Easton, Aaliyah Sesay

Aaliyah Sesay

EASTON

EASTON

Aaliyah Sesay

When we moved to Easton, my brother Abdul was excited to start the seventh grade at a new school. This was a chance for him to reinvent himself, to become the cool guy and have the cool friends. The brother I lived to impress and defend was scared of the kids at this new school not liking him. And it’s hard to imagine that he was so eager to leave his friends. They were always at the house or him at theirs. He explained his need to be liked by the kids at a new school where he would then be seen as the new kid. All that anxious energy amplified when he realized he was new in other senses of the word.

He was among the few Black kids in the school, and oftentimes found himself the only one in a classroom. The middle and high school he attended was offensively white. With white kids who would shout, “White Power” on the bus ride home. White kids who scratched confederate flags on lunch room tables. White kids who felt emboldened to say “nigger” to his face, a word they learned on TV, their first introduction to Black people before he sat in their class. It was a vast difference from the school he had previously attended, where all his friends were of color except the one white kid who was from the Ukraine. He had been transplanted into a place where the illusion of racial harmony had been dashed.

But he took it all on the chin. When confronted with those racial moments, Abdul engaged in conversations. He spoke to those kids with disturbing calm; like many of us who often find ourselves in spaces where we are outnumbered, he would not let them see his rage, his hurt, his frustration, his disgust. They would not win.

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So when they make jokes, we laugh to drown out their taunts, to obfuscate frustrated tears with those of laughter. Laughter masks a crumbling much easier than a smile. When they said “nigga” or “nigger,” Abdul stayed in the moment, asking why they felt it was okay to use it. But above all the ways in which he dealt with his peers, he silently and unwittingly promised himself he would never give them a reason to use it on him.

Abdul recounted an interaction with a white kid on the bus: the kid asked him, “How did your parents afford to buy the house you live in? Selling drugs?” An odd question, Abdul responded, “No. Not all Black people mess with crack.”

He remembers many moments like this, explaining and deconstructing their misconceptions of Black people. That responsibility they threw on him to be the voice, translator, commentator on all things Black he says he gratefully took because he knew someone had to do it. Which is understandable, but he’s not friends with these kids today. He wasn’t really friends with them at the time either. He had found the group of Black kids that moved into the development and they became his circle. And throughout all these years, Abdul managed to maintain contact with his buddies back in Ewing. Like ebbs and flows, these boys, now men, have remained friends.

Our school district, Wilson Area, is fairly small. There are three regional elementary schools that students attend based on where they live, Williams Township, Wilson, and Avona. Once they start middle school, all those students are shoved into the

69 And Ask Why

middle and high school. Because it is such a densely populated location, students living in the Wilson area are split into Wilson and Avona. This area of town is typically denoted as the more urban. When I started middle school, I was often asked where in Wilson I lived and if I went to Wilson or Avona, because other students hadn’t seen me before and I was Black. Blacks apparently, are only native to urban areas. Just a microcosm of racial profiling I would experience at a young age. Williams Township, on the other hand, was much more rural. Students from those areas were either well-off with big houses and lots of land or of lower-income but still had lots of land. The students and families here tended to be white, except for us and a handful of other Black and Asian families. Our family lived in one of the two developments in Williams Township, which mirrored the suburbs with a more rural spin on it.

This made riding the bus hell. Sometimes students would forget that Black kids sat on the same bus as them, in the seat in front of them. I remember kids making jokes about where I should sit on the bus, which made me wonder too. The front because so many had fought for my right to do that or the back because that was the new front, where all the cool kids sat? Our access to ‘coolness’ and popularity was denied because we were Black. Automatically relegated to the front or back or wherever they say because who wants to be friends with the Black kid. Sometimes, kids would make it a game to stick as many pencils in my hair as they could and see how long it took me to notice. Extra points if it managed to stay throughout all the bumpy roads.

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I’ve fought against anger because I know how it makes me look: Angry Black Girl, burnt and bitter. How I wish I could be sweet and light and inoffensive to the senses, but I’m not. I’ve lived with a lot of pent up rage. Rage toward the white kids at school. Who made me change the way I talk to hide, to survive. Who stuck pencils in my hair. Who said my hair reminded them of a dog named “Frou Frou” but when it was straightened I looked like “them,” like a person. Who told me I was a different kind of Black. It took me over ten years for me to understand how my teachers were apathetic toward me, no matter how much I tried to make myself stand out. I would take refuge in my room because I wasn’t sure if the other kids liked me, not sure why I couldn’t just fit in. So many prayers spent on making a friend, just one to make me feel less lonely. Daily prayers, nightly prayers. Prayers so silent they don’t even reach the mind, birthed in our hearts and dead in our tears.

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But We Keep Going

Prompt 1: What are you hopeful for? Who or what has helped you cope in this last year?

Prompt 2: What have you learned about yourself in the past year? How have you grown as a person from freshman year to senior year?

Prompt 3: What is something about your senior year that you want others to know?

Photographers: Dejah McIntosh, Devin Welsh, and Danielle Morris