Who Put This Song On by Morgan Parker

Author:Morgan Parker [Parker, Morgan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2019-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

MAKE A LIST OF THINGS YOU KNOW ABOUT YOURSELF

“What year were you born?”

“Excuse me?” Mr. K scoffs, American flag pin affixed to his wrinkled Oxford shirt. He gets exasperated by the mere sound of my voice. He’s just assigned us a “personal essay” about civil rights. I’m hovering at his desk being cheeky because I was mostly delightful and quiet for the whole class, plus it’s the end of the day and no one’s paying attention anymore.

“Well, I was just thinking, my parents were around for all this, the civil rights movement, that’s crazy.”

“I was young, but yes, I was ‘around for all this’ too.”

“So, what happened after?”

He grins like the Grinch. “Well—”

“I mean, after that and before Reagan,” I quip. He laughs smugly. “I guess I’m curious about black people, specifically. It seems like we’re always talking about Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks and then that’s it. I mean, what happens to black people between then and now? We’re just quiet in American history until the Obama chapter?”

The bell rings.

Mr. K shrugs. “There’s a library down the hall.”

Technically, the assignment is to reflect on one of the cases we discussed leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but I see it as my duty to creatively interpret all my assignments, and it’s my impulse to bend the rules to see what I can get away with. Sometimes you have to be the syllabus you wish to see in this world or whatever.

The school library at Vista, incredibly, does not contain any books about black life and civil rights in the 1970s and 1980s, so after school, I head to the public library, my last remaining hope.

Unsurprisingly, as a nerd, I love libraries. Specifically, the public one near my school, with seats in big bay windows and what feels like miles and miles of wooden shelves. I’m not sure what I expect to find here, but I know there are answers in books. I find a computer with a window view of a big tree swelling with orange leaves. It’s Yo La Tengo weather. I pop in my earbuds and skip ahead on I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, because I must hear “Autumn Sweater” immediately. The song actually feels like wearing a chunky cable knit sweater on a fall afternoon. It’s the perfect song for the trees.

I start by searching “black people” in the library’s inventory portal, chewing on the inside of my left cheek and absently biting a thumb nail. Immediately sensing my mistake, I type “African American History.” There are six pages of results, most of which are dated biographies and books for kids, like the only time to learn about black history is in school. Like black people are the Pythagorean theorem—they don’t really come up in real life.

I lean back in the hard wood chair feeling defeated. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.

A second-grade-teacher-looking white lady bustles around the room, moving books from a cart to a shelf, stopping to lean over kids and recommend them picture books or whatever.

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