At-Risk (5 page)

“They'll probably feed us there,” I said. “I can skip breakfast. That'll save time.”

My mother shook her head. “You are only to nibble while you're there. You don't want to stuff yourself on their food and look like a glutton. When people are watching, you have to make a good impression.”

“Who's watching?” I mumbled as I chewed.

My mother frowned at me. “They are.”

At different times, depending on whom my mother was talking about,
they
could be anyone.
They
applied to all Americans, and sometimes specifically American blacks, and on rare occasions to the family my mother had left behind in Jamaica, proud and aristocratic,
constantly watching from across the sea and waiting for her to fail and go back home.

I finished off my breakfast and got up from my chair.

“What are you doing?”

“You said to hurry—”

“You'll clean up after yourself first.”

“I thought we were late.”

“There's always time for that,” she said, watching me carefully as I took my plate to the sink and wiped the table off with a dishcloth. “You have no servants in this house.”

Thirteen years ago, my mother left St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, with the seed of me inside of her, leaving behind a life of affluence for one of struggle. She had grown up a rich little girl. She'd lived in a house with servants. There were women whose job it was to cook and serve dinner, and these women were different from the ones who gathered the laundry and washed her unmentionables. Now my mother worked in a hospital five days a week, changing bedpans and dealing with other people's filth.

Twenty-two of us girls showed up at the school's library with our mothers. Ten black American women, all dressed impeccably in blue and red, waited for us. Three women met us at the door.

“Good morning.”

“We're so glad you could make it.”

“Please sign in at the table to your right.”

They rushed to greet us, all speaking at once, then checked our names against their list to make sure we weren't crashers. Another group of three stood behind a long table loaded with red and blue gift bags. The last group of three poured cups of juice and lined them up on another table, next to plates piled high with cinnamon rolls and bagels. One woman stood apart from the others, watching and nodding as we entered and sat nervously.

“Why are they all dressed alike?” I whispered as my mother led the way to an empty table.

“They're a sorority,” my mother said, pointing to the coat of arms on the colorful banner the women had strewn between two scarred bookshelves. Our library had been redone, transformed by these women and their presence. “Those are their colors.”

“What about those?” Each woman wore a gold pin with indecipherable symbols above her left breast.

“They're Greek letters,” she said, surprising me with her knowledge. My mother was a woman of many secrets. She knew many things but told me only what she thought I needed to know at any given moment. When I was old enough to notice that other kids had fathers and I didn't and I asked her what my father was like, my mother gave the briefest of descriptions. “He was big like so,” she said, stretching her hand over her head, describing a man anywhere between five four and seven feet tall. “And black like so,” she said, pointing to the darkest object near at hand. No matter how many times I asked for more, her descriptions never went beyond this. I was never to know from her if he ever laughed, if he was stingy or carefree with his money, or even how they met. In describing my father as big and black, she told me all she thought I needed to know.

The one woman who stood apart, the leader, went around the room, pumping all of our hands vigorously. She introduced herself as Miss Diane. Then she introduced the other women. Each one came forth and said a little about what she did. The women were engineers, physicians, computer specialists, lawyers, and scientists. They gave us a history of their sorority, Zeta Alpha Delta. We all rose as they sang their sorority's hymn.

My mother took pains to tuck her skirt beneath her as she sat back down on the small chair. These women, dressed in their elegant color-coordinated suits and pins, put our own mothers, dressed in
their best, to shame. As Miss Diane explained the program to our mothers, thanking them for bringing us and saying that we would benefit from additional positive female role models at this crucial stage of our development, I listened and heard what sounded like a death knell to me. During these times together, we would focus on math, science, critical thinking, and writing skills, but they would make sure to cover the niceties as well, teaching us etiquette, hygiene, and grooming. We wouldn't have to pay for anything. We were to spend two Saturdays a month with them from ten until one for the remainder of the school year.

