Chapter 11: Pretty Please
ADSS Presents Genesis
This was a hard lesson for me. Power is a flexible tool of the oppressor. My father’s fear, that he instilled in me, became a weapon of my own demise. In order to stay safe, to feel like home could be normal, I learned to not rock the boat. To keep still. Keep my mouth shut. I learned the definition of silence, before I knew the word. We go way back, I’m guessing to the womb. Those messages travel through spiraled generations. Through life, we watch them bloom.
I did not realize I was out to please. I can remember being a student, I had teachers, I liked to please. In 7th grade, my teacher got sick early on in the school year, we were going to have a sub, for the entire year. Can you imagine our collective excitement as 12 year olds? It was going to be a year of recess. That’s how I imagined it. Like winning gold medal in easiness, every day. Comfort, luxury, no pressure. That is from a dream.
The new teacher, we’ll call her Mrs. G. She was from Canada. I never met an actual Canadian. I’ve been a Raptors fan since a kid, since I loved dinosaurs and basketball back then. When the NBA said it was going to start a team called the Raptors, I thought, perfect, makes sense. Consider me a fan.
Mrs. G and I got along well. I used to like quotes back then. I would like reading Buddhist quotes about peace. Contentment. I would contemplate their meanings. She allowed me to have a quote of the week spot on the board. I would pick one that I was thinking about, and write it in chalk, in the upper-right hand side of the board. We would talk about it as a class at the beginning of the week.
We read The Outsiders together as a class. I enjoyed it. I don’t remember much how the story goes, but I know it’s remembered well.
When I was in high school, I had another teacher, named Ms. T, we’ll call her. She was younger. Around 27. I had a crush on her. I wrote her a long note for Xmas. I don’t remember what it said. It was from the heart though. She let me, be me. I was too afraid to try to do the AP ELA class, so I was with a different group of students for my senior year. I was in the honors track, all 3 years prior.
I could feel the difference. A couple friends from the football team were in my class for the first time. White people, but not the ones I was used to. Not the ones that come from money. The ones, more down to earth, a little more raw.
I had sensibilities with them I noticed. We could kinda, get a long. The distance I felt from my white friends from honors classes, I felt more connection with them. But I was too weird to be one of them.
In that class, a mix of different minds, Ms. T, let me show my creativity. This was right around the height of Chappelle’s show. I wrote a piece, a funny poem, about the KKK. It was influenced by Dave Chapelle’s popular skit, Clayton Bigsby, that showed him as black, Klu Klux Klan member. It was the first time I read something that people laughed at.
She wrote back to me, at the end of the year. She was getting engaged. I was happy for Ms. T. She taught at a prison, before she came to teach us kids from the suburbs. She let us seniors fly kites towards the end of the school year after finishing The Kite Runner. She was a cool teacher. I guess it makes sense why I wanted to please her. I really liked her.
Being a people pleaser only gets you so far. The desire to be liked is alluring. A slithering snake, it is. I chased its tail for a while. I think that’s how I lost myself. Wanting to be accepted, only took me farther from the truth of myself. What may have started as innocent, turned into something self-loathing. What’s around us, makes an impact on what we bend to.
Growing up, having so many white woman as teachers, it was reinforced in my head to view them as caring, motherly people. Something safe. I’m sure if I grew up with all black woman teachers, it would be same for them. This definitely influenced attractions I had over time. And definitely shifts the dynamics of who I sought to please, as a black male, navigating the world.