Jenny_Lyte

I had to write an essay in my creative non-fiction writing class. The topic was when was the time that I was most fully, most richly like myself. I was a little confused on exactly what that meant. I'm only 23, so I hope I have not yet become most fully myself. I hope to achieve that the day I die and no sooner. But anyway, an assignment is an assignment. So I do what I always do and write my first draft from my heart and worry about how it actually works later. I thought I'd post it in here. I guess if I can convince you guys that this essay fits the assignment, then I suppose I can convince my professor. Anyway, here it is.


Like any American teenager, my bedroom walls were adorned with posters of attractive members of the opposite sex. It’s almost a teen right of passage; when one enters the ages of sexual maturity the bedroom wall becomes a billboard, screaming out for the world to see, your preferences in potential future spouses. As a girl I had a lot of pink and fluffy things in my room. When I entered junior high school the pinks and the whites turned to bright red. The rose-covered wall paper became hidden under posters of Boyz II Men, Tevin Campbell and other black teen idols.

I grew up in the neighborhood of East Flatbush in the great city of Brooklyn, New York. My family, like most of the families in the neighborhood, was working class. Both of my parents worked. I had a comfortable upbringing—we didn’t exactly live like the Huxtables, but my brother and I never wanted for anything. My parents worked hard and they worked together. My mother was a CPA and my father had his own plumbing business. She used to do his books for him. As a result my parents were off to work bright and early every morning. It was up to my brother and me to get ourselves to school.

I was a bit of a bookworm. I loved to read, I loved school and I loved to learn as much as I could about things I had no knowledge about. My brother Kevin, God bless him, wasn’t as into the academic nature of school as I was. He was there to be seen—to hang out with his friends, to date all the pretty girls, all the while navigating through that nagging thorn in his side known as learning. It wasn’t that he was not smart; he was quite smart in fact. It just was that to him school was more of a social engagement than an academic one. He made friends easier than I did. He would always leave early to head out with a group of other boys from the neighborhood, taking their time on the way to school to enjoy the journey (something that he has since taught me about) rather than the destination. They played ball at the courts for a few minutes, courted girls, stopped off at the arcade or music stores. Yes, he always left earlier than I did, but he seemed to arrive late for class almost every morning. He was a bit of a charmer though. No teacher could resist his golden personality or his model-like smile. One flash of his teeth and all debts were forgiven. He could come as late as he wanted and receive no reprimand harsher than a stern look from a teacher.

As a result, I walked to school alone. Occasionally I would run into some of the other girls on the way, but most of these girls were acquaintances rather than friends. See, my neighborhood was odd. We were all from working class families and we were street tough. We were armed with a quick wit born off the blacktop and tongues dipped in a sarcastic poison. It was a great microcosm in the study of Social Darwinism, because only the strong survived. It’s a Brooklyn thing. If you were perceived as weak, you were perceived as prey. Once perceived as prey, the predators would find you and eventually, wear you down.

I was the smart girl. I had straight A’s, dreamed of college and never once spoke back to my teachers. I ruined the curve on test scores. I was the first to have my hand raised when the teacher asked a question and I was the last to disrupt the class for any reason. But I was tough. I had to be. While I would willingly submit to the teachers and school policy all in the name of education, on the street I was a tough kid with a scowl on my face, scuffed knees, big hoop earrings and my hair in Afro puffs. I used to pass time by sitting on our stoop with some of the kids from school, busting freestyle raps over homemade DJ tapes pumping from a nearby boom box. I was part of the hip hop generation, the generation of kids who listened, ate, slept, breathed, sweated, bled, lived and died for a music form that our parents could only define as nonsensical noise. But at an early age I knew I wanted to be a writer. As a result I wrote and read a lot and had an early mastery of the English language. My raps were peppered with similes, allusions and alliterations that came natural to me. I was considered pretty dope on the microphone. What folks didn’t know was that it was love of writing and my enthusiasm to learn that contributed to my lyrical prowess. It was doing what kids considered weak that made me strong. It was a great life lesson.

But, I digress. The girls who walked with me to school were not friends. They were classmates. Peers. Other students. But they were not friends. They liked me for who they thought I was and not for who I really was. But we all front and we all wore masks. It’s just part of coming up in the city. As a result, most mornings, I tended to avoid these girls and often walked to school alone. I carried a notebook with me at all times and every time I felt something or made an observation, I would jot it down in my notebook for future use either in a rhyme or for a short story.

