I'm not sure there's a story here. My initial idea fell through, which was the interview the collage artists in Kalamazoo, so I needed to find a subject that I felt more secure with. I knew I'd be able to get access to Kim and see her work (she is the custodian in Hicks), which was important. Although I never got the chance to interview Kim at her home in Otsego, where she might have been more comfortable, I still felt like I caught her in her element. I woke up at 7am on various days to shadow her while she cleaned around Hicks.
I didn't know what the angle of my story would be when I went into it, and that was definitely a problem. There really wasn't a story there, but following Kim around shed a lot of light on her complexities. I think that was the angle I was going into this piece with: here is this woman who, on the most superficial level, seems to be quite simple and lead a simple life. But the more I dug, the more layers I saw. Observing her during her lunch break with other FacMan employees illuminated a lot of those complexities. I wanted to highlight her interactions with these people because that's when I was able to see a different, very vulnerable side of her.
I was afraid this would turn into one of those profiles we're supposed to avoid--a story about nice people doing nice things--especially after watching those first few interactions with other people, like the Security guards. People really adore her. But like I said, spending more time with her changed this initial impressions.
But does all of this translate on the page and actually make for a story? I don't know. You tell me!
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Monday, May 6, 2013
Profile: Kim Russell
“Here’s our wet-n-wild Kim!” teases Mark. We’re sitting in the Richardson Room when he reaches for his phone so he can show me a video of Kim and one other member of the Facilities Management custodial staff playing in the sprinklers behind Hoben on a hot day last spring. It’s Girls Gone Wild, he says. Custodian style. Kim stops him before he gets to his back pocket, laughing. “You get outta here!” she says. Her eyes disappear from smiling so big. She likes when they pick on her. Mark says they target her because she takes it so well. Kim enjoys their company most the time.
Everyday at 11:30, Kim eats lunch with the same FacMan employees: Dylan, Stephanie and Mark. I meet her at the end of her lunch hour the next day. Before she can finish throwing her trash out, the other three have already made their way down the hall to exit the building. Kim is annoyed because they’re supposed to walk out together, but she doesn’t yell for them to wait up.
“They do that sometimes,” she mumbles, resigned.
Kim doesn’t have a lot of friends. Ever since her best friend from childhood died 20 years ago, and her husband of seventeen years divorced her “for no reason”, Kim keeps mostly to herself. She says it’s because all of her friends want to party.
“I’m not a partier. I don’t party. I’m not a drinker. I’m not a dope smoker.”
“Everybody tells me I’m boring.”
She prefers to stay at home and let her dog, Magnus, “man handle” her, while she paints or quilts or makes stained glass windows. Kim wants to be an artist. She’d quit her job if she could make a living out of it.
When she’s not creating something, she’s watching Maury.
“I wanna watch them idiots fight 'cause they’re so stupid.”
She’s convinced the talk show is a set up. It has to be. There can’t be that many stupid people in the world, she thinks. She likes Maury because it make her feel better.
“I think, maybe I don’t have it so bad after all.”
If she could go anywhere in the world, it would be Jamaica.
“I would probably go just ‘cause I know all the Jamaicans here and I probably don’t have to pay to stay anywhere.” She laughs and her eyes disappear again. She wants to go to Jamaica for the beaches, even though she won’t put a bathing suit on.
“Although, if I was in Jamaica I would never see anybody again so I probably wouldn’t give a shit! Who cares, right?”
A voice interrupts her on the walkie talkie. It’s Kathy saying they need help over in Severn. Kim tells me the custodian responsible for Severn was caught sleeping, and after going three days without pay, he came back and retired. She mutters something mean about Kathy while she turns down her radio. She wears an amethyst ring on one of her fingers, drawing attention to her nails which are long and painted lilac, the way professionals do it. Her short auburn hair is combed neatly and shines. If it wasn’t so early in the morning, she might have just come from the salon.
A fun day for Kim is when she, her sister and her friend Donna go quilt shop hopping for sales. When she tries to do something different, it never pans out. Once she wanted to see a baseball game but couldn’t find her way into the parking lot.
“I got pissed off and went to the mall.”
Kim has no desire to find another husband or boyfriend. She misses her two grown boys but Magnus fills the silences of her home and the empty side of the bed at night.