As Miss Diane talked, the other nine women circulated the tables, handing each girl a gift bag to thank us for coming. When I was handed mine, I looked at the other girls at the tables near me. Some of them I already knew, most I didn't. We were all wearing the same expression, a combination of fear, awe, and distrust. Although the ladies didn't say it out loud, their message was clear: they wanted to keep us from becoming the kind of women they would shudder to see. They wanted to save us from ourselves. The girl directly across the table from me caught my attention and whispered, “Who they supposed to be?” She was my age and American, with bad skin. We were classmates, but I couldn't recall her name. Besides the red eruptions of pustules on her brown cheeks and forehead, nothing about her looked crucial to me.

My mother pushed her way to the front of the room while other parents were gathering their coats and bags to leave. “I think this will be a wonderful program for my daughter,” she said. “She wants to be a doctor. She comes from a long line of doctors. Her grandfather and her uncle both practiced medicine in Jamaica.”

I hated the sight of blood, and needles terrified me. I wanted to be a librarian, to live a quiet and orderly life. To walk among stacks of silent shelves, to know every book by its number and let no book
go astray. I loved to read worn books, dog-eared by people who had loved them. I wondered why she was lying. I tried to stand apart from her, to disappear each time she gestured to me, saying, “This is my daughter, Dorothy. She's a good girl. Smart.”

You could tell that my mother was from the Caribbean. Even though her accent was almost completely gone, eroded away through the years, her foreignness appeared in phrases and on the ends of certain words, like my name. In school I was Dorothy, at home
Dorotee
. I absorbed my mother's sounds and phrases, but didn't repeat them. Her way of talking sounded more natural to me than the everyday language I heard outside of our home, but in her voice I heard an act of erasure, a code embedded in the words she couldn't rid of her special pronunciation. I heard in those words a warning not to repeat them. Her words told me
Don't
.

“Come,” she said to me. I walked to her side, towering over her. I had to listen as she sang my praises. The women looked me over. I wondered if I looked crucial enough to them, if they saw themselves saving me from heated embraces with experienced boys, or if they could tell that I was always one of the last to be asked to dance at a house party. I was almost thirteen, but I might as well have been ten for all of my experience. I had never been kissed. Never attended a sleepover. Never done anything that did not have my mother's hand in it. Like my mother said, I was a good girl. I didn't see myself as being in a crucial stage, although I liked the way it sounded.
Crucial stage
. It was as if I was on the brink of something, standing with one toe at the edge of a cliff. At any moment I could plummet off the edge or be sharply pulled back in. Crucial. It meant I was one step away from my complete destruction. The slightest false move and I was done for. It gave my life an added sense of desperation that I liked immensely and didn't want these women to take from me. And if I were truly on the brink of something terrible, it was arrogant of them to think that they could save me.

“What was all that for?” I asked as we made our way out of the school and walked home.

“Just making sure they know who you are,” my mother said. “Who you know is important. These women here can take you far.”

I didn't say anything else as we walked home. My mother had already made up her mind, and so there would be no getting out of the program. I watched her as she walked slightly ahead of me, swinging my gift bag in her right hand.

Leon was out emptying his garbage. He waved us over when he spotted us. We lived three blocks away from the school, on a street populated by other West Indians, and Leon owned the Laundromat on our street. His Laundromat was more than a place to wash clothes. It was a place to buy phone cards and key chains, a place to ship goods. Twice a year, my mother bought two barrels and loaded them full of dry goods, taped them up, and sent them to relatives I'd never met.

“Where the two of you been all dressed and thing?” he asked.

“Dorothy started a program today at the school. Can't have the mothers showing up raggedy and such, eh.”

“That's right now. You have to represent and show them you mean business!” he said, slamming the lid of the Dumpster down hard. “It's good to see young people with something to do to keep themselves occupied. Remember when we were that age? Our parents kept us busy. There was no lying around all day, watching
TV
and such. Leave you with too much time to yourself and you run around and get in trouble and all kind of mess.”

“Not Dorothy. I have no worries on that account,” my mother said.

“That's so,” Leon said. “You doing a fine job with her”.

My mother smiled modestly.

Leon was encouraged. “You sure look fine today,” he said, giving
her a wistful look as he grinned and showed off his gold-capped teeth.

