WHEN I WAS five, I couldn’t blend. Although I’d been reading since age three—the result of my mother’s diligent schooling each night when she came home from work—if I came across the word tree I pronounced it “ree.” Even my last name, Brooks, became “rooks.” Mama went to a bookstore and got a book on consonant blends and tutored me for a year. Then she had me tested for a gifted program, and instead of going to school in Harlem—where we lived—my sister and I rode the bus with her for an hour and a half every morning to a public school on the Upper West Side with a mostly Jewish student population. She’d drop me off at my classroom door, and then she’d take the subway to work at the Hallowells’.
My sister, Rachel, was not the student I was, though, and the bus trip was draining for all of us. So for second grade, we moved back to our old school in Harlem. I spent a year being dulled at all my bright edges, which devastated Mama. When she told her boss, Ms. Mina got me an interview at Dalton. It was the private school her daughter, Christina, attended, and they were looking for diversity. I received a full scholarship, stayed at the top of my class, received prizes at every assembly, and worked like mad to reward my mama’s faith in me. While Rachel made friends with kids in our neighborhood, I knew no one. I didn’t really fit in at Dalton, and I definitely didn’t fit in in Harlem. As it turned out, I was a straight-A student who still couldn’t blend.
There were a few students who invited me to their houses—girls who said things like “You don’t talk like you’re Black!” or “I don’t think of you that way!” Of course, none of those girls ever came to visit me in Harlem. There was always a conflicting dance class, a family commitment, too much homework. Sometimes I imagined them, with their silky blond hair and braces, walking past the check casher on the corner of the street where I lived. It was like picturing a polar bear in the tropics, and I never let myself think on it long enough to wonder if that was how they saw me, at Dalton.
When I got into Cornell, and many others from my school didn’t, I couldn’t help but hear the whispers. It’s because she’s Black. Never mind that I had a 3.87 average, that I’d done well on my SATs. Never mind that I could not afford to go to Cornell, and would instead be taking the full ride offered me by SUNY Plattsburgh. “Baby,” my mama said, “it’s not easy for a Black girl to want. You have to show them you’re not a Black girl. You’re Ruth Brooks.” She would squeeze my hand. “You are going to get everything good that’s coming to you—not because you beg for it, and not because of what color you are. Because you deserve it.”
I know I wouldn’t have become a nurse if my mama hadn’t worked so hard to put me smack in the middle of the path of a good education. I also know that I decided long ago to try to circumvent some of the problems I had, when it came to my own child. So when Edison was two, my husband and I made the choice to move to a white neighborhood with better schools, even though that meant we would be one of the only families of color in the area. We left our apartment near the railroad tracks in New Haven, and after having multiple listings “disappear” when the realtor found out what we looked like, we finally found a tiny place in the more affluent community of East End. I enrolled Edison in a preschool there, so that he started at the same time as all the other kids, and no one could see him as an outsider. He was one of them, from the start. When he wanted to have his friends over for a sleepover, no parent could say it was too dangerous an area for their kid to visit. It was, after all, their neighborhood, too.
And it worked. My, how it worked. It took me advocating for him at first—making sure that he had teachers who noticed his intelligence as well as his skin color—but as a result, Edison is in the top three of his class. He’s a National Merit Scholar. He is going to college and he will be anything he wants to be.
I’ve spent my life making sure of it.
When I get home from work, Edison is doing his homework at the kitchen table. “Hey, baby,” I say, leaning down to kiss the top of his head. I can only do that now when he’s seated. I still remember the moment I realized he was taller than me; how strange it felt to reach my arms up instead of down, to know that someone I’d been supporting his whole life was in a position to support me.
He doesn’t glance up. “How was work?”
I paste a smile on my face. “You know. Same old.”
I shrug off my coat, pick up Edison’s jacket from where it’s been slung on the back of the couch, and hang them both in the closet. “I’m not running a cleaning service here—”
“Then leave it where it was!” Edison explodes. “Why does everything have to be my fault?” He shoves away from the table so fast that he nearly knocks over his chair. Leaving his computer and his open notebook behind, he storms out of the kitchen. I hear the door of his bedroom slam.
This is not my boy. My boy is the one who carries groceries up three flights of stairs for old Mrs. Laska, without her even having to ask. My boy is the one who always holds open the door for a lady, who says please and thank you, who still keeps in his nightstand every birthday card I’ve ever written him.