They even tore through our drawers. Did they think my uncle was hiding in the dresser drawer?
But as with the incident with my brothers, we did not speak of it once it was over.
In any event, I am sure this incident is at least partially why The Gold Cadillac, of another time and another place, was a story I clung to so deeply, why I remember it now, decades on. Where the details wove together differently, the fear drawn out across those pages is the same, is my own. Finishing it, I wanted more. I wanted confirmation that that which we did not speak of was real. Which was why I asked, Please, Ms. Goldberg, may I have more books to read?
Of course, she said, and gave me stories I devoured, child-size bites of the fight for freedom and justice.
Please, I went back and asked Ms. Goldberg, can I teach the class about the books?
Yes, she said, Why not? Because that’s how she was. Ms. Goldberg, with her 80s’ feathered brown hair and her Flashdance- style workout gear she wore to school every day.
I had a reward—pieces of candy—for my classmates who answered the questions I posed during the 15-minute presentations I was allowed to give on the books I read. I wanted them to know our history in this nation, what it was we come from. I wanted them to learn, as I had learned, the terror we knew. Somehow it connected to a terror I—we—felt in our own neighborhoods, in our own current lives, but could not quite name.
But between Ms. Goldberg and then Ms. Bilal—the afterschool teacher and the single dark-skinned Black woman I would have during my early education, who brought us Kwanzaa and Afrocentricity—I turned toward middle school hopeful, even if it was in a community I didn’t know, a community without my community. I expected to still be loved, encouraged. My best friend Lisa’s mother was the one who’d heard of Millikan. It was considered generally a good school, but what made it special was its program for gifted children centered on the arts. She submitted Lisa’s name as a candidate and then, Why not, she told my mother and I one afternoon. With your permission, I will submit Patrisse’s name too! Great if the girls can stay together, I remember her saying.
Months on, I was accepted to the gifted children’s program; Lisa was not. But Lisa’s mom was able to manipulate her address and get Lisa into the standard program, so in the end we are both Millikan students. But we don’t remain friends, not as we were.
Millikan Middle School is sufficiently far enough away from my home that I need a ride each morning in order to get to school on time. Before, I could simply hop on the city bus with all the other kids from my hood, but getting into Sherman Oaks is a more complicated endeavor. The problem is that my family does not own a car, which is why our neighbor Cynthia steps in to help. My mother borrows her car to ensure my safe passage. This is not quite as straightforward as it may sound.
Cynthia, no more than 19, a young mother who has on and off been involved with my brother Monte and who will eventually have a child, my nephew Chase, with him, had been shot a year before in a drive-by while she was at a party. From the waist down, she was left paralyzed. But she has a car she loans my mother, a beat-up, champagne-colored station wagon. The back windows are gone, replaced by plastic lining, and the whole thing smells like pee because with Cynthia being mostly paralyzed, she sometimes loses control of her bladder.
My mother takes me to Millikan in that car, which initially I deal with because, a car! But after the first day, I realize quickly I have to make a change. Day two and I say, Drop me off here, Mommy, meaning a few blocks away from the school. The car we are in does not look like any of the other cars that pull up to Millikan, all gleaming and new in the morning sun. Kids pour out of those vehicles, Mercedes and Lexuses, and run from waving parents onto the campus’s greener-than-green lawn, as all at once I become familiar with a sudden and new feeling taking root in my spirit: a shame that goes deep, that is encompassing and defining. I realize we are poor.
Later, as an adult, a friend will say to me, Of course you felt that. Oppression is embarrassing, she will say quietly. But in middle school, segregated as it is, between Black and white kids, wealthy and poor kids, I don’t quite know what to do with this feeling or the terrible question that encircles my 12-year-old soul: Am I supposed to be embarrassed about the people who nurtured me, who gave me to the world and gave the world to me?
I don’t fit in with the white kids who smoke weed in between classes in bathrooms or on the campus lawn. I don’t fit in with the few Black girls who want to be Janet Jackson or Whitney Houston when they grow up. I wear MC Hammer pants, crotch swinging low. I wear my own brand of Blackness informed as it also is by the Mexicanness of the neighborhood I was raised in. People say I am weird, but I don’t feel weird. I only feel like myself: a girl from Van Nuys who loves poetry and reading and, more than anything, dancing. I am in the dance department and my dances are equal parts African, Hip Hop and Mariachi, which is also to say, weird.
I do make a friend, a white boy, Mikie, who is not disturbed by my alleged weirdness, my MC Hammer pants. I pester my mother to allow me to bring him home. I love my room and I want him to see the place I became me. I don’t yet appreciate my mother’s own shame, the humbleness of our home. My mother who came from middle-class, pious parents who had cast her aside when she turned up 15 and pregnant with my brother Paul nearly two decades before.
Because despite the shame I feel within the walls of Millikan, away from there, it disappears to a large degree. This neighborhood, this world, is all I have known, it’s what I have loved, despite the hardship I don’t really know as hardship because it’s how everyone lives. Everyone is hungry at times. Everyone lives in small, rented apartments. Most of us don’t have cars or extra stuff or things that shine.
In any case, my mother relents, probably out of exhaustion, and Mikie, who will become my first boyfriend in the years before he comes out as Gay and me as Queer, is dropped off at my apartment building by his parents.
I go downstairs to let him in and in the background there is an ambulance on the block screeching, which I don’t notice at first because there’s always an ambulance screeching on the block. But for Mikie it is new and between that and our building with its peeling paint, my friend says matter-of-factly, without trying to be mean, I didn’t think you lived like this. I do not respond. We go into my room and try to act as though things are the same.
Middle school is the first time in my life when I feel unsure of myself. No one is calling me gifted anymore. No one, save for my dance teacher, encourages me or seems to have patience with me. It’s in middle school that my grades drop for the first time and that I come to believe that maybe all that love I’d gotten in elementary school had somehow dried up, my ration run dry. At the age of 12 I am on my own, no longer in the world as a child, as a small human, innocent and in need of support. I saw it happen to my brothers and now it was happening to me, this moment when we become the thing that’s no longer adorable or cherished. The year we become a thing to be discarded.
For my brothers, and especially for Monte, learning that they did not matter, that they were expendable, began in the streets, began while they were hanging out with friends, began while they were literally breathing while Black. The extraordinary presence of police in our communities, a result of a drug war aimed at us, despite our never using or selling drugs more than unpoliced white children, ensured that we all knew this. For us, law enforcement had nothing to do with protecting and serving, but controlling and containing the movement of children who had been labeled super-predators simply by virtue of who they were born to and where they were born, not because they were actually doing anything predatory.
I learned I didn’t matter from the very same place that lifted me up, the place I’d found my center and voice: