Chapter One

The Mother's Mark

I read voraciously in the autumns, winters, springs, and summers before I graduated from sixth grade. I consumed library books, magazines, newspapers, and trashy, sexually explicit novels that I borrowed surreptitiously from the shelf of my mother's closet. Later, during high school, two books --A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, and The End of the Road, by John Barth--emerged from the mountain of texts I'd encountered to become my manuals. Compelled alternately by Papa's brooding cynicism and JB's broad, bawdy satire, I vacillated between the two novels' disparate representations of their protagonists' lack of faith in modes of thought that had been normative for pre-World War I, premodern Western societies. Hemingway' s novel seemed to emphasize the importance of limited human connection despite its difficulties, whereas Barth's suggested that even limited connections were, if not impossible, potentially disastrous.

So by the spring semester of my sophomore year at Brandeis, when I encountered The Bluest Eye near the end of a class on twentieth-century Afro-American literature, I was already passionate about, and familiar with, the secular art of close, personal narrative scrutiny. After a semester spent reading, discussing, and skimming critical writings on canonical texts including Native Son and Invisible Man, I knew that Wright's and Ellison's were at the top of a very short list of quintessential moments in black expressivity. Still, my cursory first readings did not lead me to recognize these novels as aesthetic accomplishments or savvy representations of black life as I'd experienced it.

However, elements of Toni Morrison's novel hooked me immediately: its critical appropriation of the Dick-and-Jane primer; its prefatory emphasis on reconstructing what Claudia, its first-person narrator, terms not the "why" but the "how" of black female degradation; and that narrator's failed efforts to intervene to save the degraded subject--Pecola--from psychic fragmentation and social death. Soon after reading this novel, I became desperate to understand the analytical implications of Morrison's formal experimentation. Precisely what were the motivations for and the impact of her use of two narrators? Her decision to name the four sections of the novel after the seasons beginning, like the calendar of school-age children--and their teachers--with autumn? Her prefacing each of the sections narrated by the omniscient narrator with one of the sentences from the primer? And how, exactly, are the dual narrative voices connected to Pecola's schizophrenic splitting into two voices after she is raped by her father?

Also, I was mesmerized by the self-conscious revisions by a now-mature Claudia of her life. Although I recognized thatThe Bluest Eye had much in common thematically with Ellison's and Wright's representations of the difficulties of black male maturation, the male-authored novels lacked for me what I found so vital in Morrison's novel: a quality of urgent, mournful, and revisionary remembrance.

That compulsion to reconsider the past is most clearly evinced early in the novel in a passage that Claudia offers just after describing a particularly difficult bout with the flu to which her mother responds in typically brusque fashion. Significantly, this reconsideration does not require that Claudia reject her childhood interpretation and, with it, any hope that the reader will seriously consider the plausibility of her youthful perspectives on a range of matters. Rather, it is offered as an expansion and extension of her previous views of the sources and consequences of her childhood pain.

But was it really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly. Or rather, it was a productive and fructifying pain. Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I could smell it--taste it--sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen at its base--everywhere in that house. It stuck, along with my tongue, to the frosted windowpanes. It coated my chest, along with the salve, and when the flannel came undone in my sleep, the clear, sharp curves of air outlined its presence on my throat. And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die. (14)

In addition to the sorts of questions it raised about the novel's own designs, this passage suggested for me the potential psychological and emotional benefits of reexamining one's past as a knowledgeable, articulate adult armed with greater insight and a workable, clearly defined agenda. To revisit joyful and painful experiences with remnants of a child's heart and an informed angle of vision,The Bluest Eye suggested to me as an eighteen-year-old college sophomore, is to open up the possibilities of remaking myself and, perhaps, others.

