The Beat of My Own Drum

by Sheila E.

Instead I threw my energies into running and—increasingly—fighting for my freedom to walk the streets. I was attending so many track meets that my skin went really dark in the sun. The consequence of that was that I was then beaten up for my color.

  Sometimes the girls would get mad at me for having what they called “good hair.” Because of my mixed background, if I blow-dried my hair it went straight and not in an Afro like theirs. That alone could trigger a whole new wave of bullying and teasing.

  Often there was no reason at all. I’d get attacked out of nowhere. It was always stressful, humiliating, and scary.

  I was at the end of my rope, desperate to avoid being hurt anymore. No matter how tough I tried to be or how quick my defensive moves, I couldn’t win a fight if I was outnumbered. That was when my survival instinct kicked in. I decided to get even better at outrunning my tormenters. If I could run faster and farther than they could, I could escape.

  This served me well in my neighborhood, too, where the threat of violence was also lurking around every corner. I was especially afraid of the East Twenty-first Street Gang, who hung around looking for victims. Moms often sent me to get bread or milk at the corner store, so I had to plan my trips carefully. I’d take the money she gave me, then peek out the front door to check that the coast was clear before running to and from the store as fast as I could, on a self-preservation kick she had no idea about.

  Sometimes the gang would catch me and pull my hair until I cried or hurt me so I bruised, and I’d have no choice but to tell Moms and Pops. Whenever I did, they’d confront the bullies and their parents, though both would deny any wrongdoing.

  And while the adults talked, one of the bullies would punch a fist into his palm to show me that I’d pay for being a tattletale.

  Yet again, I was on my own.

  I wasn’t the only target; my brothers and other kids were grabbed and beaten or tied to telephone poles to be slapped or punched. My friend Connie was among them, and we’d often share our miserable stories in the sanctuary of her room. The corner store and my house were the only safe zones; everywhere else, we were fair game.

  As I grew into my teens, I began to wear my growing anger and frustration like a suit of armor. I was hormonal and frustrated. I felt victimized, stigmatized, and ignored. Mostly I’d argue with friends, my family, or my teachers just for the sake of it. If they told me the sky was blue, I’d tell them it was red. I’d argue the time of day just to push up against anyone in authority.

  Increasingly, I began to direct my anger toward sociocultural issues. We may have lived in the liberal Bay Area, where the law had banned segregation, but society still allowed it.

  Our community especially was becoming more and more violent, or perhaps it was my awareness of violence that was growing. We heard frequent reports of fights, stabbings, and race riots. Once in a bleak while there’d be a shooting in our neighborhood, and sirens became a familiar background noise again. Squad cars constantly drove by, and it always seemed like someone was getting arrested on every other street corner.

  Despite the police presence, our community felt unsafe, and it was the question of race that seemed to be at the epicenter. The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966 when I was a child, was extremely active, and its influence was growing. I became fascinated by it, along with the wider civil rights movement. I longed to stand up in public and raise my fist in the Black Power salute.

  Hungry for more information, I read everything I could about Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman—two women who inspired me with their courage and conviction. I saw them as models for my own emerging aspirations.

  Secretly, I reveled in the idea of creating revolution. It made me feel stronger as a young girl on the brink of womanhood.

  I was fighting for my right to be heard.

  I longed to make some noise.

  I wanted a voice.

  My biggest problem was that I had a hard time knowing exactly where I was placed within the community. People couldn’t easily tell what race I was by looking at me, so I didn’t “belong” to anyone.

  I knew Pops was born to Mexican parents and Moms was Creole, but in school and on the streets, I was pressed to come up with an answer to the question “Are you black or are you white?” There was no gray. No in-between. “Mixed” wasn’t an option—another reason for my persistent discomfort.

  I was just me.

  I knew I wasn’t white, but I wasn’t brown, either. I considered myself black, even though many of my relatives looked white or brown.

  Faced with such a stark choice, I picked black, because that’s where I felt most comfortable. I not only grew up in a largely black community, but my family spoke the slang of the “hood.”

  I wasn’t the only one who was confused in our family. Moms’s parents’ birth certificates categorized them as “Negro,” yet they had fair skin. On my birth certificate, it says “white.” My brother Peter Michael came home from school one day and Juan teased him by saying, “Hey, do you know Moms is black?”

  Peto replied, “Don’t you say Mommy is black, ’cause she’s not!” Then he started crying and yelling.

  It wasn’t until I was in my midteens that I even realized I was Hispanic. Up until then I honestly considered my family African-American—one of those that had a little light and a little dark. The day it hit me that I was something else was the day one of my father’s relatives invited me to play soccer on a team named Guadalajara. He took me to a rough part of Oakland for a practice game, and when we got there I couldn’t believe how many Mexicans were in the park. I’d never seen so many in one place at the same time. Had they been bused in specially across the border?

  “Where did they all come from?” I asked incredulously.

  Before he could respond, the team crowded around to meet me and all started talking at once with strong Latino accents. Incredibly, they seemed to know who my father was.

