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13. The Bench
- Gallaudet University Press
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180 13 The Bench “The thought occurs to me to just pray.” The year is 1955. I am twelve years old. Some days I find school outright exhausting. As I trudge along Fifty-Ninth Street approaching my house, I pass Mrs. Johnson’s home. Mrs. Johnson’s two-story house on Fifty-Ninth Street is less than eight hundred yards from our house. It has dull gray shingles and is sandwiched between two other houses of similar architecture—two-story single-lot houses designed to accommodate the average family with three or four children. Mrs. Johnson’s house slopes downward into an embankment some three or four feet from the street. Every day since starting the seventh grade, I am in pure misery. I am so miserable I want to cry, but no tears come; each step I take feels like a heavy weight on my legs; I imagine my bones aching. Nobody likes me, at least none of the kids at school, and I don’t know why. The kids shun me. Whenever I approach any of the other students, they step back or turn to someone else nearby to start a conversation. Why? It is as if I have a chronic infectious disease, leprosy maybe. Clearly, I still am not fitting in with the youngsters in my first year of junior high school, the seventh grade. No longer in elementary school, I now have six classes, each with a different teacher: Algebra, French, American History, English, Gymnastics, and Music Appreciation. My homeroom class is comprised of all girls, young ladies who are considered The Bench 181 academically advanced; I am in grade classification 7-8. The first number, seven, means I am in the seventh grade, the second number, eight, just means that I am in the top grouping for gifted or talented girls. But I don’t think the other girls are that clever, since they treat me so poorly. Smart people just aren’t that mean. My clothes are not stylish; maybe that’s the reason. Feeling alone and rejected, my only friends seem to be an occasional teacher who acknowledges that I am a hard worker, and therefore an above-average student. But even academic excellence does not draw friends to me. Alas, getting good grades is not a cure-all for the pain of the other students’ blatant rejection. Why? Why? Why don’t they like me? Yes, it has to be the clothes I wear. I don’t know what else it can be. Most of them represent the black bourgeois, and they wear the latest modern fashions. They come from the working and middle-class “Negroes” (the word “colored” is no longer fashionable or acceptable), whose parents are government employees, postal workers, or teachers in Washington, D.C. Most of their mothers remain at home, while the fathers plod off to work. There are precious few people working in industry or assembly lines simply because Washington, D.C., possesses few manufacturing plants. Negroes who do not have a college degree or technical skills may be among the lucky few who land janitorial or mailroom government jobs in federal offices and nearby military bases in Virginia. Some have jobs in the service industry: hotel cleaning, laundry cleaning, and, of course, shoe repair or domestic work. Every school morning I hike long city blocks to reach Kelly Miller Junior High School, designated to serve our neighborhoods and named for a mathematician who was the first Negro to complete graduate school in the 1880s. I walk past single bungalow homes, up a wooded hill and down and around [44.200.23.133] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:43 GMT) On the Beat of Truth 182 blocks of attached row houses. I cross a nearby bridge and circle housing projects, cut through treed lots, cross another bridge to finally arrive a half hour from the time I left home. And at the end of the day, I weave through city blocks to pass Mrs. Johnson’s home and then finally reach my house. My shoulders slope with the load of heavy books whenever I walk, especially after school hours when the tedious weight of trying to please other people weighs me down. I am also exhausted since I started taking naps shortly after arriving home and waking up after midnight to do my homework for the next day. That means I often get less than four or five hours sleep. As I pass...