Beyond her desire to find "fructifying" value in her painful experiences, this bruised, inquisitive child writes to recall her failed efforts to legitimize the life of her friend, Pecola, who goes mad because nearly everyone she encounters uses her as a scapegoat. She is mistreated by her shamelessly self-centered parents, gossiping women who blame her for being the target of her father's perverse desires, a gang of boys who ritualistically surround and hurl racialized insults at her, and Claudia herself, who acknowledges her participation in the community's efforts to confirm its own tenuous sense of self worth by reinforcing Pecola's pronounced feelings of worthlessness. A narrative of strategic recollection,The Bluest Eye suggests that Claudia re-members the past because of her need to atone for her contributions, benign though they may have been, to Pecola's demise.

It hardly mattered to me that Claudia was a fictional girl, and I was not. That she came of age in the pre-civil rights forties, and I in the revolutionary sixties and seventies. That she lived in a small, nondescript city in the Midwest, and I grew up in Philadelphia, the cradle of American liberty, the place where assiduously preserved monuments of the nation's origins can seem to overwhelm the clearest signals of the wide gulf between national rhetoric and self-evident truths like slavery and sexism. What mattered was that Claudia thought, deeply, self-consciously, about the connections between the past and the present, between herself and Pecola. I loved Claudia because I recognized that her struggles were my struggles, including the struggle to figure out how to situate oneself in relation to a community's simultaneously self-protective and injurious values.

Perhaps reading Morrison's first novel placed me irretrievably on the road to becoming a scholar of Afro-American literature. Certainly, after reading Claudia's efforts, I began self-consciously to consider the pliability of the meanings of the past.

While Morrison'sThe Bluest Eye uses the cyclicality of seasons to structure its narrative, I've organized the sections of my own acts of autobiographical recall around occasions of institutional disengagement. These occasions, called alternately graduation (emphasizing the division of one's academic career--one's life in school--into marked, measurable categories) and commencement (the commemorative recognition of a new scholastic beginning), invite reassessments and recollections of the self one was and the self one has become as a result of experiences in institutions from which one is about to depart. My sense of the interpretive significance of commencements began at the end of sixth grade, when I first arrived at the inescapable conclusion that, like the past, present, and future, my personal and institutional lives were inextricably bound together.

On the mid-June 1970 morning of my graduation from George Washington Elementary School, I looked as good from head to toe as I ever had. My typically unkempt hair, which I'd gotten cut into an attractive short Afro the evening before, was oiled and combed. My brown Easter suit pants had creases so sharp I was sure that I could use them to slice any neighborhood hardrock who crossed my path. My chocolate brown shoes were polished and shining, and my brown clip-on tie topped off what I thought was an impressive ensemble. Looking me over, my mother nodded approvingly, and Carol, who switched effortlessly from older sister to maternal surrogate when our mother was drinking, marveled at the fact that I'd remembered to lotion my typically ashy face and hands. "See you at graduation," my mother said to me as I left the apartment to gather with my classmates before our mile-long walk to historic Mother Bethel Church.

Bethel, the "mother" parish that spawned hundreds of African Methodist churches across the country, was founded in 1816 by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, black Philadelphia ministers who'd objected to the confinement of black worshipers to the balconies of white churches. I'd heard that Reverend Allen, in particular, was so beloved by his congregation that the church's members saw fit to encase his mummified remains in a crypt in the basement of the church. Apparently because of Bethel's historical significance and Rittenhouse Square location, the local ABC television station had assigned a camera crew and a reporter to cover the proceedings. When we heard this news at our final rehearsal, my classmates and I whispered excitedly to one another, thrilled that our graduation would serve as the concluding, feel-good section of the broadcast.

Mother Bethel is located four blocks from where I'd lived until I was nine, and about a block from McCall, the elementary school my siblings and I had previously attended. McCall served, in addition to some poor black kids who lived on the borders of the district, a ritzy Rittenhouse Square population, the children of doctors, lawyers, and various other affluent white professionals. Walking the final four blocks between George Washington and Mother Bethel--institutions with distinct parental claims on me (as an American citizen who hadn't begun to question the nationalistic rhetoric I'd been force-fed at school and elsewhere, and as a black Philadelphian who was at least vaguely aware of the self-righteous ferocity of civil rights and Black Power battles)--I traversed familiar streets, passing familiar stores, bus stops, and the newly refurbished playground whose former state of disrepair had made me hesitant to enter it before we moved.

