by Omar Tyree
She wiped away happy tears, as she trembled blissfully. “I’ll be here for you, baby . . . I’ll be here for you,” she mumbled with a smile.
A rush of elation overwhelmed her as more tears helplessly flooded her eyes. Tracy wiped them hurriedly, dreaming of Victor, Qadeer, black, strong and righteous, as the moon shone and the wind blew, adding to her birthday joy.
epilogue
Hey Dad!
My first year of college is almost over, and I’ve gotten all A’s and B’s.So . . . can I get a car? Sike, dad. Unless you really wanna buy me one.
I guess you know that Mercedes moved back home now. Raheema saidthat she’s doing good with her rehabilitation. I’m happy for her.
Raheema sent me a letter from Cornell University a week ago. I wasreal happy that she got that scholarship to go there. She deserves it. Shewas saying in her letter how we had been through all of our fights andstuff and how we still came out close like sisters. And she is my sister inthe communal sense. We helped each other through so much over the years,you know?
And as far as that 1200 that she got on the SAT’s, I mean, all she did was sit in the house and study. Naw, that’s my girl. She even got a boyfriend out there that’s a Sigma and politically conscious, so she says.He’s probably a nerd. No, let me stop. Anyway, I wrote her back andstuff. I told her to tell me if she’s still a virgin, she left that part out.
Me? Well, let’s just say that I’ve never gotten pregnant and I nevergot no diseases. And no, I didn’t do any drugs, either. But remember thattime you said that my boyfriend, well he wasn’t my boyfriend, but youknow, the guy that I liked back then when I was still in high school. His name is Victor, and you were right, he was in jail.
But anyway, he was my first love. He’s up for parole from Holmesburgprison in three months, and I’ve been writing letters back and forth to him for almost two years.
I can’t lie, dad. I went up there to see him a couple of times. I had to,dad. Cause it was people that kept calling me naive and stuff, saying thathe was gaming me up, and that he couldn’t have just changed overnight. But when I saw him it just made me want to wait for him even morebecause of how trapped it seemed he was. I mean, you gotta know Victor.He was always in control of things. But now he talks about going totrade schools and stuff when he gets out. And he was always smart.Victor’s brother went to college.
I want to believe in him, dad. And all these girls up here who say they my friends are always talking about how I need to get a life. But I don’tsee how they’re doing any better with these confused guys they talk to. Ittakes time for everybody to become who they’re gonna be. Like who wouldhave thought that I’d be going to Hampton and majoring in English, ofall things.
Anyway, it’s mostly because of Victor that I’m majoring in Englishnow, cause we kept writing to each other and stuff. And dad, he woulddescribe the bars and shit—oh excuse me dad, but I’m a big girl now—so the shit that he be going through in jail and all. And I used to cry and pray for him to get out soon, like a break-out or something. But it’s hard being a young black man today, or a black man period. I wouldn’t reallyknow though, cause I’m having a hard-ass time being a young blackwoman.
Anyway. I love you, dad, and here’s a poem that I wrote for you andfatherhood. It’s called, “Stop the Critics,” cause it’s always people sayinghow they think things should be.
My daddy wasn’t home 24–7,
but I do know him.
He was the handsome dark brown face
that my mother went crazy for.
I know my daddy wasn’t like Bill
on the Cosby Show.
But he was real flesh
with real struggles
and I love him so.
Some people often criticize
and say that my mother and I were robbed.
But now I’m happily in college
with my daddy’s support
so all in all
I’d say he’s done a great job.
And still people argue
that my logic seems shabby.
But since they know so much
I ask them,
“Have you ever been a daddy?”
My creative writing teacher loved that poem. Cause she says she couldrelate to how I feel about you. I mean, hey, I only got one dad. Right? And you have to make the best out of what you can.
But anyway. Victor will probably get out when I’m home for thesummer. And you don’t have to worry about me getting into trouble ornothing with him, because I’ve cooled out a lot. And a lot of guys wantedto talk to me down here. I’ve gone out a couple times, but nothing serious.I was always thinking about Victor. But hey, if me and him can’t workit out, then hell, I’m still living. I mean, people act like I’m gone die forwaiting for him. I’ll survive. And I’ll be successful at whatever I do.Nobody can say that I haven’t gotten what I wanted. So I’ll just keep reaching for the sky.
Love Tracy, with hugs and kisses.
P.S.—Send me some money, daddy. Pl-e-e-e-ease.
