My mom did this sometimes, just showed up and spied on me without my knowing. It was one of the main reasons I usually tried to do what she said, even when I thought she wasn’t around. “He said, ‘I got you,’” I told her.
“Tell me what he said, Zachary,” she said angrily.
I sighed. “He said, ‘I own you,’” I said, “but it wasn’t like that.”
She cut me off before I had a chance to finish. “He said he owned you?!” She was livid. She went to the administration, and over the next few days, the boys involved in the snowball fight had to see the dean and sit through meetings with the principal. I felt bad that they were getting into trouble when I knew they hadn’t really meant any harm, but my mom made it clear that I was to play along and make sure everyone knew I was suffering in this hostile environment. Of course, these kids and some of my other friends started holding things like this against me.
I was still doing well in school academically, but I began to struggle to fit in. I had great grades, and I excelled in particular at forensics, or public speaking. My experience speaking at mental health conventions and being trained by my mom was paying off. I consistently got perfect scores on my speeches and won eight first-place awards in the Eastern Catholic Forensics League’s declamation category. I also performed extremely well in the school-wide spelling bee, competing, in the end, against two eighth-graders. Although I finished in third place, the three of us went back and forth for a record-breaking eighty-eight rounds, so long that the administration had to come up with a new spelling list. The previous year, the school spelling bee had consisted of only twenty-two rounds. The next day, a story about the event made its way into the local newspaper.
But school was no longer a purely positive place where I could focus exclusively on doing my best. I was losing friends and was constantly worried that my mom would show up and create some sort of conflict. It seemed that whenever I was doing well or was proud of something, she found a way to ruin it—even forensics. When a white classmate’s mother edited one of my speeches, changing the word blacker to bleaker, my mom confronted the woman face-to-face and tried to intimidate her.
With fewer friends than I’d ever had before, I started to spend more time after class talking to teachers. I found that if I tried to be helpful to them, these teachers appreciated me. I suppose I was looking for positive attention and validation from an adult, something I wasn’t getting at home. There was one teacher in particular who was more than happy for me to spend time after school helping her. I spent hours in her classroom, helping her with various menial tasks. Occasionally, I even helped her with personal tasks that had nothing to do with school. She loved me for it, and I liked how it felt to be valued for having done something positive.
That teacher ran something called Blue Crew, a student group that advertised school paraphernalia, ran concession stands, and operated the scoreboards at athletic events. None of the other kids wanted to join Blue Crew that year because it had become a bit tedious and demanding, so I did all the work that was normally shared by up to ten people. I did everything, from setting up the stands and keeping score to selling the concessions and figuring out various logistical details. At the end of the season, the school gave me a sweater from the school store and a certificate as a reward for my hard work, and my mom was upset because she thought I deserved a trophy.
It was always something. In seventh grade, I had done better than another boy on a vocabulary test and we had a little argument about it. We tossed a few insults back and forth, and then he said, “At least I don’t have nappy hair.” Then he pushed me. I pushed him back, and then he swung at me. I ducked.
In the next millisecond it felt as if a million thoughts were swimming through my mind at once. My first and most salient thought was that if I shied away from a fight with this kid, my mom would somehow find out and berate me for being a bitch, a punk. She would make me feel worthless, like an utter failure. At the same time, I was thinking how badly I didn’t want to hit this boy. His family probably already thought that black people fought all the time, and if I hit back, I would just be playing into that stereotype.
I swung back. We each threw a couple of punches, and I ended up in the principal’s office. I didn’t really understand why the other kid wasn’t in trouble, too, especially since he had swung at me first. The principal spoke to me sternly about fighting, but since this was my first time doing anything wrong, there was no punishment.
My mom was much harder on me than the principal had been. She was mad that I hadn’t fought back harder and yelled at me for hours, threatening to send me out to the worst part of town in the middle of the night to toughen me up. She told me that her father would have been disappointed in me, that he would have beaten my ass because I’d been taught better than that, and that I’d better man up or get the hell out of her house. By this point, I was resilient. But she had an endless reservoir of ways to break me down and emasculate me. I knew she was sick and wrong. I also knew she was proud of my accomplishments, but sometimes when I lay in bed at night I wondered what, if anything, would make her proud of the man I was developing into.
When she was done with me, my mom got a lawyer to threaten to sue the school for fostering racism. She thought that she was protecting me from people who treated me badly, and though she had blown much out of proportion and only made things worse, I can understand, and even appreciate, her refusal to let me endure what she saw as injustice.
In the end, her battle with GPA’s administration was a fiasco. I was embarrassed and anxious and ultimately felt a small amount of relief when my mom started talking about pulling me out of GPA and sending me to another school. I vowed to myself that when I got to a new school, I’d never tell her the truth about what was going on so that she wouldn’t have anything to hold against me.
And that’s exactly what I did.
