Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? by Charlise Lyles

Author:Charlise Lyles [Lyles, Charlise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cleveland, Ohio, Hawken School, race relations, housing projects, race riots, Hough Riots, Afro Set, public school, private school, scholarship, 1970s
ISBN: 9781938441226
Publisher: Gray and Company, Publishers
Published: 2012-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

That’s me during a field trip to southern Ohio with the Woodland Branch Public Library summer reading club. I’m in the eighth grade and apparently invincible.

Chapter Eleven

I brought One of the ice-cream men back to life.

He was cute, with a deep voice like the Temptations singing background on “Just My Imagination.”

“I’m sorry you got shot trying to sell us some ice cream, Popsicles, ’n’ stuff,” I said.

“That’s okay, baby. I know you didn’t mean for it to happen to me.” He knew I was sincere.

Then we got married in a big ceremony. I wore a curly Afro and a halter dress like Diana Ross wore in Lady Sings the Blues. He found a good job at a steel mill. We bought a long, blue Ninety-eight, brand-new. On Sundays, after Reverend Berry’s sermon at Mount Olive Baptist Church, we drove around my old Mount Pleasant neighborhood in the Ninety-eight and everybody envied us.

Oh, what a delicious healer my imagination could be! Suffering. Pain. Melancholy. My mind’s enchantment could cure it, albeit temporarily. Fantasy made me sole owner of a special reality. Only I could create it and only I could destroy it. Never had I known such power.

After the ice-cream killings, I retreated on frequent binges of fantasy. I returned with my mind and emotions refreshed, ready to deal with the next round of survival in the project. Fantasizing became a natural reflex: Give me one, even slightly unpleasant reality and within seconds my mind transformed it to another more fragrant, more gentle, more splendid.

Momma sent my body to Kennard Junior High School every day for eighth grade. But my mind never showed up. It was AWOL, out fantasizing. So it was that I landed in the slow class.

The top sections one through three were for smart kids who might get to go to college. Average students went to sections four and five. Next came the “retardo” sections.

“Hey, Sugarbabe? What section you in? At the beginning of each high school year, everyone compared.

“Six.” That was several steps down from the year before. Now even Dee-Dee was in a higher section.

Whispers and snickers. Then they just came right out and said it: “Gheeyawd. I thought you was smarter than that. Section six is for them retardos. Gheeyawd. I’m glad I’m not in there with you.”

“What section you in?” I inquired.

“Four.”

“Oh. Okay then.” At least they weren’t that much smarter than I was—like those stuck-up kids in sections one through three.

All the supposed misfits—the short attention spans, the hyperactives, the just plain dumb, and the chronic daydreamers like me were piled into the slow class. We were slow, and we accepted our label. Sometimes in the corridors we hitched our narrow hips and walked cripple, just to look even more retarded than we were supposed to be.

I enjoyed the slow class. Nothing was expected of me and I delivered. Freed from academic expectation, reading and fantasizing became my basic curriculum. Should the thought enter my head of getting shot like the ice-cream men

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