Notes From the Field by Anna Deavere Smith

Author:Anna Deavere Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

NIYA KENNY: The whole time I was thinking about, “I’m embarrassing my mom. My mom’s gonna be mad. She’s gonna kill me.” Like, “Mom, Mom, Mom.” That’s the only person I’m thinking about. I was like, “Oh God, I’m gonna get outta this jail and she’s gonna beat me right in the yard.”

But everybody in the jail was like normal people to me. Everybody was nice, y’know. When they saw the video on the TV news, they was like, “Whaaa…” Everybody. Everybody was like, “Whaaaaa…He threw that little girl like that? And you was in there? Oh, girl you goin’ home, you goin’ home.”

And then when I saw [the video] on the news, when I saw the video, I was like, “I know she saw it!” The first thing that—that, uh, went through my mind was like, “My mom saw it! I know she did! I’m not in trouble anymore! I’m not in trouble!” So I call my mom, and she was like, “Niya, you don’t even know. The news is out here. They wanna interview you. Good Morning America is coming to the house tonight—”

I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. It’s just somethin’ inside of me, that I don’t know, makes me snap, when I see people bein’ mistreated, I guess. I’m talking about elementary school, I never held my tongue. One time in third grade, one of my friends was bein’ bad in class in third grade. And my teacher was, um…was (whispering) a white lady. You know, and I knew about racism, because my dad had always taught his kids, like, since we were in kindergarten, like, always raised us to know about racism, like, “Know your history.” So one time she grabbed this boy—like, picked him up by his cheek out of the chair. And I just lost it. I lost it! Lost it in the classroom. I was like, “You are not his mom! You can’t touch him like that! That is—that’s not your job! Your job is to teach us! You do not pick a student up by his cheek out of the chair!” Like, yeah. I was really mad. And um…she wrote me up for bein’ disrespectful and um belligerent. And so that was my first after-school detention. Yeah. So that’s why—that’s why I feel like I was born, y’know, with this. Because what third grader do you know would’ve stood up for, you know, her friend after the teacher pinch his cheek?

(She listens to a question.)

Shakara? We—we didn’t really—on—we—we didn’t really talk. Like, throughout this whole year. We—we talked, but not like…maybe people expected us to? I don’t know? Like, talk every single day, like, “We’re close friends now.” We’re—we’re still just as distant as we were before I stood up for her. And initially, I was like, “Is this girl, like, ungrateful?” Like, “I literally sat in jail for a day for standing up for you.” But…at the same time, you know, I was also—not at the same time, ’cause that was like me initially thinking.

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