Piecing Me Together

by Renée Watson

When I learned the Spanish word for succeed, I thought it was kind of ironic that the word exit is embedded in it. Like the universe was telling me that in order for me to make something of this life, I’d have to leave home, my neighborhood, my friends.

I do agree with this quote. I had to leave my home country just to find success in the US. I was able to finish school at BYU Hawaii. Part of leaving home, is that I took with me my family's high expectations. I need to study harder and smarter for me to be successful. I am also the first one in the family to graduate in a university. I learned how to hustle just to make my family proud of me.

though everyone says it doesn’t matter how you look on the outside, it does.

“Who are the invisible people in our community? Who are the people we, as a society, take for granted?”

But girls like me, with coal skin and hula-hoop hips, whose mommas barely make enough money to keep food in the house, have to take opportunities every chance we get.

I know all about Mom’s promises. She does her best to make them, but they are fragile and break easily.

Lots of people can’t find beauty in my neighborhood, but I can. Ever since elementary school, I’ve been making beauty out of everyday things—candy wrappers, pages of a newspaper, receipts, rip-outs from magazines. I cut and tear, arrange and rearrange, and glue them down, morphing them into something no one else thought they could be. Like me. I’m ordinary too. The only thing fancy about me is my name: Jade. But I am not precious like the gem. There is nothing exquisite about my life. It’s mine, though, so I’m going to make something out of it.

One of us has to make it out of here,

and I’m her only child, her only hope of remaking herself.

I think about this as I ride to school. How I am someone’s answered prayer but also someone’s deferred dream.

I wonder how a people’s culture, a people’s history, becomes a mascot.

I wonder how this school counselor and her three grandsons can wear a stereotype on their shirts and hats and not care.

Why do people who can afford anything they want get stuff for free all the time?

To give myself a way out. A way in. Because language can take you places.

opportunity

That word shadows me. Follows me like a stray cat.

Mom likes to go to sleep to noise. I think the voices keep her from feeling lonely.

The whole time Lee Lee is talking, I am thinking about York and Sacagawea, wondering how they must have felt having a form of freedom but no real power.

I am ripping and cutting. Gluing and pasting. Rearranging reality, redefining, covering, disguising.

“There is an old adage that says, ‘You can give a man a fish and feed him for a day. You can teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.’”

“Well, I like what Pedro Noguera had to add. He says, ‘Don’t stop there.’

He says, ‘Help her to understand why the river is polluted so that she and her friends can organize to get the river clean and make it possibl...

The thing is, I don’t think I’m shy. I just don’t always know what to say or how to say it. I am like Mom in so many ways but not when it comes to things like this. She is full of words and bites her tongue for no one. I wish I could be that way.

“I think everyone dreams of leaving home, but trust me, the cliché is true: I’ve been a lot of places and there really is no place like home.”

Yes. I do miss home.

“It’s kind of not fair for us to feel guilty for getting what we deserve. We work hard.”

You told me that knowing how to read words and knowing when to speak them is the most valuable commodity a person can have. You don’t remember saying that?”

perfectly puzzled together to make them whole beings.

“You think you know yourself, but trust me: you will keep growing and developing. That’s why you all need to take the pressure off yourselves to have these serious relationships. You will change so much in the next ten years—” Sabrina interrupts. “In ways you can’t even imagine.”

‘How do I get guys to notice me?’”

“I think being yourself will attract the person who’s best for you. You have to be true to yourself. Don’t change what makes you you, because someone is going to want you. And the guys who don’t, well, that’s their loss.”

“You have to believe you are worthy of love, of happiness. That you are worthy of your wildest dreams coming true.”

Something happens when people tell me I have a pretty face, ignoring me from the neck down. When I watch the news and see unarmed black men and women shot dead over and over, it’s kind of hard to believe this world is mine.

Mom’s love repairs me.

I believe everything these women are saying about being worthy of good things. Those are the times I feel secure, feel just fine. I look in the mirror and see my dad’s eyes looking back at me, my mom’s thick hair, thick everything. And that’s when I believe my dark skin isn’t a curse, that my lips and hips, hair and nose don’t need fixing. That my dream of being an artist and traveling the world isn’t foolish.

And this makes me wonder if a black girl’s life is only about being stitched together and coming undone, being stitched together and coming undone.

For months people will tell girls and women to be careful and walk in pairs, but no one will tell boys and men not to rape women, not to kidnap us and toss us into rivers.

I hope one day my family gets to a place where we can be thankful just to be thankful and not because we’ve compared ourselves to someone who has less than we do.

Every corner has a story; every block asks a question. So many worlds colliding all at once.

Tonight I make something about a different expedition. The one I am on. I want to get out, and I feel like a traitor for admitting

Maxine is right and wrong. Those girls are not the opposite of me. We are perpendicular. We may be on different paths, yes. But there’s a place where we touch, where we connect and are just the same.

I don’t know what’s worse. Being mistreated because of the color of your skin, your size, or having to prove that it really happened.

Makes me feel like no matter how dressed up we are, no matter how respectful we are, some people will only see what they want to see.

I am wondering how choices are made about who gets what and how much they get. Wondering who owns the river and the line, and the hook, and the worm.

Just want to go back to my mother and eat the food at her table that has no rules about the way to use forks and napkins. Want to go where I don’t have to pretend I’m not hungry, where I can eat all that’s on my plate and not feel greedy.

You need to learn that burning bridges always has a consequence.”

I know Maxine says there are some friends who are worth fighting for, but sometimes it’s just easier to walk away.

Tears for every name of unarmed black men and women I know of who’ve been assaulted or murdered by the police are inked on the page. Their names whole and vibrant against the backdrop of black sadness. Their names. So many, they spill off the page.

“I guess it made me feel like blackness needed to be hidden, toned down, and that whiteness was good, more acceptable,”

“But I think what my grandmother was saying is that it feels good to know someone knows your story, that someone took you in,” Maxine says. “She’d tell me, it’s how we heal.”