ABSTRACT
After one of the regular trips to the prof’s office for a one-on-one conference, Mike always said stuff like, “He got the power in here, but I’ll kick his punk ass outside.” That prof had a way of crossing all the life out of our papers with his red pen. I dreaded that. Of course, now I know that standardized American English is not the possession of any one group and can be used by any citizen as a tool of empowerment. It was not presented to me as something that strong conscious Black people could help to shape. I didn’t see it as a tool of empowerment and nobody was showing me how I could make it my own. I wanted to know why the White kids that we sat next to (the niggers in Farber’s words) didn’t have the same kind of grades we had, Mike and me. Before I found out, I had some living to do. (That’s the other book I mentioned.)
Now I was back and desperate to stay in school. I had two babies, and I was on welfare. I never liked the stigma attached to welfare, so my goal was to go to school, try the American way, and get a “good job.” Maybe teach school or something-I didn’t know for sure. I just felt that I was smart, and never really found out I was illiterate until I went to college and got placed into dummy English. And, yes, everybody knew it as dummy English. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get a degree and a job. I was working in the school library on workstudy, at the reserve desk. I had been in all the houses in my neighborhood now and came back to school for refuge. Dr P came into the library to put some books on reserve for his class when he bumped into me. I didn’t remember him. He said, “I know you.” I thought, “damn, I came to school to get away and this guy knows me.” I wanted to keep looking away, but this man got in my face and kept going on and on about his knowing me from somewhere. He went away only to return a few weeks later saying, “You’re the A/F girl, the one who sat directly in front and slept in my physics class. Where’ve you been?” I could say, but I wouldn’t. That had been five years ago. I just put on my smile and vaguely remembered being in his class. I remembered almost flunking it, getting Fs on most all the quizzes and the midterm. He called me “the A/F girl” because I’d come to his class hungover and I’d sleep, but somehow I decided to learn the stuff. I got an A on the final so he gave me a C for the class. A plus F = C.