The familiarity was comforting. Assuming the role of tour guide, I was uncharacteristically talkative, pointing out landmarks to my classmates, for whom these streets were largely unexplored territory, and to Miss Davis. Miss Davis was a thin woman with shoulder-length blond hair that she wore in a ponytail. She came to class decked, as the fashion of the day dictated, in wild-colored miniskirts and dresses and thin black boots that reached the bottom of her bony knees. She was a marvelous teacher blessed with boundless energy, a smoky, southern twang like Liz Taylor on a hot tin roof, and the gumption to use any and all standard teaching paraphernalia--especially thick, unfinished yardsticks and pokers--to keep the most rambunctious boys and, on occasion, girls in line.

I'd come to Miss Davis's class a year ahead of schedule because in the fall of 1968, during my first term in George Washington, my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Robinson, recognized that I already knew all of the material she was supposed to teach me that year. I'd been a good student at my previous school, McCall, but I knew that a number of my classmates there were probably more intelligent and certainly more studious than I was. I got skipped not because I'd become appreciably smarter during the summer between third and fourth grade but because I'd moved from the outskirts of a largely white, upper-middle-class school district with an excellent elementary school to an overwhelmingly black housing project and school where the resources, parental involvement, and scholastic expectations were palpably inferior.

My gregariousness during our graduation day walk seemed to surprise and please Miss Davis, whose constant prodding of me to answer questions in class suggested that she thought of me as shy or as someone who preferred anonymity to the pressures of ostentatious display. Certainly, I was typically quiet in class as I pondered with equal seriousness such topics as how to improve my basketball game and why my mother drank so much.

In many ways my activities were "normal"--I played freeze tag and climbed the always chilly, dome-shaped monkey bars; I played basketball until I was bone tired, collected all of the cards the loose change I could find would buy, and paid close attention to radio broadcasts and Daily News stories about the 76ers, especially my favorite player, Hal Greer; and I dreamed sweet dreams nearly every night about my classmate Denise. I greeted Denise each school day with a quick wave, a shy smile, and an unexpressed longing that one day she, too, would recognize that we were soul mates.

Despite that surface normalcy, I was always aware of feeling what one of my friends recently called, in describing me, a profound sense of melancholy. I was a pouty, teary-eyed boy, unable to assume a happy-go-lucky attitude or to shake the sadness of remembered and unremembered life experiences. I was aware of constantly trying to prepare myself for the next trauma, the next disappointment, the next conflict, resigned to the inevitability of serious, all-consuming, long-lasting pain, and hoping merely for the wherewithal to survive it.

That is not to say that I was unmoved by subtle and not so subtle pleasures of my life: there was the repressed delight I felt during an exhibition in my neighborhood when Hal Greer observed my jump shot and told me that I had "good form"; the tantalizing chill of waking from unremembered wet dreams; the soothing shelter of the unconditional love of my grandparents, whose laughter--hers a sweet, girlish chuckle, his an infectious, high-pitched, down-home cackle--continues to represent the sounds of joy for me; the salty sting of Wise potato chips, four bags of which my mother purchased for her children during each late-night trip with Mr. Freddy to find "some cold beer"; the sadistic satisfaction of squashing pregnant roaches; and the camaraderie my siblings and I shared as survivors of our ongoing war with my mother's alcoholism.

However, none of these pleasures penetrated my psyche for long or deepened my understanding of what it meant for me to be alive in the world. More often than not, even when I was luxuriating under its influence, I would ponder the appropriateness of my lingering too long over anything that suggested pleasure. Was Hal's comment about my form his stock line for ghetto urchins? Were my grandparents really as happy with each other or with us as they seemed? Should I eat potato chips purchased during my mother's journeys to satisfy her alcoholic urges? Did unborn roaches, huddled uncomfortably together in their tannish rectangular sacks like frightened slaves in the bowels of menacing ships, feel pain when I squashed the life out of their mothers? And would my siblings and I have been as close if our mother didn't have a drinking problem?

