Piecing Me Together

by Renée Watson

I am learning to speak. To give myself a way out. A way in.

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.

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.

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.

This time it’s not a program offering something I need, but it’s about what I can give.

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

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.

At that meeting, Lewis and Clark told the tribal leaders that their land was now the property of the United States, and that a man in the east was their new great father.

Gentrification

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. Tonight I am taking ugly and making beautiful.

“At least someone notices you need someone to talk to. It could be worse. You could be me. No one ever thinks I need anything,” Sam says.

I know Mr. Flores thinks he’s preparing us for surviving travel abroad, but these are

questions my purpose is asking. I am finding a way to know these answers right here, right now.

Mrs. Franklin blurts out, “Nothing but hillbillies, blacks, and Mexicans over there!”

“Shootouts all the time. That’s okay; let them all kill each other off.”

look around Sam’s house. She’s right: it’s small and stuffed and old. But it belongs to them, so that’s something. That’s a whole lot.

I have never thought about my deserving the good things that have happened in my life. Maybe because I know so many people who work hard but still don’t get the things they deserve, sometimes not even the things they need.

“And at the end of the day, when this program is over, she’s not going to be anyone’s mentee, but she’s still gonna be my daughter.”

Her mom is jealous

My black cotton hovers over me like a cloud.

You told me that knowing how to read words and knowing when

to speak them is the most valuable commodity a person can have.

And ever since then I’ve wanted to be a black girl who could read and write in many languages, because I know there was a time

Romare Bearden?

Mickalene Thomas,”

staring at these brown women and their faces that are pieced together with different shades of brown, different-size features, all mismatched yet perfectly puzzled together to make them whole beings.

study the making of me.

I wonder how it feels to be here as a person who’s supposed to have it all together but has some of the same questions that we do.

Sometimes it feels like I leave home a whole person, sent off with kisses from Mom, who is hanging her every hope on my future. By the time I get home I feel like my soul has been shattered into a million pieces.

Mom’s love repairs me.

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.

The man behind the counter looks at me, shakes his head, and says, “Boys.”

Excusing boys behavior. Boys will be boys 🙄

I wonder if any of these boys ever sit in a room for boys’ talk night and discuss how to treat women. Who teaches them how to call out to a girl when she’s walking by, minding her own business? Who teaches them that girls are parts—butts, breasts, legs—not whole beings?

Forget you then. Don’t nobody want your fat ass anyway. Don’t know why you up in a Dairy Queen. Need to be on a diet.” He calls me every derogatory name a girl could ever be called. I keep walking. Don’t look back.

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.

Policing of women and their bodies Rape culture

No freedom to just be, you know?”

“How you gonna live in a ’hood but be afraid to come to another ’hood?”

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.

Be bold. Be brave. Be beautiful. Be brilliant. Be (your) best.

“I’m going to see to it she doesn’t end up like one of those girls.”

But then I think, how quick it is that Maxine reminds me that I am a girl who needs saving. She knows I want out and she has come with a lifeboat. Except I just don’t know if I can trust her hand.

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.

Time to get rid of Sam! She is super ignorant

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 try to let the music wash away that feeling that comes when white people make you feel special or stupid for no good reason. I don’t know how to describe that feeling, just to say that it’s kind of like cold, sunny days. Something is discomforting about a sun that gives no heat but keeps shining.

It’s got

me thinking, is that all mentorship is? Taking someone younger than you to places they can’t afford?”

Here I am, so focused on learning to speak another language, and I barely use the words I already know. I need to speak up for myself. For what I need, for what I want.

you make me feel like you’ve come to fix me; only, I