I was really, really unhappy, like I had this big hole in my belly between my heart and my stomach and I couldn’t fill it with food or with TV or books or anything and I just felt sad, all the time, all the time, all the time.
I must have always been that way. I remember that when I was really small, maybe like five or six years old, I picked up a knife to stab my mother after she scolded me for some reason or the other. She denies this story, by the way. She says it never happened. But I remember the weight of the blade in my hand. I remember the rage and pain I felt because she had made me angry, and I remember thinking if I could hit her hard hard hard she would stop hurting me. And I remember too that she took the knife away and spanked me before I was sent to bed. I woke up later feeling, not for the first time and not for the last, that big pit.
The hole was bigger than me, sometimes, and when I woke up that day, the day after I tried to stab my mother, the hole was there, big and yawning and evil and hard and ugly. I hated myself for what I had done and I wished I had tried to kill myself with that big shiny knife instead of my mother.
It was just one of the things that weighed on me all the time, one of the things that made me feel I wasn’t good enough. School was another.
When I was home home I went to an ordinary school. Just like the thousand-and-something other kids at my school, I wore a uniform that was ugly and designed to make me feel unimportant and sheeplike; no individuality allowed. My school wasn’t especially big, or special, just a district school with ordinary teachers teaching ordinary subjects like English and maths and social studies and stuff like that.
Akilah and I had been friends from the first day of kindergarten. We were the brightest kids in every class. Everybody thought we’d both go from primary school to secondary school together. But we didn’t. When we both sat that Secondary Entrance Assessment, only one of us did well. Akilah went to a prestigious convent school where they taught French, not just English and Spanish. They taught Add-Maths. They won national scholarships. They didn’t teach technical drawing or woodwork or clothing and textiles, no practical trades at all; it wasn’t that kind of school. Mine was exactly the opposite.
I was bored most of the time. Every year was the same thing. I’d read the books twice before the start of the term, and knew all the information and more because I went to the little library in town with my mother after school and looked up everything I wanted to know before it could come up in school. I read about women’s rights, the Black Power movement, the Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance…you name it, I’ve read it. The librarians smiled benignly at me every time I walked into the library with a stack of books fatter than I was myself. I was all they dreamed of: a bookish girl who would sit quietly, and methodically read the titles they had on the fiction shelves and then start working through the Dewey decimal system of nonfiction. It was a very small library, though, and it didn’t take me long to make my way through every book I was even vaguely interested in.
Everybody thought I was smart.
Everybody, except me.
Though I had read all this stuff I wasn’t conscious that I knew anything, and I’d always thought of myself as kind of stupid. It didn’t help that I had an anxiety disorder that made me freak out every time I took a test. Like the numbers on the buses, everything I knew flew right out of my head when I got anxious. Anxiety started as a little scared butterfly in the pit of my stomach and eventually grew into a giant, sweeping moth that destroyed my ability to focus and recall what I knew. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d failed exams about things I could recite backward and forward.
The last test I sat at my old school was about earth science. I knew all about clouds and fronts and the tides—but not one useful fact stayed in my head during that test. Of course, I failed. I thought back to that test and kicked myself because I knew all the answers. Somehow I couldn’t convince my brain that I did, not when the test was actually going on.
Honestly, I don’t understand why this stuff happened to me. Why couldn’t I just take a stupid test? Why did I feel so bad, ugly, and stupid all the time? Why was everything about me just…wrong?
Take for instance my hair. For most of my life I wore my hair in short plaits, which my mother impatiently put in and took out on alternate weekends, averaging about three hours each time she did them fresh. My hair wasn’t long enough to reach my shoulders, and in my country that’s saying something. Mom always says a woman’s hair is her glory and if she has good grass growing up there, it’s an asset. I never did see the point. So what if some dead cuticle pushes out longer rather than shorter? Who cares? A few months ago I cut it all off, without consulting my mother, and she hit the roof. But I liked it better that way, almost clinging to my head, so short. You look like a boy, my mother said, but I didn’t care. It was my hair, and if I wanted to cut it right off I would. I’d never missed it, not even when the cold Edmonton breeze kissed my scalp under my new shorter cut.
I tried to remind her that Aunt Jillian had short hair. Now, understand that my mother is as black as the ace of spades, just like me. For her to change color is pretty tough. But she did it; I swear she turned pale. Aunt Jillian isn’t someone you should take pattern from, she said, then clammed up and wouldn’t say anything else.
I wanted to know why not. All my life she had pointed to her sister, Jillian, as a shining example of virtuous daughterhood, the one who had done good and made their sick mother proud before Granny died. Aunt Jillian was a Canadian citizen, someone with a house and a good job and a wonderful, perfect life in the land of milk and honey—or at least the land of nondairy creamer and NutraSweet. Aunt Jillian was the reason I had to do well in school, because I had to go to the same prestigious high school and meet all the same targets she had to carry on the family legacy. My mom had not been great at school. But I was supposed to be a top student, like Aunt Jillian, be president of the French club, become a swimming champ, lead the debate team, etc., etc. I was supposed to be everything my mother had never had the chance to be, everything Jillian had been so effortlessly.
And then, all of a sudden, Jillian was not someone to take pattern from?
Now, understand that at that point I’d met Jillian once in my life. I was six when my grandmother died of breast cancer and Jillian flew in from Canada for the funeral. She stayed to visit for three weeks. I would never forget her sweetly fragrant suitcases full of clothes and shoes and other presents for my mother and me. The schoolgirl I knew from the faded pictures in my mother’s dog-eared photo album had grown up. She was a big woman with a head of short, curly, natural hair. Aunt Jillian wasn’t married; my mom said loudly to anyone who asked that Jillian wasn’t in the market for a man and would never be. The Jillian I met wore lots of shiny silver jewelry, from the lobes of her ears to the tops, around her neck and on her wrists and her fingers, and even in her nose. She never wore makeup and she was always in black jeans and a black T-shirt, no matter what the weather. She even wore that with a black jacket to Granny Rose’s funeral. Of course I asked her, in front of a group of old people and my mortified mother, “Aunty Jillian, didn’t you wear those same clothes yesterday?” My mom pinched me hard, but Jillian only laughed and laughed. I never forgot what she said: “Girl, I wear T-shirts and jeans like a uniform. I work too hard at everything else to work at style, too.” At six years old I accepted the explanation. And as I got older, if I ever gave Jillian a thought, it was People can be different, right?