But more than any other subject, I pondered the origins, appearance, and consequences of my burn. Other mothers (and fathers) in my neighborhood abused alcohol, other families were on welfare and were as poor as mine, other fathers had deserted their families, other mothers lived with abusive men to whom they were not married. While my poverty and our familial situation were painful, certainly they weren't unique. But my burn was, or at least seemed to be. It was my distinguishing mark, what I learned in high school to think of as my Hemingwayesque wound, a tangible standard of deviation, a symbol and a partial explanation of my deep childhood suffering.

Despite my physical imperfections, I'd been told often enough that I was cute by adult female relatives and friends of my mother to believe that I probably was. Certainly, I never felt traumatized by the prevalence of images of standardized white beauty. (I had sleep-disturbing crushes on white girls in my predominantly white second- and third-grade classes, and I developed equally intense and generally unrequited feelings for black girls when I was a student at predominantly black elementary and junior high schools.) More debilitating than being poor, and certainly more of a problem than being black, was the fact that I was permanently disfigured when I was two years old.

I was always--am always--aware of my burn. For as long as I can remember, I've felt it, like a strained muscle whose dull ache reminds you of its traumatic condition. Perhaps because of nerve damage that occurred when layers of skin and inches of hair on the left side of my face were permanently singed off, my burn throbs, pulsates, and demands recognition of its existence from me. It is as though time had anesthetized my forehead, allowing me to constantly feel the contents of the pan roll naggingly down my face.

As closely as I can reconstruct it--and, fortunately, I have no firsthand recollection of the incident--I got burned because of my curiosity, hunger, and impatience: I wanted so much to see, eat, and be filled by the chicken my mother was frying that I pulled the cast-iron pan in which it was cooking down from the hotplate my mother was using and onto my upturned forehead. The scalding liquid peeled layers of skin from my entire forehead, made its way down the upper left side of my face, left a dime-sized spot amidst the hair just above and in front of my left ear, and stopped at my left cheekbone. The chicken grease then slid onto my left shoulder and forearm, my right hand, and my upper stomach, secondary areas where the marks have faded partially or fully.

Compared to the damage done to burn victims I've seen-- their vision and use of limbs significantly impaired, their entire faces covered by hideous scars--my accident caused minimal physical damage. Still, I've never achieved a healthy level of acceptance of my disfiguring mark and have told my wife, only half jokingly, that instead of buying a red sports car at the peak of my upcoming midlife crisis, I'd go to a plastic surgeon and beg him to cover up the scars on my face and make me beautiful.

When I was a child, people made fun of my burn constantly. My siblings extemporized a verse, a nonsense song whose words--"It ain't one thing but the next best thing to a ... Burnt Duck!" -- often made me cry and inspired me to locate their easily insultable imperfections. Several kids in the neighborhood teased me mercilessly. To some, I was Burnside (Raymond Burr's wheelchair-bound detective was popular then); others called me Peanut Roaster, or Bernie Dolan. I heard these names everywhere I went: in elevators, in the school yard, in class, on the basketball court. "I'm hungry, boy. Why don't you give me some of that fried chicken?" "It's burning up over there, huh, boy?" "Guess that grease didn't fry all your brains, huh?" "Bring it on, Burnside, and I'll slap the ball 'gainst your greasy head!"

My burn came to define my community identity. I wasn't the skinny, big-headed, sad-faced boy who got skipped, or even one of the drunk lady's sons. In a sense, I was my burn. Because I was also struggling with other problems that threatened my sense of self-confidence, this teasing made me consider the depth of my "inferiority complex," to use the psychiatric designation my mother learned from talk radio and employed to describe her own lack of self-esteem when she was growing up.

