My life had shifted because of my mother’s relationship, and as I struggled more at home, I leaned into the church. Shortly before I had my own sacrament of confirmation into the Catholic Church, my granddaddy decided he needed to intervene in my love affair with Catholicism. One day, after seeing that I had finished reading my mother’s copy of Roots by Alex Haley, he decided that I was ready for some “better history,” as he called it.
He took me for a ride down to Harlem to one of his favorite spots, Liberation Bookstore on Lenox Avenue, and bought me two books: They Came before Columbus by Ivan Van Sertima and Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett Jr. He told me he had nothing against the Bible or Christians, but a lot of our folks, like the ones in Roots, stayed in chains long after they were taken off because their minds were chained to the Bible I loved. If I was going to read the Bible, he said, I needed to read these historical texts alongside it.
My mother had raised me as a bookworm, and so I spent most of the eighth grade doing exactly what my granddaddy had said to do. As fast as I could read a book, he’d recommended a new one. I started caring less and less about confession and started asking Father O’Donald harder questions during his weekly visits to our classroom.
Is it true that Catholics were slave traders and didn’t do anything to help enslaved Africans until it was too late? I remember asking him once. He glared at me over his small wire-framed glasses as he stumbled through an answer about how the Catholic Church evolved over time. In turn, I stared back defiantly at the pulsating vein over his eyebrow. I had found a new thing to become: radical.
Fall of ’87 was my freshman year of high school, and I was starting at Harry S. Truman. In 1987 in the Bronx, the only thing to be was a ’round the way girl. LL Cool J would really run it down for us a few years later, but if you were young, Black or Brown, and alive, you already knew what time it was. Hip-hop was our
 way of life. Our clothes, music, hairstyles, attitude, and aspirations all flowed from what people called the “soundtrack to the streets.” I loved every bit of it.
I was desperately trying to separate myself from the eight years I had spent in Catholic school—years the new radical me now thought of as brainwashing. My mom couldn’t understand why I wanted to go to the public school instead of continuing on at the Catholic high school, but public school was free, and I suspect she let me have my way because it also unburdened her financially.
Truman had a decent academic reputation, which helped to settle my mom, but it also had a legendary reputation for violence—that unsettled me. There were all kinds of stories of girls getting jumped and slashed or stuck up after school. On all sides but the front, the school was surrounded by Co-op City, a residential community made up of about thirty-five high-rise buildings with nearly fifty thousand residents about thirty minutes north of Bronxdale Houses where I lived. Co-op was a city of its own. It was a bastion of working and middle-class, mostly Black folks, but it functioned like many of the public housing complexes in the city—insular and identity driven. People from Co-op always let you know they were from Co-op, and not just from the complex but the specific section, the most notorious being Section Five. The front of the school faced the stretch of I-95 that made up the New England Thruway, and across the highway was a part of the Bronx dubbed “the twos” or “the two hundreds” because the street numbers ran into the two hundreds. Somehow, over the years a feud of sorts had developed between Co-op and the two hundreds, which was heavily populated by Caribbean folks. If you attended Truman and were not from one of these two areas, your allegiance was quickly determined by who you chose to run with. The rules weren’t hard and fast, but they were clear enough to make students from the outside tread lightly.
I was an outsider—in more ways than just geographically. There was no harassment for being smart. Everyone was pretty cool about it as long as it was clear who you were. If you were a smart kid, you hung with other smart kids and did “smart kid things” like joining the honor bowl league or science club. If you were a tough kid, you clapped back at teachers and challenged everyone who got in your crosshairs to a fight. If you were a cool kid, you wore all the latest fashions and did I don’t know what, because I wasn’t one of them at Truman.
I landed in an undefined area. My mom initially required that I wear only skirts—long skirts—to school. She wanted to continue the modesty and uniformity of Catholic school. The only other girls who wore skirts all the time
were either deeply religious, like Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or they had “knowledge of self,” meaning they had allegiance with the Five Percent Nation—a younger, slightly more authoritarian offshoot of the Nation of Islam. I was none of the above, but because I dressed the part I got lumped into at least one of these categories on a daily basis. Few things were as nerve-racking in late ’80s New York as being approached by a group of dudes who were calling you “Earth” and talking about the “mathematics” for the day. I stood out like crazy in a sea of girls drawing style inspiration from rappers like Salt-N-Pepa and Sweet Tee. Most of them were rocking door knocker earrings, colorful leather jackets, and intricate hi-lo haircuts. They looked fly. And there I was in my long, unstylish skirts. My mom was still trying to salvage what was left of my thick, long hair after a brief stint with a Jheri curl in middle school, so there was no way she was about to let me try something like an asymmetrical haircut or bleached hair. But what I did get was a bad attitude. And I decided to let it work overtime to fill the deficit I felt from not having the rest.
