Miseducated by Brandon P. Fleming

Author:Brandon P. Fleming [Fleming, Brandon P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

My newfound passion consumed me like a flame. I was determined to transform myself. And I was willing to pay the price by any means necessary. The first step was my decision to trade my home entertainment equipment for a home library.

On that fateful day, I walked into the apartment as my roommates were playing NBA 2K on the PlayStation. I unplugged the cords in the middle of their game.

“Bro, what are you doing?” Stephon yelled, jumping to his feet like I had thrown a punch.

“I’m packing it up,” I said. I gathered the PlayStation, the forty-inch television, and every form of entertainment hardware I owned. I took pictures of it all and posted it for sale on Craigslist. I accepted the first bidder. I used the proceeds to buy a cheap desk, an office chair, and some bookshelves. The rest I spent on books, including a set of textbooks covering grammar and reading for grades seven through twelve. I wanted nothing else. I gave up games, sports, and girls (kinda) for over a year. Each day after class and my part-time shift at the campus bookstore, I shut myself in my room. I started with seventh grade and eventually worked my way up to twelfth-grade proficiency. Coach and Professor Nelson had laid down the challenge. And I trained to be a scholar with the same intensity that I’d trained to be an athlete.

I struggled at first. I couldn’t keep my eyes from tearing as I tried to understand the literature. But I wouldn’t let up. I grew weary and fell asleep, but I woke up and kept pushing. In a notebook, I wrote down the definitions of unfamiliar words. I practiced using them in everyday conversations until they were committed to memory. I kept pushing. I barely wanted to stop to eat. Over time, those big words stopped tasting like spinach. I became a better reader. The paragraphs that I once had to read three times to comprehend I could now understand on the first try. My stamina increased and I could read one, then two, then three chapters without giving up. I felt like a champion. And it hit me that maybe I wasn’t dumb after all. Maybe I was always capable of this. Maybe, all along, I was simply disinterested and disenfranchised from a world in which I never saw myself.

One day, I was reading when Walter interrupted my concentration. “Bro, you know those aren’t the only Black scholars, right?” Walter was one of my five roommates. We were all recovering dropouts, taking a second run at college while crammed into a two-bedroom apartment where we slept on floor pallets because we could not afford beds. The most any of us paid for rent was $150 a month, yet eviction forced us to move repeatedly.

Walter and I had something in common: back in New Jersey, he had lived the real nigga life and then dropped out of college when a knee injury abruptly derailed his football career. He’d moved to Lynchburg to start a new life and enroll at one of the other local colleges.

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