No, Not Mine: Literacy Narrative

RAsheda Young

ENGLB2808

Basic Writing Theory & Pedagogy

Literacy Narrative, Draft 1

February 26, 2013

No, Not Mine

“They seemed to have taken all of their smooth cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds—cooled—and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.”  The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison.

I am Pecola Breedlove.  I am the black girl many looked at but did not see.  I grew up poor.  Though at the time, I did not know it.  Our family was considered “rich”.  My father lived in the house and was active in my life.  I had my own bedroom with a bookshelf, dated yellow chipped furniture, a queen-sized pee stained mattress, and an old black and white television with aluminum foil at the ends of the antenna.  There was a hole in the ceiling the circumference of ten basketballs five feet away from my bed.  When it rained outside, incessant droplets of brown rain fell onto an overflowing bucket. That’s how my father fixed the leak.  Sometimes when I lay in bed, I could hear mice fumbling over balled up paper, smelly socks, and everything else that didn’t make it onto the top of the dresser or in drawers.  At night, I slept with a slew of blankets, an electric one too, to warm the frigid nights.  I was careful not to move to another place in bed; other places might have been too cold.   We lived like this for years. 

Local friends who came over my house, didn’t judge me because they were just as poor, their houses were just as dirty, and their voices were just as tiny.  All of us shared the same pain, but all of us were too paralyzed and too invisible to know what to do about it.  It was this nebulous thing that choked me whenever I tried to identify it, so I just left it alone.  My friends carried their pain the same way.  They, too, didn’t know what to do with it, so they turned their powerlessness into hatred that oftentimes was given to me.

            As a young person, I hated waking up in the morning.  I didn’t want my feet to touch the cold, hard floor.  It shocked my body and made me resentful.  Why the fuck couldn’t we just have heat like everyone else?  I didn’t have warm, fuzzy pink slippers to slip my feet into nor did I have a housecoat or matching pajamas.  Ever.  Still, I made my way to the bathroom.  Cracked, bare, ashy feet touched the icy floor.  Each step sent tiny, persistent pains up my body.  Finally when I made it to the bathroom and turned the water on to brush my teeth, cold water dashed out the faucet even when I turned the knob with the letter H.  Gosh, I just wanna get out of this place.  I washed my face with cold water while standing on a cold floor in a cold house with skinny gray mice.  Even though I let the water run, it still didn’t get warm.  Showers were worse; therefore, I filled the sink with not-so-hot water to quickly wash before the water got even colder.  We used Ivory soap.  It was the cheapest.  We had no lotion.

            Once washed, I returned to my bedroom to get dressed for the day.  Between shivers, I picked up and wore whatever had the least smell.  If it had a stain, I used the same wash cloth to remove it.  God, please let these stains come out.  Sometimes they did.  Most times they didn’t.  Now dressed, I made my way downstairs to the dining room to do my hair.  It was long.  I sat in a wobbly chair in front of a mirror doing my hair while listening to Hot 97.1.  Ed Lover was the host of the morning show.  He did the Roll Call.  As I curled the ends of my shoulder length black hair, I fantasized about calling the radio show and actually getting on to do the roll call: “What’s up ya’ll? Whatcha gotta say?  Who’s on the phone with Ed, Lisa and Dre?”  I always wanted to answer the question with my name, but I never got through.  Whoever did though, would be the popular person in school.  I wanted that popularity.

            Overall high school was a snooze fest.  I hated most of the people who went there and most of the teachers didn’t care.  There are some things that just can’t be faked, being genuine is one of them.  The girls hated me because I had long hair and the boys teased me because I had big breasts.  I covered them.  I wore three bras at once: a regular bra, a minimizer and a sports bra.  I wanted them to disappear underneath my XL rugbee shirts.  That didn’t happen.  I wanted to be invisible.  Maybe then the boys would stop making fun of me when I walked the halls.  Maybe they’d stop heckling me: “RAsheda got some real big boombas.”  I wanted to die.  Walking the hallways was the worse.

