A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times by Meron Hadero

Author:Meron Hadero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Restless Books

Sinkholes

A typical high school classroom in the middle of Florida in the mid-1970s. And when I say classroom, what I mean is not so much a room, really, but more an annex? In the back of the main building? Picture a tiny trailer hitched to a semi. We are the overflow, and we make do. Ms. Verne stands in front with an eraser-mark on her sleeve, her glasses at the tip of her nose, frizzy blond-gray hair radiating from her falling braid.

We have just read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and Ms. Verne says we’re going to do a class exercise, which we follow up with the usual groans and hands thrown in the air. Ms. Verne stays cheerful, assuring us that this is a good one. She says Ralph Ellison wrote about race and asks us to think about what we know about race by coming up to the board and writing down a slur.

English isn’t my first language, but it’s been ages since I found myself truly unable to grasp a lesson or a class discussion. But when Ms. Verne starts us off like that, I think I must have misunderstood. Everyone seems to feel that way, though, and there is a long, tense minute when the class says nothing, does nothing, waiting to gauge what kind of permission or pressure this is, exactly. Josh, class prez, shoo-in for homecoming king even as an underclassman, gets up first and boldly writes cracker. We are stunned, but the silence is filled quickly by the click of high heels when Jenny, his on-off girlfriend, yearbook deputy-editor, brunette-blowout writes, kike. Our shock is audible. Grungy, tough, brilliant Sara writes in such tiny letters that no one can read it. “Wooly-haired, okay. That’s what it says, okay,” she tells us, reluctantly. Pete, pitcher, pinch hitter, assistant coach, nearly every other position as the only one any good at baseball in our small town, goes up to the board like he’s stepping up to home plate, lifts his perfect arm like an ever-coiled spring and writes spic then chink. “To be thorough,” he boasts like he hit it out of the park. Someone claps twice; the pace picks up.

Right about now I notice glances darting back at me as I sit in my usual spot in the last row. Here I don’t stand out as the poorest kid in the class, as those relegated to the annex are pretty abject, but I am suddenly all the more aware of my status as the only Black kid in class, the only person of color at all, member of the only minority family in this “traffic stop” town (by which I mean a little pass-through stretch of road that dips down to twenty-five mph for a handful of miles and gets most of its revenue from speeding tickets handed out to drivers racing between two major cities). I realize they are all waiting for me to write it. The collective focus shifts from Ellison, the

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