And yet there was a problem, one I discovered in the split second it took to lift my little fingers to the keys. I was sitting at a perfect piano, it turned out, with its surfaces carefully dusted, its internal wires precisely tuned, its eighty-eight keys laid out in a flawless ribbon of black and white. The issue was that I wasn’t used to flawless. In fact, I’d never once in my life encountered it. My experience of the piano came entirely from Robbie’s squat little music room with its scraggly potted plant and view of our modest backyard. The only instrument I’d ever played was her less-than-perfect upright, with its honky-tonk patchwork of yellowed keys and its conveniently chipped middle C. To me, that’s what a piano was—the same way my neighborhood was my neighborhood, my dad was my dad, my life was my life. It was all I knew.
Now, suddenly, I was aware of people watching me from their chairs as I stared hard at the high gloss of the piano keys, finding nothing there but sameness. I had no clue where to place my hands. With a tight throat and chugging heart, I looked out to the audience, trying not to telegraph my panic, searching for the safe harbor of my mother’s face. Instead, I spotted a figure rising from the front row and slowly levitating in my direction. It was Robbie. We had brawled plenty by then, to the point where I viewed her a little bit like an enemy. But here in my moment of comeuppance, she arrived at my shoulder almost like an angel. Maybe she understood my shock. Maybe she knew that the disparities of the world had just quietly shown themselves to me for the first time. It’s possible she needed simply to hurry things up. Either way, without a word, Robbie gently laid one finger on middle C so that I would know where to start. Then, turning back with the smallest smile of encouragement, she left me to play my song.
2
I started kindergarten at Bryn Mawr Elementary School in the fall of 1969, showing up with the twin advantages of knowing in advance how to read basic words and having a well-liked second-grade brother ahead of me. The school, a four-story brick building with a yard in front, sat just a couple of blocks from our house on Euclid. Getting there involved a two-minute walk or, if you did it like Craig, a one-minute run.
I liked school right away. I liked my teacher, a diminutive white lady named Mrs. Burroughs, who seemed ancient to me but was probably in her fifties. Her classroom had big sunny windows, a collection of baby dolls to play with, and a giant cardboard playhouse in the back. I made friends in my class, drawn to the kids who, like me, seemed eager to be there. I was confident in my ability to read. At home, I’d plowed through the Dick and Jane books, courtesy of my mom’s library card, and thus was thrilled to hear that our first job as kindergartners would be learning to read new sets of words by sight. We were assigned a list of colors to study, not the hues, but the words themselves—“red,” “blue,” “green,” “black,” “orange,” “purple,” “white.” In class, Mrs. Burroughs quizzed us one student at a time, holding up a series of large manila cards and asking us to read whatever word was printed in black letters on the front. I watched one day as the girls and boys I was just getting to know stood up and worked through the color cards, succeeding and failing in varying degrees, and were told to sit back down at whatever point they got stumped. It was meant to be something of a game, I think, the way a spelling bee is a game, but you could see a subtle sorting going on and a knowing slump of humiliation in the kids who didn’t make it past “red.” This, of course, was 1969, in a public school on the South Side of Chicago. Nobody was talking about self-esteem or growth mind-sets. If you’d had a head start at home, you were rewarded for it at school, deemed “bright” or “gifted,” which in turn only compounded your confidence. The advantages aggregated quickly. The two smartest kids in my kindergarten class were Teddy, a Korean American boy, and Chiaka, an African American girl, who both would remain at the top of the class for years to come.
I was driven to keep up with them. When it came my turn to read the words off the teacher’s manila cards, I stood up and gave it everything I had, rattling off “red,” “green,” and “blue” without effort. “Purple” took a second, though, and “orange” was hard. But it wasn’t until the letters W-H-I-T-E came up that I froze altogether, my throat instantly dry, my mouth awkward and unable to shape the sound as my brain glitched madly, trying to dig up a color that resembled “wuh-haaa.” It was a straight-up choke. I felt a weird airiness in my knees, as if they might buckle. But before they did, Mrs. Burroughs instructed me to sit back down. And that’s exactly when the word hit me in its full and easy perfection. White. Whiiiite. The word was “white.”
Lying in bed that night with my stuffed animals packed around my head, I thought only of “white.” I spelled it in my head, forward and backward, chastising myself for my own stupidity. The embarrassment felt like a weight, like something I’d never shake off, even though I knew my parents wouldn’t care whether I’d read every card correctly. I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I didn’t want to be dismissed as incapable of achieving. I was sure my teacher had now pegged me as someone who couldn’t read or, worse, didn’t try. I obsessed over the dime-sized gold-foil stars that Mrs. Burroughs had given to Teddy and Chiaka that day to wear on their chests as an emblem of their accomplishment, or maybe a sign that they were marked for greatness when the rest of us weren’t. The two of them, after all, had read every last color card without a hitch.
The next morning in class, I asked for a do-over.
When Mrs. Burroughs said no, cheerily adding that we kindergartners had other things to get to, I demanded it.
Pity the kids who then had to watch me face the color cards a second time, going slower now, pausing deliberately to breathe after I’d pronounced each word, refusing to let my nerves short-circuit my brain. And it worked, through “black,” “orange,” “purple,” and especially “white.” I was practically shouting the word “white” before I’d even seen the letters on the card. I like to imagine now that Mrs. Burroughs was impressed with this little black girl who’d found the courage to advocate for herself. I didn’t know whether Teddy and Chiaka had even noticed. I was quick to claim my trophy, though, heading home that afternoon with my head up and one of those gold-foil stars stuck on my shirt.
* * *
At home, I lived in a world of high drama and intrigue, immersing myself in an ever-evolving soap opera of dolls. There were births, feuds, and betrayals. There was hope, hatred, and sometimes sex. My preferred way to pass the time between school and dinner was to park myself in the common area outside my room and Craig’s and spread my Barbies across the floor, spinning out scenarios that felt as real to me as life itself, sometimes inserting Craig’s G.I. Joe action figures into the plotlines. I kept my dolls’ outfits in a child-sized vinyl suitcase covered in a floral print. I assigned every Barbie and every G.I. Joe a personality. I also recruited into service the worn-out alphabet blocks my mother had used years earlier to teach us our letters. They, too, were given names and inner lives.