My daughter is five. We’re standing in the living room of our apartment, across from the marble fireplace we never use because the flue is stuck closed. We’ve just come in from school and errands; secured dinner from our favorite Chinese restaurant—chicken fried rice, shredded beef szechuan style, pan fried pork dumplings. We’re both cheerful, our faces flush from racing each other up three flights of stairs. Our coats are strewn all over the backs of kitchen chairs.
As I’m unpacking our dinner, my daughter, out of nowhere, says, “Daddy and I are smart and you’re not.”
Stunned frozen for a minute. Just looking at my pint-sized lovebug with the chubby cheeks and flawless sandy brown skin. Forty-two inches of darlingness had just declared that I was dumb.
Amina and her father are smart as whips. My ex-husband skipped two grades in school. My daughter was reading Shakespeare at three years old. They both have the kind of minds that can score in the 99th percentile on standardized tests even after a bad night’s sleep. On the other hand, I was more of a B student who worked diligently to overcome undiagnosed learning issues that plagued me well into graduate school. In my early years of education, I learned to read on grade level despite language processing challenges. In middle school, I learned French with Madame DuBois quicker than most of my peers. By the time high school rolled around, I was a very strong reader and was able to write five paragraph essays effectively analyzing class texts. In addition to my academic grit, I was a good girl who knew how to behave, so teachers loved me.
My tenacity led me to become the first one in my family to attend college while I also managed a full-time job. Throughout my graduate studies, Amina was with me. In the evenings, we both sat together at the table doing our homework. I often took her to class because I didn’t have a babysitter. She watched me answer complex questions during whole group discussions as well as participate actively in pair work and team projects. So why did she think I was dumb? Where did she learn that? Did I tell Amina that she was mistaken? Recite all the degrees and accolades I’d earned up to that point? I can’t recall, but I do remember my daughter standing there with her head cocked to one side and her arms folded. A hot, molten rage made my head pound. Even then, I knew it was an overreaction to a five year old’s intellectual assessment. The mood ruined, I also remember, eating dinner in silence.
That night after putting Amina to bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d done to make my daughter so sure, despite clear external confirmation of my keen intellect, that I was “not smart.” I fell into a deep sleep only to wake up the next morning with the same pulsating ruminations. Amina, of course, had forgotten about our conversation and skipped happily along on our walk to school like she always did, babbling about things I had absolutely no interest in. A pair of sneakers that lit up when you walked. The huge, huge head of her friend Sam’s hairy black dog.
Agitated pondering plagued me all throughout that morning. The other parts of my schooling experience resurfaced in harsh recollections. Middle school was an adolescent battlefield of provoked and unprovoked fighting, consistent teasing about my gym uniform with elastic bloomers too big for my skinny thighs, monthly period stains through my clothes, poor hygiene habits, an avalanche of awkward moments. High school was a blur of unannounced growth spurts, alarming hormonal surges, and terror about the insane expectations of adult launching.
As I was opening the refrigerator to grab my sandwich for lunch, it felt like a bolt of lightning struck me and burned the cobwebs in my head away. A memory came. First day of 8th grade. Picture this. Gaggles of young teens rumbling through morning classes excited about seeing each other again after a million days of lazy summer. Barely able to pay attention to instruction, we whispered, passed notes and groomed each other. Our enthusiasm began to wane after lunch so by the time we got to math class most of us were plain exhausted.
Mr. Williams was a tall, lean Black man with tawny skin, golden eyes and a medium size, unnaturally neat bush of curly black hair. He had a faint mustache that you could only see if you were really looking for it. My mother would have said he wasn’t man enough to grow real facial hair. But he was definitely a man. He had that big lump at his throat that bobbed up and down when he spoke. He used a lot of fancy math words like algorithmic parameter and coefficient. He wore a shirt and tie to school just like the white teachers. Mr. Williams watched us all dragging ourselves into his classroom. He was unsure which of us would continue walking the plank of academic overload to our imagined deaths. Others he feared would bolt in an attempt to make a fast break back to the dry land of uninterrupted teenage gossip, angst and unbridled mischief. So he watched us.
We sat down one by one in seats assembled in rows; four horizontally, five vertically. He stood in the far front corner of the room near the window, basking in the afternoon light pouring in as if he was drinking up the sun’s rays, absorbing its power, as if that was exactly where he was supposed to be, standing in divine energy. Once we were all settled in the neatly formed rectangle like sardines in a tin can, he stepped gracefully, his black leather shoes making no noise, to the smooth freshly-washed blackboard where he wrote x: 2x + 5 = 13. The white chalk gleamed off the dark background in Mr. Williams’ aura. “How would you solve this mathematical problem?”
A hand in the front of the room shot up. “Isolate the variable x by subtracting and dividing on both sides of the equation.”
“Yes! You stay right where you are.”
Mr. Williams kept putting math questions on the board and rearranging student’s seating according to their responses until all the “scholars” were sitting in the front two rows and the “dumb” kids were sitting behind them.
