My first crush

was on a boy named Shawn . He had a little thin mustache in the fifth grade. As pale and skinny and attached to metal of every sort (braces, glasses, but no earrings) as I was, he was every bit as dark and popular and also he had long eyelashes that made it seem he had mascara on all the time. I was afraid of him.

The black girls at school did not like me and my dad was a dinner table racist, so I somehow decided the reason they laughed and pretended to lunge at me so I would fall in the hallways was because they had heard the joke my dad told the previous night. Maybe they knew about the day he casually announced from the couch that if I ever brought home a black man he would kill him. (I was nine.) Or if they hadn't overheard, maybe they could see it on my face.

Shawn didn't like me and probably wouldn't have if I was black, Latino or magic. I don't think Shawn gave a damn about girls yet.

But by the time I hit seventh grade, and by the time all of those girls overshadowed me by becoming at least five feet tall, I had learned not to look at them. Maybe this made it worse. I had a great aunt who was crippled and old and bent like a horseshoe and my mom used her as a phantom threat of what I would someday become if I didn't keep a strong posture. So coupled with my aversion to eye contact was my straight haughty back, in part because I believed my mother and in part because I thought it might make me seem taller. Those girls were bigger than me. They had pierced ears and wore makeup. Boys talked to them seperately from the other boys they laughed and threw things with. They smelled like baby powder and sweat and I wanted to be just like them. I joined the track team even though I had weak legs and asthma.

I went to Martin Luther King Junior Magnet High School. I had been going to the Magnet School for Art but my best friend Leah got into MLK and I didn't like the idea of having to make a new friend. You had to take a test to get in to the Magnet program for Math and Sciences and I took it and I got in. It was right across the street from Watkins Park, which had several trees and a baseball diamond and always several dried fossils of a much older weekend crowd lying aboutin the grass and gravel. It was also across from a barber shop and the projects. Half the students came from there. The other half had taken the Magnet test, lived in various suburban parts of town, and were bused into the city to even out the school.

Between kindergarten and eighth grade I attended five different schools because the city kept changing the zoning boundaries. I now understand this was an effort aimed at doing a better job of integrating the Nashville Public School system.

Martin Luther King Junior Magnet High School was housed in the old Pearl High School building, the first historic black high school in Nashville, Tennessee. MLK Magnet ran from 7th-12th grades and as a result, the oversexed senior boys would once a semester make some social casualty out of an eighth grade girl who knew too much.

February was always an important month for obvious reasons, and this year the entire English class had to memorize Langston Hughes' Mother to Son. I rehearsed for weeks, donning my best Southern black woman accent, hoping to impress not only the coveted group of girls, but the entire class with my character choices and my free, deep Negro voice. I made pained faces in front of the mirror for "boards torn up". I rolled my eyes to the sky when describing the "tacks in it, and splinters". I worked with the word "ain't" until I got so comfortable I actually started using it in my regular speech. My dad didn't notice. My mother had ideas about it, but was too distracted to enforce them.

So I went to school the day I was supposed to recite. We were all reciting that day. An hour and a half of every single person in class reciting that lovely poem by Langston Hughes. I wasn't the worst of all. There were some who forgot the words, or didn't even try and some even brought the paper up with them. Like Lavita. We went in alphabetical order and her last name was Fear...or something else that happened to come just before mine. She was tall and black and beautiful and she had a forceful voice. She walked to the front of the room with the paper in her hand like "I don't have to memorize shit. You just wait." And she didn't. Her body, the natural tone of her voice fit so perfectly with the poem...and it was true for her...so much of it was true and you could see that...she was performing even though she didn't have to. The poem was about her. It was written about her. The applause that followed was a thin hum to her heavy woman voice and her mean eager eyebrows.

Then it was my turn. I thought "Okay. Fine. You were good, but so am I." And I walked to the front of the room, forcing my feet to stay straight and defy the usual pigeontoed laziness they slipped into. And I opened my mouth, and cleared my throat and assured myself that the applause would be twice as thunderous for I was going to do it without a script. I began with that same deep sweet voice I had practiced singing out of me like previously clouded sunshine. I was black, Southern, strong. "Now son, I'll tell you..." My eyes scanned the audience of desks. I expected to see eyes wandering the room, bored as fat flies. I expected to hear whispers and desks shifting and creaking under the shifting and creaking of restless middle school legs, but instead, every eye was glued to my face. Everyone was watching me. I had them! A captive audience. I went on, shaking my finger at my imaginary son "...aint been no crystal..."

I looked at Lavita, willing to smile in her direction, willing to concede that I had, yes, been victorious, but if she wanted, we could compare notes after class. Lavita's eyes were burning. Lavita's eyes were burning at me. Her mean eyebrows were about to pop out of their neat place above her eyes and crash into one of the neat braids in their own neat places on top of her head. I skipped to the face of whoever was beside her. And beside him. All a blur. All angry at me for being...good? For being talented and practiced? For not having to carry a script? I decided to sneak a look at the teacher; beside, behind and far to the right of me somewhere but also in front of the class, while continuing to tell the story of the crystal stair and how hard life can be. While saying with so much feeling "...there ain't been no light" I caught her eye. Eye to eye we stood for a moment. I was surprised she had been looking at me. With other students before me she just sat back in her chair and faced straight ahead, listening to the recitations with her eyes closed.

But she was standing. And there was something wrong with her hands. They were tight, or twisted and her mouth had a half smile I felt wasn't good. I raised my voice for the crescendo of the final verse. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the teacher flinch. Somewhere beyond the blinding haze of the wall of eyes and the hum of the window fans I could make out thirty pairs of anxious eyes. Or angry. Or uncomfortable.

"For I'se still goin', honey..." I shouted. My upper lip trembled and I used it. It made me seem defeated but proud. It made me seem emotional. I was emotional. I had two more lines.

"I'se still climbin'..." came out choked and scared. Something went wrong. Something would not allow me to pierce that last line with the definitive pride and indignance I had adopted for much of the poem.

"And life for me ain't been no crystal stair." I whispered it and slumped to my seat. My legs were too shaky for a bow and nobody clapped. Lavita sat two seats behind me and I could feel the imprint of her face on the back of my neck. Like her face was a hot coal brand and she had run up behind me and smashed it in.

The teacher cleared her nervous throat and started to speak. The bell rang and she held her words in, smiling an overloud, relieved "Class dismissed."

Everyone filed out and past me, Lavita making sure to brush the edge of my bag with the threat of her brisk walk, letting me know she was not finished with me yet. I sat for the terrified joy of sitting, with the blank instinctual rationale of a hunted bunny. Keep hidden. Motionless meant safety behind the ceramic table of my desk, and I wrapped my skinny legs around the metal chair legs for camouflage and to keep anchored to something. I felt dizzy and dumb. The classroom was empty. The teacher spoke to me sharply.

"Go on to lunch," and as I gathered my things to go, not feeling particularly hungry or anxious to socialize, she added "It's wrong to mock people. Smart as you are...you should know that."

She left the room before I managed to. I hid in the library and ate my peanut butter and jelly, afraid of lunch and faces and the reason my performance was answered with near-silence. I felt it had something to do with my dad.

Lavinia never did brand me with her face. The worst she ever did, in the next year and a half we spent in school together, was shoot me a glare when she caught me watching her talk to her group of girls. I watched her a lot. Maybe I was trying to figure out why she hated me. Maybe I was trying to get her to see me or maybe I thought if I looked at her enough, we could exchange smiles. Or voices.