  “Oh, your dad is Pedro Escovedo!” they told me. I rarely heard him called Pedro at home and was surprised that they’d heard of him.

  When I nodded and smiled and replied in English, they laughed and said, “Speak Spanish!”

  “But I’m not Spanish!” I said apologetically.

  They looked shocked and said, “Yes you are!”

  “I don’t think so!” I replied, blushing, but then it dawned on me that I kind of was.

  Up until that point I’d attributed being Latino to having an accent and being part of an entirely different culture. My father grew up speaking Spanish because, before the orphanage, he lived with his grandmother in Mexico, and she only spoke Spanish. She made him sleep on the kitchen floor and she kicked him around a lot. He never spoke Spanish after that.

  I don’t know why I was in denial about being Hispanic. I think I was ashamed of being Mexican because I’d heard that they were the lowest of the Latin race. I’d had to dress in satin to go to a quinceañera (when a cousin turned fifteen), and I went to soccer dances where all the men wore cowboy boots, hats, and jeans and were short in height. But despite that, I liked tall, bowlegged men with Afro haircuts who looked fine. I made fun of the Hispanics with my friends until the day it dawned on me that I was Mexican.

  Caught in an agony of indecision and still constantly picked on by black girls, I realized that they thought I was white. I couldn’t win. I knew the rules of the game, and I also understood that it would only get worse the longer it went on. I tried to run at first, and I also tried to fight back, but I always seemed to be outnumbered.

  It got so bad that I took to carrying a screwdriver or a set of keys to defend myself if I had to. Occasionally, I even carried a switchblade knife to wave or point at someone if anything happened, although I’m relieved to say I never used it.

  There is an expression that goes, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

  Worn down by fear, I reluctantly decided that if I couldn’t defend myself, then I might as well try to befriend them. Some kids join gangs because there�
�s no love at home: the gang becomes their family, and they’ll die for that family—and often do. Some join because it’s the easier option and they like feeling in a position of power.

  I joined a gang in order to survive.

  My only protection would be to try to outwit them.

  One afternoon I was cornered on my way to the store and pinned down—something I hated even more than the beating. The toughest girl in the gang loomed over me and leered, “If you think you’re such a good runner, let’s see you beat my sister—she’s a track star.”

  I had no choice but to accept the challenge, unless I wanted another beating.

  The gang leader appointed someone to stand at one end of the street—the designated finish line—while the rest stood by my rival and me (she was five years older). My heart was pounding before I’d even started the race.

  “On your mark, get set, go!” a voice yelled.

  We set off, and it was close from the start, but I ran for my life that day. Those few minutes are another slow-motion memory for me: my arms and legs pumping, my hair bouncing, the other end of the street looming in the distance. She was behind me all the way, but in my mind I was running for Olympic gold.

  And I won!

  From that day on, the gang members didn’t bother me nearly as much, and I even won their respect. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was my initiation into the East Twenty-first Street Gang.

  8. Batter Head

  The side of the drum that you hit

  Everybody is a star

  I can feel it when you shine on me

  I love you for who you are

  Not the one you feel you need to be

  “EVERYBODY IS A STAR”

  SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE

  The pressure to decide whether I was black or white only intensified when I switched to a new school in the eighth grade. My parents were concerned that the junior high school in our neighborhood was becoming too violent and decided to send me somewhere else.

  Under the new equal rights regulations, inner-city children (mostly black) were bused to (better) white schools to fill a government-set racial quota. So I took a bus each morning to Montera Junior High in Oakland Hills, a school formerly consisting of mostly middle- to upper-middle-class white students. I used my cousin’s address as my own so that I could qualify.

  Being bused every day from home to school, I would sit in the back with the black kids and play beats on the windows of the bus. With so many kids crammed inside, the windows steamed up, so to pass the time I’d write things in the condensation that people could read from the outside. I might write PEACE, LOVE, or SEE YOU LATER. It became so natural for me to write backwards that I could do it with any word I wanted. It was as if I’d always been able to.

  At my new school I was always hanging out and skipping class. Moms suspected I was doing this, and while checking up on me one day she caught me smoking openly in front of my school. She was so mad, and she told me she couldn’t understand my attitude. All of a sudden she looked sad and asked, “What are you doing with your life?”

  “I don’t want to be at school!” I told her angrily. “I don’t care about class. If I’m going to learn, I want to learn something new every day, not once a week.”

  She already knew that the only classes I cared about were science and art. I did some drawing and silk-screening, but the subjects were always about freedom and escape. My only other interest was in running track. In my heart I was still determined to make it to the Olympics one day. Life for me during those tricky teenage years was all about competing and staking a claim.

  It didn’t help that being part of the black contingent bused in to junior high created an acute divide on campus. There were a couple of other races there, as well as some “mixed” like me, but for some reason everyone assumed there were only two. I was frequently asked, “What are you, Sheila? Are you black or are you white? You choose.”