So one day, backpack on my back and notebook in hand, I walked out of our house. My brother was already long gone and my parents were already at work. I locked the door behind me, scanned the block for a potential threat and then, seeing none, headed down Tilden Avenue. East Flatbush was still a neighborhood where one could walk to school and not worry about much of anything. Sure, there were always a few scattered people here and there who could cause trouble, but the neighborhood was still relatively safe. Only recently has it become one of the stomping grounds for gangs.

On the way down Tilden, I had to walk beneath the Kings Highway overpass. It was usually uneventful, but recently there had been some construction going on. It was early in the school year, maybe the second or third week of school. And it was hot—one of those days in late September that felt more like early July or August. Even at seven thirty in the morning my forehead was peppered with beads of sweat and my legs felt moist under my jeans. Summer was ebbing away into fall, but no one had yet to tell summer about this. Summer had every intention of staying as late as it could.
The construction crew working on the overpass usually gave me some good material for my notebook. I can still remember their peculiar looks towards me. I would stop and observe and, if I saw something interesting, would scribble in my notebook. Growing up, my neighborhood was about ninety percent African-American. Like most of the kids in my neighborhood my parents worked hard to give us the necessities. The farthest west I had been was East Orange New Jersey. I knew a whole world existed for countless miles outside of the blocks that I called home, but I only knew about them from television and books. I had never flown in an airplane, had never been to Disneyland, nor had I ever been to any of the significant cultural centers of the world. Sure, my father used to take us to the zoo and to the various museums and even took us on the Harlem Renaissance tour but, for the most part, I had rarely been outside of New York. It was my whole world. As a result, other than nameless faces that we would bump into in Manhattan, I had scarcely seen a white person before.

It’s a popular belief that black and white coexist always with one eye on the other—a shaky alliance built of mistrust, misunderstanding and fear. But, for inner city folk like myself, I had virtually no knowledge of white people. I knew my father had a couple of white guys who worked for him and he even bowled on Friday nights with some. But none of my friends were white. Hardly any of my classmates were white. Everything I knew of white people came from television shows like Seinfeld. I thought all white people sat around coffee shops celebrating the mundane things of their boring and uneventful existence, just as I am sure all white people assume all black folks behaved like the characters on Sanford and Son.

As a said earlier, the posters on my walls celebrated only the finest of black men. I had no idea that a black girl could be attracted to white boy. It never occurred to me. White people were only in that never ending realm that existed outside of my immediate neighborhood. It wasn’t that I had anything against white people nor did I fail to find white men attractive. Instead, it was akin to the attitudes of owners of horse-drawn carriages in the 19th Century towards automobiles. They felt nothing towards automobiles because they did not yet exist. But how would they react once the invention of the automobile was thrust upon them?

So here I come walking down the street up to the Kings Highway overpass, baggy pants tucked behind the tongue of my untied shoes. I was eager to arrive on this particularly hot day. I figured the shade of the overpass would offer me a cool retreat to write down some interesting observations in my ever-present notebook. The construction site was fenced off. The workers all milled about doing their jobs from behind a chain link fence. As I walked up I noticed one white man peeling off his sweat soaked Knicks t-shirt and tossing it aside as he pulled a bottle of water from a nearby cooler. His hair was thick and matted with moisture, like he had just gotten out of the shower. His wet muscles gleamed in the early morning sun. He gripped the neck of his water bottle and, with the tightening of the muscles in his arm, twisted the cap off. Both he and I headed to the same spot of shade under the overpass, only on different sides of the fence. He took a long drink from his bottle, put his forearm to his head and leaned on the fence to catch his breath. Suddenly, I too needed to catch my breath. I can still see the contours of his muscles, the stubble on his chin and the strands of dark hair glued by sweat to his forehead. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. There was something about him drawing me closer. It was like watching a bad movie; it wasn’t something you would normally enjoy but at the same time, you couldn’t look away. I wanted to pull out my notebook and write down what I was feeling, but I couldn’t. First, my arms were glued to my side, and they would not obey my brain’s command to begin writing. Second, I wasn’t sure what it was I was feeling. I couldn’t catalogue it. It felt both familiar and alien at the same time, and was a nameless emotion. For once I was at a loss of words. I felt something that had yet to have a name in the English language. The closest I could muster was curiosity.