I got through those four and a half months because of friends who had also been deemed unteachable and made to feel totally useless. We enjoyed creating code names for students seated in front of us. Our rearview gave us a keen vantage point. We saw the oval heel tear in Holy Roller Linda’s left sock when she slipped out of her too-small shoes to stretch her toes. Ringworm Girl Annette’s perfect red circle at the base of her neck glared angrily at us every time she lifted her hair to scratch it. We all concluded, the day we saw Slut City Bella squeezing Trey’s crotch for the whole period, that we’d never, ever let her put her hand on anything we owned again! Outside of class we licked our wounds by dismissing Mr. Williams as someone who had shamefully sold out of his race. He was a Black man trying to be white which, in our minds, was the ultimate sin.
Deep down, I hated what Mr. Williams had done but had no idea what to do about it. After all, he was the teacher and the teacher was in charge. The fact that he was Black made him even more of an authority. Mother led me to believe, when white teachers dismissed me as stupid I could discount their evaluation, because they didn’t really know anything about Black people. But I was taught to respect the word of one of our own, because they had lived the Black experience. In Mr. Williams’ class I got the clear message that my intellect wasn’t good enough, and, because of that, I should be treated like a second class citizen. Without even realizing it, I absorbed that assessment and conclusion.
When I look back, other clear memories serve as evidence of my acceptance of Mr. Williams’ skewed judgment. In a graduate school linguistics class, during a small group discussion of Chaucer, one of my peers was impressed with how well I understood the early linguist.“Wow, you are really smart. You actually understand this stuff. Can you explain it to us?”
My response, “No. I’m not smart. I had to read this three times before I got it.” Can you believe I actually told someone that I wasn’t smart? Was Amina with me when I did that? I’ll never forget the look on my colleague’s faces, most of them white, their mouths frozen in O-shaped awe.
One finally was able to collapse the O and ask, “What are you talking about Sharon? Everybody knows how smart you are.” Even though they came from white people these statements piqued my curiosity and gave me food for thought. I wasn’t sure how much I trusted my white colleagues’ evaluation of my intellect given what I’d been taught by my mother. Would I have been able to take in that I was smart if a Black colleague had made the same comments?
But Amina is all grown up now.
My ex mother-in-law, a fellow educator and elder whom I’ve always trusted and respected, invited Amina and me to dinner. We were sitting in the living room discussing some inane test measurement the local school board was about to implement for kindergarteners. I went on and on passionately spewing a monologue–articulating point by point the emotional harm of such a stupid decision. Once finished, my mother-in-law said to her friend Lubie who was also visiting, “She’s so smart.” Then she turned to me. “You were always so smart!” Her face was beaming.
I felt confused. Were they talking about me? My mother-in-law was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, so I quickly chalked it up to some incapacity caused by the disease. The illness was finally impacting logic, reason and common sense. But then Lubie chimed in. “Oh, yes. I remember you talking about this one all the time. She’s the one who knows how to think. A credit to her race!”
My mother-in-law patted my thigh. “And always so modest.”
When I looked at Amina she again had her head cocked to one side, this time it was clear she was positively pondering.
Embarrassed, I squirmed in my seat and then politely changed the subject. I wasn’t being modest. I just wasn’t smart like that, like Amina and her father whose brains worked at super fast speed and didn’t produce thick clouds of opaque confusion when anxiety took over, who housed lint traps of information they could access at a moment’s notice, who didn’t have to wait until the fog in their heads dissipated before they could clearly see the facts before them.
Those were the people who were smart.
When Amina was five, I divorced her father and we moved to an apartment on Bergen Street in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn. I immediately enrolled her in the local public school’s gifted program. After the first week, the teacher made her the “class helper” and told me I should look into private schools. “She’s far beyond her classmates and the gap will only get worse with age.” This with a look of ridicule like saying, “Why did you put her here?”
During the second month of school, Amina’s teacher called me. She’d written a letter to parents informing them of a lice outbreak in her classroom and placed a copy in each child’s backpack to give to their parents. Amina had stood in the dress up corner and read the confidential communication to all of her classmates. Chaos ensued. Everyone was pulling at their hair and slapping their heads. By the time I picked Amina up, a circle of parents surrounded her. One mother, dressed in a tailored pinstripe suit, rushed over. “Oh my goodness. Your daughter is soooo smart!” Were my ex mother-in-law and Lubie putting me in the same category as that?
After going home, in the middle of the night, the shattering happened. I hadn’t realized until that moment, even though I’d been moving forward getting degree after degree, I’d also stood in place, stuck as that student in the back of the algebra classroom, powerless, pretending I didn’t care but secretly wishing to be one of the scholars. Mr. Williams told me to stay in the back of the room and I did. But who gave him that authority? Why should intellectual potential and acuity only be defined by his empirical measurement?
Upon reflection, what became clear is that, despite having earned a PhD and becoming an educator, I never included myself in the smart club. When it came to intellect, no matter the evidence, I always put myself in the back of the room. It was clear my daughter had learned, from her own mother, the same lesson I got when I was thirteen years old. When, so many years ago, she came to the conclusion that I was not smart, my five year old daughter placed me with the dumb kids, exactly where I’d told her I belonged.
*Edited by Non-Fiction Editor, Ravynn K. Stringfield, Ph.D.
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