She says her life was always quite simple. When she was still married, she took care of the pigs and cows on her countryside property in Otsego. She used to kill the animals for their meat, but stopped when she got attached to one of the pigs. She named it Precious.
Her husband let her keep the house and bought himself another property not too far away, so every once in awhile, she makes him come over to fix things for her.
Around 8:30am, she walks into the Security Office. Shane and Dave grin. They’re expecting her. Shane teases her with a story and she just smiles. They have to be nice to her, or else she won’t take out their trash. She tells me that not everyone is nice to her around Hicks. She likes cleaning here but misses Hoben since they changed everyone’s placement this year. She misses the kids.
She heads toward the back of the office and returns a few minutes later with their carpet sweeper. Dave tells her she can’t keep taking it, that she’s racking up the fees. She walks out of the office with it and a grin anyway. These guys are something like friends to Kim.
She wears the same outfit everyday. A pair of faded blue jeans, white sneakers, a gray Kalamazoo College t-shirt from the Bookstore. She doesn’t feel like changing when she gets home from work, so she stays in this outfit while she watches Maury or quilts or plays with Magnus, until she goes to bed, putting it back on just a few hours later and returns to a sleeping campus.
Intended publication...The Index?
Word Count: 905
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Reading Response: Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
I thought that Gay Talese's Frank Sinatra profile engaged with a lot of the different questions and ideas we came up with in our last class--questions about accelerated intimacy, about who all to profile when you profile, about access.
I'm interested to hear what the rest of the class thinks about the ending of the profile, since my attention waned a lot when Talese writes about The Sands. I wanted to stop reading and skip to the end. I was specifically thinking about a section in Telling True Stories where it says that, if you start a piece off really strong, your readers will forgive you almost anything later on in the piece. What do you guys think? How far can we stretch our readers' patience and understanding?
Talese's profile was incredibly strong because you read it and hear the authority in his words. In this piece, his authority comes from (what I assumed was, and what Talese hints as) months of research. Even though much of the piece is grounded in one or two major events, he traverses an amount of time that isn't necessarily overwhelming to read, but I imagine is overwhelming to sort through and report. Acquiring all of that information--everything from Frank's childhood to his relationships and failed yet amicable marriages, to the bits about Dolly and Nancy Sinatra--requires a time commitment that we don't have in this class. Nevertheless, Talese's profile is a great model not just because of its literary qualities (like his incredible fiction-writing techniques), but because it proves that many interviews, and with people who are not the direct subject, really pay off. It's a good lesson to learn as we dive into our profiles.
I'm interested to hear what the rest of the class thinks about the ending of the profile, since my attention waned a lot when Talese writes about The Sands. I wanted to stop reading and skip to the end. I was specifically thinking about a section in Telling True Stories where it says that, if you start a piece off really strong, your readers will forgive you almost anything later on in the piece. What do you guys think? How far can we stretch our readers' patience and understanding?
Monday, April 29, 2013
What Tita Said: Final Draft
(For Modern Love)
Not even after I flipped him the bird in front of the entire seventh grade class did Hiram understand I didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Before I could bat an eyelid at the boy I did like, Ms. Molly Meade gave me my second-ever demerit right then as the whole school shuffled into the gym for the assembly. She yelled my name like I was the first Catholic schoolgirl in Beverly to raise the middle finger to a black boy. For a second her face matched the hot red flames of her hair so that her freckles disappeared and I understood why the boys called her a flaming leprechaun. She was new and twenty-two and still squealed when Catholic schoolboys and girls broke the Golden Rule.
She pulled me aside in English class later that day. Because she was also to blame for my first-ever demerit--gifted to me when I dropped all of my textbooks and yelled “shit” in front of her, also in the gym--she required an explanation “This is very unlike you,” she began. With the rest of the seventh-grade class pretending to read The Giver behind us, I started to cry. My first course of action was to blame it on my new best friend because everyone knew Hannah Pienton was meaner than the meanest class bullies. Even though Hannah wouldn’t do the same for me, I left her out of it and instead told my first lie to my favorite teacher. “Actually, Ms. Meade, I stuck this finger at Hiram’s face,” and flipped her my ring finger.