I stood there for ten minutes while they discussed me like I was invisible, and I watched girls my age wheel their shopping carts full of dirty clothes past us and up the three steps to the Laundromat. Leon's infatuation was obvious, although my mother pretended not to notice it. I wanted to warn him about my mother, to tell him that she preferred to be left alone. There were no men in our lives. My mother's father died during my infancy and her one brother had no desire to come over. This uncle of mine now had six children, and my mother was always packing barrels full of Sweet'n Low to send to him. I had never seen my mother go out on a date, never seen her stop and smile or respond to any of the many men that expressed interest in her. Nice as he was, Leon was all wrong for her. Although he'd been living here for some time, he still seemed new.

On our first session, the Zeta Alpha Deltas showed us a video featuring “famous women of African descent.” Then they gave us notebooks and asked us to write an essay about a woman of our choice who hadn't appeared in the video. When we were done, they had us read them aloud.

One by one, we each stood up and read essays about our mothers. Halfway through the eleventh essay, I could see the women's faces falling. They seemed bewildered and disappointed. Miss Diane looked as if she was going to cry.

When we were done, Miss Elaine put a hand on Miss Diane's shoulder. “I don't think they understood the assignment, soror.”

Miss Diane took a deep breath and stood in front of us. She seemed to be making an effort to smile. Miss Linda motioned her to sit back down and she spoke to us instead.

“Well, girls, I commend you for your efforts,” she said.

Miss Tracy chimed in, “To write such beautiful essays in so little time!”

Miss Anita added, “And it's certainly encouraging to know that you all love your mothers.”

Miss Diane cut them off. “Yes, it was very good. But why don't we do this? Why don't you girls take the assignment home and work on it for our next meeting?”

We all groaned aloud at the thought of another essay, but Miss Diane was undaunted. She said, “This time, try to think of women outside of your immediate sphere. Try to think of dynamic women, women who were the first of their kind ever to do something, women who broke the race and gender barriers. Women who carved a space for themselves outside the realm that people have come to think of as a woman's role. Now do you understand?” she asked us.

We all nodded. I raised my hand.

Miss Diane called on me. “Yes, Dorothy?”

“My mother was the first woman in her family to leave Jamaica and come live in the U.S.”

Although I came to hate them, my mother was pleased with my Saturday sessions. She wanted me to distinguish myself from the others in my class, to stand out. She wanted to write home about me, finally to be able to use me as an example for my relatives over the sea who all thought I was lazy and spoiled. I imagined that my young cousins hated me. Here I was going to school in whatever type of clothing I chose, watching music videos until it was time for dinner, and having the time of my life, while they were forced into uniforms and still had to go to the kinds of schools where the teachers could hit you and your parents would thank them for it. Where girls who spoke to boys were fast and loose, where they didn't have time for television after school because they had chores. These were my mother's recollections of her youth growing up in St. Elizabeth,
and although two decades had passed since she'd been a girl in grade school, I imagined that much had not changed.

I hated the Saturdays, but there I was session after session. My grades weren't suffering, and so I didn't see why I had to give up my Saturdays to learn how to sit, when to cross or uncross my legs, and play with knives and forks. But, like the other girls, I didn't have a choice. None of us wanted to be there. We took our frustration out by barely participating, by looking past and through the women so bent on saving us. Our mothers could make us go, but they couldn't make us like it. So we slumped in our chairs and answered in mono-syllables. Of the women, we took no notice. We doodled while the Zeta Alpha Deltas talked. We smacked our gum. If we had liked each other, we would have passed notes. But we did not think of leaving or skipping out. We were all there because our mothers made us go. Because the Zeta Alpha Deltas took attendance and we couldn't cut. Because we didn't have anywhere else to be. The library surrounded us; our sounds echoed off its high ceilings. Normally, we felt crowded in there with several classes meeting at once. But with just us there, the room seemed to swallow us. We filled only two of the eight tables. We had journals to write in, but after the fiasco with the mother essays, no one ever checked them to see what we wrote.