THIS SEAT IS FOR YOU (Sinister Wisdom)
Back in 1980s Brooklyn, I thought writing was something for wealthy white people with too much time on their hands. It was then, when I was in early girlhood, I learned that I was to make a living for myself, while nursing a baby and husband. Like Mama who was a legal secretary caring for me and crack-addicted Daddy. Mrs. Huxtable who lawyered while schooling five kids and cleaning up after Cliff’s mess. And, Raj and Dee’s Mama who was a maid and worked relentlessly to get Raj, Rerun and Dwayne out of all those jams. But, being a writer wasn’t a thing to aspire to. Not for us poverty-born Black girls. Being a writer, it seemed, was a thing only for Jessica Fletcher and other phantom white folk from whom I was worlds apart.
Each day when the dismissal bell sounded and I jumped into the single-file classroom line, Mrs. Powell marched my third-grade class toward the school’s exit. Outside of Brooklyn’s Public School 139, kids bounced about, played tag and tossed balls, eluding parents for end-of-school fun. I bypassed them all, following Mama’s before-school-orders to, “Head straight to the library and wait for your father to pick you up.”
The library was around the corner from the schoolyard. It was my favorite place to be. Once there, I hunted out the day’s treasure—a book by R.L. Stine, Ann M. Martin or Edward L. Stratemeyer. I’d plop onto a plastic yellow chair and perch my book stack on a corner table. Page after page pulled me deeper into imagination. But page after page also let me down. While I loved the adventures that Goosebumps, The Babysitters Club and The Hardy Boys presented, those books—and all the others I pulled from the library shelves—didn’t reflect the crack epidemic that flamed around me. They didn’t conjure my community, our faces, our slang, our blocks. In their pages, I didn’t see myself.
