Ordinary Light: A Memoir by Tracy K. Smith

Author:Tracy K. Smith [Smith, Tracy K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary, Personal Memoirs, Women
ISBN: 9780307962676
Google: w_qcBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-31T21:01:20+00:00

HOT AND FAST

I’d walked or ridden past the local high school every single day of my life since I was three, and it hadn’t changed much. Just two blocks from our house, it sprawled on its lot with four wings fanning out from a large central quad and flanks of portable classrooms at its outer edges. There was a big weedy yard, fenced in for construction (or to minimize trespassing?) out past C and D wings, and I fantasized for a long time about scattering it with wildflower seeds, even talked to some teachers about it, though ultimately the weeds prevailed. Mom would rouse me for school using an intercom that connected my bedroom to the kitchen. “Tracy, time to wake up!” she’d call up, then ask what I’d like for breakfast. I found that getting up in the mornings was easier when the promise of food was involved and would send down my order—two eggs over easy or French toast, please!—as if she were the waitress in a truck-stop diner. Then I’d shower, dress (usually changing clothes two or three times before settling on an outfit for the day), line my eyes with the royal-blue kohl pencil I’d bought for ninety-nine cents in the makeup aisle of the grocery store, and put on a frosty lip gloss that had come for free with another department store cosmetics purchase.

Mom didn’t sit down with me for breakfast, but we’d talk through the window between the kitchen and the counter with the three barstools, where I usually ate. Small talk about the day ahead. If there was a test or some other challenge involved, we’d pray about it together, briefly, as a way of setting my mind at ease. I’d eat my meal, ignoring the newspaper set up beside me on the counter. She’d move back and forth on the other side, tidying the kitchen or lining up the ingredients for whatever marvelous thing might be waiting to be eaten later that afternoon. It strikes me now as strange how little I recall of what we said on all those mornings. Did we talk? Perhaps I ate quickly, knowing there was not much time before the first bell would sound. Perhaps she was preparing my lunch, which I still brought with me at that stage of the game: a sandwich, a piece of fruit, and a slab of pound cake.

The first few months of my freshman year, I’d walk around the corner to the Johnsons’ to pick up Qiana, who was a year ahead of me. It was a detour that made my walk a bit longer, but it was nice arriving on campus with a friend, especially an older friend, whose presence bolstered my own sense of belonging and who allowed me to focus upon things other than my clothes or my hair or the omnipresent self-conscious doubt that ran rampant among kids our age like a contagion.

The Johnsons were a black family that had moved into the neighborhood just before I’d stopped counting black families.

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