Not even after I flipped him the bird in front of the entire seventh grade class did Hiram understand I didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Before I could bat an eyelid at the boy I did like, Ms. Molly Meade gave me my second-ever demerit right then as the whole school shuffled into the gym for the assembly. She yelled my name like I was the first Catholic schoolgirl in Beverly to raise the middle finger to a black boy. For a second her face matched the hot red flames of her hair so that her freckles disappeared and I understood why the boys called her a flaming leprechaun. She was new and twenty-two and still squealed when Catholic schoolboys and girls broke the Golden Rule.
She pulled me aside in English class later that day. Because she was also to blame for my first-ever demerit--gifted to me when I dropped all of my textbooks and yelled “shit” in front of her, also in the gym--she required an explanation “This is very unlike you,” she began. With the rest of the seventh-grade class pretending to read The Giver behind us, I started to cry. My first course of action was to blame it on my new best friend because everyone knew Hannah Pienton was meaner than the meanest class bullies. Even though Hannah wouldn’t do the same for me, I left her out of it and instead told my first lie to my favorite teacher. “Actually, Ms. Meade, I stuck this finger at Hiram’s face,” and flipped her my ring finger.
She asked why I did it. The snot running down the back of my throat and genuine confusion caught my tongue. Why had I done it? For one, Hiram was the most annoying boy I had ever known. He subscribed to the laws of grade school romance that dictated all lovestruck boys drive the girls they like mad by ignoring them at recess and excluding them from their Pokemon Card clique, only to sneak glances at them in class thirty minutes later. He didn’t speak but screeched and cackled like he was afraid of being ignored, and he flailed his thick arms and legs around like a t-rex so that the floors vibrated to announce his presence. Indigo, the only black girl in his class, was his best and only real friend. She sat with him at lunchtime and during school assemblies, and while she made friends with the other six-grade girls, each afternoon Hiram walked home with only the silence his classmate begged of him during school hours.
The middle school boys called him oreo: black on the outside, white on the inside. As if the color of his skin didn’t draw enough attention to him, he spoke with a faint lisp, played guitar when most other boys played football, and never stopped smiling. One day a few weeks before the assembly, Hiram batted his beautiful brown eyes at me and became one of the first boys to ever flirt with me. I ran away, afraid he’d ask me a question to which I didn’t have the answer he was hoping for.
Hiram wasn’t the first black boy to admit he liked me. After Mrs. Flood sat Matt Brown and I next to each other four times in a row in fourth grade, Matt came to history class on Valentine’s Day with a red sealed envelope and a card inside that, in beautiful handwriting read, “Happy Valentine’s Day, Emily! I was going to put $40 in here but my mom wouldn’t let me. Love, Matt.” I told him I needed a few days to think about it, hoping he’d rescind the offer once he realized that, in fourth grade, it was really quite simple. You either liked someone or you didn’t. Like the rest of the fourth grade girls, I was saving myself for Pat Kelly, and so I justified the rejection on the grounds that I couldn’t date a boy with better penmanship.
That wasn’t the whole story. By the time we graduated, Matt would pursue most of my friends and get rejected by every one of them, and no one would ever mention the color of his skin. In Beverly--where 85% of the population was and is Irish Catholic--and at Christ the King School--where Matt Brown crowned himself the token black boy of the graduating class of 2005--people talked about race as often as our Catholic priests talked about suicide, and skin color was as relevant as God in our religion classes.
There was something just as instinctual about my aversion to Hiram three years later, except this time, a memory was at work somewhere in the back of my mind. I was eleven years old sitting in the backseat of a van on my way to Tia Tencha’s house in Monterrey, Mexico. Tito and Tita sat in the front; Mom, Dad and the aunts in the middle; the grandkids in back. Conversations with Mom’s side usually turned to boys and dating because it was the only subject that didn’t bore the aunts. They soaked in stories of Becky’s transient high school relationships with the sports captains and musicians. We knew Tita preferred we marry nice Mexican boys to keep our traditions alive, but she didn’t seem to care that all of Becky’s boyfriends were güeros. White boys. My cousins and I were becoming the first generation of Almaguer women who didn’t date and were likely not to marry Latino men because our parents opted out of the Latino neighborhoods of Chicago and into the white ones with the better schools. Becky was the first and wouldn’t be the last to get serious with a white boy.