CHAPTER 3
One Call
I left GPA in the middle of seventh grade and transferred to the Roeper School. Roeper was in Birmingham, Michigan, an affluent suburb about forty-five minutes from GPA. The culture at Roeper was completely different from that at GPA or at any other school I’d been to. Everyone there was smart, but the school focused on self-development and depth of learning rather than on broad academic achievement. Students were free to pour themselves into whatever they were passionate about, whether that was piano, history, or collecting rare insects. There were no spelling bees or academic awards. The emphasis was on creativity and radical individualism.
I loved it, but it was definitely a shock to my system. I had gotten used to the uniformed, prep-school vibe at GPA, and Roeper was liberal and profoundly tolerant. There was no cafeteria or designated lunch period. Students had one or two hours of free time a day, during which they could paint, draw, study, eat lunch, or even take a nap in the principal’s office. We called all the teachers and the administrative staff by their first names.
Even the assignments were more flexible than the ones I was used to. Instead of having to write an essay about a specific topic, we could write about whatever interested us most about a book we’d read. At that point, a big part of my identity was wrapped up in academic achievement, but that wasn’t valued at Roeper the way I’d expected it to be. Sure, the teachers wanted us to do well, but grades were less important than personal expression. So I struggled at first to reconcile my ambition and the pressure I had put on myself to perform academically with this new set of values.
When starting at Roeper, my main priority, though, was for things to go smoothly for once. I had switched schools so many times that I never felt that I could really get comfortable anywhere, and part of me blamed myself for having to leave GPA. If only I had lied to my mom better or assuaged her concern, I thought, or been a real man, maybe I could have stayed. It was stressful and exhausting to keep starting over, and I was determined to not have to go through that again.
Luc
kily, there was such a positive community vibe at Roeper that I didn’t have to lie to my mom to avoid telling her anything negative during my daily after-school reports, which continued. There just wasn’t anything troubling to share. Unlike at my previous schools, the boundaries between the black and the white students weren’t so sharp. My classmates all seemed more aware and more thoughtful. I could tell that they saw me differently than my friends had at GPA. They didn’t look at me as the one exceptional black kid and make assumptions about me, and I in turn found myself questioning a lot of my own assumptions.
I met kids at Roeper who were unlike anyone I’d been exposed to before—privileged white kids who were doing more to actively fight racism than I was, and black kids from the inner city who were deeply engaged in a variety of passions and interests. I realized I couldn’t assume that just because some people were white and well-off, they had a certain attitude about race. At the same time, people’s circumstances didn’t necessarily dictate how they engaged with the world around them.
I remember trying to describe some of these kids to my dad. “There’s this big black kid with an Afro,” I told him. “Dude is the most soft-spoken guy, and all he talks about is Steven Tyler and Lynyrd Skynyrd.” My dad and I shared a laugh over this, but I actually learned a good bit from that kid. He and many of the other students at Roeper made me realize that diversity existed in a multiplicity of ways and a variety of forms. There was diversity of thought and personality, and as I engaged with a wider spectrum of people and ideas than ever before, I saw that this variety added value.
This also complemented my understanding of affirmative action. When I was growing up, my mom had a way of explaining complicated issues in ways that I could understand. She taught me from a young age that one of the key tensions in American life was between achievement and equality. Democrats, she said, usually fought for the little guy, whereas Republicans tended to value tradition and favor ideas and policies that benefited the affluent.
Race-based affirmative action, she explained, was generally supported by Democrats and not Republicans because Democrats thought of affirmative action as a strategy that sought to make up, however inadequately, for centuries of racial oppression and the lingering effects that have persisted. That made sense to me. But my mom also wanted me to understand the significant moral and social costs of affirmative action and that there were legitimate reasons for people to oppose it.
By giving special favoritism to black students, affirmative action often disadvantaged other groups, such as hardworking white and Asian students. Lower standards for admission could also have the effect of diminishing incentives for black students to work as hard as they could, diluting the American ideal of meritocracy, she explained. On top of that, my mom pointed out that giving people access and opportunity doesn’t always mean they have the tools and resources necessary to make the most of them.
My experience at Roeper prompted me to think about affirmative action in new ways. While I still strongly supported sensible race-based affirmative action as a form of compensatory justice and a means of ensuring diversity, I began to support class- and gender-based affirmative action, as well.
In addition to reading the work of various scholars who had written about the issue, thinking about my own experience and the sharp disparities in the quality of education between certain public and private schools deepened my appreciation of the affirmative-action ethos. I saw the value of having diverse voices and opinions among those in positions of cultural authority and political power. In this sense, I realized, affirmative action was about giving people who would not otherwise have them the access and opportunity that could enhance their chances of achieving and contributing meaningfully to society.
As I had at GPA, I worked tirelessly at Roeper to fill my days with positive experiences and productivity to compensate for how unhappy I often was at home. But these experiences weren’t strictly academic. I still spent a lot of time reading and doing homework, but I spent more time than ever on the basketball court. Basketball became an outlet, a way to relieve stress and express the competitive instincts that weren’t encouraged in the classrooms. On most days, I got to school more than an hour early and played basketball, I played during my free period at school, and I often played after school or in my neighborhood on the weekends.