The man drank from his bottle again, his skin tone like that of a baked chicken breast. I imagined that if I were to put his finger in my mouth it would probably taste like chicken. I came to a stop and kept staring—eyes wide, neck craned, mouth agape in mute fascination. Suddenly the man noticed me standing there. He looked at me. Now, I wasn’t looking at him. I was staring, ogling, drinking him in. He thought it odd to see a young black girl gawking at him. I could sense his discomfort but I could not look away. He flashed a forced, embarrassed smile and said, “Morning, kid.”

He had spoken to me.

I fumbled around in my brain for an adequate response to his greeting. Good morning would probably have worked well. I said something, but I couldn’t hear it over the pounding of my own pulse in my ears. I think I said good morning. That’s what I wanted to say. He smiled again and chuckled. Oh God? What did I say?

I heard something. Loud. A hammer meeting a plank of wood? A car horn? Something. Something loud and piercing. It stabbed through our moment and took me away from what this unknown sensation was and returned me to the real world. I shook my head, trying to shake loose whatever held my brain captive.

Then I remembered. I was on my way to school. Yeah, that was it. I grabbed my notebook, pulled out a pen, and held it to the paper. I still had no idea what to write. I wanted to scrawl out everything that was going through my mind, but all that was going through my mind were questions—questions that only I could have the answer to, and yet, questions that I could not begin to answer. I gave up. I closed my notebook, put my pen in my pocket and headed off to school.

I was always an attentive student, but that day I was distracted. Why could I not find the word for the emotion I felt that morning? What was the word I was looking for? Fear? No. Curiosity? Perhaps, but there was still something else. Epiphany? Close, but still, what was the catalyst of this epiphany? My brain wrestled with it all day long. Unlike most memories, this one did not recede into the back of my mind to be swallowed up by the average stuff of everyday teen life such as so and so’s new boyfriend or the latest fashions.

I walked by the construction site on my way home, but I did not see this unknown man with whom I had made a connection with. I was slightly hurt, as if I assumed the connection had gone both ways and was expecting him to be looking out for me as I walked past.

When I got home I entered my room, closed the door behind me, slid my bag off my arm and tossed it on the bed. I looked around at my posters. The Montell Jordan’s of the world seemed a lot less attractive to me. I was too preoccupied to daydream about their soft lips pressed to mine. What was the word I was looking for?

Then it hit me.

As I laid in bed that night, I thought over and over of the man at the construction site. It wasn’t fear or curiosity. Attraction. The word I was looking for—the emotion I had felt—was attraction. I was attracted to this white man.

Initially I thought there was something wrong with me. I fought it for a long time. I would see good looking white men on television and began to think thoughts that I had never thought before. I shook my head side to side, trying to force these thoughts out of my head. My mind was like a blackboard—covered with thoughts that, when erased, would be rewritten again and again. No matter how many times I tried to force myself to believe that it was wrong to find white men attractive, my heart wouldn’t listen. It took me a long time to give into the temptations of lust and forbidden love. That year we read Romeo and Juliet in school. I imagined myself to be Juliet, a black American princess in the house of Capulet and I imagined my Romeo to be the hardworking, white son of Montague who could give me the world from the sweat upon his brow.

What had caused me to feel ashamed at first now made me feel special. I had seen and come into contact with something beautiful—a beauty that came from that vast beyond expanse that existed outside of East Flatbush.

As Cassandra Fulton read a piece from Romeo and Juliet aloud in class I sat with my elbows on my desk, chin in my hands and my eyes cocked to the left, staring out the window. A sly smile crept across my face. I was going to marry a white man someday. I knew it then and I know it now.

I am a black woman; hear me roar. I am confident in myself as a strong black American woman to know that there is nothing wrong with expanding my personal borders. I have nothing but love for my Brothers. No one tries harder in this world than the American black man. God bless him. But, the heart wants what the heart wants. And I have finally come to terms with what my hear wants. That is when I felt the most fully, most richly like myself—when I shed the scales of what I thought I wanted and learned to embrace what I really wanted.

Cynthetiq

nice, thanks for sharing the story.

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I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Jenny_Lyte

Thanks for taking the time to read it

genuinegirly

Something about it reads like an Ayn Rand novel to me, specifically The Fountainhead.

In any case, it's well-written and I hope you got a great grade! I too, hope not to become fully myself until I die. What fun is life without such a goal?

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"Sometimes I have to remember that things are brought to me for a reason, either for my own lessons or for the benefit of others." Cynthetiq

"violence is no more or less real than non-violence." roachboy

Jenny_Lyte

Whoa! Compared to Ayn Rand! Thanks genuiegirly.

girldetective

Zapatista baby! You rock!

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As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons...be cheerful; strive for happiness - Desiderata