For the next hour, the van filled with jokes about white boys and brown boys. Tita kept to herself in the front seat until someone mentioned the blacks. She didn’t engage in conversation because half the time she didn’t know what any of us were saying. Thirty-something years after coming to the U.S. from Mexico, she couldn’t keep up with the way young people talked. So when she did speak, we listened and remembered. So when Tita turned her head to the back row of the van and shouted, “I disown any granddaughter who marries a black man!”, not sure then if it was the truth or her racist humor, I soaked it in alongside the sounds of Elvis Crespo on the radio and carried its weight with me into the assembly that seventh-grade afternoon.
I knew Tita didn’t think warmly of black people, or even dark-skinned Latinos, after Mom told me the story of her boyfriend, Hank, a man darker than the darkest Mexicans in Little Village. Mom would have married him if not for Tita. That’s how it was on Dad’s side, too. When Sonica came out of Auntie Juana looking like a black baby, Tia Chole called Sonica pobrecita (poor thing) and Aunt Juana never spoke to Tia again.
Ms. Meade didn’t hear that side of the story, though. I stuck to the part my whitewashed mind could make sense of.
That’s how it went in seventh grade. Hiram stomped his dinosaur stomp and looked at me with his dumb cartoon smile. Meanwhile, Hannah made jokes about his big lips and loud mouth while I listened, always knowing there was a not so simple reason why I stuck my middle finger up at him, or why, when I saw him trailing not too far behind when school got out, I walked home a bit faster than usual so he wouldn’t catch up and ask me to be his girlfriend. I never thought to tell him that Mom had a strict “no dating until sixteen” rule because Lauren’s very public eighth-grade relationship with Charlie Rodriguez proved its irrelevance or Mom’s obliviousness, and it didn’t make much of a difference. I would have traded a lifetime of grounding for breaking it had Pat Kelly returned at least one of my infatuated gazes at his clownish smile, let alone asked me to grab burgers at Top Notch or spend a Saturday afternoon skimming magazines at Borders. I wasn’t afraid to break Mom’s rule with Pat because his penguin waddle and unwashed blond mop proved he was harmless and our relationship wouldn’t survive the summer. He was also white. Even if I had liked Hiram, I could never bring him home to the family.
Ms. Meade ordered me to write a formal apology after I flipped him the bird. The next day I sat on the steps outside the cafeteria and drafted the letter that was henceforth known as my rite of passage into adolescence. Had she told Mom and Dad that their sweet Emily had a mean streak, they would have grounded me for a week but at least helped me write the letter. But she didn’t, so I was left to it with my God-fearing conscious and sorry seventh-grade eloquence. It went something like this:
“Dear Hiram,
I’m sorry I stuck my middle finger at you in the gym. I did not mean to do it. I hope you can accept my apology.
From,
Emily Guzman”
I gave it to him the next day and he smiled like I had handed him a love letter. He continued to smile at me so big I forgot all about it once springtime came, and all I did think about was the gap in his two front teeth that shined so bright against the blackness of his skin that it occurred to me just how white our world was.
In the months following the incident, I said hi to him in the hallway, where I never smiled too warmly, while he still showered me with Valentine’s Day candy and haikus that I hid from friends and tossed in the garbage when I got home. I still watched for him on the sidewalk when school let out and listened to Hannah put him down for things he couldn’t control.
On the last day of seventh grade, I dragged behind on the front lawn while everyone else walked home with their friends. I figured the end of the school year meant the end of Hiram’s unrequited romance, until he came up to me from behind, pulled me aside, and out came the question I hoped he never asked.
“Emily, will you be my girlfriend?”
I shouted at my neighbor Allison to wait up before I hurried some excuses, not thinking to tell him some truths, like Mom didn't let me date until I turned 16, and not wanting to tell him others, like at eleven years old, I sat in the back of a van in Mexico and heard Tita say that no granddaughter of hers will ever date a black boy.
I shouted at my neighbor Allison to wait up before I hurried some excuses, not thinking to tell him some truths, like Mom didn't let me date until I turned 16, and not wanting to tell him others, like at eleven years old, I sat in the back of a van in Mexico and heard Tita say that no granddaughter of hers will ever date a black boy.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Reading Response: Writing For Story
Something that I haven't fully appreciated, and didn't appreciate when I took this class last spring, is the importance of the story. He writes, "Seeing stories is like any other marketable skill: It requires effort and practice. If it didn't, people wouldn't pay you for doing it" (74). The more journalism classes I take and Index meetings I go to, I recognize that the idea is often the most important element to a good narrative. But I still think that a good writer can turn even the most uninteresting, mundane thing into a worthwhile read, especially narrative journalists who rely so much on fiction writing techniques.
