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| BROWN SWEAT My school is what the experts call a "melting pot". Like we all decided to jump in this tin cauldron and dance on fire together. Tucked away on a sunny, dirty major street, it is teeming with brown, white, black, yellow, and fuchsia. There are the beautiful, beautiful Filipino boys with the smooth Spanish surnames and delicious curved eyes. The ones who are All American with the water carved muscles and reputations but go home and speak Tagalog with their grandfathers and write their AP essays in a corner late at night after being white all day. There are the Muslim girls who radiate holiness, with drama in their eyes and cultura in their cheeks. And surprise! Beneath the head scarf there can be honey colored hair, just like among Hispanics there are the blondes with the strong, belligerent chins and the brown with the blue eyes. Diversity. I feel for those who do not know. Venca with her icy white skin and coffin black hair, straight as a wall and as thick as time. Tom who looks black but isn't, who is lost in that shirt but who is just as lost here. He plays songs of la isla when he is not feeling lazy, which is always. This is not expected of him, but who expects to tell Jose, Fernando, Luis, and Carlos apart? All brown, all the same. That's what they think. Sometimes I think of other places and my ankles ache to fly there. But most of the time I shiver and shake and clutch this dingy odd shaped school to my chest. If I were singled out to to defend it in a hundred year war, a thousand enemies would fall each second. Because no one can take it all away. I can't live without the fake blue marble in the middle hall or the orange tile design from the eighties or the art painted by sixteen year old geniuses scattering the place. I can't do without the empty trophy cases, the security cameras around every bend, the broken vending machines, the rarely used velvet auditorium. I need the sweating herd of a thousand million souls pushing me down the halls, because sometimes I think this is the reason why I walk. Not just the present day spirits but the haunts of twelve years ago and thirty-two and seventy. They are in the walls and in the air. They are oxygen. It a poet's dream, a writer's secret thoughts. Everywhere. You think you have writer's block? Look to the side and there are an infinite amount of people whose souls are screaming, their eyes streaming, singing. They all have different stories, and they all have their own beds. This fact makes me dizzy and I stumble because of this, really, I'm not a natural born klutz. So our test scores are lower than a white school in, say, suburban Colorado. But we are living, and they are dead. By Garcia, Marissa, 2003. All rights reserved. No stealing, buster. |
| Rissa Writes |