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Chapter 8
“I’m from the place where the church is the flakiest… And nigguz been prayin’ to God so long that they’re atheist.”
—Jay-Z, “Marcy”
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In the ghetto, as in the world, clothes make the man. The policeman’s uniform, the prostitute’s latex mini-skirt, the pimp’s gator shoes, the gangsta’s low slung jeans sagging off his ass. They all give clues to the nature of the individual beneath. Books are judged by their covers here and we strolled through the halls of our little Jr. High School covered in FUBU, Adidas, Nike, and Gucci. Fights were no longer started by insults from others about our outdated clothing. We were stylin’ now. The girls treated us differently now too. They actually asked us over to their houses and out to the movies rather than just laughing in our faces when we tried to ask them. The clothes made all the difference.
We acted differently too. In a society where the standard of excellence is wealth, poverty can tax your self-esteem and your entire sense of self-worth. Likewise, a dose of affluence can boost your confidence tremendously. My grades, which had been slowly slipping down into the toilet, made a dramatic recovery. I wasn’t afraid to raise my hand in class and ask questions when I didn’t understand something. I didn’t mind calling attention to myself anymore. Not when I was wearing two hundred dollars worth of designer labels on my back.
Mrs. Greenblade, who credited herself for my transformation from class clown to honor student, began to take a special interest in me. She convinced me to work on the school newspaper writing editorials on school politics and an occasional book or movie review. I loved writing and so I started reading the paper everyday and took elaborate pains to make all the articles I wrote sound professional, just like the ones in the Philadelphia Enquirer. It excited me to finally be appreciated for something other than just being a bad-ass crazy mutherfucker. Even though I knew that hardly anyone but the teachers really even read the damned thing unless, of course, someone had been robbed, or beaten, or shot. Kids were morbid like that.
Mrs. Greenblade even tried to convince me to give up my lunch period to attend her journalism class, but I had to pass on that. Since I was already staying an hour after school to work on the paper I figured she could teach me all I needed to know about journalism then. Lunchtime was when me and my boys jacked fools for their cash. I couldn’t give that up.
At the teacher’s suggestion I began to keep notes of my daily thoughts and experiences. A lot of what I’m sayin’ here today comes out of those notes. It’s hard to recall how much of it really happened and how much of it is just bullshit. Being a writer it’s always difficult to refrain from embellishment and the whole story is just so difficult to believe. Still, it’s as honest a telling as I can manage.
When I reached the eighth grade, Mrs. Greenblade recommended me for the mentally gifted program after I passed the level fourteen English test; the equivalent of college freshman English. Unfortunately, my math scores were about two grades below the level they should have been for my age and they rejected me with a recommendation that I get some tutoring to improve my math skills.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get into the program. I can’t believe you weren’t accepted. You’re one of the brightest students I’ve ever taught. If you want I could arrange for someone to tutor you on your fractions and long division and we could try it again in a couple of months?”
“Naw, don’t sweat it. I ain’t want to kick it with them computer geeks no way.”
“How is it that you can write such beautiful poetry and essays and speak so eloquently in the classroom and then speak like such a savage?”
“You’re supposed to speak all proper in class. I mean, I thought we was just being casual right now. You know, just talkin’ like friends.”
“I want you to talk to me like a friend, Malik. I just don’t understand why you can’t speak intelligently all the time. Why do you have to talk like the rest of those ignorant heathens when you’ve got more upstairs?”
“Because I’m one of those ignorant heathens. And when I leave here that’s what I go home to. And they ain’t the type that respects proper diction. Talking above them won’t win me any friends.”
“And talking beneath yourself will?”
“You know, when I’m at home my mom and my grandmom are constantly correcting my speech. They want to make sure that when I get older and go out on job interviews, or if I wind up at some Ivy League college or something, I won’t give the white man any excuse to think I’m any less intelligent than he is. She wants me to be able to enunciate and pontificate with the best of ’em. She even had me reading the dictionary. She heard some professor say that if you committed yourself to learning one new word a day you’d be one of the smartest people on earth in just a few years. I’m still in the Bs. Do you know what a Bête Noir is? Its literal translation is Black Beast and it means an adversary or something loathsome. I’ve got tons of useless words like that floating around in my head. When the hell do you think I’m ever going to use Bête Noir in conversation? But I learn all this shit to make my mom happy. Last year my grandmom took all my comic books away. You know what she has me reading now?”
“What?”
“Roots, African Genesis, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Song of Solomon, Native Son. She finishes reading a book and hands it right to me as if there was no difference between us and I read them from cover to cover. I don’t understand a lot of it, but she helps me. I keep a dictionary nearby too. It sometimes takes me months to finish one but I read them because that’s what my mom wants. I read those books before I read the junk you guys give us to read in here. I read them because I don’t want my Grandma to lose faith in me. She thinks I can be somebody some day.”
“That sounds great. It sounds like your grandmother is a very wise woman.”
“Yeah, but even though my mom and my grandmom know how smart I am my mom always tells me not to ever talk above my own people. You know why, Mrs. Greenblade? Do you know why she tells me that?”
“No. I honestly don’t”
“Because I don’t live in the world of books and poetry. I live in the damned ghetto and what good is language except to communicate? What good are fancy words that no one understands? I talk to you this way because this is what you understand. But I talk slang in the street because that’s the language they understand out there. My mom taught me that the dialects of the streets are just as complex and beautiful as the Queen’s English and that I should learn that language just as well as book language so that I can communicate with everyone. You see, Black folks have to live in two worlds, the world of Business and Academia, the White world, and the world of the streets. You feel me?”
“Yeah, Malik. I feel you. You mother is very wise and very right. Maybe I should take some of her advice myself huh?”
“Nah. If you ever said, Fo’ shizzle my nizzle, I think I’d die laughing. Either that or punch you right in the mouth.”
I turned to leave. Lunch had begun ten minutes ago and I was anxious to bully my way into the lunch line, eat, and hook up with Tank and Huey out in the yard.
“Malik?”
“Yes, Mrs. Greenblade?”
“Would it be alright if I passed you along some of the books I read?”
“Yeah, that would be cool.”
Mrs. Greenblade turned me on to some stuff that would change the way I looked at the world forever. Existentialism gave voice to many of the intuitions I’d had growing up. Intuitions that told me that maybe all this suffering was for nothing.