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Excerpt from
For the Love of Money
by Omar Tyree
June1996
I was turning twenty-five years old in September, and I had just wrapped up my second year of instructing English at East Germantown Middle School. I had no idea what I was waiting for in my life, or why I thought that I could appease myself as a Philadelphia schoolteacher. Nevertheless, that was the career that I had settled on. It was the last week of the 1995–96 school year, and grades were already in, so we were basically baby-sitting the students for those last few days before sending them off for summer vacation. In walked this crazy mother with a scarf around her head and slippers on her feet (honestly), ranting about her daughter’s failing grade in my English class.
“You mean to tell me that my daughter could go from a C grade to an F in the last report?” she asked me with foul intent. She even had a crowd of young students gathering for the early Monday morning drama.
I was caught off guard by it. I had mailed this woman three letters during the final report regarding her daughter’s slippage in my class, her lack of homework completion, and her dropping test scores, and I could never catch the woman at home when I called. I always got one of her teenage children, who either told me that she was not at home, or asked me to hold the line for five minutes at a time while I waited for nothing. I considered the girl’s situation helpless, because I was not going to drive the hell over to her house and knock on her door to look like some maniac schoolteacher. I would probably be cursed out for that anyway, but I guess that’s what some parents need you to do nowadays
to get the message about their children.
Schoolteachers could get to my parents immediately! Was that so damn long ago? Had families become that lackadaisical? Was it an income thing? I couldn’t figure it out, and I didn’t have the patience for it.
I told the woman, “I’ve been trying to contact you for two months.” I was very civil with her. After all, she was my elder.
She said, “You expect me to believe that?” as if I was lying to try and cover my ass. The situation was embarrassing.
“Do you have teenage kids?” I asked her. I planned to take the most logical route to why she hadn’t received any of my phone messages or mail.
“Yes I do,” she huffed at me.
“Do you work during the daytime?”
I hadn’t received a work phone number for the parent.
“I work at night” she answered.
“Are you at home when the mail arrives?”
“What the hell does that have to do with you failing my damn daughter on the last report?”
She stressed that last report thing as if she thought her daughter could just cruise on through my class in April, May, and June, and still expect to pass. Maybe that’s why she did it. Her mother seemed to be condoning it.
I looked at her daughter, LaKeisha Taylor, a lazy, attitudinal type of child, and saw exactly where she got her demeanor from. While her mother poured into me with her attitude, LaKeisha looked as innocent as a flower girl in a wedding.
“Hold on just a minute” I said, and walked over to my desk. I had copies of everything. I pulled out three dated letters concerning her daughter’s lack of progress over the last couple of months and showed them to her mother.
While she looked at those, I pulled out copies of test scores, because LaKeisha had a funny problem of somehow losing failing test papers.
“Did you see any of these marks?” I asked her mother.
Suddenly, my innocent student didn’t look so settled anymore.
Her mother turned to her and said, “Girl, what the hell is this? How come I didn’t see none of these papers?”
LaKeisha didn’t say a word, so I had to say my piece.
“Well, she told me that she lost them.”
“But she still had a C,” her mother continued to argue with me.
“Those test grades do not include homework assignments,” I reminded her. “LaKeisha has not completed much of anything this last report. I can show you her entire fourth semester.”
“And she can still fail with a C? I just can’t understand that.”
I don’t think this woman was interested in seeing her daughter’s marks at all. She just wanted me to pass her that morning like presto magic or something, but I was not planning on being a magician. Her daughter was going to summer school. That’s all there was to it. It wasn’t that I disliked the girl, because I had been there myself when I was young, she just hadn’t done what she was supposed to do to pass. I had only failed seven students out of nearly one hundred and thirty that I taught that year, because I was very tough on them to learn their work.
“Well, is there anything we can do?” her mother asked me. She had a nerve to try and act civil too, as if that was going to change something. We were four days away from summer vacation. All we were doing was finishing our final paperwork as the students said their last good-byes until September.
I looked that woman straight in her face and said, “She can make it up in summer school.” I meant that too. It would be a lesson for LaKeisha in the future.
Her mother returned to sour in a snap of a finger. “Well, who the hell can I talk to about this? Because I don’t believe she needs no damn summer school.”
I could not believe what I was hearing.
I asked, “What do you believe she needs?”
The woman looked puzzled for a second. She responded out of spite, looking me over. “She needs a damn teacher who cares instead of one who’s just working for a paycheck. That’s what she needs. Gon’ tell me she can make it up in summer school.”
That’s when the kids began to laugh and snicker.
