THE GIRLS AND I SIT IN THE PARK, ON THE brick wall that runs by the basketball courts. It’s just a half wall with no kind of function but to separate the grass from the pavement, so you have to walk around it to enter the courts. We’ve never been sure what it’s even doing here, but it makes a nice place to sit and watch stuff happen.
We read aloud to each other, chapters from The Wretched of the Earth. The edges of the book curl from being touched by many hands. Emmalee reads soft and clear, but even her gentle voice can’t soften the words themselves. She reads about the struggle, the way the people who Have try to fix it so that the rest of us will always Have Not. I think of Mama, trying to keep a job, and that edge of fury about Raheem as he counts his pay like it’s never going to be enough, no matter what; never going to be enough hours in the day to make ends meet. The words are stirring, the sun is baking, and I feel my skin begin to burn, inside and out.
Emmalee hands the book to me. I don’t especially like it when it’s my turn to read. Emmalee does better. But she practices more, not just for homework but also for fun. Books from the library, all stacked by her bed. Patrice too. Her family has books on the wall, all up in a whole big bookcase. Fat books and thin books, fact books and storybooks, all jumbled together—a whole store of tiny printed words. Not like me. Holding the book’s paper spine is a little bit foreign to me. It’s not like the thick shell of our school books, heavy as knowledge and hard to crack through. It’s easy to turn these pages. But my tongue trips over the sound of things like they can never become a part of me, even when I want them to be, even when they already are. Emmalee helps me sound words out. We look them up in her pocket dictionary; there are a lot I don’t know. It makes it seem true, what Raheem says about needing to stay in school, if there’s ever going to be a chance for something better for any of us. He thinks I can get a good job in an office, the kind Mama dreams of but isn’t smart enough for, she sometimes says. But I am, they say. Smart enough. Raheem thinks if I learn more words, and how to type them, I’ll be okay.
Once when he was mad at me for not shutting up, he said I might as well be a lawyer in a courtroom, ’cause I can talk people’s ears off. I liked that idea especially, and for a while I pictured myself like a businesswoman on TV, wearing a skirt suit and my hair up all pretty, with a briefcase and a head full of important things to say like “cross-examine” and “My client pleads not guilty.” It was fun for a little while, but afterward I got mad right back at Raheem for even bringing it up. I don’t know why he put an idea like that in my mind. We both know it can’t happen. There’s a whole lot of school between me and the courtroom, unless I get real far into the Panthers, and then I might end up in court after all, but on the wrong side. Seems more likely, anyhow. I don’t know anyone from Bryant Street who’s ever turned into a lawyer, but I know plenty of folks behind bars.