I had tested into a number of honors and advanced courses, so I spent most of my day with a group of kids who fit somewhere between eager nerd or naturally smart with an attitude (like me)—or they were just white. My homeroom was a different story. Every morning we reported to a random classroom with no agenda besides listening to garbled announcements and having our attendance taken. The students in my homeroom were unruly. As a recent Catholic school student, it was beyond my comprehension that kids would be so rude and disrespectful to a teacher. I mean, we got a little hype back at Sacred Heart Middle School, but cursing at a teacher? Not listening at all? Walking in and out of the classroom? Unheard of.
My freshman homeroom was wild. Outside of some random name calling, I had never actually been bullied, but the girls in my homeroom started making comments about my wearing skirts daily. After about a week of taunting, I called on my Aunt Cecelia, my mother’s younger sister, who functioned more like an older sister to me than an aunt. She was the flyest person I knew and, outside of my mother and grandmother, definitely the toughest. If there was ever some kind of beef or argument and you heard her loudly say, “I know one thing ...,” it was wise to pay close attention to that one thing if you wanted to save yourself some grief.
I explained the homeroom situation to my aunt, who was also trying to convince my mom to reverse her skirt rule. She looked me dead in the eyes and
said, “never let them see you sweat.” It was advice I’d hear from her again and again. She told me to practice saying one phrase with force, so that everyone in earshot believed me: “Fuck you!” Even if I were scared, she said, my mouth could usually get me out of a tight corner if I was loud and convincing enough.
“But you always have to be prepared to fight,” my aunt warned. I thought of my mom’s street advice. Ever since I had been jumped by three girls on my way home in the fourth grade, my mom would tell me that if it ever happened again to pick the one with the biggest mouth, punch her in the face or kick her in the coochie, and then just keep beating on her and don’t let go. She assured me that my granddaddy had given her the same advice, and it always worked.
A month later, one of the girls from my homeroom stole my purse. It was a very good knockoff Gucci that my Uncle Joey had taken me to Southern Boulevard to purchase as a late birthday gift. Not only did the girl steal the bag off my desk when I wasn’t looking, she came to homeroom the next day carrying the purse with my stuff still inside. I politely asked her if it was my purse.
She jumped up and started screaming. “You calling me a thief? You saying I stole from you?” Before I could get my bearings, she took a swing at me. She was a tall girl, probably five-ten to my five-five. When her swing missed, my instincts kicked in. I jumped up on my desk, and when she came lunging at me again I popped her dead in the mouth with my fist, which caught everyone— especially the girl—by surprise. She fell back and tried to come at me again, but the teacher grabbed her and restrained her arms.
And then she spat at me.
I had been spat at before. In elementary school, a girl I bullied because I was jealous that my friend liked her better spat on me during an argument. I beat her up, kinda. The fight was over as quickly as it started. Mr. Wes came up to the school to get me. When I got home, he asked me why I had been fighting. I told him a girl had spat on me, and he seemed satisfied with that response. I could hear my mom fussing over the phone when he called to tell her I had gotten in trouble for fighting. I heard him say, “The girl spit on her...” My mother went ballistic on the other end. Spitting on or at someone is one of the worst forms of disrespect in the Black community. No way would my mother tolerate it happening to her child. I didn’t get in trouble for my bullying or the fight it caused. Instead, my mother lectured me that if anyone ever opened their mouth to spit on me, I should try to rip their tongue out.
When the girl in homeroom spat on me, something snapped. The good-girl wall that I had been slowly chipping away at finally crumbled, and I proceeded to whup her ass as the teacher struggled to regain control of the situation. Security guards were called into the classroom to assist, and we were both taken to the principal’s office. I got off with an in-school suspension once it was revealed that the other girl had both stolen my purse and swung at me first. I was a stellar student on paper, but the principal warned me not to fall into bad habits like violence. I had to hold my tongue not to say how can I not make violence a habit when I am surrounded by it?