Franklin has had a pretty profound impact on my writing over the last year. He reflects on personal rejections, confronts lazy reporting and thinks back on his biases in his earliest works. Everything he writes about craftsmanship, simplicity, polishing, outlining, really stuck. The best part of this book is that he forces you to examine your own writing process, and tells you quite bluntly not to do certain things--like begin your story right where the story begins or use flashbacks because you'll sound like an amateur (which still surprised me)--because they don't work.
My favorite part of "Writing for Story" is still his chapter on the outline and I still think in terms of that structure when starting the writing process. I'm curious to hear how the rest of the class received Franklin, and this section in particular--and how easily they jumped on his bandwagon (or maybe didn't jump on it....).
Franklin has had a pretty profound impact on my writing over the last year. He reflects on personal rejections, confronts lazy reporting and thinks back on his biases in his earliest works. Everything he writes about craftsmanship, simplicity, polishing, outlining, really stuck. The best part of this book is that he forces you to examine your own writing process, and tells you quite bluntly not to do certain things--like begin your story right where the story begins or use flashbacks because you'll sound like an amateur (which still surprised me)--because they don't work.
My favorite part of "Writing for Story" is still his chapter on the outline and I still think in terms of that structure when starting the writing process. I'm curious to hear how the rest of the class received Franklin, and this section in particular--and how easily they jumped on his bandwagon (or maybe didn't jump on it....).
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
"What Tita Said": Draft 2
For Modern Love
Not even after I flipped him the bird in front of the entire seventh grade class did Hiram understand I didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Before I could bat an eyelid at the boy I did like, Ms. Molly Meade gave me my second-ever demerit right then as the whole school shuffled into the gym for the assembly. She yelled my name like I was the first Catholic schoolgirl in Beverly to raise the middle finger to a black boy. For a second her face matched the hot red flames of her hair so that her freckles disappeared and I understood why the boys called her a flaming leprechaun. She was new and twenty-two and still squealed when good-natured schoolboys and girls broke the Golden Rule.
She pulled me aside in English class later that day. Because she was also to blame for my first-ever demerit--gifted to me when I dropped all of my textbooks and yelled “shit” in front of her, also in the gym--she required an explanation “This is very unlike you,” she began. With the rest of the seventh-grade class now pretending to read The Giver behind us, I started to cry. My first course of action was to blame it on my new best friend because everyone knew Hannah Pienton was meaner than the meanest bullies in the class. Even though Hannah wouldn’t do the same for me, I left her out of it and instead told my first ever lie to my favorite teacher. “Actually, Ms. Meade, I stuck this finger at Hiram’s face,” and flipped her my ring finger.
She asked why I did it. The snot running down the back of my throat and genuine confusion left me silent for a minute. Why had I done it? Part of it was really quite simple. Hiram was the most annoying boy I had ever known.
He subscribed to the laws of grade school romance that dictated all lovestruck boys drive the girls they like mad by calling them names and ignoring them during recess, only to sneak glances at them in class thirty minutes later. He didn’t speak but screeched and cackled like he was afraid of being ignored, and he flailed his thick arms and legs around like a t-rex so that the floors vibrated to announce his presence. Indigo, the only black girl in his class, was his best and only real friend. She sat with him at lunchtime and during school assemblies, and while she made friends with the other six-grade girls, each day Hiram walked home with only the silence his classmate begged of him during school.
The middle school boys called him oreo: black on the outside, white on the inside. As if the color of his skin didn’t draw enough attention to him, he spoke with a faint lisp, played guitar when all other boys played football, and never stopped smiling. One day a few weeks before the assembly, Hiram batted his beautiful brown eyes at me and became one of the first boys to ever flirt with me. I ran away, afraid he’d ask me a question to which I didn’t have the answer he was hoping for.
