about a science test. It’s all she would talk about for a week. At this point, she wanted to be an archaeologist. On the day of her big science test, something different was happening in class for me. My teacher, who I loved, kept staring at me. Whenever I moved closer to her to answer a question, she would step back. Then I saw her talking to the teacher next door. Only a door separated the classes, so they would talk in the doorway. On this day, they whispered and looked at me.
Finally, when we got in a circle to read, I ran to sit next to her and she leaned back with a distressed look on her face. She then gestured for me and whispered in my ear, “You need to tell your mother to get some soap and water and wash you! The odor is horrible!” Then she shooed me away as if I had vomited on her. I was numb.
A few minutes later I was called to the nurse’s office. When I walked in, I saw Deloris. The nurse hadn’t arrived yet. Deloris was sitting in a chair in front of the nurse’s desk and she was catatonic. She obviously was called in for the same reason. I whispered, “Deloris! Oh my God can you believe . . .” But I never finished because she told me to shut up and she put her head down again.
The nurse came in and gave a whole lecture of the complaints from teachers about our hygiene. She asked how we washed up. We said nothing.
We were trained in the art of keeping secrets and we never, ever shared with anyone what went on in our home. Ever! She then proceeded to tell us how you should never wear the same underwear twice; how to wash up; how to use soap and what areas to wash first. Then we went home.
Many decades later I brought up that day to Deloris and she told me her memories of that day. She said she had taken her science test and gotten an
A. She was beyond excited and took her paper back to her desk. She was being incessantly bullied by a girl named Maxine. Maxine looked at my sister’s test and went up to the teacher and said, “Miss, Deloris cheated.” And without missing a beat the teacher called Deloris up to her desk, took her test from her, and put a big, red F on it. She was devastated!! But she said this was a teacher who simply never liked her because she always got straight As. She was the same teacher who told me in second grade that Black people could not read or write at all when they were slaves.
I told Deloris I was sorry that happened to her and we didn’t help her. She said, “That’s okay, Viola. That was the day I decided to be a teacher. It devastated me so much that I didn’t want another kid to go through what I went through.”
Deloris has been a brilliant teacher for the past thirty-five years. It’s funny that with the complaints about hygiene, no one ever asked us about our home environment. No one asked us if we were okay or if anything was wrong. No one talked to us. There was a lack of intentional investment in us little Black girls. A few people would drop what they called useful affirmations like, “Work hard,” “Stay in school and do good,” “Be great,” “Behave and don’t get in trouble.” There was an expectation of perfectionism without the knowledge of emotional well-being. What it left in me was confusion. How do I get to the mountaintop without legs? But we constantly push it with kids now and when you’re a poor kid growing up with trauma, no one is equipping you with tools to do “better,” to “make a life.”
It’s funny that I loved my fourth-grade teacher so much and wanted her to love me with the same intensity. As traumatizing as it was to be told I smelled, it was worse feeling the shame. It was so overwhelming that I went home and did everything the nurse said. I washed my underwear, clothes, scrubbed my “privacy” and underarms. It gave me such a sense of pride to go back to school the next day, clean. I sat in class with a huge smile and waited to be acknowledged for the change. But . . . I wasn’t. None of the
teachers who complained ever really noticed us at all after that. You’re expected to be clean not celebrated. The invisibility of the one-two punch that is Blackness and poverty is brutal. Mix that with being hungry all the damn time and it becomes combustible.
If you’re hungry, you can’t focus—you have no energy. School lunch was our stable, assured meal. The food stamps our family received the first of each month paid for a grocery run. But the food soon ran out. When it was gone, my sisters and I mooched off the families of friends and dumpster-dived, rummaging through garbage for food. I would befriend kids whose mothers cooked three meals a day and go to their homes when I could. One time a friend came over to our house and when she opened the refrigerator and saw there was nothing in it, asked, “Are you guys moving?”
I shoplifted food. I was nine the last time I stole food from a store. That day I was caught slipping a brownie down the front of my pants, but I never got it out of the store, because the owner screamed at me, looking at me like I was nothing. “Get out! Go away and never come back!” The shame forced me to stop.
The experience of going to bed hungry is something that neither my sisters nor I will ever forget.
I messed up all the time. I hid my feelings—my anger and pain—or I lashed out and got into fights. Detention every day. Back talk with teachers. I pushed a teacher once. I wanted attention really bad. I didn’t know the butterflies that were ever present in the pit of my gut were actually massive anxiety. I felt I just didn’t fit in. I was a whirling dervish of complexity and emotions. The true me was so trapped inside, like that demon inside of Regan in the movie The Exorcist. When Regan is tied to the bed to keep from harming herself and her body is racked by scars from this powerful demon, her mom’s secretary comes barging in the room and as clear as day, slowly but deliberately, the words “HELP ME” form on her belly. The sweet, kind, authentic, precocious Regan fighting to be released is still alive. Well . . . that’s what I felt like. Imprisoned and possessed by outside forces that were way more powerful than me.
No one wanted to drink from the bubbla’ after me. Bubbla’ or bubbler was the Rhode Island term for water fountain. My classmates would always wait for the teacher to turn her head and whisper, “Yuck!! I’m not drinking after that nigga. You’re dirty.” This would both shut me down and anger
me. One day I tried to rip the pretty, yellow dress off Maria, a Portuguese girl who used the word nigga with impunity. My teacher punished me. I tried to explain, but she said there was no explanation. This was a teacher I loved, for whom I stayed after school once and volunteered to clean the chalkboard. She was young and pretty. I felt she liked me. This, unfortunately, was an illusion. I created a phantom to survive.
We watched an American history filmstrip that day that had a blurb about slavery with pictures of Black people in slave quarters down south. Everyone laughed when the images came up and the voice-over said, “Black people or slaves at this time were illiterate. That means they couldn’t read or write.” The kids laughed and whispered, “You niggas can’t do anything.”
I stayed after class to ask my teacher one question. Despite being a “troublemaker,” despite pushing her once by accident, I was terrified as I waited until everyone was gone and quietly cleaned the entire chalkboard. She thanked me, and as I was leaving, I got up the courage to ask, “Miss, it’s not true, is it? Black people could read and write? They could, couldn’t they?”
She shook her head sadly and said, “No. I’m sorry, honey. They couldn’t.”
I left with my head down. She never explained to me or to the class that it was illegal during slavery to teach the enslaved to read and write. It was a way to keep them subjugated.
I was looking for something or someone to define me. To infuse in me self-love, acceptance. To show me how to live. To show me I was all right.
I held on to what I had, all that I had, the team effort with my older sisters. That preserved me. We were a girl-posse, fighting, clawing our way out of the invisibility of poverty and a world where we didn’t fit in. The world was our enemy. We were survivors. Until another squad member was introduced. She needed protection that we had no weaponry for.