Being deemed intelligent by my teachers helped me to maintain a degree of self-confidence and reinforced my own tendency to find rational rather than violent means of dealing with my problems and my surroundings. However, as I searched for reasoned responses, I knew that even the most pronounced evidence of school smarts could not protect me from the sting of insults from members of my community who did not themselves deem my admittedly ephemeral advantages to be significant at all, or certainly not sufficient to level the social playing field. All that my minimal self-confidence did for me in the face of these insults was to keep me from being crushed by them. I learned the art of silent self-protection, of silence as self-protection.

We'd moved in June 1968, two months after I had an eye operation to improve the apparent focus and vision of my lazy right eye, and a week after I completed third grade at McCall. My mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freddy, a short, wavy-haired, good-looking man who had "Mom" and a faded red heart tattooed on his right upper arm, loaded our belongings onto the truck he used to transport furniture for a variety of Center City antique stores and drove them about a mile and a half from a roach-infested apartment building on Ninth Street near Lombard to the Southwark Housing Projects.

Southwark is a four-square city block complex, completed in 1961, that consists of three twenty-five-story high-rises and roughly four hundred strategically placed two- and three-story houses. Though we arrived in the projects less than a decade after they opened, signs of deterioration, infestation, and decay were everywhere. The first such sign I detected was the graffiti-lined elevator we commandeered to take us up to our nineteenth-floor apartment. On the floor of the elevator was a pool of rancid urine that trembled like jostled, not quite coagulated Jell-O.

Despite the sight and smell of the elevator, we were all well aware that Southwark was a significant step up. It provided us relative spaciousness--a living room, a dining area separate from the kitchen, three bedrooms, and a fenced-in porch with a spectacular view of South Philly--along with a large playground just across the street. As the rusty cables of the elevator slowly pulled us up to our new apartment, I looked at the nervous smiles on the faces of my family members and hoped that the hard times connected with our cramped former space might be ending.

During that walk to Mother Bethel, I thought of those times: of my father's savage beatings of my mother (incidents she told her children about so frequently that I felt I'd been a silent witness to them); of the first boyfriend of hers I remember, Mr. Cisco, slamming a hammer against her skull in a fit of calculated rage; of my mother knocking me unconscious with a thick, curved leg of our broken table in response to some now forgotten transgression.

But mainly I thought of the fun my siblings and I had: of laughing giddily as we used our communal bed as a trampoline until Mr. George's or Miss Fanny's voice rose up menacingly through the floor and commanded us to stop; of listening endlessly to the Temptations' "I Wish It Would Rain" and Marvin and Tammi's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough"--the two 45s we owned--on our cheap record player; of going with Ricky across the street to the apartment of my mother's friend, whom we called Aunt Naomi, to watch Thor and Fantastic Four cartoons on the color television that dominated her perfumed bedroom; of teasing Debby for carrying our pet bunny around by its ears and, we were convinced, eventually killing it; and of acting out a play about a damsel-in-distress that Carol directed, with Debby as the damsel with no line to remember except "Help," and Ricky and me alternating in the roles of the brave, handsome prince and the mean palace guard the prince must battle to free her. While the guard's role provided an occasion to scowl menacingly and to improvise grunts, groans, insults, and angles of attack, the prince got to save the damsel and to say the wonderful lines "Hark, I hear a cry. It is from the Princess of Nottingham. I must save her at once."

Less than a week earlier, my worthiness to accompany my classmates on this walk to this historic American site had been called into question. Along with two of my buddies, Bobby and Skeeter, I was reprimanded and sent home for the day by my school's genial white principal, Mr. Williams, because we veered off our typical center-stairway path and walked down the hallway of the darkened second-floor wing where the classrooms of the predominantly white population of severely handicapped children were located.

As we neared the unfamiliar stairway on the south side of the building, we were accosted by a loud, deep, menacing voice that ordered us to stop. When we turned around, we saw a tall, thin, wispy-haired white man in his thirties rushing toward us.

"What are you doing here?" he shouted at us.

"Here where?"