“Well, you can go to the principal’s office then,” I finally told her. Although that wouldn’t change her daughter’s grade either. I said, “LaKeisha knows the way there,” just to add my own spice to the issue.
The woman looked ready to jump me so I stepped aside. Elder or not, I wasn’t about to let her kick my ass. I would have broken every nail on my fingers to protect myself.
She looked me over once more before she left and grumbled, “You think you fuckin’ cute. That’s your damn problem. Come on, girl,” she snapped at her daughter.
I was through! I didn’t have the skin to be a schoolteacher in the nineties. At least not at a neighborhood school. Maybe I should have tried a private or Catholic school where more parents were serious about education. However, I thought that would have been a sellout. I didn’t go to private or Catholic schools. The inner cities needed qualified teachers, and I was more than qualified. Many of the inner-city teachers were barely passing their teachers exams. They were just slipping into the system based on need. So I thought I had something extra to offer.
At the end of the day, nearly every teacher in the school had heard about my stand that morning. A few of the older teachers advised me on how to deal with parents, but some of the teachers didn’t particularly care about my master’s degree and my high standards of instruction. Maybe they felt that passing students kept the peace, but I thought that only set students up to fail in the future.
“I heard what happened this morning,” one of the science teachers said to me as I stepped into the hallway and locked my classroom door. I was heading out to my car in the parking lot.
Desiree Johnson had been teaching for four years. She was twenty-nine and had a degree in chemistry from Maryland. We clicked immediately. We both believed in excellence and we were teaching to try and make a difference. Desiree just had a longer fuse than I had, and she had tougher skin. She was athletic and feisty, with a natural short crop of hair.
“Yeah, I guess I might as well get used to that, hunh?” I said to her.
“Unfortunately,” she answered. “But don’t give up on them, Tracy. It’s not the kids’ fault.”
I smiled and shook my head, thinking about the children of students like LaKeisha. If my assumptions were right, she would definitely be having them. The boys were already eyeing her, and she didn’t have the head strength or the smarts to turn them away. At least I was strong enough to choose who I wanted to be with. That helps you to choose not to get pregnant. Like the saying goes, If you don’t stand for something, you’re liable to fall for anything.
“So whose fault will it be when her children are failing twenty years from now?” I asked my fellow schoolteacher.
Desiree chuckled, taking in my glum outlook. “It’s a long cycle that needs to be broken,” she said. She was right. I just wasn’t so sure that I was the one to do the breaking, and with every step we took toward the exit that day, I continued to think, What the hell am I doing trying to teach anyway? I still had this inner desire to be someone special, someone who would shine. I couldn’t shine at East Germantown Middle School.
We made it out to the parking lot where I was stunned by the broken glass, the graffiti on the walls, and the dullness of the place, as if it was my first time noticing it. I loved Philadelphia, but I realized at that moment that I needed more than a regular job. I would suffocate and die there, spiritually. I just needed . . . euphoria, and teaching wouldn’t be able to do that for me. I needed that rush of energy that chasing after fast and dangerous guys gave me. I needed the attention that wearing sexy clothes and having things my way out on the streets gave me. I wanted the whole temptation of going for forbidden fruit again, ignoring my parents and doing something wild and crazy. I was just bored out of my mind as a teacher, and I needed a reckless challenge in my life like I had so much of in my younger years.
“So what do yo
u plan to do for your vacation?” Desiree asked me at our cars. She was parked not far from me.
I did not have the faintest idea what I wanted to do for my summer. I said, “Good question. What about you?”
“I’m teaching a couple of summer school classes. After that, my boyfriend and I are going to Hawaii.”
“Hawaii?! You really picked a place to vacation,” I told her. I was jealous. I needed a Hawaii vacation of my own. I also needed the type of boyfriend you could take on a vacation.
“Well, hang on in there, Tracy. It gets easier. The first couple of years are always rough.”
“So I’ve found out,” I joked, but it wasn’t funny. I had a lot of thinking to do.
I drove home to my two-bedroom apartment off of Lincoln Drive, and took a long look at myself inside of the full-length mirror on my bedroom door. There I was, wearing tailored suits, with manicured nails, jazzy hairstyles, designer shoes, and looking good, just to go and teach middle school students. Not that they didn’t need something to aspire to, and someone to show them the way, but maybe that parent was right. I was too damned cute and maybe just a touch superficial for the job.
“Shit!” I cursed myself, stripping from my clothes. I felt guilty. I knew I didn’t have the long-term dedication to teach those kids who needed it. I just wanted what I needed. Recognition. Was it so wrong to want to feel special and to do something about it?