Hiram wasn’t the first black boy to admit he liked me. After Mrs. Flood sat Matt Brown and I next to each other four times in a row in fourth grade, Matt came to history class on Valentine’s Day with a red sealed envelope and a card inside that, in beautiful handwriting read, “Happy Valentine’s Day, Emily! I was going to put $40 in here but my mom wouldn’t let me. Love, Matt.” I told him I needed a few days to think about it, hoping he’d rescind the offer once he realized that, in fourth grade, it was simple: You either liked someone or you didn’t. Like the rest of the fourth grade girls, I was saving myself for Matt Fahey, and so I justified the rejection on the grounds that I couldn’t date a boy with better penmanship. But that wasn’t the whole story. By the time we graduated, Matt would make his way to most of the girls in the class and get rejected by every one of them, and nobody would ever mention the color of his skin. In Beverly, where 85% of the people were Irish Catholics, and at Christ the King School specifically, where Matt Brown crowned himself the token black boy of the graduating class of 2005, people talked about race as often as the Catholic priests talked about suicide, and skin color was as relevant as God in our religion classes.
There was something just as instinctual about my aversion to Hiram three years later, but this time it came from a memory of a car ride in Mexico with my family when I was eleven years old, when I heard my Tita say she’ll disown any granddaughter who marries a black man.
I knew Tita didn’t think warmly of black people, or even dark-skinned Latinos, after Mom told me the story of her boyfriend, Hank, a man darker than the darkest Mexicans in Little Village, who Mom would have married if not for Tita. That’s how it went on Dad’s side, too. When cousin Sonica came out of Auntie Juana looking like a black baby, Tia Chole called Sonica pobrecita (poor thing) and Aunt Juana never spoke to Tia again.
Ms. Meade didn’t hear that side of the story, though. I stuck to the part my whitewashed mind could make sense of.
That’s how it went in seventh grade. Hiram stomped his dinosaur stomp and looked at me with his dumb cartoon smile. Meanwhile, Hannah made jokes about his big lips and loud mouth while I listened, always knowing there was a not so simple reason why I stuck my middle finger up at him, or why, when I saw him trailing not too far behind when school got out, I walked home a bit faster than usual so he wouldn’t catch up and ask me to be his girlfriend. I never thought to tell him that Mom had a strict “no dating until sixteen” rule because Lauren’s very public eighth-grade relationship with Charlie Rodriguez proved its irrelevance or Mom’s obliviousness, and it didn’t make much of a difference. I would have traded a lifetime of grounding for breaking it had Pat Kelly returned at least one of my infatuated gazes at his clownish smile, let alone asked me to grab burgers at Top Notch or spend a Saturday afternoon skimming magazines at Borders. I wasn’t afraid to break Mom’s rule with Pat because his penguin waddle and unwashed blond mop proved he was harmless and our relationship wouldn’t survive the summer. He was also white. Even if I had liked Hiram, I could never bring him home to the family.
Ms. Meade ordered me to write a formal apology after I flipped him the bird. The next day I sat on the steps outside the cafeteria and drafted the letter that was henceforth known as my rite of passage into adolescence. Had she told Mom and Dad that their sweet Emily had a mean streak, they would have grounded me for a week but at least helped me write the letter. But she didn’t, so I was left to it with my God-fearing conscious and sorry seventh-grade eloquence. It went something like this:
“Dear Hiram,
I’m sorry I stuck my middle finger at you in the gym. I did not mean to do it. I hope you can accept my apology.
From,
Emily Guzman”
I gave it to him the next day and he smiled like I had handed him a love letter. He continued to smile at me so big I forgot all about it once springtime came, and all I did think about was the gap in his two front teeth that shined so bright against the blackness of his skin that it occurred to me just how white our world was.
In the months following the incident, I said hi to him in the hallway, where I never smiled too warmly, while he still showered me with Valentine’s Day candy and haikus that I hid from friends and tossed in the garbage when I got home. I still watched for him on the sidewalk when school let out and listened to Hannah put him down for things he couldn’t control.
On the last day of seventh grade, I dragged behind on the front lawn while everyone else walked home with their friends. I figured the end of the school year meant the end of Hiram’s unrequited romance, until he came up to me from behind, pulled me aside, and out came the question I hoped he never asked.
“Emily, will you be my girlfriend?”
I shouted at my neighbor Allison to wait up before I hurried some excuses, not thinking to tell him some truths, like Mom didn't let me date until I turned 16, and not wanting to tell him others, like at eleven years old, I sat in the back of a van in Mexico and heard Tita say that no granddaughter of hers will ever date a black boy.