I was thirteen and also began having new and exciting social experiences. At Roeper, I felt free to be myself, and I was learning who that was through friendships, in-depth conversations, and, before long, dating. At Roeper, everyone was open about everything. For the first time, girls were interested in me, and instead of flirting or sending mixed messages, they came right up and said, “I like you; let’s go out.” Soon, I had my first girlfriend, my first kiss, even my first time breaking a rule when we snuck off campus to go eat at Qdoba or to get ice cream at Sanders.
The freedom I enjoyed while at school was a complete contrast to my experiences at home. My mom couldn’t keep me from growing up, but she did everything she could to keep me under her control. She read my texts and e-mails, listened in on my phone calls, and always made me leave the door to my room open so that she could see and hear exactly what I was doing. She even tried to exercise control over my burgeoning sexuality, offering me porn, asking me in graphic detail about how my body was changing, and forcing me to listen to Lil’ Kim songs so that she could explain the lyrics to me.
My mom couldn’t take me to bars or clubs—I was only thirteen—so she’d drive me to the entrance of one late at night, and we’d sit in the car and watch the people coming out. She taught me to pick up on the subtlest clues, the secret messages being passed between men and women that I was too young to fully understand. “Look at his facial expression,” she’d tell me as we watched a man talking to a woman. “It’s forced. That makes him look insecure.” She taught me that confidence—or the lack of it—is revealed in everything you do: how you hold your hands, how you walk, the angle of your chin. To her, this all went back to sexual prowess. But as I learned to internalize these cues, I began to use them to connect more authentically with people.
Half of the time, it seemed that she wanted to empower me so that I knew how to get what I wanted in the world, while the rest of the time she brutally cut me down. After my mom found out about my girlfriend by reading my text messages, she punished me by asking me to go to the grocery store with her and then locking me out of the car. It was winter, and I stood outside in the freezing cold as she drove away. I didn’t have a key to the condo, so I couldn’t get back inside. Ten minutes later, I got a text from her: “Zachary, you better get your bitch ass in this car.”
I ran down the street to catch up to her and found her pulled over to the side of the road, calmly smoking a cigarette. I got in, and we drove in silence. My fingers were still numb from the cold, and I was upset, but my silence infuriated her. She pulled over right on the side of the highway and just glared at me with that look on her face.
“No woman should ever take my place, do you understand me, boy?”
“Yes, I understand,” I replied.
“Don’t make me leave you out here stranded on the freeway. I gave birth to your black ass. I raised you; I clothed you; I fed you. I will not come second to whoever this bitch is. Have I made myself clear, Zachary?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“So,” she said, taking a drag of her cigarette, “tell me about the bitch.”
For the next half hour, we sat in the car as she grilled me about my girlfriend in explicit detail. What did her body look like? What kind of kisser was she? What did I want to do with her when we were alone? It was the last thing I wanted to discuss.
When we got back home, she said that I needed to learn how to dance like a real man, the way her father used to dance with Lola. So she brought in Kevin to dance with her. “Let a real man show you how it’s done,” she said. Then she put on Tupac Shakur’s “Hail Mary”
and made me dance around the room with her. “Mama told me never stop until I bust a nut,” she sang along, and then smacked me on the ass and squeezed hard.
These moments were so uncomfortable, so surreal, that I often survived only by imagining myself looking in from the outside. What would people think if they saw this? I wondered. What would they assume about her—about me? The next day at school, I was always worried that people could tell, that they could smell it on me that I’d been through hell.
That year, we moved from our condo in the city to a house in the suburbs that was close to Roeper in a much safer, nicer neighborhood. Kevin was making more money, and he and my mom had gotten married the year before. It was the first time since I had left the public school that I was living in the same neighborhood as the kids I went to school with, and my social life continued to flourish. The house was built on an A-frame and got narrower as it went up. My room was on the top floor. When I first saw the house, I thought this meant I would have more privacy, but I was mistaken. Under no circumstances was I allowed to close that door. When I was in my room reading or studying or talking on the phone, my mom would often sit on the stairs right inside the doorway, just listening. It was frustrating, and I hated it, constantly worrying, wondering if she was spying on me or eavesdropping. At times it even made me anxious. I’d get up from my desk and walk over to the stairwell periodically just to see if she was there.
* * *
—
The summer after seventh grade I went to DC to spend a couple of months with my dad. He and Brenda had split up, and my dad had moved in with his mother, my grandma Pearl. Her health was declining and her longtime partner had passed away, so my dad wanted to be there to help take care of her. My grandmother’s small house was in a rough part of DC and hadn’t been well maintained. I slept on a small cot in the living room, and it was far less comfortable than our house in Michigan, but I loved being there with my dad.
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