The preteen boys jiggled and swung on the platform, their bodies bumping against the guardrails. They don’t bother me.
The ratatat-tat of the shatterproof glass by my seat window doesn’t bother me. A drunken man stumbles around, like a cripple, but I don’t care. He gets on board, and I keep to myself.
I’ve got my books, my studies to protect me. I’m taking American Lit. We’re studying that attic-dwelling chick, the one who always wrote about death. Foster kids get to go to college for free. It’s a little-known secret, so don’t spread it, or everyone will want to get into the system.
The next stop arrives, and I happen to glance up. A little girl walks alongside her mother from a distance, like G and M in the alphabet. The mother is angry, already ten steps ahead, as the child slips through the closing doors.
The mother snaps, slinging the girl across the seat like a ball off a paddle. “Sit your bony ass down,” she hisses, depositing the girl across from her.
The smell of alcohol hangs thick in the air. The woman’s hair is dyed orange, dry and brittle, looking ready to be chopped into cornmeal. She wears a cheap, stained shirt, and her bra straps hang out — dirty, like she never bothered to wash them. The shape of her body is spilling out of her dungarees. It’s not her poverty that embarrasses me, or even the fact that she drinks during the day — it’s the lack of love for her daughter.
I bow my head, but I can’t help but look again. The girl’s pitch-black eyes remind me of myself. Her clothes are too small for her thin body — high-water pants, tight and worn, covered in lint. She’s darker than a brown paper bag, with thick, wide African nostrils and unkempt hair. The cruelest thing you can do to a black girl is not fix her hair. This girl’s hair was especially damaged from neglect. Black hair is deceptive — it looks wiry and tough, but it breaks easily when it’s not cared for. After all these years, there’s still a patch in my hair that won’t grow.
The car jolts as we enter the tunnel, the chain hook rattling.
“Mommy, what if the train goes in the wrong tunnel?” the girl asks.
Her mother snaps, “Shut the hell up, I ain’t got time for your foolishness.”
At the next stop, the tracks are hot. A rat as big as a cat struts across them. For a second, my mother’s face morphs with this woman’s. I see her fresh like the flash of a knife slicing through stars with steel stillness — the blade blood-stained, tear-stained. If I had a death wish, I’d walk up to that mother and tell her she should smile at her girl. Pretend she has golden hair instead of dark skin. Pretend her name is Colleen or Jenny, not the ghetto name you gave her, a name that even the other ghetto girls think is too ghetto.
I can’t study Dickinson anymore. I’ve never done drugs, but right then, I think I’d like to try something — Crystal meth, maybe, or at least marijuana, then methadone.
Maybe that’ll numb my mind.
I think even more, and I wish I were dead, like my father. Found on the North
Side, a gun cold and heavy in his stiffening hand.
Being in the system took me South, to a place where doctors, lawyers, professionals, and professors outnumbered the hustlers, whiners, and prostitutes. Until I was 10, I lived in various HUD buildings. The last one was condemned by neglect, and the residents let it fall apart piece by piece. I remember how the fiberglass ate at me alive, how I had to dig myself out from under the wreckage like I was in some disaster film.
I study this woman, as she sucks her teeth and rolls her eyes, scowling at her daughter and anyone else who dares to look her way.
(The NAACP sued the school district because the kids were coming to school shoeless and smelling of urine. The school even had a great Christmas play, but no parents showed up. The solution? Buy more buses — 500 inner-city kids sent out to the suburbs. Talk about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.)
I never found out the girl’s name, and in the litany of life’s guardians, I wanted to lock her in a box marked “fragile.” The next stop comes, and I feel my arm jerk — my shoulder aches.
I watch the girl being pushed, cursed at, and dragged along.
I wouldn’t call what I witness ignorance or even hatred — it’s just tradition.
Allison Whittenberg is an award winning novelist and playwright. Her poetry has appeared in Columbia Review, Feminist Studies, J Journal, and New Orleans Review. Whittenberg is a six-time Pushcart Prize nominee. They Were Horrible Cooks is her collection of poetry.
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