Word Count: 1537
Not even after I flipped him the bird in front of the entire seventh grade class did Hiram understand I didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Before I could bat an eyelid at the boy I did like, Ms. Molly Meade gave me my second-ever demerit right then as the whole school shuffled into the gym for the assembly. She yelled my name like I was the first Catholic schoolgirl in Beverly to raise the middle finger to a black boy. For a second her face matched the hot red flames of her hair so that her freckles disappeared and I understood why the boys called her a flaming leprechaun. She was new and twenty-two and still squealed when good-natured schoolboys and girls broke the Golden Rule.
She pulled me aside in English class later that day. Because she was also to blame for my first-ever demerit--gifted to me when I dropped all of my textbooks and yelled “shit” in front of her, also in the gym--she required an explanation “This is very unlike you,” she began. With the rest of the seventh-grade class now pretending to read The Giver behind us, I started to cry. My first course of action was to blame it on my new best friend because everyone knew Hannah Pienton was meaner than the meanest bullies in the class. Even though Hannah wouldn’t do the same for me, I left her out of it and instead told my first ever lie to my favorite teacher. “Actually, Ms. Meade, I stuck this finger at Hiram’s face,” and flipped her my ring finger.
She asked why I did it. The snot running down the back of my throat and genuine confusion left me silent for a minute. Why had I done it? Part of it was really quite simple. Hiram was the most annoying boy I had ever known.
He subscribed to the laws of grade school romance that dictated all lovestruck boys drive the girls they like mad by calling them names and ignoring them during recess, only to sneak glances at them in class thirty minutes later. He didn’t speak but screeched and cackled like he was afraid of being ignored, and he flailed his thick arms and legs around like a t-rex so that the floors vibrated to announce his presence. Indigo, the only black girl in his class, was his best and only real friend. She sat with him at lunchtime and during school assemblies, and while she made friends with the other six-grade girls, each day Hiram walked home with only the silence his classmate begged of him during school.
The middle school boys called him oreo: black on the outside, white on the inside. As if the color of his skin didn’t draw enough attention to him, he spoke with a faint lisp, played guitar when all other boys played football, and never stopped smiling. One day a few weeks before the assembly, Hiram batted his beautiful brown eyes at me and became one of the first boys to ever flirt with me. I ran away, afraid he’d ask me a question to which I didn’t have the answer he was hoping for.
Hiram wasn’t the first black boy to admit he liked me. After Mrs. Flood sat Matt Brown and I next to each other four times in a row in fourth grade, Matt came to history class on Valentine’s Day with a red sealed envelope and a card inside that, in beautiful handwriting read, “Happy Valentine’s Day, Emily! I was going to put $40 in here but my mom wouldn’t let me. Love, Matt.” I told him I needed a few days to think about it, hoping he’d rescind the offer once he realized that, in fourth grade, it was simple: You either liked someone or you didn’t. Like the rest of the fourth grade girls, I was saving myself for Matt Fahey, and so I justified the rejection on the grounds that I couldn’t date a boy with better penmanship. But that wasn’t the whole story. By the time we graduated, Matt would make his way to most of the girls in the class and get rejected by every one of them, and nobody would ever mention the color of his skin. In Beverly, where 85% of the people were Irish Catholics, and at Christ the King School specifically, where Matt Brown crowned himself the token black boy of the graduating class of 2005, people talked about race as often as the Catholic priests talked about suicide, and skin color was as relevant as God in our religion classes.
There was something just as instinctual about my aversion to Hiram three years later, but this time it came from a memory of a car ride in Mexico with my family when I was eleven years old, when I heard my Tita say she’ll disown any granddaughter who marries a black man.
I knew Tita didn’t think warmly of black people, or even dark-skinned Latinos, after Mom told me the story of her boyfriend, Hank, a man darker than the darkest Mexicans in Little Village, who Mom would have married if not for Tita. That’s how it went on Dad’s side, too. When cousin Sonica came out of Auntie Juana looking like a black baby, Tia Chole called Sonica pobrecita (poor thing) and Aunt Juana never spoke to Tia again.
Ms. Meade didn’t hear that side of the story, though. I stuck to the part my whitewashed mind could make sense of.