The only class I actually enjoyed was Dr. Flannigan’s English class.  He encouraged us to name the world and tell it the way we saw it.  He made us believe that someone actually wanted to hear our voices.  I sat in the front row.  I watched him more than I listened.  Red circled glasses lay across his face; they didn’t cover his brown freckles though.  Always in a blazer with leather patches at the elbow, sweater, jeans and gray New Balance sneakers, Dr. Flannigan circled that room like Olaudah Equiano, only we already knew we were strangers in our home. Collectively we possessed the foggiest idea of how to get there.  Honestly, many of us wanted to run from it.  For some strange reason this white Irish dude, connected with our largely black class.  He challenged us to write about something we wished we could change.  I wrote a 50 page book about a young girl named Tyree, light skin, green eyes, and with long hair who wanted to have a better relationship with her father.  He recognized that I was writing about me and asked me to read The Bluest Eye.  I did.  I connected to it immediately, though of course I missed central elements of the book.  I was only 16.

Then I read it while I attended Hampton University.  Hampton University represents a peculiar time in my life.  It was during my years at Hampton University that my poverty was even more pronounced.  I was at a clear disadvantage.  Foreign words like syllabus, time management, office hours, Au Pair, traveling to Europe, vacationing in the Caribbean for the short holiday were all concepts that clanked as loudly as a rusty penny in a tin can about my head.  I had no idea what they were talking about nor could I relate.  In high school, all of my friends were poor, so me living in a house with my biological father, mother, and sister was a big deal.  We had two cars, vacationed in the States, frequented nice restaurants and visited swank museums so my friends thought I was rich.  However at Hampton University, I felt like Pecola Breedlove again.

Even though my parents fought hard to instill racial pride and self-esteem into me as a child, when I’m most honest with myself, I know that I allowed other people’s insecurity to creep into my mind.  Hampton University was pregnant with self-hate.  The omnipresence of this miasmic nightmare was shown through people’s constant reference to good hair versus bad hair, light skin versus dark skin, where one lived: Hampton (rich) versus Phoebus (poor), or the labels one wore.  Constant reminders of lack permeated every part of my being.  Like Pecola, I couldn’t run from it.  Their self-loathing became my identity.  I wore it in parked cars with abusive men.  I stuffed by body with sugary pastries, Doritos, fried chicken, or pizza to medicate the loneliness.  I kept searching for Novocain.  The toilet became my sacred alter after these ravenous feasts.  Most nights, I’d just sit there folding into myself like the letter A, head tucked into chest, legs pulled into my body and arms wrapped around my legs.  Oftentimes, I’d pretend my arms were someone else’s.  They never were.  I wanted someone to notice how terribly out of control my life was.  But no one did.  I was the great pretender, vulnerable to anyone who pretended to care.

My undergraduate years were cold and strange.  Like Pecola, I was the trash bag for people’s pain.  Similar to my desire of wanting to be invisible in high school, while in college, I wanted to do the same.  I wanted to get out of there so very badly.  I couldn’t afford the labels, so I started stealing from high end department stores.  I went with my then best friend.  We dressed up in the overpriced clothes we stole so no one would think we were thieves.  It worked.  I stole so much and so often that I thought I was invincible.  My closet looked like the racks of a neatly kept department store.  It was color coordinated, each item hung neatly with just enough space in between each item to prevent a wrinkle.  Whenever I put these clothes on, I became a superhero.  I bought my way into their club.  Finally I had blue eyes.  Finally, they saw me.

Shortly after graduating college, I became pregnant with my first child.  Many people in my community congratulated me.  I mean, I was twenty-something and had a Bachelor’s degree.  That’s more than what most people in my community had.  I wasn’t happy when I was pregnant though.  Actually, I wanted to have an abortion but I felt pressured to have the baby.  I fulfilled someone else’s dream, not mine.  During my pregnancy I read The Bluest Eye again.  Pecola didn’t resonate with me as deeply.

