WORD NERDS: this is NOT your nanay's blog

The N Word

My best friend Lola was African-American. She taught me a lot about why white people and black people didn’t get along, even though in school we always learned about white people freeing black people and other colored people. The stupid boys in the class would say that Lola always wrote about African-American history. I never got to learn about Filipino history in my elementary school textbooks. I would always only ever find one small paragraph at a time about the Philippines and the war they were in. I can’t really remember which one it was. But Lola was lucky because she got to learn about African-Americans during Black History Month or once when our fifth grade class got to see a play about the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I remember that play because Lola was mad when the actors asked the audience to pretend that a character was supposed to be black when they wore a black cloth around their necks and that a character was white when they wore a white cloth around their neck. Black people’s skin is not black. They should be wearing brown, Lola said. I agreed but I was still confused.

Me and Lola and the other girls in our fifth grade class used to bring our lunches to school in our Arctic Zone lunch packs. We used to eat inside with the other kids who got free lunches, but I told my mom that it was easier for me to be with my friends if I just brought my lunch to school. The kids who brought their lunches were only allowed to eat on the benches outside in the sun and since those benches were filled with people we barely knew, we decided to sit on the ground and have a picnic-style lunch. Lola and I always ate lunch with Melissa, Ruben, Katie, Jenna, Alex and Corina.

Katie and Jenna were the leaders of our group. They didn’t live in our neighborhood and their parents were always able to pick them up right after school. Sometimes Jenna’s mom would eat lunch with us. Katie and Jenna always got us together to hang out and get ice cream together during lunch time and we would always follow them. The one time no one ever followed them but followed Lola and I was when Jenna called Lola the N word for no reason at all when they were playing together. I guess Jenna got mad at Lola, but that doesn’t give her the right to say that word. Didn’t she pay attention when we were learning history? That word was not supposed to be used anymore. I hope she got in trouble with her mom.

All of our friends huddled and hugged Lola because we wanted to comfort her and stop her from crying. That was the first time I had ever seen my best friend cry! It was as if the world stopped spinning and my heart stopped beating because I always just knew that Lola was such a strong girl. Everyone else knew it too.

Labels: Sandra Cisneros, storytime, vignettes

// posted by Janice @ 11:12 PM