That’s how it went in seventh grade. Hiram stomped his dinosaur stomp and looked at me with his dumb cartoon smile. Meanwhile, Hannah made jokes about his big lips and loud mouth while I listened, always knowing there was a not so simple reason why I stuck my middle finger up at him, or why, when I saw him trailing not too far behind when school got out, I walked home a bit faster than usual so he wouldn’t catch up and ask me to be his girlfriend. I never thought to tell him that Mom had a strict “no dating until sixteen” rule because Lauren’s very public eighth-grade relationship with Charlie Rodriguez proved its irrelevance or Mom’s obliviousness, and it didn’t make much of a difference. I would have traded a lifetime of grounding for breaking it had Pat Kelly returned at least one of my infatuated gazes at his clownish smile, let alone asked me to grab burgers at Top Notch or spend a Saturday afternoon skimming magazines at Borders. I wasn’t afraid to break Mom’s rule with Pat because his penguin waddle and unwashed blond mop proved he was harmless and our relationship wouldn’t survive the summer. He was also white. Even if I had liked Hiram, I could never bring him home to the family.
Ms. Meade ordered me to write a formal apology after I flipped him the bird. The next day I sat on the steps outside the cafeteria and drafted the letter that was henceforth known as my rite of passage into adolescence. Had she told Mom and Dad that their sweet Emily had a mean streak, they would have grounded me for a week but at least helped me write the letter. But she didn’t, so I was left to it with my God-fearing conscious and sorry seventh-grade eloquence. It went something like this:
“Dear Hiram,
I’m sorry I stuck my middle finger at you in the gym. I did not mean to do it. I hope you can accept my apology.
From,
Emily Guzman”
I gave it to him the next day and he smiled like I had handed him a love letter. He continued to smile at me so big I forgot all about it once springtime came, and all I did think about was the gap in his two front teeth that shined so bright against the blackness of his skin that it occurred to me just how white our world was.
In the months following the incident, I said hi to him in the hallway, where I never smiled too warmly, while he still showered me with Valentine’s Day candy and haikus that I hid from friends and tossed in the garbage when I got home. I still watched for him on the sidewalk when school let out and listened to Hannah put him down for things he couldn’t control.
On the last day of seventh grade, I dragged behind on the front lawn while everyone else walked home with their friends. I figured the end of the school year meant the end of Hiram’s unrequited romance, until he came up to me from behind, pulled me aside, and out came the question I hoped he never asked.
“Emily, will you be my girlfriend?”
I shouted at my neighbor Allison to wait up before I hurried some excuses, not thinking to tell him some truths, like Mom didn't let me date until I turned 16, and not wanting to tell him others, like at eleven years old, I sat in the back of a van in Mexico and heard Tita say that no granddaughter of hers will ever date a black boy.
Word Count: 1537
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Reading Response: LeBlanc's "Trina and Trina"
At one point, LeBlanc relates her positionality in the narrative to that of voyeurism. That's something I kept returning to throughout "Trina and Trina" as LeBlanc is granted (seemingly) unlimited access to Trina's most intimate interactions and behaviors, and all the while, as LeBlanc notes, Trina is largely unaware that she has an audience...or is she?
The relationship between narrative journalism and voyeurism (or the distinction between narrative journalists and voyeurs) is interesting because it raises questions about curiosity versus invasiveness. Delving into private lives is the nonfiction writer's greatest privilege, according to Gay Talese in "Telling True Stories", but I've always wondered when a reporter goes too far. LeBlanc is very self-aware in this piece, especially in this sense. She acknowledges that she's exceeding the role of reporter, "convinced I am going the limit as a reporter", when she decides to take Trina in. She feeds her, buys her notebooks in which Trina reveals her life, is her chauffeur to and from prison and rehab.
But LeBlanc seems to be equally passive in the story. "Trina and Trina" opens with LeBlanc just watching Trina go in and out of the buses doing crack. She watches Trina interact with crack dealers and neighborhood friends from the inside of her car. She's able to give the reader so much detail about Trina's appearance, interactions, mannerisms and speech because she watches and listens, like a voyeur. That she allows so many months to pass without seeing or hearing from Trina reads like a balance to those times LeBlanc exceeds her responsibilities as a reporter.
In the end, she calls Trina her friend. Trina in turn says she loves Adrian. Adrian transforms from voyeur and journalist to normal human being who can't be in this relationship anymore because it's destructive for the both of them. For me, this ending reveals the possibilities of narrative journalism and illuminates the human compassion and connection that is embedded in the genre.
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