While pregnant, I took a job as a learning assistant in a Writing Center.  I hated it.  I didn’t know if my hatred were because of my hormones or if I really hated it because of how I was treated.  A part of our training program was to have a mentor.  My mentor was an older light skin heavy set woman.  She wore weaves, colored eye contacts, acrylic nails and a tongue ring.  She was overweight.  Her clothing revealed every roll and excess.  I sat across from her and her cleavage.  In an academic setting where she and I represented the diversity, naturally I felt comfortable sitting next to her.  Wrong.  She always delighted in correcting me in public and found special delight in making negative comments about my tutoring.  During one of our many, many conversations in the back room (conversations were held in the backroom when someone got in trouble) she asked me a question.  I don’t quite remember what she asked, but I do remember saying during our conversation, “I had went…”

“You see,” she quickly cut me off, “that’s an example of what I mean.  You allow your private voice to affect your public voice.”  She continued saying something, but what exactly she said, I do not remember.  Her words were like the adults from Charlie Brown, womp, womp, womp, womp.  I just completely shut down and blocked out everything she said after she made that comment.  Allegedly she was trying to help me, but actually she polarized and isolated me.  For about six years after that incident, I had a phobia of publically speaking at my job.  I wouldn’t participate in Department meetings or engage in lengthy conversations with senior faculty.  In the back of my mind I would always say to myself: be sure to use the right word. 

However, since I was so focused on using the “right” word, I lost all access to words.  I stumbled, stuttered and just flat out sounded confused when I spoke.  I decided within myself to improve.  I read books all the time.  I studied the structure of James Baldwin’s sentences, William Faulkner’s commas and Zora Neale Hurston’s imagery.  I tried to incorporate all of them into my writing.  I practiced reading my writing out loud.  I caught a lot of errors this way.  Then I practiced speaking more.  I just focused on keeping it plain.  Sometimes it worked.  Sometimes it didn’t, but the bottom line is I improved.

That interaction just described was six years ago, but it still stays on my mind.  All the while I thought my mentor’s “problems” with me were about my grammar.  They weren’t.  What I learned from Marguerite, a minor character in The Bluest Eye, is that when Claudia and Freida could not have what Marguerite had, they became jealous.  They filled themselves with anger to prevent them from dealing with their own perceived lack.  Therefore, they tore Marguerite down whenever they had the opportunity to make themselves feel better about themselves.  Six years ago, I didn’t understand that’s what my mentor was doing to me because 1) I didn’t value myself enough to appreciate that someone could actually be jealous of me and 2) I didn’t understand how deeply my mentor was  taught to hate herself.  Like all of the characters in The Bluest Eye and like all of the persons I mentioned from my life, they all learned to hate by measuring themselves against someone else.  And for each person, it began in his or her childhood.

As a teenager my friends thought I was rich, but I wasn’t.  They hated me because I had “long” hair.  Boys teased me because I had “big” breasts; therefore, I tried to make myself invisible.  I didn’t want that type of attention.  I taught myself to believe my curves were dangerous signposts that needed removing.  In college I didn’t fit in because I didn’t wear the right clothes.  I was an alien to planet College.  I didn’t understand the lingo nor did I have the ticket to get on the right bus. This alienation continued during my mentoring relationship with my mentor. My self-esteem plummeted all because I saw myself through the eyes of someone else.  Much like Pecola, I attached happiness to external objects.  I thought if my breasts were smaller, my clothes richer, my home better, my grammar more correct, that I would be accepted.  I kept searching outside of myself for happiness.  It wasn’t until I began naming and defining the world for me that I began to speak my own language of truth.  Unfortunately, Pecola Breedlove did not get this opportunity to name the world for herself.  Instead she goes mad from the abuse of her father, mother, friends and neighbor.  Pecola, is our collective tragedy.

The Bluest Eye taught me that we are all Pecola Breedlove.  All of us bear the collective responsibility to name the world for ourselves and to encourage each other to take ownership of his or her happiness. However, we must be willing to do the work.  We must examine ourselves honestly.  The obvious answer isn’t always the real answer.  We must dig deeply into ourselves, our childhood and our subconscious to thoroughly understand the underpinnings of self-hatred and how it’s learned.  We must examine this labyrinth as it too often leads to disastrous ends.  It manifests itself in intricate ways that can numb us to anything genuine and real.  I was becoming my own tragedy until I reached deep within myself and accepted all of my faults and began honestly healing me.  Even though we have all been Pecola Breedlove at some point in our lives, I can honestly say through her story, I have found peace.  I know it begins with me.