  Under the black faction’s mean tutelage, I vowed that I was black, and my perspective on color became increasingly narrow. Anyone lighter than me deserved to be bullied—that was the rule. My fair-skinned cousin went to the same school, but we hardly ever spoke, because she’d chosen white. Luckily for her, she stayed out of our way.

  As I reflect back now on my hateful ignorance, I know that I was really just externalizing my unacknowledged rage. It was easier to turn it against others than to deal with it myself. A militant, I felt the need to take back control, and I did. Control was something I’d not had in years.

  Unfortunately, I received support and encouragement from my fellow gang members. Being part of their group gave me a false sense of confidence, and I soon became one of the leaders. They looked up to me, and we fed each other’s misguided righteousness.

  When we found out that Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday wasn’t an official school holiday, we decided to plan a mass walkout. We regarded it as our own personal protest against racism, completely failing to appreciate that Dr. King never would have approved of our actions.

  Somebody snitched on us, and the school principal announced to the entire school that any student who walked out that day would go directly to juvenile hall. Our little gang was indignant. Defiantly, we tried to sneak out the back through the woods, but the principal had kept his word and arranged for police cars and paddy wagons to surround the school.

  Outraged, we rallied together to decide what to do next. Our plans ranged from beating up the girls who’d tattled on us to spray-painting the walls. In the end we decided to initiate a food fight in the cafeteria. When we got there, though, we remembered that several black women worked there, and we didn’t want to mess up their workplace.

  For some reason, I decided that we should collect rocks and create as much damage to the school building as we could, which is pretty much what happened. Windows were broken, glass casings destroyed, and the people trapped inside were understandably scared. The police moved in to stop us and, before long, a full-fledged riot ensued.

  Needless to say, I was in trouble.

  With a capital T.

  Being summarily kicked out of that school meant I never officially graduated from junior high. Moms and Pops already suspected I was becoming a hothead, but they were shocked to learn that I’d taken it so far. They were furious and, more than that, they were bitterly disappointed.

  As ever, Moms took the lead. She negotiated a place for me in a better school in San Leandro for a year, and then she gave me a stark choice. I could either live near the school with my aunt Love, or wake up every day at five A.M. to catch a bus across town.

  I adored my aunt Love—she was always such fun to be with. She would lock the doors of her house and not let us leave until we sang her a marching song she especially liked or chimed in with her, Now is the hour (when we must say good-bye).

  It was Love who took us to Tahoe skiing once and into the country for a hayride. It was Love who took us camping in the valley where Roy Rogers lived. She’d tried to show us the big wide world beyond our funky rental duplexes in the city, but we were freaked out by such wide-open spaces.

  By the time Moms gave me her ultimatum, I wasn’t getting along with her at all, so Aunt Love seemed like a far preferable option. I also didn’t want to wake up that early. So I packed a bag and transferred to my aunt’s house and into the ninth grade at San Leandro High.

  “This is a clean slate for you, Sheila,” Moms warned me the night before I left. “Don’t mess it up.”

  I was in for a major shock.

  For the first time in my life I went from being surrounded by people and noise to being by myself at my aunt’s house. My two cousins weren’t around much, and when they were, they did their own thing. It felt incredibly strange, being in this silent home without parties or music or streams of visitors.

  I ran with a pack—hell, I’d been its leader—but suddenly I was packless. I had nobody around to lead. It was such unfamiliar territory, and I was overwhelmed with strange
and scary feelings.

  I asked myself, Am I alone? Yes.

  Am I lonely? I don’t know.

  I wasn’t sure of the difference. I just knew I felt friendless and miserable. I didn’t even have Connie to talk to anymore.

  The student population of San Leandro High was all white, so on my first day I walked into the cafeteria and felt like there was a spotlight on me. Everyone was staring. I felt strange, ugly, and totally out of place. I immediately realized that this is how I’d made all the white kids at my last school feel. Only now I was the new girl, the brown girl—the one being judged.

  I’d never felt so alone.

  The next morning I packed my own lunch and rode my bike to school. From then on—and for the rest of that school year—I’d ride off campus every lunch break and eat by myself on a park bench or under a tree.

  Was I alone? Was I lonely?

  Both. Definitely both.

  By removing myself from school for the break, I at least felt as if I was in control of my aloneness. I told myself that this was solitude of my own choosing. Needless to say, I had a lot of time to reflect—too much.

  I began to wonder what it was like for the other colored students at San Leandro. There was a Latina girl in the twelfth grade, and younger black twins who were constantly picked on. Whenever I saw them being bullied, I felt utterly ashamed of the way I’d behaved at Montera.

  It was like looking in a mirror and seeing what it was like on the other side of the glass. With no one around me, I had few distractions. I’d always been so busy telling everybody what to do, but suddenly it was just me and my thoughts. Drowning in remorse, I asked myself the same questions over and over again:

  Who am I? Why am I so mad all the time?

  Why am I so mean?

  I was carrying things around inside that had turned me into someone I didn’t like at all. I’d become incredibly angry, and I didn’t want to be angry anymore. Secretly I was still ashamed that everything that had happened to me was my fault. It wasn’t, but I didn’t know that yet.