"In this hallway."

"Going to Miss Davis's class."

"You have no business being in this section of the school. Our students have done nothing to you, and cannot defend themselves. Why must you continue to pick on them?"

"Huh? We was just going to class. We're in the sixth grade, and our rooms are right upstairs from here."

"Come with me. We're going to see Mr. Williams or Mr. Boyd or someone with the authority to prevent you from harassing these poor children."

As we walked to the principal's office, I thought of my mother's constant admonitions against making fun of the weaknesses of others. She was forced to remind us frequently because disability--physical and psychological--was so rampant in the Southwark projects. There was an elderly Parkinson's sufferer whom kids called Shaky, whose involuntary head, hand, and arm movements seemed exacerbated by his heavy drinking. And Miss Katie, whose vision had been burned away by lye thrown in her eyes by an angry lover with whom she continued to live and on whom she'd become totally dependent. And Tiptop, rumored to have gone insane during a tour in Vietnam, who structured his life around brisk, aimless wanderings through South and Central Philadelphia in wild, clashing, thrift shop polyester outfits and, judging by the gingerness of his steps, painful platform shoes. And the pleasant widower who walked his small dog in the playground near the baseball field, who couldn't speak above a whisper because, unlike Mr. Cisco, he had survived cancer of the throat. And the throngs of old folks whose limbs had given out and who traveled up and down on elevators and across our urban jungle on canes, crutches, walkers, and wheelchairs in various states of repair.

Constant, desensitizing encounters with these imperfect bodies, my acute sense of my own imperfections, and the regular public spectacle of my mother, inebriated, swaying in a whiskey- and wine-soaked breeze, squashed any inclination I might otherwise have had to stare at, make fun of, or harass anyone.

My mother was the first parent to arrive, her face a mask of stern sobriety for which I was grateful. When she sat down next to me, I gave her a cautious half smile, which she didn't return.

"What happened, Michael?"

"Nothing, Mommy. We was just walking through the hall and this dumb teacher thought we were gonna do something to those retards."

"We who?" She looked around and noticed Bobby, whom she recognized as the skinny little boy who lived in the first floor of our building, and Skeeter, whom she'd never seen before.

"Oh. What retards?"

Just then, the principal's office door opened, and Mr. Williams stepped out, greeting my mother with a wide smile, and motioned to us to enter his office.

"Miss Awkward, please come in. You, too, young man." Grabbing her elbow, he guided her to a chair near his desk.

"Mr. Williams, what's my son done?"

He told her of the teacher's suspicions, and of the verbal abuse repeatedly heaped upon the disabled children by the school's able-bodied population. After informing my mother that he'd decided to send us home, he looked directly at me. "Michael, you've been an exceptional student here, but if you get into any more trouble, I'll be forced to hold you back a grade. You're younger than your classmates, which means that you may be too easily influenced. Maybe you need another year with us before you move on to junior high. Do you understand?"

Because he had acknowledged that my friends and I had committed no major infraction, and because I was a good student with a spotless disciplinary record, his threat seemed excessive. But I was well aware of the cards he was holding. I had been skipped, and he had the power to unskip me.

"Yes, Mr. Williams, I understand."

He stood up quickly and showed us to the door. "Thanks for coming, Miss Awkward. If your son doesn't get into any more trouble this week, I'm sure I'll see you at graduation."

I waved to Bobby and Skeeter as my mother and I left the office. "Mommy," I said after we got off of school grounds, "he ain't gonna keep me back just 'cause I was walking down that hall, is he? That's not fair, you know? It's not."

"I guess he's got enough bad boys to deal with without having to start worrying about you, too. Don't you think?"

"I guess so. But I'm not bad."

"I know, Michael Cycle. But you got to be careful. You understand?"

I knew that my mother meant that I needed to monitor my behavior generally, not merely avoid repeating this particular infraction, but I replied, "I know I'm not walking down that hallway again!" She smiled a quick, close-mouthed smile, then tried to repress a giggle that turned into a hearty laugh. "No, I guess you won't, huh?"

I smiled, in spite of myself.

We arrived at Mother Bethel a half hour before the luncheon and graduation ceremonies were scheduled to begin, prompting one of the church's staff members to invite all one hundred or so of us on a tour of the church's basement. Figuring that it was more problematic to compromise my sensitive nasal passages and sharp appearance than my reputation, I joined the enthusiastic boys and girls who gleefully followed the woman. But on confronting the basement's stench, dust, spiderwebs, mildew, and, finally, Reverend Allen's crypt, I quickly retraced my steps and devised my excuse: if anyone asked, I'd say I had to go to the bathroom.

When I got back upstairs, relatives and friends of the graduates had begun to arrive. Soon thereafter, my classmates returned from their foolish encounter with dust and death and were pointed toward their assigned seats in the rows of tables on which we would eat and view the proceedings.

I can remember a few details about the ceremony quite vividly. I recall that our assistant principal, Mr. Boyd, announced that the news crew scheduled to film part of our graduation had been called to cover an important breaking story. I remember marveling at the variety of cameras that mothers, fathers, aunts, and family friends brought with them to record this moment in their children's lives. Also, I recall wondering, as people finished their food and had their paper plates and plastic utensils removed, when, and in what condition, my mother was going to arrive.

After Mr. Williams welcomed the relatives and friends of the graduates and briefly discussed the highlights of the school year, the doors to the church opened, and in stepped my mother and one of her friends, whom my siblings and I called Aunt Minnie.

When they stumbled into the center of the church, holding onto each other for support and loudly whispering to each other to be quiet, I wanted to disappear, even if it meant joining Reverend Allen's remains in the dusty basement. I turned my head momentarily away from the spectacle and stared blankly ahead, unable to focus my vision or my thoughts. When I summoned the courage to look around, they had settled into the only easily accessible empty seats that were to the right of the makeshift stage, and I convinced myself that my mother's entrance had made no impact on anyone but me. The assembled crowd kept on smiling, drinking warm water, picking at bitter fruit cups with plastic forks they'd neglected to give to the waitresses, and listening intently to Mr. Williams.

A few minutes later, we were asked to line up to receive our diplomas, and I was grateful for this sign that the proceedings were almost over. As we waited for our names to be called, a few of my male classmates remarked on my mother's inebriation. "Your moms is flying, huh, Mike?" "She fucked up, man!" "Damn, Michael, she more buzzed than a mothafucka!" "I wish I could get me some of that shit she been drinking!" I stared straight ahead, trying to ignore them and to suppress the tears welling up in my eyes. And as my name was called, I walked up to Mr. Williams, wiped my eyes, shook his hand, and smiled briefly at him. I heard him say, "Good job, young man," as I stepped away from him and walked back to my seat.

After he'd given diplomas to all of the assembled students, Mr. Williams announced a surprise final event: acknowledging the performances of the five students who'd scored above the national average on the California Achievement Test. The student with the highest overall score would receive a gold medal with the raised profile of our school's namesake, the nation's first president, and a check for five dollars. "Let me now call the names of the students, who should come up, face the audience, and receive our heartfelt congratulations."

I heard my name called first, followed by Doris's, DeWayne's, Marty's, and Stanley's. As I walked up, I saw my mother stand up, and I heard her exclaim, "That's my son! My son! My baby boy! Minnie, he got skipped last year, hear? So he's younger than the rest of his class, and look at him!"

I felt the tears well up again. As my classmates joined me, I tried to read their responses to my mother's audible chattering and to being singled out in this unexpected manner. In vain, I searched among the Christian icons prominently displayed around the room for a soothing or analogous image, but my three years of studying Catholic catechism taught me, if nothing else, that comparing my suffering with Christ's represented the height of self-absorption. I couldn't block out my mother's slurred words, which I heard distinctly above the applause. "He just got skipped, hear, and he's still one of the smartest in his class!"

(Continues...)